I come from a tennis-mad family. The entire extended family played tennis, we had a tennis court at home, weekends revolved around tennis and my uncle was a tennis coach! Every July school holiday he and my aunt ran a week-long holiday tennis tournament which was sometimes sponsored by Pepsi and even Groovy. Remember Groovy colddrinks? Wow ...... “Feelin’ Groooovy!”. Those were the days .....
This tournament was the highlight of our winter holidays and we all played in it. Brother, sisters, our friends, cousins, their friends. We were one huge happy tennis family. My friend Stace and I would plan our tennis outfits for each day well in advance, right down to the last detail, like matching pompom socks and frilly broeks complete with Beach Bronze pantihose to ward off the crisp, cold chill of the those early Highveld winter mornings. The pantihose attire was also because we didn’t want to run around the court with lily white legs even though it was mid-winter and everyone else was. Being typical teenage girls, our tennis agenda included following my uncle’s latest assistant coaches around like love-sick puppies. They were always young, handsome and made of tennis hero material. If they ever even spoke one word to us our beach bronzed legs would turn to jelly. Okay, maybe it was bordering on stalking.
We played quite a lot of tennis too because my aunt was very fair and ensured that no matter what the level of your tennis was, everyone got to play the same amount of games everyday. From the organisational side this entailed making sure that every group and section had a plate or a play-off, and that that plate had a plate which had a plate which also had a plate until either the days ran out or the plates. Despite the numerous opportunities made available to us, Stace and I never managed to win a single plate. After a couple of years, tournaments and many plates later, my aunt must have felt sorry for us, because one year Stace and I won the “Best Dressed” prize! As I said my aunt was a very fair lady.
By far the best part of the tournament was the tuckshop run by my gran. Much to my grandfather’s exasperation, she always managed to run it at a massive loss. She would go to Makro and buy huge boxes of sweets and chips in bulk, spend days baking crunchies, cup cakes, rock buns and muffins and then cover everything in chocolate icing. All these wonderful goodies would then be loaded up in her Beetle where some of the stock would get depleted by us in the back seat en route to tennis. Since so many of us were her grandchildren, you can guess where most of her stock went during the course of the day. If by some slim chance she had anything left to sell she would feel sorry for the kids who hadn’t brought any money and tell them they could pay the next day, which of course they never did. And then we would all go home and she would start the whole process again while my grandfather sat at the kitchen table elbow deep in flour and icing sugar shaking his head in despair.
