Match Point: Tennis and Dating in Dartmouth

This article appears in the Commencement & Reunions 2024 special issue.

Tennis has been on my mind lately. Before my sophomore year at Dartmouth, I thought very little about tennis. Although I grew up in Florida, where there are many country club courts where parents send their children to train at elite tennis academies, this was not my experience. The closest I came to the pros was when I was lapping around the local park course behind my grandparents' house with my little brother on hot summer days. We didn't play by rules or for points, we just hit to see the satisfying bounce of rubber and yellow down against concrete.

During my sophomore year, I took my first creative writing course, CRWT 10, Introduction to Fiction. Although we did not write nonfiction for the class, the professor mentioned Roger Federer as Religious Experience, a New York Times article by David Foster Wallace. It was then that I visited the tennis church for the first time. Foster Wallace describes Federer's 2006 Wimbledon victory over Rafael Nadal with the same passion he experienced when he saw it firsthand. I finally understood. I pulled up the YouTube video of the match and was sucked into the world of power-baseline tennis, even though I still don't know much. What changes within the player in this game, where two people lock eyes and make volleys, each hit calculated like chess?

I asked my friends what they knew about tennis and love. They misquoted an IMDb review for the 2024 tennis drama Challengers, which rewrote Oscar Wilde's quote: Everything in the world is about sex, except sex. Sex is about power. Substitute electricity for tennis, and you have it. The new sexiness of Tennis can, in my opinion, be attributed to Challengers.

I watched the movie the week it came out. After a screening at Nugget Theaters, my friends and I retreated to a dorm room and blasted the soundtrack while I reenacted Patrick Zweig's pivotal hit for Art Donaldson. Just as Foster Wallace writes about one of Federer's iconic tics, Zweig places the tennis ball in the V-shaped opening of the racket's throat, indicating to Donaldson that he was sleeping with his wife Tashi, played by Zendaya. The public knows what Donaldson has accomplished. Not Tashi.

Of course, it's no coincidence that writer Justin Kuritzkes includes this detail. The film is inspired by Federer's wife Mirka, who reacts to Federer's 2019 Wimbledon match against Novak Djokovic and turns it into a twisted love triangle: Patrick loves art, Art loves Tashi and Tashi loves tennis.

At the beginning of the film, Tashi utters a line that has stuck in my mind. She calls tennis, especially her junior US Open match against rival Anna Mueller, a relationship.

For about 15 seconds we were actually playing tennis, she says. And we understood each other completely. That's how everyone looked. It's like we were in love. Or as if we didn't exist. We went to a very beautiful place together.

I left Challengers thinking how much I wanted that dynamic. I want that feeling. Does playing at the highest level feel like really understanding your opponent? Does a game feel like love? Does love feel like a game?

This is where I return to Foster Wallace on Federer. He praises Federer's return to a tennis style based on touch and subtlety, backed by his skill and strength. This makes me think: Tennis isn't much like the Dartmouth dating scene.

There was a moment, before I arrived at Dartmouth, when I had mastered the art of touch and subtlety. Well, that is if you take into account the touch and subtlety of holding on to a crush for five years, confessing your love to that crush that is rejected, and then dating later that summer. I quickly realized that finesse had no place in the Dartmouth scene.

Perhaps it is telling that our preeminent form of flirting is a game played with four paddles, a small bouncy ball and a pit, a 5 x 10 table. Dartmouth Pong is modified table tennis, which is already mini tennis, plus alcohol, which makes the inhibitions are reduced.

I've certainly experienced the waxing and waning attraction you can feel during a game of pong. When all goes well, it's all knuckles and hugs. A classic Dartmouth trope features the heterosexual couple, a talented male player carrying the girl he's trying to romance, though the romance in question may be more like a sloppy makeout on Webster Ave. I've definitely been that girl, both because my pong skills aren't the best. the best and because playing pong is an easy way to bond, you share both your wins and your losses.

And go on dates doesn't feel easy at Dartmouth take polls on Dartmouth students' perception of hookup culture as evidence. Fifty-nine percent of respondents said they consider hookups to be the most common relationship style on our campus.

The opposite is true when things go bad in the basement. I've played with overconfident men, men who serve three times from the table or throw stupid disses at our opponents. It's no fun when your partner takes the game too seriously. What am I talking about now, love, or pong?

As I explore the parallels between the relationships that develop while playing a game of pong or a game of tennis, I find that my romantic endeavors on this campus rarely come close to Tashi's quote. It's hard to go somewhere nice together on a beer-stained floor. Pong is no substitute for tennis, and perhaps the intimacy I felt at Dartmouth is a diluted experience of the deep connection I seek.

Instead, I find myself leaning into the power base game that Foster Wallace describes, hitting hard and fast because there is no time to set up the play. Send a flitz, flirt in the basement, have a one night stand. Why not? Ten weeks does not allow you to think five steps ahead. If finding love requires a back and forth game, good luck finding a partner to play with for more than one term.

Even if you win, love becomes political. In our close-knit student community and concentric social circles, assuming the title of hookup, situationship, or girlfriend, at all different levels of intimacy, is likely to get someone hurt.

I've also realized that winning a power-baseline game, where your eyes can barely follow the ball as it flies across the field, doesn't really feel like winning. Can love really be based on sexual attraction? I discovered that those services are running out. Ultimately, someone won't return the point. Maybe they don't even try.

And why am I still playing the game? Sometimes I tell myself it's all about experience. In a Harpers Magazine essay titled Tennis, Trigonometry, Tornadoes, Foster Wallace describes his youth playing competitive tennis in the Midwest and the beauty of developing a kinesthetic sense of knowing where to put the ball. His secret power, he writes, lies in understanding the wind on imperfect courts. Will I also know when the ball will land two inches inside the court lines after throwing it again and again? Will I feel satisfaction if I find love in the game?

Instead, I want to look at one of the quotes from Foster Wallace's novel Infinite Jest: The infinite roots of Tennis's beauty are self-competitive. You try to overcome and transcend the limited self whose limits make the game possible. My pain in seeking external love comes from neglecting what I can only find within myself. I must go beyond the limits of the limited self that Foster Wallace describes. Maybe we wouldn't have to spend our time playing pong if we were only going to get close to what we're really pursuing as transcendent self-love.