The Tennis Partner: A Doctor's Story of Friendship and Loss

No one ever seems out of place in a coffee shop.

My right hand supports the fingers, the fingers of my left hand slide down the ball of the thumb, down that familiar incline, into the groove between the flexor tendons, to the radial artery. If I were a cellist, this would be my fret board.

The sky was now blotted out, replaced by a brown-gray canopy, except to the far west where an orange, perfectly round fireball had formed, looking like light at the end of the tunnel.

Keep the ball in play. Keep your eye on the ball. Follow through. These were admonitions for both tennis and life, and they spilled over from the one into the other.

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My memory of that period is tied up with sounds and smells: rain rattling on a corrugated tin roof, the scent of wet eucalyptus, raised voices inside the house that brought my heart to my throat, the telephone shattering against a wall, wood smoke from the fireplace, and, worst of all, silences that settled like a shroud and heightened until they w

The bar was filling up. The faces of the people walking in seemed relaxed, their lives uncomplicated by the sorts of things we had just traded across the table. “When

“Within your secrets lies your sickness,” Dr. Talbott had said to me when I talked to him long after David’s death. If David never sustained a lasting recovery, it was because he never let go of his secret, there were some bars that never came down. His secret is still with him. He still walks alone.

After winning Wimbledon in 1920 at the late age of twenty-seven, Tilden did not lose a match in the next six years—a feat of domination that is inconceivable in modern tennis. Like a slugger batting a thousand for six seasons.