I’ll never make the front page

In my life I find that aviation isn’t everything. It does connect to everything else, however.

For example, I used to play tennis. I played fairly often. As often as I could. I enjoyed playing the game. Perhaps because it gave me time with friends. Time to enjoy each other’s company. To talk about this and that, to pass an afternoon with laughter and hope. Hope for a better shot or a more impressive game. Laughter because I wasn’t very good. A condition that never really improved over the years.

I honestly don’t know when I started playing tennis. There were public courts near my home and my elementary school. Perhaps I grabbed a racket and started there. There were courts at Camp Blanding, the military base in northern Florida that sat directly opposite my grandfather’s house on Kingsley Lake. My neighbor Steve and I would jump in his boat, motor over to the courts, and play until either the sun burned us too much or was setting so we skittered home for dinner.

Steve went on to be a lineman at Gainesville Regional Airport where he worked closely with and then for writer, pilot, and JU 52 owner Martin Caidin.

Today I own the crew jacket Steve wore when traveling with Martin. It’s a wonderful green paramilitary thing filled with fantastic memories and great sentimental value. It rarely leaves my closet and never leaves the house. It is a remnant of another time when wearing the Confederate Stars and Bars emblem that is so prominently displayed was not considered to be problematic. Today it is. So it remains a treasured gift that never leaves the house.

Caidin, incidentally wrote a science fiction book, “Cyborg,” that became the basis for the long-running television series, “The Six-Million Dollar Man.” An eventual spin-off, “The Bionic Woman,” added to the Caidin entertainment empire.

He also published the book “Marooned” in 1964, which was made into a movie in 1969, hitting theaters just months after the first moon landing. Martin was a character, to be sure.

Steve is retired from a career in law enforcement now. He’s still a dear friend. One I see far too seldom.

Camp Blanding is still kicking, too. It’s a National Guard training facility these days, as it has been for many years.

Blanding is semi-famous for two things. It is where 60 Minutes editorialist Andy Rooney was based before heading off to Europe in World War II, an experience that launched his career. Ironically, it also served as the largest POW camp in Florida during those years, holding more than 1,000 German POWs from 1942 through 1946.

Blanding is not famous in any way for my tennis playing, or its tennis courts, or for the frivolous manner in which Steve and I would routinely beach his boat and make use of the facilities on base. There is a beauty to the innocence and arrogance of youth. I’m pleased I had the opportunity to experience both. Everyone should be so lucky.

Years later I played with my brother-in-law, Peter. Peter was good. Not great, but good. I still played like an idiot.

And I’ll tell you what was so maddeningly erratic about my game. It was my desire to consistently hit a return with such powerful backspin that my opponent would be caught flat-footed and aghast at my prowess on the court.

Now, to be fair, I can tell you I did hit that shot from time to time. It was a beautiful thing, too. Peter would zip the ball over the net fast and low. It skipped off the concrete on my side of the court coming at me with plenty of mustard on it. My plan was to slice my racket downward as I returned the ball to his side of the net. The motion of my racket would provide such powerful backspin that the ball would hit the ground in front of my opponent, reverse course, and leave him reaching pitifully to connect with the ball as it bounced benignly away from him back into the net.

When it worked, it was a miraculous thing to witness. It made my heart sing. Everything about that basic display of physics thrilled me. The problem is it didn’t work very often. The more likely outcome was that I’d simply chop the ball into the ground in front of me. Sometimes I wouldn’t get sufficient loft to clear the net. My miracle shot was killing my game. But I was determined. I was committed to perfecting that shot, so I tried it over, and over, and over again. For years.

One day after losing yet another set to Peter, my brother-in-law walked calmly to the net. He wasn’t even out of breath since I had returned so few shots to his side of the court. He tapped his racket on the net and said as plainly as he could, “I don’t know what you’re trying to do, but it’s not working. You should try something else.”

I laughed so hard I think I actually fell down on the court. He was right. Undeniably so. I was playing like a chump, committed to perfecting a shot that rarely worked. My quest was killing my game, causing me to lose often. A reality that was beginning to truly irritate my playing partner, my friend, my brother-in-law.

I started to play it straight after that. I won some, I lost some. But we played with greater satisfaction. Each outing was less about winning and more about enjoying the experience of doing something together that we both found gratifying. Playing the game itself became more important than winning it. Being a good partner took center stage, replacing the desire to have a tool in my bag that could whip all comers.

That attitude sticks with me today. I’m not the best pilot in the world. Nobody who flies with me comes away thinking I’ll challenge the memory of Bob Hoover. I shoot for being safe, for following the rules, for being open to learning new things, to go with the flow for the enhanced safety of all concerned.

That’s not such a bad goal, frankly. With this attitude I’ll never make the front page for my flying exploits, but on the other hand, I’ll never be on the front page for my flying exploits — if you know what I mean.