Murder Is My Racquet Read Online Free PDF

nothing wrong with my game. It was just that I’d allowed my basic tennis fundamentals to be corrupted and seduced by weaving a web of artifice and delusion. Playing me was, for most good church-going Americans, like playing tennis with a sentient wall of carnival mirrors. Andthat has been my style ever since. Maybe even before I ever picked up a racquet.
    You see, I was a chess prodigy when I was very young. At the tender age of seven I played the world grandmaster, Samuel Reschevsky, in Houston, Texas. He was there to play a simultaneous match with fifty people, all of whom, except for me, were adults. He beat all of us, of course, but afterward he told my dad he was sorry to have had to beat his son. He just had to be very careful with seven-year-olds. If he ever lost to one of them it’d be headlines.
    The way you play a game, especially as a child, does more than reveal your character. I believe, after some grudging reflection, it provides a psychological peephole into the kind of person you will someday be. The way you play the game becomes an ingrained, living thing, a succubus that eventually determines how you play the game of life.
    As far as chess was concerned, however, you could say I peaked at the age of seven. But by then, I now realize, I’d internalized the nature of the game. Very possibly, I’d unconsciously brought a sidecar of chess to my game of tennis. After all, tennis is not a team sport; the way you play tends to reveal who you really are. As long as you’re winning, of course, nobody ever notices.
    The game I played, the one that mildly irritated Coach Sledge, was an extremely duplicitous, downright deceitful at times, fabric of cat-and-mouse conceit. Yes, I’d begin with a strong, left-handed serve. But after that, things tended to degenerate. My stock-in-trade became a willful charade of evil fakes, feints, and last-moment viciously undercut backhands. In other words, I was playing physical chess. There is no morality in chess or tennis, or course; morality, I suppose, is consideredto be confined only to the game of life. Again, when you’re winning, nobody notices.
    Opposing players, many of whom were superior to me in basic tennis skills, were often left shaking their heads in what looked to me like a slightly more demonstrative impersonation of Coach Sledge. I would smile and graciously accept whatever accolades were thrown my way by any lookers-on. Sometimes there were stands full of people and sometimes there was only the sound of one hand clapping. It didn’t matter. I knew. Deceiving the opponent was just as good as, indeed, it almost seemed preferable to, beating him with sound groundstrokes and solid play. When you beat a highly skilled player in such a fashion, you almost have to struggle to contain your glee. I got pretty good at that, too.
    When I graduated high school I left the sport of tennis far behind me, much as I’d done with chess back in my childhood. I could still play either of them, of course, but life was moving too fast for chess, and tennis seemed to require too high a degree of tedium in finding appropriate courts, lining up appropriate opponents, and constantly changing into appropriate clothing. It just didn’t seem appropriate. Besides, I had college to deal with. My tennis racquet remained in the closet; the only webs of deceit associated with it were now woven exclusively by highly industrious spiders.
    But, to be sure, I was quite busy myself. College was a whole new ballgame, as they say. Many of the kids who were the stars of my high school senior class went directly to pumping gasoline. New facts emerged in college and I discovered to my personal delight that I flourished in this new environment. A deft talent for obfuscation works wonders with any seemingly sophisticated social set. “What you do in this world,” thegreat Sherlock Holmes once said, “is a matter of no consequence. The question is what you can make people think you have done.”