I have spent my afternoon getting balls hit at me at high speed by strong men. I was then obliged to shout a word beginning with F at them loudly (but never loudly enough).
This was because I was at Oxtalls Tennis Centre in Gloucester trying to become a line umpire.
Why?
Why not?
It started a few months ago when hurriedly writing a story for the last ever laughterinoddplaces. A story that had been knocking around my head for a while about a tennis official which ended up being called Hawkeye.
During the writing of it I realise that i don’t know nearly enough either the rules of tennis or how one becomes an official. So I done me some googling.
And it turns out that all you have to do is attend a half day recruitment day, then you get to go on a one day course and you can be an official line judge type person at proper matches and everything.
So I applied. And then promptly forgot about it.
A few months later I got a reply offering me dates for the course. And so I found myself this afternoon fretting about whether my definition of “comfortable clothing” was the same as theirs and if they could legally make me do it in my pants.
But other people were in jeans and I saw my name printed on a name badge and immediately relaxed
There were quite a few people there, of quite a few ages. I helped myself to the free coffee and sat in an empty chair with a feeling of anxiety. It was starting to dawn on me that this was serious.
We were given a brief intro to our teachers, and they were proper. Not tennis hobbiest, but people who have travelled the world, called the line at many Wimbledon finals and been to the Olympics.
I felt less and less like taking the piss and more and more like being slightly sick.
We were told how to stand. There’s an “at ease” pose (hand behind back, legs apart). This is for when there is no play happening and the line judge is quite literally at ease (aside from the fact their probably bricking it, what with all the pressure and balls).
Having to comically bend over when the player bounces his ball (sorry, it’s hard not to sound like a carry on script) a line judge then adopt the “Ready” position, hands on thighs, eyes forward.
If a serve is in then there is a safe hand signal. If it’s out then one must shout “FAULT!”
Then we were told we’d be going out on court, to be tested.
and herein lay the problem, I am not really a shouter. In life I rarely shout. Maybe a toestubb or burnt omelette might make me yell, but the yelling these people were after was another level entirely. Unless I purposely kicked a wall before every serve, or burnt some eggs during a particularly long volley I had no chance.
and it might sound odd, but there was no warmup, it was from a classroom where I’d not said a word since a polite “thank you” for being given my name badge to shouting at an almost stranger surrounded by fit people.
And there’s another problem. Fit people, people with pecs and abs and other one syllable words to make me feel inferior, they don’t like line judges, the boring officials that they are. So you can imagine how they feel about wannabe-ones.
I clam up when around sporty people at the best of times but now I was being asked, nay told, to shout that they’d done wrong louder than I’d shout if I’d found my wife somehow sleeping with me from the past.
We had to test our shouting skills. I yelled. A squeaky
“fault”
crept out and fell on the floor with a puff of dust from the hitherto unused area of my vocal chords designated for shouting. I tried again, better, less dusty, still a bit squeaky.
By my third go I tried to shout from the diaphragm and bellowed a
“FAULT”
that surprised not only the teacher, but me and a flock of seagulls.
Then we had a shout off, one group against the other, it was getting truly fucking nervewracking. And everyone was taking it so seriously. My turn came, it was odd, for a person who makes a living speaking in public, I was not only terrified but also completely clueless at which kind of font the “FAULT” would come out of my mouth in?
It turned out to be a squeaky comic sans kind of shout, I helped our team lose the first battle of the day.
Then we were going to have balls hit at us by people called Rafa and Andre and Roger (and tim) and I had to watch the line, if the ball was in (or on the line) I’d do the safe signal. If it went out I’d shout “FAULT”
It was equally terrifying, exhilarating, easy and hard. they come quick, and sometimes right at you. And after a flurry of ones easily in or out, when one is near the line there’s a real panic of what to call.
and I just couldn’t take the piss, like I’d like. I thought it would be funny to shout “FUCK” but I don’t think anyone would have laughed. I felt like I should have been making lots of Louis Theroux gurns to the camera, but there was no camera, so I gurned within, and shouted “fault” again and again.
We spent the rest of the afternoon doing just this from one end and the other. I think I was calling well, but would never shout loud enough.
The teacher was big welsh man with a baritone voice that would make eardrums bleed at a whisper. I just couldn’t compete.
and my shout was erratic, every now and again a comic sans would slip in.
But by the end of they I thought I’d done ok, and was looking forward to maybe getting the chance to do this for real in a much more nervewracking situation.
We all went our separate ways and, if nothing else, I promised to have a little more respect for the line judges in the future.
UPDATE: I didn’t get to the next stage, being sent an email the next day saying “We understand that you may be disappointed not to make it through but the standard was very high this year”
I can’t even shout FAULT loud enough, there’s an irony there somewhere.
Of course, the funniest thing is, after going through all this… I don’t even like tennis that much.