tennis

I’ve started work on a project that involves (in part) searching through some old VHS tapes mostly from the very early 1980s. This was not long after my father — Ian Graham Ellis — had bought a portapak style JVC video camera (consisting of a large handheld camera connected to a shoulder-pack that housed the VHS tape). Among taped TV shows and documentaries,¹ I stumbled across this footage of me practising tennis down the end of our street in Masterton, New Zealand. I reckon I was maybe 12 years old, and this wall was my home away from home — Dad and I even painted a tennis net on it, as well as a service line on the road itself. Any tennis aficionados out there will note the semi-western forehand grip (I suspect I was mimicking the legendary Bjorn Borg who played with a full western grip) which was coached out of me … and my forehand never recovered.