THE PULL TOWARDS PLAY: SERIES 008
Stories from the inner life of tennis.
The Pull Towards Play is a series of short portraits of real tennis players from around the world. Not professionals. Just people who keep showing up, for reasons that are hard to name and impossible to ignore.
MADISON, MELBOURNE
There is a memory she can’t shake.
She is twelve. Maybe fourteen. Playing on a Saturday morning on a synthetic court. Her mother is watching from the sidelines. This was not a regular occurrence. Full-time worker, single mother of three, there were groceries to buy and a house to clean. Saturday morning tennis was usually someone else’s shift.
But she was there that day.
The match had gone to deuce and back again more times than anyone wanted to count. Madison couldn’t close it. And then from the sidelines, her mother’s voice cut through.
“Finish it, Madison.”
She probably just wanted to get to the shops. She almost certainly has no memory of it now. But in that moment it felt like the whole world was watching. Madison hit the best drop shot of her life. The ball kissed the court and died. Her opponent couldn’t reach it.
She didn’t know it then, but her mother had given her something she would carry with her.
She filed it away somewhere deep and kept going.
Twelve years in real estate came next. She was successful by most measures and increasingly unhappy by her own. Some mornings she would take annual leave simply to avoid another day of it. To create a little space. To breathe.
Then life became harder still.
Somewhere in that difficult stretch, she found her way back to something she had left behind without quite meaning to.
She went back to tennis.
The court gave her something the rest of her life couldn’t. The aliveness of it. The way the mind has to be completely present, tracking the ball, reading the court, finding the gap. The way you can wallop a ball when you are angry or sad and feel something genuinely shift.
She found the right club, the right people.
She kept showing up.
She was thirty-three weeks pregnant.
Still showing up.
Still attacking the ball the same way she always had. Her body had changed. Her game hadn’t.
Out on court with her unborn child, she thought about what she was already passing on.
She hoped she was making a future tennis player.
Or maybe she was passing on something else entirely.
That you show up.
That you finish it.
Enough to be there again tomorrow.
She kept playing until she was full term.
Then her daughter, Edelene Mary, arrived.
Madison finished it.