Jr. Tennis You'd probably never guess it by looking at me today, but back in my high school days I was a pretty good tennis player. I played at the prestigious Port Washington Tennis Academy (mainly because my father was an instructor there), and one of the side benefits of being around the Academy was access to various associated enterprises. Chief among these (at least as far as I was concerned) was a magazine called College and Junior Tennis. The magazine mostly reported results of various tournaments and did informational pieces about who's who among the up and coming crowd in competative tennis, but it did run a few "feature articles." (In fact, my first professional writing assignment came from Jr. Tennis ... but that's a story for a different day.) What we're concerned about here is that the editor saw me sitting doodling in a notebook one day and asked if I could come up with any cartoons about tennis.
I went after that assignment like Bjorn Borg chasing down a topspin lob.
My first sale was a page of cartoons entitled "What If Darth Vader Played Tennis" (this was in the days when Lucasfilm was allowing such endeavors as the Star Wars Holiday Special ... so my little page of cartoons came in way under their radar). I no longer have a copy of that series of single panel gags, but I do have copies of the subsequent strip that I did (which I believe the editor dubbed Behind the Baseline). They ran off and on for the better part of a year ... and looking back at them now, I still get a chuckle (though more often because of my terrible lettering skills than the punchline).
I guess I'm just egotistical enough to think that tennis enthusiasts can yet find a laugh or two in these jokes, even nearly two decades later.
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