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Sibling rivalry, at its best, is a kind of private story, isn’t it? Made up of half competition, half companionship, and the merging of those two worlds is wholly impossible to explain to anyone who hasn’t lived it. Growing up, we kept score on everything. Not just the obvious things – sets on the tennis court, balls and strikes, strokes on the golf course, stamped divots at Lexington polo field – but we counted the invisible ones too. Things I didn’t even know. Who could hold their breath longer before jumping into the pool, daring stare downs without blinking, who could make the other laugh first. I’ll never forget the sight of Shells when her horse, Tsarevich, tossed her into a tree. She emerged looking like the swamp thing, limbs and leaves sticking out all over.
We spent long hours on tennis courts, southern sun beaming overhead and daylight stretching to dark. In those days, she moved across the baseline with a kind of grace few could replicate. It wasn’t a country sport then, but a competition. She had a feel for the game that few – and I mean very few – ever possess. Watching her hit forehands was like watching something unexpected before your eyes. People would literally stop and watch. I, on the other hand, had to grind for every point, every improvement on a shaky backhand and an even worse serve. In truth, we were both decent athletes, just in very different ways. Different sports. Different talents.
We idolized the greats then, names that felt larger than life: Jack Nicklaus, Annika Sörenstam (she preferred Karrie Webb), Steffi Graf, Pete Sampras, and on and on. If I told you how many hours we sat glued to a television just to watch Wimbledon, you’d never believe it (or how many old VHS tapes once existed of countless matches we’d never watch again). In those days, excellence gave claim to our own ambitions, even if ours were confined to local courts and greens and not Roland Garros or Augusta National. For a decade, my sister’s golfing claim to fame – a sport she never really took to – was an “almost” hole-in-one, a story that somehow grew more impressive with each retelling.
Even writing could take an odd sports theme – and beyond. We were always writing something. Recently, I posted a dumb joke to Facebook about vampires and Africa, built around the old Africa lyric – “they bless the rains down in Africa.” It made me think of a children’s book my sister wrote when she was about fourteen. I helped her (sorry to her teacher!) and we gave it a kind of Dr. Seuss spin – rhymes, whimsy, a magic carpet traveling the world. Somewhere in that story, we referenced a bridge in Africa named after Chelsi Smith, who had won Miss Universe in Namibia.
Years later, I interviewed Chelsi Smith for a piece. She was warm, grounded, proud of where she came from – Texas. I never told her about that book, but now I wish I had. She died in 2018. My sister died a year ago this week. Shew, that still doesn’t seem possible.
Since then, I’ve thought often about that book, about all the things we made together that now exist only in memory. We wrote parody songs too – dozens of them – mostly sports related and turned tournaments and players into rhythm and rhyme, celebrating the ones we loved and mocking the ones we didn’t.
“We play to win,” my father used to say, and we took that to heart. Maybe too much at times. The clashes we had were real, and in the moment, they felt enormous, but what lingers is the shared language of it all – the courts, the songs, the stories, the shared life. I miss those days. And I miss my sister.