My grandparents spent every winter on an island in Florida, in a small rented cottage 100 yards from the Gulf of Mexico at a place called the Shalimar. The cottage, one of a dozen that surrounded a swimming pool, had no air conditioning, paper-thin wood-paneled walls and only the suggestion of a kitchen. It was common to share a night's sleep with a flitting palmetto bug, and you had to be careful of fire ants in the yard. The Shalimar was managed by a man named Sonny, who drove around in a beat-up golf cart and liked to play tricks on the kids, such as removing his false teeth. Across the street was a murky pond with two alligators, whom Sonny called Marshall and Jake -- until the winter when Marshall ate Jake.
My grandparents did not play golf or tennis, and they rarely fished. Though my grandfather was a wealthy man, he did not own a boat. Or a jet ski. Or a sea kayak. Their screened-in porch at the Shalimar was full of seashells that they had collected on early morning walks -- shells with wonderful, exotic names such as lion's paws, nutmegs, fighting conchs, apple murexes, junonias, coquinas. In the heat of the afternoon, my grandmother crafted intricate lamps and mirrors out of these shells, while my grandfather smoked a pipe. My grandparents had the type of deep, natural tan people used to achieve in the pre-SPF days. On overcast days, they might take the grandkids to a citrus grove to pick grapefruit. Or they'd play bridge.
Pinellas Park shuffleboarder Stan Budin.
(Kyoko Hamada)
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But their true sport and pastime was shuffleboard. The biggest event of their days happened in the late afternoon, when my grandparents convened near the swimming pool with the other snowbirds for a cutthroat game of shuffleboard. For an hour, the sunny mood around the Shalimar turned tense as action on the court heated up. "Shuffleboard will break your heart," my grandmother used to say. But after the game, there would always be poolside martinis and laughter.
My grandparents loved shuffleboard so much that they built a court at their summer home up north in New Jersey. Therefore, I grew up in a family of very competitive shufflers, who for decades staged an annual Fourth of July tournament. I am the former champion of that tournament -- I still have the blue ribbon to prove it, and my name is etched on a shuffleboard plaque that's packed away somewhere in my parent's basement.
I loved my grandparents' life so much that, at the age of 9, I eagerly awaited my own retirement. I knew exactly how I wanted it to look: I wanted a rickety cottage near a pond with an alligator or two. I wanted to walk the beach in baggy plaid shorts and collect seashells. I wanted to eat a fresh pink grapefruit each morning and drink a martini in the afternoon. And, of course, I intended to play shuffleboard every afternoon.
I haven't thought about my old Shalimar vision of retirement for many years. It's winter, and I've fled the frigid northeast for an extended visit on an island at the mouth of Tampa Bay. I've come to Florida disgruntled with work. I've just resigned from yet another supposed dream job, and at the ripe old age of 33 I am contemplating an early retirement.
Now, I find myself at a bar next to the Gulf of Mexico listening to yet another bad rendition of "Cheeseburger in Paradise" by an aging Jimmy Buffett wannabe with a guitar and rayon Hawaiian shirt. I'm drinking a lukewarm can of beer in one of those insulated foam huggies along with a bunch of other sunburned guys in tank tops. I'm here because it's overcast, and I can't find a citrus grove within 50 miles that will allow me to pick my own grapefruit. "Oh, honey, nobody does that any more," one woman told me. "The liability's just too high."
So I'm drinking my beer and flipping through the Bradenton Herald -- checking the odds for the evening races at the Sarasota Kennel Club -- when a few pages past the sports section, a headline catches my eye: "Shuffleboard gets you thinking outside the box." The headline draws me into the Herald's weekly Shuffleboard Notebook column, which discusses Florida's competitive shuffleboard circuit at length.
The Shuffleboard Notebook grabs me by surprise. In the years since my childhood, I've been conditioned to view shuffleboard derisively, as a catch-all metaphor for the dowdy Ghost of Senior Citizenship Past. Shuffleboard? Not my generation. We'll never retire! We'll be having babies at age 70! We'll jump out of airplanes on our 80th birthdays! We'll be able to maintain erections at 90! We'll live forever in the shiny, golden future. Shuffleboard! Ha!
We've all read and watched bubbly news stories about the Future of Retirement or the New Old, nearly all of which trumpet sentiments like, "Today's active seniors aren't just relaxing and playing shuffleboard anymore!" Only a few months prior, I read an article in USA Today that brashly suggested, "Shuffleboard is out, rocking climbing is in." So negatively do aging Baby Boomers view shuffleboard, that the CEO of Del Webb, one of the nation's largest builders of "active adult communities" (i.e. retirement villages) recently declared, "Del Webb will never build another shuffleboard court."
Yet the fact that the Bradenton Herald publishes a weekly shuffleboard column perhaps suggests a different story. Here, in the Tampa Bay area, at least a few people still play shuffleboard. Which means that my old vision of retirement isn't totally dead. I have a hunch, however, that shuffleboard isn't likely to be around when I become a senior citizen. So, three decades earlier than most people, I decide to spend some winter days in Florida playing shuffleboard.
They call shuffleboard a thinking man's game, but all I'm thinking about right now is excuses. I must be too strong for this sport, I keep telling myself. I must be too young and too healthy and too athletic. Yeah, that's it. That's what I'll tell my friends back home anyway. I'm certainly not going to tell them the truth: That I'm a man who's losing a sporting contest to a 70-year-old woman.
Losing might even be too subtle of a description. I'm actually getting spanked, broken down, taken to school by a nice woman named Joyce Linna, with graying hair and a Tampa Bay Buccaneers sweat shirt. My score is a big fat zero. Linna, meanwhile, has 68 points and needs to reach 75 for a win. Two of her black discs are now resting on scores of 7 and 8. Which means that unless I do the impossible -- knock both of her scoring discs off the court with my one remaining shot -- I will lose my third match of the day. Joyce will be the third senior citizen to take my money on this sunny afternoon at the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club.
You see, at the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club they play for cash on Mondays and Wednesdays -- a nickel a game. I've already given nickels away to a guy wearing two hearing aids and an 88-year-old man who ambled over to the court with the aid of a cane.
As I aim the cue stick to shoot my fourth, and last, disc -- my "hammer" as serious shufflers call it -- I am acutely aware of being hustled. They're wily, these old people here at the St. Petersburg Shuffleboard Club. They know an easy mark when they see one. They know that someone my age grows overconfident at the sight of walkers and liver spots and orthopedic shoes. They know how fiendishly difficult it is to shove a waxed disc 52 feet down a court that's been sprinkled with thousands of microscopic glass shards and somehow make it stop inside the triangle hopscotch-like diagram, in one of the narrow boxes that denote scores of 7, 8 or -- in the space at the triangle's tiny tip -- 10 points. I keep scooting my disc clear past the triangle and wildly off the board. That's why I have scored no points in this game. The more frustrated I get, the less touch I have.
