Tennis Courts | Marine stadium

"I don't know if what I'm about to say makes this park a 5-star or a 1-star, so I'll let the better educated reader be the judge. I loved playing tennis here. I loved shooting the basketball around. I loved laying out on the grass and reading a book (can't beat a sunny day and a James Patterson novel). I loved everything about the place. Then they started bringing in the large equipment and ripping out the park's soul. Sure, the tennis court is still there but how am I supposed to serve up aces when the beeping starts? It was bad enough when local vagrant, Gary the Gibbon, would walk into the tennis court and demand to see some sort of identification. I don't know if that's his real name but I did watch him spit on a little kid who was playing in the court next to me. He said the kid deserved it because "his backhand lacked intention." And I know what you're thinking, Gary's probably some down-on-his-luck homeless man. Wrong. Apparently, Gary (probably not his name) is a recently retired landscape artist. Or, he ended up with some money in a divorce. The story changes every week. Anyway, the last four or five times I've been at the park, the tennis courts have been taken over for some new game called Pickleball. No, pickles aren't actually involved. So I always wait as this new fad inches closer to the abyss and the last time they asked me to play. Hoping that might speed up their departure, I obliged. And wouldn't you know it, along came Gary. He kept calling me a "sellout" and "soulless" due to my inclusion in the pickleball game (great game, btw). Then, he broke into a stream-of-conscious soliloquy about the dangers of freedom and the importance of hedonism in a society that only pretends to be about the individual. He followed that up with some Estonian poetry, likely Kristjan Jaak Peterson (my Latin is rusty), but definitely poignant. I was moved. And I'd never noticed the rustic quality of Gary's baritone. Long story short, I ran off with the pickleball setup and tossed it into the water...water, if you haven't been paying attention, that will soon flow all the way up next to Little Rec. Which, if anyone is asking, I once had back-to-back birdies on (Par-4 7th and Par-3 8th holes)."