SUGAR TRAP

Too Hard, Too Soon

Life as a celebrity isn't private at all but it has benefits. You live in the coolest places, roll with your likes, your fan base is awesome. By all standard you are an idol, mentor and also a case study for public opinion just like me, my husband, and our neighbourhood.

By the way, I am May Morris an awesome tennis player, not trying to blow my trumpet but I know my onions in the game. I have held the lekki championship cup for 3 years. I have been playing in the club's women singles, my husband Billy Morris is a fitness instructor in our neighbourhood, he used to play football but finally retired and settled into the fitness business, we have been married for 5 years and preparing for a bigger family now. Billy meant the world to me and as far as I was concerned we were the only normal couple in this vicinity filled with liars, cheats and people who live to impress others. This area is just the typical Nigerian version of Beverly hills' but I found a way to live in it.

You can learn a lot about someone by playing tennis or other sports with them. Generally, I've found that a quiet woman on the tennis court could also be quiet in her off-court life, the Same way I have found out that a loud woman on the court tears her home apart when the need arises so it was no surprise to me when I saw our friend Betty trashing her husband with a frying spoon. Betty would seriously trash anyone with her racket if a fight emerges.

And then there's Emily Douglas, the thing about Emily is that she claims to be a big girl or shows to be one she played for the national football team while she was still very active in the sport until she blew out her knee. Once the orthopaedic surgeon had repaired it, Emily switched to tennis. But she plays tennis like a football player, hitting booming serves and blasting away at the net man from the baseline.

But I can beat her anytime any day, she wasn't a match for me, she knew this and didn't like it much, maybe since I had a smaller frame than she did because of her football build, whenever I played with her I like to come to the net and put pressure on her to hit it by me. This strategy was always easy to get her locked in and finally go for the win, the frustration on her face each time I win her amuses me but I tend to keep my cool, most of the time she'll overhit and bounce the ball off the back fence, don't even get me started on her line calls which I ignore and that's the only time she wins me. Let's just say that Mr luck is always around the corner when she's making the call and of course, everyone knows her lucky charm, it's called cheating

As a result, Emily always wants to play me. She just can't stand losing all the time to "a little lady" like me. Now I'm not little, I'm 5'5 feet tall But I'm pretty slender which makes me little compared to Emily, who is 5 inches taller and seventy pounds heavier than I am.

As much as I wouldn't want to play with Emily 24/7 she's hard to avoid because we both live in the same estate which was built around a clubhouse with a pool and lots of tennis courts. With so many people playing on teams in the Lekki Lawn Tennis club, it's pretty hard to avoid someone like Emily.

The good news is that I also get to play with a lot of really nice people like my mixed doubles partner, Joseph Miller. I met Joe through my husband Billy. Like I said earlier Billy is a fitness instructor and a lot of people who live in Pato's estate take classes at his studio, including Joe. Sad for me, Billy doesn't care for tennis because according to him, he doesn't see the effort in the game, so when he learned that joe was looking for a partner, he introduced him to me and we have been playing together for about a year now.

Today we were playing against a team somewhere on the mainland, so I offered to drive joe to save gas, given the way traffic builds up on a Saturday afternoon, we gave ourselves 1 hour to get there.

As he emerged from his front door, I wondered yet again why joe was still single. Part of it was that he lost his wife in an air crash years ago. After a lengthy mourning period, one of the ways he'd coped with his grief and get back his life was to join joe's class another way was to get back into tennis, which he played in his university days. The result of all that physical activity was a fit, trim dark-haired gentleman in his late thirties. I would have expected a man as cute as joe to attract women like bees to honey and to have anyone he wanted, But he kept telling Billy that he just hadn't found the right woman.