In our primes (i.e. before the age of 60), Scott and I played countless games of tennis at which he beat me 95% of the time. We began playing in Saskatoon, where we both lived at the time. I can’t remember how or why we started our tennis sessions because I had no idea of how the game was played. But how hard could it be? You knocked a ball over a net with a racket, trying to get the other guy to fail, knocking it back over at you. All my years of playing hockey and golf surely lent me some skills at hitting a ball over a net with a racket.
Apparently not. But we played anyway because it was a “good workout”. I am six-foot-one; Scott would have been five-foot-eight if he stood on his toes. I could not beat him. The only shot of mine that he had a hard time handling was a backhand slice. It landed at his feet and never seemed to bounce in the direction it was heading. So, I used it as often as I could—once or twice a game. Scott was a good enough player that he kept the ball away from my backhand. He made me hit my listless, pathetic forehand—usually into the net or beyond the backcourt. I had no control over it whatsoever.
Still, we played on, and when I was writer-in-residence in Estevan, we played there in that stupid, ceaseless wind where he continued to beat me. However, he didn’t come to Estevan to visit me and beat me at tennis; he came to rekindle a relationship he had fomented years earlier in Yorkton, where he had been a newspaper reporter back when small towns had newspapers and actual reporters working for them. He had taken a strong liking to the school librarian in Yorkton and was pleased to learn that she had relocated to Estevan. Laurel did not play tennis but had many other attributes that endeared her to Scott, among them a love of books. Scott was a writer.
The obituary can be found here: https://www.castlegarfuneral.com/obituaries/Scott-Gregory-Miller?obId=45838000