 By Karen Sharpe
It wasn’t until he turned 65 years old that Daniel O’Keeffe, M.D., ’42 learned how to volley a tennis ball over a net. Back in the little town where he grew up in the hills of the Adirondacks, no one had the money for a tennis court.
But after he retired from his career as an ob-gyn, O’Keeffe needed something to keep him busy. He tried golf but gave up on the fourth hole of his first lesson. So tennis it was.
It turned out to be a perfect match.
In June, O’Keeffe and his partner, Ed Gall—who are both 86—won the gold medal in the National Senior Olympics men’s tennis doubles, in the 85-to-90-year-old division, in Louisville, Ky.
“I guess I was a little lucky there,” O’Keeffe says with a laugh. “We won by the skin of our teeth. It was so hot, and we played both the semifinals and finals on the same day.”
Just 48 hours before the match, O’Keeffe had been in the hospital recovering from a bout of hypotension.
“We played on hard courts, and we usually play on clay. I teased one of the girls there, saying, ‘What are you trying to do, kill us?’ ” O’Keeffe joked. “I’ve got a pacemaker, and I had just gotten out of the hospital—so, at the end of the second game, I looked around, and there was the ambulance with two paramedics. Then I said to her, ‘When are you going to have the hearse show up?’”
O’Keeffe, who clearly enjoys life and the game of tennis, still plays five days a week, taking weekends off; during the summer, he may be found on courts in Glens Falls, N.Y., and, in the winter, Payne Park in Sarasota, Fla.—where Gall and he compete regularly in local tournaments. In fact, O’Keeffe has played at the state level Senior Games multiple times and has advanced to the nationals once before.
More than 12,000 seniors competed in the national games, according to O’Keeffe—with participants in the 50s-to-90s age range. O’Keeffe and his partner weren’t even the oldest tennis players—three 91-year-old men competed in the singles division.
“There were old geezers running all over Louisville,” he notes.
O’Keeffe played baseball and basketball in high school but did not continue with sports in College because, he says, his premed studies kept him “swamped.”
“I was too busy studying,” he explains. “Coming from a small town as I did, I didn’t have quite the same educational background as some of the boys from New York and other places. Let’s just say it was challenge.”
|
