Double Fault

🔹 Congrats to our Comment Contest winner Gail P. for her comment in last week’s poll. We had a lot of great comments, but she summed it up perfectly with “An a** will always be an a**!” For her comment she wins a LA GOLF hat!

Dear readers, this story comes to us from an old club in the Deep South. The kind of place where you still wear a jacket after six. No denim in the dining room, tasteful or otherwise. It happened back in 2006, when the tennis program was still the thing wives did while their husbands played eighteen holes.

As always, we changed the names to protect the guilty.

The guy who hired the private investigator, we’ll call him Tom, did it because his wife said the pro’s name three times at dinner, blushing each time.

She’d been taking lessons for over a year. Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10 a.m. Never missed. Not for the kids’ piano recitals, not when she had the flu, not when her mother came to visit.

Tom suggested they play mixed doubles once. She said she wasn’t ready yet.

This was 2006. Before anyone tracked their spouse on their phone. Before you could pull up texts and see who they were messaging at midnight.

The PI took two weeks.

When Tom opened the file, he expected one affair.

He got three.

Three married women. All members. Same pattern every time, lessons that ran long, text messages late at night about “technique,” the pro’s car parked in driveways while husbands were at the office.

Then the PI said something Tom still remembers: “Based on what I’m seeing, I’d estimate fifteen to twenty over the last four years.”

“How do you know?”

“Because I’ve seen this before. They all run the same playbook.”

Tom didn’t go home first. He went straight to the club president. Walked into his office. Put the folder on the desk. Didn’t sit down.

“This isn’t about my marriage,” Tom said. “This is about your employee.”

The president read for maybe two minutes. Closed the folder. Didn’t say anything for a while.

Then: “How many other husbands know?”

“As far as I know, just me.”

The president nodded. “Let’s keep it that way.”

The tennis pro was gone by the next morning. No hearing. No severance. His name disappeared from the staff directory by noon.

Apparently he didn’t say a word. Just cleaned out his locker and left. One of the valets said he looked like he’d done it before.

The official announcement went out that afternoon: Jacob Ryan is no longer with the club. We wish him well.

Word spread immediately, the way it does in country club circles. A phone call to a friend at another club, a text to a former tennis partner, someone’s ex-wife still on a group chat.

By that evening, people who hadn’t been members in years were hearing the news.

The first email came two days later.

A woman who’d resigned her membership in 2003. Divorced. Living in Scottsdale now. She’d heard through a mutual friend that Ryan was gone. She told the president she’d had an affair with him back then. He’d said she was different. That he was leaving his girlfriend. She left her husband. Ryan ended it two weeks later. She’d never told anyone. She thought she was the only one.

By Friday, four more women reached out. Same story. Different years.

Then a current member sent an email. Still married. The affair had ended six months earlier. It read: “I stayed quiet because I didn’t want to destroy my family. But if others are coming forward, I need to as well.”

The once boisterous men’s grill suddenly felt more like a waiting room at a mortuary.

Guys who’d spent twenty years talking about outlandish market returns and SEC football “booster schemes” suddenly couldn’t look at each other.

Finally, someone said it out loud: “Anyone else’s wife take lessons with him?”

Three hands went up.

One guy laughed nervously. “Mine were just group clinics, though.”

Another: “Mine did privates for a few months. But it was years ago.”

A third guy, our source remembers his name but won’t say it, spoke up.

“My wife did two-hour sessions. Tuesdays and Thursdays. For two years.”

Nobody said anything.

He just got up and walked out, leaving his freshly poured Old Fashioned to answer any further questions.

This was when the bad times came. Every man whose wife had taken a private lesson now had to wonder: How would I even know?

The signs weren’t signs. They were just… life.

Maybe she bought new tennis skirts. So what, she was working on her game, right?

She mentioned his name at dinner. He was her instructor. Why wouldn’t she say his name?

She never missed Tuesday lessons. She was disciplined. That’s an honorable trait, isn’t it?

None of it meant anything, yet all of it could mean everything.

One member confronted his wife at the club over dinner. It started as a quiet conversation and became much more after she confessed. The shouting match was as legendary as the overturned table and shattered glass. Neither were seen at the club again after that night.

Two other couples went to therapy. One wife denied it so convincingly her husband apologized for asking.

Meanwhile, dozens of other men with “tennis wives” kept their heads down and moved on with life, wondering if they’d ever know the truth.

Twenty years later, the thing that remains isn’t the twelve confirmed affairs. It’s the silence that sat in the men’s grill that week.

Watching men who had known each other for decades sit there, staring into their drinks, wondering if their wives had lied to them.

“Some of them,” our source said, “never looked at their wives the same way again.”

The club changed policy. Lessons were capped at forty-five minutes. New pro. New courts. House calls strictly forbidden.

But the wives stopped booking privates entirely.

Not because of the rule.

Because the husbands were watching.

Poll Question

Last Week's Poll Result

Who won the 1991 Club Championship?

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ The lawyer - rules are rules

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 The kid - everyone knows it

⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Nobody - the plaque says one thing, the bar says another

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ The asterisk - and it always will

Lots of votes and lots of comments! Keep ‘em coming! Many pointed out that the rule violation wasn’t correctly administered, which is true - and unforunate for The Kid.

We checked with our source and apparently he gave a nod to the crowd, which the lawyer argued was affirmation that he took advice. The pro, knowing the lawyer would probably file some frivilous lawsuit, went ahead and made the controversial ruling in the lawyer’s favor.

Don’t forget to catch up on past stories at ccconfidential.vip - and while you’re at it, tell a friend!

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