Lifestyle
L.A. Affairs: For my husband, there’s no such thing as can’t. Then cancer entered our lives
The sun has just set over the Palos Verdes hills, and the tennis court lights are buzzing to life. I’m enjoying time with my husband, Steve, standing between clean lines on the deep blue courts made bluer by the artificial glow. It feels familiar and self-contained, the two of us alone in our little rectangle-shaped world. I almost believe that everything’s going to be OK, despite the phone call we just had.
I watch Steve toss the ball high over his head in a straight line, striking “the trophy pose” — the one you see on all the trophies, with one arm reaching for the sky and the other holding the racket cocked back. And with the grace of a dancer and the force of a quarterback, he whips his racket over his head to connect with the ball in a perfect serve.
“Just like that,” he says, smiling. “Did you see how my racket scratched my back?”
I’m a little breathless watching — and not just because the temperature has dropped. I wish I could serve “just like that.” But mostly, I’m admiring my amazing husband.
“Yeah, just like that. You make it sound so easy,” I tease.
The serve, I’ve learned, is the most important shot in tennis because it’s the only one you control. Everything else is just a reaction. It’s hard to perfect, and still new to tennis myself, I’m afraid I’ll never get it.
“Remember, if the toss isn’t good, don’t even try to hit it,” he says. Which is solid advice for dating too, now that I think about it. Steve’s and my online profiles could not have been more dissimilar. I was recovering from an excruciating divorce, but I signed up on the advice of my writer friends (“It’s great character material!”). My profile was just a photo of my eye and a passage from a novel — something about how a couple reads their books: One dog-ears and underlines; the other keeps their reading material pristine. Steve posted a straightforward photo with a complete description of who he was and who he wanted to meet. Lucky for me, he’s into literature.
We married 10 years later during the COVID pandemic on Catalina Island. We kayaked to our beach “venue” with our laptop, rings and champagne rolled up in waterproof bags. We traded life vests and bathing suits for wedding attire behind a rock and connected to shaky cell service so family and friends could participate. Then we paddled back, racing to return the kayaks before sundown. That’s what life with Steve is like. There’s no such thing as “can’t.” If I dream it, he gets it done down to the last detail.
From tennis to home repairs, I’m tempted to call in an expert, but Steve’s credo is: If another human can do it, I can too. From the phone call we’d just had, I was becoming aware that this difference between us was about to be tested. Having opposite dating profiles or reading styles is very different from conflicting stances on lifesaving medical treatment. Steve’s PSA popped outside the normal range during a routine lab test and his urologist recommended an MRI. Steve didn’t wait for the follow-up to learn his fate. He disappeared into his office, searching Google and picking through the latest medical journals.
He even spent time learning to read his own MRI the same way he learned to play tennis: YouTube.
“Let’s see your toss,” Steve says, as yet another of my serves crashes into the net. It’s getting colder and darker. “Try starting with both your arms straight,” he says. “Ajla Tomljanović does that.”
I doubt I can do anything like the “Break Point” star, but I try. I want to get this serve fast. Patience is not one of my virtues. Also, we need to get home, and, according to the urologist, we need to get started on treatment.
My instinct is to trust doctors to know more than I do. If they say biopsy, I ask when. Steve rejected the standard biopsy in favor of his own plan, so he’ll need a referral, which will take time. Maybe too much time. The MRI indicated a large tumor that has spread outside of his prostate. Yet here we are out on a tennis court, worrying about whether a small fuzzy ball is landing in a painted box.
I watch Steve fish around in the basket of balls. “Look at my arm as I toss,” he says. I can’t, because my eyes are swimming. The thought of life without this man is unimaginable. Prostate cancer is not a death sentence these days, but it’s also not something you put off. As I watch him strike the trophy pose again, I shake my head to drive away thoughts of his athletic body deteriorating before my eyes. I know that the side effects of hormone treatment, horrifyingly referred to “chemical castration,” can be permanent.
It makes me want to freeze this moment. During the call with the doctor, Steve used the pronoun “we” a lot — as in “We have prostate cancer” and “We want an MRI-guided biopsy.” His eyes met mine more than once, reassuring me that we’re still a team — just like we are on complex video shoots for our business, parenting a blended family and wrangling our 120-pound dog for a bath.
All these years later, the books on my nightstand are highlighted, annotated and dog-eared. Steve’s bookmarks mostly point to YouTube channels. But we’re both consulting experts in our own ways.
He misreads my face and says, “Try to remember that tennis is play! Just relax and don’t think.”
How can I explain to this star athlete that for me, play was never about competition or skill? It was always about imagination. That’s my superpower. I realize that if I keep using it to imagine the worst, it will make the difficult time ahead much harder. Instead, as the courts around us go dark one by one, I take his hand and conjure up an image of the two of us, decades from now, standing on another blue tennis court in some exotic locale, lifting a giant United States Tennis Assn. seniors mixed doubles trophy — together.
The author earned an MFA from Antioch University Los Angeles, and her work has been published in Kelp Journal, Proud to Be, Inman News and others. She’s writing a hybrid memoir with her husband about their cancer journey. Find her at brennahumphreys.com and on Instagram: @brennahums.
L.A. Affairs chronicles the search for romantic love in all its glorious expressions in the L.A. area, and we want to hear your true story. We pay $400 for a published essay. Email LAAffairs@latimes.com. You can find submission guidelines here. You can find past columns here.
Students walk on the Stanford University campus on March 14, 2019, in Stanford, Calif.
Ben Margot/AP
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Ben Margot/AP
When Theo Baker arrived at Stanford University a few years ago, he joined the student newspaper, following the path of his journalist parents, Peter Baker, a White House correspondent for The New York Times, and Susan Glasser, a writer for The New Yorker.
Through his reporting as a student journalist, he eventually broke a story about manipulated data in Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne’s neuroscience research that helped lead to the university president’s resignation.
Theo Baker’s book, How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was released May 19. In it, Baker describes Stanford as a place where proximity to Silicon Valley gives rise to a parallel system of influence, recruitment and money, with investors looking to identify promising students almost as soon as they arrive on campus.
He told Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep there was “a sort of Stanford inside Stanford,” where elite students are drawn into an “alternate reality” of excess and access to cut corners.
In the interview, he discusses how Stanford is not just a university but also a pipeline where status and power can matter as much as ideas.
We reached out to Stanford University for comment and have not heard back.
Listen to the interview by clicking play on the blue box above.
The scoreboard shows the results of the women’s singles final match between Iga Swiatek of Poland and Amanda Anisimova of the U.S. at the Wimbledon Tennis Championships in London, Saturday, July 12, 2025.
Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
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Kirsty Wigglesworth/AP
Fifteen points in tennis? Nice. Thirty, 40 — even better. Advantage — that sounds good. “Love” — that also must be great, right? Well, not quite.
As the French Open rolls on and Serena Williams has announced her return to the sport, maybe you’ve been paying a little more attention to tennis. The sport’s scoring system is notably distinct, and can sometimes be hard to grasp for newcomers. But even tennis aficionados might not know why, or how, “love” became the unmistakable callout for zero points. For this installment of NPR’s Word of the Week, we’re exploring how a word that signifies trailing behind got such a sweet name.
“Love” comes from the heart — or an egg?
It’s hard to pinpoint when the first tennis ball went over the net. Tennis is a derivative of lots of other sports, such as “jeu de paume,” a handball game played in France, said JT Buzanga, the collections manager at the International Tennis Hall of Fame museum.
But tennis became a patented, official sport in 1874, said Steve Flink, a journalist whose tennis coverage got him inducted into the International Tennis Hall of Fame. It has retained its unique, mysterious scoring system ever since.
“By and large, the original system has held up almost entirely,” Flink said.
The use of “love” goes back to the late 18th century, said Jesse Sheidlower, a lexicographer. But it was used earlier than that in card games such as whist and bridge. Before the term made its way to tennis, the sport favored plain old “nothing,” or “nil,” he said.
Why love in the first place, though? Historians don’t really know for sure, but there are a few theories.
The French could have something to do with it. Some historians believe “love” derives from “l’oeuf,” which means “the egg” in French. Because eggs are shaped like zeros, terms such as “goose egg” and “duck’s egg” have been used in other contexts to mean zero, Sheidlower said.
It’s also possible English speakers mispronounced l’oeuf as “love.” But Sheidlower isn’t convinced that’s the answer.
“It’s the French equivalent of an English expression. But since that expression doesn’t appear in French, the French word wouldn’t have been used,” he said.
To be sure, France has had a lot of influence on tennis culture, Buzanga said. For example, “deuce” or a game tied at 40 points, comes from the French word for “two”: “deux.” But he prefers another prominent theory: that “love” comes from the idiom “for the love of the game.” Even if a player hasn’t scored, it doesn’t matter, because their heart is in it. It’s the theory Sheidlower said is the most plausible, because the idiom was used by the English before tennis was popularized.
Another variation of the “love of the game” theory is that the word could have come from the Dutch “lof,” or “honor” — or the Latin “amare,” meaning “to love,” Flink said.
But if tennis’ “love” doesn’t come from a French word, the theory at least has a French sensibility.
“I think the ‘for the love of the game’ is kind of romantic,” Buzanga said.
“Love” probably isn’t going anywhere
Tennis used to be a sport of leisure. The style of play has changed a lot over the years; players are more athletic and competitive, for instance, Flink said. But the rules of the sport are more steadfast, he said.
“There’s this incredible, enduring respect for tradition in tennis,” he said. “Changes are not made easily.”
There has been one major change in modern history: the tie-break. Matches can go on and on because players have to score two consecutive points to break a deuce, or by two games to break a tied set. But the onset of television meant matches would have to get shorter if the sport wanted to capture a larger audience, Flink said.
Change even came for “love.” An alternative sprouted up in the 1970s, and is still used today: “bagel,” named for its zero shape, Sheidlower said. Novices may say “zero,” and insiders will understand what they mean, but they “will needle them about it,” Flink said.
But “love” still prevails.
“People kind of like it,” Flink said. “It’s different. Why say zero when you can say love?”
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