Bob Dyer: Playing Tennis With Jeffrey Dahmer

I didn’t mean to give him the willies. I figured he already knew.But until I called Mike Rankine last week, the Portage Lakes area resident had no idea he once played a tennis match against Jeffrey Dahmer.And lost.It all began when Beacon Journal history maven Mark J. Price was wandering around in a database, looking for material for his awesome weekly column, This Place, This Time, and stumbled across a box score for a high school tennis tournament printed May 14, 1976 — 40 years ago this month.Our newspaper reported that the previous day, a Jeff Dahmer from Revere easily defeated a Mike Rankine from Ellet, 6-4 and 6-1.Fortunately for the sake of this column, the name Rankine is almost as uncommon as the name Dahmer.