THE TENNIS DOCUMENTARY SEND-UP

DOCUMENTARIANS HAVE MASTERED THE ART OF THE TENNIS DOC; COMEDIANS HAVE FOUND EVERY WAY TO SPOOF THEM

Jason Momoa plays Ronnie Dunster in a Saturday Night Live send-up of Battle of the Sexes.

By Adrian Margaret Brune

Billed as an intimate look at a number of underdog tennis stars, Netflix’s Break Point, released in 2022, was supposed to be the penultimate documentary on a crowded court — the extra-duty ball with the heavy topspin, if you will. But among others, Break Point had to contend with The Gods of Tennis from the BBC, McEnroe from Showtime, Citizen Ashe from HBO/Max and even the man of Adidas’ “more than just a shoe” fame, Who Is Stan Smith, which never quite found a home. But what about the tennis mockumentary? Although they don’t outnumber the number of appearances Billie Jean King makes in most any documentary about tennis or women’s sports, the recent Saturday Night Live short UNTOLD: Battle of the Sexes — a lampoon of 2017 movie, Battle of the Sexes — reminds us all that nothing beats a solid spoof. 

UNTOLD: Battle of the Sexes (Saturday Night Live, USA, 2023): Before Billie Jean King defeated Bobby Riggs, Charna Lee Diamond (played by regular player Sarah Sherman) took on the largest male opponent in history, Ronnie Dunster (played by that week’s host, Jason Momoa.) “There’d be no Billie without Charna,” one sports journalist speculates, in the vein of Netflix’s Untold series. But instead of Charna defeating the Goliath Dunster, Dunster serves and hits a tennis ball straight through Diamond. Yet, in the vein of the 1960s “we shall overcome,” Diamond continues playing with a hole in her middle. Sherman, known as Sarah Squirm in her improv days, doesn’t necessarily hold back, but the short reminds us that maybe some men are bigger than Bobby Riggs. 

Tom Hanks plays an one-armed tennis player who gets dissed for a three-armed competitor in the 2013 Saturday Night Live sketch "Tennis Arms."

Tennis Arms (Saturday Night Live, USA, 2013): When it comes to tennis, snob Richard (Tom Hanks) is getting dumped by his doubles partner, Douglas (Will Forte) when he loses his dominant playing arm. Douglas tries to chalk it up to a “difference of opinion tennis-wise” in breaking the news before the annual tournament. But really, he has chosen three-arm Skip Prosser (Chris Parnell). Richard has a contingency plan at the ready, by bringing out seven-arm Toby Slaven (Bill Hader). 

Kit Harrington and Andy Samberg recreate the longest match in the history of tennis in this HBO send-up.

7 Days in Hell (HBO, USA, 2015): Disguised as one of the ever-earnest HBO sports documentaries, this a fictional account of the world’s longest tennis match, based on the actual world’s longest tennis match, which took place between John Isner and Nicholas Mahut and lasted for 11 hours and 5 minutes over three days at the 2010 Wimbledon. Except this time, former SNL player Andy Samberg is Aaron Williams, the Andre Agassi-like adopted brother of Serena and Venus, taking on Charles Poole (Kit Harrington), an over-polite British child prodigy who says “undou-btably” in response to ever question and can never please his mother. In typical Samberg style, Seven Days can go over the top, although gains every laugh for which it plays. 

Jeremy Sisto wrote and directed this comedy about a derelict tennis pro who teams with his straight-laced brother to return to the protour in Break Point.

Break Point (Amazon Prime, 2015): Volatile tennis pro Jimmy (Jeremy Sisto) wants to make one last run ay a major title. There is just one problem: no one will play with him. He drinks too much; he curses; and he has alienated just about everyone else on tour. Jimmy has one last resort however, his estranged brother and former doubles partner Darren (David Walton), whom he had abandoned years before for a higher-ranking player. Semi-supported by their tennis pro dad, J.K. Simmons, the brothers probably simulate actual tennis family dynamics better than any other tennis family. Look for cameos from the Bryan brothers and other pros. 

THE GILDED AGE CLUBS OF NEW YORK

Tennis began in Victorian England; it thrived in the new wealth of America

Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs pose for their Battle of the Sexes pre-match photos at the Town Tennis Club.

The YouTube Video dates from 1931. In the first few seconds, a large, ornate placard gives of summation of its contents: “’Big Bill’ Tilden defeats Kozeluh in brilliant style in his first match as professional.” The tape rolls on. Three men walk onto an indoor tennis court 9two carrying racquets) that looks to be Madison Square Garden as droves of clapping men in tuxedoes cheer them. Cut to the players, dressed in long white pants and white polo shirts battling with slices and long strokes, one towering above the other, as a small team of line judges look on. The lanky Tilden wins, shaking hands with Karel Koželuh, a Czech tennis and football standout known for getting everything back. The men escape into the crowd soon after, likely enjoying a cigarette or cigar and a glass of scotch at the nearest clubhouse. 

In 1930s New York, these sorts of events took place across Midtown at indoor courts from the Vanderbilt Club at Grand Central Station to the Racquet and Tennis Club a few blocks East. In fact, Tilden, in his later years, enjoyed the comforts of the Town Tennis Club, on Sutton Place near the East River. Founded by six-time Grand Slam champion Don Budge and 1931 Wimbledon champion Sidney Wood, since 1954 the Town Tennis Club has served “as a home away from home for countless tennis legends.” Here are a few more Gilded Age Tennis Clubs hidden among the 13 miles of Manhattan’s skyscrapers. 

The Town Tennis Club during a Wall Street tennis championship.

Town Tennis Club

In the early 1950s, friends, competitors and business partners, Don Budge and Sidney Wood had a vision in a city in which street corners were becoming few and far between: take tennis to the rooftops. The two found a building along the East River and  in 1954 —above an FBI garage — The Town Tennis Club opened for play. That day, Budge also became the club’s very first teaching pro — at $8 per hour. Since then, the Town Tennis Club has hosted movie stars, such as Charlton Heston, Ginger Rogers and Kirk Douglas,  and countless tennis celebrities alike, often seen hitting and dining with each other. Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs held their pre-match Battle of the Sexes press conference at the Town Tennis Club — Riggs’ home turf. Town Tennis still hosts many USTA events in its clubhouse, flanked by a long hallway in which a collection of wooden racquets used by the greatest hang, and many current pros turn up to practice on its three rooftop courts. 

The Racquet and Tennis Club of New York on Park Avenue. A number of decades ago, the club sold its air rights, making way for glass skyscrapers behind the club's stone walls.

The Racquet and Tennis Club

As much of a time capsule of the Gilded Age as can be found in Manhattan, the Racquet and Tennis Club members observe a strict code of silence about all that takes place behind its thick stone walls, including its tradition of after-work naked swimming and still-existing “men only” policy. (Women are welcome at club social events if accompanied by a male member). Located at 370 Park Avenue between East 52nd and 53rd Streets — some of the most sought-after and expensive land in the world —  the club charged an initiation fee of $200 with annual dues of $150 for access to four international squash courts, one real tennis court, and two indoor lawn tennis courts, as well as a dining room, bar, library and billiards room. In 1987, the club famously refused to allow real tennis player Evelyn David, who lived a few blocks away,  to train for the Women’s World Tennis Championship, a real tennis tournament. At the time, there were  only nine real tennis clubs in America. David Evelin had to travel 70 minutes each way to Tuxedo. 

The entrance to River House, the 23-story home to the River Club, one of New York's stories racquet clubs.

The River Club

While other clubs may have attracted the players, the River Club’s roster of names featured among a Who’s Who of Industrialists and Robber Barons from Roosevelt to Astor to Vanderbilt. Opened in 1931 and headquartered on five levels at the base of River House a 26-story cooperative apartment building on the East River, in addition to two porous Har-Tru tennis courts, three squash courts, a golf simulator, pool and new padel court,  the club once boasted an enormous marina for members’ yachts. That has changed. But River House remains Manhattan’s only apartment with its own club, and one that espoused modern rules and family values — men and women were equally allowed in all parts of the club from the beginning. As of 2013 members pay approximately $10,000 in annual membership fees. A few years back, the club attempted to separate from the co-op by buying the space. The board agreed and listed the club’s space for sale as a private residence — setting an asking price of $130 million. 

The Heights Casino

“No other clubhouse in America is quite like the Casino, for it will combine in the heart of the city many of the attractive features of a country club.” That was the blessing the New York Times bestowed upon Brooklyn’s first indoor tennis club, let alone tennis club, in 1905, a year after it opened. Sitting on Montague Street, just a few blocks from Brooklyn’s storied waterfront, the Casino put its indoor tennis court front and center, while its squash courts sit above it among several lounge and dining areas. In a pinch, however, staff could remove the tennis nets and create a huge ballroom to host some of Brooklyn Society’s most exclusive social soirees. The building’s Beaux-Arts façade and Dutch riffs still pay homage to the city’s prominent Dutch founders, many of whose descendants were members. In the 1950s, due to its no-Jews, no-Blacks policy, the Casino almost went bankrupt, however, until it changed its ways. And although called a “casino,” and gambling that took place was under the table and spoken in whispers. “Casino” means “little house,” in Italian.

A CHAMPION POSTER FOR “CHAMPIONS”

THE FINALS HAVE PANACHE AND AN HONOR TITUS POSTER TO BOOT

By Adrian Margaret Brune

Andrey Rublev chose black. His explanation: “With black you never miss, everything black. Simple.” Jannick Sinner went for blue. “Because everything is blue in the Finals,” he told the artist Honor Titus. Alexander Zverev liked something a bit closer to his Adidas kit, as did the two-toned, Lacoste-sponsored Daniil Medvedev and Novak Djokovic.

Holger Rune, however, went all out, making the male figure in Titus’ official ATP Finals poster green first, according to the Birkman Color Chart — the psychological assessment of personality based on colour choices — meaning that he is very persuasive. Titus approved.  “You’re like a green man,” Titus complimented Rune, in an ATP behind-the-scenes video. “I think you’ve done a great job.”

Maybe Rune should have stuck with the green, instead of experimenting with other colours. and settling on black and red, as this week’s season-ending Nitto ATP Finals didn’t exactly pan out on court for him as they have on paper. The blue-choosing Djokovic actually played more green, convincing fans — and everyone else — that he deserved his record-setting seventh ATP title on Sunday.

Novak Djokovic, the 2023 ATP Finals Champion, and the poster he designed in collaboration with artist Honor Titus.

Despite some injury switch-ups, however, with Hubert Hurkacz ultimately filling in for both Stefanos Tsitsipas and Taylor Fritz, the players made the most of their time in Turin, donning the finest in men’s fashion for the imposing Palazzo Reale, hamming it up with the Carota Boys and other fans, and generally admiring the overload of art and culture that is the capital of Italy’s Piedmont region.

In the spirit of the latter, the ATP fostered the players’ finer tastes with its choice of graphic art to represent the event. Building on a longstanding tradition of iconic sporting posters collected across generations, yet giving a wink to the digital art and NFTs, it chose international-artist-on-the-make, Honor Titus, to commission a colour palette and sketch for tennis fans to customise and potentially buy as their own collaborations,  as well as the official poster, for $50 each — a steep discount from the six-figures the LA-based artist and tennis buff commands for his original work. An auction to buy all eight of the Titus-player collaborations ends tonight.

Artist-on-the-rise Honor Titus photographed at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club © Mikayla Jean Miller He flew to Turin last week to collaborate with the eight ATP finalists to create unique posters.

“I’m a big fan of poster design… Italian and French poster design, you know, guys like Jules Cheret. I’ve been thinking about tennis wall paintings for a while. The idea of the tennis wall where one practices—just to play with the perspective, those lines, that idea,” Titus told John McEnroe in an Turin meet-and-greet. “I took a photo of a friend of mine who I play tennis with to get the backhand stance, you know, to get the angle right… So that was based off of a photo. Also, the colours of the ATP Finals are so vibrant and bright, and the lighting of the arena.

“I hope that through my work and through my efforts, I introduce people to various things… I love to learn, I love to ruminate on things that I love, I love to obsess about things. I obsess about tennis, I obsess about French literature… All I do is revel in my obsession. So, if I can introduce someone to something they’re obsessed with, that’s what I hope to do.”

The ATP Finals poster designed by Holger Rune in collaboration with artist Honor Titus. Rune ultimately chose red for his figure, meaning he probably needed a bit more action.

The ATP’s choice of Titus not only plays homage to the unique poster-per-tournament hallmark of tennis while putting a twist on last year’s less accessible “LOVE collection,” a series of unique digital artworks that used in-match sports data to create iconic illustrations by pop artist Martin Grasser. "It was very popular within the web3 community, but quite exclusive and less accessible for the tennis fan,” said ATP spokesperson Mark Epps. “This year, we took a big name artist who has never done a digital collectible before and without sacrificing the technical capacity pushed to keep costs as low as possible for the fans.”

“I think tennis has a very nuanced and elaborate culture. It’s always been in my purview. I will also say I’ve always played it. I follow it,” said the 6-foot-4 Titus, who attended Catholic and Christian schools and played point guard on the basketball team. “I love sport. It excites me just like music does.”

A punk in theory, Titus is a sentimentalist at heart. At the same time as playing with the Strokes, Black Flag and other New York early aughts bans, Titus hung around the Metropolitan Museum of Art and absorbed such work as Edward Hopper’s “From Williamsburg Bridge” and Bertold Löffler’s “Youth Playing the Pipes of Pan.” His work now harks back to the long skirts and cricket sweaters of the swinging F. Scott Fitzgerald 1920s, while riffing off the iconic representational art of Kerry James Marshall or the painter Toyin Ojih Odutola, who portrays Nigerian elitism through her character-driven paintings. Although Titus has painted such moneyed pursuits  as horse racing, garden partying and military parading, tennis has been his primary lens for exploring the parameters of access. 

The ATP Finals poster designed by Jannik Sinner in collaboration with artist Honor Titus. He chose green and red for convincing and action, but ultimately, six-time winner Novack Djokovic prevailed to take home his seventh title.

“…What I like to do is create and conjure images that that converse with those ideas, with that idea of access,” Titus told McEnroe. “I’ve created black figures in all white. The moneyed class were the ones that were able to wear white. That’s why these things still appear in our culture. 

“I don’t mean to harp or take the pulpit in any way, but I do like to play with those ideas. That’s all I’m doing, is introducing ideas and conversing with those ideas.”

Although he left Pace University before leaving to tour with the band and never received any formal training,  in 2020 the artist Henry Taylor gave him a solo show at his former Chinatown studio in Los Angeles. From there, it’s been a whirlwind three years with his work picked up by the gallerist Timothy Taylor (no relation to Henry) who started representing him in 2021, followed by a commission by King Charles III to create portraits celebrating the Windrush Generation and a summer show of tennis work “Advantage In”, at the Gagosian gallery in LA. 

The ATP Finals poster designed by Honor Titus, which sells for $50 at the Artchild website. Honor Titus photographed at the Beverly Hills Tennis Club © Mikayla Jean Miller

At a time when young Black artists, such as Sydney Vernon and Miles Regis, wrestle with themes of racial injustice and legacy on their canvases, Titus uses a lighter touch for his social critique. Hence, the official poster of the ATP Tour Finals is a black figure, practising tennis alone, against a wall most likely in an urban setting. Yet, the figure is, again, in all white, swinging a wooden tennis racquet in a classic one-handed Bjorn Borg takeback. 

“I want to steer the conversation in certain directions, through design and through ideas, and then have the viewer connect the dots,” he told the New York Times last year. “The contemporary Black art and the Black art boom, which I’m all for, is a bit heavy handed and overt. I’m not interested in that. 

“I like to slide in ideas, you know, under the radar and in subtle ways.” Yet, as a young Black male, he feels “like I had to take every opportunity. It’s been such a whirlwind — I just look up and keep going.”

FASHIONABLE OZ

OUT WITH NIKE AND ADIDAS, AS BOUTIQUE BRANDS DOMINATE DOWN UNDER

Marton Fucsovics sporting the Italian skull known for its collaborations.

By Adrian Margaret Brune

For every Grand Slam season, especially the opening of the Australian Open, tennis players’ choices make headlines. Who can forget the Ted Tinling dresses worn by the Original 9 or Serena Williams’ full-body black catsuit at the 2018 French Open? Tennis style often spills off court, too. Just consider the now mainstream style stalwarts, such as Stan Smith tennis sneaker by Adidas and the white RF cricket sweater Federer wore to the 2010 Wimbledon. 

The racket sport’s connection to fashion goes back to its origin in the 1870s — a new, more active sport that welcomed women. As the two sexes could now play alongside one another, flirting and romance came with the game, thus imposing a need for style on court, often to the sacrifice of practicality or comfort. Men wore blazers and flannel trousers, while women wore corsets and long kilt skirts, sometimes all-white, cotton and linen dresses featuring lace inserts and elaborate embroidery patterns. 

Since that time, however, many a designer (and tennis player) has endeavoured to make their mark on the fashion industry. One of the first was the iconoclastic Suzanne Lenglen, who became the center of a Wimbledon fashion scandal in 1919 when she wore a calf-length skirt, short sleeves and a floppy hat. The press called her indecent. Lenglen went on to win the title. In the years after, she wore a tulle wrap around her head while playing, called the “Lenglen bandeau.” It became a defining look of the Roaring Twenties.

While 2021, several tennis brands dug into their closets and recycled the styles of the 1960s and 70s (Fila, Sergio Tacchini, Ellesse and Diadora), thus rebooting the classic look of Borg, McEnroe, Vilas and Connors, 2022 and 2023 saw a number of players take on side hustles as designers. (Ostapenko in DK One and Camila Giorgi in GioMila). So far, in 2024, player have been lured by the promise of new brands created just for them in mind, as the fashion start-up takes Center Court. Here are a few that have received the most buzz (good and bad) so far. 

Ons Jabeur gets mixed reviews for her pastel-colored kit by Saudi designer Kayanee

Ons Jabeur for Kayanee

In the summer of 2022, Tunisian pro Ons Jabeur (WTA No. 6) ascended to the finals of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and in a sense, became her own woman, doffing off her old Paris-based agency and signing with the Naomi-Osaka-Stuart-Duguid supergroup, Evolve. After losing Wimbledon for the second year in a row, she finished the year at No. 6, sacked Evolve, ditched her football-centric sponsor Lotto Sport Italia and went full Arab, hiring a Tunisian agent and becoming the exclusive representative of Kayanee, a women’s sportswear company established by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund (PIF) and designed by Princess Reema Bandar Al Saud, the great-granddaughter of Ibn Saud, the founder of modern Saudi Arabia and the Saudi Ambassador to the United States. “”I heard they called me Batman. It’s good. The vibes are good,” she told the press in Australia. “I felt like maybe Serena Williams a little bit, you know, style.”

Jabeur has been a strong proponent of Saudi Arabia’s potential involvement with the WTA and has expressed an interest in bringing tennis to the kingdom. “Of course I’m one of the players that will push to go there,” Jabeur has said. “… It’s not about the money, for me it’s about giving a chance to younger women, or any women to practice sports and discover amazing things.” So far, both Jabeur’s stance and pinkish, greyish on-court outfits have received mixed reviews. “Ugliest kit ever?” remarked one fan. “Ok maybe we need to give Lotto a call back…,” said another on X (formerly Twitter). So far, the Tunisian, who made her documentary debut earlier this month, said she was enjoying her new partnership. “You know me. I don’t do those things. I’m honestly having fun to have those different collections and feel very pampered from Kayanee. So I’m looking forward to show you more outfits,” Jabeur said.

Christopher Eubanks sporting J. Lindenberg's first tennis collection for men.

Chris Eubanks and J. Lindeberg

Despite body-doubling for the late Arthur Ashe in the documentary Citizen Ashe and wins over fellow Americans Taylor Fritz and Ben Shelton, Christopher Eubanks (ATP No. 35) went into Wimbledon 2023 a relative unknown. He emerged a breakout star, a quarterfinalist in white Asics kit with the swooping white Technifibre racquet accentuating every shot. His height (Eubanks stands 6 feet, 7 inches), good looks and journeyman ruggedness caught the eye of Swedish golfwear designer J. Lindeberg, prompting the brand to make Eubanks its first male tennis ambassador in tennis. “It is extremely enticing to be one of the only faces of a particular brand,” Eubanks told Forbes magazine. “It allows for you to really see the growth of that brand and feel a sense of pride when you’re watching it grow, which is quite a unique opportunity. Not many players get the chance to be the face of a brand in the beginning and I am really excited about that opportunity.” J. Lindenberg’s designs are built on a taste spectrum that goes from “Mild” to “Wild”. Eubanks has fallen somewhere around a seven, choosing a mix of the company’s bolder patterns and solid colors for on court action, with a focus on material that is breathable and absorb sweat well. Off-court, Eubanks is sticking to the milder, more conservative designs, choosing fit over splash. One obvious benefit for the new partnership: longer shorts. “I’m really looking forward to having shorts and pants that fit me how they’re supposed to,” he said. 

Andrey Rublev has received rave reviews for his Rublo tennis kit, which features splashes of green and black with the signature Angel wings.

Andrey Rublev for Rublo

It’s been a year since Nike opted not to resign Russian tennis players after their contracts ended. In response, Andre Rublev (ATP No. 5) created his own clothing line that’s “not about clothing.” Rublo was created to “drive awareness around equality and kindness” with the hope of “making our world a better place,” the 26-year-old Rublev told the Tennis Channel upon launch in 2023. With similar bold colors and patterns to his Nike kit, Rublev has nonetheless traded the Swoosh logo for a pair of stylized angel wings. “I know I’m depressive and always have been thinking about life and death for too much, but before my days will end I will keep fighting for what I believe, what I love and who I love,” Rublev wrote on social media. Just like Nike did for the feisty red head, the Rublo look has been turning eyes in Melbourne — without its model cursing in Russian or smashing racquets. The latest gear breaks up a classic all-black oversized shorts and shirt with pops of green and teal on his wristbands, headband and right shoulder sleeve. Nike Vapor Pro shoes complete the look. “I said that I don’t plan to sign with anyone else no matter how much they offer me, but I want to try to create something of my own and play in it for a year and see how it goes,” Rublev said upon launch. 

German player Dominik Koepfer wearing one of the brighter shirts from Bidi Badu.

Dominik Koepfer and Liam Brody for Bidi Badu

“Bidi Badu” means something akin to “abracadabra.” Historically, the term developed during the times of the slave trade when slaves in Zanzibar had to entertain the sultan with magic tricks —as soon as they finished, thet said, “Bidi Badu.” Founded in Germany in March 2016, and named after a Kenyan bar, Bidi Badu’s bold and whimsical color schemes might not suite the Wimbledon set, but tennis players who favour the latest trends over old traditions. The logo even emulates a Kenyan mask. Owned by Spodeco GmbH in Cologne, Germany — an online tennis shop that manufactures not only Bidi Badu, but also tennis hardwear, tennis fitness tools, tennis balls and court equipment — Bidi Badu also promotes tennis in Kenya through the Bidi Badu Development Camp. So far, Bidi Badu has sponsored many British up-and-comers, including Liam Brody (ATP No. 98) and for a time, doubles comeback kid, Marcus Willis (ATP No. 133/doubles). The biggest names on its roster now is German player Dominik Koepfer (ATP No. 62).

Dutch player Arantxa Rus sporting one of the tamer, yet unmissable, skull-adorned outfits designed by Hydrogen.

Arantxa Rus and Marton Fucsovics for Hydrogen

For a while, lots of companies co-opted the skull logo, but only one made it stick: Hydrogen. Founded by unconventional Italian designer Alberto Bresci under the philosophy that Hydrogen is a fundamental element for happiness — and the right clothing items bring happiness — the brand has a reputation for collaborations with prestigious businesses, from  Superga to Fiat. In his many research trips, from Japan to the United States, Bresci noticed the use of skulls, although in Italy they were not considered popular. He nonetheless revised it again with a very clean design and an upturned heart as a nose. Using a fine selection of materials and sartorial cuts, items of the collection are manufactured by bespoke Italian tailors. French player Adrian Mannarino (ATP No. 19) once wore Hydrogen’s off-beat designs from lightning bolts to arrays of stars. But the brand, which also dabbles in Formula One racing kit, among other sports, now has Fabio Fognini (ATP No. 103) and Marton Fucsovics (ATP No. 70), who switched from Hungarian streetwear label Dorko (DRK). Rus, age 33, (WTA No. 45) traded sides last year.

Le Coq Sportif is synonymous with French style, but not since the days of Yannick Noah has it been talked about with such frequency.

Jiri Lehecka for Le Coq Sportif

One of the oldest sportswear brands in the world, the distinct French Coq and Tri-Color has been worn by everyone from Arthur Ashe to Yannick Noah. What started out as a collection of wool clothes in under the eye of founder Émile Camuset, eventually became a company known for its collection of cycling jerseys in 1929. From there, the brand took off, launching the first ever tracksuit, the chándal (also known as “the Sunday clothing”) and reached its peak in the 1950s signing the French national football and rugby teams. Since the 80s, however, Le Coq Sportif has been a bit in decline… until just last week, when Czech upstart Jiri Lehecka (ATP No. 71) appeared in the new purple performance collection receiving rave reviews. Even if Lehecka doesn’t keep upsetting top seeds, the brand should get a long-overdue boost sponsoring the Paris Olympic team this summer. 

What happened to…?

1. Fred Perry: After being launched in the 1950s by Fred Perry, who held the world’s number-one rank in two sports, then seen on the chests of Andy Murray, Fred Perry’s association with Neo-Nazi gangs and football hooligans killed its mojo. Expect an Original Penguin-style reboot, soon, however.

2. Under Armour: What brand hasn’t Andy Murray worn? After getting dropped post-hip-surgery and going all-in with Castore, the American sporting conglomerate, which started out in American football  is now ubiquitous in every other sport but tennis. 

3. Ellesse: While many high-profile players such as Boris Becker and Tommy Haas endorsed Ellesse — now British owned — in the past, Ellesse lost Johanna Konta when she retired in 2021. ATP No. 195 Ryan Penniston and wheelchair standout Alfie Hewitt now sport the tennis-ball-and-ski-logo.

4. Sergio Tacchini: The namesake brand of Italian tennis professional Sergio Tacchini counts many past high-profile players, such as Jimmy Connors and Mats Wilander. Currently, none of the top 100 players have been seen wearing Sergio Tacchini apparel since Pete Sampras, and Martina Hingis in the early aughts.

WHERE ARE THE GAY MEN IN TENNIS?

© Maia Flore

U.S. Open Pride Day Highlights the Discrepancy Among LGBT Players

By Adrian Margaret Brune

It was an otherwise ordinary day in the world of tennis. Just two weeks before, the men had wrapped their 2022 season in Turin and the women had said goodbye in Texas. But on 7 December, the LGBTQ+ papers lit up with front page news: French doubles players Fabien Reboul (ATP Doubles No. 46) and Maxence Broville (ATP No. 737), had posted an Instagram photo of the pair passionately kissing each other.

The image has since been removed, but anyone following Reboul’s account (Broville’s is private) might have seen it coming. Previous posts allude to the relationship multiple times; Reboul’s photographs often feature him shirtless; captions included “When your BAE is looking at you” and “People can talk, people can judge, but I am still gonna do me” with likes from Jan-Michael Gambill and other gay men. 

Rebould, 27, and Maxence, 24, weren’t the only LGBT players to come out in 2022 — Russian player Daria Kasatkina (WTA No. 14) condemned President Vladimir Putin in her process; Argentinian Nadia Podoroska (WTA No. 70) announced her relationship with fellow player Guillermina Naya (WTA No. 434); and Belgian Alison Van Uytvanck (WTA No. 280) pledged to marry Emilie Vermeiren — but the Frenchmen finally opened up the possibility that the ATP Tour could finally have open, active gay players for the first time in its history. 

Billie Jean King with partner Ilana Kloss at the 2021 U.S. Open Pride Day. (USTA).

Current ATP doubles players Maxence Broville and Fabien Reboul in the December 2022 Instagram post that (maybe) made them the first gay players on tour.

Since the US Open has celebrated its now annual Pride Day, the issue of male gay players on the ATP Tour has remained perplexing — even Rebould and Maxence have not publicly affirmed or denied the Instagram posting. Although Top Ten standouts Taylor Fritz and Daniil Medvedev have stated that the ATP is progressive enough to accept gay players, former players who are now out of the closet say different things. 

“Tennis is perceived as that country club sport, a highly competitive individual sport played across every country of the world. There are a lot of reasons not to come out as a gay man,” says Brian Vahaly, the highest-ranked tennis player to ever cross that rubicon — after retirement. (Vahaly, ATP No. 57 in 2003, retired in 2007 and announced his sexual orientation on a 2017 podcast.) “Outside of the States and Europe, there are a lot of countries not accepting of gay men. It’s not a team sport; there are not teammates on whom you can rely — you practice with your competitors.

“There are a lot of homophobic locker room comments made in jest so it’s not going to feel like a safe space. And after 20+ years of grinding hard work, to get to the finish line and then for (the media) to focus on your orientation rather than your achievement, may be a bridge too far for people.”

Brian Vahaly, a former ATP No. 57, during his playing days in the early 2000s. He came out as gay in 2017, following his retirement. (Brian Vahaly).

Vahaly has a point: despite efforts at LGBTQ+ acceptance and inclusion worldwide, more than 25 countries in Africa and nearly every one in the Middle East — places that are holding not only more Challenger events, but also high-level tournaments — criminalise homosexuality with either significant prison time or in some cases, death. A 2022 ATP Tour survey found that 75 percent of players had reported having heard colleagues use homophobic slurs. It also indicated a “strong fear of rejection, isolation from others on tour, and loneliness” as being likely barriers to LGBTQ+ players’ publicly disclosing their sexuality. Finally, the study also overwhelmingly concluded that the ATP should take action to combat homophobia leading the tour to partner with the You Can Play Project, an organisation committed to furthering LGBTQ+ inclusion in sports.

“I’m not sure if there are homosexual tennis players in the top 100,” Taylor Fritz told Reuters last December, not long after the news of the gay Frenchmen broke. “Statistically speaking, there should be. 

“Myself and my friends, other players on tour wouldn’t have any issues with it; it would be totally normal and I think people would be accepting. I couldn’t tell you why (no one has come out),” Fritz added. “That would be a lot of big news and maybe people just don’t want to be in the spotlight, maybe they don’t want the distraction of getting all the attention and stuff like that.”

Bill Tilden, Charlie Chaplin, Spanish tennis player Manuel Alonso and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. in 1923. Tilden, whom many consider possibly the greatest player of all time, was gay.(Getty Images).

While many tour players may lend an encouraging word and the ATP has support programs, one thing neither can necessarily provide is an actively playing — or even actively on tour — mentor. As far as the records book indicate, only two openly gay men have played at an elite level, both before World War II, according to the book, A People’s History of Tennis by journalist David Berry. The first, Gottfried (Baron) von Cramm, a German aristocrat noted for his gentlemanly conduct and fair play, won the 1934 and 1936 French Open before the German government arrested him in 1938 for having a gay affair with a Jewish actor. He was jailed for six months before marrying a heiress, facing down a ban from Wimbledon after the incident, being conscripted by the German Army and unwillingly fighting in World War II. 

The second, Bill Tilden, an American, won 14 Major singles titles, including 10 Grand Slams,  before he was arrested in November 1946 on Sunset Boulevard by the Beverly Hills police for having sex with an underage male. Tilden was sentenced to a year in prison, served seven months and received five-year parole conditions so strict that they virtually erased all his income from private lessons. After having another encounter with a 16-year-old hitchhiker, he was arrested again in January 1949 and was incarcerated for another 10 months. In both instances, Tilden believed his celebrity, privileged background and friendships with the Los Angeles elites would keep him from both detention and social death. It didn’t. 

The Hollywood tennis clubs banned Tilden from giving lessons and as a result of that and a subsequent injunction from public courts, he had fewer clients — and less money. At one point, a prestigious professional tournament at the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel invited Tilden to play and then kicked him off the draw. His one true friend, Charlie Chaplin allowed Tilden to use his private court for lessons. But the former No. 1 — and a candidate for the greatest male tennis player of all time — died of heart failure, in poverty at age 60. 

But remaining closeted can be its own asylum.

Baron Gottfried Alexander Maximilian Walter Kurt von Cramm (left) with 1935 Wimbledon champion Fred Perry. Cramm, a closeted gay man, was imprisoned by the Nazi regime for an affair with a man.

“I played Pat Cash at a tournament in Forest Hills on 2 May 1986 and a couple of nights before that match, I had gone to a gay bar in New York City for the first time and I can’t even begin to tell you the panic attacks and the stress I had when I had to do media,” said Bobby Blair, one of Nick Bollettieri’s first protegees and a junior standout. “I felt like if I was going to be outed, if I am going to have ‘this curse’, no one can tell by looking at me.

“I never felt I would be welcomed; if I had a breakthrough would never get any sponsorships. The summer before I quit I won a big tournament in Spain, but I said to myself that I can’t deal with this fear anymore and I quit sooner than I should have…” Blair, a friend and contemporary of Billie Jean King published a 2014 memoir, Hiding Inside the Baseline, about his dual life and the suffering of gay male athletes in the past.

For now, however, the past remains present in men’s tennis. Although there are openly gay players in men’s football, baseball, basketball, rugby and American football, it seems as if in tennis, gay players’ “love for the sport and what sport gives them overrides the exclusion they feel,” according to Vahaly, who is on the USTA Board of Directors and was instrumental in starting and continuing the U.S. Open Pride Day. “The women’s tour is 40-50 years ahead (of the men’s),” Vahaly said from Washington where he now lives with his husband and two sons. 

“There are people fighting for rights and inclusion, and we have no conversations with active players about how to change things. There needs to be a camaraderie. I  have spoken with players who are still reluctant to come out. But there is tremendous joy for athletes who feel less alone.” 

Bobby Blair, who chronicled his life as a closted tennis player in a 2014 memoir, playing tennis in the early 1980s. (Bobby Blair).

SERVING UP HOPE

Children at Vania King’s Serving Up Hope program in Uganda play celebrate wins on the homemade courts of Kampala.

AT 32, Pro vania King Left the tour for the Tennis Ngo World

By Adrian Margaret Brune

On an unusually chaotic day in the typically clamorous neighbourhood surrounding the red dirt courts of the Acholi Quarters—one of the poorest communities in Kampala—former touring pro Vania King stands among six rows of young children, clasping her racquet while they grab theirs: colourful, plastic prototypes made specifically for young players. She shouts “ready position” and the kids mimic her jumping in place, feet shoulder-width apart, both hands on the handle. Next up: shadowing King on the forehand and the backhand. Out of nowhere, King then grabs a bucket of big red balls and tosses easy hitters, while student after student aims and swings—some of the youngsters get a piece of the spongy, rotating orb used for beginners.

 “Nice try! It’s OK. Keep your eye on the ball!” King shouts encouragement. King had touched down in Uganda just a few days before in July 2022 directly from England, where she had played in the annual Wimbledon Invitation Doubles. She was hauling seven or eight bags stuffed with balls, racquets, shoes and bright-blue-and-pink-t-shirts with the words “Serving Up Hope” on the front—the “o” in HOPE a stencilled tennis ball with a heart in the middle. They promote King’s NGO, founded in 2020, as well as her new passion and career since retiring from the professional tour just two short years ago. 

“I had no idea that this would become what it has,” King says after the session. “Running an organisation is no easy task, but tough enough as it is, tennis has given me so many interesting, intersecting experiences and paths, I wanted to do something. 

“We started this at the smallest scale possible—30 kids playing every week—and now we currently teach 120 students annually.” Last winter, King took two stand-out players to South Africa to play their first international tournaments. 

In her heyday, King played for full stadium crowds at Wimbledon and the US Open, reaching a career high rankings of WTA No 3 in doubles and No 50 in singles, while picking up two Grand Slam Doubles championship trophies—Wimbledon and the US Open—along the way. At age 30, however, hampered by injuries and looking for change in her life, King called it quits at the 2021 Volvo Open in Charleston, South Carolina and returned to Uganda where she had found a mission. “I fell in love with the place and the people and I saw incredible need,” King says. “And I realised that volleying drills can be done anywhere—you just need a racquet and a ball.”

Serving Up Hope is one of several successful efforts to reignite professional tennis in sub-Saharan Africa. Previously led by South Africans in the 1960s and then Kenyans in the 1980s, from around 1995 to 2015, the continent experienced a drought of talented Futures and Challenger-level players, especially juniors, as governments struggled with stability and tennis associations across the region staved off corruption. Africa still has only one professional in the Top 10 of either the WTA or the ATP tours—WTA No 7 Ons Jabeur of Tunisia—and none from sub-Saharan Africa in the top 100, unless you count players whose parents were born in Africa and emigrated. But over the past seven or eight years, beginning with several International Tennis Federation (ITF) interventions, Africa is experiencing a tennis resurgence that could allow several players from previously unrepresented countries finally reach the top echelons of the sport. 

Local children enjoy a drink of water after a tennis lesson at the Serving Up Hope compound in Kampala, Uganda.

“We have a lot of good players in Africa,” says William Ndukwu, a London-based tennis coach and father of an emerging junior. Ndukwu started out as a ball boy at a Nigerian club and finished his career on the ITF World Tour, and has now coached his daughter, Alisha, 13, to the top 1,000 ITF Juniors in her first year. “But when you’re in a match and think about paying rent by winning the next game or helping your sick mom by getting to the final, you don’t play very well. That’s been the situation for a long time,”

The story of Africa’s emergence and then resurgence in the tennis world actually begins in 1971, when while waiting for the apartheid South African government to approve his visa to play at the South African Open in Johannesburg, Arthur Ashe and his pal Stan Smith went on a 2,500-mile tennis expedition of six African countries—Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana—giving tennis clinics, granting interviews and playing exhibition matches. Over the course of the next five years, Ashe played the first integrated tournament in South Africa, discovered French sensation Yannick Noah in Cameroon, attempted to set up a pro-tour in sub-Saharan Africa and quickly left that behind when, while playing at a tournament in Lagos, Nigeria, he was marched off court at gunpoint, during a political coup. After that, Ashe turned his efforts to tournaments in the States, Davis Cup and his health. 

More than 40 years later, several players from the Sahel region started gaining the attention of the ITF. Realising their potential, the ITF began its Grand Slam Player Development grants, giving Africa’s top players up to $50,000 to cover touring expenses and coaching. “Sometimes, a city doesn’t even have a sports shop that sells racquets. If you find one, it can ultimately cost three times the price of one in Europe,” says Frank Couraud, the development projects administrator at the ITF’s central office in London. Next, the ITF opened training hubs in Casablanca, Morocco and Nairobi, Kenya, to nurture future professionals’ ability—an effort that was recently relocated to Sousse, Tunisia, thanks to a partnership with the Tunisian Tennis Federation. The African Regional Training Centre will offer state-of-the-art facilities and provide talented players aged 13-18 with full-time training, schooling and competitive development.

It’s a good start, says Wanjuri Mbugua-Karani, the Secretary General of Tennis Kenya and a former top-five player in her home country, but it’s still not enough. “The big corporations… see Africa as a small market and therefore, no need to invest,” she says. 

 Mbugua-Karani estimates the required amount to be about $100,000 a year. “Africa has been able to produce very good junior players, but at the age of 16–18 when they should start playing professional tournaments, they lack the funds for travel and accommodation. “Africa needs to find a source for individual player sponsorship and for tournament sponsorship so we can hold ATP and WTA tournaments on the continent to greatly reduce the amount of travel expenses and foster a tennis culture here.”

Into this situation, King somehow stumbled. Her story starts out rather conventionally: on a break from the Tour, King went on safari to see mountain gorillas in Western Uganda. Following that, she started making a couple transcontinental trips per year to Uganda, always exceeding her luggage allowance. Soon enough, King decided to make her ventures legit, founding Serving Up Hope—one of the few tennis non-profit development organisations led by Grand-Slam-winning professional tennis players. It is currently the only one in Africa to offer both tennis lessons and STEM programming for underprivileged children. 

A student of Serving Up Hope in Kampala, Uganda, shares his success with a local cow.

“Playing tennis, we are so hyper focused on what we are doing—we sacrifice everything for it,” King says, explaining the reasons she is one of the few players to parlay a former tennis career into NGO work. “It’s not really until I stopped that I could try new things. 

“These are kids whose families make less than two dollars a day. For them, tennis is an opportunity that they otherwise wouldn’t see. That’s our goal—using tennis as a platform to provide opportunities on and off the court.” 

While King takes on Uganda, many other local tennis associations and other patrons, especially Nigeria and Ghana, have started putting more money into tournament and training infrastructure—many with the aim of gaining junior sport scholarships in the States. “Our foundation basically tries to get players ready for these scholarships. We pay for their SATs, ensure they have their O levels and also sponsor them to play tournaments so that they can improve their level of tennis,” Fuad Quadre, the founder of Fusion Tennis Foundation, told Nigeria Tennis Live, a site created to cover local tennis, including juniors.

“Apart from helping them boost their rankings, it will also improve their tennis to a reasonable level that can impress these schools where they will be applying for the scholarship,” added Quadre, the older brother of Oyinlomo Quadre, ranked No 92 in ITF Juniors and a sophomore playing at Florida International University. “These are some of the things the kids are not privileged to have, that’s why our foundation is there to support these kids to help them get these scholarships.”

A few of the main factors that programs such as King’s offer—thanks to her connections to the WTA—are the provision of equipment, which is hard to get shipped to needy players in Africa, exposure abroad and transnational and international visas. The African Union had once looked at scrapping visa requirements for all African citizens as part of its “African passport” campaign, but that has been abandoned until at least 2063. King also provides a discriminating eye in terms of choosing coaches and administrators for her program.

Most of all, the majority of sub-Saharan African countries have one singular problem that the majority of strong tennis nations have overcome: a lack of investment foresight by the sport’s kingmakers. Compared to Europeans who side-step into the U.S., Europe and most other tournament countries, where they can play as many matches and talk to whatever investors they please, “Africa needs the big sports brands to come here,” Mbugua-Karani says. “We need to bridge the gap where they turn pro. This is an area of investment potential in Africa, and I believe that the time of Africa is coming very soon.”

But besides King and former pro Mary Pierce who coaches from Mauritius, few former players want to get into the NGO game. King has currently  put a bit of a halt on expansion into more countries as she makes plans to build a tennis centre in Uganda, but she has found a new passion project. 

“I’ve been working with the Ugandans hand- in-hand for two years now and it’s been challenging, learning and growing through that—I’m not trying to be the foreigner that dictates things but to make this a joint endeavour,” King says. “Seeing the kids transformed and how I have transformed with them has made it incredibly worthwhile.”

Story published in Courts no. 4, Summer 2023.

A young player at the Serving Up Hope Center in Kampala learns racquet stringing from one of his coaches.

MARCUS WILLIS: ON THE COMEBACK TOUR

Marcus willis with his six-year-old daughter at home in Warwickshire.

MOST PLAYERS CALL IT QUITS AT 32, WILLIS IS JUST GETTING STARTED

By Adrian Margaret Brune

The grounds of the LTA Nottingham Tennis Centre are covered in extra- extra large signs—no matter the time of year—reminding passers-by of the Wimbledon warm-up that takes place there every June. But the place buzzes year-round with up-and-coming ITF Junior and Futures events, in addition to ATP and WTA Challenger tournaments. 

But there is Harriet Dart on the comeback tour, juxtaposed with a gigantic photograph of Harriet Dart clenching her fist in victory on her way to the 2022 semi-finals. Two courts over, another English cause-celebre is practicing his volleys looking to redeem his first-round loss the week before. He’ll go on for his first round directly after Dart with doubles partner, Scott Duncan, and push the match to even with an ace and two unreturnable serves before winning in a tiebreak. 

“When I’m in big moments, I just focus on me. I forget the score. I take myself to that practice court and just hit the serve,” Willis says post-match in the café while having a double-espresso. “It’s very easy to whip through matches and focus on the score and not think about how you’re going to play your best matches.

“I don’t know that there is a huge difference between that match and a challenger match. It’s really hard to get out of these tournaments and I’ve won quite a few. My goal was to be top 500 by July, which is still 100 points. I still have work to do, but my comeback has gone a lot better than expected.”

It’s a comeback that few fans anticipated, however. 

By early 2020, Willis had, admittedly, “fallen out of love” with the sport. The pandemic was in full swing, the British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) had closed all the courts and Willis—now with a wife and a four-year-old daughter—had been struggling with injuries. He was back in Warwickshire, back at the school where he had taught, back giving lessons as a teaching pro, with no end in sight. 

But Willis had already had his day. In 2016, the then-25-year-old came from seemingly out of nowhere, beat then-unknowns, Andrey Rublev and Daniil Medvedev, in the Wimbledon qualies and ascended to the main draw at the third Grand Slam of the year and England’s premier tennis event. He won his first-round match only to wind up on Centre Court to face none other than Roger Federer. The six-foot, four-inch, No 772 in the world, fell to the man who has been called “The Maestro,” but received a standing ovation despite losing 6-0, 6-3, 6-4.

Nonetheless, the “big dance” followed. Media, agents, sponsorship, World Team Tennis and other perks came and… went. Willis returned to his corner of the world. “One minute everyone wants to speak to you and help you and the next minute they’re all gone. And then you’re injured and maybe not so enthusiastic and then you realize you don’t have that many friends,” he said in mid-May. “A lot of people—they’re not bad people—but they go away. 

“I have to accept if I get where I want to get, things are going to happen and I just have to take it with a pinch of salt and move on—try to do what’s right for me and my family. I don’t analyse it too much because I don’t get anywhere with it. It’s good fun and part of the job, but’s that’s it.”

Lighting rarely strikes twice. Most people seldom get second chances. But Willis seems to be one of those—tall, handsome, charismatic and charming—on which the tennis gods have smiled. Last year, a member of his local club, the Warwick Boat Club where he was teaching for £30 an hour, asked if Willis wanted to leave his job teaching to join the tour again and agreed to put up the money. Willis didn’t have to think long before accepting, but with a twist: instead of singles, he has focused on becoming a doubles specialist with new partner, Scott Duncan. So far, the two have notched victories in France, Spain and all over England. They are aiming for the ATP Challenger Tour and with some luck, a Wimbledon Wildcard. 

“I took a couple years off, got married, had kids and got a couple of injuries. I think I fell out of love with the sport with a little bit. I wasn’t thinking about coming back and then I got this opportunity,” Willis says. “I told him that I’m going to need a few months to train. And he said ‘I’ll look after you, whatever you need.’” But Willis, despite his onetime Wimbledon run, had to start at ground zero, no exception. 

He started in 2022 at an ITF Futures tournament at Roehampton with his partner at the time, current ATP No 556, Mark Whitehouse. But the two couldn’t immediately get on the draw because Willis wasn’t ranked and wildcards were not available. Willis and Whitehouse signed in on site, and went as third alternates. Luck prevailed.
Someone pulled out and two others left the premises. While I’m practicing, I get a text that says, ‘you’re on,’” Willis recalls. Willis and Whitehouse played against his current partner Scott Duncan and won on match tiebreak. Out of nowhere, “I’m on the ATP board again!” Willis says. “Without that piece of luck, I wouldn’t be here now.”

Marcus Willis and doubles partner, Scott Duncan, at Wimbledon’s Centre Court, hoping for a Wildcard to play doubles in 2024.

The next week, Duncan and Willis talked and decided to join forces, specialising in doubles. They had early success, winning tournaments in France and Spain before struggling on tour. “I remember thinking, ‘Maybe I’m not good enough anymore.’ I felt like everything was so quick, I couldn’t react to it. I was miles off. In hindsight, I hadn’t played enough tennis.” But Willis’ wife, the former model and NHS dental surgeon he married in 2017 kept the faith, as did Duncan. “I like playing with a guy who is as good and as talented as Marcus,” Duncan said from Barcelona, where the pair has been playing the the MT200-Barcelona Tournament. “He’s got a big serve and great hands around the net. He moves the ball around the court very nicely. I think we can go far.”

But surprisingly, Duncan knew very little about Willis’ past. 

Born in 1990 in Slough, England, to an accountant father and a teacher, Willis began playing tennis at age eight, a bit late for tennis, but with an aptitude gained from badminton. He attended the Forest School in Winnerish, where he later taught tennis, and started playing tournaments at age 14. With a natural ability, Willis ascended the rankings quickly, reaching a high of No 15 in the ITF junior world rankings in September 2008. But Willis didn’t take his calling quite seriously enough. After being sent home from the 2008 Australian Open by the British Lawn Tennis Association (LTA) for his “slack attitude” after missed the bus to a practice session and then arriving without racquets, Willis floundered a bit—a condition he has attributed partly to the LTA’s former attitude toward juniors. 

“The coaching was amazing, but there was no human connection. On a Friday, it would be kind of like, ‘ok everyone, see you on a Monday’—no sort of relationship. And when the results were bad, it was your life, your fault,” Willis says. “ It’s a cutthroat industry. I felt I was given everything or nothing. It was a lot of pressure. At 19, 20 years old, I was by myself traveling all over the world without an idea of how to deal with anything. 

“I wasn’t that lucky when I was younger; I didn’t do the right thing all the time. It’s very easy to forget who you are and what you are doing and get very wrapped up in all of that other stuff.”

Willis considered the U.S. college system and “would 100 percent do it now,” but that wasn’t an option in England in the 2010s. “People who played in college, played and left and went to a nice job on Wall Street,” he says. “They didn’t go to the pros back then.”

That’s changed. But so has the man from Warwick. 

Once known for a bit of a “devil may care” attitude and earning the nickname Cartmann for his rugby-sized body, Willis survived some scuttlebutt in the tennis press for snacking on a Snickers and a Pepsi during matches. Not anymore. “I remember in my mid-20s, I would play tournaments, and I was going out after matches, and just not living the lifestyle that goes with professional sport,” he says. “So now, I am the opposite.” Every day now begins with a cold shower, Wim Hoff breathing, a healthy diet, two or-three hours on court, plus a post-match cool-down and weights. At friends’ houses across England or a cheap hotel, Willis is home at night, usually watching “the footie” on TV. His team: Liverpool. 

“It takes time to shake off that old reputation,” he says. “People still look at you… I won a match last week and a guy stopped me and said, “are you going out on the town to celebrate?” And I said, “No, I don’t drink anymore.”

Doubles partner Duncan was surprised to hear the nicknames and of the previous press. 

“I think we’ve put ourselves in a good spot to achieve something has dreamed about since a kid, and it would be nice for me to share the court with him,” says Duncan, a Scottish player whose “gran used to take me around the tennis club in a pram and I used to pop out and look around at the matches.” “The road is a lot more fun when you’re with someone. Me and Marcus get on well on- and off-court. We share accommodation to keep the costs down, but in those hours, we can also support each other, analyse our matches and run ideas and plans. 

“He’s good as gold as a professional.”

Willis knows, however, that at age 32, he has a time stamp on his back, even if he “doesn’t have to run around and find out on a singles court,” how good the next generation is. 

“I have a young family. I can’t be messing around. I’m finding ways to maximize without overloading pressure on myself,” Willis says. “We lost in the first round last week—didn’t play a great match. But I’m just focused on playing my best tennis every match and then I know how good I’m going to be. No regrets, no looking back.”

Even on the Federer match?

“He’s retired now, and I’ll never have a chance to avenge it. But I wasn’t massively star struck because I wanted to win the match,” Willis says. “I knew it was a big deal and I knew he was probably the best player on grass. I had respect for him, but I wanted to win and when I came off the court I was disappointed that I lost. 

“It’s only now that I look back and think now that it’s pretty cool I got to play him. But I would feel the same if if I played Rafa or Djoke or Andy. He didn’t give me anything that day. And I wouldn’t expect anything else. But when people ask, what’s my best day, it was that Monday when I won the first round or it was winning qualifying. But it wasn’t that day… because I lost.” 

Story published in Courts no. 4, Summer 2023.

THE RE-EMERGENCE OF TENNIS IN IRAQ

The Dohuk Sports Club in Northern Iraq. Photo: Adrian Brune

IN A COUNTRY COMING BACK FROM A BRUTAL WAR, TENNIS IS BECOMING COMPETITIVE AGAIN

By Adrian Margaret Brune

Driving past the Nineveh Plains and then through the Zagros mountains, a sharp left on a Tuesday night in late November leads visitors over a bridge and then past the Dohuk Sports Club. The floodlights gleamed brightly next to the stadium for the Duhok FC, the local football club. But instead of a soccer pitch, these beacons in the night lit a dusty red court for three boys — “brothers” they called themselves — playing practice matches in preparation for a tournament in Baghdad a week away. 

The Dohuk Sports Club, in Iraq’s Kurdish region, just a few kilometers from the former ISIS stronghold of Mosul, is one of the few places in Northern Iraq where girls and boys from around the region flock to play tennis. During the yearlong battle for Mosul in 2016, players flocked to Dohuk for lessons, for practice and for respite from the stress of daily life in war time. Now that the region is (relatively) stable, more and more come to learn the sport they watch on TV or to polish the skills they picked up while living in another country as expats or refugees. 

“Our parents enjoyed playing while we were living in Germany,” says Shihan Amedi, a bespectacled 16-year-old sitting on in the red, green and white stands, colored to symbolize the Kurdish flag. “And they taught me to play, and I played a lot over there.” 

“But they grew homesick and wanted to come back to Iraq. So I did.” 

The Peshmerga Park Tennis Team in November 2022. Photo: Carlotta Cardana

Although the history of tennis in Iraq is intertwined with an English legacy of colonization and power struggles in the Middle East, the nation inherited from the Brits a well-organized civil service and its clubby traditions. Among the most prominent, the Alwiyah club — founded in 1921 by the British woman who practically drew Iraq’s borders, Gertrude Bell — still stands just a stone’s throw away from Firdaus Square (where Saddam Hussain’s giant bronze bust once stood) and hosts national tournaments on its seven courts of powdery, pebble-strewn clay. 

Gradually, tennis spread among the elite Kurds, pushed northward by the International Tennis Federation (ITF), which dispatched balls, racquets and then, as the security situation improved, tennis consultants to form Iraqi national teams for both the Davis and Federation Cups. Iraq eventually centralized a small national squad in Baghdad and paid its players with opportunities to coach civil servants and the professional classes. They, in turn, practiced at al-Shaab national stadium — the home of the Iraq national football team from 1966 until 2013. 

Tragedy struck in May 2006, when extremists shot Davis Cup coach Hussein Rashid, 35, and promising players, Nasser Hatem, 28, and Wissam Adel Audal, 25, as they dropped off their laundry in Baghdad — purportedly for wearing shorts (it was later discovered that a fatwa against professional athletes had been declared). Rashid was in his second year as national coach after a successful playing career that included five Davis Cup appearances. Hatem and Rashid were lifelong friends and played tennis together as children. Yet, surviving player, Akram Mustafa Abdulkarim, helped put together another team for the Davis Cup Group IV Asia/Oceania match for 2007. 

Many other tennis coaches and consultants have recommended pro players move to another country, such as Dubai or Morocco, which has invested heavily in the “prestige” sport, in order to stand a chance on the world stage.  And elsewhere in the country, tennis facilities remain few and far between: two courts at the Dohuk Sports Club, three courts in Peshmerga Park outside Erbil and one here or there, in cities that sound familiar from their names on the nightly news: Basra, Kirkuk, Sulaymaniyah and Karbala. 

However, hope springs eternal in the cradle of civilization. 

Iraqi players practice late into the night at Erbil’s Peshmerga Park in November 2022. Photo: Carlotta Cardana

Realizing the untapped potential of both expats, refugees and nationals in a developing region, in 2020, Rafael Nadal opened his second academy in Kuwait, the country that Saddam invaded over oil rights in 1990. Nadal stated that he aimed to “help not only young talent here in Kuwait, but in the whole of the Middle East.” He added, however, “the principal and most important thing is that they grow with strong values that help them in sport, but also in the future and in the development of their personal and professional life,” thus casting some doubt that Grand Slam champions could be coming soon from the Gulf. 

But the boys playing in Dohuk — Amedi and his friends, Younis Mohamed and Ahand Sabah — might tell Nadal to not yet count out their countrymen. Iraq has several outstanding juniors coming up the ranks, including Nadal recruit Mohamad Rafa, 17-year-old Mohammed Abuzed Saber, and seasoned player, 28-year-old Adel Mustafa Al-Saedi — the latter two played on the Iraqi Davis Cup team in Turkmenistan last October. The team decisively defeated the richer, better equipped Oman team in the Asia/Oceania Group IV, but lost to neighboring Iran. Women, on the other hand, had a Federation (Billie Jean King) Cup team until 2014, but hasn’t been able to field one since. 

“Just when you have tournament for out of Iraq, (the federation) buys shoes and racquets and when you come back not winning, they say, why don’t you have better score, why, why, why?,” says Faris Ayad, a player and coach in Erbil. ” If you come and just practice, practice, practice, for what? Tournaments helps you figure out what you need to do. 

“But we need someone to support us. We need coordination and support and sponsors. We have a new federation president who seems to understand this now.”

Meanwhile, back in Dohuk, coach Avdal Hasan still trains two groups of about 30 female tennis players ages six to 25 two to three times a week. And Amedi and his friends, who often practice with the girls, still dream of putting Iraq’s flag up on the list of ITF, ATP or WTA rankings in the coming years. 

“Yes, there is very little motivation sometimes to keep tennis going — all the resources seem to go to football,” Amedi says. “But there is a core group of us who want to be standout players, who want to bring tennis back to Iraq stronger than ever.”

Two players practice into the night at the Dohuk Sports Club in Northern Iraq. Photo: Adrian Brune

BREAKING BARRIERS BEYOND TENNIS’ COLOR LINE

A group of ATA players at the Springfield (Massachusetts)Tennis Club in 1922 (right) and the ATA’s seal (left).

An exhibit highlights the association that helped make Arthur and Althea household names

By Adrian Margaret Brune

A group of ATA players at the Springfield (Massachusetts)Tennis Club in 1922 (right) and the ATA’s seal (left).

In 1944, two Black physicians, Dr. R. Walter Johnson and Dr. Hubert Eaton, watched a street-wise Althea Gibson lose the junior Girls ATA (American Tennis Association) championship title to another young Black girl named Matilda Peters. The score was 6-4, 7-9, 6-3. Matilda, who with her sister, Margaret, were affectionately known as D.C. dynamic duo “Pete” and “Repeat” Peters, had taken Black women’s tennis to new heights from their local Georgetown courts. 

But after the match, the doctors, who would go on to train and elevate the career of Arthur Ashe, offered Gibson a chance to train in Wilmington, NC during the school year and tour the ATA tournaments in the summer. Three years later, Gibson won the ATA Women’s Singles Championship — the first of her 10 consecutive ATA National titles, which she gained alongside her Grand Slams. Meanwhile, the Peters sisters were recruited by the Tuskegee Institute to play basketball and tennis. 

After graduating with degrees in physical education, both sisters went on to New York University for graduate school. The continued to compete in ATA tournaments. But by the time Gibson integrated tennis, the Peters were considered too old to compete. Each sister contributed to the advancement of Black advancement of tennis, however, in her own way, especially Matilda, who taught physical education at Howard University in the 1950s and tennis to underprivileged children through the D.C. Department of Recreation.

“”I knew that Venus and Serena were not the first successful Black female tennis players,” said Camille Riggs Mosley. “They stand on the shoulders of great people…Althea Gibson and Arthur Ashe were great because somebody enabled them to be there. They didn’t create the game; they stood on the shoulders of others.”

Although Althea Gibson officially integrated tennis at the U.S. National Championships at the West Side Tennis Club in 1950, just as every institution in post-Reconstruction/Jim Crow America, the United States Lawn Tennis Association (USLTA) — the precursor to the USTA — had a parallel Black organization: the American Tennis Association (ATA). Set up in 1916 with the union of three smaller Black tennis clubs, the ATA held its first ATA National Championships in 1917 and since then, it has been the premiere institution for promoting the sport to minorities in the U.S. The online exhibit Breaking Boundaries in Black Tennis at the International Tennis Hall of Fame (ITHF) in Newport, Rhode Island, tells the story of the ATA, as well as the worldwide effort of Blacks to play tennis, with a focus on the individual stories and successes of the first Black athletes who blazed a trail for the champions of today. 

Currier & Ives prints from 1885 that depict Black players imitating their white counterparts in both dress and attitude, but unable to play with their grace.

Currier & Ives prints from 1885 that depict Black players imitating their white counterparts in both dress and attitude, but unable to play with their grace.

Battling for Acceptance

In post-Reconstruction, if freedmen and former slaves playing wasn’t lampooned, it was generally ignored. Prior to the Open Era, local and state ATA tournaments results went largely unreported in the white press. Rather, the Black newspapers, such as the Pittsburgh Courier, the New York Amsterdam News and the Chicago Defender put tennis tournament results on their front pages — a section that might place an article detailing lynchings, burnings and the activities of the Ku Klux Klan alongside such achievements.

Blacks also still took significant abuse from the white public for trying to play tennis, considered an elite spot. In 1885, Currier & Ives, a high-end printmaking business, distributed lithographs that perpetuated racial stereotypes regarding Blacks plating tennis: that Blacks possessed speed and strength, but lacked the coordination and intelligence to master the “skill” sports. 

Yet, Blacks kept coming to Black tennis clubs, such as the Chautauqua Tennis Club in Philadelphia (established in 1890), and others throughout the Northeast, and they excelled at the sport. At the inaugural ATA Tournament in Baltimore’s Druid Hill Park in 1917, 39 competitors came from thirty-three different Black clubs across the country to rally, volley, chip and charge for the title. Tally Holmes, a 1910 graduate of Dartmouth College, became the first ATA Men’s Singles Champion and teamed with Sylvester Smith to win the Men’s Doubles title. A native of Washington, D.C., Holmes would win the championship four times and claim the doubles crown eight more times. That same year, Lucy Diggs Slowe at age 32 captured the Women’s Singles event, thereby becoming the first Black woman to hold a national championship in any sport. 

The Shady Rest Country Club (above) in Scotch Plains, New Jersey — the first Black-owned and operates golf and country club in the U.S.; the Ideal Tennis Club in Harlem (below), which hosted the ATA Nationals in the 1920s.

The Shady Rest Country Club (above) in Scotch Plains, New Jersey — the first Black-owned and operates golf and country club in the U.S.; the Ideal Tennis Club in Harlem (below), which hosted the ATA Nationals in the 1920s.

The ATA’s Wunderkind

The first steps toward the integration of tennis took place in 1929, when Reginald Weir, the tennis captain at City College of New York, and Gerald Norman, Jr., a high school champion, paid to enter the 1929 USLTA Junior Indoor Championships at the Park Avenue Armory on New York’s Upper East Side. When they showed up, the USLTA denied them spots in the draw, giving the NAACP a chance to file a formal grievance against the USLTA. The governing body of tennis was forced to publicly defend its policy of denying Black players the opportunity to compete in its tournaments.

But that didn’t stop Black players from setting world records. One of the ATA’s early female standouts, Ora Washington, had the height and reach to tame opponents into submission, and could chip and chop at the ball until it landed where she aimed. After starting her athletic career as a center for the Philadelphia Tribunes basketball team, Washington won more than 20 ATA titles during her two-decade career on the court, even beating Althea Gibson’s record. “She was nice, but she was mean on the courts,” said fellow player Robert Ryland, the first Black man to play professional tennis and coach Arthur Ashe. He claimed that Washington was one of the best players who ever lived,

Likewise, before Arthur Ashe, there was Bob Ryland. Learning tennis at an early age from and “Mother” Seames, as the matron of  Chicago’s all-Black Prairie Tennis Club was known, Ryland won the Illinois state high school championship in 1939, beating Jimmy Evert, Chris Evert’s father. He went on to Wayne State University in Detroit where he and Delbert Russell, would become the first Black men to play in the NCAA tournament, advancing to the quarterfinals in 1945. Ryland turned pro in 1959, joining Jack March’s professional tour which included Pancho Gonzalez, Lew Hoad, Bobby Riggs, Pancho Segura and Don Budge.

Jimmie McDaniel (left) a four-time ATA singles and doubles champion who won the national Black intercollegiate singles championship while at Xavier University. On July 29, 1940, McDaniel unofficially broke tennis' color barrier in exhibition match against Don Budge, Tennis No. 1 player.

Jimmie McDaniel (left) a four-time ATA singles and doubles champion who won the national Black intercollegiate singles championship while at Xavier University. On July 29, 1940, McDaniel unofficially broke tennis' color barrier in exhibition match against Don Budge, Tennis No. 1 player.

Finally, after 23 years of “separate but equal” tennis tournaments, on July 29, 1940, at Harlem’s Cosmopolitan Club — the new ATA headquarters — U.S. National and Wimbledon champion Don Budge played an exhibition singles match against Jimmie McDaniel, the ATA champion and possibly the best Black player at the time, in front of a crowd of 2,000 people. Budge ultimately won (6-1, 6-2), but the tennis world would be forever transformed. “Jimmie is a very good player. I’d say he’d rank in the first 10 of our white players,” Budge said. “And with some more practice against players like me, maybe someday he could beat all of them.”

Four years later, two Black physicians, Dr. R. Walter Johnson and Dr. Hubert Eaton, set their aim on Budge’s divination. Although they watched Gibson lose the junior Girls ATA championship title to Matilda Peters, they offered Althea Gibson a chance to train with Eaton in Wilmington, NC during the school year and tour the ATA tournaments with Johnson in the summer. Three years later, Gibson won the ATA Women’s Singles Championship — the first of her 10 consecutive ATA National titles, which she gained alongside her Grand Slams.

One of the ATA’s early female standouts, Ora Washington, had the height and reach to beat Gibson and all of her opponents, but had to choose between an athletic career in tennis or in basketball. Despite playing as center for the Philadelphia Tribunes basketball team,  Washington won more than 20 ATA titles during her two-decade career on the court. Yet, in 1956, Gibson turned up at the French National Women’s Singles Championships and made history by becoming the first Black person to win a Grand Slam. A month later, Gibson teamed with Angela Buxton to become the first Black person to win a Wimbledon Championship title in women’s doubles. She reached the U.S. National Women’s Singles Championship at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills in the fall, but fell to Shirley Fry. However, Gibson left Forest Hills, increased her training and came back the following year to dominates the U.S. National Championships, taking home both a Women’s Singles and Mixed Doubles trophy. She would ultimately win five Grand Slam singles titles and five women’s doubles titles.

Gibson, who was born in 1927, had her entire career before her, while Washington —28 years Gibson’s senior — was winding down hers. Before leaving the game, Washington reportedly challenged Helen Wills Moody to a historic exhibition match. Moody never replied. History left undone, Washington spent her post-tennis life working as a maid in Germantown, Pennsylvania, leaving Gibson to take up the Black mantle. Their memorials reflect the historic weight given to each: Gibson has a statue outside Ashe Stadium at the USTA Billie Jean King Tennis Center in New York, while a statue inspired by Washington went up in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park in 2019.

Ora Washington (left), one of the greatest players in the American Tennis Association with her trophies. Althea Gibson clutching her first Wimbledon U.S. Open trophy in 1957.

Ora Washington (left), one of the greatest players in the American Tennis Association with her trophies. Althea Gibson clutching her first Wimbledon U.S. Open trophy in 1957.

By the early 60s, another named would dominate Black tennis: Arthur Ashe. By 1960, Ashe had climbed his way to the top of the ATA and won a scholarship to UCLA thanks to the patronage of Althea Gibson’s own benefactor, Dr. R. Walter Johnson. The “it” factor for Johnson: Ashe’s coolness in the face of defeat. Routinely trounced on “Dr. J”’s backyard court by older players, Ashe would come out of each encounter losing by a lesser margin than before. His body soon caught up with his mental game and at UCLA, Ashe became the first Black man to join the U.S. Davis Cup team. In 1965, he won both the NCAA singles and doubles titles, while leading UCLA to the NCAA team championship. Ashe would win three Grand Slam singles titles and two doubles titles in his career.

Arthur Ashe holding his first U.S. Open trophy in 1968 after defeating Tom Okker for the title.

Arthur Ashe holding his first U.S. Open trophy in 1968 after defeating Tom Okker for the title.

Tennis’ Civil Rights Movement

Through the 1970s, Ashe continued to blaze a trail through the tennis world, integrating the South African Open and attempting to set up a professional tennis tour in sub-Saharan Africa. While touring on an exhibition in 1971, he also discovered 11-year-old Yannick Noah who would become a French Grand Slam champion. By then, Gibson had long left the tennis scene. In 1958, she realized that “when I looked around me, I saw that white tennis players, some of whom I had thrashed on the court, were picking up offers and invitations,” she wrote in her first memoir, I Always Wanted to Be Somebody. “Suddenly it dawned on me that my triumphs had not destroyed the racial barriers once and for all, as I had — perhaps naively — hoped. Or if I did destroy them, they had been erected behind me again,” Gibson repeatedly applied for membership in the All-England Club, based on her status as a Wimbledon champion, but was never accepted.

It would be 20 years before another Black female player to follow in Gibson’s footsteps. In 1981, Leslie Allen, an ATA champion from Cleveland, Ohio, joined the University of Southern California’s (USC) tennis team as a walk-on in her junior year and played No. 6 on its 1976 championship team. She went on to reach a career high ranking of No. 17 in the world in February 1981 and became the first Black woman to win a significant pro tennis tournament since Althea Gibson.

Leslie Allen, sponsored by Prince racquets, pictured as a 20-year-old tour rookie in Sydney in 1977.

Leslie Allen, sponsored by Prince racquets, pictured as a 20-year-old tour rookie in Sydney in 1977.

In 1986 Lori McNeil and Zina Garrison made tennis history during the Eckerd Tennis Open when they become the first two Black players to meet in the championship match of a major professional tennis tournament. McNeil prevailed 2-6, 7-5, 6-2, but Black women in the U.S. had already become a force. Garrison and McNeil — joined by Katrina Adams and Chandra Rubin — would spend the next four years trading historical milestones on the women’s tour, with Garrison becoming the first Black woman since Gibson to reach the finals at Wimbledon. On the way, she notched wins over Monica Seles and Steffie Graf, but fell to eight-time winner Martina Navratilova in the Championship match.

On the men’s end, in 1992 Bryan Shelton, a graduate of the tennis program at Georgia Tech, won the Miller Lite Hall of Fame Tennis Championships and became the first Black man to win a professional singles title since Arthur Ashe in 1978. Shelton seemed on the verge of a significant breakthrough at the 1994 Wimbledon, where, as a qualifier, he upset Michael Stich, the 1991 Wimbledon champion, in the first round and advanced to the fourth round, his career best result.

Bryan Shelton (right) currently the head men’s tennis coach at Florida and the first Black man to win a major title since Arthur Ashe in 1978 (pictured with his son, Ben Shelton, a current tour player)

Bryan Shelton (right) currently the head men’s tennis coach at Florida and the first Black man to win a major title since Arthur Ashe in 1978 (pictured with his son, Ben Shelton, a current tour player)

MaliVai Washington would surpass Shelton’s accomplishment in 1996 by reaching the Wimbledon men’s singles finals. In the same year, Washington, a native of Jacksonville, Florida became the first Black tennis player named to the U.S. Olympic Tennis Team. A recurrent knee injury ended his professional career in 1999, but following Ashe’s example of giving back, Washington established the Malivai Washington Youth Foundation, which provides academic assistance, mentoring and tennis instruction to low-income youth in his hometown.“What I took from Arthur (Ashe) over the years is, as human beings and certainly as athletes, we have a responsibility to do more than just hit a tennis ball,” Washington said. “In one of his books, (Ashe) said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘If I’m just remembered as a tennis player, I failed.’”

The Future of Black Players in Tennis

During the last 20 years, the reigning surname in tennis has been Williams. But to illustrate the efforts made before Venus and Serena took over, in 2008, a group of players, coaches and supporters established the Black Tennis Hall of Fame on the grounds of the Historically Black College and University (HBCU) Virginia Union. Inductees include all the aforementioned players, in addition to ATA champions throughout the past 100 years. Future inductees are sure to be James Blake, Donald Young, Madison Keys, Sloane Stephens, Frances Tiafoe, Naomi Osaka and Coco Gauff, among others, if or when the organization gets funding for a permanent facility.

In 2018, the 100th ATA National Championships took place in Orlando, Florida. Rodney Carey, from the Bahamas, won the Men’s Singles title while Isabelle Porter, a native of Fairbanks, Alaska who currently plays for Division II Stonehill College, in Massachusetts, brought home the Women’s Singles title, as well as the Mixed Doubles trophy. Aysha and Azaria Hayes, high-schoolers in the tradition of Pete and Repeat Peters won the Women’s Doubles title.

The year 2020 and the global upheaval over the unfair treatment of Black people in society have the tennis world pause over the need to bring more diversity and equity to the sport. After 104 years of operation, the ATA now works hand-in-hand with the USTA and other governing bodies of tennis and has called 4,700 people members and hosted 95,000 players in its various tournaments. Boundaries still exist — mainly financial — but tennis is well-poised to enter the next decade with fewer milestones to reach. 

The 2022 ATA Tennis Championships at the USTA Training Center in Orlando, Florida.

STAN SMITH THE TENNIS AMBASSADOR

On tour with Arthur Ashe in the 1960s, Smith advocated for tennis in Africa and beyond. A new film highlights his role in ground-breaking social and athletic change.

By Adrian Margaret Brune

A picture is worth 1,000 words, or so say most filmmakers. In this case, one particular 1975 photograph by renowned sports photojournalist John Zimmerman explains many things about the renowned tennis champion Stan Smith. 

Smith and his close friend, Arthur Ashe had just arrived in Johannesburg, South Africa and while both waited by the Hertz Rental Car stand with their luggage, a porter appeared. Off to the side, the ramrod straight, towering Army-Lieutenant-turned-unlikely-activist-icon dressed in a porkpie hat and sport coat holds four or five wooden tennis racquets for Ashe. But the porter — and most  of the other people the pair came across in the countries they visited for a U.S. State Department tour — thought that Smith, by then a US Open and Wimbledon champion, had come along as Ashe’s “caddie.” 

“When we went to Africa, I was the other guy who played against Ashe in all these exhibitions,” said Smith, who was ranked No. 1 in the U.S. at the time. “They would introduce him as Arthur Ashe, No. 1 player in the U.S., No. 1 in the world, one of the greatest players to ever play the game … and Stan Smith, his opponent.

“Arthur came up to me and said, ‘I’m sorry about that. If we do a tour of Alabama, I’ll carry your rackets for you,’” Smith added. “He was in tune with everything.”

Even though Horst Dassler, the founding chairman of Adidas, had a vision of Smith as the ultimate player — and less the sidekick (pardon the shoe pun) — few really know Smith, the man the classic green-and-white shoes forever bearing his face and name. A new documentary, “Who is Stan Smith?” produced by Lebron James and Maverick Carter’s Spring Hill Company, aims to delve into the long, illustrious life of the famously understated, unassuming “regular guy” from Pasadena, California, who somehow found himself on the front lines of the Civil Rights movement with Ashe, the Vietnam War through this work with the United Service Organizations (USO) and lastly, the players movement to found the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) — also known as the modern pro tour. 

“I always had an interest in trying to improve mankind,” Smith said via Zoom interview from his home near Hilton Head, South Carolina. “And it’s always been an interest of mine to get people playing — the World Cup is on right now, and many people don’t realize that tennis is right behind soccer in global popularity. 

“All you need is a court to play on and a few balls —Arthur and I did those tours as a way of proving that. But going to Africa and to China and to Vietnam was an eye-opener for me, and I really came to appreciate all people there, from the military to the civilians to the aid workers and I wanted to do more.”

Directed by Danny Lee, “Who is Stan Smith?” premiered at the IFC Center in New York in November and will turn up on ESPN sometime this spring. Interviews with Smith, along with his family and friends, as well as never-before-seen footage follow the tennis journeyman from youth to college tennis, to the Grand Slams to the International Tennis Hall of Fame — as an inductee and later president — and his “retirement” at the Smith Stearns Tennis Academy in North Carolina, which has turned out sectional, national, and international and college tennis title-holders since TK. The film also touches on Smith’s previously unknown humanitarian efforts, including his family’s adoption of Mark Mathabane, a young student and tennis player whom Smith and his wife, Marjory Gengler Smith, helped escape from apartheid in South Africa.

“During the pandemic, I had picked up tennis right away, so when I was offered the chance to direct the film, my eyes popped out of my head” says Lee, whose previous documentaries delve into subcultures, such as electronic music, skateboarding and former NBA players who become fathers to NBA players. “My take very simple: unpack the mythology — his is the name on the sneaker but what is the story behind it?

“It was initiation going to be just a sports biopic, like who is Jordan behind his shoe? But it became a story about this obsessive athlete determined to be the best in the world and in the course of that, stumbled upon his own humanity and the lesson he learned: being the best is great and but doing good leaves a more lasting legacy.” 

But first, the story of the shoe. After coaching Smith at University of Southern California and helming the U.S. Davis Cup team on which Smith played, Donald Dell became the agent of Smith and a number of his contemporaries, including Ashe, Jimmy Connors, and Ivan Lendl. Eager to expand Adidas “beyond France, especially to the United States,” according to Smith, Dassler snagged Dell during the 1971 French Open and the three men met at a Parisian nightclub, Elle et Lui in Montparnasse. Among cabaret singers and women dressed as male waiters, Dassler suggested that Smith wear the now classic shoe, only that, at the time, it carried the name of Robert Haillet, a very popular former French No. 1. “Horst suggested that I start wearing the shoe while they initiated a slow change. Robert’s name would remain on the heel while mine would be on the side.” Smith agreed, but the deal wouldn’t do for Dell. Within the year, Smith’s face and signature was added to the tongue of the shoe and Haillet’s connection to it was completely dropped. 

By the mid-1970s, the Stan Smiths had arrived on courts, in sporting goods stores around the world and on the feet of celebrities such as David Bowie, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, Damon Albarn, the members of New Order and Naomi Campbell.  “One of the few disappointments in my tennis career were my big size 13 feet — yet the shoe I eventually wrapped around them enabled me to become better known than I have ever envisaged,” wrote smith in his 2018 book, Some People Think I’m a Shoe.  While for Smith, the shoe has been a definitely been a blessing, sometimes it could be a bit of a curse. Billie Jean King had a shoe — a royal blue suede Adidas flat sole — as did Arthur Ashe (as version of the Stan Smith), but none have ever been as popular or immortal as the Stan Smiths. “I had a racquet for about 10 years with my name on it, then the non-wood racquet came along…,” Smith mused. “The shoe was a great opportunity for me at the time, but first of all, when you do these things, you have to realize that whatever comes of it, you are not in control. Whatever happens, happens. Maybe people remember you, maybe they just remember your shoes.

“A few years back, I was doing a clinic for some 12- to 13-year-old kids  and used Bjorn Borg, as an example as a player. At the time ,I thought people who know who he was, but unless a young person was into tennis history, they wouldn’t necessarily know Borg was or I was or anyone else of that era. It doesn’t bother me anymore: I don’t have a huge ego. I just try to do as much as I can to help people.” 

Now the story of the first “Stan the man” (hint: not Stanislas Wawrinka). Although Smith’s father worked as a tennis coach in the LA suburb of Pasadena, he “did not take to tennis immediately,” Smith said. Rather, he played basketball. Makes sense. Smith is still six feet, four inches tall, even at age 78. But after switching gears, he volunteered as a ball boy at the LA Tennis Club for a Davis Cup match and… was rejected. “I was, apparently, too awkward and  clumsy,” he said. So smith started jumping rope for ten minutes a day and out of the blue, won a sanctioned tournament and caught the eye of the Pasadena Tennis Patrons, a community tennis organization that helped promising juniors with coaching from Pancho Segura travel fees, kits and other expenses. After winning the U.S. National Junior title in Kalamazoo, Michigan, Smith was on his way.

Wikipedia can provide the titles the details, but after four years at USC, Smith hit the tour. “I heard Ken Rosewall… saying in an interview (during the 1970 Tokyo Masters) that he considered me one of the favorites for the title,” Smith recalled in Some People Think I’m a Shoe. “That gave me a big boost and I went out and proved him right by beating him.” That, and ten thousand Japanese people singing Happy Birthday put Smith, but “less gratifying” was the notice he received to report for the draft in LA the next day. “I played a lot of tennis in the Army and was given special dispensation to represent the United States in the Davis Cup.” 

Smith beat the combustible Ilie Nastase — nicknamed “Nasty” by the U.S. coterie — for a Wimbledon singles title in 1972, and he and former USC teammate Bob Lutz dominated the storied tournament in doubles, winning in 1972, ’74, ’80 and ’81.In 1973, he came to Wimbledon as the defending champion, yet he joined 80 other men in boycotting the event to stand in solidarity with Niki Pilic, who had been banned by the Yugoslavian Tennis Association — and subsequently the AELTC — for not playing Davis Cup. And while he could play the straight man — the guy who never rumbled the status quo — Smith eventually broke with his brothers in arms to change the way tennis was played in the late 1960s.

But two seminal events changed Smith’s life: his tour of Africa with Arthur Ashe and Ashe’s death in 1994. In June 1968 at the Queens Club outside London, Arthur Ashe attended a meeting of top players to discuss the formation of the ATP. There, Cliff Drysdale mentioned that Johannesburg wanted to host a “South African Open”. He then turned to Ashe and stated, “They’d never let you play,” meaning that the apartheid government would never grant Ashe a visa. Ashe nonetheless mailed in South African visa applications for 1969 and 1970, which South African Prime Minister John Vorster promptly rejected. In response, Ashe hit the road. For 18 days in 1971, he and Smith went on a 2,500-mile tennis expedition of six African countries — Kenya, Tanzania, Zambia, Uganda, Nigeria and Ghana — giving tennis clinics, granting interviews and playing exhibition matches. 

On a return trip in 1977, Stan and his wife, Margie, met Mark Mathabane, a young tennis player born to a life of poverty, racism, abuse and little hope in apartheid  South Africa. At age six, Mathabane joined his first gang and by ten, he was on the brink of suicide. The Smiths took in Mathabane and helped him gain a tennis scholarship to Limestone College in South Carolina. “When I met Stan… I was filled with hatred for white people because of the life I had led under racism and oppression,” Mathabane said.  “Stan had the uncanny ability to spontaneously relate to anyone… his sneaker was the perfect metaphor for enabling those to walk in the shoes of anyone they met .” Mathabane went on to be a successful author writing his first book, Kaffir Boy, an autobiography in 1986. He and his wife had three children — the youngest one named Stanley — all of whom attended Margie’s alma mater, Princeton University. 

Losing Ashe to AIDS in 1993, however, probably had the greatest effect on Smith’s own life. “I keep thinking what would it be like if Arthur was here today. He had strong opinions and he had to walk a tightrope; he could be considered an Uncle Tom by the public, but he was always well-respected and popular with tennis players,” Smith said.  “In his last years, Arthur has a t-shirt that said “Citizen of the World” and he was campaigning until the end. 

“I think that if his heart problems ad happened just a bit later and even if he would have contracted HIV, he would be able to handle it — there would be some medicines that could have helped and he would have done some amazing things.” 

But Ashe’s death has given Smith a mandate to live to the fullest, the filmmaker said. “Stan’s storyline is chock full of events and condensing the timeline and tracking the shoe inside the career then making them converge was a challenge,” Lee said. “But his humanitarian efforts were never a checkbox or talking point, but rather an organic pillar to his story.

The shoes reflect that, as well. In 50 years, Stan Smiths have come in a LGBT version, a vegan edition, a Paul Smith—Manchester United specialty shoe, Stella McCartney and Moana (for the kids) styles. Smith is often game to go to a Ballenciaga or a Gucci or a Pharrell Williams runway show, but he doesn’t collect them like some fans.

“A friend of mine called the other day and told me he had just picked up his 350th pair,” Smith said. “I only have about 130.”

THE MYSTERIOUS CASE OF JOHN ARBANAS, THE 1991 AUSTRALIAN OPEN AND TENNIS JOURNEYMEN

Melbourne Park in Victoria Australia, the location of the current Australian Open. The tournament was not designated a major championship until 1924 and moved to this site in 1988 after two decades at the Kooyong Lawn Tennis Club.

HOW DID A NO-NAME, NO-RANKED CLUB PLAYER SWEEP AO QUALIFYING INTO THE MAIN DRAW ?AND COULD IT EVER HAPPEN AGAIN?

By Adrian Margaret Brune

At age 34 years, Gregory Howe, a native Australian and English teacher in London, quit his job to chase his childhood dream: becoming a world-ranked tennis player. He gave himself a year, and if by the end of that year, he had not earned an ATP ranking point, he would give it up.

What would get under Howe’s skin so much that he would attempt this feat at such risk to his regular life? The otherworldly run of fellow Aussie John Arbanas — a local club player who had neither a major title, a world ranking, nor any sort of pro tennis career —through the 1991 Australian Open qualifying to the main draw. Arbanas came out of nowhere to notch victories over U.S. veterans Tim Wilkison and Glenn Layendecker before losing in the first round to Brazilian player Jaime Oncins.

Boris Becker holding the 1991 Australian Open trophy at age 24. He would claim the ATP No. 1 ranking that year, rising to the top of a 1,200-man field, of which 176 vied for the AO title in either qualifying or the main draw.

“The guy was a right-hander, tan wiry and very fit, with a stylish baseline game where he'd let his free hand go on his two-hander like Mats Wilander, or Bjorn Borg,” Howe said. “In those days of the Australian open, players often didn't make the trip down to Australia, and up until the early 1990s, there were often spaces in the qualifying where unranked Australian players with decent national rankings, could try their hand and sign in.

“I'm thinking maybe he caught some of the bigger American names a little under-done. But still, to beat them in a grand slam as just a nationally-ranked player is unthinkable. I always kept his 1991 Aussie Open run in the back of my mind… and when I finally achieved my first ATP point, I didn’t have to think twice. I was going to try do a John Arbanas.”

Gregory Howe competing in qualifying for ATP Mumbai in 2007. Photo: Gregory Howe.

However, Howe, Arbanas and Marcus Willis — the come-from-nowhere teaching pro who came through Wimbledon qualifying to face Roger Federer on Centre Court —seem the last of a dying breed: the tennis journeyman, the players who carry a racquet bag and not much else on the road, sometimes giving lessons or stringing to earn money to keep playing. Recent changes made by International Tennis Federation (ITF), which runs Grand Slams, and moreover, to the ATP tour rule books have cut back the draw sizes and made ranking points harder to come by in the minor leagues of tennis. A romantic tale the likes of John Arbanas — and even a Marcus Willis situation — might not come about today.

To begin with, qualifying draws. The ITF qualifying rounds for Grand Slams still have a cut-off of around 220 to 250 to accommodate ambitious players, but in the early 1990s players didn't want to travel to Australia so early in the seasons. This allowed more byes... and, according to Howe, the author of the 2018 revealing and entertaining tennis travelogue, Chasing Points: A Season on the Pro Tennis Circuit., the tournament director had the discretion to allow unranked, local players in as wildcards. “Arbanas managed to play the qualifying two of three times without any ranking. He was from Melbourne, so it made sense. Also, the local players would be coming off months of open tournaments over Australia's summer holidays and come in very match tight, whereas the big overseas pros would often fly in after their six-week break.

British qualifier Marcus Willis walks on Centre Court to take on Roger Federer during the second round after blowing through qualifying in a fairytale season.

But much more significantly, unranked players are strictly not allowed to try to sign-in for any ATP qualifying tournaments, including Grand Slam events and ATP Challenger qualifying. All ATP 250, and ATP 500 events — with some of the lowest ranking points on offer — also did away with old-school sign-ins at tournament directors’ discretion. These were replaced by an alternative list on which ATP-ranked players could put their names in case of a last-minute pull out. In the 2000s, events such as the pre-Wimbledon Queens Club Cinch Championships (formerly the London Championships) had a 64-man qualifying event, where many lower-ranked British players could play each year. Now, Queens Club has only a 16-man qualifying round with cut-offs close to the No. 200 ranking mark.

Similarly, the Kingfisher Airlines Tennis Open in Asia, the China Open in Beijing, and the Qatar ExxonMobil Open in Doha, all ran 32-man qualifying rounds a week before the main event — Howe managed to enter all of them in Autumn 2007. At an annual ATP board meeting a few years back, the administration decided to increase the quality of play and implemented 16-man draws across the board. Two events asked to keep 32 draws to help the local players and were denied. The reason, according to Howe: money. “Qualies cost money to run and earn nothing,” Howe said. “And it's just a pain in the arse to run, so smaller is better for them. But of course now the bottleneck to get into ATP qualifying events is choking players movement up, so most are just trying to accumulate points in challengers and jump into the top 100.”

Former ATP World No. 28 Sergiy Stakhovsky, a Ukrainian player and Greg Howe opponent, left the tour last year to join the Ukrainian Army after the Russian invasion.

A 24-year-old Boris Becker ultimately won the 1991 Australian Open, defeating Ivan Lendl 1-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4. The match marked the last time the former World No. 1 Lendl made a major final in his career, and it handed Becker the No. 1 ranking.

As for Arbanas he never repeated his qualifying success. Once noted as “talented and temperamental,” Arbanas at one point received a five-month suspension from the Victoria Tennis Association for “breaches of the code of conduct rules” — likely choosing to wear t-shirts over collared ones, as was the fashion of the day. In fact, despite his feat, little has been reported of Arbanas since his ‘91 run, aside from a short stint as a warm-up for Wimbledon finalist and former No. 35 John Frawley, who was coming back from a deadly virus and a wrist injury in 1990. “The gritty 7-6, 6-7, 6-4 win after a 160-minutes baseline duel with Melbourne pennant player John Arbanas was Frawley's first tournament success since February,” the Melbourne Herald-Sun reported. "I need match play, and a tough match like that will do me the world of good," Frawley said.

British player Marcus Willis (right) with doubles partner Scott Duncan at the All-British champtions M25 Sheffield event. The pair won its fourth ITF title.

Six years and change after his Wimbledon debut, Willis, now 32, is eyeing up a return to Wimbledon in the men’s doubles tournament. Like Howe, he started in the ITF Futures last summer and made the Top 500 within a year. “Playing at Wimbleodn was everything I wanted to do as a kid and it’s something I think I can do again,” Willis recently said. “Then I’d love to play the US Open and play every Grand Slam. That’s my real goal. I’ve only ever played the junior events in the Slams so I’d like to do that now.

“I don’t see a reason why I can’t do it. My goal was to get back to Wimbledon in two years and now it could potentially be one.” Once ballooning to SouthPark’s Cartman-size, Willis has certainly slimmed down to fighting weight and is aiming for Challengers around March or April and pushing into the 250-mark by June.

Gregory Howe, now 51, after winning a 2020 local tournament in Guadeloupe, the French overseas region from which his wife comes. Photo: Gregory Howe.

Eventually, Howe managed to climb the rankings to No. 1,222 and for a year, he juggled competing on the ATP tour with holding down a nine-to-five job and a marriage after moving to Dubai. Along the way he encountered almost everything the tennis world has to offer, from players whose hopes were slowly shattering, to rising stars racing to the top, from war zones with UN staffers in sparse hotels to ATP-sponsored digs and tournament cars.

With the aim to keep hold of his ATP ranking for as long as possible, Howe played one more ATP event in Doha in 2009, and reached the quarter-finals at a Futures event in Tehran in 2008. Out with injuries for two years, he had two children, wrote his book and started on a novel. Now living in Guadeloupe, Howe is thoughtful, but not overly so, about his unlikely run — a very fit sage for the younger up-and-comers. But don’t mistake that for him hanging up his racquet anytime soon. “One day I'd love to come back and play the grass court tournaments in the UK in the summer — this is heaven on earth for me.”

Chasing Points: A season on the pro season circuit is available at Amazon, Waterstones and many other bookstores.

NICK BOLLETTIERI: AN OBITUARY

Nick Bollettieri, dans son académie à Bradenton en Floride en 2022 (© Art Seitz)

A HUCKSTER WHO KNEW NOTHING ABOUT TENNIS REINVENTED TENNIS TRAINING

By Adrian Margaret Brune

There comes a point about seven minutes into the 2018 Showtime documentary, Love Means Zero, when the often-smug, yet never-say-die tennis coach Nick Bollettieri — sitting amid the ruins of the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort in Sarasota, Florida — explained the relentlessness of his pursuit. “My father said: ‘If you ain’t nobody, ain’t nobody gonna to talk about you.’”

It was possibly a strange thing for an esteemed tennis coach to say, a man who earned a spot in the International Tennis Hall of Fame without ever playing a professional tennis match. But if anything, Bollettieri, who died on Sunday, December 4, 2022 at the age of 91, craved attention — and fame. His throughway came via the children of the rich and the otherwise preoccupied elites of Gulf Coast Florida.

“I did things nobody thought of. I broke the rules of taking kids away from their parents, and brought them to an academy – the first one in the world. If I didn’t break those rules, I don’t believe tennis would be where it is today“, he says, naming the pros who came through the Colony and then the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy during the 80s and 90s: Andre Agassi, Monica Seles, Jim Courier, Aaron Krickstein, Mary Pierce. “Come on, let’s keep going baby! My Serena, my Venus, Anna Kournikova, Maria Sharapova, Tommy Haas… if you take all the students, I think there’s about 180 grand slam high notes…”

“Baby, I don’t know half of what most coaches know about pronation, turning hips and shoulders, the dynamics of the stroke, centrifugal force. Shit, I don’t know any of that.”

“All I know is that I wanted to be a winner and with winners.”

At age 12, I wanted to be a winner, too. Sitting in my bedroom in Tulsa, Oklahoma following a day of private school, a tennis lesson and/or a drilling session, plus a fitness routine, then dinner, homework and 60 pushups before bed, I would read Tennis Magazine — then the only American tennis publication left standing — where Bollettieri was the “instruction editor” and absorb his bits of advice for my game. “Hit and exaggerate the follow through“, Nick would advise on my backhand. “Wrap that racquet around the opposite shoulder at the end, baby“, he would tell me on my forehand. I volleyed from the forehand with two hands so I would turn my body appropriately, “to direct the oncoming ball without increasing the power.”

Andre Agassi et Nick Bollettieri (© Art Seitz)

By the time I was 16 and Jennifer Capriati was 16, however, I knew that I would never have the moxie or the makings of a pro player. The best I could hope for was a practice spot on a university tennis team, which I gained for a year in 1994. But, Nick… Nick kept on going.

Born and raised in Pelham, New York, to Italian parents, Nick Bollettieri played football at Pelham Memorial High School and attended Spring Hill College in Mobile, Alabama, where he first picked up a tennis racquet. Dodging the Korean War, Bollettieri nevertheless enlisted in the U.S. Army’s 187th Airborne Division. “The paratroopers were a volunteer division services. Why did I want to do that?, Bollettieri said in a 2015 motivational speeches. I wanted to be with a group that expected nothing else but the best.” Still he flunked the exam for the Naval Air Corps, but acceded to the advice of his father and enrolled in law school at the Univeristy of Miami in 1956 and kept a side job as a tennis instructor on the North Miami Beach tennis courts for $1.50 an hour. Bollettieri often came to law classes donning his tennis gear, to which the dean replied that he should “come dressed as a lawyer“, until his last day when he said “Dean, I have a few words for you.” After he handed over his books, Bollettieri said, “this is not for me.” Afterward, he called his father and told him he “would be one of the best coaches in the world.” His father replied, according to Bollettieri, “Son I will support you in everything you do, but you are responsible for the result.”

All it took was one kid — that’s all Bollettieri needed. Some may have thought Jimmy Arias with his windshield-wiper, wide-Western forehand would have propelled the 47-year-old to tour fame. But it was Brian Gottfried, a skinny Jewish kid born in Baltimore, Maryland who landed on Bollettieri’s courts in the mid-1960s that helped launch the coach’s career. Bollettieri took his protégé all over the Southeast to play tournaments, to find better players from whom he could learn and to land on courts where Bollettieri could teach his brand of motivation. “Tales of the militaristic nature of life at Nick’s academy abound. I know that turns many people off, wrote Peter Bodo for Tennis Magazine. The way I see it, Nick’s borderline harsh, discipline-based program brought something new to the soft and — let’s face it — bourgeoise sport of tennis. And the espirit d’corps he instilled in so many players, for so many years, played an enormous part in their success.”

Gottfried was Bollettieri’s start. While he was ascending to No. 3 in the world, Bollettieri started to bulid his empire. First, at the prestigious Port Washington (N.Y.) Tennis Academy, a northern tennis factory that counts Vitas Gerulaitis and John McEnroe as its prized students. Then, in 1978 Murf Klauber of the The Colony Beach Hotel and Tennis Resort hired Bollettieri as its director of tennis. He got busy recruiting, bringing in a core group of students from around the country: Anne White, Jimmy Arias and Kathleen Horvath and Carling Bassett soon joined.

Anna Kournikova, âgée de 10 ou 11 ans, avec Nick et Nick Bollettieri (© Art Seitz)

Bollettieri financed his school with the sons and daughters of the bourgiousie, who stayed at the Colony, while his better, scholarship players lived at Bollettieri’s house, where, in exchange for cleaning floors with tooth brushes and picking up cigarette butts around the hotel, among other things, they learned the Bollettieri way. When his growing cadre of students outgrew Bollettieri and a good friend, Mike DePalmer Jr., bought a tennis club on 75th Street in Bradenton and a motel to house them.
Luck struck twice when Andre Agassi, another rebellious child of immigrants, landed on one of Bollettieri’s Palm-tree lined courts in 1983. After seeing Agassi play for 30 minutes, legend has it that Bollettieri tore up the check Agassi’s father gave him for three months’ room and board — all the Agassi family could afford. By that time, Prince and Head racquets had come calling and Bollettieri had moved from the Colony to a 40-acre former tomato lot in nearby Bradenton. Nike came calling next, and the rest is a reflection in Bollettieri’s oversize Oakleys. Despite eight marriages, estranged children, financial boom-and-busts and a few grudges held by a few of his former protegees, including Agassi, Bollettieri, at age 86, hardly acknowledged the wreckage, even when it surrounded him in Love Means Zero.

By 2004, the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort was in financial trouble and no number of new owners could save it from abandonment, squatters, teenage graffiti taggers and finally, the wrecking ball in 2018. I saw it first hand, by then a 42-year-old journalist and aging player who climbed over the fence after a match at the nearby Longboat Key Tennis Center. I would take photos and write an essay about Bollettieri’s last days at the Colony and the sale of his academy to the sports agency, IMG — the closest I ever got to Nick’s secret sauce. The great still turned up at the occasional Slams and in instruction videos for the International Tennis Hall of Fame, which inducted him in 2014, but wasn’t as omnipresent as he once was. “God and a few of the mafia gave a message to get Nick in“, Bollettieri jokes on camera. But being there is one thing: it’s my obligation to help people to get to another level of play.” Still, “being there” might rank as the Bollettieri’s life achievement — his own defiant “f-you” to anyone who ever told him “no.”

Nick Bollettieri, entouré notamment de Jelena Jankovic (deuxième en partant de la gauche), Tatiana Golovin et Andreï Medvedev (les deux à droite), © Art Seitz

Some wondered if Nick Bollettieri might ever die — his energy endless, his skin seemingly incapable of decay. “If you look at Nick’s history, Nick does not look back, I just go forward, he says in Love Means Zero. I want to come across loud and clear. I did not think about things. I did not think of the ramifications, whether negative or positive, or neutral… I’ve never thought about being loved. What I think about: ‘Did I help you in life, did I give you a direction? ”

“Sometimes, a person may not love you, but if you’ve made an impact on your life, that’s success, too.”

But by August 2021, Bollettieri was in hospice care, mostly bedridden. Tommy Haas flew in from New York to see him, and Gottfried, Arias, Anne White, Robert Seguso, Carling Bassett-Seguso, Dick Vitale, and even Agassi, the player who shunned him for years, were in contact. Bollettieri even autographed racquets for charity events he would never attend.

Upon word of his passing, the tributes came rolling in over Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Even in his afterlife, however, Bollettieri just moved on, unapologetic for anything. On his official Instagram page, the announcement of his passing was one quote: “The mindset of champions is very simple. I don’t accept second place.”

IN THE NEW ISSUE:

Roger Federer, l’héritage invisible  (the invisible legacy) |  Charles Haroche, Frédéric Vallois

De la fleur au fusil... (From flower to fun) | Rémi Bourrières

All inclusive | Thomas Gayet

Humilité (Humility) | Myriam Bouguerne

Pure Aero : une raquette qui fait effet (a racquet that works) | Mathieu Canac

Entretenir la machine (Maintain the machine) | Thomas Gayet

Arnaud Federer  | Mathieu Canac

Roger Federer | Giovanni Curtopassi

THE ULTIMATE DEMISE OF NEW YORK’S EAST RIVER COURTS?

East River park on a full night in August 2020, not long after Covid-19 restrictions were partially lifted. Photo © Adrian Brune

BUILT ON A NEW YORK ‘FLOOD PLAIN’ THE COURTS WILL LEAVE TENNIS LOVING NEW YORKERS DRY FOR AT LEAST FOUR YEARS

By Adrian Margaret Brune

In the summer of 2019, as the U.S. Open show rolled into New York, the city’s public courts became a boon for celebrities: Lindsay Davenport shot a Heineken ad on a court along the Hudson River; Eugenie Bouchard drilled with then-coach Pat Cash at the Bronx’s Cary Leeds Tennis Center; even Daniil Medvedev turned up to play. His choice: the Brian Watkins Tennis Center at Manhattan’s East River Park.

Why East River Park? The proximity to East Midtown, where a lot of the players stay? For the views of the Williamsburg Bridge? Sightseeing spots created by the famous urban planning despot Robert Moses? Or the relative anonymity and no-BS attitude of the Lower East Side?

The regulars at the Center, one of the most popular tennis playgrounds in Manhattan, never asked. And Medvedev never said. But as the 2022 U.S. Open winds down and hurricane season rolls into the Tri-State area, another storied tennis venue could go the way of the Tudor City Courts, the Forest Park Tennis Courts in Queens and the former Cosmopolitan Tennis Club in Harlem: the Brian Watkins Tennis Center. 

“This is a very low- and moderate-income neighborhood. Most of the park is lined with public housing. It’s people who have been here for generations, who love this park and this place,” said Pat Arnow, a neighborhood resident who started the group East River Park ACTION. “That is why you are losing the park, because the city doesn’t care about the people who love this park right now… It’s not a tourist park. It doesn’t have a lot of rich people enjoying it.”

Courts under construction in the early 1930. Photo © New York Public Library

Last winter, despite protests, court petitions and players staging sit-ins amid bulldozers, construction started on the $1.4 billion “East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (ESCR),” — a hurricane-defense plan created in the wake of 2012’s massive Hurricane Sandy, which put FDR Drive and a good part of the East Side under water. Following the current blueprints, city contractors will build a 1.2 mile wall along the water and cover the razed park with eight feet of fill to create a berm that will supposedly block hurricane-sized currents. A new park and new courts have been planned to sit atop the levee in four, maybe five years — or whenever workers finish.

Protestors stand outside during and early morning last November 2021, a last ditch effort to save the courts. Photo © “East Side Coastal Resiliency Project (ESCR).

“If we built resilience measures, and didn’t protect the park itself, we would continue failing our communities for the exact reason the environmental justice movement started,” said Carlina Rivera, the City Council member who has represented the area since 2018. “My community doesn’t deserve a park that essentially turns into a bathtub every few years when there’s a hurricane. We deserve a park that’s protected.”

Back to Beginnings

For once, the reviled Moses might have done something good for the city — when he embarked on changing the waterfront, the East River was a hub of slaughterhouses, power stations and railroad yards. In tandem with Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive (FDR), Moses created a tree-shaded esplanade that rolled out with the highway. It housed abundant recreational facilities, lots of green space and windswept views — a respite for the tenements.

Acquiring land for a park in the LES proved prohibitively expensive and legally twisted, however. Instead, the city opted to fill in the waterfront, and in 1939, East River Park opened. It  featured a running track, a track house, an amphitheatre for famous producer Joseph Papp’s productions of  Shakespeare in the Park, and 12 tennis courts with a storage house and public toilets. 

The finished East River Courts in 1939 — a urban renewal project by the famed city planner, Robert Moses. Photo © New York Library Archive.

Since then, however, the city has chipped away at the park. In 1949, the administration decided to widen FDR and took a section of the park to do it. In 1963, Mayor Robert F. Wagner extended South Street for tourists and pushed into the park. But the most drastic change to the waterfront took place in 2012, when Hurricane Sandy came to town. In a matter of hours, East River Park was under water. 

To keep the fate from repeating, not long after Sandy, the administration of outgoing mayor Bill DeBlasio presented a more palatable $760 million plan which would have razed a smaller section of the park, built berms and marshland, and installed floodgates on FDR Drive. In 2018, however, De Blasio scrapped it for the ESCR, a proposal he argued would create a better-protected space and make construction faster and easier. It would also temporarily sacrifice the newly refurbished track, the amphitheatre, and the courts, while permanently demolishing 1,000 trees — some 80 or more years old — an ecology project, and possibly the landmark protected tennis and track houses.

A bird’s ever view of the torn-up East River courts and the playground , both of which the city allege will rebild in 2025. Photo © Adrian Brune

Local citizens under several groups, including East River Park ACTION, filed lawsuit after lawsuit. Initially, it seemed something might stick. But last December — the final month of de Blasio’s administration — demolition crews began working around the clock under constant police protection and in defiance of an appeals court restraining order to flatten the Southern half of the park, while men, women and their children sat on park amenities and stood in front of trees. On December 16, the restraining order was rejected, but by then, the damage was irreversible.

A couple waits for their court to come up during a warm August night in New York City. The courts have been the sites of numerous friendships made, much dating and even celebrity sightings. Photo © Adrian Brune

One of the more widely used courts in the city, the East River courts were renamed — a bit morbidly — the Brian Watkins Tennis Center in honor of a Utah tourist and University of Idaho tennis player who was slain in the subway while attending the 1990 U.S. Open. By spring 1991, the courts had a $1.7 million resurfacing and $30,000 donation from an anonymous donor to teach tennis to local children. 

Used nearly year-round, the courts had recently fallen into disrepair, with cracks filled with cement, downed windscreens, and nets held up, at times, with spare tennis balls, cans and anything leftover in racquet bags. With one of the major tennis centers now gone, other tennis associations across the city have braced themselves for the spill over. 

“My guess is that we are definitely seeing spill over. Fort Greene is very, very busy this season,” said Sam Burns of the Fort Greene Tennis Association, which operates the closest set of two or more public courts next to the East River. “I’m really glad that the City has committed to rebuilding the courts by including them in the improvement plans and I know that the NYC tennis community will be extremely happy when they have access to public tennis courts again.”

A sign-up sheet is used to designate the times of matches. It doesn’t always work, and while some courts have website reservations sites, none have city-wide apps to reserve courts. Photo © Adrian Brune