Get Off My Lawn: A story of one player’s quest to play on grass

By the time I started playing tennis in the mid-1970s, the sport’s original surface was no longer its surface of choice. After a century of use and abuse, the grass didn’t seem quite as green it once had. It was bumpy, it was brownish, it was slick, it was slippery, it turned to dust after a few games. Most of all, it didn’t make sense as a place for the modern game, with its Western grips and ever-more-grueling rallies, to be played.

So, for the most part, it wasn’t. In 1975, after 94 years on grass, Forest Hills shifted to clay. While the Australian Open stuck with its traditional turf, it wasn’t a coincidence that the game’s stars stopped making the trip to Melbourne during the ‘70s, and didn’t start again until the tournament moved to hard courts in 1988. As for Wimbledon, few players wanted to skip their sport’s most prestigious event, but that didn’t keep generations of them from grumbling that grass was really meant to be grazed on, not played on. In 1977, tennis’s governing body, the ILTF, finally acknowledged reality by dropping the long-antiquated “Lawn” from its name.

In spite of all that, or perhaps because of it, grass retained its allure for the millions of American hackers who picked up the sport for the first time during that decade. Its rarity, its air of aristocratic history and white-clothed privilege, its bright beauty: All of that made grass an aspirational surface, as well as a matter of simple curiosity for suburbanites. You couldn’t play tennis on your front lawn, so how could you do it on a lawn court?

There were precious few places in the un-aristocratic United States to find out, and none at all where I grew up in Central Pennsylvania. My hometown had a small private club with four Har-Tru courts, and a lot of recently constructed hard courts. Many were squeezed in between the town’s ubiquitous Little League diamonds, and at night they might be used as makeshift roller-skating rinks by the town’s teenagers. I can remember walking down a street in my neighborhood on a hot summer day after playing on one of those courts and seeing, out of the corner of my eye, the deep green of Centre Court beaming from a living-room TV that was tuned to Wimbledon. After spending a morning on steamy asphalt, dodging foul balls from the baseball field next door, that Centre Court grass looked like an oasis.

At first, I was happy just to go to a place where I could gaze at grass courts in person. On a trip to Philadelphia, my family stopped at the Merion Cricket Club; this was as close as you could get to a Wimbledon-like atmosphere in the States. Merion’s Victorian clubhouse, built in 1896, seemed impossibly grand and imposing, and the grass courts that were laid out in front of it seemed impossibly immaculate. I was amazed, and appalled, to hear that this was mainly because most of the club’s members preferred to play on clay, or even, good forbid, indoors. Looking back, I can see now that grass, despite its scenic and poetic elements, can make the game more difficult to actually play. But at the time, the sight of those empty courts was a gutting betrayal. I felt like I’d had a green rug ripped out from under me.

A couple of years later, I was invited to join a team of 14-and-under juniors from the USTA’s Middle States section to play at a club with grass courts in Rye, NY. None of us had set foot on the stuff before, and this might be the only chance we’d ever have. Alas, it rained, and we played the team event at a garden-variety indoor club nearby. I’m not sure any of us cared whether we won or lost. So, naturally, we lost.

My next brush with grass wouldn’t come until I was out of college and on a trip to London, where I had a chance to visit Queen’s Club. When I arrived, I was surprised that this storied location wasn’t a haven from the city. Instead, its lawns were plunked down in the middle of an urban neighborhood and ringed on all sides by apartment buildings. Not that it mattered; rain followed me there, too, and kept me off the grass again.

Success finally came in my 30s, when a friend invited me to the stately Westchester County club where generations of his family had been members. Located behind iron gates and an ivy-covered wall at the top of a steep hill, the club didn’t offer a refuge from the town, so much as a place where you could look down on it. Inside, the members’ clothes were white, but the grass was a deep green. To play on it was to feel as if you were playing an earlier, simpler, more elemental version of tennis, one that has been buried beneath a century’s worth of new spins and swings and racquet materials.

This Westchester grass was faster than the perennial rye currently used at Wimbledon, and it required a blunter style of play than what we’re used to seeing from the pros now. The ball darted, soundlessly, through the court and thudded against your strings. A solid first serve virtually guaranteed you a point, and once a rally began, you had little time to do anything but block the ball back. The points weren’t as long or grueling as they normally are today, but there was a different, equally challenging type of physicality to the grass game. Just getting the ball over the net felt like a triumph of strength and timing. The upside is that you knew it was equally tough on your opponent.

The service holds went quietly by. The sets ended in tiebreakers. The sun went down. The birds crisscrossed the branches of the tall trees above. The club’s members, in jackets and dresses, murmured on the verandah. Attendants fanned out to sweep, line, and water the club’s beautifully kept clay courts for the final time that evening. Here was the oasis.

I stayed as long as the light allowed that evening, but a trip back to the city, and a noisier and more enervating reality, was inevitable. Walking back down the hill, I saw a small recreational park on the other side of the highway. There was a tennis court—asphalt, not grass—a couple of basketball courts, and a soccer field, all in tolerably imperfect condition. On the tennis court, there were a pair of 30-something-year-old men in non-white clothes locked in an after-work battle; their tennis was also tolerably imperfect, the product of hours of adult competition rather than hours of teenage lessons. They were getting every last swing they could get in before the sunlight died.

The panorama of this treeless park and this cracked court seemed very American—loose, casual, history-less, open to anyone, belonging to no one. Unlike the club at the top of the hill, it offered an outlet from the work week, rather than an escape from reality. Walking past it left me with a strong sense of deja vu; I’d had my share of after-school and after-work battles in similar parks, in similarly dying light.

Since then, I’ve played on grass a few times, including at Forest Hills, and enjoyed every minute of it. I’d love to get back on the surface again; would love to spend my evenings playing tennis at a club on top of a hill. Grass remains an aspiration, but it will never be a reality. Looking back at my younger days on asphalt, though, I’ve come to think that any tennis court, whatever the surface, can be its own oasis.