Another hard, hard week of typing has been brought to a merciful conclusion. It’s time for the semi-weekly trek to Burpcastle on 7th St. in Manhattan. It’s a Belgian bar that was once run by monks—you really can find anything in New York—but it’s better now that it's been sold to normal humans. The beer is still there, anyway, which is what counts on Friday afternoon. Who needs the Hamptons?
After that, there’s tennis this weekend. I'm playing at my Brooklyn club and watching Queens Club. Nadal has just joined Federer on the sidelines, but this interlude remains one of the highlights of the tennis season for me. No other sport gets to show off two utterly different versions of itself. We go from the long, gritty grind of European dirt to the crisp, polite hush of English grass in the span of a week.
In fact, I’ve always felt this time of year should be extended. With that in mind, here are a few paragrpahs I wrote about starting a “grass season” for TENNIS Magazine earlier this year (in an article entitled, “15 Ways to Improve the Pro Game”).
*Re-growing the Grass Game
With the rise of retro ballparks and throwback uniforms, American sports have made tradition a selling point. It’s time for tennis to get in on the action.*
Since the advent of the Open era in 1968, our sport has aggressively left its past behind. We ditched grass for asphalt courts in the 1970s and then went space age with our racquets. Leave it to that bastion of tradition, the All England Club, to show us one way back.
Wimbledon has made the grass-court game viable again by firming and slowing its turf. Glorified serving contests are out and rallies are in (a little too in for some grass purists, but that’s another story). Why not spread the new grass game further by creating a season for it? There are at least three good reasons: (1) Lawn green is more aesthetically pleasing than cement; (2) it would increase the variety of playing fields and styles that tennis offers, already one of the sport’s strengths; (3) in a retro-fitted stadium, grass would have a Camden Yards effect on fans: "This is how the game was meant to be played."
Ideally, a grass season would build up to Wimbledon, but that would require more time between the French Open and the Big W. Short of that, a grass tour could be set up in Asia, a growing tennis market, late in the year. As a start, when the ATP rejiggers the Masters Series schedule, as it’s planning to do, a dual-gender Masters event on grass could be set up before Wimbledon. What better place to showcase more of tennis’ grand tradition than London’s venerable Queen’s Club?
Ah well, we can hope. For now, we have Queens on the Tennis Channel this weekend and, I believe, Eastbourne next week. Both sites have distinctive and aesthetically pleasing surroundings: the red-and-green color scheme of the Artois Championships (hey, what happened to Stella?) and the seaside homes and hotels that are visible behind the court in Eastbourne. I’ve been to Queens; the place is a treasure trove of arcane racquet sports, with one of the world’s few court-tennis courts. It’s known as real tennis in England and is the original version of the game (also begun by monks, oddly enough). It may be old, but this is still a difficult and complicated sport played with a heavy, wooden (and well-named) “bat”—the ancestor of the tennis racquet. Next to the court is a room where the players sew their own court-tennis balls. The club also houses a couple “rackets” courts. Rackets, another sporting relic rarely played anywhere but in the most exclusive old-line clubs, is an unbelievably fast-paced derivation of squash (it may predate squash, not sure).
I don’t mind a weekend without Federer and Nadal, to be honest. The rivalry has been “good for tennis,” as they say, though only the terminally deluded would say that the two of them alone could make the sport significantly more popular in the U.S. and return us to the days of McEnroe and Borg (or something). Why would we want that, really? We get to watch them play in relative peace now, without the perpetual hype machine of ESPN, which has its hands full covering the NFL’s spring mini-camps. (Hey, McNabb’s taking snaps a few days early!) Remember that during the 1970s Bud Collins referred to the now-glorified tennis boom as the “tennis epidemic,” and wished for the return of the game’s quieter days.
Well, the sport has been returned to us, the converted, but we still get to enjoy our Federer-Nadal. On second thought, their rivalry hasn’t been good for tennis. It’s been something even better; it’s been good for tennis fans.