The Grass At Last
My first true taste of lawn tennis
Message from Christopher: With the grass-court season in full swing, I am bringing this back from the archives behind the paywall. I have narrated a new voiceover only for paying subscribers.
PARIS – I have been writing about tennis for nearly 40 years and have been playing it quite a bit longer than that. But it was only recently that I finally got to hit on the game’s original surface.
Believe me, it’s not that I haven’t been close to plenty of grass courts.
I was born in Newport, Rhode Island, home of the International Tennis Hall of Fame and an annual grass-court tournament. I began covering Wimbledon in 1990, when Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg were in their prime and met in the men’s final, and Martina Navratilova won her ninth and final ladies’ singles title.
Several years later, I spent a few days in Harare, Zimbabwe for a story on the reality-trumps-fiction siblings: Byron, Wayne and Cara Black. They were raised on an avocado farm where their father Don, who had played at Wimbledon in his youth, decided to honor and leverage that experience by building his “own little Wimbledon” in a different hemisphere, complete with four lovingly tended grass courts and a weathered plaque bearing the same excerpt from Kipling’s poem “If” that has pride of place above the players’ entrance to Centre Court at the All England Club.
“If you can meet with triumph and disaster and treat those two impostors just the same.”
All three Black children went on to become world-class players. They made it on tour and thrived at Wimbledon. Byron and Cara each reached the No. 1 spot in the world doubles rankings, and Cara and Wayne won the Wimbledon mixed doubles title together in 2004.
But though we explored their family’s inspiring against-the-odds story as we walked on the grass that week, often – like Don - in our bare feet, I never managed to get out there with a racket and actually hit the ball. It was like holding a glass of Dom Perignon and never taking a sip.
Nor did I manage to play -- to my increasing frustration -- when I visited grass-court meccas like Longwood Cricket Club in Boston, Queen’s Club in London or Kooyong in Melbourne, Australia.
There was always another interview to do, another story to write or another book talk to give. But I finally got the experience in an unexpected place.
Though Paris is of course better known for red clay when it comes to tennis, there are several grass courts only a short walk from Roland Garros at Le Lagardère Paris Racing, a private club in the Bois de Boulogne that is one of France’s historic tennis hubs.
While the All England Club traditionally has required all-white clothing on court, Le Racing is a bit more free-spirited, expanding its palette and dress code to white and blue. Though the grass is hardly the main attraction at Le Racing, it does have its place, and so I finally gave lawn tennis a try with a young family friend as part of a multi-surface afternoon that also included tennis on the hardcourts and the red clay.
Here’s an aerial view of Le Racing, and you can see the three grass courts in the lower right:
I have been mixing pleasures lately. Last April, I tried a different trifecta in San Diego for The New York Times: heading to the Barnes Center to play padel, then pickleball, then tennis over 90 minutes with my host Ryan Redondo.
Here’s an excerpt from that piece:
The sounds are distinct: from the high pitch of a lightweight paddle meeting a plastic whiffle ball in pickleball to the percussive pop of a denser paddle meeting a decompressed tennis ball in padel to the more familiar thwock of strings driving a ball in tennis.
The swing lengths, like the court lengths, vary. A tennis swing is more rotational: loading the legs and then turning the hips with the shoulders following. Padel is routinely more acrobatic, with 360-degree turns and the need to adjust to the different spins off the glass. Pickleball feels more static with compact swings but also more manic at times with its abrupt changes of pace that demand both deft, considered touches and fast-twitch reactions near the net.
I enjoyed the experience and different challenges enough that I plan to try all three in the same day again: an approach more clubs are encouraging. When I am back at our longtime home on the North Shore of Boston, I have been alternating between tennis and platform tennis, a hybrid game that is played on a small-scale tennis court using perforated paddles on a gritty, elevated surface that can be heated from below during the winter to melt the snow and ice. The ball can also be played off the high wire fences that surround the court. It’s a doubles game, at least most of the time. Call it padel’s frozen cousin, and platform tennis is at its best when it gets really cold: slowing down the ball and extending the rallies while leaving you no time or desire to stop moving. Sweat will freeze surprisingly quickly.
But we stuck to just one racket sport at Le Racing . The only thing that changed was the surface, and the grass, in my book, required by far the biggest adjustment. The courts at Le Racing, it should be noted, are a far cry from Wimbledon and its reasonably high bounces that have allowed the baseline game to thrive for much of the 21st century, beginning with Lleyton Hewitt winning in 2002.
Le Racing’s courts, pristine from a distance, seemed a lot more old school once in use: slightly spongy underfoot with strikingly low bounces that sometimes bore a closer resemblance to skids. Serve and volley did not seem like the best idea but the only idea, and there was a lot more serve than volley considering that crisply sliced deliveries were often unreturned, at least by us amateurs.
It was a new, rather more unjust world after the true bounces and sure footing of the hardcourt and the slower, grittier conditions of the red clay. But we humans are nothing if not adaptable and after 15 minutes or so, my teenaged opponent Matthew was diving on the grass like Becker. No dives from me, but I was doing my best to channel Edberg with some drop volleys that did not need long to start rolling once they hit the turf.
It was different than any racket sport I had played and quieter, too. There were no squeaks from our sneakers as we changed directions, no extended scrape during a slide. It was muffled tennis on a plush carpet with staccato rallies and a fair bit of luck of both the good and bad varieties depending on where our shots landed on Le Racing’s patch of grass.
But it was a throwback brand of the game that I would gladly play again. Once, even after all these years, was not nearly enough.
