The Real Sport of Kings When our family moved from Notting Hill Gate to larger quarters on Brook Green I realized it was a ten-minute bike ride to The Queen’s Club. A mecca of lawn tennis, with grass courts, Queen’s was known for the Invitational that preceded Wimbledon. As a youth, spurred by my father whose passion was tennis, I played a lot, at times as many as eight hours a day. The game was so bound with Southampton’s lifestyle that even the houses, with their white- painted frames and green shutters, could seem a reverse echo of the grass courts on which we played. It is hard to imagine a Long Island village where we played only three months a year competing with Florida and California, but the town boasted a Wimbledon winner and several national champions. The two grandsons of Dwight Davis who had given the eponymous cup were daily opponents, and the Meadow Club Invitational (now the U.S. Amateur Championship) reigned as the longest continuing tournament on the grass court circuit. This tournament, which brought the great “bums,” as they were known, roaring in on their jalopies was the social high point of the Southampton summer, crowned by a dance and massive silver trophies that begged to be melted down. We put them up in our houses and the money I made ball-boying more than paid for all the presents I bought my parents. For much of my youth I aspired to that kind of athletic career. I wanted to travel to fabled venues: Wimbledon, Rome, Monte Carlo, Paris, Rapallo, Gstaad. Why not do it with racket in hand and a promoter footing the bill? To that end I practiced, trying to make myself into an errorless shot maker who could lay the ball on a dime again and again and again, from any angle. Such was my ambition—or rather my father’s—that for a couple of summers in early adolescence, my brother Merrill and I had our own live-in tennis tutor, from Forest Hills, whose job was to teach us the grass court serve-and-volley game. He would parlay the connection into a job at Merrill Lynch that eventually saw him running the Bond Department, the kind of team player that a developing financial house needed. Despite all the attention lavished on lessons, tennis didn’t take. Playing without glasses (at my father’s insistence), I could not see well enough to hit a cross-court volley, and the grass surface, while kind to the feet, did not encourage taking the racquet back further than the waist and developing fluid ground strokes. When at sixteen I made my break with Southampton, it was perhaps only natural that some of the loathing I felt for everything the village stood for should turn on a game that so incarnated village values: the cult of wealth, privilege, and perfection we were pushed to accept, and the mea culpas I had to deliver when I got too ambitious and hit a shot out of bounds. I had, I knew, enough abuse in my life; I didn’t need to self-inflict it as well. Fortunately there was soccer, a beautiful team game that met my need for physical activity and competition. In soccer there was no self-loathing. That magic group, the teammates I admired, and their acceptance of me, however provisional, made the daily grind of practice, conditioning, bus trips and the eternal waiting around, more than bearable. Brought up abroad in soccer-playing milieus, my teammates were more accomplished than I. In trying to keep up with them and retain my place on the field, I was always in deeper, skill wise, that I was prepared to be. The sense of adventure I found as a defender, of having to deal with opponents who could out dribble and out run me, was thrilling. Only my traveling brought an equal sense of adventure. I played soccer at Harvard, and later in New York, New Haven, Seattle, and San Francisco with teams of various ethnicities and nationalities: Swabian, German, Ukrainian, Italian, Indonesian, American, and best of all, Hungarian. For my teammates, nearly all recent immigrants as they were, soccer provided a much-needed community and with it a way of resisting the melting pot. With their cultural identity on the line, they played with an intensity ethnically mixed teams lacked. Such trust was an honor I strove to repay. When I lived in Burgundy, as I approached my forties, I was able to play with a regional club based in Les Laumes. That took me to little village cow fields all over a rather large province where my feet got to taste the various cheese-like consistencies of the mud, here Epoisse, there Chaource. Better yet, it brought worker friends, of a different cast of mind from my peasant neighbors. Unfortunately, my soccer career ended when I sustained a serious spinal injury while heading too many heavy rain-logged balls. With soccer no longer available, I needed another outlet. Why not give a game that had once meant so much to me another chance? With a reference from my Tour de France publisher, I joined Queen’s. As I was taking my first lesson— with my injury I had to relearn how to serve—I learned that the club offered free lessons in the old sport of kings, a game called real or royal tennis in England and court tennis in America. I decided to look into it. By my third lesson I was hooked. For the next eleven years I played at least four times a week. There may have been other things I did to entertain myself, but the better part of my London life went into this compellingly complicated game of angles, walls and spaces. Real tennis, the ancestor of modern lawn tennis, is a game played with hand-stitched balls and a warp-faced racquet in a huge cloistered or renaissance courtyard. You may have seen, on one movie screen or another, Henry VIII interrupting a game at Hampton Court to hear the news of Anne Boleyn’s beheading, or watched Jeremy Irons in The French Lieutenant’s Woman cutting a ball towards my small, quick, red-haired coach, Davey Johnson, at the Queen’s Club. But for all its historical associations, or perhaps because of them, the sport of kings, a game played mainly in a few exclusive clubs, could seem an endangered species like the whooping crane or the condor. That, at any rate, had been my opinion. Living first on the West Coast and then in Burgundy, I had no chance to play real tennis before moving to London. But the mid-century tennis journalist Alison Danzig’s characterization of the sport as a “game of moving chess” had long intrigued me, as did the nation of a sexagenarian world champion, Pierre Etchebaster. At 42, I might not yet be over the hill. For a beginner, the most extraordinary feature is the court in which the game takes place. “Court” is somewhat of a misnomer when the court is, in fact, a room-like building. If you ever viewed the collection of French Impressionist paintings formerly located in the Jeu de Paume on the Place de la Concorde, you will have an idea of the physical setting for real tennis, a space quite a bit wider than a lawn tennis doubles court and some twenty feet longer. The space resembles a medieval castle courtyard. The playing area is surrounded on three sides by a sloping “penthouse” roof that shields a diversity of underlying openings or galleries, and on the fourth by a stark “main” wall. Across the middle of the court runs a net, developed from what was still in Henry VIII’s day a loosely strung rope. From three feet in the middle, the net rises to five feet on either side. The net divides the court into different halves. The attacking or service side is a rectangle; the defending or hazard end is not, due to the buttress-like tambour which juts out at a 45 degree angle about twenty feet from the net along the main wall. The tambour forces the defender to try to control simultaneously two quite separate spaces, depending upon whether the ball strikes the tambour and ricochets into the middle somewhere, or whether it lands in the main portion of the space under the ladies’ grille. The division of the court into unequal attacking and defending halves gives real tennis its fundamental tension, since points can only be won from the service end. The server is constantly faced with a “Hobson’s choice” when returning a difficult shot: should he hit into the net, thus losing the point, or should he let it go unhit into a “chase,” thereby losing his serve? In any racquet game a shot smacked past an opponent’s reach wins something, but in real tennis the unreturnable ball creates a chase. The value of the chase—and it is wonderfully relative—depends on how far from the wall behind the server the second bounce lands. Only a chase can compel a change of court. Lay down a pair of chases, though, and you change on the spot. Otherwise you wait until game point is reached before changing court and disputing the chase. If the defender has laid down an excellent chase of a yard and half, then all the server (who has become the defender) needs to do is return every ball that stands a chance of landing in that yard and a half extending from the back wall, or volley out any drive directed towards the dedans, the wide spectator porch at his back.