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. This is where real tennis exacts a billiard-like accuracy. If ousted from the position as server by a chase, one can take the disputed point and with it the game by being accurate enough in making a succession of returns. Take six games, and like lawn tennis, the set is won.

This subtle system of chases is unique to real tennis and is the feature that makes the sport as much an art as a game. As a writer in The London Spectator

(1912) commented, “It makes real tennis the only game in which you get some satisfaction out of a bad stroke and double satisfaction out of a good one. The chase eliminates chance and conduces enormously to accuracy—greater than that of a bowler at cricket.”

From the defender’s need to keep the ball low to the server’s wall while returning comes the basic stroke, a scythe-like chop on the outside of the ball.

Delivered far from the body with a shoulder-swiveling turn, the “cut” imparts a spin that causes the ball to drop with each successive wall that it strikes. Such a cut puts the server at a disadvantage in having to clear the net from a place deep in a corner and no higher perhaps than his shoes. Because he can only parry such a shot and not hit out, the advantage rests with the defender. The chase creates two zones of court play, which require different stroking

techniques. On the attacking side there is every encouragement to hit out,

whereas in defending pace must be tempered with accuracy. The farther out from

the service wall a ball lands, the more beatable is the resulting chase. As an

anonymous writer in The Saturday Review (1891) enthused, “The divine chase imposes its moral restraint upon fiery hitting and makes what would otherwise be a stupid display of hard hitting into a game of skill and fine judgment, and this with plenty of hard hitting no ways debarred.”

In effect, each player must always calculate, but because of the system of suspended points one must think as much spatially as arithmetically. The unresolved yardage of a chase enters in the calculations; it all depends upon

where one is in a particular game. If the defender has succeeded in laying down

an excellent chase, there is less need to be fussy about the second, so long as it

comes quickly. Much hinges on the confidence one has in one’s serve.

How the chase system developed is a matter of some dispute. We know a version of jeu de paume, the palm game as it’s still known in France, was a pastime for monks and other ecclesiastics as early as 1050 A.D. But there are strong arguments for the beginning of real tennis in other parts of Europe. There is even a street in Poland that bears the architectural remnants of a court.

That real tennis was extremely popular by the mid-fourteenth century is clear from the enactment in England of statues forbidding its play by those in the lower classes Gambling was widespread and the stakes were high. The game flourished in the next two centuries and was played by all classes in Germany,

Spain, Italy, and France. It seems to be no accident that the heyday of real tennis coincided with the

Renaissance. All that fascination with perspective, with ruffs and angles and

dances like the pavane, with complication for complication’s sake, found an

outlet in a game that became a metaphor for court life and its swift reversals of

fortune: up at the service end one moment, down at the hazard end the next.

Courts sprang up all over—there were said to be 1,800 in Paris alone by the end of the 16th century. The vogue was such that court ladies like Catherine de Medici took to wearing their hair in the form of tennis racquets.

If many played, more certainly watched. The various galleries would not have become an integral part of the game if they hadn’t been constantly filled. I suspect it was more than the beauty of the game that drew spectators in such numbers. Any sport that lends itself so exquisitely to handicapping—players of very different abilities can still contrive a good match—is a sport ripe for gambling. From the sums waged, one gathers that tennis was the backgammon of its time. The odds-makers even stayed in the court, alongside the players, collecting wagers. In the trough that runs under the net were two baskets: one for the sixty or so balls a court needs; the other for the cash and IOU notes. Like jai- alai today, tennis provided the venue, while players may well have felt like mere pawns in the larger game of fate. “O, I am fortune’s tennis ball,” Hamlet remarks to a surprised Laertes, laying down a great chase there at his feet, and we see him directed from the hazard end in Elsinore, ricocheting between Denmark and

England, rescued by a pirate ship one moment, turning up in the graveyard the next. It was part of the famous magnanimity of Henri of Navarre, “le vert gallant,” that he used these sporting occasions to lose enormous sums he could well afford to those who played and bet against him.

The odds are constantly revised in the course of a match, as a chase with its change of court throws the whole hairpin balance into disarray. Just as professional cycle racing has been from the start a journalistic creation, so the need to wager may well have brought the system of chases, with their changes of court, into being. Each change of court served as a time out, with the bookies using the time now given over to television advertisements to make and collect the bets.

In 1657 Paris had 114 courts; a century later, there were only thirteen. A sport so associated with royalty was subject to the monarch’s whims. Louis XIV’s sport was billiards, and cards replaced tennis as the popular gambling medium in a more sedentary age. To what did the authorities put the Versailles court in the later 18th century? What better place for the revolutionary convention to meet!

By the end of the revolutionary period there was only one court left in Paris, a situation that still stands.

In England the game enjoyed a 19th century revival. The public school game had been rackets, a pelota-like game that grew out of the high walls of debtors’ prisons, where it was played with a lethal steel ball and saber-like strokes. From there, spurred by the “mens sano, corpore sano” dictum, rackets quickly spread throughout the upper-class educational system.

When the sons of the Victorian elite reached Oxford and Cambridge, there were no rackets courts to be found. Instead there were real tennis courts, for which the footwork and slashing motions of rackets had perfectly prepared them. The enthusiasm that developed for the university game resulted in a flurry of

building new courts. For a while no country house seemed quite complete

without one. Imagine how handy a tennis court might prove on days when

hunting was impossible, or when all the guests had arrived for a long weekend.

Meanwhile new building methods brought improvements to the game.

Before 1840, courts had covered roofs and were lit from the sides like churches.

With the advent of glass roof construction they could be lit from above. Later in

the century, Joseph Bickley patented a substance that helped prevent the natural

sweating of slate walls.

The construction of the racquet also evolved. Early racquets were short- handled, resembling the ones used today in paddle tennis. They were also quite heavy. It made for a much slower game played often with three, four and even five-sided teams. The racquets were loosely strung to allow a longer time on the

racquet and thus greater control. Racquets in those days were strung on the

diagonal; the cross strings were looped around the main strings rather than being

pulled through them alternately. This one change in stringing technique enabled

a different racquet, longer handled and a lighter, laminated one, to be strung

tightly. With tighter strings a new game came into being that featured the

possibility of harder hitting; not every shot had to be played on the floor.

Real tennis balls vary in size from ones as large as ostrich eggs to ones that

seem merely a hand-sewn lawn tennis ball. While the core is no longer stuffed, as

in Shakespeare’s day, with “the ornament of one’s cheek,”—the sweepings from a

barber’s floor—the rag and cork-stuffed core makes it far heavier than a tennis

ball. Drop one on the floor and it will plop rather than bounce. Because of its weight, and the length of the court, the ball travels at a clip a lawn tennis ball

rarely approaches. Kings too corpulent to duck have found it lethal.

Lawn tennis is a game of repetition. One serves or receives at the baseline

in one of two squares. Over and over again comes the same sequence of drives

and returns, a whole edifice built on holding one’s serve. And it’s intensely

conservative. Being beaten by a well-placed passing shot is acceptable; making an unforced error is not. Just walk around the grounds at a tournament and catch the vituperation. Some part of the immaculate figure cut by the players in white has obviously cracked. But legions of perfectionists can keep hanging in there, out-stupefying their opponents, one serving machine waiting for the other to blow it. Will he, or won’t he? Aren’t all too many sets resolved by the sheer luck of the tiebreak?

Real tennis is more forgiving. Losing a point, a game, even several games does not have to dent the equanimity with which one stands at the service end, still master of events so long as one manages to keep a chase, and the resulting demotion to the hazard end, from occurring.

In what does such mastery consist? Space, the control of length. Most games are played within a finite space. Just keeping the ball in play, under difficult circumstances, requires a certain self-possession. By contrast, real tennis takes place in a court that seems almost infinite. The net, high on the sides and sloping toward the middle, creates a game of diagonals, one chess bishop outmaneuvering the other. So long as I avoid the net, I can whack the ball anywhere without losing a point. In the process, all the self-loathing that we see coming from less-than-perfect human machines vanishes. In a terrain with no out-of-bounds, there are no mistakes. If I miss hit a ball, I may still surprise my opponent enough to luck out with a point. I don’t even need to play well; so long as I keep scraping back the ball from the service end I survive. I can go on performing miracles of retrieval until my opponent thinks up a shot elusive enough to put me out of my misery, or just as likely, blows it.

In a game of such infinite complication, a player can discover something almost each time he steps onto the court, a new angle if not a corner turned.

Sustaining me was my personal fascination with space as possibility. Though time makes me anxious, a tiny bowl of sand forever running out, space provides a structure within which I can calmly navigate. Doors, openings, and corridors. A good game of real tennis brings a sense of mutual fluidity, two players managing to be everywhere simultaneously. Watching a great player control the court is a little like watching a legendary Chinese emperor who rules his country while perched at his southeast window. Like the Chinese emperor he is not, so far as I can tell, ever breaking into a run. But wherever the ball arrives, there he is, inevitably.

Unfortunately, I took up real tennis too late and had too many holes in my game to attain such fluidity. Just learning the considerable geography of the court, as the ball spun into or squirted out of one or another corner, took the better part of a year. Even then I never succeeded in timing the ricochets off the jutting tambour.

Speed of foot helped, of course. In my forties I could cover short distances pretty well. But mobility is not everything. Better to be where the ball will arrive than frantically chase it from one carom to the next. A good player exerts an almost hypnotic effect—even before I’ve completed my swing he is planted where

I have directed my shot.

I remember a coach crying out from the dedans behind me, “I don’t want

to see you.” The lower I could bring my knees and back, at whatever quivering expense, the greater the racquet control. The lawn tennis player must keep the ball he is stroking within the far court rises as he finishes his follow-through,

applying his own body English. The real tennis player has no choice but to turn

completely sideways and then step into the ball, putting every bit of himself into

his front leg. And, like a golfer, he must stay there, crouched, head over the ball,

all the way through the trajectory of the shot. Good players hunch so low they

often scuttle about like crabs.

Service has been called l’âme du jeu but the game does not revolve around

it as it does in rackets or lawn tennis. For all the advantage that lies with

initiative, of being able to choose a line of attack, the delivery is basically

defensive. One can see why kings spared themselves the indignity of having to

scurry from one sidewall to the other by employing a servant who discreetly

exited from the court after lobbing a serve onto the penthouse. Even now with the

advent of the overhand hit railroad serve—an American invention off the lawn

tennis twist—percentages still favor the receiver for the first two strokes. Parry

those and the court advantage offered by having the tambour as a target can

begin to take effect. For this reason the serve is crucial even though it’s not an

attacking stroke. The server has well over a hundred options, depending upon

where he places himself. But most players stick with a basic delivery, saving the

trick serves for special yardage situations. You chase the serve with tiny balanced steps before chopping down on it from the backside. The small steps are necessary because the ball is constantly moving and you must be able to lunge to have any impact. You hit the ball less with your arm than your legs, your swiveling hips. The lunge exacts everything you have in the way of courage and commitment. Where a lawn tennis player surprised by a return at his feet can transfer his weight to his back leg, the real tennis player often has no choice but to steel himself, and against every instinct, thrust himself forward, head lowered, into the half volley.

In lawn tennis one strikes often enough the underside of the ball, the advancing shadowed half-sphere. One aligns the ball with the torso, as if it could be hit. In real tennis, you carve from the outside, striking at the outer limit of your reach. The start of the swing, though, is high, a scyther felling grain in a field. Or, more radically, one can hit straight down on the ball like a hammer descending on a nail.

The angle at which the feet are planted at the last second as one starts one’s lunge will determine where the shot is directed. An opponent may want to read the foot placement, but in a space of such size he is unlikely to catch a last- second shift of intention. Instead he reacts to the veracity of his previous shot and what it implies about one’s ability to return it on one or another diagonal. But he must keep his head down and finish the stroke before yielding to the temptation to look.

I think of the stroke as a length of rope I’ve flung out that hugs the wall down into the corner. The longer the time it takes my opponent to reach it the better off I am. Give him the time to set his feet so he can crack a shot from the

service end and I’m in real jeopardy.

By creating space with a stroke I am lengthening myself. In the new length

I inhabit I can even imagine myself, as a stooping peregrine must, tall as the sky.

But within the court structure and the point structure of that sky I am contained.

At various times in my life I have wanted to escape from the situations in

which I have found myself. But freedom strikes me as a chaos I can endure only

for a limited time. What real tennis made clear to me is the need I’ve always had

to dissolve time into space. Within tennis’s exquisitely balanced game, time

changes into another dimension: shots, points, and the suspended points that are

chases. Each player creates his own version of length. Lengths grant us our

fluidity.

The speed with which the momentum changes gives a match its hairpin

exhilaration. One can stave off the inevitable demotion to the hazard end for only

so long. But the longer I hang in there, serving, the more fluid I’ve become.

In learning real tennis, my progress was complex since there was so much I

had to unlearn from my childhood lawn tennis. And whatever athletic progress I

made, my advancing years tried to take away. I seemed to be always fighting to

stay where I was, while more gifted newcomers sauntered by. That conferred a

distinct sense of adventure to every match: I was by no means the master, I had

to deal with whatever turned up. In this sense competing resembled the

uncertainties I had faced in travel. It had not been difficult in other lands to drop the protective mask of voice, accent, family, and education and project myself as naked, open, and available. On a court, in a tournament, it was harder because there was so much more identity at stake. My handicap! My ranking! If I let myself conjure, “What if?” I was likely, my concentration lost, to be ground in the dust. Meditation? I could sit in the dark before a match, murmuring some two- syllable incantation, but it was not easy to come out on the court like a basin of limpid water and keep that constantly in mind. Much time passed before I realized it was not victory I had to envisage, but my good friend, failure. Only when I wore that mask, could I go out and in grim certainty play each point, as it had to be played, calmly, without expectations.

It helped to remind myself how vulnerable I was. I played a good classic floor game. So long as I could keep the exchanges on the floor, one length against another, I could hold my own, for a few points at least, with virtually anyone. But step up the pace and force me to defend one of my chases with a volley and my whole achievement became somewhat porous. When serve after serve is being whacked right through me, I start to feel like a rabbit in a shooting gallery.

Defeat can be restorative in the perspective it brings to it what is, after all, still a game. For me, competing has been a way of taking my pulse, and seeing where I was in my progress. It is easy to ridicule the time so many of us spend playing games: isn’t there something else we should be doing with our lives? But much is to be said for an ancient game of such refinement about which, as Hazlitt once remarked, “No one despises who has ever played it.” For me, the privilege of being out there, on a real tennis court, consumed in the give-and-take of pattern, could seem miracle enough.