RACQU E T
No. 1
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Printed in Canada by Hemlock Printers
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RACQU E T No. 1
08 Tennis Is Not the Literary Sport In His Essay on David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan Flirts With a Distortion of Category. By Sasha Frere-Jones
44 Je T’aime...Moi Non Plus
Yannick Noah Has Been Asked to Save French Tennis. Again. By Carole Bouchard
12 The Davis Cup is Broken Fans Deserve a Real World Cup For Tennis. By Gerald Marzorati
56 Pompeii in Queens Forest Hills Stadium Has Been Home to Iconic Moments in Both Tennis and Rock ’n’ Roll. By Steven Kurutz
18 Stacking the Deck When the U.S. Open Planted
74 Tennis Lessons Coming to Terms With Tennis’ Elitism. By Taffy Brodesser-Akner
Some Bad Seeds. By Joe McGovern
20 This Tun of Treasure A New World Champion
84 Arthur Ashe Vs. Muhammad Ali The Sportsmen’s Lives Read as a Conversation About What it Means To Be American. By Stephen Tignor
in Court Tennis. By James Zug
28 The Leaning Tower of Pizzazz The Iconic Tennis Designer Ted Tinling Was Allergic to Tradition. By Thessaly La Force
104 Serve and Volley, Near Vichy Fiction. By Greg Jackson
on the cover “Yannick Noah” by Mads Berg.
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Welcome to the first issue of Racquet . It’s a new quarterly tennis magazine that celebrates the art, ideas, style and culture that surround tennis. We don’t think of the game as a country club sport, lumped in with golf and healthy only in the suburbs. We’ll talk about the pro tour, but not at the expense of the conversations that reach beyond it. We fondly remember the swashbuckling sport of the tennis boom of the 1970s and ’80s, and our goal is to help restore some of that swagger to today’s game. That’s why we chose Yannick Noah for our first cover. He best personifies the quintessential Racquet player: A stylish, timeless, international showman, on the court and off. With Racquet , we want to take you around the world as we illuminate stories and issues that have resonance in the tennis world and beyond. We wear tennis whites—but by choice, not mandate.
racQu e t
Caitlin Thompson Publisher
David Shaftel Editor
Larry Buchanan Art Director
Dan Morrissey Articles Editor
Courtney Nguyen Contributing Editor
Bill Sullivan Curator
David Granger Spiritual Advisor
Racquet Publishing 750 Lexington Ave, Suite 1501 New York, NY 10022
www.racquetmag.com info@racquetmag.com
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Sasha Frere-Jones says Serena Williams “has to reassert her dominance as often as people grant it.” corinne dubreuil
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Found e r s
A. Cable Aaron Heinsman Aaron Kamm Adam Perugino Adam Pincus Adham Hammoud Adrian Alter Adrienne Swan Aga Calik Agnese Rozite Ajay Jumbu Akash Kapur Akshay Kolse Patil Albert Sheen Alec Harvey Alex Grant Alex Kapelman Alexandra Gillies Ali Hassan Alice Kaphan Alicia Palacio Alison Leung Alison McCarthy Alison Russo Allison Brantley Alonso Aramburu Alysia Bridgman Alyssa Bantleman Alyssa Higley Amy Bennett Amy L. Eddings Amy Reams Amy Sullivan Ana Mitric Anandi Rao Anders Rasmussen Andie T. Pearson Andrea De Carolis Andrea Fang Andrea Friedman Andrew McNeill Andrew Palczewski Andrew Pope Andrew Shaftel Andy Bragen
Ann Thompson Anne Marie McLaughlin Annie Johnson Annie Moore
Chandra Conway Charles Allen Charles Johnstone Charlie Johnson
David Barry David de la Fuente David Francis David Granger David Kane David Law David Markwick David Ober David Shaftel David Studarus David Taggart Dawn Fischer & Stacey Friedman Debbie Bennett Debbie Mullin
Ethan Genter Ethan Lee Etoile Stewart Eva Marsalkova Evan G. Marlow Fiona Carswell Flora Stubbs Florian Goosmann Frampton Tolbert Frith La Vin Lloyd Frits Kouwenhoven Gary and Pam Mehringer George Markell George Quraishi Georgie Maynard Georgina Cox
Uren James Rogers James Thompson Jane Bolinger Jane O’Dell Janelle Erickson Janice Deringer Janna Rearick
Chau Khuong Chris Devers Chris Ng
Anthony Webb Antonia Loucks Anu Muddu Anusha Rasalingam Atul Sharma Barbara Carswell Barnaby Cook Beatriz Pasinato Izumino Ben de la Cruz
Christian Rishel Christie Meller Christina Schafer Christoph Lohnherr Christopher Tepper Chuong H. Nguyen City Racquet Shop Claire Suddath Clare Fowler Clare Newman Clare West Colin Walker Colleen Winchester Collin Campbell Courtney Ashraf Courtney Holsworth & Connor Farrell Courtney Nguyen Craig Engelfried Craig Gallagher Craig Ross Curt Janka Dakota Gardner Dale Roberts Dan Backhaus Dan Hammerton
Janna White Jason Horne Jason Loucks
Jay Jay Gacad Jayne M Bowers Jean Paul Broc
Jean Simeon Jee-eun Lee Jeff Crady Jeff Miles
Ben Peskoe Ben Simon
Deborah O. Clendaniel
Benjamin Callet Benjamin Ergas Benjamin Randlett Bess Jacobson Beth Crittenden Beth Pili Beth Wilson Bethany Donelson Bill White Brennan Mange Brian Calvert Brian Hrebec Brian Lehrer Bridget Robinson Brigid Bergin Bronwen Liggitt
Dennis Mendoza Derrick Bradley Dick Kouwenhoven Divia Thani Don MacKinnon Don Nguyen Donald Derheim Doug McKeever Dwayne Shaw Eben M Anderson Ed Stubbs Edo Roth Elena Blanina Elizabeth Baldwin Elliot Hannon Elyssa Goldberg Emiko Nakajima Emily Connelly Emily Pela Emma Price Eric Enders Erica Cerulo Erica Newman
Geraint Fox Gigi Condos Gilbert Cruz
Jeffrey Guadagno Jennifer Crandall Jennifer Hirsch Jenny Ye Jeremy Borden Jeremy DeBord Jesse Keith Jessica Berube Jessica Flanders Jessica Graham Jessica Hoover Jessica Luther Jessica Meyer Jill Day Jill M Buker Jillian Hatcher Jillian OBrien Jim Roll Joe Cobb Joerg Siemer Johan Vesterlund
Gill McBurney Gillian Dobson Gloria Binteris Hao Yi Harriet Barovick Hayley Dewar Hayley Fothergill Henry Risman Hsiang Yee Lai
Ian Ferguson Ian Foxworth Ian Herbert Isak Sjursen Ivy Pochoda Jackie Clark
Bruce Howell Bryan Lehrer Bryan Ruiz Calin Kim Carita Caple Carl Bialik Carol B. Alan Carol Feucht
Dan Hermelin Dan Manross
Jackie Wadhwa Jacob Mnookin Jake Siegal Jakub Dohnal James Clifford James Edwards James Fontanella- Khan James Kern James McSweeney James Michael
Daniel Burr Littlewood Daniel Jean-Lubin Daniel Spitzer Daniel Weidenfeld Daniela Hofer- Gautschi Danny Timpone Dave Manelski David Appelman
John Dugan John Fisher John Latzy John Pollard John Poole Jonas Persson
Erik Fabian Erik Gudris Erwin Ong Esben Hvid Jørgensen Esther Drill
Caroline Cobb Carrie Conners Carter Paret Cate McAnulty Catherine Kelleher
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Jonathan Auerbach Jonathan Foerster Jonathan Holtz Jonathan Trejo Jonathan Weinbaum Joseph J. Barretto Joseph Meltzer Joseph Proietti Josh Levin Josh Skinner Juan C. Franco Juan Kioshy Imazu Julian Harcourt Julie Guy Julie Whitaker Justin Brown
Kylie Culnane Kym Gildersleeve
Megan Ryan Meghan Legg Mel & Pamela Shaftel Melanie Hope Mercedes Michel Mia Birkhead Michael Arauz Michael Beattie Michael Damore Michael Edison Hayden Michael Guzman Michael Mungin Michael Schmelling Michele Drohan Michele Witts Michelle Denevan Michelle Roper- Shaw Mick Hamilton Mike Dang
Owen Albert Wilkinson
Sara Ivry Sarah A. Van Dell Sarah Baldwin Sarah Levy Sarah van Mosel Scott Goldstein Sean Nelson Sean Williams Sebastien Ergas Sei Iwai Seth Schwarzman Shandy Casteel Shannon Van Loon Sharoz Makarechi Shelby Provencher Shelley Deng Sheriece Matias Dick Shola Amusa Shruti Jayakumar Simon Reed Stephanie Chau Stephanie Neppl Stephanie White Tolosa Stephanie Zook Stephen Greig Stephen Schenkenberg Steve Nelson Steven James Snyder Steven Johnstone Steven Kurutz Stuart Breingan Suzanne Enzerink Sven Winter Tabarak Sadiq Taffy Brodesser- Akner Tal Woolley Tania Spooner Tayt Harlin Terry Thuemling Theresa Legg Thessaly La Force Thierry Cote Thomas Bates Thomas Parker Thomas Tilson
Thuan Vu Tim Boeseler Tim Heffernan
Owen Beecher Owen Wilkinson Paige Cowett Patricia Willens Patrick Connelly Patrick Falby Patrick Persello- Seefeld Patrick Sauer Patrick Schmidt Patrik Ewe Paul Garrett Peter Hepburn Philip Fowler Phillip Yerby Philly O Gorman Pia Sahni Pierre Kattar Porter Barron Porter Warren Anderson, Junior Rachel M. Engelke Randy James Raymond C. Habib Rebecca Lehrer Reem Abulleil Reena Diamante Reid Moorsmith Richard Felix Richard Levy Rick Muirragui Rob Roberts III Robert D. Borteck Rodolphe Brumm Rohan Weckert Rosecrans Baldwin Royden Kadyschuk Ryun Patterson Sachin Gupte Salim Virji Sam Barker
Laura Avent Laura Furno Laura John
Tim Oppelt Tim Ruggeri Timur Kalimov Ting-Ju Yen Todd Edwards Tom & Bonnie Grier
Laura Mackie Laura Pasea Lauren Harris Lauren Jay Pan
Lauren Miller Lauren Starke Lauren Williams Laurie Mann Porter Leah Williams Lesley Thompson Linda Marmora Linda Neppl Lisa Leingang Louisa Barry Luella Rhodes Luke Reynolds Luminita Vasilica Luz Ruiz Lynn Kim M R Bagley Maida Brankman Mangesh Hattikudur Marco Storchi Margaret diZerega & Chiemi Suzuki Margaret Kelley Marine Boudeau Marisa Boyette
Tom Leipzig Tom Meyvis
Tom Osborne Tony Carmody
Trevor Zeck Troy Tollen Tyler Green Tyler Maroney Uchente Emuleomo Valen Hernandez Vanessa Tam Virginia Fairweather Wakiuru Wohoro Wayne Bonner-Bell Wes Needham Will Wilbur Yelena Kernogitski Yolanda Barron
Justin Ellis Justin Tan
Kaitlyn McGrath Kara Silverman Kara Watkins Karen Bank Karl Maier Karma Christine Salvato Kasia Kurdybacha Kate Neufeld Katherine Woolfitt Kathleen Ehrlich Kathryn Lancaster Kathy Cantwell Katie Benner Keenan Hughes
Mike Dineen Mike Nelson Mike Ockay Nancy
Phatsaphaphone Natalie Marchant Natalie So Natasha Skogerboe Nathan Deschaine Nathan
Yong Yee Ling Zachary Herz
Thornburgh NCR Tennis Podcast Neil Munshi Nic Brown Nick Brandt Nick Einhorn Nick Matassini Nicolas Fantini Nicole Geraci Nikita Taparia Nils Fergin Nina Alscher Nina Chaudry Noah Bressner Noah Davis Noel Camardo Noreen Horan
Special Thanks To George Quraishi Mangesh Hattikudur Flora Stubbs Clare Newman Ben Rothenberg Stacey Pittman Matthew Salacuse Oscar Sullivan Cameron Clendaniel Ann Marie Gardner Ryun Patterson Leanne Shapton David Rosenberg
Mark Fischer Mark Forbes Mark Roberts Martin Wilson
Kelley Deane Kelley Smith Kerry Quigley Kevin Cahalin Kevin McCaul Kevin Roose Kimberley Matthews Kimberly Wong Kirk Nahra Krista Peppler Kunle Demuren Kyle Goetz Kyle Ross Kyle Taylor
Marwan Shousher Mary Phillips-Sandy Matt Lieber
Matt Ramsay Matt Seguin
Sam Davis Sam Derse
Matteo Stefanelli Matthew Colwell Matthew Johnson Maura Miller Max Petersen Megan Dowdle
Samantha Orciel Sandy Smallens Sara Duff Sara Hausner- Levine
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Tennis Is Not the Literary Sport In His Essay on David Foster Wallace, John Jeremiah Sullivan Flirts With a Distortion of Category
String Theory , the Library of America’s brief anthology of David Foster Wallace’s tennis writing, shouts “gift” when you pick it up. It is easy to hold, both pleasantly hard and light. The cover is rendered mostly in the wet green of a tennis court, the “o” of Theory printed in the “optic yellow” introduced in 1972 to help people track a tennis ball while watching on television. The rest of the type is white, and all of it is embossed onto the front board, a design that suggests the frugality of the patrician. By dispensing with a common element—a dust jacket, the unnecessary team member—the object becomes quietly informative, authoritative by virtue of choosing to be minimal. One of the main attributes of the patrician aesthetic is to mask effort, to erase the body. But sports are themselves because of a body, and athleticism has its own language. You can’t flatten a sport. These five Wallace essays are common to syllabi and easily found in other collections, so they won’t surprise anyone who already knows his writing. As an introduction to
By Sasha Frere- Jones
Portrait by Joan LeMay
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Writing demands a form of controlled daydreaming, an act based in losses of self that alternate with conscious assertions of self—the edit, the second draft, the rewrite, an act opposed to the nature of all games and sports.
Wallace, though, the book works. We get memoir, philosophy, reporting, and a good dose of Wallace’s writerly risks in the course of 138 pages. Tennis is an organic, not stupid principle for framing Wallace. He played the game from childhood on, thought about it obsessively, and returned to it often as both subject and practice. We don’t need to buy the “greatest tennis writer ever” line to appreciate how good Wallace is on tennis (and how, maybe surprisingly, it triggered some of his most controlled writing). The book opens with an introduction by John Jeremiah Sullivan that addresses the origin of the word “tennis.” Most sports do not need this kind of explanation—you do not wonder where someone got the name “basketball.” But a casual fan, like me, did not know that “tennis” began as a French word—“Tenez,” or “Take it”—shouted before each serve. As Sullivan describes it, the “Neapolitan ear” took up this term and by the time it drifted from Italy into England, and Shakespeare, the word had become “tennise,” or simply “tennis.” The introduction eventually flirts with a distortion of category. Sullivan isn’t a real opponent here, or even a straw man, as he’s too careful to call tennis “the literary sport.” He writes, instead: It is perhaps not far-fetched to imagine Wallace’s noticing early on that tennis is a good sport for literary types and purposes. It draws the obsessive and brooding. It is perhaps the most isolating of games. Even boxers have a corner, but in professional tennis it is a rules violation for your coach to communicate with you beyond polite encouragement, and spectators are asked to keep silent while you play. Your opponent is far away, or, if near, is indifferently hostile. It may be as close as we come to physical chess, or a kind of chess in which the mind and body are at one in attacking essentially mathematical problems. So, a good game not just for writers but for philosophers, too. The perfect game for Wallace. Sullivan seems to know the dangers at hand. “Physical chess” acknowledges that we can’t call chess a sport, though it is a game.
The end of this paragraph, though, goes ahead and re-shelves tennis anyway, moving it from “sport” to “game.” This threatens to remove the athlete from the act, which segues right into denying athleticism its own logic and its own poetics. Backing up for a moment, though. Tennis is “the most isolating of games”? In my ten or twelve attempts to get through a game of tennis—or a set—I have felt not isolated, but very easily seen. Given the chance to score one ferocious and elegant point if I also agreed to a swift, equally elegant death, I would have taken it. The most isolating experience I’ve ever had in sport is playing left field in a baseball game that involves no strong hitters. You can think about eternity, perhaps even design the upper- left corner of a crossword puzzle. Even if you drift off, the crack of a well-hit ball and a few shouts are usually enough to prompt you back into position. But the larger problem, one that can dog any subject, tennis or otherwise, is the “x is
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visionaries who finger time and space (Serena, LeBron, Steph). So why even get close to the trap of the “literary sport”? This is a challenge for writers, not athletes. We want to characterize something for those who don’t know the thing, and similes using two known quantities are quickly and easily seen. (The optic yellow of rhetoric.) In 1984, if you had written that a shell-toe Adidas three-stripe was “the rap sneaker,” you wouldn’t have been far from the truth. Run-DMC made the shoe part of their uniform and cut a deal with Adidas after cutting a song about the shoe. By the ’90s, though, the sneaker was no longer seen, and the Timberland boot had begun to signify allegiance to the sister nations of hip-hop and R&B. Decades later, the shell-toe Adidas says “retro hip-hop,” but Timberland boots are probably just boots. Even when they work, broad-stroke similes often have a short shelf life. “Tennis as literary sport” isn’t entirely flawed, conceptually, since it hints at its own roots in the royal court: the ultimate patrician lineage. But that was then, to put it mildly. Of late, tennis has been dominated by two sisters, one of them possibly the most dominant player of all time. This would be problematic for royal ghosts, though Wallace would likely have taken on the political implications of the Williams sisters’ reign. In 1995 he wrote “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open,” which dealt largely with corporate ad placement (a thing that could still surprise and offend). In 2016, given the same title, how could he not take on the spectacle of an athlete of Serena Williams’ caliber being compared to a horse by a major newspaper? 1 As much as I’d like to read him on Serena’s run and a world in which she has to reassert her dominance as often as people grant it, I am more excited to read the next great tennis writer. That writer, like Wallace, only needs the sport to be itself, and will see lines that were obscured, subtle arcs, and the minor, unexpected adjustments that create major results.
the literary y” problem. Chess recalls some aspects of writing, but Sullivan had to put spin on “chess” with the word “physical” to bring it back closer to sports, a move that suggests the dangers of attempting the comparison at all. Chess involves thinking, guessing, and lots of invisible effort, bringing it close to writing but not close enough. Chess has one desired end; writing does not. Writing demands a form of controlled daydreaming, an act based in losses of self that alternate with conscious assertions of self—the edit, the second draft, the rewrite, an act opposed to the nature of all games and sports. (The video review is the closest sports get to a rewrite, but often supports already arbitrary decisions by referees who aren’t writing the sport to begin with. No really good editor would want to be compared to a video review.) The athletic act brings an advance, a retreat, or a void, and then leads to the next act. If sport is writing, it is improvised, within rough guidelines that bend in the face of your opponent and her guidelines. You don’t have to bat away someone else’s hands when you type; not very sporting, writing. Literary, though. If we focus on the process, the hollowness of a “literary sport” as a trope is clear. Athletes, even bad ones, arrange their minds to help their bodies track an element: the ball, for example. Though the muscles and synapses are doing subtle trade, the bits of the brain dedicated to written and spoken language go largely quiet. This necessary bit of rerouting is what makes playing sports both thrilling and relaxing. As the internet says, you have one job. Where is the ball? As a teenage first baseman, I was likely to be fielding slow grounders in every single inning, unlike our theoretical outfielder. I was going to be as busy as baseball gets, after the pitcher and catcher. My available powers had no job beyond tracking the position of the ball and where my body was in relationship to it. This is the core act of any sport, whether you’re a passable athlete thinking in horizontal planes (young me) or one of those three-dimensional
1 After Sports Illustrated honored Williams with its once- prestigious award, the Los Angeles Times , in a tweet, asked, “Serena Williams or Who’s the real sportsperson of 2015?” The response to the comparison American Pharoah:
was near- universal outrage.
Sasha Frere- Jones is a musician and writer from Brooklyn. He lives in Los Angeles.
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The Davis Cup Is Broken Fans Deserve a Real World Cup For Tennis
Open Rod Laver’s autobiography, The Education of a Tennis Player , and find yourself reminded again and again that there was a time when Davis Cup tennis mattered. Really mattered. Mattered to top players. Mattered to fans. Mattered to Bud Collins, who wrote the book with Laver. (Mattered to Australia, of course, which dominated Davis Cup play in the 1950s and 1960s.) Mattered to tennis’ sense of itself—the way the majors continue to matter, but Davis Cup no longer does. Laver ranks the pressure he felt playing Davis Cup with that of playing at Wimbledon. He recalls the 1959 Davis Cup final on grass at Forest Hills, where Australia wrested the cup from the reigning American champions—and where the young Laver lost both his rubbers, or matches—as being “as tense as anything I’ve been through.” He loved playing for his country—and how the fans and the press got worked into a frenzy—and believed the other players of his time did, too. He quotes Arthur Ashe, who thought Davis Cup was bigger than the
By Gerald Marzorati
Hypothetical branding by Luke Shuman
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Olympics: “[Y]ou can’t escape the fact and feeling that your country is depending on you and your game.” Laver’s only complaint was with the format, which kept him from playing more Davis Cup tennis. If you were defending the cup, you only played in the final tie, or round, against the survivor of the preliminary elimination ties. That changed: Beginning in 1972, the Davis Cup became a knockout tournament, and the defending champion was required to compete in all rounds. Other changes followed, as tennis increasingly became a global sport. (Until 1974, only four countries had ever won the Cup: the United States, Australia, Great Britain, and France.) But those changes have not kept up with the times—neither with the overwhelming demands placed on today’s male players by the nature of the game and the crowded ATP schedule; nor with the way fans, both those watching live and the millions more in front of their TVs, immerse themselves in sport. And, as a result, Davis Cup has become something of a sideshow. The stars of the game often enough skip a year, or more than a year. Fans only care, if they care at all, when their team is playing a home final. Tennis as a national- team sport—at a time when national-team sports like soccer have never been more popular, and when men’s tennis has been experiencing a golden age—languishes. In the global pop culture, where sport today resides and thrives, Davis Cup tennis is a hazy, intermittent, peripheral undertaking, musty with nostalgia and lacking the focused intensity and electrifying spectacle that have fixed a place for athletic greatness in the public imagination. The new president of the International Tennis Federation, David Haggerty, has said that a top priority of his is to bring some sort of format change to the Davis Cup. (Already, a fifth-set tiebreak has been instituted.)
Davis Cup Wins Since 1900 U.S. 32 Australia 28
Great Britain, 10
France 9
Sweden 7
Spain 5
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He’s an American, the first to head the ITF since the 1970s, and he told Christopher Clarey of The New York Times last fall that he is in favor of an idea John McEnroe has been championing for a number of years: creating a Final Four for the Davis Cup team semifinalists, to be played at a neutral site. Haggerty acknowledges that such a change will not be an easy sell to the national tennis associations whose approval by vote would be required. They tend to be tennis traditionalists, and there is a lot of tradition in the 115-year history of the Davis Cup. What there no longer is—and this is what Haggerty has going for him as he seeks to evolve the format—is a lot of revenue. Last year, over the course of nearly ninety events around the world, Davis Cup tennis generated only $25 million. In two weeks of tennis, the U.S. Open generated ten times that amount. As refreshing as it is to hear that Haggerty is committed to changing the format of the Davis Cup, his thinking doesn’t go nearly far enough. It’s a contest born of a late Victorian ideal of upper-class leisure and gentlemanly competition: Why not reimagine it for an age of professionalism and TV viewing (and social media), the way the four majors have? If you were designing an international team-tennis competition for pro men’s tennis players today, what might it look like? Put another way: If you sought to make the Davis Cup “the World Cup of Tennis,” as it markets itself, what would the format be? What the tennis public thinks of as the Davis Cup is the so-called World Group— the sixteen best national teams, which always include the previous year’s Cup winner and runner-up, with the remaining teams chosen based on an ITF ranking system. Nations whose teams don’t make the World Group cut compete in ranked groups and regional zones of somewhat
Davis Cup
Winners, from 1946 to 1973
’46 U.S. ’47 U.S. ’48 U.S. ’49 U.S.
’50 Australia ’51 Australia ’52 Australia ’53 Australia ’54 U.S. ’55 Australia ’56 Australia ’57 Australia ’58 U.S. ’59 Australia ’60 Australia ’61 Australia ’62 Australia ’63 U.S. ’64 Australia ’65 Australia ’66 Australia ’67 Australia ’68 U.S. ’69 U.S. ’70 U.S. ’71 U.S. ’72 U.S. ’73 Australia
boggling complexity and, for the most part, in provincial obscurity. Revenue from the grouped, zoned play may help local tennis associations, but revenue—more revenue— can be found elsewhere: by creating an event that attracts a larger TV audience, for example. A sixteen-team competition makes sense. Let’s abandon the rest. Now, onto that 21st-century Davis Cup event. Not every year but every two years— the year following the Olympics, and then the year before the next Olympics—let’s bring together these sixteen top teams for
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four ATP-ranked singles players add up to the lowest number is the top-seeded team, and so on. As it will be a biennial event, it seems fair to average the rankings of the previous two years. And since it will be a year-end event, why not announce the teams at the conclusion of The Championships at Wimbledon? Once the 16 four-member teams arrive at the tennis World Cup, they will play knockout ties (there is not enough time for World Cup-like round-robin early rounds) based on seedings determined by the ranking. Each tie will, as today, consist of four singles rubbers and one doubles rubber. But in the interest of making things more interesting, there will be format changes, too, to the ties and rubbers. First, “reverse” singles will be eliminated: A given player can play only one singles rubber per tie (though he can, as now, play doubles, too, in a tie in which he’s playing singles). Andy Murray led Britain to its Davis Cup victory last year, and great for him and Britain. But team tennis should be about team tennis, and limiting the singles play of the dominate players of an era will serve as an equalizer, along with providing a larger role for lesser- known, up-and-coming players. And how about we find a way to limit “dead” rubbers—those meaningless matches on day 3 of Davis Cup ties when one team has already won the first three ties and eliminated the opposing team? Currently the format is: two singles matches on day 1 (typically a Friday); doubles on day 2; reverse singles on day 3. Let’s squeeze a tie into two days, which, with the elimination of reverse singles (and the need for the singles players to have an off day to recover), should not be a problem. Day 1: two singles matches, meaning there must be a day 2 to clinch. Day 2: two singles matches (with fresh players) and a doubles match wedged between them. Yes, day 2 could still be an abbreviated day, but there will be at least one tie, and probably more, with a limit on using your star player for a second singles match.
“We wanted Yank heads to show that the, shall we say, mature Aussies were still breathing,” Rod Laver wrote after, at 35, helping reclaim the Davis Cup from the U.S. in 1973. Pictured with John Newcombe (left) and captain Neale Fraser (center). ap photo
a year-end, ten-day-long competition at a neutral site, chosen from among bidders and moved among countries and continents. This end-of-year event will not necessarily mean indoor tennis (think Buenos Aires, where fans love Davis Cup) and, in this day and age, indoor tennis need not mean hardcourt tennis. The nation hosting the event will choose the surface. How to determine the teams? Let’s borrow from the Olympics and choose based on players’ ATP rankings at a given point in the tennis season. The country whose top
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What’s lost here? The home final, of course, which is no small thing. The cacophony of fans rooting for their home team! It is what makes Davis Cup special. In particular, there are the smaller nations that have hosted a Davis Cup final but that are less likely, in truth, to win a bid as a neutral site. In recent years, there’ve been the Czechs and the Swiss; there were the Croats in 2005, and all those years in the 1980s and 1990s when the Swedes were so dominant. However, run your eye down the list of nations that have won the Davis Cup over the years. It’s a very, very short list: thirteen. (Fourteen if you count South Africa in 1974, but that final tie was never played; India boycotted the event to protest apartheid policies.) It is not hard to imagine a couple dozen nations that might host a neutral- site final. Or look at it this way: There are only eight nations whose teams have won more than one Davis Cup. Under the format change I’m proposing, sixteen nations each year arrive at the World Cup of Tennis with a chance, over ten days, to win. The host nation could be selected four years in advance, or more, providing plenty of time for planning and promotion. Fans travel the globe to see World Cup soccer; tennis isn’t soccer, of course, but it’s not hard to envision fans flying off to a ten-day team tournament, as they do to majors. Television rights to a year-end Davis Cup like the one being proposed here have got to be worth more—eventually, much more—than those for the current format. And wouldn’t the Fed Cup soon adopt this sort of format for women’s team play should Davis Cup do so? There could come a time when the two would be combined over two weeks, and perhaps intermingled, and this fully realized tennis World Cup becomes a kind of fifth major, with ATP and WTA points awarded. Now, there’s a tourney that would matter.
Gerald Marzorati , a former editor of The New York Times Magazine , is the author of Late to the Ball , a memoir about tennis and aging. He writes about tennis regularly for the newyorker. com.
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1996
No. 11 rank—but the All-England Club uses a precise mathematical calculation to determine its seeds based on the players’ previous two years of grass-court prowess. It’s consistent, if unfair. But the U.S. Open’s 1996 abstract theorem, its own organizers admitted, was based on their prediction of the tournament’s outcome. Perception-wise, there was a big problem with that. All the ranking-versus-seeding switcheroos favored the home court. Granted, two decades ago American men’s tennis was robust, with six players in the top 15, as opposed to zero as of midsummer this year. But Chang’s bump from No. 3 to No. 2 (at the expense of real No. 2 Thomas Muster) and especially Andre Agassi’s elevation from eighth to sixth seed were widely speculated as an attempt to give Chang and Agassi a better chance to reach the semifinals, along with No. 1-ranked Sampras. And by doing so, boost TV ratings for the tournament’s marquee final weekend. U.S. Open officials denied any such impropriety. Yet the optics were positively awful, especially since, to make matters worse, the seed shuffling was announced after the 128-player draw. If the tournament had explicitly wanted to give the impression that it was stacking the deck, they couldn’t have done a better job. (The women’s seeds were not altered.) Muster, the Austrian who won the 1995 French Open, was unabashed in his criticism. “You can’t make the draw and then put the seeds in then,” he told the press. “It’s like cheating…. It’s just to put Agassi not to face Sampras in the quarters.” Muster wasn’t alone. “It is an insult to the players, to the ATP rankings, and to the game,” unseeded Ukrainian Andrei Medvedev told The New York Times. Yevgeny Kafelnikov, that year’s winner of the French Open, took his irritation a step further. The Russian player, who would have taken over the No. 1 ranking if he’d won the
Stacking the Deck When the U.S. Open Planted Some Bad Seeds
By Joe McGovern
Pete Sampras puked. That’s the defining moment, twenty years later, of the 1996 U.S. Open. In the fifth- set tiebreak of his quarterfinal encounter against Spain’s Alex Corretja, defending champ Sampras spilled his guts on the green hardcourt of Louis Armstrong Stadium. (Arthur Ashe Stadium would debut the next year.) “He is a hurtin’ cowboy right now,” John McEnroe said from the USA Network commentary booth. Stooped and sickly, Sampras not only saved a match point at 6–7 in the tiebreak, but went on to win the match, plus the semi and final, for his eighth Grand Slam title. But Sampras’ regurgitation on the side of the court was actually nothing compared with the mess that was caused two weeks earlier by the U.S. Open’s organizers. For reasons that were at best clueless and at worst scheming, the tournament decided to deviate from the ATP’s official computer rankings and seed players in the draw according to a formula of their own creation. Subjective seeding is a custom practiced at Wimbledon. Not that it’s free of controversy there—Corretja, in fact, boycotted the tournament in 2000 when he was denied a seed despite his
Louis Armstrong Stadium in 1996. ap photo
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said. “I wish [the first draw] hadn’t happened.” The seed tampering, indeed, never happened again at the U.S. Open—even in subsequent years when some in the tennis community were advocating for it. In 2002, Sampras was seeded a lowly 17th, though he had won the championship four times and had reached the final the past two years. (He went on to win the title that year.) In 2011, Chris Evert questioned the USTA’s judgment in seeding Serena Williams in the 28th spot, per her WTA ranking. (Williams reached the final.) Numbers are stubborn things, but 1996 taught the U.S. Open something that the world would come to realize over the next two decades. The computer is always right.
tournament, was demoted from fourth to seventh seed—and responded by boycotting the event. “I was completely shocked when I heard what they had done to me,” Kafelnikov said at the time, citing his better- than-average hardcourt record. “I’m going home because I don’t want to be part of a tournament that does things like that.” And so, in an unprecedented about- face, the tournament decided to keep its seedings but redo the entire draw, the sports equivalent of a jury purge. At a press conference immediately after the second draw ceremony, USTA president Les Snyder expressed his embarrassment. “The integrity of the tournament is the most important,” he
Joe McGovern is a corre- spondent for Entertainment Weekly magazine, where he writes about film.
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Rob Fahey was the best tennis player in the world for more than 20 years. You’ve probably never heard of him. This Tun of Treasure
By James Zug Photographs by Michael Do
A New World Champion in Court Tennis
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It was the most electrifying moment in tennis in a generation.“Server leads 40-0,” Andrew Lyons, the marker called, his words echoing around the medieval walls. “Chase worse than a yard.” Camden Riviere, the challenger, sent a railroad porpoising down the penthouse. Rob Fahey, the champion, smacked a cut valley crosscourt. It came too hard off the back wall. Rather than playing it, Riviere let it go as it bounded past the chase. The ninth set was his. He had won the world championship.
Rob Fahey , the former champ.
Camden Riviere , the new champ.
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History of the Racquet in Court Tennis
in the beginning La Paume, The Palm
1100s The Glove
1200s The Thong Binding
1300s Battoir
1400s Battoir
1555 Scaino
a real separate sport, vibrant and growing, with governing bodies, pro and amateur tournaments around the world (there’s an epic, fortnight-long team tournament in Melbourne every two years) and new courts being built (one opened in England this summer; Charleston gets one next year). Yet it is determinedly, quirkily old-school. Players in all-white clothing still wield heavy wooden racquets to strike handmade balls. The asymmetrical court, with sloping roofs, beveled walls, doorways, and openings replicates the French village streets where it was invented a thousand years ago. The facile comparison, for tennis to court tennis, is checkers to chess. Court tennis is a dramatic leap in complexity. It is an explosion in a trigonometry factory. Balls spin and crash at all angles. There are well more than a dozen different serves. In the world championship, for example, Fahey and Riviere hit mostly railroads for first serves and then demi-piques and the occasional giraffe for second serves. Seriously. There is the chase, which more or less is a beautifully arcane way for a player gain the right to serve (you serve only from one end); it takes months for the neophyte to figure out all the permutations of the chase. It is all a bit eccentric, which is why it has such a loyal, passionate cohort of practitioners.
The crowds in the dedans and galleries roared. Riviere raised his arms, hurled his racquet and put his hands on his head. By the time he reached Fahey at the net, he was in tears. “You’re a real champion, buddy,” Lyons whispered into Riviere’s ear. “Fucking world champion. Amazing tennis. Well played.” Short history lesson. This match was in the game of court tennis (or real tennis as it is known in Australia and Great Britain or jeu de paume in France). Half a millennium ago there were hundreds of tennis courts around Europe. Anne Boleyn was watching a match when she was arrested (see: Wolf Hall). Caravaggio killed a man at a court in Rome. Shakespeare often used tennis as a metaphor. In Henry V, the French Dauphin taunted Henry with “a tun of treasure”—a gift of tennis balls—a gesture intended to mock the king for goofing around on the tennis court, being young and idle, a gambler. Rage also came to the game in 1873 when the English took tennis outside and simplified it. That is the game we now know as tennis, with Serena and Fed. Court tennis, suddenly obsolete, forced to come up with new appellations to distinguish itself, continued along in a diminished way. Today there are fifty courts around the world; ten are in the U.S. The game is not artisanal tennis but
Court Tennis World Champions Since 1994 ’94 Fahey ’95 Fahey ’96 Fahey ’98 Fahey ’00 Fahey ’02 Fahey ’04 Fahey ’06 Fahey ’08 Fahey ’10 Fahey ’12 Fahey ’14 Fahey ’16 Riviere
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1583 Nanteuil
1608 Rollo's
1675 Mitelli
1767 Garsault
Modern Court Tennis Racquet
Adapted from Tennis: Origins and Mysteries by Malcolm D. Whitman.
best record in the house.” The world championship, played every two years, is not a regular tournament. Once a challenger is determined (in the old days by committee fiat; more recently by a series of matches weeks earlier elsewhere), he faces the champion in a nerve-wracking, soul-sapping, mano-a-mano format: best of thirteen sets spread out over three days. Tasmanian versus South Carolinian. Fahey’s challenger, Camden Riviere, turned twenty-nine during the world championship. He had wanted to be world champion since he was seven years old and first playing the game in Aiken, a hamlet just over the border from Augusta, GA. A child prodigy, Riviere turned pro at seventeen and almost beat Fahey when they met in the world championship in 2008 at Fontainebleau, outside Paris. After a meteoric rise, a sharp fall. He bounced around, leaving college after a semester, working as a court tennis pro in Boston and then living in Charleston. He damaged both wrists and tore the labrum in his shoulder. After nearly a year off, he returned in 2012 and went on a tear. He topped the world rankings, won Slams left and right and never lost to Fahey again, six matches on the trot— except for the 2014 world championship in
Two hundred years ago was the first recorded match contesting the world championship of court tennis. The latest champion until May, Rob Fahey, held the title for twenty-two years—court tennis measures its champions as much by a royal reign as by titles won. Fahey was utterly brilliant, mentally tough, strong as an ox, crackling with life. He was dominant—he has notched a record forty-eight Grand Slam titles. He has been an athletic marvel of all- time but because this is court tennis he is almost completely unknown. Born and raised in Tasmania, Fahey took a job as an assistant pro at the court tennis club in Hobart, Australia having never played the game once. After a picaresque apprenticeship that included a year house-sitting in a French chateau while training at the court in Bordeaux, Fahey won the world championship in 1994 and never relinquished it. Now forty-eight, silver-haired, Fahey was based in London, worked part-time as a broker at Marianas Capital Markets and recently married Claire Fahey, the women’s world champion; in April they had their first baby, Sophie. “Claire is an incredible athlete,” Fahey said of his wife who has the best handicap rating of any woman ever. “I ended up marrying the one person who will smash all my records. I’ll have the second-
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The Penthouse Sloping roof said to be inspired by medieval marketplaces.
Galleries Various outcomes are
achieved by hitting the ball into the different Galleries.
Chase Lines The receiving player must establish a “Chase” in order to win the serve. It is said the be the origin of the idiom, “cut to the chase.”
For more information, consult the International Real Tennis Professionals Association, at www.irpta.com.
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The Court The court is comprised of the “Service” side and “Hazard” side. Games are scored in the same fashion as lawn tennis, but additioal rules abound. Balls can be played off the walls and players win the serve by establishing a “Chase,” which involves placing the ball’s second bounce as close as possible to the back wall on the Service side. The best way to learn the rules is to play.
The Tambour Balls struck off the Tambour are difficult to return.
The Grille The point is won by the server if a ball is hit into the Grille.
The Net The middle of the net is 61 cm lower than at the walls.
The Railroad Serve An overhead serve, taken while standing next to the galleries on the Service end of the court. It is intended to dribble into the corner on the Hazard side, limiting the opportunities for a foreceful return.
Adapted from Rackets, Squash-Rackets, Tennis, Fives and Badminton , Edited by Lord Aberdare, 1935
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Melbourne, when Fahey trounced Riviere seven sets to five. Fahey, the wily veteran, was mentally tougher and, surprisingly, physically fitter. “My legs were crushed after a five-set match I played in the British Open final when I was twenty-two,” Fahey said. “I thought I was young and fit and could run all day but didn’t realize how hard tennis is, bending so much, digging balls out of the corners. Cam hadn’t yet learned that.” In preparation for the world championship, Riviere took a gamble. He didn’t play once from July of last year until January 2016. Instead he did physical therapy to repair his labrum once and for all and endured 5am training sessions three days a week. He also flew to England and spent four days talking tactics with Chris Ronaldson, the world champion in the 1980s. At the 2016 world championship in May at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in the Newport Casino, Riviere swiftly turned the tables on Fahey. Riviere’s goal was to take away Fahey’s strengths. His railroad serve was so tight that Fahey was unable to hit his trademark main-wall force, a shot that emphatically ended the rally. Riviere’s retrieving was brilliant. He defended openings and got to every shot, making Fahey win a single point three or four times. And whenever Fahey made a charge, Riviere stood firm, not rolling over and granting any set without a fight. Riviere won three of the four sets on the first day and three of the four on the second day. On the third day, then, he had to win just one of the last five possible sets. He did it immediately, converted on his first world championship point. As they hugged at the net, it was milestone moment. For Riviere, the dream had come true. For Fahey, it was a welcomed denouement. “The instant I lost the last point,” Fahey said, “I felt relief. ‘Oh, thank God,’ I thought. My entire adult life, more or less, has been spent living with the pressure of being the world champion. It was instantly gone.”
James Zug is the author of six books, including Squash: A History of the Game . His writing on sports has appeared in the Atlantic , Wall Street Journal , the Daily Beast and VanityFair. com.
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Sketch of The Tennis Court Oath, Jacques-Louis David, 1792 Representatives of the Third Estate, the lowest division of pre-revolutionary French society—the commoners— met on the Jeu de Paume, the tennis court in Versailles, in defiance an order to disperse from the king, Louis XVI, on June 20, 1789. Here, they took the titular oath not to disband until a new constitution was adopted. It was one of the key events of the French Revolution. The painting, finished in 1794, hangs in the Louvre. Built in 1686, Le Salle de Jeu de Paume, has been a museum since 1880.
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The Leaning Tower of Pizzazz The Iconic Tennis Designer Ted Tinling Was Allergic to What He Thought Was the Tedium of Tradition.
By Thessaly La Force Images courtesy of The International Tennis Hall of Fame
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Ted Tinling poses with two friends.
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ertrude “Gussy” Moran was a good player, not the best, but she was photogenic, with a handsome smile and a leggy gait. As she entered Wimbledon in 1949, the 25-year-old Californian was tired of her tennis shorts; she wanted a special dress for the occasion. So she did what many other women had done before her and wrote to Teddy Tinling— fashion designer to the tennis stars, couturier of the courts. In a 1988 interview with the Orlando Sentinel , Moran described the exchange, saying: “I wrote [Tinling] a letter prior to Wimbledon, asking him if he would design me something with one sleeve one color, the other sleeve another color and the shirt another color. He wrote back, ‘Have you lost your mind?’” Wimbledon remains the world’s most prestigious tennis tournament, its formality somehow setting the tone for the game as a whole. No hooting and hollering. Dishes of strawberries and cream served for the spectators. And players must wear white. This “does not include off white or cream,” cautions the spectacularly strict Wimbledon down tennis world in 1949. G Ted Tinling's drawing of Gussie Moran, whose lace panties shocked the buttoned-
rule book. In the 1940s, the stakes were even higher. The year before Moran’s appearance at the tournament, Tinling had added a pink trim to the hem of a player’s skirt and been reprimanded by Wimbledon’s keepers for pushing the sartorial limits. Nonetheless, the designer sympathized with Moran’s desire to appear feminine. Tennis attire of the 1940s
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it only to the fourth round, but Tinling’s panties transformed her into a sex symbol. From that day on, the press nicknamed her “Gorgeous Gussy,” and she coasted on that fame for years. The panties cast Tinling as a troublemaker, and he was banned from the Wimbledon clubhouse for nearly two decades as a result of the incident. It’s tempting to paint him as a subversive—upending authority, deliberately pushing Wimbledon’s stuffy, old-fashioned buttons. But in fact it was the tedium of tradition that Tinling felt truly allergic to. He called the all-white rule of Wimbledon “kitchen-sink tennis,” a reference to the color of porcelain, which he thought boring to look at. To him, fashion was a form of expression, and how could you express yourself without any color? Tinling himself cut a natty figure in the world of tennis. A favorite nickname for him was the “Leaning Tower of Pizzazz.” Pictures show him to be completely bald, lanky, and very tall (he was anywhere from 6’5” to 6’8”, depending on who you asked and what kind of shoes he was wearing). He was fond of jewelry, bell-bottoms, and bright shirts that unbuttoned down to the navel. “Tinling was 59 years old on June 23,” read read the aforementioned 1969 SI profile, “but he dresses like a mod pop singer 40 years younger.” He was quick-witted and diplomatic, skilled in handling the egos of sports divas and stars, deft at parrying the complaints of his critics. And he had lived and breathed tennis for most of his life. Born in 1910 in Eastbourne, England, Tinling’s childhood asthma prompted his family to move to the south of France, where he wound up a ball boy for one of the greats of women’s tennis: the balletic Suzanne Lenglen. 1 He aspired to a career as a couturier,
was defined by a unisex look. For female players, this meant lots of unflattering long skirts and shorts made of uncomfortable fabrics such as gabardine and wool. “They look like they’re made by grandmothers or sisters of grandmothers,” Tinling complained. Never one to decline a challenge, he sewed a dainty white dress for Moran made of a soft-knit rayon that clung gently to her figure, with a shimmery satin trim. Moran loved it at the fitting, but had only ever worn shorts; days before the tournament, she asked Tinling to make a pair of matching panties to wear underneath. Aware that Moran had a “walk that had so much bounce she appeared to be treading on a succession of rubber balls,” and that her skirt would flutter prettily when she swung her racquet, he made her a set of underwear with a two- inch lace trim around the bottom. All he wanted, he later said, was to show off her mahogany-tanned legs. How best to describe the uproar Moran’s lace panties caused? It was like the media reaction to Janet Jackson’s nipple slip at the Super Bowl, only infused with a sense of postwar puritanism. Every time Moran served, her skirt would fly up, and as she leaned forward, the white lace of the panties would proudly offset the tops of her bronzed thighs. Tinling wrote in his 1979 memoir Love and Faults that the moment was tantamount “to a star of today suddenly appearing topless on Wimbledon’s center court.” Every photographer was on his stomach on the grass, lens angled up, calling out to Moran to serve one more time. “Gussy was a very sexy girl who always played in very tight shorts,” Tinling told Sports Illustrated in 1969. “She was, like Lana Turner, a real sweater girl. The fellows used to crawl up the wall with delight when they saw her.” Moran made
1 Tennis was a much different game in the 1920s. Lenglen, often clad in a long pleated skirt and sporting a wide headband, was famous for taking serves. Tinling recalled her bloodied bone corsets hanging in the locker room after a game. He worshipped her as a player. nips of brandy between
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