Book on Pirelli Tennis Balls
Dalle “ballette” alle Pirelli. La storia delle palline da tennis italiane
Jeanne Cherry Tennis Collection Auction
Morphy Auctions, a leading antiques auction destination specializing in fresh-to-the-market collections, is pleased to announce the sale of the Jeanne Cherry Collection of Tennis Antiques during its two-day summer Fine Art, Asian and Antiques auction on August 29-30. For more details see: morphyauctions.com.
Jeanne Cherry (1932-2017) was a well-known collector and historian of tennis antiques. She was the author of the landmark book Tennis Antiques and Collectibles, known to tennis collectors around the world and featuring photos of many of the antiques in her collection.
Known for spurring the tennis collector community as both a scholar of the sport and leading member of the Tennis Collectors of America and the UK’s Tennis Collectors’ Society, Jeanne Cherry pursued decades of collecting and antiquing through which she assembled a one-of-a-kind collection.
One of the most extensive, important and diverse privately held tennis collections in existence, Jeanne Cherry’s collection encompasses all genres of tennis antiques including early rackets and other equipment, photography, ephemera, jewelry, books, and decorative and fine arts.
Her entire collection will be sold in 193 lots. Highlights of the sale includes:
- The 1913 Wimbledon Renshaw Cup awarded to Maurice Mcloughlin for winning the Wimbledon Men’s Singles All-Comers’ Final, advancing him to become the first American to be a finalist in the Wimbledon singles;
- Other important early trophies;
- A selection of court tennis antiques, including rackets, a large trophy, and objects owned by world champion court tennis player Punch Fairs;
- An extensive collection of early rackets, including an original Sphairistike racket, as well as many lopsided, flat-top, and other rare rackets;
- Over 700 tennis books in several themed lots, including many early and rare titles, as well as books autographed by tennis greats such as Suzanne Lenglen and Bill Tilden;
- A fine, full-bodied, copper lady tennis player weathervane; and
- Tennis-related jewelry, including the iconic tennis cameo featured on the cover of her book.
“We are thrilled to offer Jeanne Cherry’s renowned collection and pay tribute to her many years of collecting and passion for the sport of tennis,” says Dan Morphy, President of Morphy Auctions. “Cherry’s love for antiquing and curiosity for history is what makes our mission at Morphy possible, and we are proud to pass her spirit of antiquing on to future generations through this sale.”
The Jeanne Cherry Tennis Collection will be auctioned on the morning of Thursday, August 30th, beginning with Lot #746 and ending with Lot #938. Bidding can be done live during the sale (in person at the auction house, via telephone, or online), or prior to the sale (by leaving bids directly with the auction house or online). For assistance with bidding, contact Morphy Auctions at 877-968-8880 or via info@morphyauctions.com.
The auction catalog can be viewed online at morphyauctions.com or at liveauctioneers.com
(scroll to lot #746). The collection can also be viewed in person at Morphy Auction Gallery during the month preceding the sale during regular business hours (Monday–Friday, 9 AM–4 PM) at 2000 North Reading Road, Denver, PA 17517.
Collecting Tennis
Collecting tennis memorabilia can be challenging, fun, and rewarding. Discovering a tennis treasure, whether it is a postcard one doesn’t have, or a Victorian garden umpire chair, thrills the true collector. Tennis memorabilia, compared to that of golf and 
baseball, is relatively undervalued, allowing collectors with modest budgets to build very satisfactory collections. One of the greatest side benefits of collecting is meeting wonderful people in all walks of life, whose paths would not cross were it not for this mutual interest.
Someone who collects teapots is always looking for an object within a specific range of size and shape. Not so the tennis collector! He or she can look for rackets, presses, ball cans, oil paintings, silver or ceramic objects, and unlimited printed matter such as programs, books, trade cards, advertisements, and postcards. Beginning collectors usually amass items, providing an educational lesson about quality, price, and condition. I remember trudging the fields of Brimfield, buying up junk rackets galore and meeting Jay Zirolli, an experienced collector, for the first time. He looked at my pile of rackets and said in his nasal Connecticut accent, “Geez, Jeanne, they’re not in very good condition.” He wouldn’t have put them in his garage. Accumulating can be a costly endeavor. If possible it is better to visit museums, and other more advanced collectors, read books, peruse Ebay, and join the Tennis Collectors of America before deciding how to focus your collection. Buy with both your head and heart. Most regretted are the special things you did not buy when you had the opportunity, but may never see again. Decide whether you want to be a generalist, gathering examples of items related to tennis, or a specialist, collecting only ball cans, bisque figurines, or tennis spoons. A cut-off date is usually desirable, but does not have to be rigid. I violated my 1930s cut-off to buy a 1970s pinball machine named “Volley Tennis.” Buy the best quality item you can afford and pay special attention to condition. It is wiser to spend more for an undamaged item than to purchase a less perfect “bargain.” The exception, of course, would be if the item is extremely rare or the only known example.
Where to Look
Obvious places to look for tennis memorabilia are flea markets, garage and estate sales, antique shops, auctions, and dealers who specialize in sports related items. Carrying a racket with you often prompts dealers to run after you offering tennis items. It is also a good way to meet fellow tennis collectors. There are thousands of tennis items offered on the online auction house Ebay. However, a word of caution about items offered. There are many fakes, frauds, fantasy items and also less knowledgeable people misrepresenting items unintentionally. Buyer Beware is the watchword. Less obvious places to look are vintage clothing shows, special charity sales put on by organizations such as the Junior League, and thrift shops. An often overlooked source is a fellow collector who is selling or trading duplicates or trying to raise money to add a special treasure to his collection. More affluent collectors can subscribe to a service such as Thesaurus, which, for a fee, alerts collectors to their special interests by tracking all auctions or sales and notifying them by FAX. Another effective method is to network with non-tennis acquaintances, friends, and dealers. A business card with a tennis motif instantly reminds people that you are an obsessive tennis memorabilia hunter. Some lucky collectors have found rackets and tennis posters on walls of restaurants and shops and cajoled proprietors into parting with coveted objects. Ads in local or antique newspapers can bring results. Tracking down every lead, however casual, often results in success. The old sports adage “Never give up” applies to tennis collectors as well.
Museums
There are only a few museums dedicated solely to tennis, but to the collector, they are well worth the visit if you are in the vicinity or planning a trip.Wimbledon Museum, on the grounds of the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in Wimbledon, England, opened in May, 1977. Tastefully designed exhibits trace the forerunners of lawn tennis up to the present day, even providing continuous videotapes of tennis greats like Lenglen and Tilden. Curator Honor Godfrey offers revolving exhibits and the welcome new addition of the art gallery. The museum will move soon to a new site but remain on the grounds. The museum enhances the education of collectors and also houses the Ritchie Library, available for tennis research by written application to Alan Little, Librarian.The International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island states that it is the largest tennis museum in the world. On display are trophies, photos, tennis equipment and other memorabilia. Two treasures are the exquisitely crafted Russian silver 1885 Men’s Championship trophy won by Richard Sears and the Horsman Diamond racket from 1880. Every year the Hall of Fame enshrines outstanding former players and also tennis personalities. In July, 2004, the 50th anniversary celebration will feature the enshrinement of Stefan Edberg, Steffi Graf, and Dorothy “Dodo” Bundy Cheney. The Newport Casino, home of the first U.S. Men’s Championship, is worth a visit in itself. The Tennis Collectors of America will attend a reception for the honored guests on July 8, 2004. Ira Swartz, a founding member of the TCA, has donated his spectacular collection of tennis cans and boxes to the museum, a great portion of which are on display.The Tenniseum at Roland Garros Stadium in Paris, France, opened its doors in time for the French Open championships in May, 2003. Built on 2,200 square metres under court 3 and the federal pavilion, the museum features a multimedia museum with the latest in technological and interactive exhibits. There is also a workroom for children with quizzes, educational games, and fun activities. The library houses volumes ranging from the 1555 Scaino Treatise on real tennis to the latest publications and posters.The Australian Open venue in Melbourne will be the new home of the Rolf Jaeger Tennis Heritage Museum in 2005 in time for the 100th anniversary of tennis in Australia. Anyone lucky enough to see this outstanding collection when it was temporarily housed in Indian Wells, California, knows that it equals the other Grand Slam museums in many areas. Among the treasures is a rare real tennis racket trimmed in silver and velvet, a prize won in an 1860 tournament. An early tilt-head lawn tennis racket, named Henry V, is also on display along with a rare long case clock with a tennis motif, oil paintings, jewelry, silver trophies, and a fine selection of very early lawn tennis books.
Dealers
Dealers who specialize in tennis memorabilia usually charge higher prices than general antique dealers, but often have high quality items, which they spend time, travel, and expense to acquire. They are doing the hunting for collectors who may have less time that money or do not enjoy poking around in junk shops and flea markets. For books, Chris and Richard Jones’ Tennis Gallery, Alan Chalmers, and The Partingtons are tops. In the U.S. Ken Benner, Randy Crow, Greg and Barbara Hall, Tom Mitchell, Greg and Priscilla Wilt have a good stock of items and for books, Larry Lawrence, Wilfrid de Freitas, and Richard Hooper always have the hard to find material.
Auction Houses
Tennis items often go higher at auction than at markets or through dealers, due to the fierce competition, especially of one-of-a-kind objects. There is usually a 10-15% buyer’s premium and a sales or value added tax added to the gavel price, which increases the cost considerably and is often forgotten by the buyer in the heat of bidding. If possible it is always best to preview an auction in person to examine items carefully for chips, cracks, authenticity and general condition. The online auction service Ebay has radically altered tennis buying because of its instant access to thousands of items. The large auction house Sotheby’s has given up sport and Christies might soon follow. In England John Mulluck and Dominick Winter still hold tennis or sports auctions. John is auctioning off Pat and the late Lionel Bradford’s tennis museum on or about June 19, 2004.
Tennis Collectors Groups
There are many benefits to belonging to a tennis collectors group. First is getting to know other collectors and making lasting friendships by mutual interests. Other benefits are sharing information, reading and writing articles, and getting together at annual meetings for seminars, buy and sell, and show and tell. Tennis Collectors of America is a newly formed group of collectors dedicated to preserving the history of tennis and promoting the collecting of tennis memorabilia. With a website and a journal, it promises to be of great and ongoing value to the collector, dealer and tennis historian. It is organized as a non-profit with a Board of Directors, officers, a webmaster and a journal editor.
Gerald Gurney’s group, the Tennis Collectors Society, was formed in England several years ago and is coming up on the 50th issue of its publication. It has grown from a typewritten mimeographed newsletter to 20 pages of excellent articles and information, thanks to the computer skills of Bob Everitt. There are still lots of treasures to be found. Good hunting!
A Brief History of Tennis Balls & Containers
An advertisement from 1905 reads:
“The game that quickens the eye, steadies the hand, and sets the whole body tingling with a delightful exhilaration, depends on the ball.”
Why Join TCA?
If you have questions about membership, please email TennisCollectorsAmerica@gmail.com. If you are ready to join, please email the completed membership form below to TennisCollectorsAmerica@gmail.com along with payment of $30 via Zelle or check. Payments via PayPal are $30 plus fee. Membership dues are for one calendar year. |
The Feel of Wood
The Feel of Wood
By Marshall Fisher
In late June of 1994, the Sesuit Tennis Center on Cape Cod looked like 1974. White shirts, white shorts, short white tennis dresses adorned the green hard courts. White caps and floppy white “Aussie” hats, too. White tennis balls. And, most striking of all, looking so thin and frail hanging from the arms of the players, wooden rackets: Dunlop Maxply Fort, Wilson Jack Kramer, Chris Evert Autograph.
Looking around as I walked to the baseline to serve, I felt as if I were back at Kendalltown tennis club in suburban Miami, twenty years earlier. Missing only was the popular Wilson T2000—metal sceptre of the brat king, Jimmy Connors. For this was the First Annual Woody Tournament of Cape Cod, the local exemplar of a phenomenon appearing recently at clubs around the country. No steel, aluminum, graphite, titanium, or composite need apply. If it didn’t come from a tree, leave it at home.
To some, the premise of the tournament may have been a novelty; my first-round opponent had never even played with wood before. To others it was merely a resurfacing of a quaint memory—”Can you believe we actually played with these things?” But to me—and to many others, as I was soon to discover—it was something much more.
In the week before the tournament, as I practiced with my old Kramers (last used in 1982, my first year of college tennis), I was visited by a long-forgotten pleasure: the feel of wood. Sure, it was harder to find the sweet spot of the smaller head, and even when you did there was none of the space-age power of today’s launchpads. It required a lot more skill to hit any particular shot; at the net you had to really volley, with correct half-swing form, not just stick out your shield and watch the ball richochet off for a winner. Fundamental technique, remembered deep in the muscles, became critical again.
The game was also more fun.
In the early 1970s, when racket manufacturers were experimenting with new metal designs, the bread-and-butter advertising campaign bragged of “the power of metal, with the feel of wood.” Every kid learning the game came quickly to know that steel was for power and wood for control, just as a flexible frame was for power and stiffness for control. The consensus, though, was that the power you got with metal was not enough to make up for the loss of feel. Connors swore by his T2000 (customized with lead tape to dampen the whippiness), but for the most part wood held its ground.
Then, in 1976, Howard Head stepped in and changed tennis forever. Having already given the world the fiberglass ski and the composite tennis racket, Head had retired from his own company and was wishing he could get more power into his tennis game. The result was the first big-head racket, and a new company, Prince. At first there was general resistance to the comical green giant of a racket that was the Prince prototype. Older ladies at the club were suddenly volleying much better, but the main reaction to the Prince Classic was laughter. Their next model, the sleek black Prince Pro, helped bring over some male players, but for a few years the oversized racket remained an object of scorn. However, by 1981, although Borg and McEnroe were still winning championships with wood, most junior players had made the switch. The power of the big rackets was too much to forswear. In 1982, although Chris Evert won the U.S. Open with a conventional racket, for the first time more than half of all rackets sold were oversized; and the majority of players at the Open wielded big rackets. In May, Martina Navratilova had switched to the big elliptical head of the Yonex R-7 just three weeks before the French Open. She won the French handily, becoming the first to win a major tournament with a big-head racket (Mats Wilander became the second the next day) and helping make 1982 the Year of the Switch. “When big rackets first came out,” she said at the time, “I thought they should have been outlawed. But since they weren’t, why shouldn’t I use one, too?”
In 1980, the International Tennis Federation had convened to discuss their options regarding oversized rackets and “spaghetti strings,” another 1970s innovation, in which the strings were kept loose and wrapped with coils to produce unprecedented spin on the ball. The ITF passed tennis’s first official specifications for rackets and strings, outlawing spaghetti strings but allowing oversize rackets to survive. The situation worsened in 1987, with the introduction of widebody rackets that made the normal oversize rackets look like wood in comparison. And now we have monstrosities like the new Prince Vortex, that uses “a graphite-fiber-reinforced thermoplastic viscoelastic polymer” to create variable flexibility. Fifteen years after the ITF’s anemic regulations, most tennis aficionados lament the state of the professional game (particularly the men’s), in which a typical point consists of an ace, or perhaps one or two cannonball shots after the serve. The power that professionals can summon from state-of-the-art rackets is simply too much for the delicate, touch game of yore to survive. Players like Goran Ivanesevich, with a massive serve and not much more (by professional standards), can reach the finals of Wimbledon.
Revisionist proposals for improving the game have surfaced from time to time: Make the balls heavier; make the court larger; take away the second serve. But this is like curing halitosis by distributing noseplugs.
Is the solution too simple to see? Bring back wood. Major League Baseball requires wood bats for the same reason—so that average players don’t start hitting 100 homers a season, and 12-10 doesn’t become a routine score. But in tennis, the racket companies are making too much money to let that happen (in 1975 the Dunlop Maxply—as good a wood racket as existed—cost $25; by 1980 you had to spend at least $100 for a decent oversized racket; and now many popular models are over $150). If the players and fans had made a stand in 1980, they could have convinced the ITF to require conventional equipment for the pros, as in baseball. In reality, they could do it now, without impinging on the racket companies’ wealth, since amateurs could still buy big rackets, just as softball players and amateur baseball players (even in the NCAA) use aluminum bats. But the inertia of 15 years of big-head professional tennis will be difficult to overcome. We may have lost our chance by 1982.
My brother and I were among the last defenders of the wood. As college teammates—his senior year, 1982, was my freshman year—we stood alone with our toothpicks against an approaching army of oversized technological wonders. Through the regular season, Ron, with his enviable speed and touch, managed to remain undefeated at the number one position, against a barrage of scientifically enhanced cannonball serves. At the Division 3 national championships in Kalamazoo, he was virtually the only player in the 64-man draw using a conventional racket. He remembers it as an immense psychological (not to mention physical) disadvantage, like fighting against rifles with bows and arrows. In the first round, he lost a close match to the number two seed.
That fall, I showed up at school with two new midsized aluminum Yonex R-1’s. Having to compete against the new rackets, I decided there was no point in clinging to wood—it just made me feel weak and small. But at the Woody tournament last year, I saw all over again how the ineluctable march of technology had degraded tennis. It’s a better sport with wood.
In April of 1991, Bjorn Borg reappeared on the professional tennis circuit after a mysterious nine-year absence. Mysterious because at the time he retired at the end of 1981 he was 26 years old, in as good physical shape as a human can be in, and had won five of the last six Wimbledons, not to mention the past four French Opens.
Borg had said he was simply sick of tennis. But perhaps he was also sick of what he saw tennis becoming. Although he and McEnroe fought their historic battles with wood in their hands, big-head Huns were visible on the horizon. How were these aging touch-and-speed players supposed to hold their ground?
Sure enough, by 1983 McEnroe was wielding a midsize graphite Dunlop. Connors was still standing by his stash of old T2000s, but after that year he would never win another major tournament. And Borg was gone with the wood.
When he resurfaced after ten years, he looked like one of King Arthur’s knights on a Connecticut Yankee’s backyard court. Young powerful palladins battled each other on the red clay of Monte Carlo, blasting serves with the latest generation of oversized, widebody rackets. And there was Borg, stepping onto the clay, pigeon-toed as ever, dangling from his right hand a black wooden anachronism, custom-made by Gray’s of Cambridge to replicate his old Donnay model.
He never had a chance. Although he was still in pristine‘ physical condition, his shots looked ludicrously soft, floating lazily across the net before taking a beating from Jordi Arrese’s oversized racket. Six-two, six-three, and the comeback was over for now. Borg quietly cancelled his plans to enter the French Open.
The next summer he was back, resigned to the times, swinging a bright-orange big-head racket. At the U.S. Pro Championships, a nontour event at the Longwood Cricket Club near Boston, he strode to the court through a tunnel of admirers befitting a rock star, his sharp Viking features humbly tilted to the ground. And he almost pulled it off, winning his first match before losing in the quarterfinals to Alexander Volkov, the twenty-second-ranked ranked player in the world, 7-5 in the deciding third set. It would be his last gasp. A few months later the comeback was over for good, and Borg moved to the Master’s circuit with his old nemesis Connors, who now also sported a flashy new oversized racket.
After playing in the Cape Cod tournament I became obsessed with wood rackets. I had feverish dreams: wandering through sporting-goods stores, finding Maxplys and Kramers on the racks selling for thousands of dollars. Or playing matches with wood rackets that fell into pieces as I hit the ball. I dreamed of wood rackets the way others dream of childhood: as belonging to a better, more innocent world, a paradise lost. I set out on a mission, to acquire at least one Dunlop Maxply in playing condition. Although my Jack Kramer was certainly a classic model, the Maxply was my idea of the consummate wood racket. Of medium stiffness, it was just right for a balanced mixture of serve-and-volley and baseline play. And its Spartan design emphasized its sylvan origin: it really looked like a piece of wood. Introduced in 1931, by the 1960s and early 1970s it had become the most popular racket in the world, and it still brought to my mind images of the great players who had used it, from Lew Hoad to Rod Laver to McEnroe.
But where would I find one? All summer I scoured tag sales in vain. Surely, there had to be some wood rackets in a basement somewhere waiting to be exhumed and sold off with the LP’s, eight-tracks, and typewriters. The closest I came to success, however, was at the local public courts, where I spotted a ten-year-old boy knocking a ball against the battered backboard with an actual Dunlop Maxply, circa 1976. As the boy and his father walked off the court, I approached and asked if they were interested in selling the relic. But I must have betrayed my zeal, for the father’s eyes lit up: “This baby?” he said. “Sorry, I love these old rackets.” He probably thought from my enthusiasm that he had a collector’s item on his hands. But as far as I knew, I was the only market for old Maxplys, and I had only a few dollars to offer.
As it turned out, though, I was not alone. I began to hear about other woody tournaments around the country. “They’re cropping up everywhere,” a Dunlop product manager told me. The Waltham Racket Club, an indoor club outside Boston, had had one the previous winter. A Dunlop sales rep I contacted had played in one in Maine the previous summer. An invitation-only tournament took place in Los Angeles in the fall.
And then, this March, I received a faxed announcement with the automated sender information: “From: WOODY H.Q. Wood is Good!” A drawing underneath depicted a 1920s tennis player in long white pants. The ornate announcement made my mouth water. “The Woody Tennis Championships,” it read. “A Gentlemen’s Grass Court Event.” Grass courts!—the one ingredient missing from the Cape Cod tournament. What wood is to graphite, grass is to asphalt. One is natural, bucolic, reminiscent of the game’s origins on lush country lawns; the other is synthetic, modern, with the ambiance of a strip mall. And although the play at Wimbledon (the only major tournament still played on grass) might suggest that grass exacerbates the problems with today’s game—power shots skid away even faster, lessening the potential for long rallies—it is the perfect surface for wood-racket tennis. One needn’t hit the serve 120 mph to have a chance; the quickness of grass allows a well-placed serve to set up a winning volley. Yet the pace remains slow enough with wood so that one needs, and has a chance to use, every shot in the book. The chip return, the slice approach shot, the defensive underspin lob, all find their strategic moment. And the feel of grass underfoot complements the feel of wood in the hand: these are the conditions for which the game was designed. Although I grew up playing mainly on hard‘ courts, tennis with big rackets on asphalt sometimes seems as much an abomination as baseball indoors on AstroTurf.
This attitude is not just nostalgia. You’ll never find a downhill race restricted to wooden skis, or a rage for tackle football played with leather helmets and no facemasks. Woody tournaments are burgeoning because of a growing conviction that tennis is a better sport when played with conventional rackets. Recently, influential tennis personalities such as Bud Collins and Martina Navratilova (finally) have urged the ITF to consider returning to wood. “The sport has no pizazz,” says Bob Carr, publisher of the trade magazine Inside Sporting Goods. “The business peaked in the 70s and died.” Indeed, tennis equipment sales have plummeted in the‘ 1990s, viscoelastic polymers notwithstanding. If the racket companies look back to the great tennis boom of the early 1970s, when the wood racket reigned, and if woody tournaments continue to spread, then who knows?
Such hopeful visions resurfaced as I gazed at the grass courts of the PGA West Tennis Club, in La Quinta, California. Four rectangles of chalk embroidered a level green basin carved out of an elegant lawn and framed by a 180-degree vista of snow-peaked desert mountains. In my bag rested two aged Maxplys, rescued from Boston thrift shops.
Granville Swope, the man behind the Woody H.Q. fax and a codirector of the Woody Tennis Championships, had invited me to come out and play in the tournament. I could hardly decline. Since the age of ten I’ve dreamed of playing on grass, and in these dreams, even in recent years, the rackets have always been made of wood.
The reality was no disappointment. The grass, fastidiously manicured for the pleasure of the wealthy, played true. My painful shin splints dissolved on the soft putting-green surface. An impressive gathering of players—teaching pros, former Division 1 college players, some veterans of pro tournaments—knocked around white balls with the wood rackets they’d grown up with, showing little difficulty in the transition. Although some players still served at speeds over 100 mph, most serves were returnable, and long rallies were common. Touch volleys won out where brutal overhead smashes, deadened by the grass, were often lobbed back with ease.
On the day of the finals (which I was not in) I practiced on a back court in bare feet. I was running along a field with a stick in my hand, chasing a flash of white.
These days, when I do play tennis, it’s almost always with one friend or another who far less experience than I have on a tennis court, and I use a wood Maxply. At that level wood isn’t even a disadvantage—I wouldn’t want to utilize the full power of a big racket anyway. We’re playing just for fun, and it’s more fun with the wood: I can feel the ball in my muscles as I hit, and place it instead of pulverizing it. When I do play a competitive match, I resort to my modern oversized racket—the joy of wood is lost when you spend the whole match fighting uphill against superior power. The most fun, however, is when my brother and I find time to go to the deserted public clay courts we discovered out in the country. We bring our wood rackets. Long baseline rallies, carefully planned approach shots, and volleys that need to be crisp and angled to win the point: we can almost imagine that big-head rackets went the way of spaghetti strings, and that tennis is still the game it should be.
From The Atlantic Monthly, July 1995
©1995 Marshall Fisher