I don’t want to get all sentimental here, but I’ll say one thing about the tennis nuts of the world. They walk the walk. Tennis must be a great game if so many good people are doing great things because of it or to promote it.
Many of you have followed the saga of photojournalist Rex Miller’s attempt to bring Ugandan Davis Cupper Patrick Olobo to the U.S. (just put Patrick or Rex’s name in the “Search” bar on the right to see my relevant posts). Well, mission accomplished. I’ll be posting briefly on that later.
Also at this Open, I met Haider Abbud, a U.S. adviser to NATO. Haider and his brothers (Ali and Jawad) are tennis nuts of Iraqi descent. They came to the U.S. when Haider was an infant. Haider was trained as a child partly by Jimnmy Connors' Svengali and manager, the late Bill Riordan (I make this point as another proof of how interconnected and small TennisWorld can be!). As an adult, Haider has gone to USTA Leagues Nationals with two different teams.
More interestingly, perhaps, Haider played a leading role in the construction of a tennis court inside the Green Zone in Baghdad. You may not know it, but Iraq is a tennis-mad nation; the game ranks right behind soccer in popularity, and some very senior officers in the Iraqi defense forces are avid players.
So Haider rounded up a group of players (including three of the Top 5 Iraqis), coaches, and other tennis nuts and built a court. “It’s not exactly Roland Garros,” Haider told me, “But it’s kind of like red clay. It’s made of a combination of dirt and clay, like a gravel road. We mark the lines with house paint.”
Of course, there’s a real shortage of tennis gear in Iraq, although the Chinese apparently are flooding the markets with knock-off Nike and Adidas gear. But some American companies, including Holabird (no relation to Halliburton . . .) and Gamma Sports, have donated gear for the various programs Haider is trying to run. He hopes to get the USTA involved and wants to bring a contingent of Iraqi ball boys to the U.S. Open next year.
Arlen, can you hear me?
I plan to retrofit a picture of the Green Zone court to this post as soon as we can, and TENNIS, the mother ship, will run a more in-depth article on this in the near future. I’ll be in touch with Haider (he’s going back to Iraq in a few weeks) and updating this story in the future.