Have you ever played on grass? It was a dream of my young tennis-crazed self, even though there was nothing resembling a live turf court—or even a dead scraggly synthetic one like you see at some resorts—where I grew up. Williamsport, Pa., was, naturally, a town dotted with Little League baseball fields. Those compact rickety triangles seemed to be carved into the base of every rolling hill for 50 miles. The town’s country club was golf only—my only connection was lying in the fairways some summer nights to look at the stars—and the public tennis courts that sprung up in the 1970s were rock hard and bare bone.
Still, the dream lived on. I imagined having a grass court in the backyard, where I'd play until late in the evening in the summer and scatter a thousand gnats with every swing. On trips to visit relatives in the Philly suburbs, my dad and I would invade the Merion Cricket Club just to get a glimpse of its many perfectly manicured grass courts. One year we drove five hours to a Middle States junior team event in Rye, New York, because we thought it was going to be held on grass. It wasn’t. I ended up playing, and losing, on the last of 10 courts at a garden-variety indoor club. The only upside was that it was too far away for anyone to watch from the spectators' area. Years later, I went to the Queen’s Club in London and was scheduled to hit on their grass courts. It rained for four straight days.
The dream had pretty much died until about three years ago. That’s when my fellow TENNIS editor Jon Levey (who, by the way, semi-predicted the Robin Soderling upset of Nadal at the French Open on this blog a year ago) took me out to the club where he grew up playing, Orange Lawn in New Jersey, which still has half-a-dozen working grass courts. It’s a storied location, having been the site where Althea Gibson broke tennis’ color barrier in 1950, when she became the first black player to enter a USLTA (now USTA) event. It also hosted a U.S. Open tune-up tournament for many years.
Orange Lawn no longer has that kind of profile—they don’t hold many tournaments inside country clubs anymore—but it has lost none of its understated luster. It sits on a wooded hill in the suburbs near New York. To reach the club from the commuter train, we walked past two local public park courts, the same basic red-and-green kind that I’d grown up on. The only “tennis” happening there consisted of a couple kids in jeans trying to bat the ball over the fence with their racquets. Leaving them behind and heading into the vast green secluded expanse of Orange Lawn, with its overhang of tall trees and bank of pristine grass courts, I somehow felt a little ashamed of my public-tennis background. Suddenly it seemed so democratic, a word that at that moment could have been a synonym for random or aimless in my mind. I wondered how I had ever begun to take the game seriously in that kind of haphazard atmosphere. I wondered how anyone begins to take the game seriously unless they’re surrounded by the culture of tennis at a club.
The grass wasn't a novelty for Jon. He would have rather played on clay because, well, it’s easier, but I had to take this chance. The courts, which were mostly used by doubles-specialist seniors in the morning, were empty when we got there after work. It was humid but the sun was going down; it lit up the tops of the trees that ringed the club and kept the rest of the random world at bay. The only thing I could hear was the ball hitting my strings. It didn’t make a sound when it bounced on the grass, and neither did my sneakers.
It was an evening of new sensations. The calmness of the surroundings was echoed in the way the surface gave way under my feet, cushioning them. The ball skidded through the court no matter what spin we used—slice was the most effective and appropriate, but even topspin shots flattened out after they bounced. There was a heightened sense of confidence and power when we stood at the baseline to serve, and there was a converse sense of total helplessness on the return, where you often looked foolish just trying to get your body in position to make contact—you needed to bend as well as stretch for a wide ball. I think Jon and I each held all the way to a tiebreaker. I could understand how comfortable Pete Sampras must have felt on grass, knowing he was going to hold when he took the balls to serve.
We could rally on grass, and while I didn’t have to shorten my swing, I did have to quicken it. And it helped. By the end of the set, I was using a Western grip to hit flat forehands that penetrated much more than usual. They also had less margin for error, but you knew that if you hit a solid shot, you were going to be rewarded. I also knew that all I needed was a solid serve—not a bullet—to win a point, which made me relax and connect on more first balls.
I’m guessing that this grass was softer, and therefore a little quicker and less predictable, than what’s currently used at Wimbledon, but to compare even the version at the All England to a normal hard court is silly. The ball, the sounds, your feet, your swing, your mindset: It’s a different experience on grass. It’s an older experience, an older sport. As we kept playing and the light died around the trees and all you could hear were the birds and the ball, I started to get a feel for what tennis must have felt like in its original lawn form. It was a shot-maker’s game more than an athlete’s—if you could put a good swing on a ball, the point was yours. Trying to win playing defense wasn’t an option. It was a faster-paced game—our service holds went by with an easy rhythm, uncluttered by the back of forth of multiple deuces. It was a game of depth and accuracy. What hurt you the most wasn't a hard-hit ball, but one that landed near the baseline and skidded from there.
Most of all it was an earthier game. As it was conceived on English lawns in the 1870s, tennis was half lawn amusement and half athletic contest. The idea was to find a sporting activity that men and women could play together, but which was a little more rugged than, say, croquet. It was civilized, in other words, and the clipped cadence of the grass-court game still feels civilized today. But it’s a different civilization, one without asphalt or concrete or DecoTurf II, one that hadn’t left the lawn, or what we call the backyard out in democratic America.
That may have been the best new sensation of all. Walking back to the baseline after missing a first serve and feeling my sneakers push into the grass, it felt like that old summer fantasy, where there was a court in the backyard and we played—singles, doubles, mixed doubles, barefoot—until the sky was black. It may feel more civilized, but tennis on grass is also one step closer to nature. There’s nothing between you and the ground.