Web extra: Photos and more details on tennis in Baghdad's Green Zone, as featured in the October issue of TENNIS.
This month, TENNIS is running one of the most alternately inspiring and harrowing stories I’ve ever had the privilege to help write and edit, Haider’s Abbud’s Tennis in the Green Zone. This piece tells a story whose basic outline will be familiar to many of you tennis nuts and activists – and I don’t mean pro-or-anti- Iraq war activists. I mean individuals who do all they can to promote and spread the gospel of tennis – that tennis is a sport that can bring joy and camaraderie and perhaps even greater understanding between people.
Here’s a little background on how all this got started. At around the time of the U.S. Open, 2005, Tennis received an email from Haider Abbud, a U.S. advisor to the newly formed Iraqi government. Haider mentioned that he was part of a group that had built a tennis court inside Baghdad’s Green Zone – the maximum security enclave where most of the senior personnel of the coalition that toppled Saddam Hussein, and their Iraqi counterparts, live and work.
Apparently, this group of diehard tennis players had cobbled this court together in their spare time, calling on all kinds of friends and calling in all kinds of favors. The project, when concluded, had an immediate and wonderful impact, giving local and foreign tennis enthusiasts a place where they could relax and interact – and in ways that had nothing to do with the sad and often ugly business at which they spent most of their day.
It turned out that Haider was coming to New York to attend the U.S. Open – and to try to raise some money and equipment for a project that turned out to be a lot more than an attempt to give some fairly stressed people additional recreation opportunities. For this was also an effort to rebuild Iraqi tennis, an entire tradition and infrastructure that had been destroyed by war. Haider and company made great headway, almost incidentally and almost immediately. Within months, Iraq was poised to rejoin the official, international tennis community with the blessing of its ruling body, the International Tennis Federation. I don’t want to get ahead of the story here, or ruin it for those of you who have yet to read it, so that’s all I’ll say about that.
When Haider wrote me that he was coming to New York in September of 2005, I knew I wanted to meet him, and that his experience would make for a great entry in my TennisWorld weblog. We met at Flushing Meadows, and hit it off immediately. Haider is a warm, compassionate, mad-for-tennis soul who comes from as classic a tennis family as you’ll find anywhere. His father, Kazim, who moved the family to the U.S. in 1969, was the first coach to Haider and his brothers, Ali and Jay. Later, the boys became protégés of Bill Riordan, who would go on to attain great power and notoriety as the manager of Jimmy Connors. All three Abbud boys are 4.0 players who have competed in USTA Leagues at the national level.
Haider returned to Baghdad after last year’s Open, and we kept in touch. He sent me photographs of the court in the Green Zone, and some of the players who have used it (these include Lt. General Nasier A. Abadi, deputy commander of the Iraqi Armed Forces - and a tennis nut of the highest rank – as well as barefoot boys and women in traditional head scarves). We talked often of doing a follow-up piece, either on the blog or in the magazine, an idea that took on special poignancy and urgency last May, when the program to resurrect Iraqi tennis – which had been going great guns – suffered a heartbreaking blow. The tragedy is described in the magazine story.
In our discussions and emails, Haider always wanted to emphasize the help he received every step of the way from individuals and firms back in the U.S. Gamma has done a great deal to help the project; so have Holabird Sports, Nike, and Haider’s “home club”, the Fairfax Racquet Club (Fairfax, Va.). Their contributions ranged from nets and net posts (Gamma) to racquets, balls and shoes. It’s hard for us to appreciate how much the Iraqi tennis players appreciated getting authentic Nike gear (“It’s Andre Agassi’s brand,” Haider once told me. “Of course they go nuts for the real thing, in a country awash in cheap knock-offs of everything.”)
We had a good time again at this year’s Open. All the men in the Abbud family attended the tournament, and they insisted that I join them in the Fairchild suite in Arthur Ashe stadium, along with my wife, Lisa, and son, Luke. We had a pleasant lunch and watched the Andre Agassi-Benjamin Becker match together. I’m glad I shared that unforgettable moment with Haider, who has done so much for the game himself.