There’s something hard to explain about a grass tennis court. Sure, it offers familiar dimensions to tennis fanatics, and it has its own conventional wisdom: Hard court gives you a true bounce, clay an amplified one—and grass will test your knees and quick hands by hardly giving you one at all. Those ideas are easy enough to understand, but what I’m getting at is a bit more esoteric, a bit difficult to describe and appreciate if you’ve never experienced it yourself. Anyone stepping onto a grass tennis court for the first time might not notice it at all, but it’s easily my favorite part: the quiet.
Playing on a grass tennis court is a rare pleasure, and it’s one that’s getting rarer. Grass is the surface that jump-started the game. In the 1870s, a British Army officer named Walter Clopton Wingfield patented a box set with racquets, a vulcanized rubber ball, and a net that could be placed in one’s lawn, yanking the game out of bespoke indoor courts and out into the backyard. It’s also the surface the modern game seems to flirt with leaving behind. Long gone are the days when three out of the four Grand Slams (the US Open at Forest Hills, the Australian at Melbourne’s Kooyong Club, and of course, Wimbledon at the All England) were contended on grass, and the surface enjoys the professional tour’s shortest season, just four or five weeks long, depending on how you count.
Grass has also evolved from the default surface for a club, mimicking the game’s origins and traditions, into an exclusive and almost throwback curiosity that exists mostly for display. In this country, fewer than 1 percent of all courts are made of grass, and fewer than 10 clubs have any at all. I get to play on grass only a few times a year—as a guest and an explorer, finagling or charming my way onto (or into) the hallowed grounds that tend to house them. I’m not a member of any country club—never have been, never will be—but I’m willing to travel vast distances and take all opportunities to get back to this quiet, beautiful headspace.