Exciting news to share: we just released the newest Portland Tennis Courterly.
It’s our twelfth issue, but only our third or fourth with an editorial theme (Wet!). Tennis, like life, is inextricably linked with water, so devoting an entire issue to its most fundamental quality—wetness—felt only natural. And so: the Wet Issue.
Mother Foucault’s Bookshop hosted our release party, which began at six. At seven, just before the readings began, I glanced over at Benson in the poetry section—right as he abandoned his plan to string five racquets for the first five arrivals. The crowd was packed so tightly around his Prince Neos 1000 that he could barely thread a single string.
On the other end of the bookshop, next to a shelf of Russian Literature, Jay handed out tastes of a 1997 Riesling that—per a sommelier in the Wet Issue—was said to have notes of tennis balls.
Tennis seemed to fill every corner of Mother Foucault’s. Donated bagels were toasting in the kitchen; a cluster of people on the balcony compared their modest USTA rankings to the Yellow Belt they earned as children in Aikido; and, from somewhere near the back, came the steady pop of a ping-pong ball hitting a repurposed wood door. Each microclimate seemed completely and utterly devoted to tennis.
As the night closed and Craig and I began sweeping people out the door, into the rain—fitting, I suppose—in a city where our own Parks Department admits 75% of our public courts are in bad condition; our supposed tennis backwater proves, if nothing else, that constraints create culture—inside and out. I guess that’s how we earned the moniker Tennis City, USA.
