By Mariah Botkin with reporting from Sikender Ashraf

Across the Pacific Northwest, tennis participation has grown nearly 11% over the past five years. But for residents of Portland, Oregon—the region’s second-largest city—places to play are disappearing. Portland Athletic Club, which was an affordable option for Portlanders for nearly five decades, as well as the only Black-owned tennis club in the region, closed its doors in February 2025. Eastmoreland Racquet Club, another affordable option, has been shuttered since 2020. And many of Portland’s outdoor public courts are crumbling and neglected—the bureau of Parks & Recreation has a massive maintenance backlog on its hands.

And yet, Portland Tennis Center (PTC)—the city’s only public indoor facility, and a rare affordable option in a city that’s rainy for eight months of the year—appears to be thriving. Located at 324 NE 12th Avenue, beside Benson High School, PTC has four outdoor courts and eight indoor courts (four in its main building and four in the adjacent “bubble”). It isn’t luxurious; the roof leaks and the bubble needs repairs. But none of that keeps tennis lovers away. Day in and day out PTC hums with the steady thwack of racquets and squeak of sneakers, and the strained exhale of hard returns. Every court is claimed Monday through Friday from 6:45 a.m. to 9:45 p.m., and from 6:45 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. on weekends (with long waitlists for mixers and drills).

Indoor courts are $28 per hour at PTC—less than half the price of a private club. Through the Access Discount Program, Portland residents can receive up to 90% off court reservation fees, monthly passes, and fees for mixers, drills, and all activities except private lessons. For as little as $7.40 a month, Portlanders can also be PTC members, and pay no additional fees for court reservations. The Access Discount Program exists because of a series of ballot measures that voters passed in 2020 and 2025. No proof of income is required for residents to participate in the program; participants self-identify their level of financial need by choosing an across-the-board discount of either 25%, 50%, 75%, or 90%. Access Passes of all discount levels must be renewed on an annual basis.

Seniors and youth are central to PTC’s community of users. About 60 seniors regularly fill the courts on weekday mornings and weekends, many relying on the Access Discount to afford play. PTC is also the fall, winter, and spring home of Kids N’ Tennis, an organization founded in 1987 to introduce children of color to the sport. Kids N’ Tennis puts on a free tennis camp for six weeks each summer at Irving Park, as well as a free camp at PTC during winter break. During the rest of the year, Kids N’ Tennis offers weekend programming to local youth for as little as $50 a month.

PTC is welcoming. Staff members know regular players by name. The center supports both recreational and competitive players through league play and drills. It plays an outsized role in expanding tennis access citywide, as there are only 15 publicly accessible indoor courts in all of Portland. This corresponds to just one indoor court for every 26,706 people, well below the tennis industry’s recommended one court for every 10,000 people. Not only is PTC the home of the city’s only public indoor courts, it accounts for over half of the city’s total supply of indoor courts that the general public is able to access.

The other publicly accessible indoor options are Portland Tennis & Education (PT&E) in St. Johns (3 courts, $14 to $20 per session) and Glendoveer Golf & Tennis (4 courts, $11 to $14 per session, or $72 per month, with no discounts available). Private clubs such as the Multnomah Athletic Club, the Irvington Club, and The Racquet Club charge hundreds of dollars each month in membership fees, and exponentially more than that in initiation fees.

It would seem, based on all these facts and figures as well as public enthusiasm, that PTC is a rare success story in the city’s otherwise morbid Parks & Rec picture, which is under enormous strain. But rather than appreciate the critical role that PTC plays in the city’s indoor tennis landscape, PTC administrators and city officials alike are eager to hand off management of the facility to the United States Tennis Association (USTA). The USTA is chomping at the bit to take it over, raising fears that the courts that belong to everyone may soon be accessible only to those who can pay to play.

* * *

Technically speaking, the proposed takeover of Portland’s only indoor public tennis facility would be by the USTA Pacific Northwest (USTA PNW), the regional counterpart of the national organization. USTA PNW has a track record of stepping in when facilities are struggling. When it took over Vancouver Tennis Center (VTC), across the Columbia River, the site was nearing closure amid declining cost recovery; USTA invested more than $1.4 million in upgrades and kept it operational.

Zach Meloche, who has played at both PTC and VTC for more than 20 years, is all for the USTA takeover. “They’ll update and modernize it, increase the junior program, and organize more tournaments for both juniors and adults. This would be a huge win for local tennis players,” he said.

The USTA’s programming extends beyond competitive play and includes youth initiatives such as Net Generation and beginner clinics like Tennis 101. Supporters say USTA facilities also offer clearer certification pathways and stronger professional development for coaches.

There is also a practical argument: under USTA management, tennis courts are unlikely to be converted to other uses. As some facilities nationwide add pickleball lines, supporters see the USTA’s involvement as a way to preserve dedicated tennis space—although the organization has incorporated pickleball courts at certain sites.

When it comes to PTC, the comparison to VTC is instructive but not identical. At VTC, peak indoor court time costs $29 for 90 minutes, plus a $10 per player surcharge for non-members, bringing a non-member doubles session to $69. At PTC’s current rate, a comparable session costs about $42—or as little as $4.20 with an Access Pass at a discount rate of 90%.

There is no clear mechanism for continuing Portland’s income-based Access Discount Program under private management. While the City could attempt to incorporate safeguards into a lease agreement, municipal-style income-based pricing did not survive the takeovers at comparable USTA-operated facilities. VTC offers seniors two free weekly court slots, but participation requires a $154 annual membership, and some seniors report six to eight players having to cram onto a single court.

Significantly, when USTA stepped in to rescue Vancouver, VTC was struggling financially and facing possible closure. PTC is not operating at a loss due to lack of demand; it is underfunded within a strained parks system.

***

The City’s real reason for wanting to ditch PTC may be budgetary. Portland Parks & Recreation is under enormous financial pressure. A 2025 city audit found that 86% of park assets are in “poor or very bad” condition, and the parks system faces an estimated $800 million maintenance backlog. Operating PTC costs the city about $2.2 million annually, with an additional $2 million needed for urgent, one-time repairs. Meanwhile, public support for parks and recreation funding is softening. Two separate levies culminated in the Access Discount Program. It was originally created under the 2020 Parks Levy, which passed with 64% voter approval. The 2025 Parks Levy (Measure 26-260) passed with just 54.6% approval. City leaders have prioritized cost savings, making new capital investments difficult. But is PTC really a burden on the city’s finances? It all depends on how you look at it.

Up until 2022, Chris Mulcahy was Portland’s “tennis czar,” overseeing both PTC and the city’s park courts. From his current vantage as a club manager in Melbourne, Australia, Mulcahy pointed to one of PTC’s major underlying structural problems. Even in years when PTC ran a surplus, he explained, the city absorbed the revenue into the general fund rather than reinvesting it in the facility. “If it wasn’t spent within that financial year, I couldn’t put it forward towards anything,” he said.

On December 16, 2025, Portland City Council’s Arts and Economy Committee heard the official proposal from USTA PNW. The City of Portland’s CFO, Jonas Berry, stated that transferring PTC operations to USTA PNW could save city government about $2 million annually. USTA’s COO China Kirk said USTA PNW would invest up to $3 million in Portland’s tennis infrastructure, including $2.3 million for PTC improvements and $100,000 to support ten community “tennis hubs” throughout the city.

Spread across ten hubs, that funding amounts to $10,000 per site. By comparison, USTA’s own Tennis Venue Services program provides up to $50,000 for initial construction of each individual court, plus $8,000 per court for resurfacing. The math makes clear that the proposed hub funding would only cover limited upgrades.

Portland is not included in the USTA Foundation’s national Community Impact Hub initiative, leaving questions about how the proposed local hubs would be funded and structured, and what level of influence the USTA would have over the programming at the hubs. It remains unclear whether the proposed agreement—which is for 30 years of control in exchange for one very symbolic U.S. dollar—is for a lease or a management contract, and how much oversight the city would retain.

At the city council meeting, several players and coaches spoke in favor of the proposal, citing the limited number of courts available for year-round play, and the aging “bubble” that covers four of PTC’s indoor courts.

The former tennis czar, Mulcahy, views the deal as a positive step toward acknowledging the city’s very real maintenance issues—but he has reservations. “If USTA is able to come in with a sizable figure, that would make sense,” he said. “But I think what they’ll end up doing is offering smaller little Band-Aids, then get away with running the center at a profit.”

Councilors said labor transitions, community partnerships, and low-cost access protections are unresolved. They asked USTA staff to return with a formal agreement in Spring 2026.

At least one councilor has reservations. “I do have concerns about how this particular partnership could impact both [Portland] Tennis Center workers and patrons,” Councilor Elana Pirtle-Guiney wrote in response to an inquiry from the Courterly.

She added that negotiations between Parks & Rec and USTA PNW are currently underway and involve a non-disclosure agreement, limiting what councilors can share publicly. Despite the cloud of secrecy surrounding the proposal—an NDA? Really? For a public tennis facility?—the USTA takeover of PTC is far from a foregone conclusion. “This isn’t a done deal,” she wrote, “and if this partnership isn’t good for the City, I won’t be supporting it.”

Councilor Mitch Green mentioned USTA’s recent national transgender athlete policy, the banning of trans athletes from competing as women, to which Kirk responded that she would “address it offline.”

Parks & Rec prohibits discrimination based on gender identity, and PTC’s programs are currently open to trans athletes. Whether those protections would carry over under USTA management remains unclear.

Despite these unanswered questions, and the fact that no agreement has been approved by the City, the USTA has already created a booking page for Portland Tennis Center on its national platform.

The proposal has received little coverage in local Portland media, leaving many players unaware a decision is approaching. In late February 2026, Portland Monthly ran a sponsored post by USTA PNW, promoting tennis growth in Portland and featuring COO China Kirk—the same official who presented the PTC proposal to city council—but without any mention of the pending transfer.

Racket Business, an industry newsletter that has scrutinized USTA’s aggressive growth strategy, has raised concerns about executive compensation. The CEO of USTA PNW, Matt Warren, earned $340,000 in 2023; the regional organization’s COO, China Kirk, earned $263,000. Racket Business also took issue with governance within USTA PNW, citing whistleblower allegations from 2021.

Evergreen Tennis, a private club in Camas, Washington, said that it has struggled in recent years after USTA PNW expanded its footprint nearby. That includes both taking over VTC and securing a 30-year management agreement at Camas High School, without competitive bidding.

The club’s owner, Clark Vitek, told Racket Business that “[t]he USTA likes to go into publicly owned facilities so they can get the long-term lease for the infrastructure at zero dollars.”

Which raises a question about the proposed takeover of PTC: Can USTA PNW actually afford it? USTA PNW’s 2024 IRS Form 990 reports $8.16 million in revenue and $8.13 million in expenses, leaving a narrow operating margin. PTC’s $2.2 million annual operating cost would represent roughly 27% of the regional organization’s annual revenue. Whether USTA PNW could absorb those costs without changes to pricing or programming remains an open question. It is, in many ways, the central one.

* * *

Off the record, citing fears of retaliation, several PTC staff members expressed concerns that, if the USTA takes over, their salaries will be decreased and their current union protections will be removed.

Several PTC regulars also shared their reservations with the Courterly. One senior predicted that if prices rise to USTA levels, senior participation would drop by roughly half. Some might shift to Glendoveer or attempt to secure time at one of St. Johns’ three courts. Others, particularly those on fixed incomes, might stop playing altogether.

Another PTC regular, who wished to stay anonymous over fear of retribution, put it plainly: “I believe there are management problems within both Portland Parks & Rec in general, as well as [at] the tennis center. But I still think it should be a pillar of our public tennis community. I would rather have something imperfect and affordable that is not subject to USTA politics.”

When Portland voters approved Measure 26-260 in November 2025, they increased property taxes by about $310 per year for the average homeowner. Part of what they got in exchange was a stated commitment to “continue free, discounted recreation programs for families experiencing poverty.” While PTC’s $2.2 million annual operating cost is far from insignificant, it represents just 2.4% of the levy’s $91 million yearly revenue that voters approved.

Six weeks after the ballot measure passed in 2025, the City proposed transferring PTC operations to USTA PNW. If the USTA takeover of PTC goes through, levy revenue would remain with the city, but it is very difficult to imagine how the Access Discount Program would continue under private management. The oversight committee created by the measure may ultimately weigh whether outsourcing the management of PTC to the USTA aligns with voter intent.

Yet another PTC regular who wishes to remain anonymous put it more bluntly: “They’re keeping the money and getting rid of the center.”

The stated mission of the USTA is to grow tennis to 35 million players by 2035. PTC’s mission, since its founding in 1973, has been to provide Portlanders with an affordable place to learn and play tennis. For now, at least, the city still holds the keys.

Postscript: On April 20, 2026, Mayor Keith Wilson released his proposed budget for fiscal year 2026–2027. On p. 889 of the 1150-page document, he includes the following item under his “Summary of Budget Decisions”:

Transfer Portland Tennis Center Operations to US Tennis Association

($779,385), -4.0 FTE

Anticipates transfer of tennis programming operations to US Tennis Association PNW. Eliminates seasonal expenses and all full-time employees, along with all external and internal materials and services. Reduces half a year of program cost, anticipating transition by 12/31/26.

Reality of Doing: An Interview with Bimbo Tennis’s Director, Laura Loy

Interview by Scarlett Svoboda

Portland Tennis Courterly is currently partnering with TheaterGarden on the Portland production of Bimbo Tennis, a bold original play written by visiting playwright Emma Gardner and directed by Portland artist Laura Loy. Inspired by the nationwide battles between tennis players and their pickleball-obsessed neighbors, Bimbo Tennis is an on-court, intimate, interactive experience set in a world where socialist bimbos—characterized by color, play, mess, and queerness—enter an epic showdown with anesthetized, corporate Dickball. Bimbo Tennis is an adaptation of both Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Arthur Kopit’s The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis (1965).

Performances will be held August 6–9 and 13–16 at Southeast Portland’s Colonel Summers Park, beginning each night at dusk. Audiences are invited to come early for pre-show tennis activities, which will include things like clinics, exhibition matches, and mini-tournaments on different evenings. Tickets can be purchased online at https://bimbotennis.eventbrite.com or at the show itself. Follow @tenniscourterly and @theatergarden for all the latest updates.

As daily rehearsals were underway, Portland Tennis Courterly’s Summer Editorial Fellow, Scarlett Svoboda, sat down with director Laura Loy to discuss the joys and challenges of directing a play on a public tennis court, as well as Loy’s incorporation of choreography, audience participation and Commedia dell’Arte into the production. Laura Loy is a creator who believes passionately in theater’s power to foster empathy and community. She opens new pathways for human connection by challenging the bounds of space and time. Laura has devised, directed, choreographed, written, taught, and performed at venues across North America and around the world. Her award-winning physical theatre company Box of Clowns has been featured on America’s Got Talent and The Gong Show. Portland performance credits include company membership at Imago Theatre, and shows with Broadway Rose, Tears of Joy, Lakewood, Speculative Drama, Sir Cupcake’s Queer Circus, and the Stage Fright Queer Horror Theatre Festival. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length.

Q: The primary textual inspiration for Bimbo Tennis is The Cherry Orchard by Anton Chekhov. What’s your primary source of inspiration as a director?

A: Tennis itself has necessarily been a big inspiration for the movement and shaping of this play. In addition to having the whole cast take a group tennis lesson, I’ve really enjoyed picking up playwright Emma Gardner’s tennis-culture references and finding ways for the scenes to support them. I’ve definitely been using my background in Commedia dell’Arte mask performance to uncover as many games and gags as possible, so the actors have lots to play with.

Bimbo Tennis opens with a conflict concerning light. As Katya Bimbova says, “When will the light happen?” How did you approach the technical challenges of a performance on a public tennis court and a plot that almost requires artificial lighting? What other choices did this unique set require?

I have spent the last 15 years as a devotee of the Theatre of Place movement, so I’ve tried to highlight, rather than cover, the un-theatre aspects of performing on a tennis court—I don’t want the audience to ever forget where we are. Any additional set dressing we need is provided by the actors—they can act just about any reality into existence. We rehearsed almost exclusively guerrilla-theatre-style on Portland’s public tennis courts, which included having to leave the court whenever anyone wanted to play tennis on it. It made for excellent ‘reality of doing’ moments, where the actors were literally displaced, just like the Bimbovas.

As both a previous puppeteer and current director, do you have a favorite prop for choreography or directing, whether that be for versatility or a single comedic moment?

Favorite? That’s hard. A hallmark of my work is a theatrical props maximalism that I can’t seem to avoid. I love all of the tennis stuff that we’re using in this play, especially that most interesting of furniture items: the Line Judge Chair.

The script of Bimbo Tennis contains audience inclusion in Bimbova tomfoolery. The previous live readings of the play also invited audience participation. With this fully developed performance, is it your goal to push audience investment even further? This kind of openness allows for improvisational moments—how do you direct your actors to embrace those new challenges?

With a seven-person cast and a robust script there are definitely trade-offs between letting the characters have free reign to play while also making sure the audience doesn’t miss important plot points. I’m approaching this conundrum by building the audience’s trust little by little throughout the play, starting off with a full fourth wall then growing outward, so the audience can build not just rapport, but relationships with the characters. Sometimes that means the blocking is practically a dance, other times it’s sending the characters out to give Bimbo makeovers to the audience while improvising about Comodi-titty Fetishism.

Is there a specific scene in the play that gives you particular satisfaction to direct, whether that be a small moment of back-and-forth bimbo-ing, the longer monologue sequences, or the open improvisational audience interactions?

Effectively blocking seven actors on a small stage, surrounded by audience members on three sides, plus all the distractions of a busy summer park, has been an excellent puzzle. I actually had to bring in my basketball background from childhood and draw out ‘plays,’ so the actors knew when and how to move. I love all of the moments of ‘clown logic,’ especially when it involves specific timing. Listen for some excellent ‘scream-offs.’

This summer, Adams and Ollman — gallerist Amy Adams’ Pearl District space — is showing Tenez, a tennis-themed group exhibition staged as part of the first-ever Portland Arts Week. Which ran, officially, between July 9–12. The citywide event was organized by longtime gallerist Elizabeth Leach, who brought together 16 Portland galleries around a shared theme of art and sports — part of a four-day program that also included a two-day symposium, performances, film screenings, and free sporting events in the downtown Park Blocks, timed to a summer when the city was getting a new professional basketball team and World Cup fever ran high.

Tenez is Adams and Ollman’s contribution to that citywide conversation, gathering a wide range of work around the game of tennis, including a fictitious turn-of-the-century match staged with hand-built puppets by Joshua Mosley, a new Katherine Bradford painting, archival footage of Robert Rauschenberg’s 1966 performance Open Score, and pieces by artists including Connie Purtill, Peter Gallo, Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis, Melanie Flood, and others. The show runs with regular gallery hours through August 8, and by appointment afterward.

What follows is a transcribed and lightly edited version of our conversation, as Amy walked us through the exhibition piece by piece.

Tyler: You’re obviously a big tennis fan — how long have you been playing?

Amy: Since 2021.

Tyler: A COVID tennis person.

Amy: Yes, maybe five years now. I was a four-year varsity athlete in high school, then I started smoking cigarettes…

Tyler: What sports?

Amy: I was a field hockey player, but then I didn’t play any sports for a long time. When I was in Philly, I was in certain circles — running an artist-run space where we made exhibitions and put on music shows. It was a different ethos. I remember moving to Portland and seeing punk rock people exercising, which you’d never saw on the East Coast — that Venn diagram didn’t really cross.

I really got back into sports because I loved watching my son on the lacrosse field and I realized that I was missing physical competition. We joined the Multnomah Athletic Club (the MAC) because of him, and during COVID I signed up for a Tennis 101 class. Immediately, I was like, like, how do I play more of this?

Tyler: You got the tennis bug.

Amy: I got it.

Tyler: It is hard. I played as a kid, I took a few lessons and had the fundamentals down. I don’t see myself going through that learning curve as an adult, so I’m always impressed when I meet people like you, who essentially started from scratch.

Amy: I really feel like I have about five good years left. So I need to make the most of it.

Tyler: They say the athlete dies twice.

Amy: Yeah, I’m descending, not ascending, surely.

Tyler: I don’t know — you made the semifinals in the Women’s B Bracket at the 2026 Mount Tabor Open. That’s no small thing.

Amy: I thought we were going to lose the first match, and we kept going!

Tyler: You won one of the most memorable (at least for me) matches of the entire tournament.

Walking the exhibition

Tyler: Was there anyone in this show you especially wanted to include — someone you thought of right away when you were putting it together?

Amy: Several people, actually. This animation, Jeu de Paume, screening in the back room of the gallery is by Joshua Mosley. He’s an artist based in Philadelphia who makes precise stop-motion animations rooted in historical events, but that are fictitious. This one is an imaginary match between two real tennis players in Europe at the turn of the century.

Tyler: Were the two players real, historical figures?

Amy: Yes, two actual players, but who never played together.

Tyler: How was the piece made — was it puppets, a built set?

Amy: Those are hand-built puppets and a replica of the Chateau de Fontainebleau in France where he staged a match of jeu de paume. He made this piece in 2014 — it was shown at the Whitney Biennial, and at several museums since. Being a Philadelphian, I was familiar with his work and had seen a major exhibition of his at the ICA Philadelphia. This animation was one of the first things I thought of as I worked on the exhibition. The interesting thing is — in his animations, he often focuses on these interstitial moments, not an overt narrative. The camera pans, the focus shifts to somewhere the action isn’t. It’s a kind of meditation on attention.

Tyler: Does this set exist physically somewhere?

Amy: The set does, yes. He’s working on another animation with this same set currently.

Tyler: Wow. Incredible. I say this all the time, but that’s why I like playing outside. Time passes inside a club too, but outside feels like an invitation to be present and watch the light change throughout the day — one of the most appealing parts of tennis to me.

Amy: [Katherine] Bradford, too, is in the show. I studied painting with her in graduate school and have known her a long time. She's well known for her figures, often androgynous, set in Rothko-esque fields of color that could be water or sky. There is always some interaction among a group of people—coming or going, dreaming, flying, swimming, diving. She'd made works about sport including tennis before, so I asked if she'd make something specifically for this show. This is her piece — it's called Rose Courts.

Amy: This sculpture is by a Japanese artist based in Tokyo, Kenji Ide. This is very much his language — small, maquette-like works that might reference a puzzle, a game, or an architectural model. I knew about an older series of works that Kenji had made about tennis. Kenji played as a child and he talked about tennis serving as a metaphor for psychological interaction.he work he made for our exhibition captures a landscape where two different types of psychological exchanges exist side by side.

Amy: This was a last minute addition, Peter Gallo, who is an artist and art historian that lives in Vermont. I was actually going to hang these in my home, but then realized these have to be in the tennis show as they capture the emotional register—utopia and anguish—of the game.

Tyler: And the net?

Amy: It’s by Lenka Clayton and Phillip Andrew Lewis. They make a lot of socially engaged work. They discovered that there was only one remaining net-maker left in the UK, near where Lenka grew up, and they created this work that combines all the different kinds of nets they produce — for catching a bird, a fish, a tennis ball, a cricket ball. It’s called A Net to Catch Everything I. It’s woven with all these different colors, and at a certain hour of day it’s beautiful, catching the different types of rope and string holding it together.

Tyler: This reminds me of the nets at Tabor’s east courts.

Amy: The sculptural bookends are by Jeffry Mitchell — a Pacific Northwest artist. He often makes functional objects —pot,dishes or furniture — and these are bookends using the Lacoste crocodile logo, preppy iconography that was co-opted by the queer community.

Amy: Conny Purtill is an artist based in Los Angeles. His piece is called Deuce, drawing the connection between different types of games, their language and structure. He is an incredible draftsperson. The first time I saw the work was in Philadelphia — a small group of us were invited to someone's house to look through books in which he had made delicate pencil drawings. Fascinating — not really made for the art world. A lot of the work is about gifting, showing love.

Amy: This work is by Dan Attoe, an artist from Washington who often depicts sublime landscapes populated by minuscule figures “messing it up” such as a woman in a bikini on a motorcycle in a majestic mountainscape. This one depicts the tennis courts his daughters learned to skateboard on during COVID.

Tyler: Oh — there’s skateboarding. Oh god. This feels very transgressive for a tennis art show. This is very offensive to me, those wheels are for sure damaging the tennis court.

Amy: You know what, you’re the first person to react to this painting in that way.

Amy: And this is Takeshi Konomi’s Prince of Tennis series — I thought people would enjoy seeing them.

Tyler: They’re beautiful. He really weaves tennis into the narrative so well. It’s not lip service, or purely aesthetic.

Amy: And this sculpture is by Bernie Kaminski who started making papier-mâché sculptures during the pandemic after his daughter brought a school project home.

Tyler: Have you talked to any of the artists in the show about whether they actually play tennis?

Amy: Nobody in this room plays tennis, as far as I know — just fans.

Tyler: Is that right?

Amy: This photograph is by Melanie Flood, who lives and works here in Portland. She often photographs the accoutrements of being a woman — beauty products, enhancers, the odd, almost bondage-like things we’re expected to do or wear, bras, hair curlers. The pleats of the tennis skirt were of real interest to her.

Rauschenberg’s “Open Score”

Amy: This is a film made from archival footage of 9 Evenings: Theatre & Engineering, an event organized by Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) in 1966 which paired artists with engineers from Bell Labs to use cutting edge technology to make work. This is Robert Rauschenberg’s performance, Open Score. At the start, you’ll see two tennis rackets wired for sound, and Frank Stella — playing against his own tennis pro— in a match where every time a ball is hit, one or two of the venue’s lights go out, until the audience is in total darkness. Then a group of performers on stage — I believe they were school friends of Rauschenberg’s son — become visible only through the newest infrared technology of the time.

Tyler: How did you even find out about this?

Amy: I learned about it while doing research for the show. There’s actually a gallery in London that had screened it, which was the only other recent screening I knew of. The film was compiled by Julie Martin and Barbo Schultz Lundestam from footage of several of these performances.

Tyler: This is fantastic — you did a really good job.

Amy: I wanted to do a tennis show for a long time. The recent Art and Sport week gave me an excuse.

Tyler: Do you have any tennis art in your own house?

Amy: That Ralph Pugay drawing that is in the show is in my personal collection.

Tyler: That’s great — thank you so much.

Amy: Nice to see you — I’ll see you around. Let me know if there’s any tennis programming coming up.

Tyler: Maybe I’ll see you at Bimbo Tennis — not sure if I’ll go every night, we’ll see if I like it.

Adams and Ollman is located at 418 NW 8th Ave, Portland, OR 97209 — visit them online at adamsandollman.com or follow along on Instagram @adamsandollman.

Portland Tennis Courterly is proud to partner with TheaterGarden on the upcoming Portland production of Bimbo Tennis, a bold original play written by visiting playwright Emma Gardner and directed by Portland artist Laura Loy. Inspired by the nationwide battles between tennis players and their pickleball-obsessed neighbors, Bimbo Tennis is an on-court, intimate, interactive experience set in a world where socialist bimbos—characterized by color, play, mess, and queerness—enter an epic showdown with anesthetized, corporate Dickball. Bimbo Tennis is an adaptation of both Anton Chekhov’s The Cherry Orchard (1904) and Arthur Kopit’s The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis (1965).

Mark your calendars for August 6–9 and 13–16 at Southeast Portland’s now wall-less Colonel Summers Park. Performances will begin at dusk, and audiences are invited to come early for pre-show tennis activities, which will include things like clinics, exhibition matches, and mini-tournaments on different evenings. Tickets can be purchased online at

https://bimbotennis.eventbrite.com

or at the show itself. Follow @tenniscourterly and @theatergarden for all the latest updates.

Just before daily rehearsals began, I sat down with Emma Gardner, the playwright behind Bimbo Tennis and also its Executive Producer, to talk about her updated script, the world of her play, and quite a bit more. Gardner attended Santa Monica public schools, played on the Santa Monica High School tennis team, and grew up watching Shakespeare on the Gussie Moran Tennis Court at Reed Park. Her previous iteration of Bimbo Tennis had a homecoming run at Reed Park. Gardner’s previous full-length play, Tourrorists: A January 6 Comedy, had a sold-out run at the Hollywood Fringe Festival and won the Encore Award. The interview that follows has been lightly edited for clarity and length. —Jay Boss Rubin

How has Bimbo Tennis changed since Portland got a sneak peak of the production last summer?

Very much. The play has always wanted to evolve. We hosted a magical staged reading of Bimbo Tennis, for free, at the 2025 Mt. Tabor Open. That felt like a fitting final chapter for that version of the play.

This current iteration was inspired by conversations with my original creative partner on the project and its first director, Madeleine Woolner, as we explored Portland last summer. One afternoon we stumbled into Melville Books on Northeast Alberta Street, and I found a copy of The Cherry Orchard—the David Mamet version—just as Madeleine and I had been discussing why the play didn’t quite “work,” and why the plot felt less than fully satisfying.

Madeleine kept saying, Chekhov is great for a reason. When I read Mamet’s version of The Cherry Orchard, everything clicked. Everyone in the play had to be in love with someone else in the play, but none of them could acknowledge it. I was ready to write the new script.

The new version of Bimbo Tennis is two acts instead of one. What inspired that shift?

Two acts allow space for the play to breathe. Mark my words: something cool will happen at intermission.

Did you find yourself making any other adjustments with a mind to staging the production in Portland as opposed to LA?

This production received funding from Portland’s Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC), as part of a grant led by one of our producers and the actor playing Bimbo Katya, Julia Bray. Julia participated in the reading at Mt. Tabor Park last summer and had the idea to bring the show back to Portland for a full, eight-night run. Together, Julia and I wanted this version to lean in to the clown elements of the show and activate Portland’s unique and talented scene, bringing in queer and diverse actors.

I can’t wait for everyone to see the brilliant work of director Laura Loy and the cast. They’re all so funny and really heighten the clown and physicality of every moment. The RACC grant enabled us to develop the show into the fullest version of itself it’s ever been.

I love how Act I ends with all of the characters falling prey to their worst instincts. Is this what we all do in times of crisis, on the court and off?

Yes. The Bimbos and Andreessen occupy a pretty unforgiving world. Most of the characters are falling prey to their worst instincts all the time, especially when they play tennis—apart from beautiful, saintly Duncan. Will he ever crack?

If you thought you were going to lose your housing and way of life, wouldn’t you lose your shit, too?

You also gave the Bimbos a matriarch …

I did!

How does the addition of Ludmila Bimbova shift the themes of the play and the dynamics between the characters?

Ludmila heightens everything and demands more of the relationships between the characters. Her inspiration, Lyubov, is the central character in The Cherry Orchard. In the previous version of Bimbo Tennis, her spirit was diffused through various other characters. Now, she is embodied; Ludmila is the history and meaning of the court come to life. And she also makes the class system so much clearer. Chekhov was biting and specific when it came to class, and the critique still tracks today.

What is the class system in the play, and how does it relate to the class system in which we exist?

In this new version, the Bimbovas are the wealthy landowners who have inherited their property and wealth, but failed to maintain it. This world moves quickly; overnight, dynasties can fall and new ones emerge in their wake. The Bimbova Family Tennis Court is the cherry orchard, the beloved community asset they cannot bear to part with. If the Bimbos were savvy, they would sell some of the other houses on their property, pay off the taxes they owe, and save the court and the mansion. But this would require common sense and foresight, two qualities the well-endowed Bimbos haven’t been bred for.

Meanwhile, Andreessen and his daddy are new money; they still bear the stink of their surfer (serf) lineage, but smart investments in horrible new AI companies have given them sudden capital and power.

Lowest on the totem pole, Duncan is a modern-era domestic servant. He is proud of his family history, but the Duncans barely survive and have depended entirely on the Bimbova family for generations, with no capital or land of their own. The Andreessens offer to employ Duncan, but he will be no better off than with the Bimbos; both sides have language for it but lack the ability to improve the material conditions of the working class.

The addition of Boo Boo, Ludmila’s deceased son, makes Bimbo Tennis much more of a family story. Can you tell me about your decision to insert a ghostly presence into the story?

Gosh that makes me want to cast you as the eighth character: Ghost of Boo Boo.

I’ve always dreamed of playing a ghost.

We’ll see how witchy the cast and director get with it. As far as inspiration, my nickname as a kid was “Bobo”—

Wait, really? So was mine. Well, is it was ‘Jaybo,’ actually, and then ‘Bo’ or sometimes ‘Bobo’ were the nicknames of the nickname.

An adaptation of an adaptation. Nice. Anyway, perhaps Boo Boo is a throwback to all that. Once we were doing sun-play (the sun will never rise again), and son-play (Andreessen is a daddy’s boy, and Pepper is Ludmila’s adopted son), it only made sense to have a third son. A dead one. He died in a pond near the court. Ludmila refers to him as “soggy” because he’s still here, to her.

Fascinating. There’s a line in the play, “Some of the greatest tennis players are the most emotional.” Are you an emotional tennis player when you compete?

How do you define emotion? Does it have to be visible to others? I’m usually pretty engaged in whatever dynamics my opponent and I create in our match. Sometimes I get pissed off, if my opponent makes several bad line calls or has negative energy, but it feels gauche to show that. I rarely escalate a situation beyond some light trolling.

In a singles match, if my opponent isn’t lowkey my friend by the end, something is wrong. We’re having a conversation! And we get to occupy a full court to ourselves for hours of matchplay—why wouldn’t we be having an awesome time?

On the pro level, do you distinguish between a fiery, expressive player such as Alcaraz, and an emotionally volatile one such as, say, Kyrgios? Do you prefer the vulnerable players to the unflappable ones?

So there’s expressive play style and then there’s, like, he’s a yeller, and sometimes even, he’s a hitter. No one ever talks about the hit to decorum tennis took from John McEnroe’s histrionics. What a nightmare. I like left-handed players.

Let’s talk about sex and tennis. In the play, the two are inextricably linked, as they were in your and Sarah Ostreshs’ review of the Sofi Tukker album WET TENNIS. Marcus Andreesen says, of sex and tennis: “Two frustrating activities, satisfaction so elusive.” Meanwhile, Dickball is never frustrating—it’s flat, smooth, defined by absence rather than presence. It seems like the dichotomy between sex and tennis versus sexlessness and Dickball is delineated along messiness and risk—physical risk, sure, but just as much so mental and emotional risk. Are the risks of failure and frustration necessary for, if not ‘satisfaction’ exactly then at least meaningfulness?

Dickball reflects a big flattening that I feel in modern life. I’m definitely in agreement with some of the great minds of our time that friction is a good thing. Becca Rothfeld’s All Things are Two Small, Kyle Chayka’s The Longing for Less, and Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks were all inspirations in this department.

Not all friction is necessary, but a lot of frictions make us remember that we’re alive. Dickball is software engineering; nothing of human value is produced. These poor software engineers, convinced they’re elite with their 70-hour work weeks, don’t get to shop for food, cook, or engage in many quotidian human activities. We ought to have some solidarity with the Andreessen Factory workers. The Bimbos don’t, but the rest of us should.

Messiness and risk are kind of my personal religion. If you’re not taking a swing, how do you know you’re alive? I’m feeling a lot of Finite and Infinite Games vibes from this question. And honestly? That’s a good thing. (Sorry, I’m making a bad AI chatbot joke.)

Every character in the play is in love with someone else—but they can’t ever say it, so they can’t ever be happy. Even the Bimbos, with their world of color and sex and free expression, rely on stagnant generational wealth which can’t provide the structural freedom the Bimbos really seek. Sex is plentiful in the play, but little of it is satisfying. This spirit of play is increasingly incompatible with dusk capitalism, which compels us to maximize our non-work hours and treat other people as a means to greater capital. Why do you think we’re in a sexual drought?

In another of the play’s big tennis metaphors, tennis is described as “life at its most basic. We must be aggressive yet cooperate, we have to be savage, yet respect a strict code of behavior.” I personally love this about tennis, how you play against your opponent on the most obvious level, but you also play with your opponent to create beautiful moments together.

I’ll be honest, I cribbed a few of these lines from a more earnest play about tennis and relationship dynamics (Doubles by David Wiltse). This ethos was very much on display at the Mt. Tabor Open during 4th of July weekend, with players regularly complimenting their opponents on their successes against them.

But certainly there’s some cognitive dissonance and potential for messiness in such a set-up. Since Dickbal is relatively flat, maybe the dynamic skews more adversarial?

That’s the thing about Dickball, isn’t it? The play’s antagonist sport is based on pickleball, sorry to shock any delicate readers. I find pickleball very shrill: from the sound of it (about 70 dBA), to the short clip of a shot—don’t you dare take a full swing!—to its proponents who speak with ‘one voice,’ often at city council meetings, often on behalf of an all-white cast, and often pretending simple utilitarianism principles automatically apply to tennis.

Does pickleball inspire anger in its players—or does it only permit that emotion? All I will say is I think pickleballers are a group that would quickly adopt mob violence as a strategy. This is a recurring interest of mine; I researched extremist white-supremacist dynamics for my last full-length play, Tourrorists, a comedy about the January 6 insurrection.

There’s a moment where Ludmila, who doesn’t know how to work the lights on her own court, says: “I don’t do the lights, I own the lights.” She’s used to having her court butler, Duncan, take care of such things for her. This resonated with the more overt ‘influencer’ theme in the play. Pepper Mills is a tennis influencer, this time around.

Pepper was always, energetically, an influencer, a “local celebrity” as he describes himself. As we know, when you influence for money you sell your soul. So, it has to be worth it. Google is in talks to buy Portland Tennis Courterly. Should we all become a brand?

There’s a suggestion in the play that it may be possible for tennis and Dickball to “share” publicly accessible space. In my experience, anytime pickleball is given an inch it takes a mile. I just witnessed an example of this at Gabriel Park: Two of the previously eight tennis courts there have officially been converted to pickleball. When I was there the other night, the pickleball was attracting such large crowds that players began spilling over onto the tennis courts and colonizing those, too. Do you think that the sharing of resources between superficially similar but culturally quite different sports is (or could be) viable? Or is that a tactic for pickleball to get and take whatever it can?

Yeah, that’s the thing. The entitlement is really wild. You have to self-audit: Am I doing pickleball (pretzel) logic?

Share resources, hmm. I don’t think the loudness of pickleball makes it eligible to be part of shared communal space. Sorry. LA is already the second loudest city in the United States. NoiseCon2023’s topic was Pickleball Noise. Courts in Santa Barbara were removed because they were too loud. Dickball companies across America are laser-focused on the problem of Big Loud. (Can you tell that my Bimbo Tennis research class included a module on the Sound of Pickleball?)

I’ve always believed pickleball should be played out of earshot and out of public view. Let it migrate to disused malls. Santa Monica’s Promenade is already a hotspot for Dickerson’s Ballsack (the full name of Dickball). Brava. Loudness itself is an amazing metric of what we are willing to suffer as a society.

“Superficially similar but culturally different” sports is a funny idea. Do you think the sharing of resources between groups of “superficially similar but culturally different” people is possible? Yes, but it is extremely difficult and requires frequent review. Happy America 250.

Capitalism’s abuses know no bounds. They’re often haphazard, accidental, ass-backwards. We have to poke fun as often as we can. Pickleball calls itself something already so disgusting, so nauseatingly chipper and icky, that it resists mockery. They talk about dinking—well, congratulations, now it’s called Dicking and your racquet is a dill pickle. Enjoy the free press.

We can’t let capitalism’s—or Trump’s for that matter—pathetic and self-demeaning affect confuse us. We have to find more creative ways to satirize things. Or, you know, do actual organizing work. This is my praxis, shut up.

The other question you’re asking, I think, is an interesting one about categorization. Should we group all racquet sports together? I’m hesitant to even put them both in the category of ‘sport.’ Pickleball is an invented language; it has no native speakers. Its only “celebrity players” are former tennis players (shoutout to my former high school tennis teammate turned pickleball pro: I hope they’re paying you, girl.)

Here in Portland, the spectre of pickleball as the major threat to the local tennis ecosystem seems to have crested and receded. Between some signage put up by Portland Parks & Recreation and some often tense person-to-person conversations, many pickleball players no longer need to have it explained to them why they can’t simply take over a tennis court. Sure, they may try when they think no one is looking, but you don’t have to explain the whole situation to them from scratch each time they’re caught red-handed. Meanwhile, what the popularity of pickleball represents—late-stage capitalism, austerity measures, efficiency culture, etc.—is still very much a threat to local tennis culture in Portland and elsewhere. There is so much in your play that reverberated with me on this level: the kind of ‘noblesse oblige’ of private property owners such as the Bimbovas, who generously allow the public to access their courts; those same private property owners asking for millions of dollars from public coffers to keep a facility open and ‘save’ it from either disappearance or obsolescence; the false choice between old, crusty money and new, techno-fascist money; the auctioning off of publicly accessible infrastructure to the highest bidder. I suppose I wanted to ask about relevance, and how the themes and metaphors of Bimbo Tennis continue to be urgent even after the threat of pickleball limps off into the sunset. Just as a side note, here in ‘Tennis City, USA,’ the City of Portland has dispensed with the auction and is just giving away its public tennis infrastructure.

Thank you for saying ‘spectre.’ Lest we neglect to shout out Club Leftist Tennis’s “Against Pickleball” manifesto, which I believe has raised the consciousness of left-handed players countrywide. Now, would they actually host some tennis tournaments (and tennis plays)?

These intersections you mention are really excellent. This is part of why I was excited to bring the show to Portland; I love that it tells a different, local story here. We should all be talking about assets all the time. Assets make the world go round. Sorry, typo. Asses. Asses make the world go round.

The thing is—and I don’t want to scare our tennis community—but even when pickleball dies, there will be another pickleball. And Dickball did do something good: it made us have to fight for tennis. We grew up thinking that tennis would always be here, that we wouldn’t have to defend our desire and right to run around on a full-sized tennis court. We had to make tennis more accessible, and we did: U.S. tennis-playing has grown by 10 million players since 2019. In 2022, I started a Bimbo Tennis League, the true origin of the play, where I gathered fashion-forward friends with no tennis ability to hit balls around in the crisp pre-work dawn at Griffith Park. Shoutout to the original tennis Bimbos: Ryan, Ildar, Emma F, Lillian, Stas, Deva, Flemming, Anna-Sofia, Paul, Arden, Hannah. I’m including you if you came even once <3

Cities should run their own tennis. Tennis infrastructure is a perfect barometer for the health of a city. It’s not that hard, but it’s important. I’m sure it’s not easy to run a city—federal funding is being cut, blah blah blah. When will we learn that a lot of basic services can and should be run by the people who use them?

Do you think people want a VC called “10-S” to come in and ruin tennis? Make you have to watch an ad to get onto the courts, book them using a QR code, gender segregate play? Sorry, I haven’t been inside a corporation in a while, not quite sure what they do in there. We’re only a few light-years away from someone telling you virtual tennis on your phone will provide the same benefit. Is that what’s happening in Portland? The coolest things are free and well-run.

Velvet Winters, who in many ways is laughably virtue-signaling, says something I really admire in the beginning of Act II: “Tennis won’t always be here. We have to work and fight for tennis every single day.” Would it be better if tennis, and publicly accessible tennis, were simply guaranteed? Or is Professor Winters on to something—that the work and fight for something you love is “the whole reward” in and of itself?

I will fight for things because I have to, but I’d obviously prefer to be recreating and reading. Similarly, solidarity as a by-product of struggle is very meaningful, but I’m also a huge fan of solidarity as a by-product of pleasure.

Velvet is a workaholic, which is a huge theme of the play. Remember: workaholism is dangerous and even fatal if you don’t catch it early! Velvet is virtue-signaling in that she’s not really fighting every day. She’s studying the problem because she finds it interesting, but is she in the streets for tennis? Is she working to expand access to tennis in her community? Is she, ahem, even playing tennis every week at Colonel Summers Park? Hardly.

As the threats facing local tennis culture continue to morph and multiply, we at Portland Tennis Courterly sometimes find ourselves brainstorming about how, and through what mechanisms, we can keep playing tennis the way we love to play tennis—endlessly, communally, without having to shell out for court time, and without having to circumscribe tennis into little 45–60 minute chunks. Velvet, at one point, proposes a collective. Certainly this has been discussed—sounds good in theory, but it would be a pain in the ass. Then there’s an in some ways sadder, in some ways more radical proposal made by Katya: “We’ll make our own tennis. My friends up north have an empty lot we can play on. We’ll gather some of the nets to take with us.” In the grimmest of possible scenarios here in Portland, all park tennis courts could eventually fall under the control of the USTA. But the streets and lots would not. A patch of concrete. A rope for a net. Could that be … enough?

That’s a beautiful articulation of the ethos: to play tennis “endlessly, communally, without having to shell out for court time, and without having to circumscribe tennis into little 45–60 minute chunks.” The beauty of tennis’s scoring is that it is “out of time.” The clock does not determine how long a match will go; the points do. I recently played an untimed singles match; it ended up being three hours, in peak heat, and it was decided in a tiebreak by two points. We played, getting hotter and more delirious, trading anecdotes at the breaks about boy/girlfriends. We marveled at what was happening, saying to each other: “This should be illegal.” Yet always knowing we would fight to the end. Ultimately, we stayed on the court for three hours because it was a conversation that took three hours. Recreation shouldn’t have a squeezed-in, rigorously timed, “your hour’s up, now I’m on” mentality.

Katya is vacuous and participates in bad faith, but she does try to future-proof the sport against a real threat her community experiences. If you’re desperate enough, anything can be tennis. A sad, dilapidated wall might hold just enough spirit of the game to satisfy a girl and her racquet for an afternoon. That said, holding firm on the dimensions of the tennis court feels like the right place to start—even if the quality of the court surface and surrounding environs may vary.

Let’s not put tennis in the parking lot. Or pickleball. Don’t take away parking lot culture; it’s for weed and alcohol and, occasionally, parking.

So what do you think is more admirable, to fight for the survival of the tennis courts that already exist, or to imagine and make our own courts where they’re less likely to be threatened—at least for the time being?

You’re making me the arbiter of admirability? Anyone on the side of more tennis is an ally and a scholar, as far as I’m concerned. I think people should be intersectional about their saving of courts. If you pay for a private club membership, bring lots of people there to play as guests. I used to be in a league where I would pay $2.50 for yearlong participation. Often, we would get fruit and cookies after the match, provided by the host club. But a woman at one of the clubs complained that her club was providing nicer fruit than other clubs, and she wanted other clubs to match that level of fruit. So they compromised by having none of the clubs provide fruit. Even sans fruit, it was still a very nice league for my friend and fellow Courterly contributor India Mandelkern and me to play doubles in.

One final question. I wanted to ask about the motto, or slogan, “May all tennis whores find their court.” Is that an allusion to the Arthur Kopit play, or is it wholly original? The line isn’t in Bimbo Tennis, but it’s in some of the associated materials, and feels like it conveys many of the play’s sentiments.

Anytime anyone says the word whores, they are referencing Mr. Kopit. JK, it’s kind of an obscure play. I guess there haven’t been many tennis plays (or sports plays for that matter) because sports is already theatre and, well, ball is life.

Also, I am not sure if Kopit meant the word whore as affectionately as I’m using the term bimbo, but I’d like to think so. The whores are pretty admirable in The Day the Whores Came Out to Play Tennis, even though they have no spoken lines. Pretty criminal from a humor perspective, but it’s about sending a message. And they really do send the rich, inept men inside scrambling as they pelt the building with tennis balls and bring it crashing down. I deeply believe everyone deserves to play on a tennis court. And if you identify as a whore, a bitch, a cunt, I hope you find a community that appreciates you.

View complete collection of tournament photos here.

Who will win the Mt Tabor Open?

This weekend: Oregon’s Highest-Altitude, All-Comers Doubles Tournament and Singles Invitational Returns.

For three days, public tennis courts inside Mt. Tabor Park will become home to one of Portland’s most ambitious public park tennis tournaments. Starting Friday morning and through Sunday afternoon expect an eruption of community tennis.

Come wander through and we bet you’ll stay longer than you expected to.

Finals take place Sunday.

Free to attend.

Mt. Tabor Park
July 3–5, 2026

Follow along throughout the weekend: @tenniscourterly

This book review will be published in the Big Issue, which comes out June 6th.

Review by Tyler Pell

Can you have too much of a good thing? Ashton Politanoff’s Dad Had a Bad Day suggests the answer may be yes—especially if that good thing is adult recreational tennis.

Like so many before him, Ned rediscovers tennis after abandoning it in high school—only he returns to the sport as an unemployed husband and father of a preschool-age son. What begins as a healthy diversion quickly metastasizes into something more sinister.

A former Division I college tennis player, Politanoff navigates the jargon-laden universe of tennis with grace. Though not as titillating as Miranda July’s All Fours (her 2024, sexual-candor filled meditation on female midlife dissatisfaction), Politanoff’s novel explores its own terrain of longing and escape.

Set in the probably-familiar-to-you universe of USTA leagues, Dad Had a Bad Day is a breezy, funny, occasionally cringe-inducing ride. Politanoff traces the strange gravity tennis can exert when the rest of life feels uncertain. Beneath the energetic writing and hyperbole lies a sharper question: In an age defined by social isolation, do the rituals and minor solidarities of adult rec tennis function as a kind of antidote? And if they do—what happens when you exceed the recommended dosage?

By asking such questions, Dad Had a Bad Day quietly challenges one of the game’s most cherished clichés, and asks yet another question: Is tennis really the world’s healthiest sport?

Twenty-two years after the first French Open — and 22 years before Stade Roland Garros was built — the tennis-inspired ballet Jeux opened in May 1913 at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. Produced by Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, one of the most influential ballet companies of the 20th century, the work brought together composer Claude Debussy and choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, each towering figures in the world of ballet. Jeux had all the makings of a smash hit. Instead, when it opened, it was a complete flop.

While audiences and critics at the time failed to appreciate it, Jeux has since earned the respect of the ballet world and is now considered a classic work.

New York–based choreographer Christopher Williams is the latest director to reinterpret the ambiguities of attraction through the lens of a tennis match. His newest iteration of Jeux opened this October at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York City. We had the chance to speak with Williams about his interpretation of the classic ballet last month.

What makes Jeux such an important work?

“It’s probably the first ballet ever to be about a modern sport in the choreographer’s own time. Most ballets before that were drawn from preexisting stories. Nijinsky had the audacity and genius to create something rooted in contemporary life. The scenario was grounded in the here and now — and possibly even imagined as taking place in the future.”

Where did Nijinsky get the idea for it?

“The story goes that he was at some lovely outdoor evening event and saw moths flying around candles on café tables. From that, he invented the scenario of three players who had been out enjoying a social tennis match, then went searching for a stray ball, after which a psychological and romantic drama unfolds.

And, for goodness’ sake, the title itself means ‘games,’ right? He’s talking about the sport, the games we play in our minds while playing the sport, the games we play with each other in social interactions, and the games of love.”

Why do you think he chose tennis?

“The ballet itself isn’t really about tennis. Tennis is more of a framework through which the relationships between the three players unfold. The game becomes a vehicle for a modern romp in the park.

Interestingly, things like electric street lighting were still relatively new at the time, so tennis could suddenly be played at night and in mixed company. It lent itself to sporty motion, beautiful young characters, and the possibility of romance. Nijinsky saw tennis as the perfect vehicle for all of that.”

Do you know how Nijinsky became interested in tennis?

“I’m not sure if this is actually true, but people think Diaghilev introduced tennis to Nijinsky. In reality, it may have been a Russian prince — Prince Pavel Dmitrievich Lvov — who first exposed him to it. The prince became an early patron of Nijinsky, taking him around cosmopolitan society, introducing him to exciting new experiences, and playing tennis with him while Nijinsky was still young and impressionable.

I think Nijinsky came to see tennis as this exciting contemporary sport associated with freedom and permissiveness.”

Was that permissiveness accepted at the time?

“There was a lot of queerness embedded in the original ballet because of the dynamic of two women and one man — this ménage-à-trois suggestion. But Diaghilev actually wanted Nijinsky to create the ballet for three men.

In his diary, Nijinsky writes: ‘Diaghilev dreamt of making love to two boys at the same time and wanted those boys to make love to him. The two boys are two young girls and Diaghilev is the young man. I camouflage these personalities on purpose.’

Nijinsky found that dynamic troubling, even though he was Diaghilev’s lover. It was, in some ways, an early example of a coercive power imbalance. Diaghilev had enormous influence and had effectively transformed Nijinsky into a global superstar. That kind of permissiveness was often tolerated when attached to someone with Diaghilev’s power.”

Switching gears a bit: What do you think tennis players could take from ballet?

“People often think sports and the arts exist in completely separate worlds, but tennis is deeply artistic. It’s physically demanding, yes, but the way you use your body matters tremendously. A graceful, balletic player may possess strengths that completely unsettle a more brutish opponent.

There’s a simultaneous psychological and physical drama unfolding during a match.

When I was younger, there was that famous saying: football players take ballet. Ballet is incredibly useful as a discipline because it asks the body to pursue an almost unachievable ideal form. Even for bodies naturally suited to it, achieving that aesthetic requires immense muscular control and lightning-fast reflexes.

To express music physically at that level takes extraordinary coordination. So yes, absolutely — anyone interested in improving their game should look to dance. It sharpens your ability to improvise, stretch, gauge distance, leap, and react instantly. All of those things are commonplace in classical dance, and all of them translate directly to tennis.”

In Portland, they’re disappearing. The city removed the hitting wall at Irving Park two years ago. Someone appears to have set the backboard at Colonel Summers Park on fire. It’s technically still standing, but I’d imagine its days are numbered. While the city still maintains some adjacent infrastructure — like the handball courts at Laurelhurst and Farragut Park — the dedicated tennis hitting wall is just about extinct. The wall at Alex Rovello Memorial Courts remains the major, obvious exception. Otherwise, the walls at Essex Park and Kenilworth Park, way down near Powell Blvd., appear to be the northernmost surviving hitting walls on the east side — and both have seen better days.

There are alternatives, if you adjust your focus. In fact, in the Central Eastside and downtown, where I live and work, there are a number of fantastic concrete walls that serve as ideal hitting partners. Here are my three favorites:

The concrete wall at the caged-in court at Harriet Tubman Middle School is the ultimate hitting wall. Tall, long, and surrounded by fencing, you couldn’t design a better practice wall if you tried. The downtown views and basketball hoops are the cherry on top.

The parking lot adjacent to the old Miller Paint store on Grand and Pine has two walls that meet at an angle, creating excellent conditions for keeping balls in play. It’s centrally located and almost always free of cars after 6 p.m. Ambient street lighting keeps the space playable well into the evening, and the industrial surroundings mean you’re unlikely to bother neighbors.

The TriMet turnaround at 11th and Morrison downtown is the Black Diamond wall. The graded slope, brick-like cobblestones, and MAX tracks create a tremendous challenge. It takes near-perfect precision to keep a rally alive. The mural celebrating Portland musicians offers excellent visual targets, and TriMet’s close watch over the property means cars are rarely an issue. Beware of trains.

Did I miss any good walls? What’s your favorite repurposed hitting wall in the city?

First things first: this e-newsletter is not replacing our award-winning print publication. Our physical magazine are not going anywhere. They remain the truest answer to the question: What is Portland Tennis Courterly?

This space exists alongside it.

Why this, why now: because there are stories, ideas, and conversations that move faster than print—things we’re seeing on courts, hearing from players, noticing in the culture—that deserve a place to live in real time.

What this is: a running dispatch from Tennis City, USA. Short-form writing, interviews, opinions, field notes, and the occasional curveball. A place for contributors, collaborators, and readers to think through the game together.

What to expect: irregular, but intentional. Some weeks more, some weeks less. Always in service of the same thing—expanding what tennis can be, and who it’s for.