The Canals of Mars: A Memoir

The Handmade Court

B uilding a tennis court was a dream I shared with my father. Constructing it ourselves was his dream alone. But it seemed so easy, standing beside him in the middle of June near the edge of the twenty acres of land he’d just bought as an investment in his distant retirement that I estimated the end of July, August tops, and the two of us would be spinning outlimealongtheboundaries,gettingthingsreadyforplay.Hehad me captive, because tennis was all I had wanted to do since May, whenI’dreachedthequarterfinalsofthebiggestjuniortournament in Pittsburgh, my rocket-flat serve and forehand good enough to be successful in the 15-and-unders, even against the kids nearly two years older, the ones lucky enough to have birthdays a month or two after the cutoff date of October 1. Thenearesthousewasahundredyardsawayupadirtroad,and my father said there weren’t any zoning ordinances that discouraged using your land any way you pleased. “Look at all that clay,” he said, and I agreed it looked like we could hold the just-finished French Openrightthereonournewpropertyiftheyhadpostponedituntil September. “And this place is nearly level to begin with. We just push this bank over to there, fill in this low spot here, roll it, get some fence, and we’re in business.” “All right!” I blurted. I was willing to give up a month of weekends to shovels and wheelbarrows and the heavy, water-filled rollerthattheresidentswhorentedthatnearesthouseallowedusto store in their garage. This was going to be country-club stuff: a clay court,privacy,hoursofplaywithoutsomejerkswearingstreetshoes telling me and my friends to “get the fuck off the court,” meaning any of the only three public courts in Shaler Township in 1959. Three weeks earlier, my first time in a tournament, I was dressed in plaid swimming trunks and the same white T-shirt I wore under dress shirts on Sunday morning. Up until that Saturday, The Handmade Court 110 ■ w o r k I’d never worn shorts to play tennis, because I didn’t own any. I played in old black chinos, faded to near-white at the knees—mostly with my father, who wore his green work pants to the pay-by-the-hour county courts ten miles from where we lived. I wore a pair of black high-top tennis shoes, and the first morning at the tournament, I learned that “tennis shoes” was a figurative expression. I wasn’t allowed on the clay courts where the youngest entries were being shuttled, so I had to wait (and so did my angry opponent) for a default on one of the hard courts for us to play. Tennis shoes, I was told by the tournament director, had flat soles. They were low-cut and lighter, and they weren’t black like my Keds. I had two tennis rackets at least, the ones my father and mother used. They wererightoffthediscountstorecounter,pre-strungwithstringsocheapitshredded into what looked like unraveling cardboard. No one else in the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Tennis Tournament wore shorts that weren’t white. Where I played tennis with my friends, there were nets with holes so large they resembled the webs torn by the struggles of victims captured by giant spiders in the movies I watched on late-night television. Men in blue jeans who used the same skinhead balls all summer would lean on those nets to swill beer after thirty minutes of loping around bare-chested. By the end of May, even if the park service repaired the worst holes in April before they put the nets back up after a winter in some storage garage, the net strings would tear away from the tape that ran across the top, so you might, every once in a while, skid a shot through a hole without fluttering a bit of cord. If your opponent wasn’t paying attention, the point continued. For placing legitimate shots, however, cross-court was best. Although there weretimeswefoundthenetpulledstraightacrossbymenwhothoughtitneeded to be the same level from side to side, it always sagged, when we lowered it, into a sad, shallow U because there was no center strap to adjust for tension. The second day of that tournament, I added a cardigan sweater that was a cheap knock-off of what Perry Como wore on television every Saturday. It had red and blue cuffs and a similar stripe where it buttoned up the front. I’d noticed that the better players had V-neck sweaters; they had racket covers, and strings that were gold or clear. And their rackets said Wilson and Bancroft...