The Circuit by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Author:Rowan Ricardo Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

PART TWO Spring

CLAY

The stylish locales of the biggest clay tournaments—Buenos Aires, Rio, Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, Rome, Paris—belie the true grit at the heart of their tennis. Which is not to say that those cities don’t have their rough edges. Of course they do. But tennis and rough edges for the most part tend not to mix. If tennis were a leaf falling onto a stream, it would fall on the placid part, the part in a faraway bend, the picturesque but boring part. An obvious exception to this is the divine comedy that is the U.S. Open, but that’s a story of late-summer hard courts that we’ll get to later.

Matches on clay courts are a grind. The surface is rooted in a pragmatism made from and infused by the tactile, utilitarian art of ceramics, and it distinguishes itself from other tennis surfaces in its erratic effects. Clay forces a player’s body to adapt or fail, a player’s mind to obey or die. Shots sponge off the granular surface, slowing down and trampolining back into the air at unlikely angles. Returns that would have been winners on grass and hard courts come ricocheting back to you, sometimes bouncing as high as your shoulders, and players have to slide into their shots. It’s hard to stress how difficult it is to adjust to these conditions. Imagine a two-month span of the basketball season in which everyone was forced to play on a thin layer of sand. Suddenly there’s a premium on probing, strategic shots over straight-ahead power.

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