Me, Myself and Rhode Island

Real Tennis Anyone?

I have never played on grass. I grew up looking through fences at women, then called ladies, hitting balls across the net on red clay. These were not the Hello Girls of WWI, no. These were the baby boom moms, and this was not exactly what it seemed. Nothing was.

I wonder if Maude Beaton will make it into this season’s Gilded Age episodes. The Anglo/American empire, Ma Bell, RCA, Cranston and Coventry…do not trigger me. But I do hear them, and listen even more carefully when any of those words drop in.

You may have forgotten I am “celebrating” twenty-five years of contracting. I do not know if the New York Yacht Club has clay courts in Newport. Yes, I could search for that. I was up on the hill only once, alone, as a guest, for breakfast. I sat outdoors overlooking the water in a white Adirondack chair. No one else was there.

I have played on the clay courts in the hills above Highlands, which were built, I imagine for the America’s Cup crews before the race was moved to Newport. There are rackets and there are racquets. A bird in the hand, they say, is worth two in the bush. The net came before the racquet. Jeu de paume was first played sans racquet.

“We swear not to separate and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the kingdom is established.” This was The Tennis Court Oath (translated from its original French). By the time the head came off Marie Antionette, wooden racquet had already spared the palms of aristocrats.

And, the Gilded age’s Jay Gould’s son won Olympic gold in 1908, in this forgotten sport of the mega rich. I thought I could only imagine the sound of hands hitting Melton cloth covered cork balls, until I was surprised that the game is still being played, right here on Gould’s own court, in Lakewood, New Jersey.

Those baby boom mothers were economically far less well off than the Gilded age aristocrats, but they had acquired the skill set, on clay and asphalt, not grass, and were aware of that. They sure could hit.

Wikipedia