WEST NEWBURY, Mass. – It’s been a good month for someone planning to sample tennis subcultures.
First, in late November, I found myself on the court in sweet Mar del Plata, Argentina, as four middle-aged men traded lobs and overheads while playing a sport called padel.
Then, in a different hemisphere and a very different season, I was one of four middle-aged men trading shots in the cool of a New England December while playing platform tennis.
For now and for the foreseeable future, the tennis that Roger Federer and Jelena Jankovic play as they chase summer and paydays across the planet is in no danger of losing its grip on supremacy. But established sports have a way of morphing into something similar in spirit, but delightfully different in practice.
Think rugby and football. Think windsurfing and kitesurfing, and think tennis and its much more obscure descendants.
First, there was paddle tennis, developed by Frank Peer Beal in 1898 in Albion, Michigan, as a playground game for children and a gateway to this established sport that was already rapidly gaining popularity. popularity. Beal, an Episcopal minister, then took his creation to New York, where he persuaded local officials to establish courts in Greenwich Village to provide recreational opportunities for young people.
The court was significantly smaller than a traditional tennis court, making it attractive to city dwellers with limited space, and a single set of lines was sufficient for singles and doubles.
The motivations were different for the inventors of platform tennis. Fessenden Blanchard and James Cogswell Jr., both tennis enthusiasts from Scarsdale, an affluent suburb of New York, wanted to exercise during the winter months. So in 1928 they built a miniature wooden court on a raised platform in Cogswell Yard.
They weren’t the first to play the game on a platform. Deck tennis was a popular diversion on cruise ships; some of the tennis stars of the day, including Bill Tilden and the Four Musketeers of France, entertained passengers by playing on deck during Atlantic crossings.
But it was winter on firmer ground, and Cogswell and Blanchard soon arrived at new concepts. They strung chicken wire around their field to keep the balls out of the snow, then decided that balls that bounced inside the lines and bounced off the wire were still in play. Both men used paddles in wood instead of stringed rackets. They also used softer balls to slow down the game.
From the start, their game was a diversion for the elite, in part because building the field on a platform, a necessity with the frozen ground beneath, was an expensive proposition. This is still the case today, at a cost of approximately $60,000 per court.
Padel, the most recent and most international of these racket sports, is also a child of the wealthy classes. It takes its name from the Spanish word for paddle tennis.
In 1974, Alfonso de Hohenlohe, a Spanish prince, was in Acapulco, Mexico, visiting his friend Enrique Corcuera. An industrialist, Corcuera had built another type of small tennis court on his property: one with solid pediment-style walls at each end. The ball could be played outside the walls with the same type of perforated rackets used in platform tennis and paddle tennis.
Prince Hohenlohe liked what he saw so much that when he returned to Spain he built courts at his private club in Marbella on the Costa del Sol. This sparked the interest of Manuel Santana, a former tennis great who won four Grand Slam titles and who lived in the area.
Argentine visitors to the region soon exported the emerging game to their country. It experienced considerable growth in the 1980s, attracting more than a million recreational players and becoming the second most practiced sport in the country, after football. Padel quickly lost momentum due to a resurgence in tennis and a new generation of professional stars like David Nalbandian.
Mar del Plata, where Spain beat Argentina in the Davis Cup final last month, is still considered the padel capital of Argentina, producing the best players who compete on the Spanish professional circuit.
“It’s a great game, but it’s not what it used to be here,” said Marcos Peroggi, a 31-year-old padel player and instructor in Mar del Plata. “His roots in Spain were in the upper classes. Here, it was more of a people’s game. But it is now in Spain that it is strongest.”
Spain has more than a million players and 13,000 courts, according to the Spanish padel federation.
I first played padel in Seville in the 1990s and did it indoors on artificial grass, but outdoor hard surfaces are more common. Padel is played with a thick, smooth racket that resembles a table tennis racket on growth hormone. The game also differs from tennis in that the serve must be hit from below, with contact made at or below waist level.
The slice – a rarity in the topspin-rich world of modern tennis – is a must, as are the lob and volley. The exchanges are long and cunning often trumps power, but not as often as in the winter version of this platform sport. In paddle tennis, the fence absorbs more rhythm and fury than the solid walls of the padel. As both sports are played almost exclusively in doubles, it is difficult to find open spaces on the small courts.
“One of the great things about our sport is that because it’s very difficult to put the ball away and the screens cancel out the power, you can come in and play against very high level players without necessarily getting blown out,” he said. Ann said. Sheedy, executive director of the American Platform Tennis Association.
Platform players regularly call their game “paddle”, which could lead to confusion if they ever meet padel players. And this creates some confusion when they meet with practitioners of American paddle tennis, now played mainly in California. “We have to be very careful,” Sheedy said.
Although padel is played with modified, under-inflated tennis balls, platform is played with solid rubber balls. The platform tennis racket is thinner and has grain mixed into its painted surface to provide friction. Grain is also mixed into the pitch surface to help improve stability in cold weather.
With the emphasis on defense, platform gatherings at higher tiers can and do reach triple-digit levels. Although players can serve overhand, they are only allowed one serve. A ball that hits the net and lands in the service area is in play, a logical idea that tennis might want to borrow.
But the biggest difference between the parent game and its esoteric child is the typical weather conditions. The platform tennis surface is raised to make room for a heater, and my partner Greg Pope and I played Saturday after a light snow.
It’s a setting that tends to attract the diehards, and one of the charms of platform tennis is that no one really knows how many there are lobbing in the cold.
“People are hovering around the 100,000 figure, but I have no way of knowing for sure,” Sheedy said. “Our association has 9,700 members, but obviously not everyone who plays is a member.”
