The Tennis Court Oath
The Promised Land for The Future of Tennis by David Arthur Walters
Prologue
I arose on the Sabbath with a mission in mind, to find the Promised Land for the Miami Beach High School Tennis courts. And the reader will see that I found it in Beach High’s backyard, for its resemblance to the Zion scrubland in the Near East is obvious, notwithstanding a few differences between Florida and Palestine. We all know the story about the man who sold his home to fund his search for diamonds afar. And then diamonds were discovered, right in the backyard he had abandoned! Likewise, the Promised Land I found for the tennis courts had oft been noticed but was rejected because its promise was all too obvious. It is in the backyard of Beach High.
Now I have begun with the end in mind. But I am moved to recount my journey, my Moses-like trek to that wondrous backyard on the city golf course, Par 3. Mind you that the Egyptian mystics and Trinitarians alike were certain that number 3 is no coincidence, in the name of the beginning, the middle, and the end as one, the indivisible point of life. But before I proceed with the account of my trek a little prologue is in order in respect to those who just dropped in to see the Promised Land.
A hard-headed, hard-court faction in Miami Beach wants to replace five of the clay courts at world-famous Flamingo Park Tennis Center with hard surface courts, because, or so they say, they have the best interests of the kids in mind. Kids must have hard courts to succeed, they say, and there is no room on the school grounds to build hard courts; therefore they must be placed at Flamingo Park. But 90% of the tennis players don't want hard surface courts, because hard courts hurt players, and clay courts produce better players, anyway. Man himself is made of clay, sayeth the clayists, so how dare the pot argue with the potter! Let clay cleave to clay!
Someone has wondered why the private firm that manages the Flamingo tennis center, GSI (Green Square Inc) Bollettieri, would want to alienate the 90% of their customers who want only clay courts. Nick Bollettieri's son, Jimmy Bollettieri, is the big shot pro at the center, but no one has asked him the hard question lately. Quite frankly, people who raise that issue around the center are treated very rudely, as I was when I politely asked Green Square general manager and vice president Victor Weithorn what was going on. After displaying unmitigated glaring contempt for me in the asking, he said that it was "reasonable" that the kids play on hard courts and that the hard courts be installed at Flamingo and not somewhere else, and that the only objections to it were coming from certain wheels squeaking before the inherently irrational city commission.
Tennis racketeer Nick Bollettieri, the tutelary father of GSI Bollettieri, and father to its Head Pro Jimmy Bollettieri, who claims that he is an “exact replica of his dad in teaching style, philosophy and work ethics,” claims that hard courts are good for kids in the beginning:
"In the first few years when a child is learning the game, it should be done on a surface where the ball bounces the same way all the time. So I believe a hard court is where the technique is first taught."
Thus spoke the great master of the tennis education industry, an industry that the ex-paratrooper who majored in philosophy single-handedly originated in what he called Tennis Heaven i.e. Florida. Why send unruly kids off to military school to drill with rifles and become fodder for war when you can send them to tennis camp to drill with tennis rackets and give them a shot at Wimbledon Championships on the grass at The All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club in London?
Should we consider Nick to be the final authority on tennis and its playing surfaces? Someone else might say kids should not build up their expectations for uniform ball action, and play on somewhat irregular surfaces, where they may learn to deal effectively with slight surprises here and there.
Nick is not beyond criticism, although he has declared himself to be the best tennis coach in the world; or at least he gives some lip service to the value of criticism. Some time after Jon McEnroe said Nick didn’t know anything about tennis, Nick told tennis writer Paul Fein:
“I appreciate that comment from John, and then two months later John sent his son fulltime to my academy…. I believe a lot of people take criticism as a pure negative. If you evaluate the criticism and there’s some value to it, by God, that’s damn good criticism.”
No matter how Nick qualifies his appreciation of negative criticism to save himself from it, there is the indisputable fact that he has coached 10 of the best tennis players in the world. Still, he is humble enough to say to Greg Garber of ESPN.com, that “To tell you the truth, I don’t know s….” But he can spot a player’s idiosyncrasies and help take advantage of them. And he admitted to Douglas Robson of USA Today that he was not always the font of tennis wisdom, yet he was not entirely stupid:
“Andre (Agassi) is right – I didn’t know my ass from my elbow. But I knew people. You don’t make the record I have without knowing something.”
Andre, whom Nick has called “a second son,” negatively criticized Nick in his autobiography OPEN, as sons often criticize their fathers. But the book reviewers made too much of the aspersions referencing Nick’s alleged stupidity about the game.
What Andre actually wrote was: “I asked some of the older boys, some of the veterans, about Nick…. They say he’s a hustler, a guy who makes a very nice living off tennis, but he doesn’t have the game or even know it that well…. He’s captivated by cash….”
However that might be, we have yet to receive Nick’s advice as to whether or not five of the clay courts at Flamingo should be converted to hard courts. His son obviously wants that to happen. Like father, like son?
Given Nick's history of success, we might think that Jimmy wants the high school kids to battle it out on hard courts at Flamingo, for a fee, because he might discover some great talent, give him or her free lessons, and eventually wind up going on tour with his prodigy for a piece of the action.
“Nick likes to discover new stars and showcase them in his tournaments,” wrote Andre. “New stars generate buzz. New stars add to the aura of the Bollettieri Academy, and bolster Nick’s image as a great tennis master….” And later on in the autobiography, he writes, “I continue to live and train at the Bollettieri academy, with Nick as my coach and sometime travel companion though he feels more like a sounding board. And, honestly, a friend. He looks to me for headline-generating wins which help his academy. I don’t pay him a salary, because I can’t, but it’s understood that when I turn pro I’ll give him bonuses based on what I earn. He considers this more than generous.”
Mind you that Nick has denied that his interest in his prodigies was rooted in greed: he told Douglas Robson that he did not make a red cent from Jim Courier, Monica Sales and the like, but did not mention Andre except to say, “I wish I had all the money Andre made.”
By the way, we do not know what the kids at Miami Beach High School, some of whom might wind up at Wimbledon with the right coach, really think about all the fuss over where they should play tennis and on what surface, because much of their thinking is inculcated and represented by adults. How could they possibly know what is best for them anyway, given the fact that the human brain is not fully formed for the production of mature intellectual processes until a person is about twenty-five years of age? Of course there are rebels among them who may talk back, behave inappropriately, and become stars some day.
Perhaps the rebels know why so many copies of OPEN have been checked out of Florida libraries, with great interest given to the fact that Andre managed to free himself from going to school altogether, his mother doing his correspondence school work for him – he told her she could keep his diploma. Surprise: Andre said he hated tennis, but he hated school even more, and was glad to give it up for tennis.
“The worse I do in school, the more I rebel. I drink, I smoke pot, I act like an ass.” To make appearances worse, he wore earrings, wore a Mohawk dyed pink, wore effeminate clothes – his dad asked him bluntly if he was a “faggot.”
“When I had Andre for six-and-one-half years,” Nick told Paul Fein, my main job was to keep him out of jail.” After all, Nick does not believe in forcing people into a mold, but in working with or around their idiosyncrasies. “I felt that if I was lenient with Andre, then in the long run I knew he had some special talents that would blossom later on….”
Not that Nick approved of teenagers using alcohol and other drugs at his world-famous academy in Brandenton, Florida: “We tried to make the academy as drug-free as any live-in school, and I think we did a good job. Were we drug-free? Absolutely not.”
Absolutely not. Now several people have said they have witnessed Jimmy openly smoking pot around the Flamingo Park Tennis Center as well as the other Miami Beach center where he teaches, and there are rumors that a video on the subject is circulating. Some reported the drug use to the city manager and city attorney among others in April 2010, expecting that a drug screening would be done. Now that a formal public records request has been made for the drug screening records, the city attorney is mulling over whether or not it would be legal to release them if they exist. But most people could care less about that issue: “So what? Who doesn’t smoke in South Beach?” sums up the typical attitude.
Kids will be kids, anyway, or rather human beings who love liberty most of all so are bound to disobey authority, especially when repressed. Nick loves the individualism of the tennis game, because the athlete has to think on his feet and act, and have his errors immediately exposed for the entire world to see. Andre tells it like it was in the bad old days at the Florida academy:
“The constant pressure, the cutthroat competition, the total lack of adult supervision – it slowly turns us into animals. It’s Karate Kid with rackets, Lord of the Flies with forehands….”
In a way, the battling it out as if in the jungle, where the natural law is allegedly a war of all against all and each against each, was what manufactured the big winners in Nick’s tennis camp. Nick spoke wistfully to Paul Fein of the bad old days:
“They battled it out. They cheated. They punched noses. They threw rackets. They learned how to compete.”
Well, maybe the parents of the current crop of tennis players will want their kids to train with the old pro James Bollettieri, or maybe they are satisfied with non-certified high school coaches – we have seen that a coach does not have to be a tennis player or know too much about it. If they want to go with the Bollettieri methodology in Miami Beach, they can enroll their kids in his academy at Flamingo Park, which has the 17 clay courts 90% of tennis players want to play on. GSI Bollettieri also manages the North Shore Tennis Center, which has 10 clays courts and 2 hard courts.
Now, then, the hard court faction and the soft court faction have nearly come to blows over the soft or clay versus hard or concrete issue, and one may wonder who will cast the first stone to put the sinner of choice to death. We would remind everyone that no one is free from sin, and that the Palestinians and Israelites who fight over holy rubble have rocks in their heads, wherefore neither side can come to a peaceful resolution.
I confess that I know next to nothing about tennis. I believe that the original tennis surface in North America was grass, and that Wimbledon is played on grass, that grass is faster than concrete, and that grass is also something that certain tennis pros still smoke. But alternatives to grass are imperative. I am reluctant to come down on either the hard or soft side of the debate, and say that clay is the future of tennis in North America - it is the present or the now for the rest of the world.
For one thing, we are not talking about real clay, for the clay is only so-called clay and not natural clay - natural clay is still used in South America. Concrete was a technological advance over the old clay courts because far less maintenance was required. The game differs somewhat on a hard "neutral" surface, and a hard-court tradition developed on that surface. We may never be rid of hard surfaces not matter what the material may be, no matter how many injuries are suffered - perhaps congressional hearings should be called on the subject of tennis injuries, as they were called on football concussions. Still, who knows what technological developments will bring to the game in the future? A surface may be developed that may allow the player to slide a bit, as on clay, and thus suffer less injuries, yet be varied from time to time to produce different reactions of the ball in order to speed up or slow down the game.
Anyway, my interest in tennis is secondary here, as I have an ulterior motive: to rid Miami Beach of certain regressive and decadent political influences emanating from the ruling city clique, and thus be of some assistance in maintaining a neutral surface for all the games people love to play for one reason or the other, whether they be hard and fast or soft and slow.
The Third Estate in Miami Beach, all those who are not members of the ruling city clique and their claquers, want to be rid of the Gonzalez Administration and several Miami Beach commissions as soon as possible, but they have been restrained by fear of retaliation if they rise up as lone individuals. Wherefore the time is nigh for the Third Estate to gather together at the tennis court, as did the Third Estate of France did gather at the real or Royal (wood floor) tennis court on 17 June 1789, and acting as a real City Assembly, take a Tennis Court Oath along the following lines:
"The City Assembly, considering that it has been summoned to establish a new city administration and commission, and to effect the regeneration of public order in Miami Beach to maintain the true principles of fairness and decency; that nothing can prevent it from continuing its deliberations in whatever place it may be forced to establish itself; and, finally, that wheresoever its members are assembled, there is the City Assembly; decrees that all members of this Assembly shall immediately take a solemn oath not to separate, and to reassembly wherever circumstances require, until the City of Miami Beach is reconstituted and consolidated upon firm foundations; and that, the said oath taken, all members and each one of the individually shall ratify this steadfast resolution by signature.”
I propose that WE adhere to some of the principles of success that made Nick Bollettieri a great head coach, instead of the principles of the City Administration’s current Leadership Academy, which in conformity to its motto Be Nice & Don’t Complain breeds mediocrity. Instead, we shall be naughty, although we shall do so nicely – we note Nick’s characterization of Monica Seles: “She is just a kind soul. And what made her so good when she went on the court, she was meaner than a snake. But she was always ladylike, and she always respected the sport.”
Practice makes perfect, so drill, baby drill, until you drop, and be somebody special. But drill is not everything, for actually battling it out makes winners. Yes, hard work is necessary if you are to be winners, but you have to think on your feet too, think positively and believe that you will win in the end. Visualize that end every day. Remember, relate to one another, and appreciate each other’s idiosyncrasies and employ them to your mutual advantage. And do be greedy, but make sure you organize your greed to everyone’s benefit or you will go bankrupt. Believe in this message and work at it every day and you will be glad you did.
That being said, I shall soon begin by revealing how I discovered that I might be Moses, and how I wound up at Par 3 of the golf course behind Miami Beach High School.
Pictures:
The Third Estate Assembled at the Real Tennis Court
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Serment_du_jeu_de_paume.jpg
The Real Tennis Court
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Jeu_de_paume.jpg
July 3, 2010
Miami Beach
