The American Surface (OT), 7.18

Mornin', Tribe. I've got a lot of post-Wimbledon material on my plate, mostly for Tennis (the magazine), but this will be your Off-Topic post for the rest of the week. But feel free to talk about the substance of this post - or any other tennis topic - as well.

I have a few pleasant surprises in store in the next day or two, and will probably be out of contact on Friday and Saturday. We're going up to the farm in game-rich Andes, where I will be meeting with a specialist from the state to help design a new pond.

I love ponds in general and I especially love swimming in ponds. My  wife, Lisa,  prefers salt water and loves the beach, while Cowboy Luke loves any kind of water, especially if he can fling himself into it from a boulder or high perch of some kind. He wears a life jacket, and performs these massive belly flops; boy, is he in for a surprise when he finally swims well enough to take off the padded PFD (personal flotation device)!

So who all is going to the beach, and who's going to the lake or pond for summer vacation?

For some reason, I haven't really been able to warm up to the events in Amersfoort, Stuttgart or Los Angeles yet, although the players are there, in droves. Guess I have Grand Slam hangover, and am already looking ahead to the the US Open Series hard court events.

Part of my indifference, I suppose, stems from the fact that  Amersfoort and Stuttgart are clay-court events, and to me the clay for 2007 is so-o-o-o-oh over. I don't begrudge the Europeans - promoters, fans or players - for wanting to extend the clay-court season.  But it's a bit of a downer,  with  Monte Carlo, Rome and Paris behind you, and the crew coming off a month on grass courts. Amersfoort? Shrug.

Somehow, returning to clay just doesn't feel right, not after the long and action-packed French Open Series, followed by the brief grass-court season culminating with the event that leaves the clay-court season for dead, Wimbledon. I suppose the solution would be a longer grass-court season, but that's one of those "if pigs could fly" scenarios. Wimbledon and Roland Garros are doomed to be played just weeks apart in the forseeable future.

In many ways, clay is the best of all surfaces for summer tournaments (hard courts, after all, have all the properties - and aesthetic appeal - of your basic Teflon-coated frying pan). Unlike hard court,clay doesn't reflect heat, it absorbs it. It also is kinder on the joints and muscles than hard courts, and it not only stays cooler, it can be watered as frequently as the person in charge of such things deems fit. The Volvo International, back when it was played at North Conway, New Hampshire, was a delightful event: a tournament played on red clay, against a background of dark pines and the looming mountains of the Presidential range in the White Mountains.

I realize writing this that no surface quite says "tennis" to me like clay, and that has to be because of all the little rituals and images that linger in my mind. Water, cool water, gracefully arcing from a hose, falling to the court to firm it up and turn it darker, as a grounds keeper does his job. Or picture yourself, dragging that large mat across a court to wipe it clean of all previous ball marks, while a partner runs that odd little cane-like brush over the lines, walking along as the brush whirrs audibly, leaving the line behind it spotless. It was always fun to watch the first marks appear when you started to warm up on a neatly prepped clay court; made you feel that the upcoming hour represented an entirely new beginning on a Tabula Rasa -  anything was possible, including successful backhand topspin lobs.

The battle to determine "America's surface" was fought and won by hard court devotees back in the late 1970s (if you remember, the US Open was played on green clay for three years running, beginning in 1976, after which the USTA moved the event from the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, Queens, to the nearby National Tennis Center). And I can't help but wonder if we didn't miss a great opportunity by insisting on going with hard courts at the NTC.

To some degree, the decision was ideologically based. The NTC was conceived, in every sense, as a pointedly egalitarian enterprise. It would be a public park when it was not hosting the US National Championships, open to anyone who wanted to play the game. It helped shape the decision that hard courts like the Deco-Turf ones at the NTC, require almost no maintenance. Thus, the civic and USTA-related entities that would run the NTC most of the year would not have to factor high maintenance costs into their budgets.

Of course, hard courts were also, by then, the surface of choice in most, if not all, American tennis venues. In the Northeast, the cradle of American tennis, grass and even clay courts once dominated. But as the egalitarian empire in California grew, the popularity of  "all-weather" hard courts spread throughout the land. Californians went with hard courts - back then, they mostly were just some form of asphalt, sometimes painted pea green - because they were cheap and easy to build, and the climate was moderate enough to prevent winter frost heaves from breaking up the hard courts. Also, in an arid land (remember, the American West is essentially a vast desert, with little oases tucked away here and there), the idea of wasting water on maintaining grass or clay courts did not sit well.

As the game became popular enough for schools and public parks to contemplate building courts, the asphalt variety proved most appealing for the practical reasons. Still, many towns, especially suburbs of cities where the tennis tradition was strong, bit the bullet and installed clay courts. Growing up in northeastern New Jersey, I had plenty of free access to public courts, almost equally divided between hard and clay courts. In the summer, we played on clay. In the fall, when the clay courts closed, we moved to the hard courts and played on them through the winter and spring.

When the US Open decided to leave the confines of the WSTC and make a big statement about popularizing the game in the Open era, clay was as viable a contender as hard courts for America's surface. In fact, if the decline of the American game had started earlier, there might have been an even more compelling argument for going with clay (although many of you know I don't buy the theory that if you want to create great players, train them on clay). As it was, the WSTC was finding it increasingly burdensome to maintain all those grass courts for the USTA, and fancy tennis clubs generally look down their noses at hard courts. So the USTA decided to play the nationals on green Har-Tru clay.

The green clay generally plays a little faster than the red European stuff, and its top dressing is more gritty. Jimmy Connors was able to beat Bjorn Borg on green clay, and attacking players like John McEnroe, Vitas Gerulaitis, Raul Ramirez and Brian Gottfried all did well on Har-Tru at the US Open. It was also the surface on which Chris Evert developed her game.

Meanwhile, many pundits and in-the-trenches USTA types vociferously argued that hard courts were the true, unique American surface (they were unique only in sense that they were too plain Jane for the rest of the world -or proper tennis clubs - to embrace). But you could make a danged good case for grass and clay, too. Grass, of course, was dismissed as an outdated surface that sent all the wrong, elitist signals about tennis everywhere but, oddly enough, at Wimbledon, where those vibes were deemed acceptable because they represented tradition. And lets face it, the WSTC and Australia's Kooyong were seen not repositories of tradition, but as Wimbledon wannabes.

The results on Har-Tru suggested that, at least in that era, the American style  - which was more easily and precisely defined than the American surface - worked well on clay. You could play serve-and-volley and attack the net to your heart's content; you just couldn't do it as recklessly and indiscriminately as you could on grass, or the  kind of lightning-fast hard courts on which the California game developed.

Still, at the end of the three-year run on Har-Tru, the US Open winners were, in iorder starting in 1976: Manuel Orantes, Guillermo Vilas, Jimmy Connors. That two of the three champions were Spanish speaking spooked the USTA and helped the hard court lobbyists. In the end, the USTA decided that hard courts would give US players a better chance, they would better represent the "American game", and they would be cheaper to build and easier to maintain, year-after-year, for a public park.

With newer, more sophisticated hard courts appearing every year, the USTA - probably presciently - understood that the days when hard courts looked like pieces of parking lot were fading fast. One good thing about hard courts today is that they have more in common with sophisticated indoor surfaces than old-fashioned California hard courts.

Ultimately, as nice as it would have been for Har-Tru clay to become America's surface, it was probably wiser to go with hard courts for one main reason: after the break-up of the grass-court monopoly (remember that three of the four Grand Slams were held on grass until 1976), the degree to which tennis would be a multi-surface sport - at least at the highest level - was undecided. Today, it is a three-surface game (clay, grass, hard), four if you insist on counting the struggling European fall indoor tour.

If the US Open had opted for Har-Tru, tennis would overwhelmingly be a one-surface sport - plus Wimbledon. That is, the already substantial presence of clay would double, which would be overwhelming, and make both the grass-court window and fall indoor circuit appear even smaller than they are). And as nice as clay-court tennis is, I much prefer a diversity, and some semblance of balance, in surfaces.