The Trophy Stays
We are starting one-day popup tournaments at clubs around greater Richmond, Virginia. A draw, mixed formats, food on a long table, and a cup that never leaves the club it was won at.
The best tournament I have played in was run by a man called Gerald out of a plastic box. The box held a draw sheet, a roll of tape, eighty-odd balls of varying age and a biscuit tin of subs collected in coins. Forty-one entries, one day, a final played in the sort of light you only get at eight in the evening in late June, and a supper afterwards cooked in somebody's actual kitchen. Nothing about it was slick. Everybody I have spoken to who was there remembers it.
We have spent about a year working out what Eastwood should do beyond making clothes, and every answer we liked came back to a day like that one. So we are going to run some, starting at home in greater Richmond. They are called popups, which is not a good word, and we have not thought of a better one.
What a popup is
A one-day tournament at your club, run with you rather than at you. We bring the format and the fixtures, print the draw, bring kit for everyone playing, and bring a photographer who will spend most of the day not photographing the tennis. You bring the courts, the members, and whoever it is at your club who knows how the urn works.
A few dozen players. Mixed formats through the day — short-set doubles in the morning with rotating pairs, so that people get four or five matches rather than one and a long wait; a proper draw in the afternoon; and something faintly ridiculous in the middle that gets the juniors and the people who have not played since April onto a court. Food at some point, outdoors if the weather holds. Finished by early evening, because everybody has to get back.
No fee, in either direction. We are not asking clubs to pay for this and we are not paying clubs to host it.
Why this and not the obvious thing
The obvious version — the version a clothing brand is supposed to do — is to sponsor something. Put a name on a tournament that already exists, hand out branded bottles, take the photographs and leave before the food. We have been to those days. They are perfectly pleasant and nobody remembers them by August.
What we keep writing about here is that the match is the least of it. The twenty minutes at the fence beforehand. The argument about a line call from 2019. The four people who actually run the place and are never thanked in any formal way. None of that is a thing you can sponsor. It is a thing you can turn up for.
A club is not a venue. It is a group of people who happen to have some courts.
So the day is built around the parts that are not the match. Short matches, on purpose, so there is more standing about between them. One long table rather than a queue at a hatch. A draw that puts two people who have been members for nine years on the same court for the first time, which happens more often than you would think.
The trophy
There is a trophy, and it stays at the club. It does not travel on to the next one. It goes on the shelf in the bar next to the 1987 team photograph and whatever else has accumulated there, and next spring somebody will look at it and remember the day, or at least remember the weather. If we come back, it gets another name on it. If we do not, it is still yours.
That is the only part of this we are precious about. Everything else is negotiable: the format, the timings, whether the juniors play in the morning or all day, whether the food is a barbecue or somebody's mother's quiche.
Ambassador clubs
Clubs that host become Eastwood ambassador clubs, which sounds considerably grander than it is. It means the kit stays with your members when we have gone. It means a standing discount on anything we make afterwards. It means the photographs from the day are yours, to use for the website nobody has updated since 2021.
And it means we will keep asking your opinion, which is worth more to us than it is to you. Almost everything we know about how tennis clothing actually fails, we learned from people who play three or four times a week at a club with a resurfacing problem and firm views about it.
No exclusivity, nothing to stock, nothing to sign that runs to more than a page.
Where
The first few are in greater Richmond, Virginia — partly because it is where Eastwood started, and partly for the unromantic reason that we can load a car, drive out to Midlothian or Ashland or past Short Pump, run a full day and still be home the same night. Henrico, Chesterfield, both sides of the James. After that it depends who puts their hand up. We are interested in the six-court suburban club with a good clubhouse and a bad kitchen. We are interested in the two-court club at the end of a gravel road where half the balls end up in the trees. Har-Tru, hard, or the one grass court somebody's grandfather laid and the club has argued about ever since — we do not mind, though we will make a fuss about photographing whichever one you have.
What matters more than the courts is whether there is somebody at the club who wants to make it happen: a Gerald, with a box. If that sounds like yours, there is a form at /popups. It asks a little about the courts and rather more about the people.