Three Surfaces in Nine Days
Clay, grass and hard inside one fortnight, at roughly the same standard, producing three completely different games. Notes on what each one asks for.
Between the last week of June and the first week of July I played on all three surfaces. This was not a project. It was a consequence of a friend's membership, a family thing in Sussex, and a council court I could book on my phone for nine pounds. Nine days, three surfaces, the same mediocre standard of tennis throughout, and three games with almost nothing in common.
Clay, Tuesday
Red clay is the only surface that keeps a record. Every ball leaves a mark and every slide leaves a smear, and by the end of a set you can read the whole match off the court like bad handwriting. What it mostly says is that you have been standing too far forward.
It takes about forty minutes to stop trying to hit through it. Clay absorbs pace and hands back height; the ball arrives slower and further up your strike zone than your arms are expecting, and until you accept this you spend a set hitting technically excellent shots into the middle of the net.
What it asks for is patience, which everybody says, and which sounds like a virtue right up until you are doing it. In practice patience means hitting the same cross-court forehand eleven times and not becoming curious about whether the twelfth could be a winner. It isn't calm. It is a form of managed irritation.
I lost 6–4, 6–1 to a man who did nothing whatsoever except not miss. He was, I learned afterwards, sixty-eight.
Grass, the following Sunday
The Sussex court had been cut that morning and was, at the baseline, more soil than grass — the correct state for a private grass court in July, and something nobody there felt any need to apologise for.
Grass rewards deciding early. The ball stays low and skids on and gives you appreciably less time than you would like, but it is a consistent kind of less, and after a few games you notice you have started moving forward without having decided to, because the alternative is playing every ball off your shoelaces.
It also punishes vanity. The heavy topspin forehand that works on clay simply sits up on grass and gets put away. Slice — which I had spent a decade filing under what you do when you can't — turns out to be the right shot about forty per cent of the time.
And it is slippery in ways you cannot see coming. I went over once, entirely without drama, in the manner of a man stepping off a kerb he hadn't noticed was there.
Hard, the Wednesday after
A council court, blue over green, with a net a couple of inches low and a crack running diagonally across the deuce court that we agreed to play as a let if it caught. Nine pounds, no membership, no conversation with anybody.
The hard court asks for nothing, which is both its quality and its problem. The bounce is true, the pace is whatever you put on it, and there is no negotiation with the surface at all — which means the only remaining variable is you. Everything that happens on a hard court is your fault. Clay lets you blame the bounce. Grass lets you blame the lawn.
It is also the one that hurts. Two sets on hard cost me more the following morning than three on clay had, and it wasn't close. Everyone has known this for years. The tour keeps scheduling on it and the rest of us keep playing on it, because it is what the council laid down in 1978 and has never had the money to replace.
The honest conclusion after nine days is that the surface changes the game more than any piece of equipment ever has, and that almost none of us get any say in it. You play what is near you. If you learned on hard courts you probably hit flat, stand on the baseline and find clay tedious. If you learned on clay you probably think everybody else is in a hurry.
The other conclusion is that the version of me that plays on grass is a better tennis player than the version that plays on clay, and that this tells you nothing at all about tennis. It tells you that I ran out of patience in the fourth game.