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A Note from our Book Club Director

By Scott Korb

It’s fair to say it was books that brought me to Tennis City, USA, and it’s likewise true that I brought a great many of them in tow. Bankers boxes filled with them lined the narrow hall of our fifth-floor walk-up for weeks before the move west, where I’d begin work directing the creative writing program that had years earlier hired me to teach. Given all we left behind in NYC when we decamped, though—a convertible couch, our bed and mattress and box spring, an antique dresser roomy enough for both Kate and me, her blue Schwinn out back by the trash, to name just a few sentimental pieces—it was no guarantee that my tennis racquets would have been among the items to make the cross-country, early-Covid trip. The only tennis I was playing back then was across the centerline—no net—of a basketball court in a park alongside my son’s elementary school, or, with him, against the massive edifice of P.S. 40 in the space where the kids at recess would play wallball.

But the racquets did come along with the books, a Wimbledon Eclipse Expert I played with in high school and which I’ve passed on to my son, and a black mid-80s Head Composite Professional that an ex had given me, if memory serves, even as we were breaking up. “Do you want this?” she would have said. I was hardly playing then, but, as the kids say, it was aesthetic. I’ve kept it all these years, and last Christmas there was a matching white model under the tree. Even more aesthetic. That’s the one I use these days when I play.

It feels like chance that, in those early days in Portland, I came back to tennis, a story of homecoming I’ve heard from countless players I’ve encountered on the park courts who welcomed me, and who’ve welcomed you, to play. But, then again, conditions were right, which means that maybe it wasn’t chance at all, that it couldn’t have been any other way.

The Portland Tennis Courterly Book Club, which had its inaugural meeting on January 27th, extends for readers this chance-not-chance experience of play and possibility through books that for some reason—obvious or not—have us thinking about tennis. We began with James P. Carse’s Finite and Infinite Games (1986), whose opening lines capture, for me, the very conditions of play the Courterly, in all its many branches, relies on and celebrates.

There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called finite, the other infinite.

A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.

We invite you to participate in the Courterly’s new Book Club as another way to do what the right conditions have made possible. No one’s trying to win. We just want to keep playing. Join the Club at tenniscourterly.com/book-club, and enjoy these catalog descriptions of various “tennis books,” all of which are contenders for upcoming discussions.

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