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Don’t call it a comeback–Portland Athletic Club, or “PAC,” has been here for years. Marion Blackburn founded the business in 1977. He was then, as he is now, the only proprietor of a single-owner, Black-owned tennis facility in the Pacific Northwest. PAC is currently under the general management of Marion Blackburn’s daughter, Nikki Blackburn-Orr. She works closely with the club’s Director of Tennis Programs, Laura Conway, who is the daughter of Portland soccer legend Jimmy Conway. In many senses, PAC is a bastion of continuity. But following the club’s recent court resurfacing, recruitment of new pros, and renewed emphasis on youth tennis, PAC is also boldly entering a new era.

Longtime PAC pro Jack Neer (Neer is yet another Oregon sports icon) remembers a color change to PAC’s courts sometime in the 1980s. But this past summer marked PAC’s first proper resurfacing since the club opened its doors nearly five decades ago. Back then, it wasn’t called PAC. The club was originally called Tennis Town. The name later changed to Raleigh Hills Racquet and Health Club before settling on Portland Athletic Club—a better fit, as Raleigh Hills doesn’t technically begin for another half mile down the road.

The resurfacing took place in mid-July, at the same time as the resurfacing at Irving Park. While that’s a coincidence, PAC and Irving Park were both known for having some of the fastest courts in town, and for being focal points of local African-American tennis culture. Following the resurfacing, PAC’s five courts—bluish purple with white lines, and a vibrant green between them—have remarkable visibility. The new surface, which is Har-Tru, is notably slower. But it’s also “perkier” and “the ball sits up better,” in the words of Conway, who was previously with Oregon Youth Soccer Association and Tualatin Hills Park & Recreation District. The new surface has undeniably better traction. Courterly correspondents have investigated the new surface personally, and found that it lends itself to lengthy rallies and slowly sliding balls that might not have been reachable before.

The courts at PAC were actually slotted to be resurfaced several years ago. When the COVID-19 pandemic began in early 2020, Marion Blackburn delayed the costly project; he used the money he’d set aside to pay his employees instead. Following the pandemic, PAC got three different bids for the resurfacing job, and ended up going with the local chapter of a national company called Beynon Sports. Though the estimate for the job was twelve to fourteen days, it took three and half weeks. In order to resurface five courts, and fill in the 3 ½’’ dip between Courts 2 and 3, 40,000 lbs of sand were brought in, along with 40,000 lbs of urethane. The courts now slope up ever so slightly from the lobby, which features couches and chairs in a viewing gallery, as well as a long “homework table” where kids can be found after school and in the evenings. Entering the courts, players step onto a gently raised plateau. All in all, the project cost $100,000. Half of that came from a USTA grant, but only after the USTA was satisfied that the courts would contain a full 18’ of backcourt between the baselines and curtains. Before the resurfacing, PAC’s backcourts were 16' 4’’ (To be eligible for grant funding, the USTA also requires 12’ of space between courts).

Notably, there is no pickleball at PAC. But Courts 3, 4, and 5 have blended lines for kids and juniors. In conjunction with the resurfacing, PAC has recommitted to robust youth programming. They run a huge junior academy that attracts over 200 players—the biggest program of its kind in the area, according to Conway. PAC also hosts an off-season league for high schoolers, in which over 60 kids come twice per week: once a week to train and once for matches. All of PAC’s various youth programs are affordable and accessible. With the recent addition of top Portland-area pro Lew De Leon, youth tennis at PAC is set to skyrocket to a whole other level.

***

While there is much to celebrate at Portland Athletic Club, the recent developments are undeniably bittersweet. Due to health reasons, Marion Blackburn is no longer involved in day-to-day operations. And his son, Anthony Blackburn, the club’s long-time head pro who touched the lives of hundreds if not thousands of Portland-area tennis players, retired from teaching in 2023, also for health reasons.

Most people speeding past the 5800 block of the Beaverton Hillsdale Highway likely have no idea of all the tennis and cultural history that lives on inside the club. If they glance down the driveway into PAC at all, they see a sunken parking lot. You have to look off to the side to notice the covered courts. And you have to look inside the building to get a sense of the business’s fuller story. When Marion Blackburn—who is originally from Huntsville, Alabama—moved to Portland in the 1960s, he was initially denied membership by the Irvington Club, even though he was a high-level player who lived nearby. It was only after the protests of Jack Neer, who was a pro at Irvington at the time, that Blackburn was admitted. When Blackburn decided to open his own tennis teaching business, he strung up nets in a concrete-floor, low-ceilinged warehouse on Macadam Avenue. Clients came by the dozen, but only to depart for fancier facilities after sharpening their skills. That venture, called Tennis Lessons Inc., was the predecessor to Tennis Town, which Blackburn built from the ground up.

PAC is currently in the process of putting together new USTA teams. And there may be some PAC tournaments on the horizon, as well. With the new chapter of PAC now officially begun, the club would also like to get more younger adults in the door. It’s the only private club in the area where you can literally “come in off the street,” Conway emphasized, and pay a modest guest fee to hit on an available court. PAC is waiting for you with the open arms of a multigenerational family business. Come see what this one-of-a-kind tennis facility is all about.

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Sung to the tune of The Go-Go’s “We Got the Beat” chorus:

I got the pop
I got the pop
I got the pop
Yeah, I got the pop!

After months and months of playing with an off-the-rack aluminum stick with sad strings, I finally got a proper racquet so I could thwack red balls the size of grapefruits and hear a fat thump that’s somewhere in between the proper sweet-spot pop and the soft thud of a wool ball tumbling in a dryer. Green dots followed. Now, by the miracle of YouTube tutorials, I can sporadically hit a forehand with just enough whip and velocity to crack a clean pop from a regular Penn 4 or whatever. This may not seem a big deal for all of you rec players born with sweatbands on your wrists, but I’m the non-active type who took a walking class to earn required credits in my community college days forever ago.

It’s been more than a year since I stepped onto the cracked asphalt at the Essex Park courts for the first time—not one athletic bone in my flat-footed body—and I’ve since spent tens of hours flailing around our beautiful city’s public courts. I’ve hit in the shade of the towering firs at Mt. Scott; next to the porta potty at Woodstock Park; at the pristine Alex Rovello Memorial court; in the dark at Clinton City Park; at the Sellwood Park courts that had once been illegally converted to pickleball courts. I’ve taken lessons at Mt. Tabor, both west and east courts; admired the lush weeds sprouting from the base of the nets at Kenilworth Park; heard the roar of the Pickle’s crowd at Walker Stadium in Lents Park. Once, I tried to play at Colonel Sumner, but I was in a bad mood and there were three people waiting ahead of me so I stomped off like a cranky tennis Karen. Between classes, drills, and sweating like a maniac swatting at a ball machine by myself, I’ve spent the most time at PTC hitting out of bounds or into the net.

What have I got to show for all this time spent acquiring a repetitive stress injury sending me to the physical therapist? Let’s put it this way: Can I rally for more than a minute if my life depended on it? I prefer to be cremated. How’s my serve? Ha! What about tennis-induced negative self talk? Excellent. No coaching needed for this. I am a writer, after all, so I’ve been living with mental anguish like it’s a chronic condition without a salve.

And, yet, I persist, one split step at a time. Driven by some inexplicable desire to imperceptibly improve at something that doesn’t really matter, I keep buying shorts with big pockets. Maybe, just maybe, another year from now I’ll have a serve and you can hear me singing, to the tune of Neil Diamond’s “Sweet Caroline”: First serve of mine, bum bum bum, good times never seemed so good.

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Perhaps the most remarkable fact about the First-Annual Chapman Cup—what we called a mini-major, a hard-court/grass-court genderless doubles competition, hosted in Portland the final weekend of 2024’s summer—is that the origins of the tournament remain a mystery even to its head organizers. I was one of those organizers, and for the life of me—and likewise for the life of PTQ’s editor, Tyler, my co-organizer—we can’t, with any exactitude, recall whose idea a tournament even was, though the choice of venue, those broken-down, cracked-up, weedy old courts in Wallace Park, behind Chapman Elementary School in the Northwest District, would have been mine.

When my family moved to Portland’s west side in 2020, my son enrolled in Chapman, and these were the first courts he and I played on in what this newsletter proudly calls “Tennis City, USA.” We hoisted a banner that said this, too—including the scare quotes—for the tournament weekend.

The other idea that would have been mine was to host the tournament to align with the seasonal roosting of the Vaux’s swifts, who each year, numbering in the thousands, spend evenings at summer’s end circling the elementary school before spiraling down for the night into Chapman’s tall brick chimney. Around dusk through these weeks, sizable crowds of people gather on the hill overlooking Chapman’s turf soccer pitch, cheering on those birds, booing the crow who each night snags a swift from the air, and my idea was that the end of our tournament days would surprise those Swifties with another form of natural beauty in the shape of serves and volleys, a gorgeous lob, maybe even a tweener, some hopeful human life on courts that have fallen into disrepair, in a city many bemoan has likewise fallen. I’ve only ever known Portland with much of its downtown vacant and obviously mismanaging humanitarian crises in housing, mental health, and drug use; but it’s nevertheless become our home over the past years, and those we see in crisis we see as our neighbors, and most of the problems the city faces are hardly unique to this place, and there’s life here—plant, animal, human, tennis—that gives me hope despite the times.

It was the summer of 2021 when I first stumbled into the players we figured would come out for the Chapman Cup, news I reported to a New York friend back when I found them: “There’s this group of people I’ve been playing tennis with. It’s possible people organize to play tennis this

way all over the place, though in all my life playing I’ve never experienced it: it’s a group of people aged mid-twenties through mid-seventies, who all meet at the same court on Portland’s east side every day, and it’s highly competitive, in that everyone plays hard, but not at all competitive, in that no one’s really out there to ‘WIN,’ if you take my point. From all walks of life, as diverse a group as I’ve seen here, or often in NYC, honestly. They rotate in and out, sometimes playing a set of tennis, mostly just playing around. Hitting HARD.” After that summer, what felt like an important return to tennis after probably a decade away—a common story among those I’ve met in Portland—I hadn’t returned to the east side to play, mainly hitting with my son in our own neighborhood. But Tyler played there, and when we decided to meet to begin planning for the tournament—a meeting I organized over Instagram, drawn first to the newsletter’s profile through a story in Willamette Week—I made a return, the courts were newly surfaced, and the doubles match I encountered that morning—Tyler and Jay vs. Benson and Logan—was just what I’d seen a few years earlier: highly competitive but not at all competitive. I’m not sure anymore who won.

There’s a scrap of notebook paper I have, something of Tyler’s, that tells a partial story of that first, or another, meeting (I can’t be sure). Among other things, these scribbles provide evidence of our earliest hope that we might draw enough players to create two brackets: “A & B levels,” Tyler wrote, even correctly anticipating the need for a “waitlist.” (All told, more than 64 players registered, and 32 teams played 30 official matches and as many consolation sets as we could fit in.) First in a list of several discarded ideas, including men’s and women’s singles draws, is the proposal for a “tug of war.” He hadn’t yet gotten the idea for the speed-serve competition, which we held—at our whims—between matches, and judged with a radar gun.

The top of this scrap contains the cryptic phrase “Holistically throughout the year,” an idea that wouldn’t have meant anything to me in the moment, but which I now know describes a hope that the Chapman Cup might be just one of a number of other events and activities that PTQ organizes, or covers, or promotes, within the greater tennis ecosystem, across seasons and surfaces, indoor and out. For our part, we’ve talked about moving the tournament back a week or two next year, since by the opening night of the tournament only a handful of Vaux’s swifts were still taking refuge in Chapman’s chimney.

Maybe we’ll host a mid-summer tournament, too. Jay suggested a concert alongside the tennis. Tyler decided not to play the First-Annual Chapman Cup, but I won a first-round B-bracket match with Bo, my original partner, and then when illness struck him overnight, Bo stepped out and I won a second-round match with Fraser. We then lost a tight semi. And, so the actual results aren’t lost to history, I’ll end with those (though I can’t for the life of me recall the scores): Rachel and Kate beat Craig and Greg to win the B bracket. Nick and Molly defeated Will and Jake in the A-bracket final. Benson hit the fastest serve at 98 miles per hour. And though the swifts were no-shows, we’ve got photographic evidence of at least one tweener.

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