This story originally printed in the Spring 2024 (Carnation) Issue of the Portland Tennis Courterly
Big Willie Style by Tyler Pell
“Willie leaves these behind the backboard for us when we need to use ‘em,” my new hitting partner, Harrison, explains.
Harrison walks toward the backboard at Colonel Summers Park and his right arm disappears behind the big green wall.
“Willie?” I wonder, as Harrison withdraws a hand holding two push brooms.
“You don’t know Willie? Older guy with a long white beard? He rides around town on an old mountain bike?”
I try to put the breaks on my mind conjuring an image of a roving, tennis-court-maintaining Santa Clause, but to no avail.
***
That Portland’s public needs help maintaining its outdoor tennis courts isn't much of a surprise to people who play on them. A 2021 study by Portland Parks & Recreation found that only thirty of the city's 103 total outdoor tennis courts provide the bare minimum of a “surface with conditions that are safe and enjoyable.” The majority of them are in Southwest Portland.
According to KGW, Parks & Rec has a 615 million dollar backlog of deferred maintenance projects. Parks and Trails Planning Manager Brett Horner lamented the sad state of the city's outdoor tennis courts while also acknowledging his department can't do much about the crumbling infrastructure.
“We do have some maintenance money that we can use,” Horner explained, “but we only get a few million dollars a year. Most of it ends up going to emergencies or park roofs that need to be redone—you know, more safety-related things.”
For some Portlanders who rely on public parks for their intrinsic social, recreational and environmental benefit, the no man’s land between emergency maintenance and deferred maintenance presents, if nothing else, opportunity.
After Harrison put me on to Willie’s guerilla stewardship, I started seeing evidence of his handiwork all around Portland. Most of the east side’s popular tennis courts bear at least one of his trademark improvements.
My favorite repair in his repertoire is his repurposing of long, narrow scraps of wood to fill in gaps at the bottom of chain link fences that surround courts. Chainlink, as it ages, curls up at the bottom, leaving just enough space for a tennis ball to roll under, making their retrieval a pain—sometimes impossible. Willie has endeared himself to users of outdoor tennis courts all over Portland with these kinds of creative but common-sense solutions.
I decided I needed to track him down. I asked Ben Doan, a local pro and former manager of Players Racquet Shop on NE Sandy Blvd., about connecting with Willie on the telephone and he laughed. “Willie doesn’t have a phone.” No email address, either. But Willie is far from off the grid, I learned. He lives on a busy commercial strip, above an old typewriter repair shop. But proximity to the printed word doesn't make him easy to communicate with, especially not remotely. If you want to talk to Willie, your only option is face to face.
When I finally met him, it was on his turf, last September at Laurelhurst Park.
***
“Willie?” I ask, leadingly, through the chain link fence. He nods. I told him I’d been trying to track him down.
“I know,” he said.
He told me he had just finished sweeping up some broken glass. He was reticent, at first—not at all interested in expounding on his pro bono maintenance and custodial work. But he was eager to show off his new racquet: a red, ceramic Dunlop from the 1980s that he unsheathed from a bag atop his tricked out three-speed Huffy beach cruiser that doubles as his tool chest.
Willie has long gray hair pulled back in a ponytail, and, as Harrison previewed, a white beard. He is dressed in loose-fitting jeans and running shoes, with his Timex safety pinned to his blue oxford shirt. I notice his shirt has a few patches on it. Some of the patches seem like mending work, others—the peace sign—like creative flourishes.
Many of Willie’s improvements are so subtle that they’re invisible to those who don’t directly reap their benefits. As we walked around the courts Willie had just swept, he groaned over the removal of one of his recent installations: “I put hooks up so people could hang their stuff from the fence. They were all over the court.” He described something that looked like old metal coat racks that could hold six to eight hooks each. “Not only did they”—city maintenance crews, I intuited—“take the racks, but they took down all the little hooks.”
Willie shows me one of his repairs. “If you notice the benches here, both the welds broke on both these ends, and it was all falling down.” Willie used old shoe string and metal wire to repair the broken welds.
While we're talking, a handful of tennis players trickle onto the courts. Each of them says hello to Willie as they enter. A few are there to hit with Willie, actually—as they do every Friday morning, weather permitting.
Before I leave Laurelhurst that day I’m able to meet a few people in Willie’s tennis circle who don’t share Willie’s aversions to telephones.
One of his hitting partners, Craig, lives near the park and has been playing tennis with Willie for years. “This is why I will always say, ‘never judge a book by its cover,’” he told me a few days later. “Not in a million years, looking at Willie, would I think that he’s about to play tennis. He doesn't have that tennis attire, the tennis look.”
Most people who play tennis with any kind of proficiency are products of expensive lessons from pros at private clubs. But the more you hang around public tennis courts, you learn that is far from the only story.
***
Willie grew up in San Francisco’s Mission District. He spent most of his free time playing sports: the “big three” of football, basketball, and baseball, mostly. When Willie and his friends visited the neighborhood tennis courts, it was only to retrieve the abandoned balls they would bring back home for games of stoopball: chuck a ball off the steps of an apartment building and then chase after the rebound.
Some of his family members played a bit of tennis. An uncle who was training to be a priest played tennis in seminary. “I never played with them,” Willie explained. “But just knowing that they played opened me up to the game.”
Willie learned how to mend and repair by “helping the old man fix his car.” He broadened and deepened his skillset as a young man, most profoundly when he lived on a 163-acre commune in Tennessee. “It was a basic, back-to-the-woods kind of project.”
Not until the 1990s, while Willie was living in Fremont, California, did he finally catch the tennis bug. He played on the city’s public courts—constantly, almost religiously. First he just hit against backboards; eventually, he built a network of people with whom he played against and honed his game.
When he arrived in Portland, about fifteen ago, he began applying the skills and the ethos he’d developed over his lifetime to the city’s public courts. For Willie, to love something is to work to improve it.
***
I meet Willie at a bar where he likes to watch tennis. He doesn’t work at the bar but he looks after its sprawling dining room, clearing tables, pushing in chairs, and helping to tidy up while he watches whatever sports are on. The bar’s owner has entrusted Willie with the remote control and he adjusts the sound on whichever screen has the most action.
As we split-screened the Miami Open and women’s college basketball, Willie’s awareness for all things tennis came more into focus. He has real affection for particular oddities of Portland’s tennis court inventory, like the older net-post crank mechanism at the Lair Hill courts, and the pristine surface at the Berkeley Park’s Alex Rovello Memorial Tennis Courts. He also likes to dream, asking me at one point: “Do you ever think about pooling money together to buy some land in town to build a huge geodesic tennis dome?”
***
Ben Doan, the local pro who warned me it wouldn’t be easy to track Willie down, is a product of a more organized public tennis program. He grew up in an underserved section of Ft. Wayne, Indiana, and bemoans the opportunities lost to Portland’s crumbling public tennis infrastructure: “I wouldn't be a tennis player, or coach, or industry professional to any extent if it weren't for parks programming.” Doan didn’t begin playing until he was a teenager. He was introduced to tennis through a program in Ft. Wayne called Lifetime Sports, which offered free tennis, golf, and swimming lessons in public parks during the summer.
When he was the head boys coach at Franklin High School, from 2019 to 2021, a foot-sized hole in one of the courts at Clinton Park often interrupted practice. “Parks programming can be so powerful,” Doan described, “but if you’re not allocating resources to support programs then those opportunities don't mean as much. Most courts in Portland are completely unplayable.”
Franklin’s boys team has since moved their practices to Mt. Tabor—another park that Willie has unofficially adopted—but the team hasn’t been able to outrun issues with Portland’s playing surfaces.
At one of Franklin’s first practices of the season, Willie was there with his hoe, digging a shallow ditch into the hillside above the courts so that spring water would stop seeping onto the baseline. He dropped a handful of seeds as he dug to foster the growth vegetation to help absorb water. This was a big job and a job that truly needed doing—not some minor, whimsical fix. Last year, Willie paid a houseless person out of his own pocket to help divert water away from the courts. This year, he did it by himself.
While Willie’s generosity and altruistism make for a good character study, he can’t be expected to make up for the shortfall in Parks & Rec’s maintenance budget. Even if Portland had multiple Willies, a few individuals’ time, energy and good intentions aren't enough to overcome system-wide shortcomings. As for ordinary players, and the city’s future Ben Doans who don’t even know yet that they have a talent for learning and then teaching high-level tennis? They can keep sweeping off leaves and broken glass with the brooms Willie stashes around town, but a healthy public tennis ecosystem shouldn’t have to depend on enigmatic benevolence. It takes a functioning city government to keep court surfaces in good-enough condition that they are worth sweeping off in the first place.