This story originally printed in the Fall 2025 (Brown) Issue of the Portland Tennis Courterly
We All Hoisted the Chapman Cup
By Scott Korb
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.