“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.

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Ok, I’ll admit it: I don't win tennis matches that often.

See, dear reader, when I take to the court, I'm strictly focused on trying to hit the ball with the grace of a swan. Or a tennis pro. Or both. Why? Because there's no greater feeling than a clean ball strike. The sensation. The sound. The movement of the ball. The dopamine it releases is so potent I should have to pay. It makes me feel like doing a thumbs-up just thinking about it. Yup, just did one. But, because I obsessively hound for this one feeling, the other stuff falls to the wayside. The other stuff is \"winning.\"

I don’t play tennis just so I have a chance to win at something. To me, tennis is an attempt to brush up against an art form I can hardly begin to comprehend; a skillset I'll never acquire, no matter how \"aspiring\" I may be. Don’t you want a small nibble of that revelation, too?

C’mon, allow me to wax poetic for a bit. What other sport utilizes slow-motion replay to such an extent? Watching on TV, they cue it after almost every point. We humans will go to great lengths to examine the heights of athleticism, vaulting these feats into a realm akin to beauty and art. It’s only natural to hold the gaze of something mesmerizing for as long as we can in the vain hope that intangibles are revealed and find purchase in our muscle memory. That's not how it works but, wow, isn’t tennis nice to look at?

So here's my question: As an adult with an adult job and adult responsibilities and adult struggles, why would you play tennis simply for the sake of winning? What exactly will you win? At the end of the day, are you not still an adult stricken with the aforementioned plagues of adulthood? Maybe I just lack the competitiveness needed to be \"a winner,\" and this quasi-spiritual grasping at the lovely intricacies of the game is my roundabout way of dealing with it. It's something I used to worry about. But now? Eh, life is hard enough without losing yourself in the dark art of winning > all else, so who gives a flip? ;)

I recently played a doubles match against an old timer (I lost) who told me afterward that I had a \"youthful\" game. While I may have been a youth to him, to an actual youth, I'm not, so I think what he meant is that I made a shit-ton of unforced errors trying to hit the ball loud as opposed to his method of trying to hit the ball in. Hey, man, you wouldn't tell a painter how to paint, would you?

I'd rather die, or in this case, lose, than sully my practice of this beautiful game. It's my life's WIP masterpiece, even though instead of oil paints, my abilities only allow me to work in crayon.

And therein lies the rub. I'll admit it, Mr. Brad Gilbert, winning is indeed more fun. But in the pursuit of the W, when does tennis cease to be Tennis and become nothing more than a war of ball-pushing attrition? Don't you know in war there are no winners.

That's why, dear readers, it all comes down to this: I guess if I can't bring myself to win ugly, I can still, at the very least, attempt to lose pretty.

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When I came to, my vision was still cloudy from the chemicals that had been sprayed in my face. I tried not to panic. You trust your intuition more than your eyesight, I reminded myself. On the tennis court, I use to hit volleys without looking anywhere near the ball. My immediate preoccupation wasn’t visual. As usual, it was linguistic. I knew I was being held ransom, but I didn’t know what to call the thing I was being held in. While I waited for my vision to return, I reached out with my fingertips and felt for clues. Matofali. The bricks surrounding me were damp, almost clammy, as if they’d been rubbed with something. Instead of meeting at right angles, they curved around in a circle. Slowly, I steadied myself and got to my feet. I craned my head back and, over the course of what felt like several minutes, I detected starlight. There was an opening at the top.

Was I in a shed? A cell? Maybe it was more like a shell? The word shell reminded me of a riddle I learned back when I was an introductory Swahili student: nyumba yangu haina mlango. My house has no door. That’s what I would call it: yai. I was being held inside an egg.

I banged with my fists but the walls of the eggshell refused to crack. I tried shimmying up the shell’s convex sides but they were too slick with albumen. Defeated, I lay down with my back against the packed sand and extended my legs upward. Blood rushed to my head and I thought of the riddle again. In East Africa, riddles were used to educate children and keep them occupied while their mothers cooked dinner. But the egg was also bound up with that terrible Western riddle. Gazing out through the opening, I felt the old conundrum of causality creeping up—the original problem I had hoped to dodge, or defuse, with knowledge gained in Tanzania. What came first, the chicken or the house with no door?

Confusion wasn’t the right word for it. It was more like an anxious inner monologue: A, B, A, B; cause, effect; chicken, egg. English poked and prodded. Every thought split into its constituent components, positive and negative, before and after. Neither side ever won. The score always added up to zero. Swahili provided a sweeter, more sociable soundtrack—but it hadn’t succeeded in drowning out that other voice in my head.

Deep in the night, transfixed by the stars, I recalled an image that had nothing to do with the criminal case that had brought me back to Tanzania on short notice and nothing to do with Swahili. And yet, it had everything to do with learning another way of being. It was a sign posted at the private athletic facility where, decades earlier, I first recognized my intuition on the tennis court. THERE ARE WALLS BEHIND THESE CURTAINS, the sign read. All of a sudden, I was a boy again, staring up at the laminated warning. The words and concepts morphed and inverted. How did I know there weren’t more curtains beyond the hidden walls? And beyond that, more walls covering up another set of curtains? Wall, curtain, wall, curtain—what was real and what wasn’t; how was I supposed to deduce the difference? Stop worrying over that sign, Rock. I heard the comforting voice of Lamont Turner, my old coach, as if he were right beside me. What you ought to worry about is your footwork. The years I’d spent training at Teaneck Tennis Center had never been in direct dialogue with the period of my life when I became a Swahili speaker. The two aspects, formative and transformative, batted the ball back and forth. The rally was long and semi-cooperative, but it was also excruciating. Inside the yai, nothing was separate. English, Swahili, Tennis in an American suburb, a cartel caper that stretched from a jail on the Brooklyn waterfront to bustling Bongoland. I couldn’t keep any of it walled or curtained off from the rest. My mind was a house with no doors.

Faces appeared in the starry sky, as if projected from within me. My former lover, Zuhura, who was there when I’d been taken captive, and who I hoped was searching for me now. My client back in America, Feruzi Fahari, who radiated pride even from within his roomy prison jumpsuit. And from a much earlier chapter, connected to the storyline at a level deeper than language: Lamont Tuner, Tennis Professional.

A lone gull overhead interrupted my reverie and signaled it was almost morning. Seagulls first came to the Coast Region on German ships, like stowaways. Of Fahari and I, neither of us were stowaways, but we both went looking for something we lacked. Msafiri, traveler. Swap the “s” and the “f” and it becomes mfasiri, translator. Travelers across oceans and continents. Travelers across taps of the tongue and gulps of the glottis. My mind roamed and rearranged, right up until the arrival of the mosquitoes.

I had to get a hold of whoever my captor was. I had to break out of the egg. I’d seen men in this part of the world scale coconut trees that were nearly vertical. I tried climbing, but the bricks were too slippery for me to get any traction. “Unisaidie!” I screamed, but my throat was too dry for sound to project. The mosquitoes swarmed in on me. I crouched down, buried my face in the sand, and covered the back of my neck with my hands. How far away was my jailer? What were my captors demanding in exchange for my release? A snake slithered across the back of my eyelids. An eagle swooped down and clawed at the gash on the top of my head. My brain felt like an overripe jackfruit, festering and about to burst.

Sleep, if you can call it that, came just before sunrise. After the buzzing abated but before the blazing began.

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Spring 2024

Big Willie Style

Losing Pretty

Excerpt from an International Crime Novel with a Tennis Subplot