The ITF needs to do something to help the volley because, at the moment, it has died. The attacker has no chance. Pat Rafter or me, at our best, would get smashed out there. The balls they use here are soft and they fluff up after three games. After a few games it’s almost impossible to hit a volley for a winner. They should just take the US Open ball – end of problem and it would be a much fairer tournament. It’s almost impossible for the volleyer to exist in the game of tennis. Something has to change. You can’t have a slow court and slow ball, coupled with the string technology which means the ball is coming off the strings quicker and with more spin. The rallies are going longer, there’s more injuries because of the longer rallies and nobody has done anything about it. You see all the injuries that the guys and also the women are suffering on hardcourt as a result of that. There’s three issues that we’ve seen develop in tennis that’s restricted the volley and therefore the variety of the game. One’s the strings, another is the pace of the court and the other is the ball. The US Open have a fastcourt, similar to here, but with a faster ball. They also have a women’s ball and a men’s ball. The men’s ball is slower than the women’s which is quite often why you see Venus Williams serving almost as fast as the men. But the men’s ball at the US Open is significantly faster than here. To me, the way to fix it is obvious – just take the US Open ball.
Pat Cash
Tag: tennis (page 1 of 1)
Image: the Evonne Goolagong tennis wall in Barellan, Australia
My relationship with tennis was electrified by a three year stint our family undertook in a small town in New South Wales in which only four hundred people lived, but one of whose most famous citizens was the Wimbledon champion Evonne Goolagong.
At that age I was unaware of the situation in which Australia’s indigenous peoples found themselves, a mere two hundred years since the invasion of the Wiradjuri peoples’ western plains and grasslands. I was myself an agent of a white bread, monolithic culture.
Typically enough however, like most Australians, despite having no respect for or understanding of indigenous culture, I was happy to claim Goolagong as one of us. At the end of each training session, we would diligently drag the long strip of carpet across the court’s surface, erasing our footprints as we had erased those of they who had walked this earth before us.
Friday afternoon was the time for the young kids to train, with coaches stretched across all four courts. In the final moments of training we’d indulge in a game we called community (but probably goes by other names elsewhere), and which involved every kid crowding onto one court and engaging in a process of elimination.
Each player who committed an error would be forced off the court until only two players were left ‘standing’, with all the other players surrounding the court and cheering on proceedings.
This brings me to the fundamentally connected nature of people and of words. Books are like elaborate games of community tennis (or perhaps, now that we’re a bit older, beer tennis) in which the game is trying to find a single winning poem, knowing also that the beauty of these compilations and collections is that the weak sit alongside the strong, the young and the old coalesce, the short and the long, poems that would probably not talk to each other in any other setting.
These are poem communities.
In these kinds of games of community (and yes, I am toying with ideas here, seeking an in, a connection), there is no real need for a winner. The winner, as we are always told, is tennis itself.
When I speak of books as coherent communities here, I do not mean in the conventional sense of ‘oh, what a disparate, quirky and fascinating bunch of individuals whose work has been assembled here’. Despite having been included myself in several anthologies, I am not interested in the biographical components of these books.
I am interested in these books as communities of poems, not poets. It is only in this distinction that I can bridge the gap between the poem and the solo poet.
Now, back to that nagging problem of invasion.