by John Fox
“Not to worry,” she said. “When they get out of that alley, you’ll bloody well hear about it.” I ordered another shot, which she poured into a plastic cup with a wink.
Taking the cue, I climbed back over the barricade and headed up the street with my new layer of insulation in hand. From the position of the crowd, I clearly hadn’t missed a thing, though there was some stirring up ahead. Minutes later a guttural roar went up as the pack shot out of the alley like a cork fired from a champagne bottle. They broke toward the harbor. The Doonies were on the go again! My heart raced as I bounded toward the water with the crowd behind the ba’. Was it going all the way?
We caught up to the pack on Harbour Street, just a hundred feet now from the water’s edge. Small fishing boats bobbed in the choppy surf nearby. A fierce battle was on against the windows of St. Olaf’s, where we’d just been drinking.
The chants began, “Doonies! Doonies! Doonies!” An upset was in the air and the Uppie supporters confirmed it with their silence. For another 30 minutes or so, the pack thrashed about the waterfront. A boy was thrown hard to the sidewalk and the medics stepped in. The Uppies weren’t going down without a proper fight.
Then it happened. The final break, by a fellow named David Johnstone. Not, it turns out, our man Davie who threw in the ba’. And not the legendary David Johnstone who years earlier had his glass eye turned backward in the heat of a ba’ contest. But yet another David Johnstone. He was on his knees in the crush of the scrum, I learned later, with the ba’ in his hands when a gap appeared portside. He reached out and threw it hard. That’s when I spotted it, sailing above the heads of the crowd and clearing the iron rails at the harbor wall, where it splashed into the waters of Kirkwall Bay.
A cheer went up from the crowd as four Doonie men dove into the black, icy waters after the prize. There, by the water’s edge, was an ecstatic Graeme calling to his younger teammates, “If you’re claiming it, get in there!” The Doonies had won the ba’ and broken their long drought. Now the battle was on to see who would take home the “sacred orb.” I pushed my way through the crowd and peered over the harbor railings. In the dark, I could make out traces of four or more players tussling in the water as each tried to climb up the seaweed-covered ladder with the trophy. The ba’ finally made its way up to the street and through the crowd with several men grappling for it the whole time.
“Norman’s ba’!” called out a young woman in the crowd. “Ronald’s ba’!” cried another. Other voices joined in, offering the names of other players who they felt deserved the honor.
As Davie had explained to me two nights earlier, the winner of the ba’ isn’t simply the player who ends up with it, or even the one who fought the hardest that day. Just as you can’t choose to be Uppie or Doonie, you can’t expect to have a lucky day and walk away with the prize of a lifetime. The winner is the man who’s showed up year after year in the hail and the ice, who’s had more ribs broken in the thick of the scrum than he can count, who’s given up his Christmas Days and New Year’s Days year after year for the love of this crazy game. As Davie had enacted the real-time negotiations for me as they were playing out among the Doonies at that moment, “Did he play in other ba’s? Did he help out his teammates? Did he ever miss a ba’? What was his attitude when he was losing?” Within five minutes, every part of your past will be dredged up on the spot.
Finally, after nearly an hour of heated debate and scuffling, one man was hoisted above the mob with the ba’ over his head. Forty-seven-year-old veteran Rodney Spence had won the honor. After five hours of play, the ba’ would go home with him, along with 300 or so players and spectators for whom he’d have to host a raucous all-night party. Rodney would, for the rest of his life, have on his fireplace mantel the greatest prize any Orkney man could ever hope for. The Doonies would hold their heads high in town once again and would enjoy bragging rights for at least another 51 weeks. And the fishing, quite possibly, would be the best it’s been for years.
Chapter Three
Advantage, King
To see Good Tennis! What diviner joy
Can fill our leisure, or our minds employ?
. . . Let other people play at other things;
The King of Games is still the Game of Kings.
J. K. Stephen, “Parker’s Piece,” 1891
Sometime around AD 1220 a German monk named Caesarius wrote down a fabulous tale. It seems a few years earlier a young Parisian monk-in-training—known as something of an “idiot” by his peers—was approached by the Devil with the temptation of a magic stone. “As long as you hold this in your hand,” offered the Devil, “you will know everything.” Your classic Faustian bargain.
The young idiot became an instant scholar but was then quickly gripped by a mysterious illness and gave up the ghost. The young man’s soul was snatched by demons and hauled off to hell. There, against a ghoulish backdrop of sulfurous vapors, the demons split into two teams and proceeded to knock the young man back and forth. “And those standing at the one end hit the poor soul after the fashion of the game at ball, and those at the other end caught it in midair with their hands,” which of course had claws as sharp as iron nails.
Though it might stretch the modern imagination to connect this devils’ pastime to a classic Federer-Nadal showdown, this medieval account is believed to be the first printed reference to the game we now know as tennis.
Appearing first in the north of France in the 12th century, the earliest form of tennis was known as jeu de paume, the “game played with the palm of the hand.” Noticeably absent from the demons’ bout or from other early accounts is any sign of a racket or a net, what most would consider the two hallmark features of the sport. In fact, over a period of some 300 years, most of the rules and scoring methods still used in the modern game would develop before anyone thought to string catgut through a wooden frame or stretch a net across the court.
It’s no great surprise that the first account of tennis would come from a monk, given the dominant role of the Roman Catholic Church in daily medieval life. Ball games of all kinds were played on Easter and other feast days and, like most activities, were tightly controlled by the clergy to ensure that no sins were committed in the course of having fun. But unlike football, which was played by commoners among the open fields and narrow lanes of medieval villages, tennis began within the confines of cloisters, the inner courtyards of medieval monasteries. More often than not, the most avid players were the monks and abbots who lived there, as many an ecclesiastical account confirms. “On Easter Day, after dinner,” a report from 13th-century France recounts, “the Canon of St. Cyr, at Nevers, joined with the Bishops in believing that their dignity would not suffer by a little volleying of a tennis ball.”
What would later become known to the world as the sport of kings got its start, strangely enough, as the sport of priests.
Some 800 or so years after inventing the game of tennis, the French remain as passionate about the game as they ever were. Each May and June, thousands of fans pack themselves into Roland Garros Stadium in Paris to watch the greatest players test their mettle on its clay courts at the French Open. But I hadn’t traveled all the way to France to learn about lawn tennis, a relatively recent variation devised and patented in 1874 by Major Walter Wingfield, a society Welshman looking for new ways to amuse his garden party guests.
Instead, I went to France to watch and play jeu de paume, an obscure, challenging, and stubbornly traditional sport that has changed little in more than 400 years.
Jeu de paume is played indoors on a large enclosed court that, even to the uninitiated, bears a striking resemblance to the medieval cloisters of its ancestors, complete with sloping penthouse roofs, open galleries, and other features with monastic origins. An intentionally sagging net divides the court in half, the net and the racket having been introduced in the 16th century.
At the game’s peak there were, according to one French source, “more tennis players in Paris than drunkards in
England.” A Venetian ambassador of the time remarked famously that “the French are born with rackets in their hands.” In 1596 there were 250 jeu de paume courts in Paris alone that were said to have employed some 7,000 people. Today, there are just 47 courts left in the world and only three are to be found in France. History, it seems, has been kinder to English drunks than to French jeu de paume players.
I began my journey on a train packed with tourists and weekenders bound for Fontainebleau, located 35 miles south of Paris. The town of 16,000 is surrounded by the Fontainebleau Forest, a dramatic woodland more than three times the size of Manhattan that once served as the favored hunting grounds of the French kings. My fellow travelers sported backpacks and climbing gear, no doubt on their way to enjoy a day of bouldering among the forest’s famous outcrops. I stood out from the crowd in my sneakers and tennis whites, clearly bound for more civilized pursuits. I was headed for the palace grounds of the Château de Fontainebleau, site of the oldest tennis court in France and one of the oldest in the world.
A spring drizzle welcomed me. In the empty town square, an antique merry-go-round carried a lone, glum child dressed in a furry bunny suit. I could tell it was going to be an interesting day.
The chateau, together with its gardens, ornamental lakes, fountains, and endless winding pathways, is a sprawling monument to royal excess. Little more than a country cousin to the sophisticated splendor of Versailles, it nevertheless dwarfs the modern town that’s grown up like a collection of caretaker cottages around it. I entered the chateau grounds through the grand Court of the White Horse and walked along the long cobbled pathway that leads to the chateau’s main entrance. Straight ahead was the double-horseshoe staircase where in 1814 Napoleon bade farewell to the Old Guard and went into exile on the island of Elba.
To the left of the staircase I spotted what I’d come for. A small wooden sign, painted with a gold tennis racket, hung over an old gray door, the only indication that inside was the royal tennis court of King Henry IV.
I pushed open the creaky wooden door and walked up several monolithic stairs, my footsteps echoing in the hall. In a tiny side office that also serves as the court’s pro shop, bathroom, and changing room, I encountered Matthew Ronaldson, Fontainebleau’s club pro. Matty is a good-natured young Englishman of 27 with blond hair and an unabashed, near-reckless love for jeu de paume, or what he and his countrymen call “real tennis” (in the United States it’s called court tennis and in Australia royal tennis). When I caught up with him, he was hunched over a wooden workbench with a basket of balls at his feet, a ripped-open ball in one hand, and a needle and thread in the other. “Have a seat. If you don’t mind, can I keep sewing while we talk? I’ve got a backlog of balls to catch up on.”
The sorry state of jeu de paume in its home country is well illustrated by the fact that the club pros at the only three courts remaining in France are English.
Matty comes from the closest thing the sport of real tennis has to a ruling dynasty. His uncle, Chris Ronaldson, was world champion from 1981 to 1987 and long-serving pro to the British royal family at Hampton Court, the oldest tennis court in the world, built between 1526 and 1529. Chris taught Prince Edward how to play and wrote the only instruction manual on the game. Matty’s dad and cousin run two other clubs in England, and another cousin runs one in Washington, D.C. All told, members of the Ronaldson clan run close to one-eighth of the remaining real tennis courts in the world.
As we talked and Matty sewed balls together I soon came to learn that the difference between real tennis and what Matty and his fellow players—usually with a hint of contempt—still call “lawn tennis” begins with the balls. Your typical lawn tennis ball is factory-made in South Africa from rubber mixed with 14 to 18 chemicals and covered with felt that’s steamed to make the nap fluffy, increasing wind resistance and control. All any player needs to do is purchase a can of these balls at the local sports shop and peel open the pressurized can. Ready for action.
Not so with real tennis. There’s no factory in the world that makes real tennis balls, no store that sells them. Each ball is handcrafted on site by the club pro from scratch.
Matty lined up his materials to show me how a ball is made. “For starters, the core of the ball is made of crushed cork.”
“Where do you get the cork?” I asked.
He looked at me in disbelief.
“Um, wine corks?” he answered, pointing to a couple of recently emptied bottles in the corner of the office. “The club members bring them in. And of course I do my level best to contribute to the game as well.”
He pulled out a plastic shopping bag filled with corks and fished out a couple of synthetic ones. “These might keep wine fresh all right, but they’re pretty much useless for making tennis balls,” he said as he tossed them in the garbage.
As we learn from Shakespeare, who mentioned tennis no fewer than six times in his plays, the most common substance used for stuffing tennis balls in 17th-century England was human hair. In Much Ado About Nothing there is this exchange between Don Pedro and Claudio about the bachelor Benedick:
DON PEDRO: Hath any man seen him at the Barber’s?
CLAUDIO: No, but the barber’s man hath been seen with him, and the old ornament of his cheek hath already stuffed tennis-balls.
In 1920, during renovation work at Westminster Hall in London a few old leather balls stuffed with hair were found among the rafters.
The French of that same period seem to have been less inclined to make use of human hair . . . or maybe they were just less hirsute. They used dog hair instead, stuffed into white leather covers. There was enough mystery and controversy back then around exactly what materials were being used to stuff tennis balls that one French king passed a decree requiring that the balls used on the royal court be stuffed only with wool “and not containing sand, ground chalk, metal shavings, lime, bran, sawdust, ash, moss, powder, or earth.”
I mentioned this controversy to Matty as he was shredding and pounding a few corks into little bits and asked him if it continues today.
“Well, no one’s stuffing balls with hair anymore—not that I know of at least.” But, he added, real tennis players definitely notice the quality and craftsmanship of the balls.
“See, even after being bashed about for days, mine keep their spherical shape,” he boasted, putting a worn-out old ball in my hand. “Some young pros try to cut corners or just don’t take the right care and they end up with soft, lumpy balls that don’t bounce properly.”
Matty went back to work, pulling out a small scale and weighing out exactly 60 grams of crushed cork. He stuffed the cork into an old ball cover, tied it up, pounded it with a mallet until it formed a consistent, hard sphere, and then wrapped the core with white fabric tape.
“Now here comes the really tedious part,” he announced, reaching for a spool of black thread. I admit I couldn’t quite believe we hadn’t yet reached the tedious part. Tying one end of the thread to the bench, he proceeded to meticulously tie the ball, first in one direction, then turning 90 degrees and tying in the other, then splitting sections to form orbits of thread at every possible angle. “Doing this right is the key to having your balls stay hard and keep their shape.”
Looking at the near-finished product, with its crisscrossed layers of thread and tape, I recalled an image I’d come upon in a 1767 French encyclopedia illustrating the process of ball production and the tools involved. It struck me as remarkable that so little had changed, from the materials to the methods to the essentially medieval technology that Matty still uses to ply his craft.
Illustration of racket and ball production, from Garsault’s Art du Palmier-Raquetier, 1767.
Finally, he pulled out a roll of familiar optic-yellow wool felt and cut two long strips, which he tacked onto the ball to hold them in place. He then began to trim the edges into rounded forms that would neatly cover the ball’s surface. Once he’d achieved the right shapes he went on to sew the ball’s cover together w
ith needle and thread, making sure the felt was tight and even all around.
“There we go!” he declared triumphantly as he tossed the finished ball to me. All told, it had taken him 45 minutes to make a single ball. The finished ball I held in my hand was slightly smaller and about 25 percent heavier than a lawn tennis ball.
“Do you mind if I keep this one as a souvenir?” I asked.
Matty’s face took on a look of visible pain as he stared silently at the fruit of his hard labor in my greedy hand. “Well . . .”
“You know what, never mind,” I said, immediately embarrassed.
“It’s just that it takes so bloody long to make one and, to be honest, we sell these to the public for twenty euros each.”
He plucked the shiny new ball out of my hand and reached into his discard basket. “Would you be okay with an old one?”
I took the gift happily, embarrassed by what would surely not be my last breach of real tennis etiquette. Matty grabbed two rackets out of the corner of his office. “That’s enough work for one day. Shall we play?”
The jeu de paume court at Fontainebleau is a spectacular, cavernous space, the largest real tennis court in the world (there’s very little standardization in the size of real tennis courts). The stone construction of the court’s outer walls gives it the damp, echoing feel of a medieval castle’s great hall. The original tennis court was built here by Henry IV in 1600 along with a second outdoor one of which only traces remain. When “good king Henry,” one of France’s most popular kings, wasn’t granting religious liberties to the Protestants or guaranteeing a “chicken in the pot” for every commoner, he was known to relax with a spirited game of paume. In fact, he loved tennis so much that after narrowly surviving the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre in 1572, in which thousands of Protestants perished in Paris at the hands of rioting mobs, he rose first thing the next morning to continue a tennis match he’d started the day before.