Gang-gang. Will Tennis Bounce Back?

What the gutter press has called, unforgivably, his "cocky" declaration last week in Paris that he thinks it helps his form for him to have sex before an important match, has got Canberra tennis players, especially the members of Tennis Seniors, abuzz. Should we be following his celebrity example? When a great player gives tennis tips surely we should pay attention.

Meanwhile the rise of Our Nick and of other young Australian players, has some of us daring to dream that it may help with the revival of tennis. It is in the doldrums now here in the ACT and in Australia at large. But ArchivesACT has just dusted off a file that shows tennis in robust health in early Canberra. The file, 47/1924 - Tennis Courts - General File - Including Provision of Pavilions is ArchivesACT's Find of the Month.* It provides a snapshot of Canberra's tennis facilities and demographics in the period 1928-1931.

But for a long time now all Canberra suburban tennis clubs (there are about 30 of them), even my own idyllic, heritage, Reid Tennis Club, have suffered dwindling memberships.

Young people are to blame. Not content with giving up buying and reading newspapers and thus plunging my industry into the horrors, they have largely as well given up playing tennis. What ever do young people do with their time?

But should Australia enjoy a new, long-overdue golden age of dashing, glamorous, sexually-active-before-their-matches Australians winning Grand Slam events Australian youngsters may be beguiled back into the character-building sport. Then Canberra's today rather forlorn and sparsely-patronised courts may teem again.

Many homesteads of the Canberra region boasted a tennis court by the late 1880s, and social tennis "parties" were an important social activity. But the first local true tennis club may have been the one Queanbeyan's Age reported in September 1898, declaring "A tennis court has been made at the back of the blacksmith shop at Hall, and a club formed."

As public servants percolated into Canberra in the 1920s, bringing their big, wooden, snowshoe-shaped racquets with them, demands on existing tennis facilities increased. The AchivesACT file includes a survey of tennis clubs and their members that the Federal Capital Commission did in 1928. The FCC was collecting data to give it an idea of how popular tennis was in the ACT so that it had a better idea of what tennis players' demands for facilities it needed to respond to. The survey found that tiny, compact Canberra bristled with 16 tennis clubs and that some of them had memberships (notably Reid with its 67, Blandfordia/Forrest with its 72, Ainslie with its 84 and Eastlake with its 95) that will kindle envy in the bosoms of some of today's clubs' presidents.

This history-conscious column sometimes discusses the Lost Sounds Of Canberra (for example the workers' whistle that used to shrill from the Power House at Kingston). Now discussion of tennis in the olden days reminds your gnarled old columnist of one of Canberra's lost smells.

In those olden days (especially the 1970s and 1980s) before today's synthetic grass swarmed over all of Canberra's courts, the playing surfaces were made of the crushed and crumbled "ant-bed" materials discussed in the ArchivesACT file and/or of some concoction of mixtures of en-tout-cas clay, sand and gravel. In hot, dry weather the preparation of these courts for play required that they be liberally sprinkled with water (all clubs had courtside hoses) so that they weren't dust bowls to play on. And, as you played the hose over these hitherto dry and baking courts the welcoming surface would give off the most gorgeous, impossible-to-define perfume. It had some of the qualities of the perfume of freshly-baked bread, but with the additions of some earthy, sun-on-sunbathers' skin nuances. I used to feel as I sprinkled, wondering if it was just me being perverse, that there was something even a little erotic in this aroma, as there is in some of the aphrodisiacal perfumes alluring women wear.

Then, confiding my secret one day to someone with some scientific knowledge, he told me that in fact rain falling on baking earth is known to trigger pheromones important to the sexual impulses of native fish. Watering the courts and enjoying this aroma I was putting myself in the shoes (in the scales, really) of a sexually active Murray cod.

No discussion like this one of lust and lawn tennis, those two close cousins, is complete without a mention of John Betjeman's poem The Olympic Girl. An elderly male at courtside admires a gorgeous female tennis star. To explain (it is another of those Lost Sounds Of Canberra) old fashioned gut-strung racquets smiting fluffy white tennis balls used to make a "plung" sound.

Oh! would I were her racquet pressed
With hard excitement to her breast
And swished into the sunlit air
Arm-high above her tousled hair,
And banged against the bounding ball
"Oh! Plung!" my tautened strings would call,
"Oh! Plung! my darling, break my strings
For you I will do brilliant things."
Fair tigress of the tennis courts,
So short in sleeve and strong in shorts,
Little, alas, to you I mean,
For I am bald and old and green.

*ArchivesACT's June 2015 Find Of The Month is Game, Set and Match : Canberra Tennis Courts 1928-1931. It is available via the Archives' website archives.act.gov.au