The Pull Towards Play: Series 001
stories about why players return
The Pull Towards Play is a series of short portraits of real tennis players from around the world. Not professionals. Just people who keep showing up, for reasons that are hard to name and impossible to ignore.
LETSKO: Korea
There was a court he used to walk past.
Every day, during the years when work was everything and time was not his. He never stopped. He just kept walking.
Tennis had found him once before, in 6th grade, a school club, a racket, something that felt good before life decided otherwise. Then years passed. The court was there. He wasn’t.
He lives differently now. Out of Seoul, into the countryside, farming and marketing and time that belongs to him again. And on court, something returns that he didn’t have a word for until he was back on it.
“So much of the day is repeated work,” he says. “There are stretches where my life starts to feel almost dead. The moment I step on court, all of that disappears.”
He calls it spiritual energy. Not the energy that food gives you, something closer to the energy that reminds you why you’re here. The court as the place where the feeling of being alive comes back.
He built Letsko Tennis to document the people who keep showing up. Not the professionals. The everyday players. The ones whose reasons for being on court are quiet and personal and rarely recorded anywhere.
He is one of them.
“Tennis is the rope that pulled me out of a deep darkness, back into the world.”
There was a court he used to walk past. He doesn’t anymore.
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