The Pull Towards Play: Series 005
Stories from the inner life of tennis.
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.
BARNABA SANDRO FAGIOLI: New York
There is a court in New York he will never name.
Not because he is trying to be mysterious. Because if you share the address, as his friend Brian says, you might as well never go back.
Barnaba Fagioli found it about a year ago. Italian born, now settled into New York the way people settle into cities that ask something of them. He works at the intersection of tennis, wine, art and culture. He curates natural wine for galleries and creative spaces. He writes. He builds things slowly and on his own terms.
The unnamed court is where a lot of it comes from.
There are maybe ten or fifteen regulars. No hierarchy, no sign-up sheet, always room for one more. Players rotate in and out regardless of level. Rami holds court there, loud and blunt and exhausting until he isn’t, until the day he apologised for a ball that may or may not have been intentional and everything shifted. If you stay long enough, things change.
“It’s where I found a community,” Barnaba says. “Some of those people helped me through difficult moments I would have otherwise faced alone.”
He spends his days around people obsessed with process. Artists, athletes, winemakers, makers of things that take time. He went to a Tony Lewis opening and stood in front of work where the mistakes and the marks and the layers stay visible, where the artist doesn’t erase what came before. Later that same week he hit with Anthony, eighteen years old, ridiculously good, quiet in that confident tennis player way. Hours and hours of invisible effort behind every shot.
Tennis taught him something those other worlds couldn’t quite reach. Not technique. Not strategy. Consistency. The willingness to come back the next day without needing a reason.
“I don’t get tired of failing,” he says. “I don’t get tired of coming back the next day and trying again. Tennis might be the only thing in my life that I’m willing to pursue every single day without needing motivation.”
He plays daily. He breaks racquets occasionally. It is literally tattooed on his left arm.
On the good days something shifts. The stress and the noise from outside fall away and something else takes over. He describes it like diving underwater. Suddenly you are in a different world. Time disappears. The only thing that exists is the next shot.
He thinks that is why he is obsessed. Some people find that feeling through meditation or reading or yoga. He finds it on a tennis court. Usually the one he won’t name.
Last September, working around the US Open with Palmes, he realised tennis had become more than something he played.
“It was the first time I thought, this is where I belong.”
The feeling followed him. To Los Angeles. To weekends with Broken Rackets. To conversations with people he had only ever known online. At the end of one of those trips, he was offered five more days and a chance to go to Indian Wells. He said no. He was already on the plane home before he understood why that was the wrong answer.
Tomorrow, someone new will probably arrive at the court he won’t name. Someone will leave. Someone will stay longer than they intended.
He’ll be there again.