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.
MONIKA, MILAN
Two tennis courts on the Athenian Riviera, gardens on every side. Monika was there for a single day, a layover between a flight from Milan and a boat through the Ionian islands. She noticed the seating around the courts and the small pro shop stocked with vitamins and Wilson gear.
That’s mostly how she moves through the world. A hotel gym in Comporta that opens straight onto pine trees. A rooftop in Bali where the walls turn terracotta as the light shifts through the afternoon. She trained in architecture and interior design at UT Austin, and the habit never left her. She still reads a room, or a court, by its surfaces, its light, what surrounds it, even the sound it makes.
That eye came second, though. Tennis came first. A racquet in her hand at three, competitive through her teens, then a lower-back injury at fifteen that wouldn’t fully resolve. She kept trying to play through it for a few years anyway. By the time university started, tennis had gone quiet almost completely.
It came back in London, for practical reasons. She had a new job and wanted to meet people and see the city differently, so she started looking for courts. The people arrived with the courts, and the city arrived with the people.
London didn’t hold her. She left interior design behind and moved to Milan instead, drawn to a way of living where beauty was built into the everyday rather than reserved for special occasions, and stubborn enough to want to learn a third language for no better reason than wanting to. It was in Milan that tennis became her profession rather than her hobby. She now works as a creative consultant to sport and wellness brands, including Broken Rackets, a global tennis culture platform, shaping how a sport she grew up inside presents itself to the world, a sport that has, in her lifetime, become noticeably more fashionable than it once was.
None of that follows her onto the court. “When I play, it’s just tennis to me,” she says. Somewhere in the middle of a real point, instinct takes over and the analysing stops. It is one of the only places she knows where presence isn’t something she has to try for.
For a while, she thought tennis, design and travel needed to add up to a single explainable thing. She has stopped looking for the theory. “The connection is simple,” she says. “Passion.”
She calls tennis an old friend, the kind that survives long absences without asking for an explanation. Though she’s quick to add that, mid-match, when things are going badly, it can feel like the opposite. Both are true.
The court is the constant. Everything around it keeps changing.
Monika writes about tennis, design and travel on her own Substack, Moving by Design.
Nice to see another tennis account on here 🎾👋
Beautifully written piece! I think one and tennis are nemesis’s instead of old friends though 😁