Every club has a bucket of balls nobody plays with anymore.
It sits somewhere near the gate. Somewhere between yellow and grey, the felt flattened on one side, the bounce mostly gone. Nobody decided to keep them. Nobody decided to throw them out either.
But every one of those balls was hit. Hundreds of times, by people who turned up early, stayed late, played one more set. The bucket isn’t really full of rubbish. It’s full of play.
The wear is the story. It’s the only evidence that anyone played at all.
I’ve started noticing it everywhere.
A new ball in a heel
At Roland-Garros this month, Lacoste creative director Pelagia Kolotouros sent models across the clay of Court Philippe-Chatrier in tennis whites rubbed through with ochre. One shoe, the ACE-T1, stood on a real tennis ball, its name printed across the felt. Her show notes described the marks of the court as evidence of accomplishment.
A house built on pristine tennis whites now wants whites that look like they’ve been played in. On the runway, those marks are designed. On courts everywhere, they’re happening anyway, usually where nobody is looking.
It took me back to Marcy. In September I wrote about Vicente Muñoz photographing the public courts at Marcy Playground in Brooklyn in their last days before refurbishment. The cracks, the faded lines, years of other people’s matches pressed into the surface.
Lacoste imagined the marks of play. Muñoz kept the real ones.
The people who go looking
Giasco Bertoli found his first on a walk in the Swiss woods, more than twenty years ago. A court nobody used anymore. No net. Dead leaves. Thousands of photographs and four books later, one of them published with Racquet, he still shoots them empty, and is drawn most to the ghosts.
Andrew Rankin finds his across regional Queensland, where it’s hard to find a town without one. Courts turned into car parks, or taken back by weeds. Sometimes the score of the last game is still chalked on a wall.
As if someone might come back to finish it.
Mirella von Chrupek finds hers across Poland and beyond, in sunshine and in rain, through Sunlit Courts. A visual artist with an eye for geometry and colour, she is drawn most to the forgotten courts, and finds a quiet poetry in them. An umpire’s chair waiting at the end of a leafy path. In her newest series, Tennis Balls in the Wild, one ball is wedged into a rusted wall, three are half sunk in wet clay, and one sits alone on cracked terre battue, worn bald.
Nobody will play with those balls again. She photographed them anyway.
Keeping the ball
Some people go further. They keep the thing itself.
Mathilde Wittock cuts used balls by hand in her Brussels studio, dyes them, and slots them into chairs, benches and walls, with no glue, so everything can come apart again. Her Bounce chair alone holds 420. Up close, the pieces still look like tennis balls. That’s the point.
The felt has been somewhere.
Strings get the same care. reString, whose restringing pop-up I wrote about during the US Open, makes broken strings into bracelets by hand. In Boston, LET turns used string into shirts. This year it became the first official string recycling partner of a professional tournament, and the Winston-Salem Open saved every string cut out during the event for it, with plans to sell back as shirts next year.
What was inside the racquet ends up on the player.
What we’d rather keep
Last month an Instagram restorer sanded, polished and restrung a racquet about a hundred years old. The comments turned on her. Not because she’d done it badly. Because she’d taken away what made it worth having.
On the Mornington Peninsula, designer Ann-Maree Winter did the opposite with her old tennis court, cutting it apart and working it into a garden. Glue from the old turf still traces faint lines across the concrete. The court is still there, if you know how to look.
And across Melbourne, Ludis collects used balls from clubs like Kooyong and turns them into shoe soles. Founder Lilian Xu has worked eight Australian Opens, so she knows exactly how many balls a summer goes through. Here the ball changes shape completely. What it keeps is where it came from. Somebody’s Saturday, somebody’s lesson, somebody’s club championship, now walking around the city.
At Melbourne Park, even the tubes the Australian Open balls arrive in have started coming back, as tables around the precinct. Something to look for in January.
Worn in
I keep coming back to the bucket by the gate.
Tennis loves the new. The pop of a fresh can. Strings that feel almost too cooperative. Lines repainted white. But most of what the game actually is happens in the wear. The grip worn smooth where your hand settles. The pale patch behind the baseline. The ball that lost its bounce because it was hit, again and again, by people who kept showing up.
That isn’t waste, exactly. It’s a record.
A few people are finding ways to keep it. Most of it still ends up in the bucket.
Either way, it was played with.
Enough to keep.