Tennis in the Time of Adams
What does the new mayor’s austerity agenda mean for tennis in New York City?
Despite being full of drama and political intrigue, the 2021 mayoral election in New York City had little to offer leftist tennis players. No candidate either ran as an unabashed supporter of our beloved racket sport, or was able to coalesce the city’s ascendant left. Even worse, we were shocked to see some run on openly anti-tennis rhetoric, something we all thought was a relic of the Guiliani years.
Who could forget when former Department of Sanitation head Kathryn Garcia pledged to remove the “Tennis Ball Cap” rule, which limits the number of balls that can be used on a court at once to 6, claiming that it is “completely unenforceable” and that it would “slow down games.” Typical of those who espouse technocratic neoliberalism, this reckless effort to “cut red tape” in the name of pruning an overgrown bureaucracy betrayed a lack of understanding of the game as well as the protections that rank and file players have long fought for. As we all know, the Tennis Ball Cap rule is part of a sacred social contract between players, without which, the public courts could be littered with hundreds, or thousands of balls, delaying match play for all and encouraging wasteful decadence.
However, despite not having a horse in the mayor’s race, we were disturbed to see Eric Adams emerge victorious, who was both unnervingly pro-pickleball during his term as Brooklyn Borough President and has positioned himself against leftists again and again. On January 1st, while leftist tennis players watched his Times Square coronation on live tv, the one thing on all of our minds was, “What will this mean for tennis?” Now a few months into the administration, an answer is starting to emerge, and it’s not pretty.
During the past month, Mayor Adams made two moves signaling where he stands. First, a tennis photo op. This is something that should be taken very seriously as a rite of passage for all politicians. Decked out in an NYPD hat and sporting an all-black Wilson Pro Staff (which in that color you could easily imagine being standard issue for a hypothetical SWAT team tennis division), Adams posed for pictures and showed off his amateurish forehand. If this was an attempt to pander to us because of our growing power and influence, it was a weak effort. Adams has become known to say whatever he thinks will please the audience in front of him, so we can clearly call this as a fault.
The second action – less flashy but perhaps more impactful, not unlike a second serve – was when Adams released his’ first budget as mayor for the 2023 fiscal year, and by all measures, it’s bad. The city budget, which is rather opaque at first glance, is often viewed as a statement of priorities for the administration. Regardless of attempts to curry favor with weak photo ops, this document reveals where the money is really going in a city that is losing public courts, and letting the ones that remain fall into disrepair.
Before diving into the numbers, we must remind ourselves of the stakes. So far, this year has not been good for public tennis. In the name of “climate resiliency,” beloved courts at East River Park were violently torn up, raising questions about whether the flood protections are actually just being cited as an excuse to destroy tennis solidarity. Public courts in parks across the city are in desperate need of resurfacing, even in affluent neighborhoods like Fort Greene, while the City has deployed an small army of court attendants to check for tennis permits, which cost upwards of $100 a season. In fact, the only time we’ve seen maintenance and repairs being made has been in conjunction with an advertising campaign for private corporations, as was the case with Wilson and Kith’s commodification of a court at Kissena Corridor Park. And leftist tennis players have had to endure all of this while watching the further encroachment of the reactionary pickleball into the public realm in the spirit of manifest destiny, as our greenspaces turn from public to public/private.
With all of this in the background, the budget doesn’t look good. In fact, the cuts are so drastic to the Parks Department (which, while we have disagreements with over the permitting system, among other things, is the sole public developer of tennis courts we have at the moment), that this budget could only be described as tennis austerity. After promising to almost double the Parks budget, Adams actually cut its budget for 2023. In spite of this, he actually increased the budget for the Department of Corrections and let the NYPD off the hook with no cuts. While we are doomed to watch our meager tennis facilities crumble, we now must also fear being thrown in jail when the attendants ask to see our permits, or if we dare question the primacy of pickleball.
After successive administrations of revanchist anti-tennisism, which now we can clearly place Eric Adams within the tradition of, it’s easy to forget that it wasn’t always like this. In fact, there used to be a champion of tennis living in Gracie Mansion with the full-throated endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America. His name was David Dinkins. It’s hard to imagine today, but Dinkins played as often as 5 times a week and not just for photo ops (though he never shied away from having his picture taken out on the court in the latest tennis fashion). Dinkins spent his political capital to secure a permanent home for the US Open in New York City when it wasn’t politically popular, ensuring tennis culture would thrive in our city for generations. His devotion to the sport, and the leftism that developed out of his close study of point construction, was admirable and should be a model for leftists aiming to govern effectively.
While rejecting the tennis austerity of carceral pickleball players like Eric Adams, or the flat technocratic neoliberalism of Kathryn Garcia, we should remember that tennis leftists like David Dinkins offered us a glimpse of an alternative. Let's imagine a city where playing tennis 5 sets 5 or more days a week is the norm. We need to fight tennis austerity with tennis abundance. To the politicians of New York City we ask, which side are you on? Deuce or ad? The people’s or pickleball’s? Socialism or barbarism? For our sake, we hope they pick the right answer.