« Diversions, yes, but from what ? » Marcel Hanoun

At bottom, broadly speaking, tennis will wear you out. Despite the range of variations always possible, the game is founded on principles of neverending resumption and repetition. From one season to the next, its professional side adds to this the spectacle of a permanent renewal, with its archetypal behaviors and its recognizable tactical patterns, its statistics and its prizes. And for champions after the victory, for the spectators who, without reason or hope, support them, there is most of all the vacuous feeling and the disappointment that it was « only that », after all, nothing perhaps. Still, I keep coming back to it, and I am not the only one ; as if the tedium, this expectation not met or even this malaise were the best assurance of a revived curiosity, at the same time as the best way to deflect the absorption of the mad keen or the desire to « do the match over » together.

Attention may then drift, move away even temporarily from the main centers (the competition, the economy or even the practice of the sport), to tackle tennis through the detail, the periphery, the evidences lost along the way. To see it again as for the first time, every time. Why is it played with a racket, and how to explain the disproportionate importance this tool is assuming these days ? If competition is a school for life, which life are we talking about ? Who are these professional players whose singularities – social, cultural, political – seem to vanish as soon as they enter the stadium that serves as a stage ? What exactly do we pay for when we buy a ticket to go see matches ? How have amateur practices come to be seen as deviant, with their joys of physical expense, their taste for gesture and movement, for the company of someone else ?

This edition may last as long as these questions generate others still – and as its editor manages to add to it. For the time being, indeed, I am writing and maintaining it on my own and with limited means in both French and English ; co-editors interested by these opening generalities are welcome, as are the readers willing to give up some of their time to point out omissions, errors or other documentary sources and expand on an article or an argument. The periodicity I am thinking of would be between ten days and two weeks. If a brisker pace is hoped for, it is not imperative. The huge majority of this type of effort aims at monitoring the news on a regular basis and even at providing permanent updates, but this does not have to be the case for tennis | let calls. The internet proverbially favors speed and flows ; but it also comes with storage capabilities, which means that, published yesterday, today or tomorrow, articles remain available for reading or browsing in the infinite presents that are the readers’. It is a blessing, not a disadvantage, for a small-scale editing effort like this one, not to have to keep up with a stream ever too fast, but rather on its participants’ yearning for research and writing. In the way it is run as in its approach, this edition thus fully claims the right not to be current.

This claim will translate in various types of columns, whose alternation would slowly give shape to the edition : interviews ; reading notes on a book, an article, an essay, a fiction, a web site, spectator’s notes on a documentary film, a broadcast match, video interviews ; short stories of « documented fiction » ; and musings or investigations on tennis understood in a wide sense. Already, tennis | let calls is looking for witnesses of all kinds : former ball boys and girls ; tennis spectators, very generally ; staff in charge of transcriptions for press conferences given by professionals on tournaments ; professionals or semi-professionals ; technicians and engineers of the game involved in some way or another in the design and manufacturing of the tools necessary for practice (court, balls, racquets and strings…) ; employees in audiovisual industries in charge of the representation and broadcast of tennis ; amateur practitioners… And I could go on.

[more to follow]