What does it feel like to lose, and then rediscover, the game of tennis? Photographer Josh Skinner takes the shots. Writer Peter Short returns the serve.

Photos by Josh Skinner | Words by Peter Short

May 7, 2024

Flipping through the images of 76inthethird, by photographer Josh Skinner, feels like someone saying to me, “I daydream about tennis. Do you?”

I do. I always have.

As a child in Florida, I imagined Grand Slam wins as I pummeled our garage door. Serve, forehand, volley winner, followed by a Borg-like collapse and a quick handshake at the garage door handle. Sometimes I would whisper a speech to myself. Sometimes I would start a new match against a different opponent, in Paris or Melbourne or even on grass at the All England. These waking dreams, I know now, were an escape from the chaos of my childhood.

For the past 15 years, Skinner has photographed abandoned tennis courts throughout the South. Decaying courts in small towns, in city parks and middle schools, behind post offices and churches, near city halls and on campgrounds. Green courts, blue courts, bright red and orange clay courts. Courts with rotting nets and fading lines, rusting fences and warped backboards. Photograph after photograph, Skinner floated across the 2,808-square-foot universe of the tennis court, seeking revelation in the geometry of service boxes and sidelines.

He calls this project 76inthethird. He and his wife began driving the back roads of Georgia, Alabama, and the Carolinas looking for anything worth looking at. Both are artists, and at first Skinner drove while his wife photographed old houses, peeling paint, decaying stairwells, and mason jars. They were near Bostwick, Georgia, one weekend afternoon when Skinner spied an old tennis court – a burnt-orange clay court on private property.

Liberty, South Carolina, 2015

Sparta, Georgia, 2015

Bits of grass encroached on the sidelines of the court. The fence hugged the baselines so tightly that going back for a deep ball could mean an ugly collision. Hedges grew wild along one side, while a row of pines dropped needles on the court. Huge oaks loomed overhead. Bags of extra clay, clumpy and thick with moisture, slumped in a rotting utility shed. The net, covered in lichen and moss, was as alive as a coral reef.

Even in its better days, this court would have been a minefield of acorns and tricky patches of light and shade. Skinner had never seen a clay court before, much less a private one in someone’s backyard. He grew up in the flat cold of Minnesota, where the only courts he saw were the public slabs added to every city park built in the 1970s. In a small town in the South, it was not unusual for a person of status to build a court on their own land. Tennis was a mark of gentility.

Skinner didn’t shoot a single photo that day, but an obsession took hold. For me, these images conjure a belief that the whole adult world could be kept at bay by the boundaries of a tennis court. They make me think about my father on his sober days perched on the viewing deck of a pro shop reading a Ludlum novel as I lost again in the first round of another tournament.

After his epiphany in Bostwick, Skinner began using Google Maps to pick out the unmistakable geometry of tennis courts in aerial views. He dropped pins and set out on weekend road trips that sometimes involved 300 miles of driving and five stops. When Skinner arrives at a ghost court, he stretches as if preparing for a match, takes out his camera and adjusts the settings like a player plucking his racquet strings, and walks on. At some point he sees it. The seismic crack in the concrete. The baseline caked with dead leaves like sea wrack. The zipperlike opening in a lime-green chain-link fence. He operates mostly on feel, like a net player blocking a slap forehand on instinct.

Hammondville, Alabama, 2016

Washington, Georgia, 2016

Obsessions have a way of spilling over into other aspects of your life. They rarely stay contained. Tennis came back into my life during the pandemic lockdown in the spring of 2020, not long after my father passed away, just as my two stir-crazy sons were turning feral. They whacked the tennis ball on the tetherball so hard that it came off the cord, then improvised by using the paddles to swat the ball back and forth in the backyard. I taught them an eastern grip and how to step into their shots. They spent the next two months knocking the siding off the garage wall and shredding the grass with their natural split steps. I followed their lead, buying a racquet, then two, and a bucket of practice balls. On a nearby court, I discovered that a perfectly hit ball can still make everything right with the world, just as it did when I was an 11-year-old practicing in the driveway.

Skinner plays the game, too, with his tennis buddies at a pair of green courts next to a permanently closed church. They use a common warmup that begins with opponents standing close to the net slowly reintroducing themselves to their strokes, softly shaping forehands and backhands over the net until muscle memory locks in. They gradually step back, increasing the intensity and depth of their shots as they reach the baseline. When they forget how many times the ball has crossed the net without mistake, they begin to play 21.

It’s a simple game. As in table tennis, the winner is the first to reach 21 by a two-point margin. Points last longer than the games shown on TV, where the most important shots in a match are the first two, serve and return-of-serve. In 21, players feed the ball to each other, and even if their skill levels are different, the rallies extend and deepen, building rhythm and confidence. Skinner is surprised by his ability to run down balls, shocked by his snap instinct to send a shot back over the net with more pace or spin or angle. His brain quickens, he says, and ideas become clearer. The fog of everyday life lifts and thoughts that are ordinarily out of reach become magically clear. Then the point ends and one player feeds the ball to the other with the hope that this exchange will last even longer and be even more exciting. This approach to tennis is like Skinner’s practice as an artist: It’s playful, but focused; creative and open, but also disciplined and repetitive in a way that frees him from self-consciousness or ambition. Both are pure pursuits.

Mentone, Alabama, 2015

Sparta, Georgia, 2016

Both Skinner and I feel disparate parts of ourselves coming together on the tennis court. Hitting the perfect cross-court forehand allows Skinner to be both a spontaneous, instinctive kid and a meticulous craftsperson obsessed with technique. Sometimes joy comes from capturing exactly the right play of light on a crumbling court in Hammondville, Alabama. Sometimes joy comes from sliding into a shot on concrete. For me, playing is the cathartic release that I felt as an angry boy hitting a perfectly struck ball coming together with the peace I feel as a father watching his sons rejoice in a clean winner.

The common argument you hear about tennis is that people don’t play tennis. Yes, participation in tennis has grown for the past three years. Still, only 23 million Americans play the game. I’d argue that most people don’t play football, either. I rarely see middle-aged adults running post patterns in the park. The truth is, most people don’t play much at all. They exercise. They run and bike and swim and lift heavy things. But that’s not playing.

What tennis enthusiasts crave isn’t more people waiting for a court, it’s more people who talk and think about the sport. When one obsessive meets another – on an airplane, in a grocery checkout line – it feels like finding your people. All the stories, thoughts, and memories about this game stored in the back of your head come spilling out, expressing a simple but deeply important desire to have what means something to you mean something to someone else, too.

Warrenton, Georgia, 2016

For me, Skinner’s most memorable image shows an old wooden backboard he found in Franklin Springs, Georgia. It’s made from four large sheets of plywood painted white and secured on a frame with large bolts. A broad stripe of black paint represents the net. The backboard is weathered from the elements, of course, but also from repetitive strikes of tennis balls, fading bruises concentrated in and around two target squares hovering just above the net line, also outlined in black. It’s an uncommon backboard because it invites two players to practice at the same time.

The backboards I hit against as a kid were mine alone. Me facing a brick wall, sending and receiving my own energy until I wore my arm and heart out. Tennis was an escape for me then, a lonely place where tunnel vision was rewarded with tangible progress and sometimes victory. Now that I’m older, tennis means sharing a space with another person who, like me, savors the feel of the ball sinking into the string bed for a fraction of a second before the strings snap back and the ball rockets forward. Revolution after revolution, until it strikes the surface and releases its stored energy – to a member of your tribe. ◊