For two weeks every summer, the elite tennis world convenes in a world-class facility for top competition, celebrity sightings and $32 lobster rolls. For this brief period, Flushing, Queens, is the center of tennis in the world. Then the tour and the players move on to San Diego, London and Seoul.
But a few miles away in the middle of Brooklyn, there is a homegrown scene where tennis is played on rugged asphalt courts all year long. There, drawn to 11 modest public courts in Lincoln Terrace Park, is a community of players, most of them Black, that has thrived for decades despite outdated facilities, high crime rates and very little recognition.
It is a world away from the Open. There is no locker room at Lincoln Terrace, and no protective bubbles for indoor play in winter. The spotty lighting leaves some courts unplayable after dark. The slick court surfaces force regulars to learn to handle severely skipping balls. There is constant clatter from subway trains running alongside the court.


“It’s the most Brooklyn thing ever, to try to concentrate on returning a serve while the subway is roaring by next to you,” said one regular, Andy Goveia, 31.


The courts lie on the border of Crown Heights and Brownsville, which has some of the highest crime rates in the city. In 2020, a man was fatally shot right at a court entrance.
And yet the tennis itself is remarkable. Competitive matches — never mind the scene in the bleachers — can rival the Open for drama, as fleet-footed players smash serves, hammer returns and lunge for passing shots.
The courts serve as a neighborhood gathering spot for players largely of Caribbean extraction, a cultural and social hub with an unmistakable West Indian flavor.


Many evenings, soca music mixes with the smell of Jerk chicken and pelau, a Trinidadian chicken dish. An older man in Rastafarian garb regularly takes a spot on the sidelines selling peanuts and cold drinks. Bottles of wine and Guinness might appear. It has been like this since before the USTA National Tennis Center opened. The latest threat may be the gentrification of Crown Heights. Some regulars fear the steady increase in use may disrupt this tennis community’s hard-won traditions. But so far, the courts remain infused with as much energy as any center court match at Arthur Ashe Stadium.


The longevity of the tennis scene is thanks largely to the Lincoln Terrace Tennis Association, an expansive group of players who help maintain the park and expose local residents to the sport with competitive tournaments and Saturday-morning clinics run by volunteer coaches and staffers.
The group’s roots go back to at least the 1960s. Their clinics often draw more than 150 children and close to 100 adults, said its president, Charles East, and the annual fee of $50 for children and $60 for adults includes the use of loaner rackets.
Charles East, the president of the Lincoln Terrace Tennis Association, said that clinics run by the group can draw more than 150 children and nearly 100 adults.Credit...Dieu-Nalio Chéry for The New York Times

Despite the stardom of Serena and Venus Williams and newcomers like Coco Gauff, Black tennis players are underrepresented at every level, from recreational to professional, said Joan Gordon, 70, a chairwoman of the association.
“It is still largely an elite, white sport,” Ms. Gordon said during a break from helping players on a recent Saturday morning. “So our main goal is to expose the community to the game.” Ms. Gordon began playing at Lincoln Terrace in her youth in 1973 and had to scrimp for the $25 to buy a wooden racket.


“Even today, $25 is a lot for some of these parents,” she said, as children were put through calisthenics while their parents ran through serve and volley drills on another row of courts. Even before noon the scene around the courts was lively, with dancehall music pumping through speakers and a woman serving players roasted breadfruit and codfish.


“You have generations of families who have played here,” said Marva Brown, 41, whose three children went through drills nearby conducted by volunteer coaches.
“This keeps tennis accessible in an inner-city neighborhood, so we can play this sport,” added Ms. Brown, 41, a public defender from Crown Heights who started playing tennis in her teens and was inspired by the rise of the Williams sisters.


She helped get her children excited about tennis last winter by showing them the Will Smith film “King Richard,” about the early years of the Williams sisters on the courts of Los Angeles. While there hasn’t been a rise to stardom like the Williams sisters’, many young players introduced to tennis at Lincoln Terrace have earned college scholarships and even played professionally.
Each summer the association sends a dozen children to an upstate New York tennis camp, a chance to be scouted by college coaches. Among the young players who rose up from Lincoln Terrace is Akilah James, who eventually earned a tennis scholarship to the University of Arizona, where she now coaches after having played as a touring pro.


Adrian Clarke, 66, moved to New York from Barbados at 17 in the 1970s and fed off the competition at Lincoln Terrace.


“You had to learn how to keep yourself safe — you had prostitution on the streets and across the street, we had the occasional murder,” said Mr. Clarke, now director of tennis for the Prospect Park Alliance. “As kids, we would be on the court and they’d warn us not to cross the street where the prostitutes and criminals were.”
A scholarship lifted Mr. Clarke from the tough courts in Crown Heights to the heralded Port Washington Tennis Academy in Long Island, alongside the likes of John McEnroe and Vitas Gerulaitis. After college tennis, he played professionally and earned entry to the U.S. Open qualifiers by winning the 1983 national championship held by the American Tennis Association, a league created in 1916 when Black players could not play white tournaments.
These days, one player to watch at Lincoln Terrace is Autumn Clarke, 16, a promising junior tournament player who often hits with her talented 13-year-old brother, Levi.
The Parks Department manages Lincoln Terrace, but much of the daily upkeep is often handled by Mr. East and other members. The court lights are scheduled to turn off at 1 a.m. but they often remain lit. So an informal but tight group of regulars frequently stays well past that, playing tennis and dominos or just hanging out. The group tends to congregate in the two courts next to the one where Lincoln Terrace’s teaching pro, Eric Jordan, teaches.


They play year-round, even clearing snow in the winter. When the Parks Department removed tennis nets citywide during the coronavirus lockdown in 2020, these regulars bought and rigged their own nets — sometimes just a length of rope — to keep playing.


It helped them get through the pandemic, which hit this part of Brooklyn particularly hard. More than a dozen longtime regulars died from Covid-19 and others mobilized to help locals suffering from the virus, the players said.


In the rough days of the 1990s, violent crime plagued the 77th Precinct, where the murder rate was among the highest in the city.
“You had prostitution and crime — they found bodies in this park,” said Hastings Williams, 67, a retired accountant from Flatbush who grew up in St. Kitts and Nevis and is now a regular at Lincoln Terrace.
Violent crime has declined but hardly disappeared. Mr. East said he was mugged several years back during his morning maintenance. Since then he has locked himself inside the courts while cleaning them.
In New York, where private courts can run upward of $100 an hour, the 587 public courts in 91 city parks provide an affordable tennis alternative. But court time is highly sought-after at popular spots. Securing an hour of playing time at Central Park or in Fort Greene, for example, often involves lining up early in the morning just to sign up for a later hour of play. At Central Park, players follow a regimented system of hourly bells and announcements keeping play organized.


At many courts, the city’s Parks Department assigns attendants to manage reservations, enforce playing time limits, and check for the ($100 seasonal or $15 single-day) required playing permits.


But at Lincoln Terrace, there is rarely a long wait and no competitive sign-up sheet. At popular tennis spots, a Parks Department attendant might check players for permits. But at Lincoln Terrace, permit-checking is lax enough that many players can get by without them.


A general lack of crowds at Lincoln Terrace allows singles players to play longer than the usual one-hour time limit for singles at city courts.
Most players are respectful about time limits when people are waiting, said a longtime regular, Roger Browne, who coaches players at the courts. But sometimes newcomers have complained about players running over their allotted time. The response, he said, is usually, “That’s the way it’s done in the hood.”
And this is the way it’s done at the courts’ weekend tournaments, which are open to all comers.
At a recent mixed doubles finals, the writer Touré, a longtime regular at the Fort Greene public courts, trolled the Lincoln Terrace crowd by wearing a custom “Touré Terrace Park” T-shirt, a teasing claim of ownership referencing the numerous titles he has won this summer at Lincoln Terrace.


Touré and his playing partner, Amaya Lopez-Clay, won their match handily, even after a lengthy interruption by a car crash outside the courts, which seemed to be the result of an apparent car chase involving several feuding young men.
Spectators ran out to watch but then, fearing gunfire, scrambled for cover. The men sped off and the finals resumed once the tennis crowd gave up on waiting for the police.


But such episodes are now the exception, players said. More normal is the scene one recent night when a group of regulars rotated on and off a pair of courts and enjoyed some music and snacks well into the summer night.


“This is our country club,” Mr. Jordan, the teaching pro, said.
Mr. Goveia wiped off sweat after a spirited set.“New York is about making the best of what you got,” he said. “These courts aren’t the best, but we’ve made the best of what we got.”

Source: New York Times

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