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Portland might not have professional tournaments or world-class tennis academies, and many of the city’s public courts have seen better days. But Portlander Tyler Pell sees potential in the city’s community tennis culture. He wants to make sure other people see it, too.
Enter Portland Tennis Courterly: The stylish, quarterly (get it?) newsletter devoted to all things Portland tennis.
The Courterly’s first issue, published in spring 2023, was short and straightforward. It was printed on white, tabloid-size paper—Pell used the Multnomah County Library printers for the first few issues—and featured a tennis advice column, an interview with the director of the Portland Tennis Center, and a brief news update about the center’s recent weather-related woes.
That first newsletter’s design was neat but stylized, foreshadowing the Courterly’s coming evolution. Pell, who came up with the idea for the Courterly with a friend from college, sought out more contributors and collaborators. By the following spring, he was printing using a risograph technique and had secured a few advertisements. Today, over two years in, the Courterly features a masthead with more than a dozen names, and its coverage goes well beyond tennis basics.
In February, Tennis Courterly published a 30-page issue focused on pickleball (the Courterly is firmly against it), supported by a $5,000 Portland Arts Project grant from the Regional Arts and Culture Council (RACC). It contained an in-depth, reported feature by Pell about an Irvington couple fighting the rise of pickleball in their neighborhood, an anti-pickleball manifesto originally published by a leftist tennis club, a paper doll “fun section,” and an essay titled “Beyond Pickleball,” which featured the scathing pull quote: “To be good at tennis is to be beautiful. To be good at pickleball is to be good at pickleball.”
Normally, the Courterly is presented as a newsletter—one long piece of paper, with text on both sides, folded to create three panels. Pell drew inspiration from the Portland Bureau of Planning and Sustainability’s Curbsider mailer, which contains information about the city’s garbage and recycling systems and is distributed free of charge.
Pell said he chose the newsletter style because he thinks it’s “the perfect way to present something as serious and worthy of reading.” This is in contrast to the zine format, which he thinks is unfortunately not as well-regarded by the masses.
Jay Boss Rubin, Tennis Courterly’s managing editor, is a writer and Swahili translator. He’s also a longtime tennis enthusiast and was excited to find an outlet to combine his passion for the sport with his literary background. Rubin says the newsletter isn’t “a secret literary magazine, nor is it just for tennis people.”
This has allowed the publication to find a diverse set of contributors, from professional writers to people who had never been published before. Rubin compared this range of writing experience to the different levels of tennis expertise a person might experience on Portland’s courts.
“There’s something really special happening where it’s not just about always trying to play up and play better. We’re in community with players of many different levels and different ages,” he said. “There’s a nice way we could all play together.”
From the beginning, Pell’s goal with the Courterly has been to “rebrand tennis in Portland,” and build on the groundswell of enthusiasm he sees for the sport. “Tennis Courterly began in an attempt to change perception, to bring people together and build a political consciousness around tennis and public resources in Portland,” he said.
Pell also hoped the publication would help introduce and acclimate new people to Portland’s tennis scene, which he said can be “very opaque, with all these different rules and barriers to entry.”
“It didn’t seem like anybody else was trying to encourage other people to understand and get into tennis,” he said. “It feels like a lot of Portland’s tennis clubs are really just talking to themselves and to people who already know about it.”
In addition to the publication, Tennis Courterly has begun hosting community tournaments at Portland parks. In July, the Courterly team staged the Mt. Tabor Open, their biggest event yet. Pell said the tournaments and in-person events make up an important part of the whole project’s mission, which is to encourage real-world participation and engagement with Portland’s tennis courts and public spaces.
“There’s been a tremendous void of meaning in our lives, and I think a lot of it has to do with the fact that everything feels gray and homogeneous and the same when we live online,” Pell said. While the publication has a noticeable Instagram presence, which Pell said helps get the word out about the newsletter and events, it’s “sort of antithetical to the whole point.”
“The whole point is to go to the park and pick up a physical copy, and read it and hopefully enjoy it,” Pell said. To reinforce that physical engagement, only some of the Courterly’s stories are available online. The best way to read the newsletter is to pick up a print copy, which you can find at some tennis courts, as well as Players Racquet Shop and Old Town magazine store Chess Club.
There’s more going on for the Courterly, too. The publication is supporting the release of a photo book, Full Western, by newsletter contributor Jake Arvidson, which celebrates Portland park tennis. They’re planning their next tournament, the H2Open, for the end of October, and their next issue, “The Wet Issue,” for release in November. Pell is also working to schedule a production of the play Bimbo Tennis, a Chekhov adaptation written by Emma Gardner, for next spring or summer.
But in the end, Pell said, it’s all about tennis.
“People can be coaxed to the tennis court if there’s something bringing them out. You don’t have to be really good at tennis to like to play tennis,” he said. “It’s just a great way to engage with your friends, or to meet new friends, or you know, rivals or enemies. All of this is possible on the tennis court. If there’s something fun at the center of it to bring people out, people will come out to play.”
The Full Western release party will be held at One Grand Gallery, 1000 E Burnside, Sept 5, 5 pm, check @tenniscourterly for more.
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Taylor Griggs
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