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The Tennis Hall of Fame The storehouse of memories. That's the way I feel about 194 Bellevue Avenue in Newport, Rhode Island. My own first memory of the place goes back to a July afternoon in 1954. Driving from Ohio via New York to introduce myself to Boston, I decided to make a long-yearned-for pilgrimage. Detouring toward the ocean, I hoped for at least a glimpse of The Casino, as it's named, the aged playpen where it really all began in this country for the game called tennis. As a rube from Ohio, I didn't know quite what to expect. I was aware that the inaugural U.S. Championships had been staged there long ago on grass (a mysterious surface to me, raised on ball-blackening asphalt), and Newport was "high society" territory. But I didn't know that the U.S. Tennis Association had just given The Casino status as the game's Valhalla. Nor could I have envisioned such a thing as the Hall of Fame's golden anniversary celebration up the road in the unimaginably distant year 2004. Timidly pushing open one of the large green doors at the wooden-shingled entryway on Bellevue, I cautiously entered the mosaic-floored foyer. It was a private club and I didn't want to be seen as an intruder. So, remaining in the shadows, I edged toward the portal opening onto the courts until—POW!—I was hit in the eyeballs by an almost pastoral scene. In a setting of emerald green, men and women in white were at joyful play.  Pete Sampras, Bud Collins and Rod Laver at the Tennis Hall of Fame. Enthralled, I wanted to come back. I wanted to play on those courts. Fortunately, I did (losing, of course, in the first round of the U.S. Amateur Grass Court Championships in 1976). Often I have returned to the elder among the world's tennis parlors, to absorb the atmosphere so pleasing and curative to a tennis degenerate. Sucking up the sea breeze, I walk where great champions have roamed and been enshrined, commune with their ghosts, explore the International Tennis Hall of Fame's museum, examine the artifacts and displays in the treasure trove of memories. In 1965, having become entitled to a press pass as an ink-stained wretch—we were still using typewriters—in the employ of the Boston Globe, I became acquainted with the quixotically delightful Jimmy Van Alen. Tilting against the windmills of traditional scoring, he was in charge at The Casino, his beloved boyhood haunt. [It was never a gambling den, as the name might suggest, but a place of pleasure in one Italian useage.] Jimmy had enough money, time and moxie to lobby the establishment to death and transfiguration, until the poobahs of the USTA finally accepted his baby (a bastard, some said)—the tie-breaker. Not for some years did I learn that Van Alen, the cherubic-faced "Newport Bolshevik," had been radicalized (a few weeks after my initial peek) by the 1954 title bout of the Casino Invitational. After the U.S. Championships had outgrown The Casino and skipped to New York's Forest Hills in 1915, the men kept coming to Newport for the Invitational, an important stopover on the Eastern grass circuit. A summertime chlorophyll-green path, it was for decades the spine of American tennis, limited to so-called amateurs, until the sunrise of "Opens" in 1968. That progressive development pretty much killed grass, except at The Casino where the Jimmy Van Alen Cup is annually up for grabs, and God's own sod prevails at the Campbell's Hall of Fame Championships, an ATP Tour staple the week after Wimbledon. Anyway, a little more than a half-century ago, the Nos. 6-5 Americans Ham Richardson and Straight Clark labored four hours to reach a decision for Richardson, 6-3, 9-7, 12-14, 6-8, 10-8. (An extremely long match in that day, considering the absence of chairs for contestants to sit on. No 90-second breaks; the bygone commandment of "continuous play" was in force.) Van Alen thought it was worse than reading "War and Peace," and he went to war against deuce sets, issuing a piece of his mind. "No match should take that long or that many games. It's urological torture for players, fans, court officials."
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