Garhi Shot First
Hall of Fame
Several years ago, while researching a book about trying to become a serious senior tennis player in my sixties, I happened upon a photograph on the Tumblr feed of The Millions, the online literary site. In the foreground, there stands an elderly fellow wielding a wooden racquet in his right hand. He has a white, Eastern Church patriarch beard. He is dressed for, I don’t know—a folk wedding? This, the caption explained, was Tolstoy. Across the net is a woman in an ankle-length caftan; is that his daughter and confidante, Alexandra? I wondered. And who is that to her left? And the man younger than Tolstoy, the author’s doubles partner, his face obscured by Tolstoy’s head—who is he?
None of these other figures were identified, nor was the photographer. Tolstoy’s wife, Sophia, took up photography in the late eighteen-eighties and left behind hundreds of pictures of the Tolstoy family, so she seemed a likely suspect. But the photo wasn’t dated. A blogger for The Millions had seen it in a tweet posted by Elif Batuman, a staff writer for this magazine who studied, and has written about, Russian literature. She, in turn, had discovered it on Pinterest, where it was pinned by someone associated, as far as I could tell, with Einaudi, the big Italian publishing house. None of this gave me any more information about the photograph or when it had first been taken. But I thought: Tolstoy has got to be older than me here, so this must be the turn of the century. And then I thought: Tolstoy played tennis?
I needed to know more. (Maybe I was looking for a distraction from the book; the writing was going slowly.) I was able to find a few other photos of Tolstoy on the court. One was published in “The Bud Collins History of Tennis,” and dated 1896; Tolstoy turned sixty-eight that year. In this picture, he is wearing a dark, belted peasant blouse of a thick, canvas-like cotton; dark trousers and boots; a Cossack hat. He has his racquet drooping in his right hand. Not far from his right boot is what appears to be the ball. His expression, of anger carefully controlled, says it all: he’s just lost a point.
The rest of the article: http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/why-tolstoy-took-up-tennis
About the author: Gerald Marzorati, a former editor of the Times Magazine, is the author of “Late to the Ball,” a memoir about tennis and aging, out in May.
I'd bookmarked that a while ago but never went back to read it.
