Margaret Sherman played tennis four times a week at the Palisades Tennis Center, with the same three ladies. She would get her smoothie right afterwards - the same one every time, because once she found something she loved, she stuck with it. She would ask them to add a pinch of ginseng because she read an article about that being good for post match recovery.
That smoothie stand is gone. Her favorite court is gone. Her least favorite court, the one with the crack right along the service line, is gone too. She hasn’t seen her friends in weeks - not because they died, or moved away, but because their meeting place is gone. Their excuse to see each other. Any semblance of anything being easy, or pleasant - gone.
Much ink has been spilled over the Southern California wildfires of January 2025. Rugged journalism and personal pleas alike. The fires even have their own Wikipedia page - which, as far as milestones go, sucks.
The shock, the confusion. The tossing of blame. The loss of things tangible and intangible. The important (family heirlooms, journals, classic records) and the unimportant (those t-shirts that fit so perfectly from that company that doesn’t exist anymore so you bought like eight of them when they were going out of business).
The resilience of communities; of individuals.
But so many of us still hadn’t truly seen it. Even as an Angeleno, if you were lucky, you still might not have seen more than a plume of black smoke. Responding to text messages asking if we were okay while we flipped through the same images everyone else was.
I went to go and try and take pictures of the Palisades Tennis Club with a photographer a couple weeks into February. They wouldn’t let us through at first. A nice-enough guy wearing military garb and holding a gun for some reason stopped us, asked for a resident ID I didn’t have, or a “press pass” I hadn’t thought to photoshop.
By the time we came back and got through, it had rained for the first time since. And it didn’t look like we had expected - like those pictures of ash we had all become accustomed to.
It just...wasn’t there. Like it had been removed. Clicked and deleted. Seeing it that way for some reason punched the gut harder. I saw what looked like a concrete rectangle in a familiar shape.
It’s difficult to emphasize enough how much Los Angeles had positively awakened to tennis in the last few years. It was remarkable to see - especially having lived through a distinct “before” and “after” period.
That organic-feeling groundswell of Sporty & Rich and Challengers and this cute little vintage tennis apparel shop on Virgil Ave and suddenly all my Silverlake friends are asking what racquet I use. It was different than a trend. Padel is a trend. Carhartt is a trend.
People were talking about it with me on a nearly daily basis, describing how they’re in a clinic on Tuesdays and a league on Thursdays. As if they had awoken into different people - people that Did This Now. That doesn’t just go away. The shuttering of the Cinerama Dome doesn’t kill movies.
You see people playing in their front yards, on uneven hilly driveways in Eagle Rock. Using their clanging garage doors as backboards. Annoying the neighbors; not caring.
This is how tennis in LA will persist. Wherever these people land, wherever their new longterm hotel happens to be, there will be a way to play. Santa Monica has a batch of courts that are still standing. One leaf blower to one layer of ash and they were okay.
Gigi Fernandez has set up what is probably LA’s 1000th GoFundMe to rebuild the Palisades Center. A novelty check was somberly handed to someone on court at the BNP Paribas Open. On the announcement post, someone you charitably hope is just being a cheeky fucker in the comments asks, “will it include pickleball courts?” No, Derek, whatever your name is, it won’t.
Margaret Sherman now makes a long drive to Sherman Oaks to play. She has to pay eight dollars to book a court (ten on the weekends - she wanted to be sure I specified). She’s fine with all that.
She’s not gonna give up tennis. And no one else here is either.
