Slice of inaction

“That smell… I swear I could drink it in,” says Eddie Redmayne. “The unmistakable ‘cluck’ followed by the persuasive, elongated hiss. It’s a smell for the ages. Who knew that a two-piece rubber shell filled with pressurised gas and clad in fuzzy yellow stu could promise so much? This is the sport.” The actor, who describes the process of opening a fresh tin of tennis balls in Laura Bailey’s lovely new book, Courtship, captures something of the sense of, well, ‘courtship’, perhaps. It’s a love affair with the sport of tennis that goes, like many love affairs, beyond the realms of reason. Part of the infatuation is physical, and the tennis court – the physical embodiment of the freedoms, memories and glories of the sport – has come to represent something distinct in our culture: a great leveller but also a status symbol; a playground and a battleground; a place of artifice and of nature. Here, and in the book itself, photographer Mark Arrigo captures a selection of the more esoteric and intoxicating examples from across the world.