View and download the entire issue of ATR 64 – January 2018 Vol 19 No 1
Nearly two years ago, when the Old Globe stage director telephoned, looking for a teaching pro, Geoff Griffin, director of tennis at San Diego’s Balboa Tennis Club, answered.
Last summer, The Last Match, a play about two professional tennis players, opened Off Broadway in New York City.
Thanks to a decision by director Gaye Taylor Upchurch, the two actors swung imaginary rackets with remarkably realistic ground strokes and serving motions.
For tennis players starved for authenticity in dramas about their sport, it was a delicious sight.
Griffin, a 1985 SDSU graduate and local tennis pro, tutored the San Diego actors.
Mary Carrilo, a former touring pro and TV tennis analyst, taught the New York actors.
The Last Match is an exploration by playwright Anna Ziegler of the fears and aspirations of two players in a U.S. Open semifinal.
“It was about what it was like to be older and the young upstart trying to prove himself, and it could have been in any aspect of life,” said Jules Boracks, a devoted San Diego theater goer and longtime recreational player. ”Tennis was a perfect metaphor.”
Upchurch wanted realism, she told ATR, without distractions. “It was definitely a challenge figuring out how to put tennis on stage and have it still feel exciting, but not so bogged down in reality,” Upchurch said.
POISE: Alex Mickiewicz, left, and Wilson Bethel prepare to “hit” their serves in The Last Match.
“None of them had played tennis before but they were actually very athletic,” said Griffin.
“Because the racquet was imaginary, if you could work really hard, you could teach them a pretty good swing,
“It wouldn’t go over the fence in real life, but the fact that they didn’t hit it over the fence made them look better than they really were.”
A 1977 high school graduate who later taught tennis in Europe, Griffin passed up playing Aztec tennis, choosing to buckle down and finish his college studies between 1983 and 1985. He earned a marketing degree.
Griffin became tennis director for the Balboa Tennis Club at San Diego’s Morley Field in 1989, four years after graduation.
For Last Match’s New York staging, TV analyst Carrillo saw a duty to impart confidence.
The New York Times reported that Carrillo showed the actors “how to test the tension of the racket by hitting it against the palm, how to swat a ground ball and make it leap into your hand, how to strut back to the baseline after a successful point.
“You give them a little attitude,” Carrillo said. “It’s a ritual.”
Times Critic Ben Brantley wrote that the play’s “real setting is the crowded interior of the players’ minds.”
He called The Last Match an “essay on how we invest in athletes as symbols and reflections of our own mortality.”
Near the end of his review, he exalted:
“The routine back-and-forth of a hard-fought match finally approaches the ineffable radiance of one of those moments that tennis fans live for.
“Time seems to stop in such moments,” he wrote, “even as it extends into eternity.”
Eternal thanks for the master stroke of Geoff Griffin, an SDSU graduate — John Martin