A ball loping over the net to the left side of the oblique, painting the line, wrapping the back tarp of the fence. A polyrhythmic box-step, a pas de bourrée, a chassé, a plié. The physicality of tennis, not so unlike dance, can be quite clunky—though, when months of practice congeal muscle to memory, the rhythm that follows is euphoric. When executed correctly, the game’s dumbfounding machinations yield a delicate and irreproducible waltz, the court a theater in which relentless practice transmutes into moments of perfection.

Laura Bailey’s Courtship: For the Love of Tennis, out via Rizzoli this spring, explores these theaters and the choreography within them through a personal essay and selected quotes about the game. Her writing is paired with images of courts across the world taken by Mark Arrigo, who frames each court as a monolithic space, carved out of rock over millennia to be perfected precisely for its unique environment. Some courts are found dilapidated, eroded from past performances. Others, either well-kept or refurbished, preserve the games of yesteryear.

On coastlines or wedged into city centers, tennis courts serve as places to congregate and to meditate: they are sites encouraging hours of physical repetition and empty space, gaining all the more attention as emotional and viral safe havens in the years following the pandemic. USTA’s 2024 U.S. Tennis Participation Report, for instance, elucidated how 2020 alone accounted for a 4% increase in the game over the previous five years combined. Tennis is all the more relevant, taking its current form with NextGen superstars rising up in the wake of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer (two of “The Big Three”) leaving the sport, while Serena Williams hung up her unsurpassed career in 2022. Netflix’s Break Point series showed global audiences a slice of life to the road on tour, while Luca Guadagnino’s 2024 epic Challengers was sweaty, sultry, and high-octane. Where a pickle-ball fad lives, a tennis court will remain.

To Bailey, tennis occupies space in the mind arguably more than it occupies space in the physical world. Quite simply, one just can’t get away from it. During an illness, it’s hours of Andy Murray’s 2016 highlights. It’s shadow-serving while brushing one’s teeth, coming-to 25 minutes later on your lunch break at your local gear store in the midst of renting your fifth rental racket in a handful of months. Bailey exemplifies, “The hustle and the flirt and the interrogation. The extreme intimacy of the duel counterbalanced by mystery and anonymity… It all plays out on court.” Once one has fallen under its spell, the tennis court elicits a peace in your exhaustion, bright lights and the meditation of a practice that is never quite perfect.

The courts featured in Courtship, and the writing that accompanies them, honor moments in the expansive lifespan of the sport, underscoring a singular reasoning—the space that hosts the game is part of the magic: this dance is not a duet nor a double’s match, but a trio, the beauty a product of the place, the sport, the practice.