Live, From a Connecticut Backyard, It’s … a Sport!

“I was up there for a good hour,” Considine said. “A little scary to tell you the truth — 15 feet up there, with those guys slamming into the fence.”

To keep the number of people involved down even further, players doubled as television commentators, joining the play-by-play man Brad Easterbrook to discuss the next match after finishing their own.

Post-match interviews were conducted at a considerable distance.

“I would do anything in the world to trade this situation for getting back to normal,” said Harry Cicma, whose independent production company staged the event and made the deal with ESPN. “But people were contacting me and were really sad and depressed they didn’t have live sports, and I was just thinking of ways to do it in a safe way and about the sports that would work. Football, baseball or basketball, you need a public venue. But platform tennis you can do at someone’s house in a safe manner, one on one, and we happen to have the best players in the world in the New York area.”

According to Considine, there are only “100,000 to 150,000” platform tennis players in the world, nearly all of them in the United States. The hub is in suburban New York; the game was invented in Scarsdale in 1928. The world’s No. 1 player, Johan du Randt, drove down for the tournament from his home in Boston.

Parsons, a 40-year-old Canadian, is ranked No. 3 and said he lived “less than a seven-minute drive” from where the event was staged. Like many top platform tennis players, he once played professional tennis. He was a member of Canada’s Davis Cup team.

Article source: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/07/sports/tennis/platform-tennis-coronavirus.html