All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club gets Sports Illustrated spread

By John Burbridge

sports@charlescitypress.com

Many of the most accomplished athletes in the world still remember the first time their names appeared in Sports Illustrated.

If Rylan Kuhn, a sophomore at Mason City High School, ever finds glory on the tennis court or even the basketball court, he’ll likely won’t be the exception.

“When he saw his name mentioned in the story, he got so excited,” Mark Kuhn said of his grandson.

In the October edition of Sports Illustrated, the All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club and its famously manicured grass tennis court built and maintained by the elder Kuhn on his family homestead just south of Charles City was featured in a four-page spread.

It was part of the magazine’s Hidden Gems project that also spotlighted an innovative sandlot baseball field in Austin, Texas.; a limestone quarry indented with an Olympic-size swimming pool in Louisville, Kentucky.; and a resurrected futbol pitch/venue in Hamtramck, Michigan.

SI came to the AILTC when it hosted the “Court of Dreams Classic” the weekend July transitioned to August this past summer. That tournament attracted some of the top-level collegiate players in the region and country as well as future UCLA player Anne Christine Lutkemeyer, ranked at the time No. 3 among prep female seniors in the United States, who emerged as the tourney’s Ladies Singles champion.

When SI contacted Kuhn about the project, he suggested that they come down to cover the “Alex J. Kuhn Invitational”, an annual youth tournament in memory of Kuhn’s son, who committed suicide in 2016.

Schedules didn’t align for the magazine to come down for that event, which took place several weeks before the “Classic”, but Rylan — who “more than held his own” during the youth tournament named after his father — got a shout-out in a paragraph.

The journalists composing the feature included photographer David E. Klutho, who took all the art for all the Hidden Gems stories, and was also in Iowa for the “Field of Dreams” Major League Baseball game where he snapped several ethereal shots of the distant wild fire-refracted sunset hovering over the game in progress and the surrounding cornfields; and writer Stanley Kay, who recently did a SI feature on how a bronze statue of tennis great Arthur Ashe now stands tall amid Richmond, Virginia’s infamous yet reconstructed “Monuments Avenue” that formerly paid homage to the Confederacy.

Kuhn was more than impressed with the finished product.

“(Klutho) has been all over the world and he told us all these fascinating stories,” Kuhn said. “(Kay) had two hour-long interviews with me when he was down here, and he later contacted me on my cell phone to make sure he had all the facts straight in the story.

“When he first talked to me, he was asking me all these strange questions … like he wanted to know the names of the flowers around the court. I didn’t know how he was going to use any of that, but when I saw the story, he managed to weave all that in there. He did an amazing job … and it was all accurate.”

Incidentally, AILTC also was acknowledged by SI’s current executive editor Jon Wertheim, who produced a short documentary on the subject for the Tennis Channel in 2011.

Kuhn was able to secure several editions for keepsake, but Sports Illustrated “hard copies” are not as accessible as they were back in … say … in 1974 when then-fiances Jimmy Connors and Chris Evert graced a cover (Kuhn still has that near-half century old copy in near-pristine condition).

“I don’t know where you can buy the magazine anymore,” he said. “It’s nice to have something posted online or on video, but when you have something like this …” referring to the print story “… it seems to reach so many more people. When this came out, my email blew up from the responses.”

Every summer, Kuhn and his wife Denise host tennis enthusiasts across the country as well as the world who want to experience playing tennis (for free) on a grass court. The SI article will likely spur interest, especially with the home mailing address — 2667 240th St., Charles City, Iowa — attached to the story’s “Court of Dreams” graphic.

“I like the way they did that,” Kuhn said. “I also like the (Charles City) Comets’ team color (orange) in the lettering.”

Though grass courts may be going the way of printed journalism and literature, several AILTC visitors have been inspired to build — or attempt to — their own home grass courts and have leaned on Kuhn for advice.

One of these visitors is Minnesota Vikings starting quarterback Kirk Cousins.

“He definitely has the means,” Kuhn said of Cousins, who recently played at the AILTC while accompanied by his personal tennis pro instructor, “and you can tell by just talking to him that he’s serious about it.”

But let’s get one thing straight: Putting down a Wimbledon-quality playing surface is not rocket science … it’s likely more complicated than that.

When Kuhn gets down to the details of keeping a dream alive that germinated circa 1962 when he was 11 years old while listening to BBC broadcasts of The Championships, Wimbledon, you realize it’s not easy being green. It involves mastery of strip tilling and drill-bore aeration; knowing the distinctive characteristics of perennial rye grass from that of Bermuda grass and/or Buffalo grass; and being able to read the weather well enough so a unforecasted downpour doesn’t wipe out hours of seed planting.

“In a way, it’s much like growing corn,” Kuhn says in an effort to keep it simple. “And what’s corn? Just another type of grass.”

Maybe that’s why tennis courts and baseball fields have been popping up in the middle of cornfields.