When I was growing up, my dad was a tennis coach at (of all places) the Fashion Institute of Technology. For reasons I’ll never understand, Manhattan’s premiere fashion school had a physical education requirement, and if you were a student there in the 1980s or ’90s my dad probably taught you to hit. Even after retirement he still dressed the part, walking around Boca Raton in Sergio Tacchini tracksuits.
My dad also coached us kids to varying degrees of success. My brother went on to play Division 1 tennis at Cornell; I quit the high school team to audition for the musical. My dad didn’t fight me on it, but I know he was disappointed. “Tennis is a sport you can play for life,” he said.
I didn’t pick up a racket for the next 25 years—first out of pride, then out of fear. Could I still play? But lately I found myself missing the particular sweat that comes from an hour wailing forehands from the baseline. I missed the smell of the court. And I missed the fashion, an obsession reignited by Challengers—or more specifically, the image of Mike Faist in short shorts. But really I missed my dad. And nothing would surprise him more than me stepping out onto the court after all of these years. If Faist could star in the musical (or at least Spielberg’s West Side Story) and play convincing enough tennis onscreen, maybe I didn’t have to choose.
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If I was going to face my demons I’d need to devote some real time to the sport, which is how I found myself on a plane to Austria for a stay at Stanglwirt, a 400-year-old, family-owned resort in the Tyrolean Alps that looks like the backdrop to The Sound of Music. The vibe is Aspen ski chalet by way of Vienna. And over the years, the hotel has welcomed Clark Gable, Muhammad Ali, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s the kind of place where a pillow menu sits on the nightstand. Naturally, the hotel offers in-room dog-sitting services.
More importantly, for my purposes, they have a major tennis academy with eight clay courts, six indoor courts, and an expansive spa to soak tired muscles. The plan was to take lessons for the week. And I was in good company: Austria’s Dominic Thiem, who won the U.S. Open in 2020, sometimes warms up at Stanglwirt before July’s Generali Open, an official stop on the ATP tour.
Traveling to play tennis is its own contact sport—even for us mortals. In late June, the Bryan Brothers will run a three-day camp at Stanglwirt. Black Tomato, the high-end advisors known for luxe experiential travel, often sends clients to Puente Romano in Marbella, where Rafael Nadal, Serena Williams, and John McEnroe have all played. (Guests at Puente Romano can take lessons from Marko Djokovic, Novak’s kid brother.) And if you should find yourself on Richard Branson’s Necker Island, his private coach is available for workouts.
The stakes are high. Stephanie Reiner of the travel agency, For the Love of Traveling, tells me she once planned a girl’s trip to Sea Island, Georgia, for a group of competitive tennis players. When her client realized she’d mistakenly left her clay court shoes at home, Reiner sent a local pro shop to the hotel where they set up a trunk show courtside. Crisis averted. Here's the truth: No one wants to lose, not even on vacation. Especially at Curtain Bluff in Antigua, where visitors fight to book Stadium Court at sunset. “You’ll find a lot of guests walking by at that time,” says a coach Karim King. It turns out we all want an audience.
That same heightened atmosphere is on display at Stanglwirt, a hotel that once had more tennis courts than guest rooms. Maria Hauser, daughter of owner Balthasar Hauser, recalls visitors coming from all over the region to play tennis at her family’s hotel—followed by a plate of veal schnitzel at the inn’s traditional restaurant. When the players asked why they couldn’t stay over, her father drew up plans to expand. Stanglwirt now offers 171 rooms and suites, plus a Peter Burwash-branded tennis academy run by Petra Russegger, an Austrian once ranked 259th in the world. As a junior player, Petra faced off against Anna Kournikova. Today, she has to rally with me.
Stepping out onto the court after two decades was nerve wracking. So I wanted to at least look the part. Loewe designer Jonathan Anderson did the costumes for Challengers—and now (less famously) for my own return to tennis. I’d bought a bunch of his J.W. Anderson for Uniqlo collaboration with Roger Federer on eBay and laced up.
“It’s like riding a bike,” Petra assured me. And in some ways, she was right. Despite my hiatus from the sport, my forehand remained surprisingly intact. What I’d forgotten—and what’s really distorted when you’re watching Wimbledon from your couch—is the absurd 78-foot distance between baselines. Petra looked like she was a mile away. Or a kilometer in this case.
We started slowly with groundstrokes before moving on to volleys and eventually serves. Any fear of embarrassment quickly dissipated. Not because I was so good (I was fine), but because of the setting. Stanglwirt’s red clay courts are set against the Wilder Kaiser mountain, a snow-capped behemoth where cheesemakers toil away in cliffside cabins all summer. (At the end of the season, no less than the Austrian military is brought in to transport cheese down the mountain.) Architectural Digest once included the courts at Stanglwirt on their list of the "28 Most Beautiful Courts in the World.” Trust me, no one was looking at my backhand. I felt alive.
I played again the next day—this time with coach Dave Hong, who previously taught at Las Ventanas in Cabo and at the One & Only in the Maldives, and he and I got a little more granular. I was holding my racket too tight, he said, which is surely a metaphor for something. “Try different grips,” he advised, “see what feels comfortable, understand your instrument. Back in the day, people would teach you to step forward, follow through, bend your knees. And that’s perfect if the ball’s at the same place every time. What happens if you can’t get into that position?”
I loosened up. I ran for a shot deep in the corner. And somewhere along the way I stopped hearing my dad shouting “low to high!” and remembered how he looked. I remembered his smile from 78 feet away. He could be a ruthlessly competitive player (even more so in retirement where was known to curse audibly on the courts). But he always found joy in the game, and I think he wanted the same for me.
On the third day, Petra complimented my serve. More importantly, she told me to keep playing when I got home. “Tennis is a lifetime sport,” she said, unintentionally echoing my father.
The irony of a Jew flying to Munich to reconnect with his dad was not lost on me. But the truth is, I felt closer to him than I had in years. He could not have imagined playing on a clay court in the Austrian Alps. (Or that the hotel’s milk comes from an on-site dairy farm.) And he would have absolutely hated the movie Challengers—from the CGI tennis ball down to that absurd final point. Still, he would have loved this bit Zendaya says in the film: “Tennis is a relationship.”
With my muscles sore—heart and otherwise—I retreated to Stanglwirt’s heated, outdoor saltwater pool. Then I hit the lobby bar, which is exactly what you’d want from an Austrian chalet. Picture miles of naturally scented pine, a pub band playing Oasis covers on a small stage, and a pair of genial bartenders named Bernd and Philipp mixing drinks, telling you how they’d driven 90 minutes away to source some shrub deep in the woods for their own house-made liqueur. Raise a glass (or four), sleep in, repeat. Tennis, anyone?
