By Ryan Carey
The ‘25 Cherry Blossom Doubles was held April 10th-13th at Westwood Country Club. With a whopping 32 teams entered, it was sure to be a fun weekend no matter what transpired. Thursday saw the opening day’s play begin with the ceremonial ringing of the winning gallery gong by David Watson representing a touring group from the Royal Tennis Court. There was no overarching theme this year but “25” was interwoven throughout the tournament in various ways. The first of which was the introduction of a “25”-cent gumball machine filled with random chases called the “Change Machine”. Whereby you could ask the marker to change an upcoming chase and he would then put a quarter into the gumball machine and out would pop a new chase alongside the oohs and ahhs of the spectators dramatically lying in wait.
Friday’s cocktail party raised a glass to Sir Arthur Guinness (born in seventeen and 25) with the mind blowing revelation that when you rotate the Guinness harp logo a quarter turn, it becomes a court tennis court! A harpist serenaded us during cocktails and later on a traditional Irish duo put the reels in “Reel” Tennis. We also raised a toast to the invaluable James Greenley, who will be leaving us shortly after the tournament to move to North Carolina with his fiancee Emma (a “St. James” Gate plaque was also presented in keeping with our theme). A tip of the paddle was also paid to the anniversary of Ping Pong Diplomacy with a caricature artist using ping pong paddles as a canvas. There was a “quartered” ping pong table on hand, so we labelled those two activities as “Drawn and Quartered”. The motto of the Ping Pong Diplomacy exhibition matches was “Friendship First, Competition Second” and that seemed like a kindred notion for how the Cherry Blossom weekends always seem to go, so we adopted that motto. We also used the logo from the souvenir paddles from those matches made by The Double Happiness Company of Shanghai, but for our purposes, we changed it to Cherry Blossom “Doubles Happiness”.
Saturday saw the introduction of the 25 cent arcade Pong machine and a corresponding tournament. After the group photo, the Pong Final between Head Professional Ivan Ronaldson and Charles-Antoyne Hurstel was played on court and the game was projected onto the Main Wall. With the rowdy crowd cheering like it was some combination between the Colosseum and Thunderdome , it was a back and forth affair (literally) with Ivan eventually taking the title 21-19.
Paume Sunday saw everyone play a meaningful match with the losers of the round robin groups getting to “joust” in a Free Play final. Full draws and results can be found here. Matches can be seen on the Prince’s Court YouTube channel here.
Thank you to our Head Professional Ivan Ronaldson and Assistant Professional James Greenley for their Herculean efforts in making the tournament run as smoothly as it did. Special thank yous also go out to Racquets Director Dai Edwardes-Evans to allow the Cherry Blossom’s peculiarities to occur and to the Motz family who does a lot of behind the scenes grunt work to make the Cherry Blossom the special event that it is.
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE CHERRY BLOSSOM PHOTO ALBUM
CLICK HERE TO SEE THE FULL RESULTS
