Serving up a Grand Slam appetizer

The courts at the 2,700-seat Spruce Peak Stadium are the same surface the athletes will play on next week, when the U.S. Open kicks off. The Classic began Tuesday and wraps up today, Thursday; it features six professional players in a laid-back warmup to the final Grand Slam event of the year.

For information, including tickets to today’s championship matches, visit stowetennis.com. Grand Slam Tennis Tours of Stowe, the event organizer, is also posting updates through its Twitter handle, @MyTennisTicket, and live-streaming video of the matches on its Facebook page, fb.com/grandslamtennistours.

For the players participating in the Classic, these matches at the feet of Vermont’s most famous ski resort means an opportunity to warm up in a relaxing, quiet atmosphere, far removed from the din of Queens, N.Y., where upwards of 700,000 fans flock to the two-week event. For local tennis fans, it means a unique blend of intimacy and action, as the players get to show both their athletic prowess and their lighter side.

On Tuesday, the opening day of play, the two highest-ranked players in the tournament, Spaniard Albert Ramos Vinolas and American Jared Donaldson, stared down each other in the grueling midday sun and kept the other from gaining an inch. They brought their own heat, with punishing serves and returns that resulted in deuce after deuce, break point after break point.

Tuesday’s second match was just as entertaining, but in a more off-kilter, off-speed match of drop shots and sky-high lobs. Germany’s Tommy Haas squared off against Canada’s Vasek Pospisil in a match that was cut short because of practically monsoon-level downpours. While it was going, though, the fans got a treat of good tennis and plenty of cheer.

Haas is the old man of the bunch at 39 years old, and he carries the lowest Association of Tennis Professionals ranking, at 250. So, he had to keep Pospisil off-balance by taking the mustard off each of Pospisil’s serves and bringing the speed down to the veteran’s pace. Even though Haas got a reprieve from the rain, when the match resumed Wednesday, Pospisil made short work of the German.

The Stowe Classic doesn’t have a judge keeping an eye on every line for an errant serve or out-of-bounds return, so it’s up to each player to call it as they see it. It lends a rollicking sense of playground basketball, if your local playground is Rucker Park in Harlem.

After a monster 11-hit volley between the men, Haas let a Pospisil serve go by him. It was close, but it was out. Or was it?

“Is it out?” asked the center-line judge, the only one with official eyes on the court.

Haas: “That’s why I ask you?”

Judge: “OK, then it’s out.”

Pospisil, laughing: “It looked in to me.”

About three dozen fans, shouting in unison: “It was in!”

Haas: “OK, then. It was out.”

A taste of more?

The Classic is a warm-up for next week’s U.S. Open, for which all six players have qualified. Even more important, the organizers hope it serves as a warm-up for a new era of professional tennis in the Green Mountains.

Tennis is big in Stowe, and Grand Slam founder Andrew Chmura told vtdigger.org that there are about 300 courts in town, about one for every 14 residents. And the game used to bring the big names to town.

The Head Classic was an annual tournament in the 1970s and ’80s that attracted players such as Jimmy Connors, Ilie Nastase, Brad Gilbert, Guillermo Vilas, Vijay Armritraj, Johan Kriek and Tom Gullikson. Ivan Lendl once held up a bumper sticker at a press conference that read “I Love Stowe.”

Then, the Head Classic just stopped.

In 2007, Chmura helped lure the Fed Cup, the world’s largest international women’s team tennis competition, to Stowe, but there hasn’t been anything since. Although the stands during the early matches this week were far from full, this week’s success could mean more tennis.

For one, even though the tennis stadium will go away after the Stowe Mountain Lodge Classic wraps up, the courts will stay, blue and green and beckoning the top players to the top of Vermont.

Pros around Stowe

The tennis players arrived in town over the weekend, and they haven’t simply holed up in their hotel rooms the whole time. Eagle-eyed tourists and locals have sighted the athletes all over Stowe.

Kyle Ross of Grand Slam Tennis Tours offered some helpful advice in spotting a player: “If they have one forearm that looks more developed than their other one, it’s definitely a pro.”

A Massachusetts couple riding the Over Easy gondola to Spruce Peak said they saw Tommy Haas atop Mount Mansfield, hiking the Chin after a practice Monday.

Riding shotgun on a golf cart around the resort was Frances Tiafoe, a 19-year-old American ranked 71st in the world — at 17, he was the first teenager to earn a wild card into the French Open since Michael Chang in 1989.

Stowe couple Jim and Kay Stevenson were out of town for the actual matches, but they’d heard some pros were practicing on the courts Monday afternoon at Stowe High School.

There, Jeremy Chardy, a French player currently ranked 79th in the world, exchanged volleys with an up-and-comer from the Czech Republic, Ondrej Styler. Chardy was focused but took some time to exchange pleasantries with the locals.

“Allo, I am Chardy. I am pleased to meet you,” he said, with a firm handshake made even stronger by that over-developed forearm. “It is very nice up here. Very quiet. Peaceful.”