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THE TENNIS TACTICIAN, LLC

Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area

cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — the Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet) combined with the national flag of Chile
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Ascensor Concepcion in Valparaiso, A short nineteenth-century funicular railway climbing a steep slope in Valparaiso, its small wooden-bodied cars rising on parallel tracks from a narrow street entrance to a promenade overlooking the harbor
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Plaza Sotomayor and the Monument to the Heroes of Iquique in Valparaiso, A broad formal square opening toward the harbor of Valparaiso, faced by the blue-gray neoclassical former naval headquarters and centered on a tall stone monument crowned by a statue of a naval officer
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, A narrow five-story house painted in bright colors on the slopes of Cerro Florida in Valparaiso, its curved windows and ship-like upper rooms looking out over the amphitheater of hills and the Pacific harbor
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Palacio Baburizza in Valparaiso, An Art Nouveau mansion of towers, slate roofs, and curved balconies standing on the Paseo Yugoslavo atop Cerro Alegre in Valparaiso, housing the city's fine arts museum
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — the Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet) combined with the national flag of Chile

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet)

Valparaiso, Chile  ·  Bags > 4-9

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet)

This six-frame satchel holds a poet's quiver in one graceful stanza — generous storage, somewhere for the small things, a shoulder that does not complain, a great deal of unpublished potential. One request before purchase: wander the hills of Valparaiso with it, past the funiculars and Neruda's house, and feel something. The tour comes included. The longing is complimentary.

↓   Tour Valparaiso, Chile

Four stops before the checkout

Valparaiso, Chile
01
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Ascensor Concepcion in Valparaiso, A short nineteenth-century funicular railway climbing a steep slope in Valparaiso, its small wooden-bodied cars rising on parallel tracks from a narrow street entrance to a promenade overlooking the harbor
Stop one

Ascensor Concepcion

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet): Before the view, the mechanism. Two cabins on one rope, and the original power source was WATER — you fill the tank of the upper car until it outweighs the lower one, release the brake, and gravity performs the whole journey for nothing. No fuel. No engine. One valve and a hillside. It was inaugurated on 1 December 1883, the oldest of Valparaiso's funicular elevators, part of the fleet of hillside lifts built to move people between the narrow port-side flat and the residential hills above, and it runs from Prat Street near the Turri clock tower up to the Paseo Gervasoni on Cerro Concepcion, the hill settled in the nineteenth century by English and German merchant families. Later converted to electric power, which I forgive. At its height the network ran more than two dozen ascensores; the survivors were declared national Historic Monuments in 1998 and the historic quarter was UNESCO-inscribed in 2003. It creaks. It is a hundred and forty years old and still lifting. Let it creak.

02
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Plaza Sotomayor and the Monument to the Heroes of Iquique in Valparaiso, A broad formal square opening toward the harbor of Valparaiso, faced by the blue-gray neoclassical former naval headquarters and centered on a tall stone monument crowned by a statue of a naval officer
Stop two

Plaza Sotomayor and the Monument to the Heroes of Iquique

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet): I will keep this one plain, because of what is directly beneath us. The ceremonial heart of the city sits between the port and the former Intendencia, that wedding-cake building of the early twentieth century which long housed the headquarters of the Chilean Navy. At the centre stands the Monument to the Heroes of Iquique, dedicated in 1886, with a crypt beneath holding the remains of Captain Arturo Prat and the comrades who died with him in the naval battle of Iquique on 21 May 1879, during the War of the Pacific. Prat boarded the Peruvian ironclad Huascar as his wooden corvette Esmeralda was being sunk, and the anniversary is commemorated here each year with naval parades. One structural note worth having: excavations for a parking garage beneath the square exposed remains of the nineteenth-century waterfront, now displayed under glass. The old shoreline is still down there, carrying the new one. Cities stand on their own foundations more literally than people imagine.

03
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — La Sebastiana in Valparaiso, A narrow five-story house painted in bright colors on the slopes of Cerro Florida in Valparaiso, its curved windows and ship-like upper rooms looking out over the amphitheater of hills and the Pacific harbor
Stop three

La Sebastiana

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet): Five narrow floors stacked up a hillside — a difficult site, and that was rather the point. Pablo Neruda, Chile's Nobel Prize-winning poet, bought the unfinished house and inaugurated it in September 1961 because he wanted somewhere that felt as if it floated above the bay, and that brief can only be met with a very small footprint and a great deal of vertical circulation. He filled it with carousel horses, ships in bottles, maps, coloured glass, and a bar from which only he was allowed to pour, and spent every New Year's Eve there watching the fireworks over the harbour. The house was ransacked after the 1973 military coup, in the days around Neruda's death, and stood damaged for years until the Neruda Foundation restored it and opened it as a museum in 1991.

04
cardio tennis clinics Victoria Park — Palacio Baburizza in Valparaiso, An Art Nouveau mansion of towers, slate roofs, and curved balconies standing on the Paseo Yugoslavo atop Cerro Alegre in Valparaiso, housing the city's fine arts museum
Stop four

Palacio Baburizza

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet): Now look at what this one is standing over, because a good part of it is cantilevered straight out across a slope, and that is genuinely awkward to detail. They got it right. Built in 1916 on the Paseo Yugoslavo of Cerro Alegre for the Zanelli family and acquired soon after by Pascual Baburizza, a Croatian immigrant who made a fortune in the nitrate trade that powered Chile's economy in the early twentieth century. The architects Arnaldo Barison and Renato Schiavon worked in an Art Nouveau style rare in Chile: asymmetrical towers, curved balconies, hammered-copper details. And do note the copper, because hammered copper is its own weatherproofing — no coating, no maintenance schedule, it simply oxidises and then protects itself for the next hundred years. Sea air. A century. Still there. Baburizza bequeathed his European and Chilean painting collection to the city, and since 1971 the palace has housed the Municipal Museum of Fine Arts, reopened in 2012 after a long restoration. The paintings are very fine. The roof is finer.

The Valparaiso, Chile track

Dunlop CX Club Tennis Bag (6 Racquet)

Written for this world alone.

What is a bag, if not a stanza with a zipper? (I've been workshopping that one.) The Dunlop CX Club 6 Racquet bag holds, as the name confesses with admirable economy, up to six racquets in its generous main compartment — six!

a sonnet's worth of sestets — along with an accessory pocket for grips and dampeners and the small consolations of this life, and a padded, adjustable shoulder strap for the long walk between matches, which is, of course, a metaphor. Lightweight polyester construction. Bold CX styling in black and red, the colors of ink and of the heart.

It carries everything except, alas, my unfinished manuscript.

It lives in Valparaiso, Chile, and honestly, of course it does. This is the port city of tumbling hills and creaking funiculars where Pablo Neruda kept La Sebastiana, his house above the bay, filled with carousel horses and ships in bottles, where he watched the fireworks every New Year's Eve.

A Nobel laureate lived here and I can't get published in the club newsletter — but I digress. Ride the Ascensor Concepcion, the oldest of the hill elevators, running since 1883, and let it lift you and your six racquets the way a good line lifts a poem. Stand in Plaza Sotomayor where Chile buried its naval heroes. Feel things. That's free, unlike everything else.

Six racquets is a club player's whole quiver, a coach's whole afternoon, a doubles team's whole hope. You will carry it everywhere from a morning hit down by the port to a hillside court above the bay, and it is also perfect for a slow ride up the Ascensor Concepcion with your whole quiver on your shoulder, which is the closest this city comes to a rhyme.

The bag carries it all without complaint, which is more than I can say for myself.

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