Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo

Reykjavík, Iceland  ·  Clothing > Long Sleeves > Mens Long Sleeves

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo

This is a playing shirt with sleeves to the wrist: an elastic knit that gives in any direction, ribbed cuffs that stay put, a dropped back hem, and no interest whatever in holding your sweat. Before checkout it intends to show you Reykjavík, and what a correctly specified foundation looks like.

↓   Tour Reykjavík, Iceland

Four stops before the checkout

Reykjavík, Iceland
01
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinics — the Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo photographed at Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík, Iceland. A tall pale concrete church at the top of Skólavörðustígur whose stepped wing-like flanks rise either side of a central tower in imitation of cooled basalt columns. A clear, very cold early morning in late winter, the low sun raking hard across the concrete from the side and throwing the steps into long shadow, camera down near ground level looking up the facade. Commuters are cutting up the hill with hoods pulled tight, a man is scraping ice off a windscreen with the engine running, the main door has just been opened for morning service and two people are going in, a delivery cyclist is walking the last of the slope. The folded polo lies on a granite step in the near foreground, and no one is wearing it or touching it.
Stop one

Hallgrímskirkja

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo: Concrete, and the form is taken from basalt columns — the hexagonal jointing that Iceland's own lava makes as it cools and contracts. Guðjón Samúelsson drew it in 1937, which means the geology of the island is effectively the load diagram. Construction began in 1945 and was completed in 1986. Forty-one years on site. Think about that purely as a project: four decades of setting out, of matching pours, of holding tolerances consistent between generations of workmen who never met one another. Samúelsson died in 1950, and somebody else picked up his drawings and kept building to them. Kings get statues for far less. Whoever maintained the setting-out across forty-one years is the one I would like to shake hands with.

02
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinics — the Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo photographed at Höfði in Reykjavík, Iceland. A small white timber house with a gabled roof standing alone on an open lawn on the seafront at Borgartún, the bay and the ridge of Esja behind it and no other building near. Grey overcast midday in autumn with a hard wind coming off Faxaflói, the sea white-capped, grass flattened, gulls holding still against the air. The camera is at eye level, straight on, the product in the middle distance off to one side. A school group is being herded into a photograph with the house behind them, a teacher counting heads with one hand on a hat, a runner going past on the seafront path, two people wrestling with a car door in the wind. The polo is laid flat along a low sea wall, unattended and completely ignored.
Stop two

Höfði House

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo: Timber frame, 1909, built for a French consul, and there is almost nothing structurally remarkable about it — which is exactly why I want you looking at it. In October 1986 Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev sat down inside this small wooden house. The summit ended with no signed agreement, and it opened the door to the arms treaty that followed. Now note the specification: no reinforcement, no monumental approach, no grand span. A house. A room. Two chairs. And the lesson I keep having to relearn is that a structure only ever has to be adequate for the load it actually carries — this one carried the Cold War for two days and did not settle a millimetre. It is also said to be haunted. Not my department.

03
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinics — the Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo photographed at Perlan in Reykjavík, Iceland. A glass dome mounted on top of six huge white cylindrical geothermal hot-water tanks arranged in a ring on wooded Öskjuhlíð hill. A warm, bright evening in late June with the sun still high at ten at night, the light golden and level across the dome. The camera is elevated on the observation walkway looking down and out, the frame wide and the product small in it. Families are working their way round the deck, a child has both hands and a forehead flat against the glass, a group is pointing out across the roofs to Esja, somebody is holding a phone up at arm's length, a birthday party is being carried out to a table. The folded polo sits on the parapet rail at the edge of the walkway, small in frame, and nobody goes near it.
Stop three

Sun Voyager (Sólfar)

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo: Polished steel on a low stone plinth, sitting in salt spray on an exposed seafront, which is a materials decision before it is anything else. And it is not a Viking ship, whatever you have been told on the way here. Jón Gunnar Árnason made it and described it as a dream boat, an ode to the sun — a vessel carrying light, and hope, and progress toward undiscovered territory. He was seriously ill while working on it and died in 1989, the year before it was unveiled in 1990 for the city's two hundredth anniversary. So the fabrication was completed and installed by other hands, working to his geometry. That is the part that gets me. A drawing is a set of instructions that outlives the person who wrote it, and this one was followed exactly.

04
Beverly Heights cardio tennis clinics — the Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo photographed at the Sun Voyager (Sólfar) sculpture in Reykjavík, Iceland. A polished stainless steel skeletal boat on a low round stone plinth beside the seafront path on Sæbraut, open water and the ridge of Esja directly behind it. A clear, hard-frozen night in February with a green aurora moving across the sky and the steel picking up the light along every rib. The camera is close and intimate with a shallow depth of field. A loose crowd has gathered in the dark: tripods being levelled, someone crouched changing a lens with bare fingers, a couple standing very still with their heads back, a cyclist stopped with a foot down, breath showing under the path lamps. The polo is folded on the stone lip of the plinth, mid-frame, and not one person is looking at it.
Stop four

Perlan

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo: Six cylindrical tanks. That is what you are actually looking at — geothermal hot water storage, piped up from underground and used to heat this entire city — and the glass dome went on top because somebody looked at six pieces of municipal plant on Öskjuhlíð hill and asked what else they could be made to carry. It opened in 1991. And here is the part that genuinely moves me, more than any church we have looked at today: Iceland went from burning imported coal to heating almost every home with the ground beneath it. That is not architecture. That is a national plumbing decision, taken correctly, paying out every winter since. The dome is very handsome. The tanks are the achievement.

The Reykjavík, Iceland track

Nike Court Slam Long-Sleeve Tennis Polo

Written for this world alone.

A rugby-inspired long-sleeve polo in 100% polyester, built on Nike's Dri-FIT ADV platform. The knit is four-way stretch, lightweight and breathable, and it is engineered to move sweat off the skin rather than hold it, which is the entire point of a long sleeve you intend to actually play in.

The fabric is cut to limit cling, the back hem is extended for extra coverage when you reach, and the cuffs are ribbed so they stay where you put them instead of riding up the forearm mid-rally. Machine wash.

The reason a long sleeve exists at all is a place like Reykjavík, where the wind off Faxaflói bay decides the temperature and the forecast is a rumour.

You will wear this everywhere from an outdoor court in a stiff northerly to a warm indoor hall, and by the way — in a country whose social life genuinely revolves around the geothermal swimming pools, a shirt that dries fast and packs flat is not a luxury, it is basic equipment. Wear it, play, roll it into the bag, go and sit in the hot pot.

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