Themed Cardio Tennis Clinics in the Fort Lauderdale Area
An outer short carrying one of the oldest names in the sport — no liner claimed, cut for the split step and the fold. Sulaymaniyah comes first: Amna Suraka, where you read everything and say nothing on the way out, and Azmar mountain at night.
Sergio Tacchini New Orion Men's Tennis Shorts: Amna Suraka was once a Ba'ath-era security prison, and its red, shell-pocked walls are preserved as a museum. Took me right back to the '76 semifinal when my serve left a few marks too—well, not like that, forgive an old champion his metaphors.
Sergio Tacchini New Orion Men's Tennis Shorts: The Slemani Museum is famed for antiquities and is often ranked in Iraq just behind Baghdad's National Museum. Naturally I compared the display cases to my trophy cabinet—then remembered theirs is several thousand years older and considerably classier.
Sergio Tacchini New Orion Men's Tennis Shorts: Sarchnar Park sits in the middle of Sulaymaniyah as a popular green space for a breather from the city. I used to call that the changeover, right before breaking serve and pretending I wasn't out of breath.
Sergio Tacchini New Orion Men's Tennis Shorts: The road up Azmar Mountain gives a night view of Sulaymaniyah spread out below, all lights and altitude. Reminds me of watching the court from the umpire's chair after winning match point—briefly majestic, then someone asked me to stop climbing things.
In my day you played in whatever the club had, and I will tell you now that half of what I won, I won in shorts that fought me the whole way. Nobody talks about that. Everybody remembers the forehand. Nobody remembers the seam.
So let me be useful for once. The Orion is one of Sergio Tacchini's oldest and best-known names — it has been on tennis players and, unexpectedly, on the terraces since the 1980s, adopted by people who never picked up a racquet — and the New Orion is the current cut of that idea in a short.
What a tennis short has to do is unglamorous and absolute: it has to allow a full split step without riding up, it has to take a ball in a pocket without dragging, and it has to come out of a bag looking like it was folded rather than fought. That is the job.
It is not a compression garment and there is no built-in liner claimed here; it is the outer short, and what goes underneath is between you and your own judgement. The house was founded in 1966 by Sergio Tacchini, who actually played the tour — I never beat him, for the record, being roughly forty years too late to try.
Sulaymaniyah is a city I would send anybody to, and I would send them first to Amna Suraka, the red security building left shell-pocked and standing, kept as a museum of what was done inside it. You go there before you go anywhere else, and you do not talk on the way out.
Then the Slemani Museum, whose antiquities are second only to Baghdad's.
Then Sarchnar Park in the middle of the city. And then, in the evening, the road up Azmar mountain, with the whole city laid out and lit below you.
Everybody remembers the forehand. Nobody remembers the seam.
The seam decides more matches.
