All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club

The most vivid illustration of the surface’s reach is not in any club at all. As a boy, Mark Kuhn heard the BBC’s Wimbledon commentary on a shortwave radio with his grandfather in the family farmhouse, and the sound of the tournament never left him.

Decades later he turned the farm’s old cattle feedlot into a single grass court, with seventeen loads of sandy soil, five lines of drainage tile and a sixteen-head sprinkler, and kept it to something close to Wimbledon standards. After writing to Wimbledon’s head groundsman, he spent eight days with the All England Club ground staff in 2012. By 2017 visitors had come from 42 states and six countries, and Madison Keys, who played an exhibition there in 2022, called it the eighth wonder of the tennis world.

The All Iowa Lawn Tennis Club is, in one sense, an endearing personal story. In another, it is a precise measure of the surface’s pull: a court in the Corn Belt built by a man who wanted to experience something he had only ever heard on the radio.