Yeah, Mon, Jamaica Means Tennis
By Roger Cox

A light rain was falling as I stepped to the edge of a platform high in the forest canopy in the lush hills behind Jamaica’s Montego Bay. After checking my safety harness and gear, the guide gave me the thumbs up to go. Moments later I was flying feet first above the tree tops, suspended from a set of pulleys running along a pair of horizontal cables that spanned a 200-foot-deep ravine. Looking down I could see the winding course of the Great River and the red-orange blossoms on the very top of an African tulip tree. It was an exhilarating crossing, and at 1,000 feet said to be the longest in the world.

The canopy tour actually consisted of seven such rides, although none as long as that thrill-packed final, stitched together by hikes through the forest. I’d been picked up at my resort and driven through the small towns of Anchovy and Montpelier and then along a dirt road through orange groves to a camp at the edge of the woods. For the next hour and a half eight of us, accompanied by three guides and a photographer, zigzagged back and forth across the Great River, occasionally glimpsing local kids out for a swim or tourists in inner tubes floating downstream on another kind of adventure outing.

From the first time I visited, Jamaica has had a special appeal for me. On the one hand it’s very good to tennis players, but it’s also an appealing Caribbean island for people like me who are not good at doing nothing. Rather than bake on a beach, I’d much prefer be hiking up a waterfall, as I did at Dunn’s River Falls in Ocho Rios; floating on a raft down the Martha Brae River; touring Noel Cow-ard’s house Firefly, where he was buried; or boning up on the legend of the “White Witch” at Rose Hall Plantation.

What has kept me from exploring even more of Jamaica is its tennis opportunities. On many Caribbean islands, a tennis racket can be just so much excess baggage (something you carry but find little opportunity to use beyond, perhaps, taking a lesson with the pro). Jamaica is a notable exception. The island has a history of attracting the greats of the game, from tennis legend Don Budge, who used to spend winters at the Montego Bay Racquet Club, to Rod Laver, Althea Gibson, Bjorn Borg, and John McEnroe.

In recent years, the former stars are most likely to show up for special events: in October, Kathy Rinaldi, Luke and Murphy Jensen and Brenda Schultz-McCarthy headlined a fantasy camp in October during the annual Tennis Month at Couples Swept Away Negril. And Roy Emerson, Fred Stolle, Owen Davidson and Sherwood Stewart are scheduled to appear for the 8th Annual Grand Slam Legends festival at the Tryall Club in Montego Bay the weekend of November 27-28. Yet even when they’re not around, the opportunity for tennis is ubiquitous.

As you’ll quickly discover when you begin to check out lodging options, Jamaica is rife with all-inclusive resorts: Sandals for couples (www.sandals.com), Beaches for families (www.beaches.com), Superclubs (www.superclubs.com) and Couples (www.couples.com)—all have multiple sites, most with tennis courts and many with professional tennis staff. None of these has a higher profile than Couples Swept Away Negril, about 60 miles west of the Montego Bay airport. Don’t let the name mislead you: Although marketed under the “Couples” umbrella, you do not actually have to be “coupled” to stay at this 140-room property—though you do need to be over age 18.

Couples Swept Away supplements its soft, white-sand beach and water sports activities with a 10-acre sports complex comprising a well-equipped fitness, lap pool, modest spa, bar, and most important of all, ten tennis courts (five hard and five Har-Tru). To ensure that those courts get plenty of use, Swept Away not only has a staff of four full-time USPTR-certified pros for private lessons, but also recruits a visiting pro from the United States each week to conduct clinics and run round robins and tournaments.

Ann and Sandy Benett from Moun-tain View, California, have been vacationing at Swept Away for 13 years, specifically because of the tennis. “I’m an intermediate in a family of 5.0s and 5.5s,” she told me. “I take the clinics and private lessons, and my husband hits with one of the pros.” The Benetts come in August every year, which often means they have pros to themselves for as many hours as they want.

The island’s landscape changes in winter. Tennis and fitness director Robin Spence notes this is the time that tennis activity reaches its zenith. “In the winter, most people are repeat guests and they’re here for tennis,” he told me. That means that the daily round robins generally get a better turnout, but also that the clinics run by the visiting pro can become unwieldy, with as many as ten players on court at one time.

If Swept Away sets the tennis standard for the all-inclusives, then Tryall Club (www.tryallclub.com) does so for villa colonies. Located 10 miles west of Montego Bay, this former plantation sprawls across 2,200 lush, hilly acres. Its focal point is an eighteenth-century Georgian Great House, whose ridge-top perch affords a sweeping panorama of the island’s north coast and the club’s 18-hole golf course. Thirteen one- and two-bedroom Great House villas (each optionally staffed with a housekeeper/ cook) cling to ridge, while another 56 larger villas (some with as many as six bedrooms and most with swimming pools)—all fully staffed with housekeeper, butler and cook—dot the hillsides or hunker along the coast.

I arrived at my Great House villa to find my housekeeper/cook Patricia waiting to with an offer to prepare meals and do laundry. That villa was just steps from a restaurant in the historic Great House and 100 yards from a ridge-top complex of nine courts. Two of these courts sported a new soft surface called Classic Clay, and there are plans for converting two more. Tennis director Richard Ferdinand, a former junior champion in his native Trinidad, had set up some doubles for me. Like all guests, we had the use of a ball boy—although it took some time before I remembered to let him do his job.

In season, there are weekly clinics and social round robins. However, given that so many of the players are villa owners and members who prefer to take private or hitting lessons, and I suspect, play among themselves, I worried that the average vacationer might feel like an outsider. Pierre Lapeyre, part of my doubles group and whose wife’s family owns a Tryall villa, alleviated my worries. “Anyone who spends much time at the courts soon meets many of the players,” he assured me. “And when we’re here, we get calls all the time about guests looking for games.”

So many players know each other and the staff that Tryall feels more like a private club than a resort, a sense enhanced by the requirement to wear predominantly white. Yet the club isn’t stuffy. A little bar and covered terrace on the 10th hole of the golf course is just steps from the courts, and thus, provides a convenient and low-key gathering place for tennis players.

The atmosphere is different at Round Hill Hotel & Villas (www.roundhill
jamaica.com) a few miles to the west. As the name suggests, it has both hotel rooms (36 of them now being redesigned by villa-owner Ralph Lauren) and 29 villas. At Round Hill, the villa staff prepares only breakfast, so its beach-front bar and restaurant are much busier than Tryall’s. The bar, in fact, is a favorite with people staying elsewhere, as is its restaurant popular for Sunday’s Jamaican buffet breakfast.

Tennis at Round Hill is supervised by Calvin James, its pro of 15 years. “We specialize in private lessons,” he told me. “But we also run round robins and group clinics whenever there is demand for it. We also have tournaments and social doubles events over the Christmas holidays.” As at Tryall, ball boys are a standard amenity.

Set on 110 acres of a former allspice and pineapple plantation, Round Hill affords both seclusion and intimacy. Although many of the villas range in size from two to five bedrooms and have their own pools, guests naturally gravitate to the lively freshwater pool and footprint of pebbly beach below the hill that gives the resort its name.

Adults seeking peace and quiet have only to follow a path west from the beach, which leads to an adults-only area with spa, fitness center, grassy expanse overlooking the water, and a small swimming pool. However, Round Hill also encourages families by offering a complimentary Pineapple Kids’ Club for those ages 3 to 12, and in summer, the resort brings in a visiting tennis pro to conduct junior tennis clinics.

The largest tennis complex on the island can be found at Half Moon (www.halfmoon-resort.com) 7 miles west of Montego Bay. Set on 440 acres along two miles of white sand beach, this 419-room resort encompasses a wealth of recreational amenities, including 9 hard and 4 artificial grass courts. In addition, there is the Robert Trent Jones Sr. golf course (currently being upgraded), a well-equipped fitness center, a spa, 51 swimming pools, an equestrian center, two water sports complexes, and a dolphin encounter. Half Moon also offers a shopping village, a supervised children’s playground, and a nature reserve—all within the confines of the resort.

I arrived at the tennis pro shop to find a table of trophies and sign-up sheets for a variety of events, both junior and adult. Tennis director Kirby Grizzle, who started at Half Moon as a ball boy, explained. “Whenever there’s a holiday in America or Europe that brings in a lot of families, we run a festival of events for them to play in,” he told me. Although the weekly calendar lists four clinics—two for adults and two for juniors—Grizzle says that what happens in any given week fluctuates with de-mand. “You have to be very flexible with the program because our goal is to ensure the satisfaction of the guest.”

Not having a local membership ensures guests have priority on the courts, but also makes game matching a bigger challenge. Grizzle ad-mits that this fact is one reason his staff includes not only teaching pros and ball boys, but also hitting pros to fill in when another guest player can’t be found. However, this problem didn’t seem to be an issue with the people I talked to. Many of these players were return guests, drawn to the friendly staff and easy camaraderie of the courts. Those with kids raved about the children’s programs, both on court and off. And most seemed content to spend their entire vacation within the confines of the resort. Like me, if they have any hope of thoroughly exploring the island, they’ll have to keep coming back time and again.

For information about travel to Jamaica, contact the Jamaica Tourist Board at 800-233-4582 or www.visitjamaica.com.