I’m usually doing a lot of coping around this time of year: As a massive tennis fan—both the watching and the playing—the season generally winds down after the (just-concluded) US Open. And as for my game? While it’s really just hitting its stride, I’ve already started planning out the indoor season. My wife and two kids, meanwhile, just want an escape—tennis or no tennis, just somewhere fun, active, un-boring… and warm.
Enter the South Carolina Lowcountry. I’d been hearing about it forever from friends, and one particular part of it—Hilton Head Island—has been imprinted on my psyche since my tender years. Growing up land-locked in the midwest, I was an avid reader of Tennis magazine, and each month I’d marvel at the ads in the back for various tennis camps, tennis vacations, tennis instruction—seemingly all of which (or so I remember it) were located in this mysterious place called Hilton Head. When I then had the chance to meet the former US Open and Wimbledon champion Stan Smith—yes, the guy with the shoe—out at the Open, and he invited me to come down to Hilton Head to hit with him, it seemed like destiny.
First things first, though: The flight from New York to Savannah, Georgia is quick—two hours and small change—and a brief car ride delivered us to the Montage Palmetto Bluff. Any remaining traces of the much-overrated “real world” disappeared almost instantly the moment the car turned onto long, lazy streets cascaded with trees hanging Spanish moss. Soon deposited into our sprawling three-story brick home (like most things here, a newish build that hearkens back to various Southern architecture tropes) in the middle of Wilson Village, we dropped our stuff and headed out to grab rental bikes and a golf cart (the main mode of transportation around the 20,000 acres—much of it a protected nature conservancy—which comprise the property, which also contains 32 miles of waterfront property)…