The Courts We Built: The Battle for a Tennis Cathedral: (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780983749547)

In 1977, thirty-six people in Eugene, Oregon opened their checkbooks and built a tennis center on a handshake with the YMCA. No contract. No lawyers. Just a promise: we build it, you run it as a tennis center. For everybody.

For forty-five years, both sides kept that promise.

Then the YMCA stopped.

This is the story of what happens when an institution breaks faith with the community that built it - and what that community does next. Drawing on Orwell, Cervantes, Buber, and William James, Douglas McCarty makes the case for saving a place that matters, and offers a vision for what it could become.

Part history of the place, part love letter to tennis - and a battle plan for anyone who has ever watched a bureaucracy consume something irreplaceable.