The gray-blue Hyundai was miles from anywhere in my guidebook, winding past tiny churches and lolling banana plants and a man selling salt fish outside a welding shop. I trailed it down a narrow potholed street, then into a narrower lane where abruptly a shirtless man stepped before it with a tired palm out. A mellow flurry of activity ensued. A dude with dreads climbed wearily off a nearby porch and dragged aside an old wooden door propped in the road as a barrier, while two other dudes, slick with sweat, began shuffling off the road themselves, over to where the sidewalk would be if this were a sidewalk kind of neighborhood, which it wasn’t.

But the Hyundai wasn’t passing through — the activity in the road was the destination. Only when the driver cut his engine did folks recognize the VIP now in their midst. At that point they would’ve handed over their firstborn.

Mark “Venom” Griffith emerged from his car, all muscular and languid, a jaguar in sportswear. I’d spent a good amount of time with him by this point, but he was still striking. Those lover-boy eyelashes don’t hurt, but like all celebrities he commands attention simply by existing. He also commands it by being the best road-tennis player in the world. That fact is particularly meaningful if you’ve heard of road tennis, a matter we’ll discuss in a bit.

A novice at the National Primary School Competition.

For now, Venom, 34, had a 21-by-10-foot patch of his country to dominate. We were in Chelston Gardens, a working-class neighborhood in southwest Barbados. Guys over here were snipping weed into baggies; a chicken over there pecked around in the dirt. The rectangle had been painted on the asphalt god knows how many years ago and was bisected by an eight-inch-high length of scrap wood, supported by hunks of cinderblock at the ends. This was the net, and on either side, every day, opponents wielding crude plywood paddles would gather to whack a defuzzed tennis ball back and forth ferociously. The action has been happening here, fast and ankle-high, just about every day since before most of these guys were born. Picture regular tennis, picture Ping-Pong, merge these two in your mind. You have now conjured Venom’s reason for being.

What was once a janky neighborhood pastime on the island became, at some point over the past half-dozen decades, the janky unofficial national sport. Cricket might be the ­dignified (and televised) game of the ­Caribbean, the big stadium may be a palace built for cricket, it may be a cricket player’s statue that stands out front, you might find a whole goddamn store called Cricket Legends of Barbados at Grantley Adams International Airport — but around the neighborhoods and villages of Barbados, in the hearts of former and current children, road tennis is hallowed. Which is why the last few years have gotten particularly interesting.

In a lonely bit of good fortune, Venom has become the world’s only professional road-tennis player; the purse, such as it is, is a purse for one. He’s won sponsorship deals and, in his biggest victory so far — that Hyundai. It’s also left him with a giant target on his chest, at least to any islander with a decent forehand. One of them, a younger man with long braids and a skull tattoo on his neck, was just now pulling up here in Chelston Gardens. I parked my rental behind Venom’s car and stepped out into the tropical heat.

Mark “Venom” Griffith (left) and Davien “Force Ripe” Taylor take a load off at Davien’s mother’s store after playing all morning.

This was not an official tournament — that would come. For now, and in other matches around the island, Davien “Force Ripe” Taylor had come for an unofficial go at the champ, who’d begun stretching his quads beside his parked car. I’m not going to tell you this mellow block was suddenly tense at the sight of the impending rivalry — I mean, I was literally watching the game with a reggae musician named Princi Lite holding what I can only assume was a hand-rolled cigarette, roughly the size of a Lincoln Log — but within five minutes Venom was serving, and it was hard not to notice everyone leaning in a little more.

It’s like stumbling upon two stooping giants warring over a tiny village: faster than tennis, wilder than Ping-Pong, more comprehensible than cricket.

A few specifics for those unfamiliar with the sport: A set comprises the best of three games, which are played to 21, and you must win by two points, so what might be a 15-minute game could stretch to hours with well-matched opponents. More aggressive hitters are known as attackers — Force Ripe is one — while defenders like Venom more or less aim to be wall-like. All the while, this is happening eight inches off the ground. If you’ve ever stumbled upon two stooping giants warring over a tiny village, you can appreciate the strange allure of the spectacle: faster than tennis, wilder than Ping-Pong, shorter than soccer, more comprehensible than cricket.

Cooling down between games.

For the first ten minutes, Force Ripe seemed tentative, as though he’d already accepted his place on the road-tennis ­hierarchy. But really the dude just wasn’t warmed up. In game two, Lite and I watched an engine switch on. Force Ripe stands a few inches taller than Venom and has to lunge to get low enough to get the ball. He funnels that lunging energy into his swing. The result is nuclear. Frankly, it’s hard to even see some of his shots. At one point, battered by a series of these blasts, Venom got caught on his heels. Force Ripe stepped up to slam it clear over him — but then just gave it a love tap. Eighteen all.

Venom did not come for this. For that matter, he did not get kicked out of grade school, possibly face a life in jail, then turn his life around, cut his hair, dial back the partying, and become a role model — he didn’t do that stuff to lose. He put his hands on his thighs, caught his breath. His face was a faucet. It looked, to a budding road-tennis connoisseur, like he was playing for his life, and he was.

I would come to love Venom. The guy pours his beer into cups when impressionable young people are around, drives his ailing mom’s taxi in his off hours to make ends meet. Ditto Force Ripe, who, when he’s not attacking Venom, cuts hair in a small outbuilding behind his mother’s bar; AVOID ABUSIVE LANGUAGE is written on the wall. But to understand the roots of road tennis itself, I think you have to go back more than a century.

That’s when lawn tennis, the precursor of regular tennis, started exploding around the world. By the 1920s and ’30s, the Brits were playing it, the Americans were playing it, the French were playing it, the Aussies were playing it, and the lush British colony of Barbados wanted to play it, too. They just couldn’t.

As the biggest sugar exporter in all the colonies, the island’s prosperity had been divided equitably among the slaves and the — kidding, of course. The wealth was siphoned off by the Crown, and poverty lingered for generations. The idea of paying for a tennis racquet in 1930s Barbados, much less having a court built anywhere near your dirt-road village, was laughable.

But just as tennis mania was sweeping the globe, a political rights movement among descendants of slaves happened to be sweeping Barbados. Insurgency and racquet sports both being in the air, Barbadians did the only logical thing: They invented an anti-elite, egalitarian alternative to tennis that the island could call its own. Driftwood and even hardcover books became racquets, bicycle tubes grips. Metal from people’s roofs was used to reinforce the racquets’ edges. Kids learned to skin the fuzz off tennis balls — they play faster that way — and the narrow roads wending through Barbados’s shantytowns became spots for courts.