Murray was 7 when he picked up tennis. It was a fluke: His parents needed to deposit him somewhere for the summer, and they heard about an all-day camp that cost only $12 for 8 weeks, hosted at the public courts near their South Side home. The son of a judge and a public-school assistant principal, Murray went on to become the de facto coach of his high-school team, recruiting promising players from local middle schools, and then attended Florida A&M on a tennis scholarship. The university later covered the expense of his M.B.A. while he served as an assistant coach. A onetime pharmaceutical marketing manager, he took over the tennis operation on 47th Street in 2008, renaming it XS Tennis — ‘‘A play on ‘excess,’ greater than normal,’’ he said. But every year since, the owners of the building have seemed on the brink of shutting it down. Murray began to sell the idea of a new facility on the South Side, one big enough to transform what tennis looked like in Chicago.

The city financed $2.9 million of the XS Tennis Village. ‘‘It’s going to be literally a college-scholarship production facility,’’ Mayor Rahm Emanuel told me. Emanuel donated $5,000 of his own money and wheedled far larger sums out of his deep-pocketed friends. But, he said, he mostly got out of Murray’s way when they were making the pitch: ‘‘I’m his wingman,’’ the mayor declared. In their pitches, Murray would marshal market studies and data sets, highlighting the work XS was already doing in 10 local public schools. He talked about the center’s capacity to help lift up the long-beleaguered neighborhood. It would spur private investment and add to a cultural corridor being developed by the University of Chicago just beyond the school’s traditional Hyde Park boundaries. Taylor Townsend, a teenage pro whom Murray coached on the tour for a couple of years, helped with fund-raising; having grown up playing on the South Side, she appeared as the fulfillment of the tennis village’s dream.

There were doubters, of course. Some in the Chicago tennis community don’t think anyone can fill 27 courts in a neighborhood still dominated by vacant lots, especially when tennis courts elsewhere remain empty and too many outsiders still think of the South Side as a place to avoid. Murray needs not only to raise an additional $3 million to complete the center; he will also have to keep the lights on and pay his staff while offering tennis at a price ‘‘nontraditional’’ tennis families can afford. At the groundbreaking for the facility in June, Bobby Rush, the 12-term congressman from the South Side, told the crowd of 200 that he initially opposed the project because he didn’t like the idea of government land designated for public housing going to tennis players. But he said he was won over by Murray’s passion and his vision. Alluding to Venus and Serena, Rush proclaimed, ‘‘From Compton, California, to Chicago, Illinois, it’s happening, and it’s happening right now. We are going to dominate tennis.’’

Two blocks from the old Hyde Park Racquet Club, at the edge of a city park, Tyrone Mason was feeding backhands to a trio of youngsters, commanding them to brush up on their swings to drive the ball with topspin. Weather permitting, Mason, 61, has presided at these same public courts most days for the past 25 years. Murray took some of his first lessons from Mason, and so did I. The courts represent much of what I think is great about tennis in the city. It’s not that they’re especially ideal in terms of playability. The overhanging branches of a tree extend over a baseline, interfering with service tosses on one side. There is often a clamor from Little League games, high-school-football practices or families that set up grills and sound systems on weekends. A bench nearby is a preferred roost of weed-smoking teenagers. And when Mason isn’t around, dog walkers use the enclosed courts as a run. But all the distractions make the tennis feel as if it’s part of the wider community, especially when contrasted with the snobby seclusion of the country club. Little kids press their faces against the fence, while adults stop to admire the play. Mason waves to drivers blowing their horns in greeting, and he speaks to most passers-by, whether he knows them or not. It’s the Jane Jacobs urban ideal of the ‘‘sidewalk ballet’’ by way of the tennis court. Parents often see Mason’s pupils hitting deep topspin shots and inquire about lessons for their own children.

Like tennis everywhere, black tennis in Chicago began as something a bit more genteel. In 1912, a group of prominent African-Americans in the city, many of them doctors and lawyers and businessmen, formed the Chicago Prairie Tennis Club. Blacks were barred from country clubs and, until the late 1940s, from official competition in what was then called the United States Lawn Tennis Association. Park-district leagues in Chicago weren’t fully integrated until the 1960s. ‘‘It wasn’t the epitome of success to play tennis, but we wanted to be included in American life,’’ Ron Mitchell, who has helped operate the Prairie club for the last 25 years, told me. In its early years, the group fielded challenges from black tennis associations on the South Side and elsewhere in the Midwest. It took part in an annual tri-city matchup among similar organizations in Cleveland and Detroit. The best players from Chicago went on to compete in contests held by the American Tennis Association, formed in 1916 as the corresponding national black tennis league. The first black player to claim a United States national title wasn’t Althea Gibson, who won the U.S. Open in 1957, but Lorraine Williams, a 15-year-old Chicagoan affiliated with Prairie Tennis who took first place in a junior division four years earlier.

Mason was already out of high school when he touched a racket for the first time, in 1972. This was just four years after the beginning of the modern pro tennis era, as players without amateur status were finally allowed to compete in major tournaments. On the South Side and the North Side and all over Chicago, it suddenly seemed as if everyone were playing. The coach I trained with the longest, a smooth-swinging lefty named Waverly Hill, didn’t hit a tennis ball until this same time, when he was in college. It was a revelation, he told me recently: ‘‘I knew instantly it was the sport I should have played all along.’’ Hill was soon spending most of his days at Tuley Park on 90th Street, competing against Mason and other fervid converts. Many of them got their professional starts teaching park-district tennis.