Thwack! Adam Zaccara serves the ball with heavy topspin right down the middle, a blooper that's going to land in center court. This will be an easy shot. The ball's moving so slow that I can see its treads turning in the air. I'll enjoy seeing the whites of Zaccara's eyes as he realizes my return will go zinging past him into the corner.

But my eyes are the ones that are bugging as the ball just dies on the grass court, skidding 6 inches below my racquet head. Zaccara hits another gimme serve down the middle, and it's déjà vu all over again: I swing hard with the intent of putting it away and end up whiffing another easy one.

It happens again and again, until I start swinging early and moving in fast. Then Zaccara's the one scrambling for balls, and suddenly I feel like Roger Federer.

Welcome to the wily world of grass tennis courts.

The grass court at the International Tennis Hall of Fame in Newport, Rhode Island, is likely the closest I'm going to get to Wimbledon. The gothic buildings and Victorian grounds, where the first U.S. Open was held in 1880, have a merry old England kind of look. And the museum holds some of the best tennis memorabilia in the world. Newport is known for its America's Cup sailing heritage, but tennis is definitely another big draw.

It's certainly been one of my passions for more than 30 years, right up there with boating. I've had the fortune to play on courts all over the world, train with world-class coaches and even interview John McEnroe for Tennis magazine, but I've never played on grass. Just about every other surface, from clay to concrete to even rubber. But grass, that holy grail of surfaces, had always eluded me – until Newport.

Although I live just across Narragansett Bay, maybe an hour by boat, I've always avoided Newport. Too many tourists, too much traffic. But as I discovered on that warm May day chasing balls around the lawn, Newport is actually a pretty cool place to visit.

I made the trip with Peter Van Lancker, president of Hunt Yachts and a longtime friend, aboard a Hunt Surfhunter 29, built just up the bay from Newport.

The Surfhunter, with its hardtop and 375 hp inboards, is a great boat to cruise around the bay. Though the water was glass-calm on the day we cruised, it can get pretty choppy in a New England kind of way. And the C. Raymond Hunt hull on the Surfhunter was made to cruise offshore in rough conditions.

But we didn't have to worry about that. It was perfectly calm as we cruised south toward Newport, past guys in clamming boats with huge rakes that scrape the bottom for quahogs; past Prudence island, known for its eccentric locals who live there year-round; past the imposing U.S. Naval War College; and into Newport Harbor.

Newport is known as the world's yachting capital, at least by local sailors. The harbor has a protected, semicircular shape and is full of sailboats, small catboats, modern J Boats and even a handful of historic 12 meters such as Heritage and Columbia that raced in the America's Cup.

It's probably one of the few harbors on the East Coast where there are more sailboats than powerboats, though there is a fair share of motoryachts. A huge 200-foot expedition yacht, loaded with a 29-foot powerboat and a dozen crewmembers, moved slowly past us on its way to the Newport Yachting Center.

Up a hill at Harbor Court, a social function was happening on the long, well-manicured lawns of New York Yacht Club, where the club's mostly male members congregate in summer. Men in blue blazers and khakis were standing in front of the Victorian building, sipping drinks and we could hear a few hundred Thurston Howell III accents drifting down the hill in the breeze. Several historic America's Cup yachts were anchored in front of the club.

We tied up at Van Lancker's local yacht club, Ida Lewis Yacht Club, which has a very different feel than New York Yacht Club. It's a former lighthouse. Ida Lewis was the lighthouse keeper in the 1900s and is credited with rowing out to several stranded ships and saving sailors. The club is fairly unpretentious, and members are much more likely to show up in shorts and T-shirts than blue blazers.

I hit the tourist trail in Newport for a few hours, visiting the International Yacht Restoration School (IYRS), a waterfront school full of apprentices learning the art of wooden boat building. The facility is in a renovated electricity generating plant, and it's buzzing with people cobbling together small catboats. The students have restored about 100 historic yachts, but their biggest project, the 133-foot 1885 schooner Coronet, promises to be a mammoth undertaking.

Newport has a small, walkable downtown, defined by its waterfront areas. I walked around the tourist spots in Bannister's and Bowen's wharves, doing some window-shopping and having coffee at Handy Lunch. Newport has a decent selection of good restaurants, most fairly pricey, but my favorite is Aidan's Pub on John Street, an Irish pub with a hearty menu.

I kept it light since there was a tennis match to play. Heading to the International Tennis Hall of Fame, I didn't have high hopes, thinking it would be just another moneymaking tourist attraction. Sure enough, when we arrived there were three or four tourists playing croquet on the court where they held the first U.S. Open match in 1881. Croquet? That's like visiting the hallowed sanctuary of the Sistine Chapel and playing darts with the paintings.

But my opinion changed as soon as I entered the old-style clubhouse with its wooden lockers and cramped showers. Members are supposed to dress in all white, like the good old days. The facility is actually a club with an active membership who treats the grass courts like other clubs with clay or hard courts. No big deal.

But as I walked onto the springy surface with the club's teaching pro Adam Zaccara, it was a very big deal to me. It felt like watching McEnroe and Ivan Lendl head for center court at Wimbledon.

Suddenly, I was Laver, Sampras, Federer, Agassi – all the Wimbledon champs that every tennis kid fantasizes about being someday. But that fantasy quickly disappeared as we started to hit. I'm a pretty good player, rated about 4.5 NTRP or say a B+, but the soft grass felt like running on shag carpeting, and the balls just skid. I had to apologize to Zaccara more than once as I lurched for balls I missed or sent them over his head into the fence.

But after about five minutes, I got my groove back and start hitting pretty well. Ten minutes later, I was moving Zaccara around the court. Suddenly, frustration was turning into fun. We didn't play that long, maybe 45 minutes, but we had a few good points and I started to appreciate how difficult grass is, while further appreciating the slow, even play my own club's clay courts provide.

But the tennis was just part of the afternoon. Next, I spent a few hours walking around the museum. The complex is actually the renovated Newport Casino, which was built in 1880 and has undergone several multimillion-dollar renovations since it became the Tennis Hall of Fame in 1954.

The "International" was added later as the organization began to induct non-U.S. members. Currently, there are 200 inductees from 18 countries. Most are big names such as John McEnroe, Pete Sampras, Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova. But others are the unsung heroes of the sport who helped promote it or build its infrastructure over the years.

The museum is exceptional, a 20,000-square-foot collection of rooms that spans the history of the game, with interactive exhibits from the first years in the 1800s up to the current stream of champs. It's cool to be able to see, in the same display, the outfit and royal blue Adidas shoes Billie Jean King wore hanging next to Bobby Riggs' "Sugar Daddy" jacket. I still remember being glued to the TV set during the "Battle of the Sexes" match in 1973, when King cleaned Riggs' clock.

I expected the museum to be a collection of faded photos and old wooden rackets bought on eBay. But there's tons of historical memorabilia, including Martina Navratilova's nine singles trophies from Wimbledon, Gustavo Kuertin's size 12 shoes and Jack Kramer's racquets.

It's also interesting to compare the sizable trophies players get from winning the U.S. Open to the smaller Wimbledon cup to the chintzy-looking plates of the French Open. I've never considered myself a fan type, but the experience felt like traveling to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame to see Jimi Hendrix's guitar or Janis Joplin's multicolor Porsche. It's like taking a trip back in time to the days when tennis heroes really were my heroes. I definitely left on a high.

The day ended on a relaxing note, sipping a drink on the deck of Ida Lewis Yacht Club with Van Lancker, looking out over Newport Harbor. The yachting capital of the world suddenly seemed pretty attractive to a mere powerboater, especially when you throw in the grass courts just up the hill.