While the U.S. Open might be “the biggest stage in tennis,” New York isn’t exactly Tennis Town, USA. The best juniors and pros rarely (if ever) relocate to train at Billie Jean King, and for us mortals, even getting a court in the city during the winter months requires money, foresight, and/or a gratuitously long train ride. America’s tennis capitals lie elsewhere—in Florida and Southern California.

It’s fitting, then, that the regions host the dueling events that make up the Sunshine Double—the Miami Open and the PNB Paribas Open at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, aka Tennis Paradise. Without undue offense to the “beautiful” South Florida parking lot, I think Indian Wells, as a venue, captures the strange spirit of Southern California far more completely than its East Coast counterpart evokes the Florida tennis scene.

The first time I went to Indian Wells was in 2008. The tournament, back then, was called the Pacific Life Open, and the Garden was less than a decade old. Ana Ivanovic bested Svetlana Kuznetsova in the women’s final, and Novak Djokovic, fresh off his maiden Australian Open title, took home the men’s crown wearing that hideously iconic Adidas shirt that was smeared with a digital S.

I was 13 then, and there with my friend Eitan and our moms. He and I had met a few years before this via remarkably ’00s Californian circumstances—playing ping-pong on a cruise to Alaska. It was only after arriving back at LAX that our families figured out we all lived in Encino and that Eitan and I were both tennis players. In fact, it turned out we went to private schools on the Mulholland strip that shared a fence. His father, an imposing former tank gunner in the IDF, used to stand on the balcony of their house, gazing down at their private court, bellowing at us in his thick Israeli accent as we hit, “Enough with the fancy shots, Eitan! Heet the ball in the quart!”

Southern California tennis, like Southern California itself, is an incongruous sprawl. There are the state-of-the-art complexes at UCLA and USC. The ritzy old money hangs like the Los Angeles Tennis Club, the Riviera, and Pasadena’s Valley Hunt Club. The private courts, like Eitan’s, that are innumerable in certain parts of town. The public parks and the high school facilities riddled with cracks and raggedy nets. The endless banks of courts in Orange County. Clubs carved into blank suburbia and soundtracked by freeway noise. The kinds of places with accompanying apartment complexes and golf courses with grass hydrated to an iridescent green. While Florida might be home to humid Har-Tru clay, what unites Southern California is that it’s hard-court country.

I grew up playing tennis here. Although I lived in the San Fernando Valley, the packed multi-weekend tournaments took me from the stadium courts at the Barnes Center in San Diego to the rickety municipal courts in Santa Barbara and nearly everywhere in between. I’ve played in Fullerton, Seal Beach, Whittier, Long Beach, Irvine, Northridge, Calabasas, Anaheim, Carson, Lakewood, the Jack Kramer Club, Coto de Caza, the desert, and too many other places to count.

Every tournament site stunk of sunscreen, and the “come on”s echoed to the parking lots. Heavy topspin was the de facto game, and it often seemed you could punch someone in the face without getting a code violation. The draws were diverse in level, race, and socioeconomic class. The matches were chaotic. The academy kids from Weil and Advantage came from all over the world. All, or at least many, of us harbored hopes (or delusions) that one day, if everything broke right, we might end up playing in front of the crowds in Tennis Paradise one day.

But what is Tennis Paradise? In the Southern Californian imagination, it’s a blustery, stoic tennis garden known (historically at least) for its comically slow courts that appears almost like a mirage. There’s great viewing. Minimal chain-link. Ideal weather (well, at least this time of year). Luxe digs. A Nobu outpost for the tournament. Those mountains. In a region where so many places look like other places, there’s nowhere else like Indian Wells. It’s easy to forget, walking under the shadow of Stadium 1, out amongst the outer courts, great tennis everywhere, that just beyond the parking lot lies a bland, dry landscape smoothed of history and full of blocks where the houses look similar and nearly every store is in a strip mall.

To play one’s best tennis, I’ve found, it behooves you to forget about anything nonessential. Dwelling on the macro issues—stuff like breakups, professional stresses, fires, droughts, or the rising tides of fascism—doesn’t really help you hit your forehand better or stay calm or play one point at a time. To be a truly great tennis player, I’ve often speculated, might require forgetting for a while that anything outside of tennis exists.

It’s possible that escapism is intrinsic to the Southern Californian spirit. This would be the time to insert some bullshit about Hollywood or Disneyland or the monotony of freeway driving. How this is a new country with a short memory, stuffed with recycled ideas. What I can say for certain is that for me, for better and worse, Indian Wells stands as a monument to not acknowledging tennis is ephemeral and ultimately not that big of a deal.

Tennis Paradise isn’t real life. It’s an elongation of that euphoric moment we all get sometimes watching or playing a match when your mind can hold only one thought at a time. When you cock your head to the ball and, for a single moment, the shot is everything.