A professional tennis player once won a tournament two years in a row. Just think, said one of the champion’s friends, you can now use your trophies as bookends. The newly crowned victor countered that he would have no books to put in between them.
That’s far from the case with Andrea Petkovic. “Some people escape with drugs and alcohol,” said Petkovic shortly after winning her first-round match at the Volvo Car Open in Charleston. “For me, it’s literature.”
Rarely will one encounter an athlete as engaged by ideas—art, literature, philosophy, politics—as the 29-year-old German. Petkovic is nothing less than the book-toting person you might have met in college who hung out in the quad debating the merits of various thinkers, writers and painters.
Still, the saying remains: once a player, always a player. So naturally, we had to ask Petkovic how some of her favorite authors might fare were a racquet placed in their hands. Meet just four of Andrea’s icons:
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
