Steve Tignor recently released* High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry, and Peter Bodo’s The Courts of Babylon*, originally published in 1994, has now been re-released as an eBook. We thought it was a good time for both authors to ask each other about their respective works.
!Highstrungjpg-d6f5163aabe747fa Steve,
You seem so comfortable and at-home with what we might call the modest personal essay. Given that this is your first book-length effort (published, anyway), did you find that you had the mental and emotional wind for the longer race?
Good question, because it took some adjustment. I'd never written in such long arcs before. The longest articles I'd done were probably 3000 to 3500 words, and this book was supposed to be 80,000 words. I must have had that number in mind the whole way, because I looked down when I'd finished the last chapter and that's almost exactly what I had. But I found the writing much more tiring than anything else I've done. Just the amount of sustained thought, day after day, took some getting used to.
Is this the book you had always hoped and wanted to write?
It is. I love tennis in that era (late 70s, early 80s), the Open in that era, the grittiness of New York in that era. And I always love stories about “ends of eras,” and stories that are really snapshots in time, which is what this is. The 1981 Open was also a perfect and dramatic way for this era to end, with Borg driving out of Flushing and into the sunset.
Which do you prefer to read and/or write, fiction or non-fiction?
I like to read fiction slightly more than non, but I read them both equally. I read a lot to help my own writing, a lot of stuff with a rhythm that I can carry over into my own stuff. I've written almost no fiction at all, and have never had a good grasp of how plots work. I've gotten better at creating emotion and “characters” by writing about tennis, actually, and do feel like I could cross over to fiction in the future. Or at least take a stab at it.
Did you look to any previously published works or authors for guidance, either practical or inspirational?
I read virtually every tennis book I could find, from that era and other eras. As far as setting the book up, I had some sport history books in mind, one of which was The Rivalry by John Taylor, which used the rivalry between Wilt Chamberlain and Bill Russell to tell the story of the “golden age” of the NBA in the 1960s. That book covered an entire decade, while mine takes in 14 months or so, but the idea was similar.
What was the most agreeable aspect of writing this book?
My favorite parts of the book, and the ones that were the most fun to write, were about the side characters—namely, Connors, Gerulaitis, Nastase, and Lendl, who each played a role in the 1981 Open, and who each get their own chapter here. The fact that you could put all the good stuff about them into a fairly small space, but still devote all of that space to them, I thought worked really well. And there isn't much better comic relief than Jimbo, Vitas, and Nasty.
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Read Peter Bodo's answers to Steve Tignor's questions about Courts of Babylon here.