The traditional complaint is that Christmastime in the U.S. gets longer every year. Like hem lengths, the length of the shopping season can be seen as a sign of the economic times. And those times are tough. This year my hometown of Williamsport, PA, may have broken new ground by holding the city’s Xmas parade the Friday before Thanksgiving.
On the other hand, we have less time to do the actual shopping than ever. If you’re not camped out in the parking lot at Target at 5:00 A.M. on Black Friday, or you haven’t logged on to Amazon.com by the end of Cyber Monday, it feels like you’ve missed the boat, the deals are done, everything’s been taken.
If you’re like me, though, you’ve just started asking people what they want for Christmas. How do the tennis players or fans in your family answer? A new racquet might be too steep, a pair of sneakers too risky, a vibration dampener a little on the feeble side. How about the String Thing, the device that Mark Philippoussis claims he uses—"it's a no brainer," Scud says, with unintentional aptness—to straighten his strings? I took one to the court this summer, but it only made me realize how little my strings moved when I hit the ball. I’m guessing that’s not a good sign.
What about a book? You might have heard somewhere, in a so-called literary journal or two, that there isn’t much good tennis writing out there, that you should become a baseball or golf or even a boxing fan if you really want to read about sports. By these accounts, aside from David Foster Wallace and Levels of the Game, you might think that tennis has inspired approximately as many literate sentences as Ultimate Fighting.
I used to believe the same thing, until I started doing research for my own tennis book, High Strung (hint: it didn’t sell out on Amazon on Cyber Monday). The library at Tennis Magazine, along with various used book sellers online, allowed me to read just about everything I thought was relevant to my own story—which was pretty much everything, since my book attempts to sum up most of tennis history in a couple of chapters. During the writing process, I even veered into the history of New York City. I bet you wouldn’t have guessed that there was half a chapter in High Strung devoted to the life and work of Robert Moses. Trust me, it was fascinating, but sometimes an editor is a good thing.
Anyway, in the process I found out that there really is a lot of excellent tennis writing. It goes much deeper than McPhee or DFW. So deep that I planned to do a series this year on all of the various tennis-lit discoveries that I had made in the last 15 months or so. But like a lot of planned series around here, it never got off the ground. Now that the Christmas buying season is here, it seems like a good time to round them all up with capsule reviews. I realize that a used, 88-cent book is probably not the classiest gift you can offer, but maybe you can use the pocket cash from Grandma to pick up a couple of these after the 25th. Most of them do come pretty cheap. Here’s Part I from my home tennis library, with links to their Amazon pages. I’ll talk about the rest tomorrow.
Lloyd on Lloyd, by Chris and John Lloyd with Carol Thatcher (1985)
Ok, we’re starting slowly. This dual biography by the long-since-divorced tennis royals is probably not worth even the 1 cent that Amazon is charging. But it is notable for two things: (1) It was co-authored by Margaret Thatcher’s daughter; and (2) There’s a photo of the couple in happier times, making out, in their clay-stained sneakers, on the hood of the BMW that Chris gave John for his 30th birthday.
The Tennis Set, by Rex Bellamy (1972)
My favorite book by the distinguished and lyrical former tennis correspondent for the London Times. In it, he gives a tour of the game’s legendary locales and his memories from each during the 1960s and early 70s. Here’s Bellamy’s neatly rhythmic summation of the 1969 Championships: “This was a Wimbledon dominated by mini-dresses, maxi-sets, and Ricardo Gonzalez.”
Love Thirty, by Rex Bellamy (1990)
Thirty mini-profiles of the stars that Bellamy has seen and loved over the years. There are lots of pithy observations, but the one I remember best concerns John McEnroe, a man whom Bellamy finds “morose at best; odious at worst”: “McEnroe does not bear himself with pride. He looks unkempt and a mite diffident. Not the kind of man to attract a second glance.” I guess the book should have been called Love 29 (Detest 1).
Covering the Court, by Al Laney (1968)
Memories from the longtime New York Herald tennis writer. If you want a history of the game during the teens and 20s, this is the one to get. Laney’s smooth first-person style brings McLoughlin, Tilden, Johnston, Williams, Lenglen, Wills, and others back to elegant life. Also interesting is his take on the barnstorming pros of later years. Men like Kramer, Riggs, Gonzalez, Hoad, and others have typically been cast righteous outlaw heroes in retrospect, but Laney saw them at the time as feckless hustlers who could have gone mainstream much earlier had they set up real, competitive tournaments rather than continuing with their endless, pointless one-night stand tours. But the one-night-stands were where the easy money was.
Jimmy Connors Saved My Life, by Joel Drucker (2004)
Drucker relates his personal and familial ups and downs to those of his hero, and in the process writes the best book on the meaning of a tennis player
Inside Tennis, by Peter Bodo (1979)
“It’s spring again,” Bodo tells us in the first line of his chronicle of the 1978 season. He’s in Rome for the Italian Open, and he finishes in New York at the U.S. Open that fall. In between, he uses a unique writing style—present tense, very little first person, short sentences—to convey the personality and pageantry of a game that was at its peak of popularity.
Short Circuit, by Michael Mewshaw (1982)
If you want to learn about the rise and fall of tennis from the 1970s to the 1980s, read this and Bodo’s Inside Tennis back to back. Mewshaw covers the same ground in 1982, beginning in Italy and ending at Flushing Meadows. Except, rather than starting at the grand old Foro Italico, he begins in a virtually empty indoor arena in Genoa, where the WCT tour is staging a desultory tournament. Mewshaw follows the WCT around Europe, from one airless stadium to another. This was the year that Lamar Hunt had broken from the ATP completely; players in WCT didn’t receive ranking points, so they were literally playing for nothing more than money. It’s the perfect set-up for this writer, who was drawn to the dour. Here’s how Mewshaw, a novelist by trade, says he came to write the book:
“After publishing a novel set against a drought and famine in Africa—reviews, pro and con, described it as mordant, bleak, and unrelievedly depressing—I had done a non-fiction account of a 15-year-old boy, a childhood friend of mine, who had been sentenced to life in prison for murdering his parents. When an editor called from New York and proposed that I write a book about the 28 black children who had been killed in Atlanta, I recoiled, fearing that had been typecast as an apostle of gloom and cataclysm.”
I wonder why. Mewshaw’s take on early 80s men’s tennis is indeed bleak, gloomy, and borderline cataclysmic, but he did shine a light on the pro game’s dark side, its greed, drug use, match-fixing, womanizing, and the all-around spoiled behavior of its stars. It has been re-issued as an E-book and is still worth a read, especially for the accomplished sentence-making. Favorite phrase: “the rococo curlicues of Nastase’s mind.”
Winner Loses All, by Lars Skarke (1993)
Now if you want really bleak, this tale of Bjorn Borg’s decline should be next on your list. It’s an unauthorized bio—i.e., a takedown of epic proportions—by Borg’s former business partner, and it may or may not all be true. (Borg and Skarke had fallen out years earlier.) Fiction or non-fiction, it’s an amateurish yet compellingly sinister look at what Skarke sees as the monster behind the myth, the devil beneath the angel. It also gets bonus points for having my favorite title among all of these books, and some of the best back-cover promotional copy:
“Bjorn Borg burned brighter than any athlete ever. Then, slowly, he became engulfed by the darkness in his soul . . . Now his cash has been squandered on Bacchanalian orgies of girls, booze, and cocaine. His company is bankrupt. He has tried to kill himself and his two marriages have ended in divorce.”
But all of that is just a lead-up to the real killer: “Even his tennis has become an embarrassment.”
That’s tough to top, so I’ll leave it there for today. More tomorrow, from Bud Collins, Richard Evans, and that literary titan himself, Ilie Nastase, among others. Plus a happier portrayal of the Angelic Assassin, from his first ex-wife.