In this brief caesura before the start of the men’s semifinals, I’d like to consider the question of how to write about tennis. John Updike once observed that golf lends itself “oddly well” to being written about. I’m not sure tennis does. Most writers have difficulty avoiding that handful of ready-made expressions to describe the game in action: laser-like backhands; wafting underspins; rocketing volleys and pounding serves. I’ve probably used most of these in this blog. The best tennis writing provides a passable simulacrum of actually watching, or playing, the game. John McPhee’s “Levels of the Game” is sports journalism that utterly transcends the genre. Published initially in 1969, in The New Yorker, it describes, almost point for point, a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Rather than focus purely on what he saw, McPhee got the two players to watch a video replay of the encounter and to describe what was going on in their heads at each moment. McPhee also folds in the backgrounds of both players—one black, one white; one Democrat, one Republican; one poor, one privileged—and the result is an essay that not only reveals, better than anything before or since, the deep connections between how someone plays tennis and who he fundamentally is but also illuminates the condition of the United States at that turbulent time. Here are the opening sentences:
Arthur Ashe, his feet apart, his knees slightly bent, lifts a tennis ball into the air. The toss is high and forward. If the ball were allowed to drop, it would, in Ashe’s words, “make a parabola and drop to the grass three feet in front of the baseline.” He has practiced tossing a ball just so thousands of times. But he is going to hit this one. His feet draw together. His body straightens and tilts forward far beyond the point of balance. He is falling.
In a 1972 piece about Wimbledon that McPhee published in Playboy, he writes about Rod Laver, who dominated the game then as Roger Federer does today. The following puts me in mind of Federer who, even when he has a match well in hand, will run down anything:
Laver is so far ahead that the match has long since become an exhibition. Nonetheless, he plays every point as if it were vital. He digs for gets. He sends up topspin lobs. He sprints and dives for Alexander’s smashes. He punches volleys toward the corners and, when they miss, he winces. He is not playing against Alexander. He is playing against perfection.
The British novelist Martin Amis is a fanatical tennis player and has worked the sport into a number of his novels, including “Money” and “The Information.” He also writes amusingly about the sport in an essay, “Tennis: The Women’s Game,” published first in Vogue, in 1988, and reprinted in his book “Visiting Mrs. Nabokov.” In that piece, Amis argues that the women’s game was at that time more compelling than the men’s. “The men have entrained a power struggle of outsize athleticism,www.suprashoesukcheap.co.uk, machismo and foul temper. It’s all rat-a-tat-tat, or rat-a-tat, or, on fast courts, simply rat”— aces. He also refers to Gabriela Sabatini as “this bronzed hallucination of fluency and youth.”
Back in 1995, when I was a reporter for Rolling Stone, I was trying to get Amis to agree to being profiled. We met for coffee at the Royalton Hotel, in midtown Manhattan. I seemed to be making progress, but he had not committed. Knowing of his tennis addiction, I mentioned that I play—not strictly true at the time,www.monclerjacketscoats.co.uk; I’d given up the sport in frustration and shame. Amis’s eyes instantly kindled and he leaned forward, fully engaged for the first time that afternoon. “You play?” he rapped out. “Well, we’ll have to do the story. You come to London and we’ll play at my club.” He was practically digging out his cell phone to book a court. One look into Amis’s blazing eyes—I’ve seen that look before, and it’s always a precursor to my losing 6-0, 6-0—and I knew that I must back out not only of the game but of the story. Which I did.
Speaking of Mrs. Nabokov, it was her husband, Vladimir, who, for my money, wrote the best description of tennis anywhere. This is from “,www.justinbiebersuprashoes.co.uk;Lolita,” whose heroine proved a natural on the court:
She would wait and relax for a bar or two of white-lined time before going into the act of serving, and often bounced the ball once or twice, or pawed the ground a little, always at ease, always rather vague about the score….The exquisite clarity of all her movements had its auditory counterpart in the pure ringing sound of her every stroke. The ball when it entered her aura of control became somehow whiter, its resilience somehow richer, and the instrument of precision she used upon it seemed inordinately prehensile and deliberate at the moment of clinging contact.
Nabokov was a fine tennis player, and was not averse to using the game as a metaphor for writing itself—a solitary activity involving precision, strategy, and foresight. Once, when an interviewer persisted in drawing comparisons between Nabokov and Joyce, he replied, “Oh, yes,www.monclerjacketsukcheap.co.uk, let people compare me to Joyce by all means, but my English is patball to Joyce’s champion game.”
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