Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon

Description

Tennis has never been played better than it is today. To watch Rafael Nadal spin a forehand at 4000 rpm, Maria Sharapova arabesque out of a serve, Serena Williams utterly destroy a short ball, or Roger Federer touch a volley into an impossibly angled winner is to watch not only the best players with the best coaching hitting with the best racquets, it is to watch the culmination of an entire history. Love Game is different from most tennis books—it isn’t a ghostwritten biography, and it won’t teach you how to slice your serve. It’s a book about tennis’s grand culture, one that unveils the sport’s long history as it lives and breathes (or grunts) in the modern game. No one is better equipped to tell this story than novelist and historian Elizabeth Wilson. With a penchant for tennis’s inherent drama, she finds its core: a psychological face off between flamboyant personalities navigating the ebbs and flows of fortune in the confines of a 78 x 36–foot box—whether of clay, grass, or DecoTurf. Walking the finely kempt lawns of Victorian England, she shows how tennis’s early role as a social pastime that included both men and women—and thus, lots of sexual tension—set it apart from most other sports and their dominant masculine appeal. Even today, when power and endurance are more important than ever, tennis still demands that the body behave gracefully and with finesse. In this way, Wilson shows, tennis has retained the vibrant spectacle of human drama and beauty that have always made it special, not just to sports fans but to popular culture. Telling the stories of all the greats, from the Renshaw brothers to Novak Djokovic, and of all the advances, from wooden racquets to network television schedules, Wilson offers a tennis book like no other, keeping the court square in our sights as history is illuminated around it. 1 The game of love PART ONE: A LEISURED CLASS 2 Healthy excitement and scientific play 3 Real tennis and the scoring system 4 The growth of a sporting culture 5 On the Riviera 6 What’s wrong with women? 7 A match out of Henry James 8 The lonely American 9 The Four Musketeers 10 Working-class heroes 11 Tennis in Weimar – and after 12 As a man grows older 13 Three women PART TWO: THIS SPORTING LIFE 14 Home from the war 15 Gorgeous girls 16 Opening play 17 Those also excluded 18 Tennis meets feminism PART THREE: THAT’S ENTERTAINMENT 19 Bad behaviour 20 Corporate tennis 21 Women’s power 22 Vorsprung durch Technik 23 Celebrity stars 24 Millennium tennis 25 The rhetoric of sport 26 Back to the future Bibliography References Acknowledgements Photo credits Index