Reviews:
"Superb." -- New Yorker
"Championship stuff." -- Bud Collins
"My only complaint is the title's redundant." -- David Foster Wallace
"This delightful collection confirms that tennis, an apparently simple game, is always simmering with sentiments,
epiphanies, mysteries, confrontations, and resolutions: in short all the things of which literature is made." -- Peter Bodo
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This book is a wonderful selection of tennis-related short stories and poems, and still regarded as one of the best-ever tennis anthologies.
George Vecsey, who wrote the Foreword, declares: "This anthology confirms my belief that tennis is the perfect sporting metaphor for life. . . . it goes where journalists such as myself are not licensed to travel: withing the hearts of people who wield a tennis racket for money or for love, for hatred and revenge, for exercise and challenge. . . . tennis fans understand
that tennis has it all -- love, power, sex, money, power, violence, aggression, manipulation -- the whole spectrum of human behavior, even the occasional sporting gesture or humane touch."
Examples:
**The eternal strong feelings engendered in playing against a parent - age, youth and the passage of time, in Roger Angell's Tennis
**The arrogant athletic ego in competition, in Ring Lardner's Tennis by Cable
**Knee-jerk racism in life and society, in Paul Theroux's The Tennis Court
**Snobbery that meets its match when a socialite must accept defeat at the hands of an outsider, in Ellen Gilchrist's In the Land of Dreamy Dreams
**The perils of squandering an advantage when a wife realizes that her husband's concessions on court are actually an extension of his business and marriage failures, in Irwin Shaw's Mixed Doubles
**The melancholy resignation of a great Champion of yesteryear who must accept that "times have changed" after he delays his final entry into Heaven to play one last championship match on Earth, in Bill Tilden's The Phantom Drive
And as the publisher concludes: "But between the lines, behind all the vibrant storytelling and versifying, this book - like all fine art - touches on the meaning of life."
Best,
Gary
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