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

by Elizabeth Wilson

Overview

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.    

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226371283
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	05/06/2016
Pages:	352
Product dimensions:	5.80(w) x 8.60(h) x 1.10(d)

About the Author

Elizabeth Wilson is a novelist and nonfiction writer whose many books include Cultural Passions, Adorned in Dreams, and The Sphinx in the City. 

Table of Contents

1 The game of love 1

Part 1 A Leisured Class

2 Healthy excitement and scientific play 9

3 Real tennis and the scoring system 20

4 The growth of a sporting culture 28

5 On the Riviera 39

6 What's wrong with women? 51

7 A match our of Henry James 63

8 The lonely American 74

9 The Four Musketeers 80

10 Working-class heroes 88

11 Tennis in Weimar - and after 100

12 As a man grows older 113

13 Three women 123

Part 2 This Sporting Life

14 Home from the war 135

15 Gorgeous girls 146

16 Opening play 155

17 Those also excluded 167

18 Tennis meets feminism 177

Part 3 That's Entertainment

19 Bad behaviour 191

20 Corporate tennis 209

21 Women's power 223

22 Vorsprung durch Technik 230

23 Celebrity stars 241

24 Millennium tennis 261

25 The rhetoric of sport 278

26 Back to the future 292

Bibliography 308

References 314

Acknowledgements 325

Photo credits 325

Index 327

Editorial Reviews

More an attempt to wed social history and the game than a blow-by-blow account of the game's development and characters, the book weaves a wandering, eccentric path through the century and a half since modern tennis's founding as a boxed game called Sphairistike.

The New York Times Book Review - Jay Jennings

A love-all letter to the beautiful, sweaty, glorious, grunting game.

Saga

A sporting history unlike any I've read—one that, in its sophistication and thoughtfulness, shows up the hollowness of most other accounts.

Observer

A richly textured history distilled through an illuminating private passion.

Literary Review

Weaves a wandering, eccentric path through the century and a half since modern tennis’s founding as a boxed game called Sphairistike. . . . Wilson drop-shots mini-essays on broader intellectual topics.

New York Times

Ms. Wilson’s is an original and provocative mind at work.

Wall Street Journal - Jane Leavy

03/15/2016
Novelist Wilson (The Sphinx in the City) views tennis as an art form, and its practitioners as artists. This argument has long been made by acolytes of all sports, but Wilson puts forth a convincing testament to its veracity with this volume as she tells the history of tennis from the 1800s to the present. Notable topics are feminism, color barriers, class consciousness, and professionalism vs. amateurism. The author expertly traces the transformation of tennis from a fun diversion for the leisure classes of Victorian Britain to slogging work for the world's top players (often from poor countries or backgrounds) who play more than 11 months a year and have, since childhood, been fixated on one goal: to become professional tennis players. Wilson bemoans the tennis fan's grief that the modern game is predicated on sheer athleticism rather than artistry since court surfaces are uniformly slow, even the grass courts of Wimbledon, which has made it a baseline game of attrition instead of one where deft shots and traditional aggressive strategies are utilized. VERDICT Wilson does a fantastic job of telling the story of professional tennis. Her strength is in discussing the beauty and appeal of the game when played at its highest level.—Brian Renvall, Mesalands Community Coll., Tucumcari, NM

Library Journal