The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

Overview

Winner of the 2019 PEN/ESPN Award for Literary Sports Writing

“The Circuit is the best sports book I've read in years, maybe ever.” —Rich Cohen, author of The Chicago Cubs and Monsters

“As sports writing goes, The Circuit is unusual in the very best way. Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes with such fluidity, and packs the book with bursts of brilliance. This is a compulsively readable guide to one truly Homeric year of professional tennis.” —John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars

An energetic, lyrical, genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.

In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet—and Paris Review sports columnist—Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it’s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.

Phillips charts the year from winter’s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall’s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.

The Circuit will convince you that you don’t leave the world behind as you watch tennis—you bring it with you.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250234926
Publisher:	Picador
Publication date:	12/10/2019
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	427,075
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven (FSG, 2015) and The Ground (FSG, 2012). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.

Table of Contents

CONTENTS

PREFACE xi
A BRIEF NOTE ON SCORING xiii
A GLOSSARY OF TENNIS TERMS xvii

Ready . . . Play 1
Part One: Winter 13
Part Two: Spring 99
Part Three: Summer 143
Part Four: Fall 161

Editorial Reviews

Phillips keeps the pages turning with an easy yet exacting style and keen observations. Tennis nerds in particular will enjoy his parsing of Federer’s retooled backhand . . . Phillips’s wit suffuses this text . . . The Circuit is a welcome palate cleanser, a license to enjoy an underrated sport at its best." —Andrew Lawrence, The Atlantic

"Rowan Ricardo Phillips’s The Circuit is a tennis romance, and unique. Phillips knows the love. He is a sportswriter and poet, and remarkably, because tennis love isn’t easy to explain, he has found the right supple, sometimes tactile, and tender language for it . . . " —Lynne Tillman, Bookforum

“The touchstone for any tennis writer is John McPhee, who wrote Levels of the Game, the finest book in the history of the sport. Mr. Phillips has writing skills comparable to Mr. McPhee’s, which is high praise.” —Tom Perrotta, The Wall Street Journal

“As an aficionado and player, Phillips is especially attuned to tennis’ weirdness among other sports . . . Phillips’ lyrical impulses ignite his compressed, efficient, accurate, lively and always liquid prose . . . Phillips wields his prose like an elegant, one-handed backhand, fending off florid metaphors and deflecting the canards about sports, to present the tour’s basic process: the sport is a distraction.” —Walton Muyumba, Los Angeles Times

"Phillips reveals his love of tennis on every page. There is a generosity of spirit toward the reader . . . a joy to read: a poet’s love song to the game of tennis." —Geoff Macdonald, The New York Times Book Review

"A delightful book, told with a true aficionado's passion. The Circuit's engrossing account of the 2017 professional tennis season opens out into unexpected vistas of meaning." —Ian Frazier, author of Travels in Siberia

“For those who follow tennis, The Circuit is the book to read. With sharp insight into the key players' mannerisms, dazzling physical description, and lyrical, gorgeous prose, it's a pure treat. Rowan Ricardo Phillips's passion for the sport, its subtle geometries and self-defeating head games, is unequaled: game, set, match." —Phillip Lopate, author of To Show and to Tell

From the Publisher

…Phillips reveals his love of tennis on every page. There is a generosity of spirit toward the reader as he explains the tournament calendar, how the A.T.P. ranking system works and how important seedings are in Grand Slam draws. He even includes a comprehensive glossary of tennis terms. A passionate player himself, Phillips views the game as something to share, an organizing principle in his life, as important to him as literature and writing…Phillips's analysis of the Federer-Nadal final in Melbourne is the highlight of the book, and this is appropriate since the match was the best of the year…His description of the contrasting styles of Federer and Nadal is incisive, lucid and inspired…The Circuit [is] a joy to read: a poet's love song to the game of tennis.

The New York Times Book Review - Geoff Macdonald

08/13/2018
Poet and tennis fan Phillips (Heaven) serves an exciting account of the 2017 men’s tennis season, detailing the games, sets, and matches as he follows the players from the Australian Open in January to the U.S. Open in August and September. At center court stand Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, who by the end of the season are ranked #1 and #2 in the world, respectively. Phillips then introduces a cast of challengers, including Andy Murray, who started the year ranked #1 with his “lighting quick two-handed backhand,” though his promise early in the season was cut short by injuries. David Goffin, whom Nadal finishes off in straight sets in Monte Carlo on a clay court, is a technician with an attractive game whose backhand, “even when he makes an error with it,” is perfect, according to Phillips. By the time the U.S. Open rolls around, Federer has moved up in the rankings from #17 to #3, leaving tennis fans eagerly anticipating a possible finals match between him and top-ranked Nadal, his longtime rival. Phillips energetically illustrates the fascination “to watch someone lose something that no one among the thousands or millions could see but all could feel” and the tactics players use. Phillips’s enthusiastic recollection of the 2017 season will enthrall tennis fans. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

2018-08-21

The Paris Review sports columnist follows a nail-biting tour of men's professional tennis.

For award-winning poet Phillips (Heaven: Poems, 2015, etc.), tennis became a "private joy" even after he stopped playing." That sense of joy imbues his vivid recounting of one historic, emotionally roiling year: the 2017 Association of Tennis Professionals Tour. The author begins in Australia, where the first tournament of the year occurs in Brisbane on Jan. 1, in the summer heat. At that point, the two top-ranked players were Britain's Andy Murray and Serbia's Novak Djokovic, competitors, the author observes, who seem to be "heralds of tennis's new form of dominance: sadistic resilience and rugged precision." Meanwhile, "the best two players on the planet," were Rafael Nadal, ranked 9, and Roger Federer, 16. Despite a short explanation about scoring and a 20-page glossary of terms, readers who don't know a bagel ("to be winning or have won no games in a set") from a breadstick ("to be winning or have won only one game in a set") may be challenged to follow some descriptions of particular matches and the variables involved in players' rankings, which "position players in a tournament like pieces on a chessboard," indicating who gets to compete in qualifiers and where a player is arranged within the tournament draw. Nevertheless, Phillips conveys the relentless tension of a game where "one step in the wrong direction in the middle of one point can cause an avalanche that sweeps away any advantage, no matter its size." Throughout the winter, Federer and Nadal crept up in rankings, and spring heralded tournaments around the world on clay courts, distinguished from other surfaces "in its erratic effects. Clay forces a player's body to adapt or fail, a player's mind to obey or die." By fall, competitors' face-offs, injuries, and brilliant strategies had eroded the "air of inevitability around the Murray-Djokovic rivalry" and led to an astonishing outcome.

A treat for avid tennis fans.

Kirkus Reviews