I’ve known enough book collectors by now to realize my shelf of tennis books is not a true collection. It’s simply a working library of books I read and re-read. One of them, The Inner Game of Tennis, published in 1974 by W. Timothy Gallwey, was the first purchase I made. This was before I started playing tennis. It had been recommended to me by a friend, who was a concert pianist and composer. He said it helped him with his music-making. He had learned about it from another friend, an aspiring soprano, who said it helped her with her singing. And so I sought it out, hoping it would help me become a better writer. It was 1979, I was twenty-seven, and my first short story had just been published by Joyce Carol Oates’s literary magazine, The Ontario Review, but I was having trouble writing another. I needed guidance. I read how-to books about writing, but found them too market-oriented and formulaic. I also read writers’ biographies, but found they all had sad endings. (My future writing teacher, John Barth, would reiterate this notion, suggesting we skip the last chapters of these literary lives.) Happily, I discovered in The Inner Game the valuable advice to ignore the analytical, critical Self One in favor of the non-judgmental, non-verbal Self Two.
I am now seventy-three, and my library of tennis books includes many other classics of the game that have helped me not only with writing but also with tennis, which I eventually took up as a major pastime, in 1987, after I won a week at a tennis academy. It happened because I was at the 1986 U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows as a guest of my parents, who were both good amateur tennis players and frequent attendees at the tournament. Since reading The Inner Game, I had dabbled a bit in the sport—I had even bought a tennis racquet, a wooden one—and seeing the professionals playing for real instead of on TV was illuminating. It was also emotionally exhausting and at one point, I took a break to wander around the exhibitors’ booths. One of them displayed a sign saying: “Pick a Winner to Be a Winner.” Its challenge was to pick the winners of both the men’s and women’s competition; successful pickers would be put into a raffle pool to win the tennis-academy week. I picked Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl, simply because they were the biggest names that season. Then I completely forgot about it until a few months later when a registered letter came through my mail slot. My husband and I thought it was a hoax. Who’s Nick Bolletieri? we wondered. When we realized it was legitimate, we both arranged to spend a week at the Nick Bolletieri Tennis Academy (now world-famous as IMG Tennis Academy) in Bradenton, Florida. Bob went as a paying customer, but it cost only $700 for the week’s lessons and drills, a two-bedroom condo, and three meals a day, plus an evening out to see the sunset at a bar. And there were only two others on court with us; a third was injured within hours and went home.
I have been playing both outdoors and indoors without pause ever since. I believe it was Nabokov who recommended that every person have two passions for a satisfactory life. His were writing and butterflies. Mine became writing and tennis. For three reasons I found the sport the perfect activity for my non-writing hours. First, it got me up and out of my desk chair to exercise. I had tried running, but on each excursion I easily grew bored; I realized early on that I needed a bear chasing me in order to keep me motivated. Tennis opponents became the bear. Second, tennis has rules. At the time I began to play, I was getting my short stories declined with words like, “Too contrived-seeming, we think.” Seriously? Besides being a rejection, it was a badly written sentence. In tennis, there were no subjective opinions: the ball was in or out. I could live with that. In fact, I thrived on it. Third, when you get even a little good at tennis it can be aesthetically pleasing to play.
In addition to tennis, my parents played golf, and eventually that took over as their singular sports passion. I remember once noticing on a visit home that their bookshelves were loaded with how-to, instructional golf books, plus a single novel: Of Human Bondage. (Who knows? Maybe the title led them to believe it, too, was a golf book...) I went through my own phase of buying and reading instructional tennis books, but have found time and again that they were of far less value to me than The Inner Game and a few others whose focus is, like Gallwey’s book, on the mental aspects of the game.
True collectors like to boast about the highlights of their collections. My library has only one so-called high spot: a first edition, first printing, of John McPhee’s Levels of the Game. Published in 1969, this gift from a rare-book dealer friend is a brilliant, double profile of pros Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner that uses as its “plot” device a point-by-point analysis of a match they played at Forest Hills in 1968. The other books I wouldn’t exactly call low spots, but they are easily found on Amazon today. Of these my favorites are: one of the best sports autobiographies I’ve ever read, Open by Andre Agassi, ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer and published in 2009; David Foster Wallace’s posthumous collection of essays, String Theory, published in 2014, six years after his suicide; and Foster’s mammoth novel of 1996, Infinite Jest, set partly at a tennis academy and partly (this is telling) at a drug rehabilitation center.
Have you written about tennis? I am sometimes asked. I answer no. In fact, I have assiduously avoided it. Mark Twain called golf “a good walk spoiled.” Tennis would be a good game spoiled if I thought about it too much. There has been one exception. In 1994, I wrote "Narrow World of Sports" for The Women’s Review of Books. It is an essay that discusses 17 tennis books, most of them written or ghost-written by players or their intimates, and most of them quite awful, including Bobby Rigg’s Court Hustler (1973) and Mariana Borg’s Love Match: My Life with Bjorn (1974). Better than those were three by Billie Jean King (1974, 1982, 1988)—she has since published others, including All In (2021)—as well as one by an observer of the game, Herbert Warren Wind, who reported on tennis for The New Yorker for many years. Since I still play, I’m not going to break my rule and write much more about tennis here. I just wanted to get this down, for posterity’s sake if no other. I also wanted it to serve me as a reminder that if I do get tempted to write about tennis in my retirement, I shouldn’t.
I should mention that my tennis-book library now includes a copy of Percy Boomer’s On Learning Golf, published in 1946. I have tried golf twice and found it wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I picked up Boomer’s book at a used-book sale, mostly in remembrance of my parents. I did not save any of their golf books when we cleaned out their house. I have since discovered there is much wisdom imparted by Boomer that could be applied metaphorically to tennis, writing, or any other endeavor requiring the abandonment of “end-gaining,” i.e., result-seeking, while you’re in the process of achieving that result. “Do not transfer your attention from the matter of making the correct swing to the matter of where you want the ball to go,” Boomer wisely writes. His advice is really no different than “Be here now,” which is the reason why there are, in addition to Boomer's, more than a few books about Buddhism and yoga on my tennis-library shelf.
I am now seventy-three, and my library of tennis books includes many other classics of the game that have helped me not only with writing but also with tennis, which I eventually took up as a major pastime, in 1987, after I won a week at a tennis academy. It happened because I was at the 1986 U.S. Open in Flushing Meadows as a guest of my parents, who were both good amateur tennis players and frequent attendees at the tournament. Since reading The Inner Game, I had dabbled a bit in the sport—I had even bought a tennis racquet, a wooden one—and seeing the professionals playing for real instead of on TV was illuminating. It was also emotionally exhausting and at one point, I took a break to wander around the exhibitors’ booths. One of them displayed a sign saying: “Pick a Winner to Be a Winner.” Its challenge was to pick the winners of both the men’s and women’s competition; successful pickers would be put into a raffle pool to win the tennis-academy week. I picked Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl, simply because they were the biggest names that season. Then I completely forgot about it until a few months later when a registered letter came through my mail slot. My husband and I thought it was a hoax. Who’s Nick Bolletieri? we wondered. When we realized it was legitimate, we both arranged to spend a week at the Nick Bolletieri Tennis Academy (now world-famous as IMG Tennis Academy) in Bradenton, Florida. Bob went as a paying customer, but it cost only $700 for the week’s lessons and drills, a two-bedroom condo, and three meals a day, plus an evening out to see the sunset at a bar. And there were only two others on court with us; a third was injured within hours and went home.
I have been playing both outdoors and indoors without pause ever since. I believe it was Nabokov who recommended that every person have two passions for a satisfactory life. His were writing and butterflies. Mine became writing and tennis. For three reasons I found the sport the perfect activity for my non-writing hours. First, it got me up and out of my desk chair to exercise. I had tried running, but on each excursion I easily grew bored; I realized early on that I needed a bear chasing me in order to keep me motivated. Tennis opponents became the bear. Second, tennis has rules. At the time I began to play, I was getting my short stories declined with words like, “Too contrived-seeming, we think.” Seriously? Besides being a rejection, it was a badly written sentence. In tennis, there were no subjective opinions: the ball was in or out. I could live with that. In fact, I thrived on it. Third, when you get even a little good at tennis it can be aesthetically pleasing to play.
In addition to tennis, my parents played golf, and eventually that took over as their singular sports passion. I remember once noticing on a visit home that their bookshelves were loaded with how-to, instructional golf books, plus a single novel: Of Human Bondage. (Who knows? Maybe the title led them to believe it, too, was a golf book...) I went through my own phase of buying and reading instructional tennis books, but have found time and again that they were of far less value to me than The Inner Game and a few others whose focus is, like Gallwey’s book, on the mental aspects of the game.
True collectors like to boast about the highlights of their collections. My library has only one so-called high spot: a first edition, first printing, of John McPhee’s Levels of the Game. Published in 1969, this gift from a rare-book dealer friend is a brilliant, double profile of pros Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner that uses as its “plot” device a point-by-point analysis of a match they played at Forest Hills in 1968. The other books I wouldn’t exactly call low spots, but they are easily found on Amazon today. Of these my favorites are: one of the best sports autobiographies I’ve ever read, Open by Andre Agassi, ghost-written by J. R. Moehringer and published in 2009; David Foster Wallace’s posthumous collection of essays, String Theory, published in 2014, six years after his suicide; and Foster’s mammoth novel of 1996, Infinite Jest, set partly at a tennis academy and partly (this is telling) at a drug rehabilitation center.
Have you written about tennis? I am sometimes asked. I answer no. In fact, I have assiduously avoided it. Mark Twain called golf “a good walk spoiled.” Tennis would be a good game spoiled if I thought about it too much. There has been one exception. In 1994, I wrote "Narrow World of Sports" for The Women’s Review of Books. It is an essay that discusses 17 tennis books, most of them written or ghost-written by players or their intimates, and most of them quite awful, including Bobby Rigg’s Court Hustler (1973) and Mariana Borg’s Love Match: My Life with Bjorn (1974). Better than those were three by Billie Jean King (1974, 1982, 1988)—she has since published others, including All In (2021)—as well as one by an observer of the game, Herbert Warren Wind, who reported on tennis for The New Yorker for many years. Since I still play, I’m not going to break my rule and write much more about tennis here. I just wanted to get this down, for posterity’s sake if no other. I also wanted it to serve me as a reminder that if I do get tempted to write about tennis in my retirement, I shouldn’t.
I should mention that my tennis-book library now includes a copy of Percy Boomer’s On Learning Golf, published in 1946. I have tried golf twice and found it wasn’t for me. Nonetheless, I picked up Boomer’s book at a used-book sale, mostly in remembrance of my parents. I did not save any of their golf books when we cleaned out their house. I have since discovered there is much wisdom imparted by Boomer that could be applied metaphorically to tennis, writing, or any other endeavor requiring the abandonment of “end-gaining,” i.e., result-seeking, while you’re in the process of achieving that result. “Do not transfer your attention from the matter of making the correct swing to the matter of where you want the ball to go,” Boomer wisely writes. His advice is really no different than “Be here now,” which is the reason why there are, in addition to Boomer's, more than a few books about Buddhism and yoga on my tennis-library shelf.
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