Books

Love Game: A History of Tennis, From Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon, by Elizabeth Wilson

Staff Picks – what our journalists read for pleasure: Laura Slattery and tennis have been a love match since the 1980s. She reckons this new history of the sport is ace

John McEnroe appeals the umpire’s decision during Wimbedon in 1982: the big personalities of the era persuaded Laura Slattery, growing up in 1980s Dublin, to pick up a racquet. Photograph: Allsport UK /Allsport

Laura Slattery's face
Laura Slattery
Wed Nov 12 2014 - 13:34

What are you reading?

Love Game: A History of Tennis, From Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon by Elizabeth Wilson.

What’s it about?

It’s the story of tennis: part on-court romance, part off-court sociology. Wilson traces its evolution from leisure fad of the corset-wearing white elite to erotic cousin of Hollywood showbiz, through to the bad behaviour and player politics of the 1970s boom and the brand-endorsed work ethic of the 21st-century game. The macho image of modern male tennis, all power and endurance, is contrasted with the game’s earlier reputation as a “sissy” sport, while Wilson details how women players are either dismissed as frivolous frilly-knicker wearers or shamed for being too athletic and not “feminine” enough.

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Why are you reading it?

When I was growing up in Dublin in the 1980s, personalities like Navratilova, Evert, McEnroe and Becker inspired kids to take their racquets to the free public courts that were then dotted about the city. Now I’m an armchair fan of both the WTA (women’s) and ATP (men’s) tours. Wilson’s book was published this year in the run-up to Wimbledon, which still marks the peak excitement for deuces, double faults, broken strings and “new balls, please”, though the highest-ranked, un-injured men will wrap up their season at the ATP World Tour Finals in London this week.

Would you recommend it?

Yes. It’s a smash. The book serves up compelling biographies of champions like Suzanne Lenglen, the first international tennis celebrity (whose father was also the original “pushy” tennis parent), and “chippy” 1930s star Fred Perry, whose later veneration by the BBC belies his outsider status as a working-class player who clashed with the snobbish tennis establishment. Wilson breaks down the rhetoric of sport with the finesse of a cross-court passing shot, her prose slicing through fashion, technology, money and the tragedies of many players’ lives.

What book should everyone read?

A Room with a View, EM Forster's light Edwardian novel of cads, tourists and misguided engagements. Attitudes to lawn tennis become a key plot point when the unsympathetically portrayed Cecil Vyse twice refuses to be the fourth player in a game of doubles, which fiancee Lucy Honeychurch holds to be "abominably selfish" of him.