Reading happily between baselines

ON TENNIS:There is no shortage of literature on tennis and you can also improve your sex life at the same time, writes Johnny Watterson

The 2008 Official Guide to Professional Tennis is all very well. It keeps us from relying on our memories. But try reading it from cover to cover and you have a five-set baseline grind on your hands.

Tennis literature has not had a glorious past but the characters who dip into the sport now and then never fail to leave a whiff of their presence after they move on. JP Donleavy is one. The Trinity College graduate and master comic of The Ginger Man also wrote the less well celebrated De Alfonce Tennis: The Superlative Game of Eccentric Champions, Its History, Accoutrements, Rules, Conduct And Regimen, which was published in 1984. In the book Donleavy is the top-ranked player, according to the WDTA (the World De Alfonce Tennis Association). One of the rules is that the author never loses in competition. But being the true sportsman he is, he has not invoked it the few times he has been bested in championship play.

The rock star of British literature, Martin Amis, has also written about his tennis exploits before his regular games with fellow author and friend Julian Barnes came to a crushing end when the two fell out after Amis changed his agent from Barnes's wife to someone else. You might have thought that would have added a little edge to their games but no, their relationship exploded. Still Amis took time out to fantasise about the game in an article published in the New Yorker magazine in 1996.

"Krajicek was surprised to win Wimbledon. Yet when my turn comes, I'll take my triumph humourlessly in stride," wrote the author of London Fields, Money: A Suicide Note and Times Arrow: or The Nature of the Offence. "In preparation I am taking the trouble to compile my entry for the ATP Tour Player Guide. Here's how it's looking: Birth date 8/25/49. Height 5' 6". Weight: 150 . . . Career losings: About 200 pounds (gambling). Career heights . . . 1991 - Beat a 60-year-old to reach career best second round of Paddington Sports Club Over 35s. I skipped the Olympics and I have pulled out of the Open. My plan is to conserve myself for Wimbledon 97 . . . Sampras is only six feet one . . . but I'd precision-lob the clown, or else dink my returns to his feet, making Pete crazy. Becker can expect the same treatment. At Wimbledon I will probably be unseeded and may face quite reasonable players in the early rounds."

Last year Sligo Tennis Club's Tom Higgins launched his three great tomes on The History of Irish Tennis, containing everything you need to know, need not know and may never wish to know about the game in Ireland.

There have been numerous biographies on all of the big names, few of them memorable. Justin Henin's is remarkable for showing us just how odd and messed up the private life of the little Belgian champ was before she prematurely retired this year.

John McEnroe's biography, McEnroe: Taming the Talent by the former Sunday Times tennis correspondent Richard Evans, was interesting if only to bring us into the complicated world of the former Wimbledon champion. We have John Barrett's annual World of Tennis, Brad Gilbert's big seller Winning Ugly, John Feinstein's harder-hitting Hard Courts: Real Life on the Professional Tennis Tours and in November of this year Tennis Ireland will be making its own contribution to the sport's literature.

To celebrate its centenary year the governing body is planning to launch a book in the beginning of November, Tennis In My Life.

It aims to celebrate the game through the eyes of a number of well-known individuals and practitioners of the sport. The 18 contributors include the Olympic gold medallist from 1956 Ronnie Delany, Gary Cooke (Après Match), the pianist Hugh Tinney, Goal's John O'Shea, Sam Barry, Amy Bowtell and Seán Sorensen.

As is often the case, the interesting pieces come from the least likely places, the former Grand Slam competitor and Carrickmines player June Ann Byrne giving a glimpse of what the game brought into her life.

"I love music and had the great honour of playing tennis with Pavarotti over the years," she writes. "Whenever he would come to play in Ireland, Fitzwilliam would ask me to play him because I have good control and can put the ball wherever I want. The first time we played he said: 'June Anne, I think you play cat and mouse with me'. But I told him that if anything were to happen to him on the court I'd have to deal with the wrath of all those who had bought tickets for that night's show. There were always two tickets for me at the box office when he performed here."

Delany notes with a tinge of sadness how he left the game behind. "I had to give up tennis because I became a runner," he writes. "Tennis is a game in which one can express oneself. It's also a very egotistical game. You can ace your opponent and there's a great satisfaction in that. In a tight situation it requires an immense amount of concentration, and lots of stamina. I never quite mastered the nerves of the game. I always got too much adrenaline at once, which is wonderful for running but not for tennis. I could hit the ball an awful clatter but I never learned to control my nerves."

Slices of life are always interesting but if it's highbrow you seek for go no further than Sex as a Sublimation for Tennis from the secret writings of Sigmund Freud. Very interesting. The right service court is exhibitionism, the left penis envy and the alley between the tram lines Oedipal conflict.

Freud writes: "The lob is the Cinderella stepchild of tennis, under-utilised, unrecognised and generally disparaged. The name lob itself is a condensation of a sexual organ."

Pass The 2008 Official Guide please. Quick.