The Right Set: A Tennis Anthology

From stately lawns and gentlemen players to Andre Agassi and Venus Williams: 65 great writings on tennis that chronicle the transformation of the sport.
Since its inception, tennis has embraced traditions more patrician than plebeian. But times--and tennis--have changed. The game once reserved for royalty has moved from estate lawns to the concrete courts of the city. Old guard amateurs have given way to prodigies plastered with corporate logos. And while barriers of gender, race, and class have been shattered, the modern plagues of self-promotion, the paparazzi, and challengers of ever-escalating talent loom large.
In The Right Set, award-winning novelist and editor Caryl Phillips presents a collection of writings on the remarkable evolution of a gentleman's pastime into a sport of jet-set players of athletic and psychological genius. Here are the stories of champions, from the Renshaw twins to "ghetto Cinderella" Venus Williams. Here, too, are volleys between tradition and innovation--debates on everything from etiquette and earnings to Andr? Agassi's rejection of the customary tennis whites. Insightful, informative, wonderfully entertaining, The Right Set is as colorful and surprising as the game itself.
John McPhee on Ashe vs. Graebner
David Higdon on Venus Williams
James Thurber on Helen Wills
Martina Navratilova on Bad Losers
Martin Amis on Smashing the Rackets
and more

Divided into nine sections ("The Great Match," "The Old Guard," etc.), The Right Set moves easily down the line through time and culturally across court from the noblesse oblige of white flannels on green lawns to the smoldering tempers of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Venus Williams. In between, James Thurber volleys a smashing winner with his courtside observations of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills; Ted Tingling waxes movingly on Bill Tilden; Grace Liechenstein celebrates Billie Jean King; and Arthur Ashe deftly takes apart his most formidable opponent--skin color--in "The Burden of Race." John McPhee's superb Levels of the Game--a book-length report on a match between the fluid Ashe and the mechanical Clark Graebner at Forest Hills--is happily excerpted twice.

If the pieces themselves range from the sparklingly witty (see Martin Amis's "Tennis Personalities," positively radioactive with observations like "Laver, Rosewall, Ashe: these were dynamic and exemplary figures; they didn't need 'personality' because they had character") to the curiously quaint (check out Wills's 1928 essay on etiquette), editor Phillips doesn't let his anthology cohere as a unit because he doesn't get in there and rally with it: first, his introduction is less sure-footed than Sampras on clay; second, he provides no context for the individual pieces or the writers who penned them. Which is too bad, because he's assembled a collection of tennis nonfiction that offers both power and touch--and an awful lot of memorable prose. --Jeff Silverman