Tough Draw: The Path to Tennis Glory - Hardcover

Berry, Eliot

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0805023143 ISBN 13: 9780805023145

Publisher: Henry Holt & Co, 1992

Synopsis

A gifted chronicler of the game and published novelist, Eliot Berry focuses on the pivotal matches of the 1990 and 1991 seasons. He uses a competitor's eye to reveal the subtleties that separate the big winners from the journeymen players.
Some of the top pros are great talents but mediocre competitors. Others survive because - like boxers - they have something to prove to the world. Steffi Graf, bruised and unnerved by family scandal, is down 5-4 in the third set of the 1991 Wimbledon final, with her opponent, Gabriela Sabatini, serving for the match. Steffi Graf finds an opening, just one shot, that recalls in both players memories of their competitive natures - and the match swings her way.
Likewise, we observe Jimmy Connors, the unseeded wild card at the 1991 U.S. Open, as he reaches back to uncover his special magic as a competitor, only days short of his thirty-ninth birthday. A year earlier John McEnroe, whose behavior has defaulted him in Australia, returns from his exile to win his ninth (out of ten) five-set match at the Open.
The big matches and the lesser known ones that often shape the players are analyzed. Edberg, Becker, Berger, Courier, Navratilova, Capriati, Seles, Lendl, Agassi, Krickstein, Sampras, among others, are all here, along with surprising comments from top players of the past, including Pancho Gonzales, Margaret Court, and Ken Rosewall. Like the game itself, Tough Draw is a triumph of art, grace, and power. Fresh, vivid, uncannily accurate - only someone who cares so deeply about tennis and knows the game so intimately could write with such eloquence and authority - Tough Draw does for tennis what Roger Angell has done for baseball.

About this title

From Kirkus Reviews:

A passionately impressionistic and insightful celebration of professional tennis from former junior player Berry. With the 1990 outdoor season as backdrop, Berry sketches an alternately fierce and fluid physical and psychological battleground--one that pits gritty veterans and established young stars against a startling array of talented newcomers. Refreshingly uninterested in scandal and gossip, and paying scant attention to the sport's political and business aspects, Berry searches for the heart of the game itself--``the source for the drive top players have and the tremendous, pure appeal of the action''--locating it in an amalgam of killer instinct and the desire for social acceptance. The latter point--arising from a thoughtful reading of the first-generation backgrounds of Andre Agassi, Michael Chang, and Pete Sampras, and the broken families of Martina Navratilova and Jimmy Connors--though occasionally wonderfully on target (e.g., self-conscious ``rebel'' Agassi is ``America itself, part immigrant, part blonde''), is, unfortunately, more often undercut by overstatement (the Maryland-born Sampras is hardly a ``Greek kid''). Much better is the picture of the larger tennis world--as much a matter of parents, coaches, officials, fans, and retired greats as of the players themselves--moving from Florida's Lipton International to the French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. Included are sensitive glimpses of the perhaps ruinously introspective Boris Becker and the articulate and driven Navratilova, along with less talented but equally determined ``strugglers'' such as Jay Berger, and, in a brief coda set at the 1991 US Open, the remarkably resilient Connors. Fittingly, however, Berry is at his best in charting the furious shifts of individual matches, going beyond simple play-by-play to capture the ``combination of talent, concentration, brains, luck, and heart'' needed for tennis greatness. Not quite an ace, but an impressive sportswriting first serve. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

From Publishers Weekly:

Berry, once a nationally ranked junior and pro tennis player, here presents keen analyses of the current court stars' strengths and weaknesses. He also offers an irksome number of unnecessary metaphors and similes, often indulging in such unclear descriptions as "a man with a 1950s baseball player's body." The book's main problem, however, is not the writing but the subjects, since today's tennis stars are simply less interesting than the flamboyant Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, the icily efficient Chris Evert and Bjorn Borg and the high-powered Martina Navratilova and Ivan Lendl. Hence, interviews with Stefan Edberg, Pete Sampras, Aaron Krickstein, Gabriella Sabatini and Monica Seles, although adroitly conducted, don't have great appeal, and Berry's review of the 1990-1991 season's high points doesn't catch fire. Author tour. ( Sept.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About this edition

• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co
• Publication date: 1992
• ISBN 10: 0805023143
• ISBN 13: 9780805023145
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 320