I had a friend when I was younger who loved to play tennis. When I tried to convince him to go play basketball, he would stubbornly hold up a racket. This power struggle usually ended with me chasing tennis balls down the street, as he blow shot after shot past me.
Since then I haven’t ever developed any affection for the game. I could pick Roger Federer and Raphael Nadal out of a lineup, and like most red blooded young men, I know who Anna Kournikova and Maria Sharapova are. But other than a few booze filled trips out to the US Open, and the occasional Sportscenter highlight, I spend less time thinking about tennis than I do about Neoclassical Economics.
After reading High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and The Untold Story Of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry, I realized that my lack of appreciation is due in large part to being born in the wrong era.
Stephen Tignor, a Senior Writer for Tennis Magazine and a columnist for Tennis.com and ESPN.com, tells the story of the Golden Age of Tennis from 1970 to 1981. High Strung focuses on the iconic characters who made this such a remarkable time. These men were there at the start of the “Open” Era, when professionals where allowed to compete for money in major tournaments.
Before 1968 being a professional was frowned upon. Rod Laver, who won at Wimbledon in 1962, was asked to refrain from wearing the tie, that all past winners received as a sign of honorary membership, when he turned pro in 1963.
Bjorn Borg was an ice cold competitor who revolutionized the way tennis was played. The Viking God created such a frenzy with young girls, that they called it a “Borgasm”. Blessed with supreme talent, he was an unstoppable lunatic who could rival Bob Wiley (Bill Murray from What About Bob?) for idiosyncratic behavior. Borg would wear the same clothes, sleep in the same Holiday Inn, take the same route to the tournament, brought the playoff beard to tennis, and was surrounded by family members and coaches who were just as superstitious. For luck, his mother chewed candy during one of Borg’s matches. When the match seemed well in hand, she spit it out onto the ground, only to pick it up and start chewing again when the match tightened.
While Borg was the Teen Angel, John McEnroe was the despised by most tennis fans. The New York Times called him “The Worst Advertisement for our system of values since Al Capone.” One sociologist even penned a book with the working title: John McEnroe and the Decline of Civilization. Despite all that, like Borg, McEnroe changed the way tennis was played. While his demonstrative shenanigans are no secret to anyone who follows sports, High Strung delves deeper into the fascinating psyche of a man who earned the title of Superbrat.
Tignor also provides a unique look at men like Jimmy Connors, the original bad boy of tennis, Llie Nastase, who is rumored to have slept with over 2500 women and was ranked number six in Maxim Magazine’s Top Ten Living Sex Legends, and Vitas Gerulaitis, the original flamboyant tennis star, driving Rolls-Royces and dating movie stars, who battled drug addiction before dying in a tragic Carbon Monoxide accident, shortly after completing rehab. As well as introducing Ivan Lendl, who started the game’s transition to the high powered version that tennis fans see today.
Throughout the book you get a sense of what it was like to be around these men. You can feel the animosity, the hatred, and the stubborn admiration that they had for each other. Tignor, with succinct yet captivating prose, puts you in the car, in the locker rooms, on the court, and into the clubs with these men in such an intimate fashion, that it forces you to feel close to them, and to an era that is long gone.
At times he takes on a nostalgic tone, like a grandfather regaling us with tales of the good old days, but his voice is so well educated and his words so fluid, that you forgive the few examples where he seems to marvel over the mundane.
We read books about sports because we want to live in the lives of these men and women for a few hundred pages. More often than not they turn out to be nothing more than empty, self indulgent tales that reveal nothing we didn’t already know, or couldn’t have guessed for ourselves. High Strung does such an exceptional job of painting the world of Professional Tennis, and the men who shaped it, that you feel a genuine sense of tension in the matches, all of which have been in the books for over three decades.
By the end, I found myself caring about Bjorn Borg when he walked off the court after losing the 1981 US Open final, and vanished from the spotlight. Tignor creates such an emotional connection to these men that you even feel almost sympathetic to men like McEnroe and Connors, because you are right there next to them, feeling what they feel.
I wasn’t expecting to like a book about men who played a sport I don’t follow, and who hit their last meaningful shot decades ago. But Stephen Tignor’s book is about so much more than tennis. It is about the struggle to overcome adversity, while finding your place in an ever changing sport, and it is about real people with real flaws, who had feuds that would make the Jersey Shore kids jealous.
Above all, it is a fascinating portrayal of a sport, and a time, that we will never see again.
Click Here to buy your copy today.
——Corey
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