A time travel odyssey: Fifty years as a tennis historian

WATCH: Andy Murray tours the museum at the International Tennis Hall of Fame

Fifty years ago this month, I began my career as a tennis historian. I was 12 years old, and in July 1972, I attended Tony Trabert Tennis Camp for the first of what would eventually be six summers.

Holding a tennis racquet was humbling. But holding a tennis book at the camp’s library was transcendent. Around this time, my older brother Ken said, “If you played tennis a little more than you talked about it or read about it, you might be a good player one day.”

Well, here we are.

To write about contemporary tennis is a joy. But that’s not simply because I have the chance to witness current greats. For me, the game exists as one grand loop of time and place, champions, contenders and characters, woven in a tapestry of infinite dot-connecting.

It’s well-known these days that Rafael Nadal is a natural right-hander who plays tennis left-handed. Are you aware that the opposite was the case for Ken Rosewall, Maureen Connolly and Margaret Court? How did that affect how each played? Roger Federer savors fondue—which reminds me that some of the kindest words John McEnroe ever wrote were in appreciation of a hot dog vendor at a Manhattan subway stop, and that a sweet tooth might well have cost Don Budge a major singles title. How did Bill Tilden rework his backhand, Billie Jean King her serve, Martina Navratilova her forehand volley? What, there used to be a Wimbledon consolation tournament? A New England patrician created the tiebreaker?

View tennis this way and the layers run deep and endless, a textured carousel of memory and connection. Novak Djokovic’s sustainable baseline attack conjures Budge. Federer’s enduring footwork summons Rosewall. Nadal is a stylistic descendant of Guillermo Vilas. The Indian Wells tournament has roots in stand-up comedy. The Western grip was first notable on a San Francisco public court. Stroll across Roland Garros and ponder the legacy of Suzanne Lenglen in all her athleticism. Journey to Australia and take in an island nation that became a tennis superpower. Witness the evolution of the US Open, from garden party to electric carnival. Enter Centre Court at Wimbledon, where I’ve often sat in silence at 8:00 a.m. “It’s all now you see,” wrote William Faulkner. “Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow, and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.”

My immersion in tennis coincided with its boom years of the ‘70s. Amid such growth, it was easy to drink up the sport’s history. There were two major national magazines, World Tennis and Tennis. Television coverage soared, from seven events on-air in 1971 to 70 five years later, all on NBC, CBS, ABC and PBS. The latter featured commercial-free coverage and the sport’s premier historian, Bud Collins, from whom stories tumbled out with humor and color. The other major TV analyst happened to be the man whose camp I went to every summer. One morning when I was 13, Tony told me where to aim my lefty serve and what to do should the receiver alter his return position. Six weeks later, he said the same thing about Rod Laver during a nationally televised US Open epic.

Much of my engagement has been formed by reading. Years ago, I was told about an ambitious young tennis player. This man, his friend said, didn’t want to read about captains and kings. He wanted to meet them. My counterstatement: Had he read about them, wouldn’t he have had more to say once they met? Wouldn’t prior knowledge have made his inquiry even more edifying? Surely Emma Raducanu, her every move dissected, might well benefit from a study of the fishbowl Virginia Wade, aka “our Ginny,” occupied as she labored to win Wimbledon for more than a decade.

Those tennis boom years triggered a proliferation of books, an output largely triggered by both the game’s newfound popularity and its demographic affinity with the urbane, aspirational world of publishing. Many publishing executives had played tennis for years. The growth of tennis gave further validation to create one title after another—not just portraits of such icons as Billie Jean King and Arthur Ashe, but a vast array of biographies, histories, coffee table narratives, reference guides, whimsical fancies, and anthologies I continue to deploy nearly 50 years after I first bought them.

John Barrett, my fellow International Tennis Hall of Fame historian-at-large, authored and edited the dazzling World of Tennis. This was an annual look back at the prior tennis year, complete with articles from many journalists on various trends, concise player bios authored by Steve Flink and summaries of tournaments, ranging from the Grand Slams to many more all around the world.

“The early rounds went clickety-click according to the seedings,” wrote Candace Nyles Mayeron in her account of the 1975 Pacific Southwest Open. “It was an interesting year for the Maleeva sisters,” wrote Barry Wood in the 1991 edition. Lance Tingay in 1977: “It has always seemed to me that if a player like Adriano Panatta did not exist in real life, then sooner or later a novelist would have to invent him.”

Then there’s my real secret weapon, a book I obtained six months after that summer of ’72. The Fireside Book of Tennis is a 1,025-page collection drawn heavily from such outlets as the New York Times, Sports Illustrated and World Tennis. It’s broken into three sections—profiles of players and notables; accounts of various competitive events and key political moments; and instruction.

Here one finds the keys to grasping tennis’ kings and queens and so many others who comprised the castle. In his World Tennis piece, “The Style of Rod Laver,” Julius D. Heldman” “Most players who come under the ball slow it up. Not so Rod; he is also moving in and hitting so hard that the shot is deep and attacking and has unusual pace.”

New Yorker staffer James Thurber on the 1926 Suzanne Lenglen-Helen Wills “Match of the Century,” won by Lenglen 6-3, 8-6: “Helen Wills met a baptism of fire which was strange and new to her: she encountered a variety and a brilliance of technique that she has never encountered before.” (For more on Wills, watch the TenniStory video above.)

The Fireside Book has triggered dozens of ideas, a rich gallery of prose that’s also often helped me figure out how to describe a recent match—not always an easy task when a story is due within hours of its conclusion. “At times [Pancho Gonzalez] seemed to have too much respect for the ball to hit it hard,” wrote Rex Bellamy in a story about the 1968 French Open. “Instead, he whispered to it, like a fond parent lulling a child to sleep.”

Often, over the course of an assignment, I’ll grab one book after another from my bookshelf. Soon they litter my office floor, open to various pages, yellow Post-It notes stuck across various pages and passages. Such has been the case for this story. It’s a joy to commune so much with our sport’s rich history; back and forth, forward and back, again and again and again. To quote the poet T.S. Eliot, “We shall not cease from exploration/And the end of all our exploring/Will be to arrive where started/And know the place for the first time.”