Steve Tignor recently released High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis's Fiercest Rivalry, and Peter Bodo’s The Courts of Babylon, originally published in 1994, has now been re-released as an eBook. We thought it was a good time for both authors to ask each other about their respective works.
!CourtsofBabylonCover Pete,
It’s hard for me to believe I’m getting a chance to ask you some questions about The Courts of Babylon. I read the book shortly after it came out, in the mid-90s, when I was still looking for a start as a writer. It was inspiring. I began it at my parents place in PA; I was sitting in my sister’s bedroom for some reason, and had intended to get up and go somewhere else. But I was so engrossed in the book I didn’t get up for hours. I ended up reading the whole first chapter, on Pat Cash and Aussie tennis, in there. It felt like the tennis book I’d been wanting to read for a long time, a more thorough, serious, and entertaining look at the pro tour than I’d seen anywhere before. So, some questions I’ve always wanted to ask.
The title: Was that yours, or an editor’s? I ask because neither my title nor sub-title was mine. I like “High Strung,” but wish the subtitle, which is too-narrowly focused on Borg and Mac, was different. How do you like Courts of Babylon now?
Well, let me first say that your anecdote makes me feel both proud—and old. I agree with you on your title (unfortunately), and remember sitting with you in your office as we went through options. For the record, I thought the original working title (Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe and the Last Days of Tennis's Golden Age) was better than this final one. But publishers will twist themselves into knots trying to come up with something they feel (in committee, BTW) is the most “marketable,” losing sight of all else. Count yourself lucky they didn’t decide to go with “Sexcapades on Center Court. . .” Thankfully, it’s one of the only things in which they have that degree of say and control. But let’s forget that because while I’ve just delved into it recently, I can already tell the title doesn’t do the book justice.
Titles are funny, they’re either there automatically, gracefully, obviously just right, or you go through all kinds of contortions and finally come up with something. . . serviceable. The Courts of Babylon is one of the few times in my life when a title came to me and seemed right and natural from the get go, for which I have to thank whomever produced a picture book circa 1970 called Hollywood Babylon. I’m not sure why I was so impressed by the title of that book (or was it the picture of Marilyn Monroe on the cover, smoking a cigarette, left boob conveniently falling out of her white satin strapless gown?), but it was just. . . there. . .20 years later for me. The original hardcover (Scribner’s) volume had the subtitle: Tales of Greed and Glory from the Harsh New World of Professional Tennis. That was changed for this new, ebook edition to Dispatches from the Golden Age of Tennis. My publisher, Diversion Books, wanted a subtitle that had a more contemporary feel and I yielded on that.
I re-read a lot of the book last year while researching mine and was surprised by how down you seemed on the sport, and the greed surrounding it, at the time. This was a trend at the time it was published, 1994. It was the same year as Sally Jenkins’ “Is Tennis Dying?” piece in Sports Illustrated and Digby Baltzell’s Sporting Gentleman, which at one point had the working title, John McEnroe and the Decline of Civilization. Was that just a bad moment for the game to you, or had you just become fed up? Has the sport improved? Is it alive again?
That’s a very astute observation. Digby Baltzell was a mentor and he became a friend and enormous influence. I can’t overstate how much I learned and even borrowed from him. I was thrilled that the New York Times Sunday book review published a two-page spread reviewing Courts of Babylon and Sporting Gentleman together.
It’s a bit of a cliché, but there was more of a Wild West/Gold Rush feeling about tennis back in those days, and for real reasons. If there seemed to be more greed, it was probably because there was more opportunity, especially for entrepreneurs and empire builders. It was like the gilded age in American history. The big difference now is that the frontier has been tamed and settled. The outlaws have been brought to heel. The rule of law has gradually come to supplant rule by strength, will and power. An infrastructure now exists for funneling players into the game (with media training and all!) and a voluminous rule book has been codified, eliminating potential controversies and surgically removing a number of the philosophical questions that once enlivened the game, or specific incidents in the game. The game is better off for it, I truly believe that, and the continued growth of tennis proves it. I can’t imagine anyone today criticizing the game in the way Sally did in her watershed SI piece. Tennis has become a mature, professionally organized and run sport, but that’s all it is. Back in those days, it somehow seemed like. . . more.
What do you think the biggest difference is between today’s players and those of the generation you talk about in this book, the Borg, Macs, Grafs, and Capriatis, etc.? Which do you like better? Which have you enjoyed writing about more? (They might be very different answers.)
The biggest difference is the extent to which career in every sense seems to utterly dominate and shape the best players today, and that makes them somewhat synthetic personalities who sometimes have real trouble transcending their professional identities. It also makes it very difficult to get even reasonably close to them. I was very lucky to form somewhat textured relationships and friendships with many players of that era; I think it’s impossible for a journalist to do that today (and I say that knowing journalists are not supposed to befriend their subjects, a theory I reject, at least when it comes to sports journalism).
I used the verb “dehumanize” a lot in Courts of Babylon, and while it sounds kind of high falutin’, it’s a valuable concept to keep in mind. I want to be careful here, because people are remarkably flexible and in some ways inalterable, but the degree of dehumanization that goes on in tennis has, predictably, increased with the growth of the game. Tennis players these days are dual personalities—professional machines in working lives, regular human beings under cover of night, at home. I’d like to see less distinction between the two. Sometimes I feel that to the typical player—especially a good player—people like us, as well as fans and ordinary folks, as well as the physical world beyond the court are just. . . scenery. I don’t criticize the players for this; in fact, I think it’s a very heavy price to pay for their success. And they have no choice but to be this way because of how tennis development works.
Do you feel like your writing has changed since you did this book? What do you think when you look at its sentences and ideas, and do you feel like doing a blog in the intervening years has changed how you approach writing?
I rarely look at Courts of Babylon, unless I need to look something up. I think I found my critic/commentator’s voice in Courts of Babylon, which makes sense because the book was the end of one thing and the beginning of another. Up to that point, I felt my job was to “understand” the players, in a pretty personal way, and to be a kind of conduit to their fan base. I was less judge, more lawyer working on their behalf. But I more or less grew up as a journalist with the subjects of Courts of Babylon, and knew I would never have such intimate and natural relations with successive generations. I would never cover tennis in quite the same way once the generation I knew best passed, because I would have personal obligations—real or imagined—to inhibit me. I always had a hard time writing something critical about somebody who I had to look in the eye and shake hands with the next day; it made me feel tawdry so I avoided it. Now, I enjoy the distance I keep from most of the players, and that has shaped what I write and how I write it. I’m now mainly an opinion journalist; it’s less that I feel I earned the right to be that with my previous work than that if I were to stay in the game, this is where I had to go with my writing.
Do you have a favorite moment in the book? I think its most famous is either when Borg laughs when he sees you in Monte Carlo, or Arthur Ashe tells you that Jimmy Connors is “an a--hole, but he’s my favorite a--hole.” My favorite parts are the Becker chapter, since you knew him well, a car ride you took with Ashe, in which he explained his philosophy better than any other place I’ve read, the Borg section of course, and when you watch Johnny Mac go out and try to body surf at the end. And of course Jim Courier’s signed message to a pushy Italian fan.
Shoot, you sure remembered a bunch of the ones that still make me smile when I think of them. I like the Ashe quip about Connors because it so perfectly captures some essential aspect of Ashe, who was truly a great man. But one of my own highlights was that quite amazing plan Ivan Lendl had for making everyone have a broad stripe painted on his car, which would give him/her the right to travel in one or another lane on the highway. That he could come up with such an Orwellian, bizarre, colorful solution to the problem posed by bad drivers who fail to keep right on the highway still boggles my mind—and makes me laugh.
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Read Steve Tignor's answers to Peter Bodo's questions about High Strung here.