So you must have a little extra time on your hands right now. You don’t have to watch tennis, read about tennis, follow any live scores, comment on my predictions, wonder whatever happened to Yanina Wickmayer, or keep your knives sharpened for those obnoxious and diabolical Federer or Nadal fans that you hate so much. Be careful, though, the enemy never sleeps.
What should we do to fill the gap? There’s holiday gift-buying, of course, but I’m not very good at that. I dislike shopping to the extent that I have no idea how to do it, or where to look for anything, when this time of year comes around. Where do people find the various stocking stuffers and thingamajigs they give to each other? (I’m sure there’s a thingamajig.com, now that I think about it.) All I know anything about buying are books, so that’s what pretty much everyone I know gets. Boring, I know, but that’s why there’s a publishing industry in the first place, right? So people can give each other 500-page hardbacks that they'll never read.
There must be more enjoyable, and less stressful, activities than shopping to try for the next three weeks. Here are a few that I’ll be considering.
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Say Hallelujah with Leonard Cohen (try not to look at his ghoulish face while you do, though). I like tennis as much as the next person, but there is a season for everything, including not having to watch it or worry about it. Think of it this way: It makes the Aussie Open that much sweeter when it comes around. Every sport should feel like a blank slate once a year.
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While I’m over at You Tube, I’ll stick around to sample the amazing and ever-growing library of music available. There are songs and shows and performances I never thought I would be able to see at all, let alone anytime I wanted. Dylan goes electric? That was the stuff of legend, like King Arthur and his round table, when I was a kid. Not anymore.
One example. Twenty years ago, I was driving around Philadelphia listening to UPenn’s radio station. The guest DJ was Marshall Crenshaw and he played an old soul song called “My Heart’s Not in It.” I knew I had to own that song, immediately, whatever the price. That night I went to the one place I thought might have it, a massive thrift 45 shop in the anonymous rundown outskirts of 69th St. in West Philly. I must have pawed through 5,000 records, 10,000 records, who knows—nothing. The greasy old guy there, who knew everything about 60s soul, had never heard of it. Over the years I discovered that the singer was a woman named Darlene McCrae, but I never heard the song again or came across even a mention of it. Until Monday. Here it is. I’d been building the thing up in my head for 20 years, but it lived up to the billing I’d given it. The moment that stuck in my head—the way she slides “my” and “heart” together the second time in each chorus—is still there. It’s one of those golden soul moments, when the singer does something she doesn’t have to do.
Plus, it came with a typical You Tube bonus: It led to REM’s tremendously casual version of “There She Goes Again,” which I’d forgotten all about.
(I’ve heard there’s a site that will make an MP3 of a You Tube clip. Anyone know anything about that?)
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Watch non-tennis-related TV. My most concentrated tennis viewing take place weekend mornings. The problem there is, the most obvious alternative are Saturday morning cartoons and Sunday morning political talk shows. Whenever I accidentally stray onto one of the latter, I’m so agitated by the posturing that within seconds I have to change the channel, thinking as I do, “Thank God I don’t watch those shows.”
But I’ve been catching up with The Office—still as brilliant and strangely touching as ever, in my opinion. And In Treatment. Making therapy entertaining, that takes some doing; this show does it. And the PBS Newshour—making stories about experiments in water treatment in Bangladesh riveting takes some doing, but they do it.
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Read a tennis book. This might fill the gap, or be overkill, I don't know. This year, in attempting to write my own book on the sport, I’ve chewed my way through most of the literature that exists on the subject. You haven’t lived until you’ve polished off Lloyd on Lloyd (that’s Chris and John) and Break Point, “the glittering, Grand Slam thriller by the international bad boy of tennis,” Ilie Nastase. First line: “He drove with his left hand, pivoting the big car smoothly southwest, through the streets of Paris, while the other wandered languorously over the girl’s thigh.” In the next line, you find out what kind of car he’s driving. It’s a Rolls.
George Plimpton didn’t have much good to say about tennis writing—he said it was fuzzy and fizzy or something like that. And lit snobs won’t dig any deeper than David Foster Wallace. They should. There are a lot of high-quality tennis books; more than any other sport, I’m willing to bet (not actual money; just a figure of speech). Richard Evans’ Open Tennis; Bud Collins My Life with the Pros; Evans’ biographies of McEnroe and Nastase; Love-30 by Rex Bellamy; Forest Hills, by Robert Minton; The World of Tennis, by Richard Shickel; Joel Drucker’s Jimmy Connors Saved My Life; Jack Kramer’s The Game; among others. Even Bill Scanlon’s autobio is worth a read. One that’s not so great, but which has one of my favorite titles, is the story of Bjorn Borg’s fall: Winner Loses All. (Curiously, I wasn’t that crazy about one of the more famous tennis books, Frank Deford’s Bill Tilden bio.)
The one I’ll recommend is Covering the Court, a memoir by the NY Herald’s longtime tennis writer Al Laney, who retired in 1968. His smoothly personal and readable style is the best way I’ve found to learn about tennis in the first half of the century. Find a copy here.
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Look up. Do you ever, when you’re walking down the street, dimly begin to recognize that there are clouds above your head? You forget all about them most of the time, but they still hang around—lumpy and wispy and random and slowly changing. Are they waiting to tell us something? If you’re really desperate for something to do without tennis, you know where to find them.
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Book a flight. This is the time of year when I start to ask: "Why do I live in the Northeast again?" I hate the cold more each winter, but this time I'll get a respite for about 15 days. I'll be at the Australian Open. It always happens when I click "purchase" for my tickets to a hot-weather destination: My mind jumps ahead and I feel warmer. For a second or two.