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    Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
    Unavailable
    Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
    Unavailable
    Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
    Ebook465 pages3 hours

    Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon

    By Elizabeth Wilson

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Tennis has never been played better than it is today. To watch Rafael Nadal spin a forehand at 4000 rpm, Maria Sharapova arabesque out of a serve, Serena Williams utterly destroy a short ball, or Roger Federer touch a volley into an impossibly angled winner is to watch not only the best players with the best coaching hitting with the best racquets, it is to watch the culmination of an entire history. Love Game is different from most tennis books—it isn’t a ghostwritten biography, and it won’t teach you how to slice your serve. It’s a book about tennis’s grand culture, one that unveils the sport’s long history as it lives and breathes (or grunts) in the modern game.
               
    No one is better equipped to tell this story than novelist and historian Elizabeth Wilson. With a penchant for tennis’s inherent drama, she finds its core: a psychological face off between flamboyant personalities navigating the ebbs and flows of fortune in the confines of a 78 x 36–foot box—whether of clay, grass, or DecoTurf. Walking the finely kempt lawns of Victorian England, she shows how tennis’s early role as a social pastime that included both men and women—and thus, lots of sexual tension—set it apart from most other sports and their dominant masculine appeal. Even today, when power and endurance are more important than ever, tennis still demands that the body behave gracefully and with finesse. In this way, Wilson shows, tennis has retained the vibrant spectacle of human drama and beauty that have always made it special, not just to sports fans but to popular culture.
               
    Telling the stories of all the greats, from the Renshaw brothers to Novak Djokovic, and of all the advances, from wooden racquets to network television schedules, Wilson offers a tennis book like no other, keeping the court square in our sights as history is illuminated around it.    
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of Chicago Press
    Release dateMay 6, 2016
    ISBN9780226371313
    Unavailable
    Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon
    Author

    Elizabeth Wilson

    My family was involved in running the British Empire in increasingly lowly postions sliding slowly down the social scale. They felt quite dislocated after WW II and my mother led a very marginal existence. Perhaps because of this she had me educated at St Paul's Girls' School, where I encountered a completely different world of the Jewish and non Jewish intelligentsia, and then at Oxford. Possbily because of the discrepancy between home background and sophisticated educational milieu I was extremely rebellious. I trained as a psychiatric social worker because of an interest in psychoanalysis, but throughout 10 years working in the field I was repelled by its conservative ethos and morality and eventually escaped to a polytechnic. But this time I was involved in Gay Liberation and the Women's Movement, which defined the 1970s for me. In the 1980s I became a lesbian co-parent and later a parent governor at Camden School for Girls. Beginning in the mid-70s I wrote a number of polemical/academic works about women, and then shifted into an interest in fashion and dress (I am currently Visiting Professor at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London). For some years I was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain, but am now a Green Party member. I am currently working on another novel and also on a book about the necessity of atheism.

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    Reviews for Love Game

    3.5/5

    5 ratings2 reviews

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    • 3/5
      "The term 'love' is also mysterious, although possibly it had something to do with the universal practice in earlier times of betting on matches ('for love or money'). That one word has caused more controversy than any other aspect of the game, but these linguistic mysteries only add to the romance of tennis."
      Every year in June, a friend of mine despairs over many comments of mine - both on social media and when meeting up in person - because I will be in the throws of the ongoing thrill that is the tennis season and my friend absolutely detests the sport - and especially the scoring system. Or, rather, I should say the the 'idiotic' scoring system.
      Over the years, this has developed into a bit of a joke between us and by now we have made it a tradition that she will comment on the matches as well - which usually is hilarious.

      What has all this to do with the Love Game? Nothing, except that when reading this book I was reminded of my friend and how much she would despise the book. Not so because Love Game is about tennis, but because there seem to be very few answers in the book to questions that the non-tennis enthusiast might have. What I am getting at is that, while reading this book, I was not sure who it was written for. Was it written for people who are already familiar with the sport or for people who were looking for an overview of the sport and its history?

      Most of the book read like a piece of academic work, although less like a research paper and more like a literature review, touching on subjects and stories, but never fully investigating them.

      Also, having followed the sport since the late 1980s and actually having read some of the books that are referenced in Love Game, much of the information was tangible, if not even familiar. Even to a degree where it was possible to notice where stories were summarised to the extent that they may have lost some of their poignancy.

      As a result, I liked the book as a compendium of tennis history but only as a quick introduction, as an appetizer, if you will. I would doubt tho that the fairy impersonal, dare I say passion-less, style of the book would enthuse anyone to find out more about the personalities and issues that have shaped the sport since its inception.
    • 4/5
      This was an interesting, colourful and occasionally annoying history of lawn tennis, from its origins in the 1870s to the present day. The author spends a fair bit of time setting tennis in the context of the development of sport, culture and society in general. While this is perfectly legitimate, I felt that her analysis was sometimes overlong and rather simplistic, particularly in the latter stages where she rails against the corporate domination of the sport, painting it as being a stagnating or declining sport, with boring players, an image that just doesn't seem to square with the tennis I love to watch. Of course, there is always room for improvement and some players are always going to be more exciting to watch than others, but that's life. I didn't buy into her doom-laden narrative. On the good side, though, there were some interesting sketches of the great players of the early decades such as Tilden and Cramm.