I’m not sure who said that but I am fairly sure it’s true. The best sports writing is about golf, of this I think there’s little doubt. The reason for that is simple. Golf writing is either about hero worship, which never gets old, or tragedy, which also never gets old or both.
Think about the boredom of writing about ordinary good golf:
“And then our hero hit another ball into the middle of the fairway. Then he hit another ball into the middle of the green. Then he made another putt.”
Now try this: “Our hero was nervous as he stood on the 10th tee, a tricky dogleg left. Memories of snap hooks into the woods bedeviled his mind as the wind swirled from right to left. He was already three shots behind the leaders with the hardest holes on the course still to be played. He hit a towering drive that was no more than ten feet left of his target line, but the wind freshened right at contact and the ball drifted left of the tree line before it vanished from view. Ten minutes later after having to strip down to his underwear in order to play his second shot from a pool of swamp water, the resulting ball miraculously caroming off a greenside tree into the center of the green, our hero unceremoniously sunk a ten-footer for birdie.”
A tennis ball is a bit larger than a golf ball and my early reading suggests that writing on tennis is Ok, but surely not to the level of good golf writing. One problem, I think, is the nature of the action. Too little describable time passes between tennis shots to delve into a player’s mindset. But now I am getting caught on a tangent.
I’m reading these three tennis books. In a couple weeks, I’ll review them. Technical Tennis is the most interesting, surprisingly, though the writing of David Foster Wallace’s String Theory is undeniably excellent and the story of Pancho Segura’s life in Little Pancho is as improbable as it is true.
Tt
Tennis thing 