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Levels of the Game

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Ostensibly this book is about a tennis match, Arthur Ashe versus Clark Graebner in the 1968 US Open Semifinals. The match was historic in itself:

"It has been thirteen years since an American won the men's-singles final at Forest Hills, and this match will determine whether Ashe or Graebner is to have a chance to be the first American since Tony Trabert to win it all. Ashe and Graebner are still amateurs, and it was imagined that in this tournament, playing against professionals, they wouldn't have much of a chance. But they are here, close to the finish, playing each other. For Graebner to look across a net and see Ashe--and the reverse--is not in itself unusual. They were both born in 1943, they have known each other since they were thirteen, and they have played tournaments and exhibitions and have practiced together in so many countries and seasons that details blur."

But McPhee is actually after bigger game than this one match. He also provides insightful portraits of the two very different contestants. Ashe, the only championship level Black tennis player of his time, is single, liberal, mercurial, a finesse player and a risk taker. Graebner is married with kids, conservative, religious, a power player and risk averse. McPhee demonstrates how their personalities influence, indeed shape, their play and how their lifelong rivalry lifts their games to higher levels when they play one another, ultimately lifting Ashe's game towards perfection by the end of this contest.

Ashe would go on to win the tournament, becoming the only amateur to win it in the Open era and together Ashe and Graebner lead the US to it's first Davis Cup in years. After that though, while Ashe went on to a respectable career, Graebner slipped into obscurity. But in this book, McPhee has preserved a moment in time when the two were evenly matched on the court, despite being polar opposites off of the court and in charting the lives that brought them to that moment, he provides a penetrating glance at two fascinating men.

This is a real pinnacle in Sports writing.

GRADE: A

To say John McPhee has written the best tennis book ever is to say too little. This is far more than a tennis book and, if you're looking for instruction, far less. The platform, if you'll excuse the tennis pun, is a U.S. Open final between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe, but it is a study of two men and what brought them to this point, athletically but especially sociologically. The reflective Southerner forced to be a pioneer because he is black. The more rigid son of the Midwest and privilege, with greater power and less versatility. The vagaries that make them human: Graebner, the more up-tight, gambling with a prepared point successfully at a crucial spot in the match. And at the end, there is Ashe, triumphantly whistling a winner off his suspect backhand to close out the match. You want to cheer. And you understand more about people than when you opened the book.

This book is so gracefully written that it isn't till the end that one realizes that McPhee's writing style(s) has been imitating the players' tennis styles, and that his language has moved effortlessly intune with the 'Levels of the Game'. Inlight of Arthur ashe's death, the book acheives a new poignancy.

"Levels of the Game" is, on the surface, an account of a single match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in the semifinals at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills. But as the title suggests, a game --- any game, at any degree of competition --- is not just about competence. How you play is a revelation of character; how you play is who you are.

It's on all the other levels that this is a great book --- one of the greatest you may ever read, period. First, because of the subject. Arthur Ashe was not the Jackie Robinson of tennis; when he emerged in the 1960s, he was the only African-American player of note in America. Clark Graebner was a dentist's son and a ringer for Clark Kent. As it happened, Ashe and Graebner were both best-of-breed. It's not inaccurate to say that they were friends. But you can't miss the notion that they are also archetypes: privileged white kid from Ohio vs. against-all-odds black kid from Virginia.

In a mere 146 pages, John McPhee --- you know his byline from a zillion profiles in The New Yorker, many of them mesmerizing, some beyond dull, but all meticulously reported and more carved than written --- has pulled off a literary coup. He has written an account of the match that's thrilling sports reporting. After, he clearly interviewed Ashe and Graebner at length, for he recreates what they were thinking and feeling at every key point in the match. And then he goes still deeper, talking to parents and wives, coaches and mentors, so he can deliver acute biographies of each player and a revelatory portrait of a sport --- and a nation --- in transition.

A mediocre writer would construct this book with long passages in italics. Or chapters that pull us out of the match and take us back to Virginia or Ohio. Well, you don't write a book called "Levels of the Game" without being aware of the levels of your craft --- and knowing that, when you settle yourself at the keyboard, you can play at a championship level.

Which is not to say that the book reads like "great writing". Just the opposite. It reads like great storytelling. There are no flights of language. It's just great reporting. And then, for a paragraph or a page, the telling of a story that takes place far from Forest Hills that helps to explain why Ashe or Graebner are playing a certain way or having certain thoughts about their match.

The biographical, historical and psychological passages are surprising. And thrilling --- you will be amazed at what Ashe had to overcome, and who helped, and how it worked out. And the same for Graebner, though, of course, the challenges are considerably smaller. But what's most exhilarating is when the strands merge, and you're both in the match and inside the players' heads. Like this:

Now the thought crosses Graebner's mind that Ashe has not missed a service return in this game. The thought unnerves him a little. He hits a big one four feet too deep, then bloops his second serve with terrible placement right into the center of the service court. He now becomes the mouse, Ashe the cat. With soft, perfectly placed shots, Ashe jerks him around the forecourt, then closes off the point with a shot to remember. It is a forehand, with top spin, sent cross court so lightly that the ball appears to be flung rather than hit. Its angle to the net is less than ten degrees --- a difficult brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else. Graebner feels the implications of this. Ashe is now obviously loose. Loose equals dangerous. When a player is loose, he serves and volleys at his best level. His general shotmaking ability is optimum. He will try anything. 'Look at the way he hit that ball, gave it the casual play,' Graebner says to himself. 'Instead of trying a silly shot and missing it, he tries the silly shot and makes it.'

Notice what's missing: the construction "he thought". McPhee has no need to step back from the moment and use that writerly qualification. He knows what Graebner thinks --- he's writing from authority. And so every word can drive the narrative forward. The writing has the power and velocity of the game it describes.

Everyone who likes tennis even a little will savor and learn from this book. But even more, anyone who likes good writing --- or aspires to write well --- should clutch "Levels of the Game" like a lifeline. The way you learn to write, after all, is to read great writing and imitate it until you break through to a style of your own. If that's your game, start here.

This was my first John McPhee book, selected because of its subject matter (I'm an ex-serious tennis player). John McPhee was recommended to me as a writer/essayist who can take any subject and write about it intelligently and interestingly. After finishing this book, I would agree with that characterization, but clarify that the subject in this particular book is not professional tennis or even the game of tennis but rather two people and how they have managed their lives. That they play tennis is the point around which the book comes together, but it is not the point on which the book stands. If you're looking for insight into the game of junior/professional tennis, try David Foster Wallace's great essay about Michael Joyce in _A Supposedly Fun Thing..._. If you're looking for insight into two particularly interesting people--Arthur Ashe is one of them, but his compatriot and opponent, whose name, of course, I have forgotten, is worth equal time--in a particularly interesting time period and situation, check this book out.

Reading this book in 2011 was really interesting. 1968 was the year of the Big Bang for tennis with the onset of the Open era.

The whole character of this match between Ashe and Graebner feels like a period piece. Imagine at the time, being 6 foot tall was pretty tall for tennis. Nowadays, if you are not at least 6 foot you are short for this game. Back then, serve-and-volley was the dominant style of playing. Nowadays, it has completely disappeared. When is the last time you saw a guy rush the net routinely on his second serve? Well, maybe Taylor Dent a couple of years ago. That's when playing against a modern returner like Robin Soderling, Dent hardly picked up a game per set in two consecutive devastating losses. In other words, the standard style of play in 1968 is now obsolete. That's probably because 3 out of 4 of the Grand Slam tournaments were played on grass. Now, only Wimbledon is. And, they changed the quality of the grass and the pressure of the balls to slow down the game. Also back then, they did not play tie breakers. Sets could go on forever (scores like 10-8, 12-10 were not uncommon). Additionally, out of the 128 men field I think only one of them had a two-handed backhand (Cliff Drysdale who had a most formidable backhand at the time).

Despite the book historical interest, I felt like the book had a few weaknesses.

First, why politicize the game in the most meaningless way. The concept of Graebner playing conservatively like a Republican and Ashe more deliberately like a Democrat was the most vapid framework.

Second, McPhee picked up the wrong match. The 1968 US Open was among the greatest tennis tournaments of all time. The Ashe-Graebner match up was one of the dull ones compared to a cocktail of sensational match ups. The final between Ashe and Tom Okker was a far better match than Ashe-Graebner. Ashe ran into probably one of the most talented players of all time. Okker was a short, light footed, speedy, versatile, elegant Dutchman whose game most resembled Federer. Ashe barely won in 5 sets. If you wanted politics, you could get a lot more drama in the intense match between Cliff Drysdale from South Africa (in the days of the apartheid) vs Ashe. For a battle of the generations, the Pancho Gonzales - Tom Okker match must have been pretty great too. Okker won it in a tough 4 set battle. But, Gonzales must have been more than 15 years older. You never see such an age gap between pro tennis players nowadays.

In summary, this book is historically interesting. However, it could have been far more interesting.

In Levels of the Game, John McPhee once again creates narrative structure out of his subject matter, in this case, a tennis match. The book is ostensibly about a single game of tennis played by Arthur Ashe, the first great black tennis player and one of the best tennis players of all time, and Clark Graebner, a white tennis player who was Ashe's rival for many years on the amateur circuit.

McPhee develops the two men as the opposite of each other: liberal v conservative, black v white, calm v emotional. And the narrative takes this another step. Just as the tennis ball bounces back and forth in a match, so does McPhee bounce back and forth between his two subjects, Ashe and Graebner, race and tennis. McPhee wants to draw a parallel between a person's background and their tennis-playing style, and for the most part, he succeeds.

As any reader of nonfiction knows, John McPhee writes perfect sentences, does unparalleled research, and crafts his books like a master carpenter. Levels of the Game has all these typical McPhee traits, is easy to read, and full of insight. On the other hand, by todays standards, the book is awkward. The shifts back and forth from Ashe to Grabner, from past to present, become jarring over time, and some of McPhee's sentences are unusually stiff and formal, almost academic.

Levels of the Game is a book about sports the way that Friday Night Lights Friday Night Lightsis a book about sports. It uses the game as a window into something else, an attempt to describe two very different men, and all that they represent in America in 1968.

Excellent portrayal of the interior game of tennis. Also, it's a fascinating and important story of the struggle of the African American player coming up through the culture of tennis in America.

Anyone who has written will appreciate this book, and how McPhee tells two stories-the forestory and the back story-and keeps both moving along nicely. This is among several McPhee books that are worth looking at closely, for anyone who loves to write-or loves to read.

Written for the New Yorker magazine in 1969, this 150 page sports 'classic' has all the punch-and-jab terseness that makes John McPhee's writing both immediate and immediately recognizable. It's fun to read, no question. And it has a way of implying that more is at stake than the ostensible subject of investigation, although McPhee is often artfully cagey about declaring what that "more" might be.

"Levels of the Game" is constructed around a point-by-point account of a single tennis match played in 1968 by Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, an African-American and a German-American who were the soul of the championship American Davis Cup team, playing both as singles and as doubles partners. Ashe and Graebner were as much friends as fiercely competitive rivals can ever be, despite their markedly different personalities and world-views. Graebner, the 'spoiled' scion of a conservative Christian dentist, plays stiff and predictable power tennis, "Republican tennis" as it were. Ashe, also a 'privileged child' despite his color and father's illiteracy, is "bold, loose, liberal, flat-out Democratic." Several critics have made McPhee's point more explicitly than McPhee would ever do: "You are the way you play."

Like the volleys of an exciting match, the profiles of Ashe and Graebner - their childhoods, their fathers, their training in life and tennis, their quirks and virtues - are lobbed back and forth between the points of the game, from Ashe's first serve to Ashe's last winning stroke. McPhee is crafty; he depicts both men with implicit admiration and maintains as judicious an air of impartiality as an nominee for the Supreme Court under hostile questioning. But there's little doubt about whom he assumes HIS readers will root for, and his tone shows it. Ashe's victory - Ashe's whole career - was a triumph of Civil Rights in America over the forces of stand-pat hold-on-to-your own conservatism. Anyone who doesn't cheer when Ashe scores a point in this match has totally missed the point.

When McPhee wrote this book, in 1969, it must have seemed that the societal match which it symbolized was almost over, almost won. Racism had 'charged the net' in the South of Wallace and Faubus, and the ball had been lobbed out of reach. Watching the ads on TV today, couple-watching on the streets of American cities, noting the approval ratings of the First Couple in the White House, one could indeed say that Ashe's victory was prophetic of America's racial Redemption. "Game, set, match to Lieutenant Ashe," McPhee wrote; "When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high."

However, if we take this historic match as an analogy for the cultural match-up between conservatism and liberalism, McPhee's success as an oracle is less clear. In 1969 perhaps, the egalitarian ideals of the New Deal and the Great Society might have seemed pervasive and permanent. The 'loose' liberalism expressed in Ashe's tennis was the preferred style of American youth, and the tight hind-end game played by Graebner didn't stand a chance.

Ahh, that was before the Culture Wars, before the 'Southern Strategy', before Reaganism and Ollie North, before egalitarian idealism got lost in the Bushes. What McPhee didn't foresee was that Clark Graebner's 'Republican tennis' could claw and scratch, rage and pout, and make a comeback. After all, they play how they are.