The Right Set: A Tennis Anthology [Paperback]

Caryl Phillips (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 27, 1999

From stately lawns and gentlemen players to Andre Agassi and Venus Williams: 65 great writings on tennis that chronicle the transformation of the sport.

Since its inception, tennis has embraced traditions more patrician than plebeian. But times--and tennis--have changed. The game once reserved for royalty has moved from estate lawns to the concrete courts of the city. Old guard amateurs have given way to prodigies plastered with corporate logos. And while barriers of gender, race, and class have been shattered, the modern plagues of self-promotion, the paparazzi, and challengers of ever-escalating talent loom large.

In The Right Set, award-winning novelist and editor Caryl Phillips presents a collection of writings on the remarkable evolution of a gentleman's pastime into a sport of jet-set players of athletic and psychological genius. Here are the stories of champions, from the Renshaw twins to "ghetto Cinderella" Venus Williams. Here, too, are volleys between tradition and innovation--debates on everything from etiquette and earnings to André Agassi's rejection of the customary tennis whites. Insightful, informative, wonderfully entertaining, The Right Set is as colorful and surprising as the game itself.


John McPhee on Ashe vs. Graebner
David Higdon on Venus Williams
James Thurber on Helen Wills
Martina Navratilova on Bad Losers
Martin Amis on Smashing the Rackets
and more

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Divided into nine sections ("The Great Match," "The Old Guard," etc.), The Right Set moves easily down the line through time and culturally across court from the noblesse oblige of white flannels on green lawns to the smoldering tempers of Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, and Venus Williams. In between, James Thurber volleys a smashing winner with his courtside observations of Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills; Ted Tingling waxes movingly on Bill Tilden; Grace Liechenstein celebrates Billie Jean King; and Arthur Ashe deftly takes apart his most formidable opponent--skin color--in "The Burden of Race." John McPhee's superb Levels of the Game--a book-length report on a match between the fluid Ashe and the mechanical Clark Graebner at Forest Hills--is happily excerpted twice.

If the pieces themselves range from the sparklingly witty (see Martin Amis's "Tennis Personalities," positively radioactive with observations like "Laver, Rosewall, Ashe: these were dynamic and exemplary figures; they didn't need 'personality' because they had character") to the curiously quaint (check out Wills's 1928 essay on etiquette), editor Phillips doesn't let his anthology cohere as a unit because he doesn't get in there and rally with it: first, his introduction is less sure-footed than Sampras on clay; second, he provides no context for the individual pieces or the writers who penned them. Which is too bad, because he's assembled a collection of tennis nonfiction that offers both power and touch--and an awful lot of memorable prose. --Jeff Silverman

From Library Journal

Award-winning British novelist and playwright Phillips (The Nature of Blood, LJ 1/97) has compiled a delightful and revelatory sampler of 65 pieces divided into nine sections that cumulatively underscore the inherent tension generated by tennis's staid traditions, eccentric personalities, and innovations. Some of the most eloquent and articulate voices in the literary tennis canon are represented: there are excerpts from John McPhee's classic Levels of the Game and John Feinstein's Hard Courts, Arthur Ashe's beautiful commentaries in "The Burden of Race" and "The Davis Cup," and James Thurber's review of a Lenglen-Wills match. Phillips strikes an oddly comfortable balance between historical and contemporary voices, sometimes yielding interesting surprises, as in Rich Koster's 1976 profile of "bad boy" Jimmy Connors, who speaks of getting a rush from the crowd's hostility but who in the twilight of his career came to embrace and seek out audience support and adoration. A fun read for all tennis fans.ABarry X. Miller, Austin P.L., TX
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; First Edition. pb original edition (July 27, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375706461
• ISBN-13: 978-0375706462
• Product Dimensions: 5.1 x 0.8 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,199 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Witty contemporary overview of Tennis icons, June 14, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Right Set: A Tennis Anthology (Paperback)

My wife loves for and lives for tennis. That's why, when I give her this book for her birthday in three weeks, she will have an even better insight into the soul of her well-known tennis heroes and heroines. This compilation is a bright, insightful commentary of the state to Tennis today; its nine sections involve description of virtually all facets of the game, including tradition, history, personalities, etc. I know of no other recent publication that one can read and leave with the smug satisfaction that comes with "expert-level" knowledge. You may not exactly qualilfy for being a ref at Wimbledon after reading The Right Set, but you will feel as if you could.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars If you like tennis, you'll love "The Right Set", December 19, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Right Set: A Tennis Anthology (Paperback)

"The Right Set" is the tennis equivalent of "The Best Sports Stories" annual series except that it contains 44 great pieces written in the past 75 years.
My favorites are "Ladies of the Evening" by Martina Navratilova, "Tennis Personalities" by Martin Amis, "The Davis Cup" by Arthur Ashe, "Tilden: The American Mountain" by Ted Tinling, and "Becker" by Gordon Burn.
Since virtually every great player and important issue are
covered, I suggest you read a story or two a day to extend your reading pleasure.
If you like tennis, you'll love this treasure of a book.