Books about life on Tour

[TennisHack]

banshee said:

thanks for putting these here, Hackie. I will read all of them when i have time. I enjoyed that Rostagno in Mexico story. Marc Rosset had a similar experience in NY.

That story is spine-tingling! It's so weird to think about someone escaping death on a whim like that.

I remember 9/11 happened right after the USO. Also a creepy thought for tennis fans!

[Stefan Koubek Fashion Guru]

admin said:

*sigh* The way things were...and the reason GWH doesn't like the book so much?

Pg 167

When you think of clay, you think of marathon matches on slow surfaces, players standing behind the baseline, trying to outlast their opponents in long, long rallies; players such as Guillermo Vilas and Manuel Orantes and Ivan Lendl and Mats Wilander and even a couple of Americans who made their mark in the seventies – Harold Solomon and Eddie Dibbs. Michael Chang ended a thirty-four-year drought for American men at Roland Garros in 1989. However, Bjorn Borg, playing a classic clay-court game, won Wimbledon five times. His fellow Swede and Wimbledon champ, Stefan Edberg, also has a classic serve-and-volley game rather than the more European style.

Clay is still the dominant surface on the men’s circuit. There are more tournaments played on clay than on anything else. After the French Open is over, the clay-court circuit grinds on in Europe and South America throughout the summer. Many players never play on any surface but clay. Kent Carlsson, a Swede who may have been involved in more horrendously dull matches than any player in history, actually reached the Top Ten while almost never stepping off the clay.

Yes, considering this is poor journalism and he didn't make mention of the fact that cause of 5 knee operations that he wasn't able to play off the clay, not that what he wanted to, but the choice was made.

[Stefan Koubek Fashion Guru]

admin said:

Here's what Feinstein said about the other prominent Swedes:

Pg 20

Lendl stirred no emotions at all. Neither did Stefan Edberg, the fluid Swede who won back-to-back Australian Opens and then won Wimbledon in 1988. Edberg was the Swedish stereotype personified: totally blond and totally bland, a person who went out of his way to be more boring than he actually was, because he craved his privacy. Mats Wilander, the other brilliant Swede of the post-Bjorn Borg era, was a bright, interesting man, one of the few players whose intellect McEnroe respected. But his game was deadly, especially on clay, where his strategy most often was to bore his opponents to death. Everyone in tennis respected Wilander, but no crowd outside of Sweden was ever moved by his play....

...suddenly the three players dominating the major tournaments were Lendl, Wilander, and Edberg. In 1987, Lendl and Wilander met in both the French and the US Open finals in matches that, if seen in the right places, could have ended insomnia forever.

Only thing he got right there was about Edberg. Wilander was very popular in Australia and Pernfors among others was a bright personality.