BEST BOOKS ON... TENNIS

A SURPRISING number of my friends have, in midlife, become enthusiastic tennis players.

Soon we will go on an eight-family holiday. Amid the daily round of negotiations over activities, I look forward to a mid-morning moment when, over coffee, a male-dominated cluster will discuss when they might fit in a game.

I will be on the sidelines, or perhaps seeking out an eightyear-old to smash at Boggle — it’s important to play to your strengths and tennis is not one of mine. Though of course, like any sentient person, I love Wimbledon.

‘As to tennis, I thought to myself — yeah, I can play that stuff,’ declares John Self in Martin Amis’s Money. ‘A mere four or five summers back you could have seen me out there...I haven’t played since, but I’ve watched an awful lot of tennis on television.’

What follows is a virtuoso description of ignominy as the desperately unfit Self turns up for a presumed knockabout with film producer Fielding Goodney, only to find he’s playing at Manhattan’s swankiest club, surrounded by major players. ‘I should have realised that when English people say they can play tennis they don’t mean what Americans mean when they say they can play tennis. Even in my prime I was never more than an all-weather park player.’ What some Americans mean when they say they are playing tennis is central to John Updike’s (still) bracingly sexually frank 1968 novel, Couples. Its action revolves around a promiscuous social set in suburban Massachusetts, the games they play on and off court — and to what cost.

The heroine of Jilly Cooper’s Imogen also gets deuced. Tennis ace Nicky Beresford sweeps the naïve librarian off her feet.

He claims to have been so distracted by her in the crowd, that it threw his game. On a group holiday in the South of France, however, Imogen is sidelined. Rest assured, though, this ends with love for all the right players.

In life, as in tennis, be a player, not someone who is played.