SPORTS
Tennis
8 books
Eight books for a sport that has produced a disproportionately rich literary and journalistic tradition relative to its audience size — partly because tennis, more than most sports, is a psychological game that rewards the kind of interior analysis that good writing requires. The list covers the game's history, its defining players across multiple eras, the specific culture of professional tennis (which is unlike any other sports culture in its global nomadism and its individual exposure), and the memoir tradition of players who have processed their relationship to the game through writing. These eight books will give any reader a genuine understanding of what makes tennis the game it is.
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Open
Andre Agassi
Agassi won eight Grand Slams, was ranked number one in the world, and hated tennis for most of his career. His father built a ball machine in the Las Vegas backyard and made him hit thousands of balls a day before he was old enough to choose otherwise. He wore a hairpiece at Wimbledon because his hair was falling out from stress. He used crystal meth in 1997 and lied to the ATP about it. He married Brooke Shields, divorced her, married Steffi Graf, and found something resembling peace in his thirties just as his body began to fail. Ghost-written by J.R. Moehringer with full access and no apparent filter, this is the most honest sports autobiography on this list and one of the best ever written. The overview entry for the non-fan — read this first and the sport will make sense in ways it didn't before.
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Short Circuit
Michael Mewshaw
Mewshaw is a novelist who spent the 1981 tennis season following the professional circuit — not Wimbledon and the US Open but the satellite tournaments in between, where the mid-ranked players grind for ranking points and prize money that barely covers travel expenses. What he found was not the gentleman's sport of its reputation: the petty corruption, the fixed matches, the players and coaches working the system at every level, and the specific dark comedy of professional athletics conducted far from the cameras. Around 274 pages and the funniest book on this list — funny the way that things are funny when they are also genuinely depressing. Published in 1983 and out of print, which makes it the deep cut simultaneously. The reader who finishes Open wanting to know what the tour looks like three hundred rankings spots below Agassi comes here.
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Broken Code
Rohan Nadkarni
Professional tennis has a match-fixing problem it has spent two decades pretending is smaller than it is. Nadkarni spent years documenting the specific mechanisms: the lower-ranked players who supplement income by losing sets to order, the betting syndicates that identified and exploited them, and the ATP's systematic failure to investigate corruption it had more than enough evidence to pursue. Published in 2024 and the most recently reported entry on this list. Note the institutional argument embedded throughout — this is a story about a governing body that prioritized the sport's reputation over the sport's integrity for long enough that the problem became structural. The uncomfortable entry. The reader who watches tennis casually will finish this book watching it differently.
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String Theory
David Foster Wallace
Wallace wrote five pieces about tennis across his career — he was a junior tournament player in Illinois before he became a novelist — and collected them here at 154 pages. The centerpiece is his 2006 New York Times essay on watching Federer play, which is the best piece of sports writing of the decade and possibly longer: an argument that watching Federer is a religious experience available to the secular, that his movement constitutes a form of beauty that has no adequate equivalent in ordinary life. The other four essays cover Wallace's own junior career, Michael Joyce on the satellite circuit, and the specific loneliness of professional tennis. Cross-seeds with the Essays & Longform Journalism list. The reader who thinks sportswriting cannot be literature has not read this book.
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You Cannot Be Serious
John McEnroe
McEnroe was defaulted from the 1990 Australian Open for telling a line judge he was the pits of the world, which is a relatively mild sample of what he was capable of on a tennis court. He was also the most gifted player of his era and possibly any era — a serve-and-volley game built on feel rather than power, a touch at the net that Borg and Connors could not replicate, and a competitive fury that expressed itself in a running argument with every official he ever encountered. McEnroe tells all of it in his own voice: the rivalry with Borg, the rivalry with Connors, the marriages, the art collection, and the specific psychology of a man who played his best tennis while apparently losing his mind. The humor entry and a primary source simultaneously. Around 304 pages and not a dull one among them.
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Levels of the Game
John McPhee
McPhee took a single 1968 US Open semifinal between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner and used it to write a dual portrait of two men and two Americas. Ashe is Black, intuitive, improvisational, playing tennis as a form of expression; Graebner is white, mechanical, systematic, playing it as a form of control. The civil rights movement runs beneath every point. McPhee alternates between the match as it unfolds and the biographies of the two men, and the construction is so precise that the tennis becomes a form of argument about what kind of country America was in 1968. Under 150 pages and the most formally elegant book on this list. The reader who picks this up for tennis will find himself reading about something considerably larger by page thirty.
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Big Bill Tilden
Frank Deford
Tilden won six consecutive US championships through the 1920s and was the most famous athlete in America for a decade — more recognizable than Babe Ruth, more celebrated than Jack Dempsey. He died in 1953 in a Los Angeles rooming house with forty dollars to his name, his belongings in a suitcase, waiting for a ride to a tournament he never reached. In between: two convictions for soliciting minors, the complete destruction of a career and a reputation, and the specific trajectory of a genius who could not manage the distance between his public greatness and his private life. Deford is one of the finest sports writers who ever worked and this is among his best books. The biography entry and the darkest life on this list.
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Strokes of Genius
L. Jon Wertheim
The 2008 Wimbledon final between Federer and Nadal lasted four hours and forty-eight minutes across five sets, was interrupted twice by rain, and ended in near-darkness. Most people who watched it consider it the greatest tennis match ever played. Wertheim, a Sports Illustrated tennis writer, spent the following year reconstructing it point by point — the tactical adjustments, the psychological shifts, and the specific physical and mental demands of sustaining that level of play for that long against that opponent. Around 224 pages and the deep dive entry on this list: one match examined with the same granular attention that Coffey brought to the Miracle on Ice and Feinstein brought to The Punch. The reader who saw the match will find things he missed. The reader who didn't will feel like he was there.