The Circuit
A Tennis Odyssey
Published on 1. January 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
256 pages
978-1-250-23492-6 (ISBN)
Description
In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet - and Paris Review sports columnist - Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it's divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.
Phillips charts the year from winter's Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall's U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.
The Circuit will convince you that you don't leave the world behind as you watch tennis - you bring it with you.
Phillips charts the year from winter's Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall's U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.
The Circuit will convince you that you don't leave the world behind as you watch tennis - you bring it with you.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
New York
United States
Publishing group
St Martin's Press
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Unsewn / adhesive bound
Illustrations
Includes 16 tables and 24 black-and-white illustrations throughout
Dimensions
Height: 208 mm
Width: 136 mm
Thickness: 22 mm
Weight
214 gr
ISBN-13
978-1-250-23492-6 (9781250234926)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Person
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven and The Ground. He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, the PEN/Joyce Osterweil Award, and the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and of a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City.
Content
CONTENTS
PREFACE xi
A BRIEF NOTE ON SCORING xiii
A GLOSSARY OF TENNIS TERMS xvii
Ready . . . Play 1
Part One: Winter 13
Part Two: Spring 99
Part Three: Summer 143
Part Four: Fall 161