“When the ancient Greeks sculpted the victors of an Olympic event, the goal was to produce not the athlete itself but the perfect, idealized image of the athlete, the body in rhythmos, the discus throw imagined as god-like, eternal.” Such is the vibe of Linebarger’s eccentric, playful, and stubbornly experimental collection of odes to the gods of tennis and to the game itself. A humanities professor whose work includes poetry and chapbooks, Linebarger has produced a most unusual sports book, with over 70 short tributes to all-stars and more obscure champions alike. Each is paired with a painting, drawing, or photo from an array of artists, and all of them together argue for a highfalutin approach to a sport that already appeals particularly, if not exclusively, to aesthetes.Tennis Players as Works of Art is also a tribute, of sorts, to Linebarger himself, who uses each oft-succinct paean as an excuse to exhibit the breadth of his talent—or at least his ambition. Each entry boasts a fresh approach. Sometimes Linebarger contextualizes a player in history, writing of Serena Williams that she “wields her racquet like Muhammad Ali his mouth and fists, Charlie Parker his lightning sax.” Other times, Linebarger simply admires the way they move or their features, as when he gushes about Leslie Turner’s beautiful “hand sculptures” or Vitas Gerulaitis’ messy mass of “lion locks.”
Perhaps inevitably, Linebarger can overdose on poetic waxing, as when he describes Suzanne Lenglen’s every tennis stroke as a “musician’s glissando or dancer’s glissade guided and placed as if on a handkerchief on her opponent’s side of the court.” But at its best, his compendium invites the reader to think of tennis as all-encompassing, finding creative connections across the arts and beyond. Who else, when writing about a sport that’s produced John McEnroe and Roger Federer, might rope in postmodernist writer Donald Barthelme or abstract painters Wassily Kandinsky and Mark Rothko? This is for the select audience whose hearts are lifted at a chapter title like “Rafael Nadal and the Lascaux Cave Paintings.”
Takeaway: Madly ambitious, stubbornly experimental ode to the gods of tennis.
Comparable Titles: Jay Jennings’s Tennis and the Meaning of Life, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric.
Production grades
Cover: B+
Design and typography: A-
Illustrations: A-
Editing: A-
Marketing copy: A-
