|
Editorial Review Product Description
This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides a brilliant, stroke-by-stroke description while examining the backgrounds and attitudes which have molded the players' games.
... Read more Customer Reviews (11) 
Thumbs Up!
If you love to follow tennis, love modern history, and have a particular interest in the civil rights era this is an interesting read.It's a short book, very quick read, and I found it relevant even in 2010 as a 30 something reader who was too young to follow these players n their prime.
Dated but groundbreaking
In Levels of the Game, John McPhee once again creates narrative structure out of his subject matter, in this case, a tennis match. The book is ostensibly about a single game of tennis played by Arthur Ashe, the first great black tennis player and one of the best tennis players of all time, and Clark Graebner, a white tennis player who was Ashe's rival for many years on the amateur circuit.
McPhee develops the two men as the opposite of each other: liberal v conservative, black v white, calm v emotional. And the narrative takes this another step. Just as the tennis ball bounces back and forth in a match, so does McPhee bounce back and forth between his two subjects, Ashe and Graebner, race and tennis. McPhee wants to draw a parallel between a person's background and their tennis-playing style, and for the most part, he succeeds.
As any reader of nonfiction knows, John McPhee writes perfect sentences, does unparalleled research, and crafts his books like a master carpenter. Levels of the Game has all these typical McPhee traits, is easy to read, and full of insight. On the other hand, by todays standards, the book is awkward. The shifts back and forth from Ashe to Grabner, from past to present, become jarring over time, and some of McPhee's sentences are unusually stiff and formal, almost academic.
Levels of the Game is a book about sports the way that Friday Night Lights Friday Night Lightsis a book about sports. It uses the game as a window into something else, an attempt to describe two very different men, and all that they represent in America in 1968.
Levels of the Game
Excellent portrayal of the interior game of tennis. Also, it's a fascinating and important story of the struggle of the African American player coming up through the culture of tennis in America.
The Match Wasn't Over
Written for the New Yorker magazine in 1969, this 150 page sports 'classic' has all the punch-and-jab terseness that makes John McPhee's writing both immediate and immediately recognizable. It's fun to read, no question. And it has a way of implying that more is at stake than the ostensible subject of investigation, although McPhee is often artfully cagey about declaring what that "more" might be.
"Levels of the Game" is constructed around a point-by-point account of a single tennis match played in 1968 by Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, an African-American and a German-American who were the soul of the championship American Davis Cup team, playing both as singles and as doubles partners. Ashe and Graebner were as much friends as fiercely competitive rivals can ever be, despite their markedly different personalities and world-views. Graebner, the 'spoiled' scion of a conservative Christian dentist, plays stiff and predictable power tennis, "Republican tennis" as it were. Ashe, also a 'privileged child' despite his color and father's illiteracy, is "bold, loose, liberal, flat-out Democratic." Several critics have made McPhee's point more explicitly than McPhee would ever do: "You are the way you play."
Like the volleys of an exciting match, the profiles of Ashe and Graebner - their childhoods, their fathers, their training in life and tennis, their quirks and virtues - are lobbed back and forth between the points of the game, from Ashe's first serve to Ashe's last winning stroke. McPhee is crafty; he depicts both men with implicit admiration and maintains as judicious an air of impartiality as an nominee for the Supreme Court under hostile questioning. But there's little doubt about whom he assumes HIS readers will root for, and his tone shows it. Ashe's victory - Ashe's whole career - was a triumph of Civil Rights in America over the forces of stand-pat hold-on-to-your own conservatism. Anyone who doesn't cheer when Ashe scores a point in this match has totally missed the point.
When McPhee wrote this book, in 1969, it must have seemed that the societal match which it symbolized was almost over, almost won. Racism had 'charged the net' in the South of Wallace and Faubus, and the ball had been lobbed out of reach. Watching the ads on TV today, couple-watching on the streets of American cities, noting the approval ratings of the First Couple in the White House, one could indeed say that Ashe's victory was prophetic of America's racial Redemption. "Game, set, match to Lieutenant Ashe," McPhee wrote; "When the stroke is finished, he is standing on his toes, his arms flung open, wide, and high."
However, if we take this historic match as an analogy for the cultural match-up between conservatism and liberalism, McPhee's success as an oracle is less clear. In 1969 perhaps, the egalitarian ideals of the New Deal and the Great Society might have seemed pervasive and permanent. The 'loose' liberalism expressed in Ashe's tennis was the preferred style of American youth, and the tight hind-end game played by Graebner didn't stand a chance.
Ahh, that was before the Culture Wars, before the 'Southern Strategy', before Reaganism and Ollie North, before egalitarian idealism got lost in the Bushes. What McPhee didn't foresee was that Clark Graebner's 'Republican tennis' could claw and scratch, rage and pout, and make a comeback. After all, they play how they are.
Not just the best tennis book. A great book. Period.
"Levels of the Game" is, on the surface, an account of a single match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in the semifinals at the U.S. Open in Forest Hills. But as the title suggests, a game --- any game, at any degree of competition --- is not just about competence. How you play is a revelation of character; how you play is who you are.
It's on all the other levels that this is a great book --- one of the greatest you may ever read, period. First, because of the subject. Arthur Ashe was not the Jackie Robinson of tennis; when he emerged in the 1960s, he was the only African-American player of note in America. Clark Graebner was a dentist's son and a ringer for Clark Kent. As it happened, Ashe and Graebner were both best-of-breed. It's not inaccurate to say that they were friends. But you can't miss the notion that they are also archetypes: privileged white kid from Ohio vs. against-all-odds black kid from Virginia.
In a mere 146 pages, John McPhee --- you know his byline from a zillion profiles in The New Yorker, many of them mesmerizing, some beyond dull, but all meticulously reported and more carved than written --- has pulled off a literary coup. He has written an account of the match that's thrilling sports reporting. After, he clearly interviewed Ashe and Graebner at length, for he recreates what they were thinking and feeling at every key point in the match. And then he goes still deeper, talking to parents and wives, coaches and mentors, so he can deliver acute biographies of each player and a revelatory portrait of a sport --- and a nation --- in transition.
A mediocre writer would construct this book with long passages in italics. Or chapters that pull us out of the match and take us back to Virginia or Ohio. Well, you don't write a book called "Levels of the Game" without being aware of the levels of your craft --- and knowing that, when you settle yourself at the keyboard, you can play at a championship level.
Which is not to say that the book reads like "great writing". Just the opposite. It reads like great storytelling. There are no flights of language. It's just great reporting. And then, for a paragraph or a page, the telling of a story that takes place far from Forest Hills that helps to explain why Ashe or Graebner are playing a certain way or having certain thoughts about their match.
The biographical, historical and psychological passages are surprising. And thrilling --- you will be amazed at what Ashe had to overcome, and who helped, and how it worked out. And the same for Graebner, though, of course, the challenges are considerably smaller. But what's most exhilarating is when the strands merge, and you're both in the match and inside the players' heads. Like this:
Now the thought crosses Graebner's mind that Ashe has not missed a service return in this game. The thought unnerves him a little. He hits a big one four feet too deep, then bloops his second serve with terrible placement right into the center of the service court. He now becomes the mouse, Ashe the cat. With soft, perfectly placed shots, Ashe jerks him around the forecourt, then closes off the point with a shot to remember. It is a forehand, with top spin, sent cross court so lightly that the ball appears to be flung rather than hit. Its angle to the net is less than ten degrees --- a difficult brilliant stroke, and Ashe hit it with such nonchalance that he appeared to be thinking of something else. Graebner feels the implications of this. Ashe is now obviously loose. Loose equals dangerous. When a player is loose, he serves and volleys at his best level. His general shotmaking ability is optimum. He will try anything. 'Look at the way he hit that ball, gave it the casual play,' Graebner says to himself. 'Instead of trying a silly shot and missing it, he tries the silly shot and makes it.'
Notice what's missing: the construction "he thought". McPhee has no need to step back from the moment and use that writerly qualification. He knows what Graebner thinks --- he's writing from authority. And so every word can drive the narrative forward. The writing has the power and velocity of the game it describes.
Everyone who likes tennis even a little will savor and learn from this book. But even more, anyone who likes good writing --- or aspires to write well --- should clutch "Levels of the Game" like a lifeline. The way you learn to write, after all, is to read great writing and imitate it until you break through to a style of your own. If that's your game, start here.
... Read more |
