Nicholas Fox Weber

In a nutshell

The Art of Tennis is really a celebration of different qualities of tennis. It celebrates the impact tennis has had on literature, on fashion, on music, on ballet, on theater. It also celebrates the beauty of the game itself, not just when it's well played, but the capacity of the game to reveal human character. To reveal generosity, or to reveal bigotry. To reveal kindness, or the lack thereof. There is an indescribable element that makes you get absorbed looking at the player. You feel that he or she radiates something or have a super quality of aliveness. And that's always very interesting in a tennis player.

Tennis has influenced music. The composer Dmitri Shostakovich based an orchestral piece on the idea of a game of tennis being played, called The Golden Age.  Erik Satie, another wonderful composer, also based a composition on the idea of tennis titled Le Tennis. So, all that I did was find what was out there—and there are some very rich things out there—and bring them together.

Tennis also impacts fashion in various ways. For example, there was a player named Bunny Austin. Bunny Austin was a dapper Englishman—utterly charming as an individual, a world-class player—and he was also the first person to wear shorts at Wimbledon. Now… that’s an act of temerity. Why did he wear shorts? What was the public reaction to it? Why did he have the personality that made it possible for him to carry it off? Why did René Lacoste’s sense of style become so prevalent that most people still know the name Lacoste, and what it symbolizes?

Then you have Katharine Hepburn. Katharine Hepburn was one of the first people to wear a short skirt on the court. And you have some designers who turned to the idea of creating tennis clothing, and I'm talking about very significant designers. You have Oleg Cassini, who was a designer for Jackie Kennedy. He was engaged to Grace Kelly and designed for many famous movie stars. He designed whole lines of tennis clothing and had a particular feeling for the flair that the sport can demonstrate. And then you have Jean Patou—one of the great French designers. He made very chic tennis clothing in the 1920s, at the same time that Coco Chanel had ideas for tennis players.

The close-up

If a reader finds The Art of Tennis in a bookstore, I hope, first of all, that they look at the cover, and they realize that this should be fun. I think the cover is very skillfully painted in a lighthearted way. This is supposed to be just like the fun of watching a game, the fun of playing, and so on. And then I hope the person will open the book and realize that he or she is in for some surprises. This is not going to be a book about any one thing, particularly. It's going to be a book that goes all over the place—with a sense of order, of course—but not necessarily chronologically, or by theme, but rather it's meant to divert you.

For example, quite astonishingly, Caravaggio killed someone with a tennis racket. He had to leave Rome because of that. He had to flee. Caravaggio, we know, is a marvelous painter and a very colorful character. But I don't think people realize that it was in the course of a tennis game, a game of a very different sort than what is played today, but of a tennis game, that he ended up taking someone's life. And not by accident.

Lastly

I go back to this idea of pleasure. I hope that the readers will have a very good time with it. I hope that they'll be entertained. Again, I don't want to sound pretentious, but I like to think of it as an intelligent form of entertainment. I think it's beautiful that Althea Gibson was the first Black person to play in the U.S. Open at a very snobby tennis club in Forest Hills, New York. Not just the first woman, but the first Black person. And the reader, in coming to know Althea Gibson, encounters a story of human courage, not just hers. But also of the player Alice Marble, who was a well-established white female player, and who absolutely shamed the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association into changing its regulations so that Althea Gibson could play in the Open. I love moral courage. It doesn't occur all over the place, and when I encounter it, it's a great thing to write about.

Who are some of your favorite current young players in tennis?

One of the people I really love—if I'm not mistaken, she's out of high school now, but she started as a high school student—is Coco Gauff. She's a superb player, but she also emits a quality of concentration. She's all there. And by chance, maybe 3 years ago, before she was a big name - she was known, but not the name she has since become—I was in the airport in Rome, about to catch a flight to Paris. I saw her standing there with her tennis rackets in a case, and I just couldn't resist saying, "Are you on your way to Paris to play in the French Open?" And the way she answered me—you can tell certain things about people instantly. She was not self-important; she wasn't inflated in any way. She was as likable as she is determined. For me, she's an example of one of the great female players.

Among the male players, I'm all over the place. I have a particular liking for Jannik Sinner. Some people think he doesn't emit enough emotion. But there's something about him—I am like an old-fashioned New Englander, and Sinner is, like, a mountain guy. He's like a person you would meet on the ski slopes, and could have met on the ski slopes in the 1960s, and that's a familiar type to me. It's a type of character for whom I personally have great feelings. I also like Carlos Alcaraz. I love his magical ability to hit a shot that no one else in the world could hit. My god, he gets it from right behind him. But he has a different style, gets the crowd more involved. They all have different styles, and they show emotion in different ways. I have a grandson who's unusually poised for an 11-year-old. And you don't see him sad very often, and you don't realize the intensity with which he does things. But the more you know him, you do recognize that intensity. It's really there. He's got a lot of drive, which in a way is a form of emotion. He just doesn't flaunt it. And I've always thought that the person who shouts loudest isn't necessarily the most emotional person. The very quiet person can feel things very deeply. So, I can't claim to know any of these players extremely well. But the quality of intensity comes through. And intensity reflects emotional engagement.

What can you tell us about the crowds in Grand Slams?

There are very different types of crowds, depending on what country we're in. If we are in Paris, the crowd at the French Open tends to be very well-behaved. There's not a lot of shouting or heckling. But they're incredibly nationalist. And just because you're in Paris, just because you're French, doesn't really mean to me that a French player is the one you have to root for. I'm much more interested in individuals. Not in nationalism. Then you have the crowd at the U.S. Open who are not always my favorite, because they do things like applaud double-faults. If someone double-faults, it's not okay to cheer it. No one wants to double-fault. You don't even want to play against a player who's double-faulting, and that shows an edge that I just don't like very much. The crowd in Wimbledon is, as you would expect, generally quite correct and well-behaved, and it's very nice to see.

It's not only the crowd that interests me, but depending on the stadium, you have the question of the food. Naturally, the French and Italian Opens, you can have an awfully good lunch. I'm not talking about being in a fancy restaurant there, I'm just talking about getting ordinary fare. And I enjoy that. I also love strawberries and cream at Wimbledon.