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 wide angle

I take an immense amount of pleasure in writing. This may sound trite, but life is full of hardship—God only knows that. And life is full of a lot of bad things. I find that I've been blessed with an ability to feel pleasure rather intensely when I write. When I wrote about the artist Mondrian, I wanted to enhance the reader's pleasure in looking at a Mondrian painting—enhance it by following the forms, or by understanding the history of the artist and the painting. When I write about tennis, I want you to have an amusing experience as a reader. I don't want you to be bored. I want you to be in there imagining some of the colorful human exchanges that take place. I want you to imagine some of the amazing physical feats that take place. So, the wide angle is—and I hope the word doesn't seem pretentious—but I think of myself as a celebrant. That's what I want to be.

I'm very close to my grandsons. And I know that, realistically, there'll be a time when I'm not around, so I hope that when they read what I've written in years to come, they'll enjoy … 'oh, there's Baba's sense of joy in things', and they'll understand it a little bit and have some smiles out of it.