Short Circuit
(1983)Six Months on the Men's Professional Tennis Tour
A non fiction book by Michael Mewshaw
Reviews:
[Mewshaw's] outsider view and novelist's touch make this one of the best books ever written about tennis. - The New York Times
By turns, Michael Mewshaw's Short Circuit is a hilarious, naive, incisive, stylish book that deserves being summed up in a single word: important. Anyone with a stake or merely an interest in tennis should read it.
[As] a look at the fun, games and personalities on the tour Short Circuit is a neat, readable travelogue, studded with trenchant observations and a novelist's insights. There are finely tuned, biting vignettes [and] dozens of sharp sketches of prominent pros that benefit hugely from Mewshaw's fresh eye. He has, furthermore, played and studied the game long enough so that his descriptions of matches that interest him at each tour stop are first-rate journalism. - Sports Illustrated
Michael Mewshaw's book Short Circuit is the most hilarious, most intimate and most shocking book ever written about a professional sport. It is one of those rare books which adds eminence and style to the literature of the sport. Short Circuit is a love song to the game of tennis and an indictment of the men who play it. - Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides
Description:
Short Circuit is a riveting account of life on the professional tennis tour in the golden age of the early 1980's; a book that combines first-rate sports writing with explosive investigative reporting that rocked the game to its foundations when it was first published in 1983. This version is now updated with a new introduction and afterword which illustrate the full scope and repercussions of Mewshaw's discoveries, shedding new light on recent gambling and doping scandals in the sport.
Michael Mewshaw set off to follow the men's professional tennis tour, planning to bask in the sun and watch the world's best practitioners of a sport he deeply loved. He intended to study the clean, uncluttered geometry of the game, the clarity of wins and losses. He found some of that: the gritty play of Jimmy Connors, working his way back to the top; the emergence of the explosive Ivan Lendl as a world-class player; the frustrations of the lavishly talented John McEnroe.
But Mewshaw found, as well, that the tour was shadowed by a sideshow of girls and drugs, and dominated by never before revealed financial arrangements. He found fixed matches and gambling; he learned of illegal, under-the-table money regularly paid by tournament directors to superstars. He discovered conflicts of interest involving umpires that would cause scandal in any other sport. He unearthed a pattern of activity - much of it involving the most famous, talented, and wealthy athletes on the tour - that led one important tennis figure to confess "Tennis was born in dishonesty and has never grown out of it." Ultimately, Mewshaw also discovered that officials charged with policing the game, when faced with evidence of unsavory or illegal conduct, were more than willing to ignore it.
This remarkable story, exciting, sardonic, shocking, was one of the first in-depth examinations of the professional tennis world, and still holds the power to amaze. After reading it, you may never be able to watch a tennis match the same way again.
Michael Mewshaw is the author of eleven critically acclaimed novels and more than half a dozen books of nonfiction. He as won a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts for his fiction, and has received various prizes for his investigative journalism, travel writing, and tennis coverage. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Playboy, Los Angeles Times, and in other magazines and newspapers throughout the world. He is married and lives in Key West and Europe.
[Mewshaw's] outsider view and novelist's touch make this one of the best books ever written about tennis. - The New York Times
By turns, Michael Mewshaw's Short Circuit is a hilarious, naive, incisive, stylish book that deserves being summed up in a single word: important. Anyone with a stake or merely an interest in tennis should read it.
[As] a look at the fun, games and personalities on the tour Short Circuit is a neat, readable travelogue, studded with trenchant observations and a novelist's insights. There are finely tuned, biting vignettes [and] dozens of sharp sketches of prominent pros that benefit hugely from Mewshaw's fresh eye. He has, furthermore, played and studied the game long enough so that his descriptions of matches that interest him at each tour stop are first-rate journalism. - Sports Illustrated
Michael Mewshaw's book Short Circuit is the most hilarious, most intimate and most shocking book ever written about a professional sport. It is one of those rare books which adds eminence and style to the literature of the sport. Short Circuit is a love song to the game of tennis and an indictment of the men who play it. - Pat Conroy, author of The Prince of Tides
Description:
Short Circuit is a riveting account of life on the professional tennis tour in the golden age of the early 1980's; a book that combines first-rate sports writing with explosive investigative reporting that rocked the game to its foundations when it was first published in 1983. This version is now updated with a new introduction and afterword which illustrate the full scope and repercussions of Mewshaw's discoveries, shedding new light on recent gambling and doping scandals in the sport.
Michael Mewshaw set off to follow the men's professional tennis tour, planning to bask in the sun and watch the world's best practitioners of a sport he deeply loved. He intended to study the clean, uncluttered geometry of the game, the clarity of wins and losses. He found some of that: the gritty play of Jimmy Connors, working his way back to the top; the emergence of the explosive Ivan Lendl as a world-class player; the frustrations of the lavishly talented John McEnroe.
But Mewshaw found, as well, that the tour was shadowed by a sideshow of girls and drugs, and dominated by never before revealed financial arrangements. He found fixed matches and gambling; he learned of illegal, under-the-table money regularly paid by tournament directors to superstars. He discovered conflicts of interest involving umpires that would cause scandal in any other sport. He unearthed a pattern of activity - much of it involving the most famous, talented, and wealthy athletes on the tour - that led one important tennis figure to confess "Tennis was born in dishonesty and has never grown out of it." Ultimately, Mewshaw also discovered that officials charged with policing the game, when faced with evidence of unsavory or illegal conduct, were more than willing to ignore it.
This remarkable story, exciting, sardonic, shocking, was one of the first in-depth examinations of the professional tennis world, and still holds the power to amaze. After reading it, you may never be able to watch a tennis match the same way again.
Michael Mewshaw is the author of eleven critically acclaimed novels and more than half a dozen books of nonfiction. He as won a Fulbright, a Guggenheim, and an award from the National Endowment for the Arts for his fiction, and has received various prizes for his investigative journalism, travel writing, and tennis coverage. His articles and reviews have appeared in The New York Times, the Washington Post, Playboy, Los Angeles Times, and in other magazines and newspapers throughout the world. He is married and lives in Key West and Europe.
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