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Levels of the Game
by
John McPhee
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.
Paperback, 152 pages
Published
November 1st 1979
by Farrar, Straus and Giroux
(first published 1970)
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Jessica says my reviews are too snooty; I assume this is because my reviews are comparative based - so many allusions to David Markson, or other books I've read.
But I challenge you to meaningfully review books in a non-comparative manner. I can talk about a book's pacing, and tone, and vocabulary, and meaning, and entertainment - but what are the scales for those? What qualitative and quantitative words would lend any meaning to my attempts to elucidate those factors for someone el...more
But I challenge you to meaningfully review books in a non-comparative manner. I can talk about a book's pacing, and tone, and vocabulary, and meaning, and entertainment - but what are the scales for those? What qualitative and quantitative words would lend any meaning to my attempts to elucidate those factors for someone el...more
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This is certainly the most unusual sports books I've ever read. The framework is that the entire book is a play-by-play of a single tennis game in 1968 between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. Interspersed throughout are digressions into both players' personalities, backgrounds, and politics. As per usual for McPhee I did learn a lot of random trivia (Arthur Ashe was a lieutenant in the army!) Language about race was off-putting 40 years later (it was written in 1969) although I know it was ac...more
It was eye opening to read this account of Championship level tennis from just over 40 years ago. Ashe and Graebner were two of the top players in the world and they both had day jobs because tennis was still an "amateur" sport.
Graebner has been lost to history but it was interesting to get his insights about hoping to be a millionaire by his early 40's, of course if he had come along thirty years later he would have been a millionaire many times over for his tennis abil...more
Graebner has been lost to history but it was interesting to get his insights about hoping to be a millionaire by his early 40's, of course if he had come along thirty years later he would have been a millionaire many times over for his tennis abil...more
What a delightful little book about tennis. If you enjoy the sport at all, it's definitely worth your while to pick up this quick read. The pacing could have gone awry with all the back and forth between play-by-play and personal histories of Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, but it actually worked and worked well.
It's interesting to think about 'tennis purists' of the time thinking Ashe & Graebner's power games were ruining the sport for the future. If only they could have seen Roddic...more
It's interesting to think about 'tennis purists' of the time thinking Ashe & Graebner's power games were ruining the sport for the future. If only they could have seen Roddic...more
In 1968, the U.S. Open Championship was first opened to amateur players. They weren't expected to do very well against the players on the pro tour, but both Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner made it to the semifinals. This is the story of that game. McPhee starts right off with the first serve, moving cinematically for a close shot of several points, then backing out to focus on the perspective of someone in the player's box or watching the match on television, or maybe taking a panoramic shot of t...more
John McPhee is a truly gifted writer. He can make anything interesting, and, while there are some clear consistencies in his style, I like the way he addresses different subjects in different ways in his books. Levels of the Game is basically two mini-biographies of tennis players Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, set against the backdrop of their US Open semifinal in 1968. But the match, rather than being just the context, is interwoven into the biographies. So in covering the two men's history, ...more
McPhee puts us courtside, watching the ball go by and feeling in our guts the ebbs and flows of the match. Each points pulls a connecting thread that leads us to know a lot about the players -- Ashe, the (today) underrated star, Graebner the forgotten WASP -- and how American society worked at the time. Saying the latter played tennis like a Republican somehow gives me a clearer image of his game than any YouTube footage could, and yet you understand very well where he comes from and why he sees...more
This early John McPhee book works on many levels, as an account of a match between two young tennis stars, Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner; as profiles of each man at the start of their careers; as an examination of race and sport in America at the end of the 1960s. I wish there were less tennis jargon in the accounts of the match between Ashe and Graebner but that's a quibble. I was surprised by how meaningful this book still is.
John McPhee's writing is so precise, so eloquent and so brilliant it takes my breath away. In this short work, he details the semi-final tennis match at the US Open in Forest Hills, NY played by Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in 1968. In addition to narrating the match almost stroke by stroke, he examines each player's background, and the impact that it has on their tennis games.
It's 40 years old - anyway the tennis match is that McPhee describes play-by-play in a breathtaking way, filling in with bits of the players' lives and thoughts. Everyone knows about Arthur Ashe, but I'd never heard of Graebner, his opponent. I don't know much about tennis but I would think that those who do would enjoy this book even more than I did. Fantastic read!
McPhee uses a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner as the anchor of his descriptions of the two men, their personalities, tennis games, different paths to the match itself, and to a small degree the game of tennis. A nice snapshot of Ashe, and the state of tennis at the sport at the time, before his stardom and meaning in American culture is fully realized...
John McPhee is one of my favorite writers. Other favorites of McPhee: A Sense of Where You Are (Basketball's Bill Bradley), Encounters with the Archdruid (inside the argument for use, conservation and preservation).
if you are a tennis fan....
all the legends are discussed: ashe, laver, pancho gonzalez...a step back into time.
also, touched by the camraderie in the game of tennis where its every man for himself.
all the legends are discussed: ashe, laver, pancho gonzalez...a step back into time.
also, touched by the camraderie in the game of tennis where its every man for himself.
Also recommended by Sports Illustrated's Jon Wertheim as an all-time top tennis book. And so I've got to add it.
Snail in Danger (Sid) Nicolaides
marked it as maybe-read-sometime
Recommends it for:
tennis fans, especially those interested in the history of U.S. tennis
Shelves:
sports
Another book referenced in A Terrible Splendor. This didn't seem to have as much scope as that book.
A very different world and tennis world in 1968 that McPhee very effectively brings to life.
i love dorky john mcphee.
Reading a review of a John McPhee book means that you are wasting valuable time that could be spent actually reading a John McPhee book. One of his better early books, "Levels" is, first and foremost, a book about a tennis match. Then you realize that, first and foremost, it's a book about race in America. What's remarkable is that these two competing centers exist at the same time, in the same space, and are, in fact, the same conversation.
Matt Buchholz
rated it
Recommends it for:
David Foster Wallace fans
Recommended to Matt by:
Nate Dore
Shelves:
book-club
A concise, intricately paced piece of creative non-fiction that makes a compelling argument for the view of sports, or at least tennis, as intellectual endeavors. Makes a boy curious about all those "America's Best Sports Writing" anthologies that seemed like a joke before.
A double character study, in which the net betwixt opposing tennis players is both literal and metaphorical. Arthur Ashe was an uncomplicated figure in my eyes before I read this book. The other guy, I can't remember him at all.
"Ashe leads four games to one, fourth set. His game is so big now that it is beyond containment. There is something about it that suggests a very large aircraft beginning its descent for Kennedy."
I don't even like to watch tennis but I love this book about it.
Levels of the Game by John McPhee (1979)
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John McPhee was born in Princeton, New Jersey, and was educated at Princeton University and Cambridge University. His writing career began at Time magazine and led to his long association with the New Yorker, where he has been a staff writer since 1965. The same year he published his first book, A Sense of Where You Are, with FSG, and soon followed with The Headmaster (1966), Oranges (1967), The P...more
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