A friend asks if I don’t feel even the slightest impulse, when it’s personal with an opponent, to drop the racket and go for his throat. When it’s a grudge match, when there’s bad blood, wouldn’t I rather settle it with a few rounds of old-fashioned boxing? I tell my friend that tennis is boxing. Every tennis player, sooner or later, compares himself to a boxer, because tennis is noncontact pugilism. It’s violent, mano a mano, and the choice is as brutally simple as it is in any ring. Kill or be killed. Beat or take your beat-down. Tennis beatings are just deeper below the skin. They remind me
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