Tennis Paradise

After decades of football’s dominance, we are now experiencing a true tennis renaissance. All-white outfits are back, as are piqué polo shirts, replacing those synthetic T-shirts straight out of a village fair, with huge numbers in capital letters on the back. The Wimbledon aesthetic is back, in contrast to the clamour of the Bernabéu; you can hear children in the park talking about Alcaraz rather than Mbappé. In his latest book, "Tennis Paradise", Francesco Longo – who plays tennis himself, and who used to follow the sport on TV and at the Internazionali before this clay-court craze – helps us understand the sophistication of the sport. A sport that is a duel, a sport at the mercy of the seasons and the elements, a sport that ‘catapults you into an imaginary landscape’, but perhaps also a foretaste of paradise on earth, when we shall be resurrected in ‘indescribably beautiful bodies’, as the scriptures say. Agassi, the new Adam. ‘When I play in Rome,’ says Panatta, ‘I feel as though I’m in Paradise’. What does the peace [of a grassy rectangle] refer to, that bliss which seems to have its roots in a distant past, in the mythological age of our forefathers?’

With Longo, we follow a calendar that begins in Australia and ends in Shanghai, passing through the idyllic Miami of a very young Maria Sharapova, the dreaded Roland Garros – a venue for ceremonies – and Monte Carlo, the ‘land of the sun’, where the legendary Björn Borg plays his final tournament. “Following tennis means immersing oneself in a dimension with few references to reality and only a few allusions to the conflicts of history, to the friction at the borders between nations,” writes Longo. There is something eternal in this fluid running, in utter silence, striking a yellow ball and sending it over the net. Tennis is the anticipation of an endless summer.

In "Tennis Paradise", rather than an epic of sport – however much tennis players often resemble Homeric figures – we are presented with a blend of lyricism and cosmogony, a careful yet light-footed lens that paints for us panoramas, scenes, stories of rivalry and chance, of dreams and rituals. Tennis Paradise is not a story about tennis players, but a quest for the essence of tennis – explored through the players themselves, through the hard courts, grass and clay, and through ‘alertness, endurance, speed, courage and intelligence’, or, as the author puts it, ‘the virtues practised by today’s saints’. Longo, who is also a novelist – and this is evident here – seems to have read every important book on the sport, whilst blending anecdotes and reflections with Modian-esque childhood memories and passages from literature, ranging from Sebald to Nabokov, from Bassani to Antonioni’s films. ‘Love,’ we read in The Garden of the Finzi-Contini, ‘is a cruel, ferocious sport, far crueler and more ferocious than tennis!’ And what of the love of tennis?, we ask ourselves.

    

Francesco Longo
, "Tennis Paradise
", 66thand2nd, 168 pp., 19 euros