Balls And Brats

By John Skow

HARD COURTS by John Feinstein; Villard; 457 pages; $22.50

Baseball isn't really for strong, quick fellows who can bat .296; it is for skinny nonathletes who can memorize earned-run averages. Football is for Republicans. But what character flaw is fed by watching tennis six hours a day for two weeks when the French Open, Wimbledon or the U.S. Open is on the tube?

That's the sort of question a certified tennis nut asks himself halfway through Hard Courts, John Feinstein's long and relentless examination of the men's and women's pro-tennis tours. If the game's mood is as brackish and the players are as egomaniacal as this guy says, what am I doing here? It's a grouchy, spoilsport question, whose answer probably is that tennis watching is for those of us who always wanted to throw our oatmeal on the floor when we were little but were afraid the referee would default us.

Yes, the tennis pros of both sexes are petulant, greedy children. Yes, their agents, management execs, tournament directors and manufacturers' reps have the fresh, openhearted appeal of plant lice. No doubt Andre Agassi's extensive entourage is as pompous and absurd as Feinstein says, and somehow it is not startling to hear that the parents of young French Open winner Michael Chang are widely unloved. But there's more to world-class tennis than posturers and connivers, and Feinstein, who covered tennis for the recently defunct sports daily, the National, misses the the joy of the game almost completely.

He does not seem to feel the marvelous rightness when two players extend each other beyond the edge of what is possible. He does not report the gritty $ stretches when character rules the game's flow and the flow ruthlessly illuminates character. Bud Collins gave us such narration in his wonderfully lighthearted 1989 memoir, My Life with the Pros, and John McPhee wrote the classic tennis portraits (of Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe) in Levels of the Game. Feinstein had the opportunity to write a book that would stand with these, but he is flat where he should be funny, and unevocative where he should sketch scenes.

Tennis players are on intensive view for longer periods than any other athletes, which is why they hide their heads under towels at changeovers. But Feinstein does not give us that view. He does not show Lendl or Becker or Navratilova moving on a court. A single exception illustrates what is missing. Jimmy Connors, Feinstein says, was playing singles in the early stages of a tournament, and another match was under way on the adjoining court. Connors went wide for a ball, slugged a winner, was carried into the next court by his momentum, saw a ball from the other match coming at him, and hit that for a winner too. That's Connors, the scrappy genius, twice as competitive as anyone else. But if you want to know why John McEnroe and Steffi Graf matter, and not just how spoiled and rich they are, you won't learn it here.