When Roger Federer battled back from a second-set tiebreaker to a five-set, 76-game win over Andy Roddick in the 2009 Wimbledon gentleman’s singles final, television commentators and sportswriters broke out the superlatives to describe the match. Yet the response was tempered by the inevitable comparisons to the previous year’s championship final between Federer and the Spanish bruiser Rafael Nadal. That was the four-hour, 48-minute, double-rain-delayed battle of epic rivals that L. Jon Wertham describes in the subtitle of his book Strokes Of Genius: Federer, Nadal, And The Greatest Match Ever Played. Wertham, a Sports Illustrated columnist, breaks down the drama point by point, pausing at dramatic moments for peeks behind the Wimbledon scenery and analyses of the competitors’ backstories. It’s a revealing investigation not only into a game, but also into the place of tennis in today’s sporting landscape.
Some great books have been written in order to dissect a single sporting event in minute detail: Bob Ryan’s Forty-Eight Minutes: A Night In The Life Of The NBA and Daniel Okrent’s Nine Innings: The Anatomy Of A Baseball Game come to mind. But the model for Wertham’s volume is John McPhee’s Levels Of The Game, an account of a match between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner in the semifinals of the 1968 U.S. Open. Wertham has some advantages with his chosen subject—a tremendous rivalry, contrasting (but not caricatured) styles of play, and, of course, The Greatest Match Ever Played. And for the most part, he capitalizes on them. His digressions illuminate the oddities of the Wimbledon stage and complicate the simplistic pictures of the competitors often drawn by the media, while his main text does a credible job of describing what was so wonderful about this one match.
A few of Wertham’s choices nag, though. He seems bent on inserting himself and a few of his media friends too frequently into the narrative. The tone is sometimes distractingly informal or idiosyncratic. And it’s just difficult for anyone whose name isn’t McPhee to find ways of describing tennis shots that doesn’t become repetitive or confusing. However, the effect of Strokes Of Genius is to raise the conversation about tennis above magazine-profile hype and sports-page reportage. Wertham takes tennis seriously, and he writes about it like it matters. As he’s painting nuanced portraits of the two best players in the men’s game and breathlessly awaiting the outcome of their transcendent moment on its most hallowed stage, it’s hard not to feel smarter, more worldly, and yes—much more of a fan.