Just in time for Wimbledon (June 29 through July 12), teNeues offers “The Stylish Life: Tennis,” a new coffee table book that ranges over the art, fashion and personalities of the modern game that began in the late 19th century. It’s a book that had me at the back cover.
The photograph (also reproduced opposite the Table of Contents) depicts the green tennis courts of Italy’s Il San Pietro di Positano resort spilling onto the jagged, pristine blue Amalfi Coast. That photograph and the reproduction of a Roger Broders poster circa 1930, with its clay courts tumbling onto a periwinkle Mediterranean Sea in Monte Carlo, are precisely what I imagined in “Water Music,” my debut novel, when my athlete-heroes vacation on the island of Mykonos.
These two images – along with Franklin McMahon’s fabulous red and green painting of tennis courts at the Hotel Del Coronado in California and a still from Alfred Hitchcock’s “Strangers on a Train,” featuring Farley Granger in action – also capture much of what we love about tennis, its elegance and the possibility of escape.
And that’s before we even get to the people. There’s Rod Laver – the greatest tennis player I ever saw – walking under an arch of tennis rackets with his bride on their wedding day; Sloane Stephens returning Flavia Pennetta’s serve, her tawny muscles gleaming through her scooped-back top; hirsute gladiators Björn Borg and John McEnroe, posing grim-faced and pensive respectively at the net before facing off in the 1981 Wimbledon final.
Today’s players are both well-represented and not. How come no Andy Murray? Not stylish enough?
There’s a photograph of Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic on the way to the Monte Carlo Casino in 2008 that I misremembered when I described it in another post on Rafanole, their rivalry. This photo, taken three years before Nole overtook Rafa for the No. 1 ranking, catches what makes them such complements. Rafa, the more muscular of the two, seems lost in thought. Nole, more sinewy, looks off as if glimpsing something we can’t see. Their arms touch at the elbows. They seem less like guys on a prom date than male models.
Maybe Nole is glancing at the photo opposite them. It shows the other vertice in the “trivalry” – Roger Federer – with Vogue editor Anna Wintour at the 270th anniversary celebration for Moët & Chandon Champagne, a Fed sponsor, on Aug. 20, 2013. Feddy looks at the camera – smiling, oblivious, every inch the self-contained supernova – while Wintour gazes adoringly at him. It’s a photo that’s at once character-revealing and a little sad.
It’s also a reminder that tennis has always been a game of the haves and have-mores.
As well the haves and have-nots.