The Circuit A Tennis Odyssey Author:Rowan Ricardo Phillips ?The Circuit is the best sports book I've read in years, maybe ever.? ?Rich Cohen, author of The Chicago Cubs and Monsters — ?As sports writing goes, The Circuit is unusual in the very best way. Rowan Ricardo Phillips writes with such fluidity, and packs the book with bursts of brilliance. This is a compulsively readable guide to one truly Homeri... more »c year of professional tennis.? ?John Green, author of The Fault in Our Stars
An energetic, lyrical, genre-defying account of the 2017 tennis season.In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet?and Paris Review sports columnist?Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it?s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams. Phillips charts the year from winter?s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall?s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.
The Circuit will convince you that you don?t leave the world behind as you watch tennis?you bring it with you.« less