Tennis has never been played better than it is today. To watch Rafael Nadal spin a forehand at 4000 rpm, Maria Sharapova arabesque out of a serve, Serena Williams utterly destroy a short ball, or Roger Federer touch a volley into an impossibly angled winner is to watch not only the best players with the best coaching hitting with the best racquets, it is to watch the culmination of an entire history. Love Game is different from most tennis books—it isn’t a ghostwritten biography, and it won’t teach you how to slice your serve. It’s a book about tennis’s grand culture, one that unveils the sport’s long history as it lives and breathes (or grunts) in the modern game.             No one is better equipped to tell this story than novelist and historian Elizabeth Wilson. With a penchant for tennis’s inherent drama, she finds its core: a psychological face off between flamboyant personalities navigating the ebbs and flows of fortune in the confines of a 78 x 36–foot box—whether of clay, grass, or DecoTurf. Walking the finely kempt lawns of Victorian England, she shows how tennis’s early role as a social pastime that included both men and women—and thus, lots of sexual tension—set it apart from most other sports and their dominant masculine appeal. Even today, when power and endurance are more important than ever, tennis still demands that the body behave gracefully and with finesse. In this way, Wilson shows, tennis has retained the vibrant spectacle of human drama and beauty that have always made it special, not just to sports fans but to popular culture.             Telling the stories of all the greats, from the Renshaw brothers to Novak Djokovic, and of all the advances, from wooden racquets to network television schedules, Wilson offers a tennis book like no other, keeping the court square in our sights as history is illuminated around it.     “Weaves a wandering, eccentric path through the century and a half since modern tennis’s founding as a boxed game called Sphairistike. . . . Wilson drop-shots mini-essays on broader intellectual topics.” ― New York Times “A richly textured history distilled through an illuminating private passion.” ― Literary Review “A sporting history unlike any I've read—one that, in its sophistication and thoughtfulness, shows up the hollowness of most other accounts.” ― Observer “A love-all letter to the beautiful, sweaty, glorious, grunting game.” ― Saga “Ms. Wilson’s is an original and provocative mind at work.” -- Jane Leavy ― Wall Street Journal Elizabeth Wilson is a novelist and nonfiction writer whose many books include Cultural Passions , Adorned in Dreams , and The Sphinx in the City .  Love Game A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon By Elizabeth Wilson The University of Chicago Press Copyright © 2014 Elizabeth Wilson All rights reserved. ISBN: 978-0-226-37128-3 Contents 1. The game of love, PART ONE: A LEISURED CLASS, 2. Healthy excitement and scientific play, 3. Real tennis and the scoring system, 4. The growth of a sporting culture, 5. On the Riviera, 6. What's wrong with women?, 7. A match out of Henry James, 8. The lonely American, 9. The Four Musketeers, 10. Working-class heroes, 11. Tennis in Weimar – and after, 12. As a man grows older, 13. Three women, PART TWO: THIS SPORTING LIFE, 14. Home from the war, 15. Gorgeous girls, 16. Opening play, 17. Those also excluded, 18. Tennis meets feminism, PART THREE: THAT'S ENTERTAINMENT, 19. Bad behaviour, 20. Corporate tennis, 21. Women's power, 22. Vorsprung durch Technik, 23. Celebrity stars, 24. Millennium tennis, 25. The rhetoric of sport, 26. Back to the future, Bibliography, References, Acknowledgements, Photo credits, Index, Gallery, CHAPTER 1 The game of love 'BY THE TIME I WAS THIRTEEN I was madly in love. It was a blinding, choking, loyal love, filled with devotion and dedication. Obvious to all, it was understood only by a few.' The object of Ricardo Pancho Gonzales' affection was his tennis racquet. He even took it to bed with him. A Mexican–American from a humble background, he was to have a troubled, passionate relationship with the game. The scar on his cheek gave his Latin looks a dangerous edge; he was no stereotype of the languid, white-clad player. Nor was he alone in falling in love with a game. The placid Dan Maskell, who also came from a working-class family, but was a far different character from the fiery Mexican, started as a ball boy, and 'thus began a love affair with lawn tennis that has never faded'. The British pre-war star, Fred Perry, felt the same. Indeed, in no other sport than tennis has the relationship of players and spectators, the game and its followers, been so often discussed in terms of romantic love. Even hard-bitten journalists fell for tennis. A. L. Laney, a sports writer between the wars, entitled his autobiography Covering the Court: A Fifty Year Love Affair wit