Ad In Ad Out: Collected Tennis Articles of Michael Mewshaw 1982-2015

For the past thirty-five years Michael Mewshaw has covered pro tennis with a novelist’s sense of style, a travel writer’s feeling for place and an investigative reporter’s commitment to unearthing the truth. Like Short Circuit, his description of life on the men’s tour – the New York Times hailed it as “one of the best books ever written about tennis, and the most timely” – and Ladies of the Court, his account of the women’s circuit, Mewshaw’s articles offer original and often shocking insights into a sport that all too often receives superficial coverage. AD IN AD OUT ranges over four decades, providing vivid profiles of Bjorn Borg, Gabriella Sabatini, Monica Seles, Ivan Lendl, Andrea Jaeger, Andre Agassi, Rafa Nadal and Serena Williams.
It depicts the sport’s beauty, its captivating geometry, and its exhilarating mano a mano competition. Whether analyzing a Grand Slam final or self-deprecatingly admitting his own comic attempts to master the game, Mewshaw conveys his knowledge of tennis history, along with his passion for the sport and the men and women who excel at it. His evocation of high stakes tournaments in Italy, France and England is more than equaled by his accounts of matches on garage rooftops, on private and public London courts, and beside a Spanish swimming pool where his opponent wears espadrilles and a bikini.
But AD IN AD OUT also discusses subjects that rarely get reported. Betting and match-fixing, performance enhancing drugs, tanking and sexual abuse all come in for factual examination. And so does the increasing frequency with which tournaments are played in sunny places for shady people, i.e. in tax havens, repressive states eager to improve their images, and lawless regions where organized crime has discovered tennis as an excellent way to launder money. After AD IN AD OUT no reader will ever watch tennis without realizing how much more there is to the game.