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Arthur Ashe thinks that Clark Graebner, being a middle-class white conservative dentist's son from Cleveland, plays stiff and compact Republican tennis. Graebner will acknowledge that this is true, and for his part he thinks that, because Ashe is black and from Richmond, Ashe's tennis game is bold, loose, liberal, all-or-nothing, flat-out, Democratic. These things--and the stories of Ashe's and Graebner's lives, and of other lives relevant to theirs--emerge in Levels of the Game, a narrative of a match played by Ashe and Graebner at Forest Hills.
At the time of the Ashe/Graebner match at Forest Hills, Ashe and Graebner were twenty-five. They had known each other half their lives. Mr. McPhee's book begins with the ball rising into the air for the beginning serve, and ends with the final set-point.
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Copyright ©2000
- 2003 Farrar, Straus
& Giroux |
Levels of the Game 
After writing
over a period of years a number of long biographical sketches of individuals (Frank L.
Boyden, Bill Bradley, Euell Gibbons, Temple Fielding, Thomas P. F. Hoving), John McPhee
found that he wanted--as he put it--"to try to write about two people simultaneously,
two whose lives were closely interreflective and who would in a sense sketch or mirror one
another while I was attempting to sketch them. Watching Ashe and Graebner one day at
Forest Hills, I thought, 'Why not experiment first with a pair of tennis players? Why not
Ashe and Graebner? They're the same age. Any two Americans who reach this level will have had
to know each other since childhood. At their level, the community of tennis players is
so small that there are no strangers.' Any two world-class players of about the same age
and from the same country will inevitably know one another well, and when they play there
can be few surprises. Physical equipment being about equal, the role of psychology becomes
paramount, and each will play out his game within the fabric of his nature and his
background."