Synopsis
This is a real tennis book, not some quickie concoction to exploit the tennis boom, but a bona fide telling by a writer of distinction of a real life at the top in world class tennis Ken Rosewall s. Rosewall s is the greatest record in modern tennis. He has ranked first in the world or among the first three for more years than any other player ever including Tilden, Kramer, Gonzales, Budge. For more than two decades, since he was a teenager, he has imposed his will upon the great players in the game, as a Davis Cupper, as top amateur, and as top pro, from his early victories over such Wimbledon champions as Dick Savitt and Vic Seixas, to his great back-to-back winning of the pro championship over Rod laver, to his losing struggles to Wimbledon, still the number two seed, in his forty-first year! In addition to telling graphic detail the match play career of Rosewall from his start to the present, including his greatest matches, for the most part in his own words, Twenty Years at the Top provides unique, never-done-before analyses by Rosewall of the strengths, weaknesses, styles of all the stars of the past quarter century. It thereby provides an invaluable mine of instruction and information for all lovers of tennis. This is a tennis book for tennis players, tennis buffs. It is not a gee-whiz star biography or a sports journalist s once-over-lightly assignment. Sophisticated about every aspect of tennis, it is invaluable alone for its records of the modern tennis era. And because Ken Rosewall s career happens to encompass both the earlier white flannels amateur era and the transition to the current pro era of vast money, here is the story of the game s coming of age. We get to know not only Ken Rosewall as intimate life story his childhood, parents, marriage, home in Australia, his awesome debut as a tournament victor but also crucial insights into the games and lives of this era s stars: Hoad, Bromwich, Quist, Gonzales, Kramer, Riggs, Sedgman, Laver, Mulloy, Drobny, Nielsen, Roche, Borg, Ashe, Nastase, Connors, and all the rest. Rosewall also gives us a chapter on how to play good club tennis.