I played a little tennis, growing up, but not much. My parents enrolled me in clinics at a swim club in the summer, and once a week in clinics during the school year. Then, eighth grade, they let me choose whether to continue the sports they’d required of me since I was a child (soccer, ice hockey, tennis), and I quit them all and disappeared into fantasy books. A decade and a half later, I lived near city courts in Brooklyn, where a Dominican man was giving lessons for cheap. Within a month, I was hooked, and it’s been an obsession ever since, a prevailing concern of playing and watching, practicing and reading – total tennis, all seasons, all reasons.
As I write this, Wimbledon Radio murmurs in the background.
Tennis, like all big things, is slow to change until it isn’t. Love them, respect them – Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Rafael Nadal – but professional men’s tennis is entering a new period, and to see new characters emerge makes engaging with the sport more thrilling. Idolatry wants stasis, it wants statues. Passion is broader-minded, but desires the new to be braced.
I can’t think of a single interest of mine that isn’t, in some part, tied to identity, and I don’t know that being a person, a person who wants their system software updated recurrently, can exist without a sense of one’s hungers and weaknesses – i.e., one’s character, nebulous as it may be. I read an article in April about a farmer who proudly never eats anything different. I felt nothing in common with the man and everything. We both have systems of living, they just happen to be antipodes. The world is continually changing, endlessly noteworthy. The shame of death will be how much I missed.
Sidebar: Well, something happened this week that’s never happened before – I learned that Everything Now is a bestseller. Amazing. Very, very appreciative of this, especially because, in my understanding, the list is based on data from independent booksellers, which are dear to my heart.
This coming week, if you like, catch me in conversation with the great L.A. novelist Steph Cha, sponsored by local shop Book Soup: Thursday, July 8, 6pm PT (registration info here).
As always, you can find a list of upcoming events and recent media appearances over on my website. And to everyone who’s bought the book, rated the book, told somebody about it or sent me a note, or posted on social media – thank you.
What the what? A (mostly) weekly newsletter by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin of (very) short essays about things he finds beautiful.
Rosecrans’s new nonfiction book, Everything Now, is now available from Amazon, Bookshop, or your local store. Any books mentioned in this newsletter are on a list at Bookshop.