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Bud Collins : TOTAL Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia

Sport Media Publishing, Inc., Ontario, Canada, 2003

ISBN 0973144343

8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall. BN6 - A 2nd printing hardcover book SIGNED and inscribed by Bud Collins to previous owner on the half-title page in very good condition in very good dust jacket that is mylar protected. Dust jacket has some wrinkling, chipping and few tiny tears on the edges and corners, dust jacket and book have some bumped corners, light discoloration and shelf wear. 9.5"x7.5", 938 pages. Satisfaction Guaranteed. Robert Frost, the great American poet and occasional weekend baseliner, once observed that writing free verse was akin to playing tennis with the net down. The words were meant as a dig at archival Carl Sandburg, but they could well stand as a testament to the scope of the mission embraced by Total Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia. Unlike the major North American team sports and even other individual pursuits such as golf, where the administration and governance of the sport has evolved toward a single official body, tennis remains, well into the 21st century, a sort of all-comers, catch-as-catch-can endeavor, where different aspects of the game are overseen by district and overlapping groups and individuals. Pulling all the threads together to create an orderly reading and reference history of the sport turned out to be a woolly mammoth of an undertaking, not a chore for the faint of heart or for anyone not an avowed serve-and-volley man by nature. Without doubt, the one man capable of pulling it off is the architect of this volume, Bud Collins. Universally regarded as the dean of tennis journalists, Collins has been writing about and commentating on the sport for more than 40 years. His vast reservoir of knowledge and expertise lies at the core of this book, whose mission is no less than to become widely regarded as the bible of tennis. Building on the foundation of three editions of Bud Collins' Tennis Encyclopedia, Total Tennis seeks to raise the ante as it incorporates extensive new sections devoted to each of the four major championships as well as illuminating the characters of the men and women who defined the game. In addition, this inaugural edition marks the introduction of the game's first detailed historical player registers. Within these pages are countless hours of reading and thumbing pleasure for anyone who has ever plunked down in front of a television set on a weekend afternoon in July or September, watching a Herculean struggle for the singles championship of Wimbledon or the U.S. Open, as well as any soul who ever felt the pure joy at a perfectly hit winning forehand barely skimming the net and touching down, irretrievably, just inside the line. Who was the fist tennis player to wear short pants in a match? Who is the oldest winner of a major title? Who was the player expelled from the U.S. Championship because he filed press reports from Wimbledon several weeks earlier? Who was the player thought by some to be the greatest in the game's history, but who won just two major singles titles? Who is the male player who has appeared in the most major singles semi-finals (31), but has a losing record in those matches? The answers to these and thousands of other questions lie waiting inside Total Tennis: The Ultimate Tennis Encyclopedia.. Book Condition: Very Good. Binding: Hardcover. Jacket: Very Good

2nd Printing
Signed by Author

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