In The Circuit: A Tennis Odyssey, the award-winning poet - and Paris Review sports columnist - Rowan Ricardo Phillips chronicles 2017 as seen through the unique prism of its pivotal, revelatory, and historic tennis season. The annual tennis schedule is a rarity in professional sports in that it encapsulates the calendar year. And like the year, it’s divided into four seasons, each marked by a final tournament: the Grand Slams.
Phillips charts the year from winter’s Australian Open, where Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal renewed their rivalry in a match for the ages, to fall’s U.S. Open. Along the way, Phillips paints a new, vibrant portrait of tennis, one that captures not only the emotions, nerves, and ruthless tactics of the point-by-point game but also the quicksilver movement of victory and defeat on the tour, placing that sense of upheaval within a broader cultural and social context. Tennis has long been thought of as an escapist spectacle: a bucolic, separate bauble of life.
The Circuit will convince you that you don’t leave the world behind as you watch tennis - you bring it with you.
- ISBN10 1250234921
- ISBN13 9781250234926
- Publish Date 10 December 2019 (first published 20 November 2018)
- Publish Status Active
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Picador USA
- Format Paperback
- Pages 256
- Language English