The Circuit

From jacket: This hard-hitting novel on the subject of professional tennis goes behind the polite courtside manners and starched facade that tennis traditionally presents, to offer an insider's behind-the-scenes view of the sport.Set in the near future-sometime in the early 1980s, when a whole new crop of whiz kids have taken over from the current Connors/Ashe/Newcombe/Vilas stars of the 70s -The Circuit opens with the top pros from around the world arriving for the June grasscourt tournament at Queen's Club in London, considered important in itself but especially as a tune-up for Wimbledon. As the tournament progresses we flash back to their earlier lives until, by the end of Queen's, we know most of them intimately; we have followed them from their young amateur years, moving slowly-and often painfully-from the junior ranks on up the demanding ladder toward the pinnacle attained by only a select fewwhere, often, fame and fortune wait. And sometimes despair and disaster.In these pages you'll meet America's number-one player, Francis Shepherd, as well as Randy Mariano, who fights Shep for top honors and is known as a hustler, wise guy, and bad sport; the English ace Jaguar Gray, whose introduction to the sport is, to say the least, unusual; the Aussies Jesse Fraser and AI Wick; the Italian champion, Franco Berconi. And you'll meet the women who fight the men for limelight and purses, and sometimes for more: Laurie Silverman, number one in the United States and battling her rival, Missy Teaford, for the top spot in world rankings; and the South American Consuelo Alvarro, so graceful they call her the "Margot Fonteyn of tennis."The book culminates with Wimbledon itself, still the most important tournament on "the circuit." not only for the money but especially for the prestige. The tension of the on-court struggles is more than matched by the offcourt dramas taking place among the players, amid the swirl and color of one of the world's greatest spectacles.