Love Game: A History of Tennis, from Victorian Pastime to Global Phenomenon

The Situationist writer, Guy Debord, whose book, The Society of the Spectacle, became the bible of the ‘événements’ in France in 1968, denounced the commoditisation of leisure and accused capitalism of colonising all aspects of life. To view the spectacle –in this case

To be authentic was to express your feelings.

Mephistopheles

Club du Lys in Paris.

‘the art of the racquet the most appropriate sport for the man of letters’.

Nor do sporting records necessarily reflect a hierarchy of greatness. Aesthetic and qualitative judgements enter just as much into sports as into music or painting. Rankings of the ‘greatest’ players based on how many tournaments, games, matches or anything else they won omit crucial qualities of beauty, excitement and creativity.

The South of the northern imagination was, says Mary Blume, a land of the recovery of innocence and simplicity.

By the 1980s McDonaldisation was spreading to the world of leisure and sports. Partly as the result of new technologies, tennis was being McDonaldised too.

So, while a performance of transcendent music is something deeper than ‘entertainment’, tennis is ultimately darker than entertainment, containing within itself an inherent contradiction and thus continually in thrall to frustration and paranoia.