Spanning 13 professional seasons, this colorful and personal account of one man's life on the grueling pro tennis circuit pulls no punches. As one of only two players over the age of 30 ranked in the top 20 players in the world, Vince Spadea offers an inside perspective on his life as a world-class athlete: 11-month seasons, 68 tournaments, five continents, four court surfaces, and countless hits and misses. Starting at age eight under the tutelage of his demanding father, he climbed the rankings, battling injury, coaching decisions, and snubs from both fans and players. His place in the glamorous and gritty world-class tennis scene gives him much dirt to dish, and all the big names are there--Andy Roddick, Roger Federer, Martina Navratilova, and Jennifer Capriati. Spadea takes shots with John McEnroe at practice, raps with the Williams sisters over email, and trades barbs with Andre Agassi, who once called Spadea a "journeyman." Part memoir and part expose, this equally comic and gripping trip through professional tennis reveals that the game may begin on the court, but it continues far outside the white lines.
BREAKPOINT is a journal of Vince Spadea's 2005 pro tennis season. It chronicles his ups and downs on the international tennis tour. He records his successes and failures on the circuit and his feelings about them as he falls from a Top 20 ranking to 77th .
The book contains a few interesting tidbits about Courier, Agassi, Federer, Blake and other celebrities but many of those seem like payback digs. Mostly Spadea is self-involved with a comeback that fizzles at the age of 31 and a game that fails him at key points. Page after page laments his failures of direction, confidence, coaching, and results. After a while, the incessant self-doubt and whining becomes a bit tedious.
It is hard to feel really sorry for a pro tennis player who has earned more than $4 million playing a game he enjoys and then complains about it for 279 pages.
I love tennis. I watch so much--especially when the Slams are on--that even I admit it can be excessive. So it was nearly inevitable that I would read this book. Some comments made by TV commentators/retired tennis players about this book made it sound like Spadea dishes dirt. He really doesn't. If anything in this is "dirt" then I don't understand the term. Although this book is not well-written by any stretch of the phrase it is entertaining--but mostly unintentionally so. His writing makes him seem like an anti-social, immature complainer. The funny part is that Spadea clearly *believes* that he is a fun, artistic, over-looked gem of a man. All that said the book has merit if only to demonstrate the way that the pro tennis tour consumes a person so wholly that they often don't get socialized the way everyone else does. Spadea seems stunted, has poor social skills, and has few interests outside of tennis. (I have seen these traits in other tennis pros.) The one obvious interest is his supposed "rapping". Even that is (mercifully) absent in the second half of the book. We learn that Spadea has an odd focus on James Blake, offers a weak denial to homosexuality with hints to the contrary in the 240 pages preceding it, and that he called his mother in during a match that he was losing. At age 30. The book documents a year on tour, and not a particularly successful one. So it's not an uplifting book about a compelling hero. But in trying to relate the difficulties of life on the pro tour Spadea--unbeknownst to him--also shows us that it can hold a person back in areas outside of tennis.
Hoo boy. More whining from a third-rater* about how he doesn't get enough respect; I've just finished reading Nathalie Tauziat's opus, and now this. But at least Mlle. Tauziat was the French Nº 1 for seven years.
The bulk of the book is concerned with Mr. Spadea's year of 2005 in tennis, with brief descriptions of, and anecdotes about, players, coaches, fans, and other denizens of the tennis world, including women. The author's relationships with these are also described. By his own admission he doesn't try to get close to other male players (p.59), and this in itself is a problem for the book, because he's unable to portray them with any depth; nevertheless, I found myself hoping he makes a lot a money from it, because if all his relationships with women are like those described herein, one has to wonder if he'll be left with much else.
There's certainly scope for an "in-the-trenches account of life near the top of the pro tennis tour". Unfortunately, this one is neither particularly interesting, nor particularly informative; it's too self-centred to be either.
All of this does not of course mean that Mr. Spadea is a bad person, or that getting to the Top 20 is a contemptible achievement. Nor does it mean that his book is entirely without interest (hence the three stars). In fact, some of it has a kind of horrifying fascination, and parts of it (such as the tips on how to pick up girls) are unintentionally hilarious.
But if you want an informative, charming and witty book about tennis, get Gordon Forbes's A Handful of Summers: as I write, it's still available second-hand in the US, and if that fails it's still in print at Amazon UK (although the in-print [HarperCollins] edition is a cheesy one with no photographs).
*Rule of thumb (admittedly arbitrary, but at least well-defined) for the purpose of this review:
First-rater -- those who have won three different Slam championships; or in a particular Slam have won it three times, or have won the Triple Crown (singles/doubles/mixed) in one year .
Second rater -- all other Slam champions.
Third-rater -- everyone else.
This is not as brutal as the obvious definition, which also has the defect of not being applicable before the ranking system was invented:
First-rater -- those who are or have been Number 1.
Second rater -- those who are or have been Number 2.
Third-rater -- those who are or have been Number 3.
