Consider the Lobster: How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart

Because I am a long-time rabid fan of tennis in general and Tracy Austin in particular, I've rarely looked forward to reading a sports memoir the way I looked forward to Ms. Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story, ghosted by Christine Brennan and published by Morrow.

This is a type of mass-market book—the sports-star-"with"-somebody autobiography—that I seem to have bought and read an awful lot of, with all sorts of ups and downs and ambivalence and embarrassment, usually putting these books under something more highbrow when I get to the register.

And on her epiphany after winning that final: "I immediately knew what I had done, which was to win the US Open, and I was thrilled."

On the upside, though, this breathtakingly insipid autobiography can maybe help us understand both the seduction and the disappointment that seem to be built into the mass-market sports memoir.

There is about world-class athletes carving out exemptions from physical laws a transcendent beauty that makes manifest God in man.

They enable abstractions like power and grace and control to become not only incarnate but televisable.

We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain.

We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain.

We want to hear about humble roots, privation, precocity, grim resolve, discouragement, persistence, team spirit, sacrifice, killer instinct, liniment and pain.

When we all heard, in 1977, that a California girl who'd just turned fourteen had won a professional tournament in Portland, we weren't so much jealous as agog.

She was the first real child star in women's tennis, and in the late Seventies she was prodigious, beautiful, and inspiring.

There was an incongruously adult genius about her game, all the more radiant for her little-girl giggle and silly hair.

So the point, then, about these sports memoirs' market appeal: Because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get, these ghost-written invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive for book buyers.

So the point, then, about these sports memoirs' market appeal: Because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get, these ghost-written invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive for book buyers.

The book fails not so much because it's poorly written...but because it commits what any college sophomore knows is the capital crime of expository prose: it forgets who it's supposed to be for.

In particular, Austin's account of her own (extremely, transcendently interesting) competitive career keeps digressing into warm fuzzies on each opponent she faces.

But there is also here an off loyalty to and penchant for the very clichés with which we sports fans weave the veil of myth and mystery that these sports memoirs promise to part for us.

It's almost as if Tracy Austin has structured her own sense of her life and career to accord with the formulas of the generic sports pro. We've got the sensitive and doting mother, the kindly dad, the mischievous siblings who treat Tracy like just another kid.

We've got the ingenue heroine whose innocence is eroded by experience and transcended through sheer grit; we've got the gruff but tenderhearted coach and the coolly skeptical veterans who finally accept the heroine.

We've got the wicked, backstabbing rival (in Pam Shriver, who receives the book's only unfulsome mention).

We even get the myth-requisite humble roots.

We had to be frugal in all kinds of ways...we cut expenses by drinking powdered milk...we didn't have bacon except on Christmas.

...and downright creepy are some of the details Austin chooses in order to evince "how nonintense my tennis background really was"...

Regarding her de facto employment in what is technically known as sports hustling: "It was all in good fun."

The naïveté on display throughout this memoir is doubly confusing.

When she sees a player "tank" a 1988 tournament match to make time for a lucrative appearance in a TV ad, Tracy "couldn't believe it...I had never played with anyone who threw a match before, so it took me a set and a half to realize what was happening."

She was the first of tennis's now-ubiquitous nymphet prodigies, and her rise was meteoric.

She spent the next four years effectively crippled by injuries and bizarre accidents, playing sporadically and watching her ranking plummet, and was for all practical purposes retired from tennis at age twenty-one.

What's nearly Greek about her career's arc is that Tracy Austin's most conspicuous virtue, a relentless workaholic perfectionism that combined with raw talent to make her such a prodigious success, turned out to be also her flaw and bane.

A successful Tracy Austin autobiography, then, could have afforded us plain old plumbers and accountants more than just access to the unquestioned genius of an athletic savant or her high-speed ascent to the top of a univocal, mathematically computed hierarchy.

This book could actually have helped us to countenance the sports myth's dark side.

Which is to say that inspirational, honorably used, describes precisely what a great athlete becomes when she's in the arena performing, sharing the particular divinity she's given her life for, letting people witness concrete, transient instantiations of a grace that for most of us remains abstract and immanent.

Which is to say that inspirational, honorably used, describes precisely what a great athlete becomes when she's in the arena performing, sharing the particular divinity she's given her life for, letting people witness concrete, transient instantiations of a grace that for most of us remains abstract and immanent.

Of course, neither Austin nor her book is unique. It's hard not to notice the way this same air of robotic banality suffuses not only the sports-memoir genre but also the media rituals in which a top athlete is asked to describe the content or meaning of his technē.

Of course, neither Austin nor her book is unique. It's hard not to notice the way this same air of robotic banality suffuses not only the sports-memoir genre but also the media rituals in which a top athlete is asked to describe the content or meaning of his technē.

One sort of answer, of course, is that commercial autobiographies like these promise something they cannot deliver: personal and verbal access to an intrinsically public and performative kind of genius.

It remains very hard for me to reconcile the vapidity of Austin's narrative mind, on the one hand, with the extraordinary mental powers that are required by world-class tennis, on the other.

The real secret behind top athletes' genius, then, may be as esoteric and obvious and dull and profound as silence itself.

The only certainty seems to be that such a person does not produce a very good prose memoir. That plain empirical fact may be the best way to explain how Tracy Austin's actual history can be so compelling and important and her verbal account of that history not even alive.

As is so often SOP with the truth, there's a cruel paradox involved.