Tracy Austin Serves Up a Bubbly Life Story (review of Tracy Austin's Beyond Center Court: My Story)

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PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER TRACY AUSTIN SERVES UP A BUBBLY LIFE STORY Aug30, 1992 Reviewed by David Foster WallaceBEYOND CENTER COURT My Story By Tracy Austin with Christine BrennanWilliam Morrow. 288 pp. 20I am a longtime rabid fan of tennis and life stories in general, andof Tracy Austin in particular. I've rarely looked forward to readinga new book I was supposed to criticize as I looked forward to BeyondCenter Court: My Story. And I don't think I've ever felt as downand disillusioned and cheated by a book.Here's Tracy Austin on the first set of her final against Chris Evertat the 1979 U.S. Open: "At 2-3, I broke Chris, then she broke me,and I broke her again, so we were at 4-4."'And Tracy Austin 's epiphany after winning that final: "I immediatelyknew what I had done, which was to win the U.S. Open, and I was thrilled."Tracy Austin on the psychic challenge of pro competition: "Every professionalathlete has to be so fine-tuned mentally." Tracy Austin on her parents:"My mother and father never, ever pushed me."On Robin Williams: "What an intelligent man."Meditating on excellence: "There is that little bit extra that someof us are willing to give and some of us aren't. Why is that? I thinkit's the challenge to be the best."I guess this breathtakingly insipid book has helped me understandwhy the whole genre of ghostwritten athletic bios is so disappointing.Uniformly rotten and yet ubiquitous, these sports memoirs sell becausethey seem to promise something more than the regular old name-droppingcelebrity autobiography.But these corporate-PR sports bios, chock-full of truisms, never deliver,and Beyond Center Court: My Story is especially appalling. It failsnot just because it's poorly written, which it is. (I don't knowwhat ghostwriting sportswriter Christine Brennan's enhancing functionwas supposed to be here, but I don't see how Austin herself couldhave done any worse than 200-plus deadening pages of "Tennis tookme like a magic carpet to all kinds of places and all kinds of people,"enlivened only by howlers like "Injuries - the signature of the restof my career - were about to take hold of me.") It fails, too, becauseit manages to commit what any high school senior knows is the capitalcrime in expository prose: It forgets its audience.Quite simply, the first loyalty of a successful autobiography hasto be to the reader. Austin has allegiances aplenty in Beyond CenterCourt, but none are to the poor paying customer. This author's firstloyalty seems to be to her family and friends. Whole pages are givenover to retina-numbing, Academy-Award-style tributes to parents,siblings, coaches, trainers and agents, plus glowing little burblesof praise for pretty much every athlete and celebrity she's everencountered. Martina Navratilova: "She is a wonderful person, very sensitive and caring"; Dick Enberg:"Dick is such a professional"; Liz Taylor: "She was exquisite"; adnauseam.Austin is also loyal in her service to her own public image, her endorsement-lucrativeposition as a media Role Model: "Even with all this early success,I still considered school more important than tennis"; "I have never,ever tried drugs of any kind, marijuana, anything."There's also a weird loyalty here to the very biographic cliches bywhich we tend to mythologize sports stars. One such cliche-myth isof course that the person who's an extraordinary athlete on the fieldis really just plain folks off the field. Beyond Center Court devotesmuch of its space to showing that the off-the-court Tracy Austinwas just a normal American teenager. The obvious problem is that,since normal American teenagers tend to be rather shallow and uninterestingcreatures, we're flooded with data such as that Austin enjoyed watchingtelevision ("Charlie's Angels, Happy Days and Welcome Back Kotter,especially"), and that she got her braces removed at age 15 - "Whata feeling!"Sometimes her fondness for press-release-type truisms forces Austinto adopt an almost surreal narrative naivete. She protests with greatenergy that her tennis-fan mother never forced her into tennis atage 2, apparently never considering the fact that someone who's 2doesn't have sufficient awareness of choices to require any sortof "forcing."But the biggest reason Beyond Center Court is especially disappointingis that it could have been so much better than the average I-was-born-to-volleymemoir.The raw facts of Austin's life and rise and fall are almost classicallytragic. She was the first of pro tennis' now-ubiquitous nymphet prodigies,and her rise was meteoric. Picked out of the crowd by coaching guruVic Braden as a toddler, Austin was on the cover of World Tennismagazine at age 4. She played her first junior tournament at 7; bythe time she was 10 she had won the national girls' 12-and-underchampionship both indoors and out, and was being invited to playpublic exhibitions. At 13, she had won national titles in most agegroups, been drafted as a professional by World Team Tennis, andappeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated under the legend "A StarIs Born."At 14, having chewed up every American female under 19, she enteredthe qualifiers for her first professional tournament, and won notonly the qualifiers but the whole tournament, which is roughly equivalentto someone who's ineligible for a learner's permit winning the Indy500. She played Wimbledon at 14, turned professional as a ninth grader,won the U.S. Open at 16, and was ranked No. 1 in the world at 17,in 1980, the same year her body started to fall apart.She spent the next four years effectively crippled by injuries andbizarre accidents, playing sporadically and watching her rankingplummet, and was pretty much retired from tennis at age 21. Her onlyserious attempt at a real comeback, in 1989, ended on the way tothe U.S. Open - literally on the way, driving to the stadium - whena van ran a light and nearly killed her.The basic problem, of course, is that top athletes turn out not tobe articulate about just those qualities and experiences that constitutetheir attraction and our compulsion. The basic question is why thisfact is so bitterly disappointing. The answer might be that productslike these PR- memoirs seem to promise precisely what they can'tdeliver: personal communicative access to an essentially public performativegenius.But U.S. audiences aren't stupid; we'd catch on after a while, andit wouldn't be so profitable for the publishers to keep churningthese things out.Maybe what keeps us obsessed and buying is the persistent desire bothto experience genius in the concrete and to universalize genius inthe abstract. And maybe our disappointment at the vacuousness oftheir memoirs is our own fault. Maybe the truth is that we wronglyexpect geniuses in motion to be also geniuses in reflection, andtheir failure to be that is no more cruelly disillusioning than Eliot'sinability to hit the curve ball or Kant's glass jaw.

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APA

Wallace, D. F. (1992). Tracy Austin Serves Up a Bubbly Life Story (review of Tracy Austin’s Beyond Center Court: My Story). Philadelphia Inquirer.

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