David Shaftel

This past March, John Feinstein, author of 48 books and a Washington Post reporter and columnist for nearly 50 years, passed away at age 69. As any proper sportswriter would have it, Feinstein’s final byline appeared the same day. 

In 1986, Feinstein came to national prominence with A Season on the Brink, his behind-the-scenes account of the ’85–’86 Indiana Hoosiers basketball team coached by the tyrannical Bob Knight. Feinstein didn’t pull any punches on Knight’s potty-mouthed authoritarian ways, the ones that would cost him his job and reputation down the line. Season on the Brink was a huge hit, selling more than 2 million copies, spending weeks at No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list, and vaulting Feinstein out of the Post toy department to become an author who could cover, in a similar manner, whatever sport he so desired. 

In 1990, that meant a calendar year embedded within professional tennis bouncing with the balls to every corner of the globe. The result was Hard Courts: Real Life on the Profe$$ional Tennis Tours. Hard Courts is monumental, and not just because it’s a whopping 456 pages. Its baseline is chronological, but the words flow more as a long and winding riff; it’s a jam-bandy door-stopper packed with everything you’d expect, and a lot you wouldn’t. Mostly, I found it a spirited read with a number of absorbing characters—not named Ivan Lendl or Stefan Edberg—and a mind-bending time capsule for those of us who flipped our cable TV remotes back and forth between the end of the Cold War and Yo! MTV Raps. 

Thinking back on the summer of 1990, there was a lot of sitting on my Montana couch hungover reading USA Today to keep up with the tennis goings-on before late-afternoon minimum-wage shifts at the ice-making factory. So in that easily digestible color-coded spirit, let’s break down Hard Courts. Here are eight likes and dislikes, shrewdly labeled “ace” or “fault.”

(1) ACE: Picking the Perfect Details Feinstein always had a brilliant instinct for finding killer small details and anecdotes that would stick with readers long after they’d forgotten 99 percent of the rest of the book. In ascending order of “most likely to be recalled on my deathbed”: At the Queen’s Club, John McEnroe went ballistic on journeyman doubles player Scott Davis for rocket-launching a water balloon, from a fair distance, that exploded—kinda like an IRA special—at the feet of an unsuspecting Vitas Gerulaitis, who was warming Mac up a couple hours before the semifinal; the Virginia Slims of Washington was being picketed by anti-tobacco activists, so loyalists like Martina Navratilova and Pam Shriver were instructed by the WTA Grand Poobah to individually let the assembled press know the company never “asked them to smoke or promote smoking,” as if that settled it; and Pete Sampras once told Feinstein he saw Michael Chang’s overbearing mother, Betty, “reaching inside her son’s shorts, with his teammates standing right there, to see if his underwear was wet.”

(2) FAULT: Authorial Money Obsession Feinstein has one annoying bugaboo that he will not let go of: guaranteed appearance fees. Under-the-table envelopes were always part of the game, but those rules had been relaxed, so “fifty-four of the seventy-eight stops on the tour” offered up-front money to stars for participation. Did any player ever fly in, cash the check, play half-assed, crash out, and bolt as if the lower-level tournament was simply a personal benefactor? Sure, but Feinstein doesn’t establish it as any sort of common practice. It feels like more often, tennis players just overextended themselves, but Feinstein is obsessed with the idea that guarantees rob the sport of the competitive spirit. He takes Roland-Garros tennis impresario Philippe Chatrier’s quote that “Money is killing our game, the motivation for true greatness is gone for most players by the time they are eighteen.” You sure about that? Because we have the benefit of living in the future where 44-year-old, $43 million career-prize-earning, seven-time Grand Slam Champion Venus Williams has yet to officially retire. 

(3) ACE: Crystal Ball, Men’s Division One great thing about Hard Courts is it captures Sampras at a few magic inflection points when potential and word of mouth morph into a star being born. In February, at 18, Sampras won his first tournament, the U.S. Pro Indoor, and (hilariously, with zero malice) said a few months later of the host, “Nobody remembers who won Philadelphia.” By summer’s end, he would claim his first major, beating future rival Andre Agassi in the US Open. It’s a cool thread knowing the Sampras career to come, but also for the future of the Las Vegas Kid, who comes off horribly in Hard Courts. Feinstein is no fan of Agassi, labeling him “the most unpopular player on tour” and “as rich and arrogant as any superstar who ever played the game.” He has even greater disdain for his brother Phil, “who would have kicked the (hypothetical) homeless person in the head and said, ‘Hey, what do you mean, getting in Andre’s way?’” It’s mostly earned, as Agassi is a massive diva who requests a big security detail in Cincinnati because of the nonexistent “mob” of fans, spits on a US Open chair umpire (and gets away clean), tanks matches when he’s down, skips out on publicity obligations, and constantly gripes and moans about it all, the type of spoiled rich asshole who stiffs taxi drivers. The beauty is, we know he won’t be this guy forever, that even dudes with nobody to answer to can learn to answer to themselves. And Steffi Graf. 

(4) FAULT: Crystal Ball, Women’s Division In 1990, youth was served on the women’s side of the net as well. At 16, Monica Seles became the youngest major winner up to that point, taking down Graf at the French Open. Between the ’91–’93 Aussies, Seles would go on an absolute tear, winning seven Grand Slams with a 55–1 overall record. The even younger 1990 comer was Jennifer Capriati, who at 14 lost to Seles in the French semis. By year’s end, the eighth grader would win her first title, in Puerto Rico, finish the year at No. 8, and sign endorsement deals with Diadora and Prince. The enthusiasm Feinstein has for these hypercompetitive young women bounds off the page, but we have the unfortunate knowledge that crystal balls go both ways. If this were a history book, their powerful comeback stories would be told full circle, but Hard Knocks puts us right there when the future for Capriati and Seles was so bright, there wasn’t a dark cloud in the sky. 

(5) ACE: Love for the Game’s Great Characters Since Feinstein wasn’t confined by a newspaper deadline or a magazine word count, he could follow his reporter’s whims and zero in on people who bring joy and smarts—like his no-bullshit broadcaster crush Mary Carillo, who, we learn, as a player flipped from amateur to pro on the spot to pay off a hotel bar bill—to the grueling yearlong “season.” My favorite portrait is of Ted Tinling, the World War II spy who became the go-to 1960s–80s female tennis fashion designer and remained a gadfly and life of the tennis party until his death at 79 in May that year. Tinling watched his final tourney in a wheelchair, a Virginia Slims event in Boca Raton where Capriati became the youngest finalist in history. Feinstein adores Tinling, saying “even as his body betrayed him, Ted remained the smartest, funniest person in the sport.” Feinstein was cool with the openly gay Brit, which made him part of the inner Tinling circle; perks included the bawdiest of sex tales, snarkiest of commentary, and bitchiest of asides. At the Aussie, Tinling referred to a young woman from a Sydney newspaper in a halter top as “Miss Orange Tits.” When told by a colleague that the woman overheard him, Tinling replied, “So what? She knows she has orange tits. She designed them that way.”

(6) FAULT: Garden-Variety Journalistic Sexism Throughout his prolific career, Feinstein had a reputation as a proud-and-loud liberal. In Hard Courts, he is on the side of equal pay and generally doesn’t sneer at or condescend to the women’s circuit. And yet, like many reporters of the era, he is continually commenting on female players’ attractiveness. However commonplace it was then, it’s cringe now. Feinstein mentions how John “Mr. Chris Evert” Lloyd caused a row by saying half the women on tour were overweight, then adds his own “walking around the Italian Open” thought that “the number of women who would be well served by losing ten, fifteen, or twenty pounds was striking.” This is on the same page where Feinstein discusses players who have been open about dealing with anorexia and bulimia because “the fact remains that most women players feel tremendous pressure to look good.” Which is a weird enough juxtaposition, but there is no excuse, even in 1990, for this throwaway sentence at another point in Hard Courts: “[Conchita] Martinez was almost as big as [Gabriela] Sabatini but with none of her beauty.” 

(7) ACE: Let’s (Barely) Remember Some Guys If you’re a grunge-era tennis sicko, John Feinstein has got some names lost to history—or never found in the first place—for you. In Hard Courts, everyone, no matter how obscure, gets at least a one-line descriptive due before becoming sacrificial lambs to the top dogs. Here are a trio for the ages: Kelly Evernden (“a workman like player from New Zealand who had once owned a bar in Fayetteville, Arkansas”), Martin Wostenholme (“a Yale graduate with a degree in economics who had never quite gotten around to seeing tennis as a life-and-death proposition”), and Markus Zoecke (“Other than having beaten [Jimmy] Connors in Milan in the match where Connors broke his wrist, Zoecke had done little to distinguish himself”). 

(8) ACE: Engrossing, Selective Match Scribing Hard Courts was published in August 1991, giving Feinstein plenty of daylight to think through what matches were significant enough to get into, as opposed to who won what title. It isn’t an expressed underlying conceit to the book, but Feinstein could feel a teenage sea change in the ’80s-to-’90s air. It’s why he barely details Sampras’ straight-set US Open Agassi thrashing but goes brilliantly in-depth on the McEnroe-Sampras semifinal. Here was the unseeded (ancient for those days) 31-and-a-half-year-old vs. the 19-year-old upstart, with the frenzied Queens crowd going nuts for their home-borough boy, but it was a four-setter-not-to-be. The changing of the guard laid bare in prose: “In a sense, McEnroe was looking across the net and seeing himself, circa 1979: young and brash, supremely confident, and equipped with one weapon—the serve—that could keep any opponent off balance…. The difference, of course, was in Sampras’ demeanor. He wasn’t bratty at all. He played one point, then another. No flash, no dash, no whining or crying.” 

Beyond an engrossing memory-lane lollygag, there’s one compelling argument I can make as to why Hard Courts matters in the here and now. We need to keep these vibes alive. These behind-the-scenes works weaving together a number of disparate characters, capturing a finite amount of time as it happens, don’t get around much anymore. I’m intricately aware of their demise as a reviewer and because, for the past five years, David J. Roth of Defector and I have cohosted a sports books-and-authors show. What started on Zoom in the pandemic went live in 2022 from the back of a Brooklyn beer garden. We’ve featured more than 50 books, and exactly one, Alex Squadron’s Life in the G, takes the Feinstein approach. And as rollicking as it is, the NBA G League is filled with guys who are only household names in their respective households and can use the ink, not exactly the same as, say, the Bill Walton-led 1979–80 Portland Trail Blazers in David Halberstam’s lionized The Breaks of the Game. 

The reasons these books are falling by the wayshelf are self-evident, but it’s still a shame books like Hard Courts are becoming as rare as the Seles two-handed forehand. Done right, the sense that real time is unfolding, broadly, game by game and chapter to chapter, delivers readers a sense of immediacy and momentum, but with enough time having passed that moments throughout the season worth revisiting can be judiciously refined and unpacked. Hard Courts accomplished the task and then some. 

When my turn finally comes, I look forward to a brief smile of recognition at Michael Chang’s soggy drawers. 

John Feinstein, 1955–2025