So the point, then, about these sports memoirs’ market appeaclass="underline" Because top athletes are profound, because they make a certain type of genius as carnally discernible as it ever can get, these ghostwritten invitations inside their lives and their skulls are terribly seductive for book buyers. Explicitly or not, the memoirs make a promise — to let us penetrate the indefinable mystery of what makes some persons geniuses, semidivine, to share with us the secret and so both to reveal the difference between us and them and to erase it, a little, that difference … to give us the (we want, expect, only one, the master narrative, the key) Story.
However seductively they promise, though, these autobiographies rarely deliver. And Beyond Center Court: My Story is especially bad. The book fails not so much because it’s poorly written (which it is — I don’t know what ghostwriter Brennan’s enhancing function was supposed to be here, but it’s hard to see how Austin herself could have done any worse than two hundred dead pages of “Tennis took me like a magic carpet to all kinds of places and all kinds of people” enlivened only by wincers like “Injuries — the signature of the rest of my career — were about to take hold of me”), 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.
Obviously, a good commercial memoir’s first loyalty has got to be to the reader, the person who’s spending money and time to access the consciousness of someone he wishes to know and will never meet. But none of Beyond Center Court’s loyalties are to the reader. The author’s primary allegiance seems to be to her family and friends. Whole pages are given over to numbing Academy Award-style tributes to parents, siblings, coaches, trainers, and agents, plus little burbles of praise for pretty much every athlete and celebrity she’s ever met. In particular, Austin’s account of her own (extremely, transcendently interesting) competitive career keeps digressing into warm fuzzies on each opponent she faces. Typical example: Her third round at 1980’s Wimbledon was against American Barbara Potter, who, we learn,
is a really good person. Barbara was very nice to me through my injuries, sending me books, keeping in touch, and checking to see how I was doing. Barbara definitely was one of the smartest people on the tour; I’ve heard she’s going to college now, which takes a lot of initiative for a woman our age. Knowing Barbara, I’m sure she’s working harder than all her fellow students.
But there is also here an odd 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 bio. We’ve got the sensitive and doting mother, the kindly dad, the mischievous siblings who treat famous 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. Austin, whose father is a corporate scientist and whose mother is one of those lean tan ladies who seem to spend all day every day at the country club tennis courts, tries to portray her childhood in posh Rolling Hills Estates CA as impoverished: “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.” Stuff like this seems way out of touch with reality until we realize that the kind of reality the author’s chosen to be in touch with here is not just un- but anti-real.
In fact, as unrevealing of character as its press-release tone and generic-myth structure make this memoir, it’s the narrator’s cluelessness that permits us our only glimpses of anything like a real and faceted life. That is, relief from the book’s skewed loyalties can be found only in those places where the author seems unwittingly to betray them. She protests, for instance, repeatedly and with an almost Gertrudian fervor, that her mother “did not force” her into tennis at age three, it apparently never occurring to Tracy Austin that a three-year-old hasn’t got enough awareness of choices to require any forcing. This was the child of a mom who’d spent the evening before Tracy’s birth hitting tennis balls to the family’s other four children, three of whom also ended up playing pro tennis. Many of the memoir’s recollections of Mrs. Austin seem almost Viennese in their repression—“My mother always made sure I behaved on court, but I never even considered acting up”—and downright creepy are some of the details Austin chooses in order to evince “how nonintense my tennis background really was”:
Everyone thinks every young tennis player is very one-dimensional, which just wasn’t true in my case. Until I was fourteen, I never played tennis on Monday…. My mother made sure I never put in seven straight days on the court. She didn’t go to the club on Mondays, so we never went there.
It gets weirder. Later in the book’s childhood section, Austin discusses her “wonderful friendship” with a man from their country club who “set up … matches for me against unsuspecting foes in later years and … won a lot of money from his friends” and, as a token of friendship, “bought me a necklace with a T hanging on it. The T had fourteen diamonds on it.” She was apparently ten at this point. As the book’s now fully adult Austin analyzes the relationship, “He was a very wealthy criminal lawyer, and I didn’t have very much money. With all his gifts for me, he made me feel special.” What a guy. Regarding her de facto employment in what is technically known as sports hustling: “It was all in good fun.”
In the subsequent section, Austin recalls a 1978 pro tournament in Japan that she hadn’t much wanted to enter:
It was just too far from home and I was tired from the travel grind. They kept offering me more and more money for an appearance fee — well over a hundred thousand dollars — but I said no. Finally, they offered to fly my whole family over. That did it. We went, and I won easily.
Besides displaying an odd financial sense (she won’t come for $100,000+, but will come if they add a couple thousand in airfare?), Tracy Austin seems here unaware of the fact that, in the late Seventies, any player who accepted a guaranteed payment just for entering a tournament was in violation of a serious tour rule. The backstory here is that both genders’ player associations had outlawed these payments because they threatened both the real and the perceived integrity of pro tennis. A tournament that has paid some star player a hefty guarantee — wanting her in the draw because her celebrity will help increase ticket sales, corporate sponsorships, TV revenues, etc. — thereafter has an obvious stake in that player’s survival in the tournament, and so has an equally obvious interest in keeping her from getting upset by some lesser-known player in the early rounds, which, since matches’ linesmen and umpires are employed by the tournament, can lead to shady officiating. And has so led. Far stranger things than a marquee player’s receiving a suspicious number of favorable line calls have happened … though apparently somehow not in Tracy Austin’s experience.