Tennis, a Dictionary

P.M. Powles was an OTA-certified Tennis Instructor who has coached in Peterborough, Ontario, for seven years.

This small (8” x 8”, 84p.) book arranges tennis jargon, related topics, and catch-phrases into a dictionary format. Each “key” word on any given page is accompanied by its corresponding cartoon, about fifty of them in all. We start off with Ace, and end at Zero: in tennis it means love, and you are nowhere. Some of the definitions are short, and others make no attempt to be definitions at all but are simply impressionistic descriptions, most of which are clever. The author is knowledgeable, particularly concerning the history of the sport during the last ten years. But the book is a curious mixture; some of the comments come from the vantage point of a pro player, while others are from the perspective of an amateur. While all of this is clever (e.g., the definition of father on p.26), I found very little of it funny. Nor are the cartoons funny, probably because this whole topic has been over-exposed in the past five years. Now and again there is a funny definition (e.g., concentration: “the ability to focus your entire attention on a fluffy ball without thinking of sex, what’s for dinner,...a cool beer… or... where were we?”).

To sum up, this is a clever idea that, like the beetle VW, is now past its prime.