NONFICTION - Nov. 1, 1992

TOUGH DRAW by Eliot Berry (Henry Holt: $25; 325 pp.) Once a top amateur tennis player, Eliot Berry is back on the circuit, this time to chronicle important matches from the 1990 and 1991 professional tennis seasons. He understands, perhaps better than those of us who observe the struggle to the top from the sidelines, that tennis, like any money sport, is about celebrity and the coming stars, that it is only the people at the top, or within sight of it, who attract and keep our attention. So Berry looks at Becker, Connors, Lendl, McEnroe, Navratilova, and at the players who, by luck of the draw or sheer talent, sometimes find themselves playing the giants of the sport. Berry does a great job of describing the actual matches, as someone who not only understands the subtleties of the game but appreciates the psychological aspects of competition. One quibble, about which journalists could debate endlessly: Berry keeps inserting himself into the action, giving us his inner thoughts (“The little bastard aced me,” he writes of McEnroe after a difficult moment in an interview. “He caught me leaning in the wrong direction: compassion”). Reporting is certainly some kind of competition, but it isn’t tennis. The forced conceit intrudes on an otherwise fluid book.