Jim Westhall has written an enormously entertaining and informative book about the adventures and misadventures in 26 years of directing professional tennis tournaments.
His tournaments were enormously popular with an entire generation of fans who flocked to one variation or another of the Volvo International at four different venues. A tournament they came to know simply as the Volvo.
Westhall whose promotional instincts align him with such luminaries as P.T. Barnum and the legendary baseball impresario Bill Veeck, became known over the years as an indefatigably innovative pitchman for his tournaments.
In 1982 the singles final between Ivan Lendl and Jose Higueras was washed out by rain and completed 57 days later. The story of how he accomplished this, and at what cost is almost worth a volume in an of itself.
NONSENSE AT THE NET, edited by Tennis Magazine feature writer and editor Peter Bodo, is a real insiders book. Anyone who attended and enjoyed the Volvo International at any stage in its history will love this book, and so will anyone interested in how tennis tournaments are staged, and what makes them more or less successful. |
