Ad In Ad Out, Michael Mewshaw's New Book on Tennis Shows His Unique Story Telling - UBITENNIS

Ad In Ad Out, Michael Mewshaw’s New Book on Tennis Shows His Unique Story Telling

From Bjorn Borg to Roger Federer, from Steffi Graf to Serena Williams, in 35 years of illustrious career Michael Mewshaw has followed tennis all around the world, visiting the greatest stages of the sport. Now Mewshaw's best pieces are collected together in ''Ad In and Out'' his new book now available online.

By Ivan Pasquariello
5 Min Read

In thirty-five years Michael Mewshaw has seen more than just few tennis balls bouncing around the most prestigious courts in the world, hit by the most famous players in the sport’s history. In fact, Mike has seen almost all the greatest talents of all time leaving their mark in tennis, starting from their junior career, developing into the champions we all know and still talk about. From Bjorn Borg to Roger Federer, from Steffi Graf to Serena Williams, Michael has seen them all and has followed the sport enthusiastically, always with his unique way of telling stories, beyond just the results, deeper into the characters, narrating the humans holding the racket.

Now Mewshaw has decided to collect all of his best pieces and put them together in a book, named ”Ad In Ad Out: Collected Tennis Articles of Michael Mewshaw 1982-2015′‘ now available on Amazon.

To better understand Mewshaw’s unique style of writing, we decided to share an abstract from a story he published years ago regarding Bjorn Borg.

 

BJORN BORG: DECLINE AND FALL OF A LEGEND

More than six years after his retirement at the age of twenty-six, Bjorn Borg has become a black hole looming amid the constellation of current tennis stars. His light has dimmed, but he still exerts an enormous pull, a mysterious force, that alternately troubles and titillates a fascinated public. In effect, his absence from the game has come to be more significant than the presence of most players, and his refusal to say much on his own behalf has resulted in reams of comment from agents, ex-lovers, self-described friends, sports pundits and penny psychologists. Recent events, including a reported suicide attempt, marriage to Loredana Berte—an Italian pop singer with a lurid reputation—and the collapse of the European division of the Bjorn Borg Design Group, have provoked an avalanche of questions. What has happened to the five-time Wimbledon champion. How, in half a dozen short years, has the Great Wheel of Fortune spun him from the pinnacle of fame to the point where in some quarters, he is viewed as burned out and broken down—at best a pathetic husk of his former self; at worst a self-indulgent multi-millionaire hellbent on self-destruction?

Given the extent of the misinformation and the depth of distortion produced by media attention, it is important to point out at the start that in the case of an international celebrity like Bjorn Borg one is often reduced to dealing with a persona as opposed to a person. One is manipulated into analyzing pseudo-events, not an actual life. If there is a tragic dimension to the arc of his career, it may simply be that the huffing and puffing machinery that confected his enormously successful image is now hissing and spitting out its mirror opposite. Because Borg was a splendid tennis player, the world wanted to think he must be a splendid man. Now that he has experienced a few of the problems human flesh is heir to, the world strains to find some deep significance in his shortcomings. In both cases there has been the mistaken assumption that this limited and uninteresting man could serve as an exemplary role model or an object lesson anywhere except on a tennis court.

But, of course, nothing so dull as the truth, nothing so dull as Borg himself, could have been counted on to sell shoes, shirts, racquets, tournament tickets and expensive blocks of television time. The International Management Group (IMG) recognized this from the moment they took on the long-haired teenager and cleverly transformed him into what Italian IMG representative Cino Marchese described as “the perfect machine, the perfect tennis machine, the perfect money-making machine.”

 

The rest of the story is contained in Mewshaw’s book, available on Amazon.

 

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