Game Changer: My Tennis Life

One might think an Aussie tennis player who would call himself a game changer in the title of his autobiography might be a "dinkum figjam," a self-consciously "tall poppy,” and "not much chop" as a writer—or at least in any case be a pretty "bodgy" writer of book titles. But keep reading his book and "bob’s yer uncle," meaning everything will be all right.

That’s your warning: There are a few fairly obscure Aussie phrases and words in this sportsman's memoir by a lad raised in a Melbourne suburb with family roots in the gold-mining town of Tarnagulla; but even those unfamiliar with the lingo should have no trouble getting to know and like the author.

The title Game Changer works in any number of ways for McNamee and not all of them are forms of bragging. Usually a game changer is somebody who is so good at a game that not only are individual matches affected but also a sport’s entire history is—sometimes including even the rules. McNamee, by his own ingratiating admission, wasn’t that good. But he was good enough to win some Grand Slam doubles titles and to be part of the glittering Australian Davis Cup tradition.   

And he did change his own game. He wasn’t the first top-flight tennis player to learn new shots: Bunny Austin, back in the twenties, learned a top-spin backhand during a few weeks away from the Davis Cup grind and put it into practice right away to fine effect; take a look at any book-length treatment (ahem) of Austin’s life. But young McNamee added two shots in full career, a two-handed backhand and a semi-western forehand (just sayin’—in case you’re a groundstroke grip aficionado).

The other reference in the title is probably to the significant changes Paul McNamee effected in the pro game: how tournaments were run, who played in them, where, whether indoors or out, and for how much money, especially in Australia. He had a lot to do with opening up Asia to major tennis, getting the winners of the Asian Tennis Championships automatic entries into the Australian Open and spearheading the innovative men’s and women’s world championship known as the Hopman Cup.

Paul McNamee was a stylish, athletic, plucky player. The photo on the cover shows him in good 1980s form: all in white, short shorts, cotton polo, matching wristbands, sweat-curled mullet, back foot dragged forward to necessitate a punishing torso-twist on his serve, ball toss even with the baseline, meaning it was a tricky, not particularly airborne delivery. He tended to leave the air-bearing stuff for the middle of the point, like his friend Chris Lewis from New Zealand, or his compatriots Cash and Rafter, volleying madmen all. Proof comes in photo two (the book is lavish with photos), teenage McNamee diving for a beaut of a backhand volley, ball hitting sweet spot, tongue out the corner of his mouth as if the shot is a joke whose punch line he has delivered before. 

Jokes and storytelling are an antipodean tradition; McNamee does his bit, with match-play narrative dominating in the first half and tennis-business negotiations the second. Some of this is no joke. Unless you’re an event organizer, you might find the inside baseball of profits and ratings as dry as a dead dingo’s donger, regardless of the colorful nature of the teller’s language.

But a few stories stand out. In one, presiding at the centenary Australian championship, McNamee goes to the locker room to console Andy Roddick, who has just lost a tough semifinal to Aussie Leyton Hewitt, egregiously leaving the court at one point and ostensibly putting himself in hot water with the tournament ref. Roddick trusts McNamee enough to take his advice and go straight to the tournament office before even showering, ready with a heartfelt apology, which averted the likely sanction from Peter Bellenger, one of McNamee’s mates. Maybe a big moment in Roddick’s career as a sportsman—he certainly ended his playing days a mensch rather than a bad boy.

Memoirs are sometimes written to take some tarnish off a reputation, to reposition the tectonics of the record, or to get even. From that standpoint, for most of Game Changer, she’s apples: hundreds of pages with no rancor, no spleen, nothing but kind words for competitors and business rivals.

McNamee tells us about his being dumped by Martina Navratilova as doubles partner, even though they had just won Wimbledon, and both parties come through the story unmarked. It isn’t until very near the end that a possible inner wheel comes to light, a reason to write the book: his troubled relations with the governing body of Australian tennis. “One day they’ll be held to account,“ he writes.

For us, that’s a game we’ll never know the score of. In what McNamee writes about Tennis Australia, there is more spin than in a Mansour Bahrami drop volley. He ends the book with a stirring account of how he coached Su-Wei Hsieh to a Wimbledon doubles championship against two girls funded and coached by Tennis Australia. He recalls how he had been made to change his game by the Australian brass, and he wasn’t about to do that to Su-Wei and her partner. 

“[Having] won the tiebreak, 7-1, they jumped to a 2-0 lead in the second set, with Su-Wei serving. Peng was not in the traditional net position and instead was camped on the baseline with Su-Wei. They’ve been doing this on and off in their partnership for some time, and I’m sometimes asked by my Aussie peers if I condone it. I do: although it raises eyebrows, especially since it probably hasn’t been seen on Centre Court at Wimbledon since the 1930s, I know it’s comfortable for them. I haven’t forgotten the pressure I felt in the 1986 Davis Cup final to serve and volley like a true Aussie. No player I coach will ever be subject to that pressure.”

Good on ya, Macca! One meaning of game changer does not pertain: You didn’t forcibly change their games.