Levels of the Game

On one side of the net, Arthur Ashe: black, liberal, artistic, free-swinging, and cool. On the other, Clark Graebner (who?): white, conservative, businesslike, stiff, and anxious. From the 1968 U.S. Open semifinal between these two longtime friends McPhee builds a portrait that follows the lines dividing the two athletes but blurs them with precise observation and the players' own candor. (And in passing he records a snapshot of a year of even more tumult and change than our own.) It says something about the great McPhee that even this work, which is likely not among his ten best-known books, can be called a small masterpiece.