Tennis and America, Thank You
Tennis and America, Thank You

Author: Freddie Botur

Publisher: AuthorHouse

Published: 2013-07-08

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 1481746855

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Jack Kramer: Freddie, nobody wants us. 1966 In 1966, when I had the Thirty-Fourth Street armory, Jack Kramer, the world famous player and promoter, approached me and asked me to put up fifteen thousand dollars in prize money for a tournament he wanted to organize early in 1967. He had eight professionals set to go but no place to host the tournament and no prize money to offer. Freddie, nobody wants us, Kramer said. Madison Square Garden does not want us. White Plains does not want us. I could not believe that a great and famous player like Jack Kramer was coming to me, an unknown immigrant, to ask if I would be interested in promoting the tournament. I thought about it for a little less than a minute, knew instantly that we could accommodate nearly four thousand people in the armory, and determined that I would make it happen. A few days later, I received a letter of confirmation from his manager, Mr. Wills. The players he was proposing were the most famous names in the game. We just needed to come up with the prize money. Since we did not have anyone who could sponsor us, I put up five thousand dollars myself and asked two of my friendsLieberman, vice president of a gas company, and Zdenek Capek, the engineer friend who helped me design the roll-up mats for the armoryto invest five thousand dollars each. I can still name the singles draw from the top down: Rod Laver, Fred Stolle, Dennis Ralston, Butch Buchholz, Pancho Gonzalez, Pierre Barthes, Mike Davis, Andres Gimeno, Pancho Segura, and Cliff Drysdale. No one was willing to underwrite the event.

Thank You, M'am
Thank You, M'am

Author: Langston Hughes

Publisher:

Published: 2014-08

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781623236212

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When a young boy named Roger tries to steal the purse of a woman named Luella, he is just looking for money to buy stylish new shoes. After she grabs him by the collar and drags him back to her home, he's sure that he is in deep trouble. Instead, Roger is soon left speechless by her kindness and generosity.

Thank You for Your Service
Thank You for Your Service

Author: David Finkel

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2013-10-01

Total Pages: 272

ISBN-13: 0374710961

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Now a Major Motion Picture Directed by American Sniper Writer Jason Hall and Starring Miles Teller No journalist has reckoned with the psychology of war as intimately as David Finkel. In The Good Soldiers, his bestselling account from the front lines of Baghdad, Finkel embedded with the men of the 2-16 Infantry Battalion as they carried out the infamous “surge”. Now, in Thank You for Your Service, Finkel tells the true story of those men as they return home from the front-lines of Baghdad and struggle to reintegrate--both into their family lives and into American society at large. Finkel is with these veterans in their most intimate, painful, and hopeful moments as they try to recover, and in doing so, he creates an indelible, essential portrait of what life after war is like--not just for these soldiers, but for their wives, widows, children, and friends, and for the professionals who are truly trying, and to a great degree failing, to undo the damage that has been done. Thank You for Your Service is an act of understanding, and it offers a more complete picture than we have ever had of two essential questions: When we ask young men and women to go to war, what are we asking of them? And when they return, what are we thanking them for? “Finkel sketches a panoramic view of postwar life....A book that every American should read.” —Jake Tapper, Los Angeles Times Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and the New York Public Library Helen Bernstein Award for Excellence in Journalism. One of Ten Favorite Books of 2013 by Michiko Kakutani (The New York Times), a Washington Post Top Ten Book of the Year, and a New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year

Unstoppable
Unstoppable

Author: Maria Sharapova

Publisher: Sarah Crichton Books

Published: 2017-09-12

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0374279799

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In 2004, in a stunning upset against the two-time defending champion Serena Williams, seventeen-year-old Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon, becoming an overnight sensation. Out of virtual anonymity, she launched herself onto the international stage. "Maria Mania" was born. Her success would last: she went on to hold the number-one WTA ranking multiple times, to win four more Grand Slam tournaments, and to become one of the highest-grossing female athletes in the world. And then -- at perhaps the peak of her career -- she was charged by the ITF with taking the banned substance meldonium, only recently added to the ITF's list. The resulting suspension would keep her off the professional courts for fifteen months -- a frighteningly long time for any athlete. But Sharapova's career has always been driven by her determination and by her dedication to hard work. Her story doesn't begin with the 2004 Wimbledon championship, but years before, in a small Russian town, where as a five-year-old she played on drab neighborhood courts with precocious concentration. It begins when her father, convinced his daughter could be a star, risked everything to get them to Florida, that sacred land of tennis academies. It begins when the two arrived with only seven hundred dollars and knowing only a few words of English. From that, Sharapova scraped together one of the most influential sports careers in history.

Beautiful Country
Beautiful Country

Author: J.R. Thornton

Publisher: HarperCollins

Published: 2016-04-19

Total Pages: 217

ISBN-13: 0062411926

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“This unsettling book about the moral encounter between America and China is a study of privilege, innocence, and risk. It is a tragedy of manners and a portrait of Beijing -- amplified and torqued and unmistakable.”— Evan Osnos, autor of Age of Ambition, winner of the National Book Award A coming-of-age story set in modern day China centering on the friendship between an American and a Chinese boy who meet while training with Beijing’s Junior National Tennis Team. Chase Robertson arrives in Beijing as a fourteen-year-old boy still troubled by the recent death of his older brother. He discovers a country in transition; a society in which the dual systems of Communist Era state control and an emerging entrepreneurial culture exist in paradox. A top ranked junior tennis player in the U.S., Chase joins the practices of the Beijing National Junior Tennis Team and is immersed in the brutal, cut-throat world of Chinese sport. It is a world in which gifted children are selected at the ages of six or seven for specialized sport schools where they devote their entire youth to the pursuit of athletic excellence and are paid as professionals by the state. Athletes find themselves compelled to do anything possible to succeed—right or wrong. Those who fail to reach the pinnacle are cast aside and are left facing a desperate future without hope. In China, Chase gains access to a culture rarely open to Westerners, and soon finds himself caught up in secrets. When his closest friend and teammate turns to him for help, Chase is faced with the dilemma of what to do when friendship, rules, and morals are in conflict. A big-hearted debut, Beautiful Country explores a friendship against the backdrop of a quickly changing country.

On Tennis
On Tennis

Author: David Foster Wallace

Publisher: Little, Brown

Published: 2014-06-24

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 0316284823

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From the author of Infinite Jest and Consider the Lobster: a collection of five brilliant essays on tennis, from the author's own experience as a junior player to his celebrated profile of Roger Federer at the peak of his powers. A "long-time rabid fan of tennis," and a regionally ranked tennis player in his youth, David Foster Wallace wrote about the game like no one else. On Tennis presents David Foster Wallace's five essays on the sport, published between 1990 and 2006, and hailed as some of the greatest and most innovative sports writing of our time. This lively and entertaining collection begins with Wallace's own experience as a prodigious tennis player ("Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley"). He also challenges the sports memoir genre ("How Tracy Austen Broke My Heart"), takes us to the US Open ("Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open"), and profiles of two of the world's greatest tennis players ("Tennis Player Michael Joyce's Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness" and "Federer Both Flesh and Not"). With infectious enthusiasm and enormous heart, Wallace's writing shows us the beauty, complexity, and brilliance of the game he loved best.

The Little Green Book of Tennis
The Little Green Book of Tennis

Author: Tom Parham

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2015-04-17

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781503559042

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Golf is a disease, not a game. Especially when you take the game up in your fifties, as I did. After a series of injuries stopped my recreational tennis play, and my retirement from a lifetime of coaching and teaching tennis, I tried golf. It didn't take long to realize it was not an easy endeavor. Someone said, "You can't learn anything from a golf book, but you have to read a lot of golf books to find that out!" I found the gurus of golf instruction: Ledbetter, Pelz, and Hogan, who was said to have written the book with the secret! I did find one that really attracted me but in a somewhat different way.