Wertheim, then a tennis writer for Sports Illustrated, spent the 2000 season travelling the women’s tour — the practice courts, the press rooms, the player lounges, the agents’ dinners — and wrote it up as a single continuous story. The timing was extraordinary luck. That year Venus Williams won Wimbledon and the US Open and took Olympic gold in Sydney, Lindsay Davenport and Martina Hingis were fighting to stay ahead of what was coming, and Anna Kournikova was the most photographed player in the sport without having won a tour singles title. The book caught a hinge year in the act.
What it’s about
The animating concern is the gap between the product and the business behind it. Wertheim’s argument is that women’s tennis in 2000 was simultaneously the most commercially successful women’s sport in the world and a chaotic, barely governed enterprise, and that the two facts were connected. Individual players are effectively small companies. Their parents, coaches, agents and sponsors all have distinct financial interests in them, and those interests do not reliably align with the athlete’s health, education or long-term happiness.
The book works through what that produces. Girls turn professional in their teens with adult-sized earnings and adult-sized obligations, having been coached full-time since childhood by parents who are often also their employees. Ranking systems and appearance fees push players to compete injured. Marketability and results come apart, so a player who never wins a major can out-earn one who does — a point Wertheim makes without much sympathy for the resulting complaints from either side. And the tour’s governing bodies, sponsors and broadcasters all have reasons not to interfere.
Running underneath is the Williams story: two sisters coached by their father outside the entire junior-tennis pipeline, arriving in a sport that had no idea how to categorise them and, Wertheim documents plainly, was often unwelcoming in ways that had nothing to do with tennis. His reporting on the resentment and the whispered accusations they faced is one of the more valuable parts of the book, and it reads better two decades on than most contemporary coverage does.
Key ideas
- The athlete as a small business. Each player sits at the centre of a network of paid dependants, which distorts every decision about scheduling, injury and coaching.
- Parents as the structural problem. The parent-coach arrangement, near-universal at the time, makes it very hard for a young player to get disinterested advice about her own career.
- Fame and results are separable. The Kournikova phenomenon showed that endorsement value could be almost entirely uncoupled from the scoreboard, with consequences for what young players were taught to optimise.
- Early professionalism and burnout. Wertheim traces the pattern of teenage stars flaring and fading, and the tour’s belated, partial attempts to limit how much a minor can play.
- The Williamses as outsiders. Their unorthodox path and the hostility it attracted are treated as a story about the sport’s insularity rather than about the sisters.
- Nobody is in charge. Tours, federations, agencies and the four majors have overlapping and competing authority, which is why obvious reforms kept not happening.
Who it’s for
If you care about tennis, this is close to essential — it is well reported, briskly written and unusually clear-eyed about the economics that sports journalism normally leaves out. It is also a good case study for anyone interested in how young athletes are managed as assets. Two caveats. First, it is a period piece: the players are frozen in 2000, and much of the specific gossip has dated, though the structural analysis has not. Second, the tone is tabloid in places — the subtitle is a fair warning — and the book leans on locker-room anecdote in ways that sit uneasily beside its more serious arguments. Reviewers at the time made exactly that complaint. Read it for the reporting and the moment it captures.