• by Larry Dobrow , Featured Columnist, August 4, 2005

When Tennis announced plans for a top-to-bottom revamp, it seemed inevitable that the venerable tips-n-grips title would go the leisure-activity - as - a -lifestyle route. I envisioned a publication fat with tennis fashion spreads, tennis makeup advice, tennis cars, tennis décor, tennis recipes, and tennis celebrity gossip. I assumed, naturally, that it would suck.

The good news, then, is that the Tennis renovation confines itself mostly to graphic redesign. The grey blobs of text find themselves replaced by shards of bright color and a handful of slender sidebars. Out of necessity, the photography remains mostly the same: Few tennis pubs have much to offer beyond the lunging-for-drop-shot, winding-up-killer-backhand, and pouncing-post-serve poses. But overall, Tennis has succeeded in thrusting itself design-wise into the 21st century. Before, it had stalled somewhere around 1978.

From an editorial perspective, the results are slightly more mixed. Perhaps owing to the comparatively puny size of the August issue - it clocks in at 88 pages - several of the features feel rushed. This is most noticeable in the ongoing countdown of the 40 greatest players of the last 40 years (which the just-hit-40 mag immodestly dubs "the Tennis era"). The issue does a disservice to legends like John Newcombe by encapsulating their careers in a mere 100 to 125 words. Despite this, the mini-mini-features don't lack for wit or nuance: about Monica Seles, Tony Lance writes, "...the woman with the Olive Oyl hairdo, Woody Woodpecker laugh, and super hero grunt ended up with a bang-'em-on-the-head game straight out of Looney Tunes."

Much better is the "baseline" section of newsy blurbs and featurettes. Though it borrows liberally from Sports Illustrated's front-of-the-book "Scorecard" (a sport-themed celeb Q&A, a facts/figures sidebar, etc.), the section unearths a glut of info that even tennis aficionados might not yet have stumbled upon.

One item pairs the shortest and tallest players on the men's tour for some light banter, while another checks in with '80s sensation Hana Mandlikova. Better still is the reporting on China's tennis boom, which includes a solid Bond-villain-ish quote from some tournament dude ("It's very important for China to do well in tennis. All efforts are being made to achieve this objective"). Can't you just picture the guy rhythmically tapping his fingers together as he says this, followed by a throaty, evil laugh? The lesson, as always: I gotta get out more.

Despite its dippy cover headline ("Fit and Focused"), the August issue's conditioning-centric feature on Maria Sharapova doesn't hesitate to acknowledge her flaws as a player, going so far as to note the superior athletic ability of foes like Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin-Hardenne.

The other main story, on showboat shots (think the Triple Lindy from "Back to School," but with a racket), gets a lift from its neatly illustrative accompanying photography. On a different front, I would have liked to see the piece on 16-year-old prodigy Donald Young delve deeper into issues of race and class, but maybe that's because I've already ingested about 20 stories on the kid. As a primer, it works well enough.

Finally, while I recognize the publication's long-lead status, Tennis really ought to concern itself a bit more with timeliness. The item on the Williams sisters' appearance at the White House Correspondents Dinner may be right in the mag's wheelhouse, but the event took place on April 30 - rendering coverage of it the publishing equivalent of six-week-old milk.

In the end, the mostly-new Tennis remains a solid bet for both casual and involved fans. The mag may limit its audience by shying away from the hype that could lure neophytes dazzled by Sharapova and her fresh-faced peers, but to abandon its sport-first heritage would be sheer folly. It's one of the increasingly rare publications that doesn't try to be something it's not, and earns points for bucking the trend towards lifestyle glitz.