It is obvious that sports writers write less about sport than about life. With False bounces, his third book, James Hyndman certainly celebrates the very beauty of tennis, the sport he has loved since childhood, but also uses it as a fruitful metaphor. And suddenly, tennis is no longer just about rackets and balls, but about filiation, love, courage and pride.
Posted yesterday at 7:00 p.m.
A player finds himself facing a ball, allowing him to finish off his opponent for good. “You walk towards her, you see her offering herself to you like a flower, and now the muscles contract, your race, from fluid that it was, becomes heavy and cluttered”, writes the popular comedian in a chronicle (“Conclude”) which speaks as much, if not more, of the transience of everything and the fragility of our certainties than of sport.
After oceans (2018) and An adult life (2020), James Hyndman therefore signs here his most beautifully singular and perhaps most personal book. List of memories, reflections on fatherhood, dialogue sketches, comic monologue: the actor reveals the versatility of his acting through some 25 short texts, several of which have already appeared between the pages of Tennis-mag, which he has been collaborating with since 2015.
And if some of these chapters are more in the register of sports commentary, and others did not necessarily deserve to be immortalized in a book (texts on the pandemic, in particular), the author is indeed playing on this short what we call literature, where the intimate and the universal collide, when he remembers his uncle who was once a referee at Wimbledon thanks to a fascinating alignment of planets (“Drobny”), or when he recounts his father’s wrath at his son’s domination of the field (“Bilan”).
His homage to one of his trainers (“Lost Photo”) perfectly encapsulates this balance between humour, perspicacity of the gaze and gentle melancholy with which the author uses tennis as a prism through which this sometimes somewhat muddled game that is existence momentarily finds its meaning and coherence. For Hyndman, writing and sports are both, in their own way, schools of life.
Book of a finesse that will delight neophytes of the yellow ball, False bounces yet rings true, as if James Hyndman is finally giving himself up completely to the writing game. And one day, ” [s]Without warning, tennis takes on another meaning, perhaps its true meaning. It becomes a rhythm, a breath, a flow to tune into. […] A free space where each blow, each stroke, each surprise invites you to improvise, to create, to express yourself”.
False bounces
James Hyndman
X Y Z
144 pages