Books: Winning Ugly

"Winning Ugly" is a book about the mental side of tennis - how to play the game as opposed to how to hit a forehand. It was written in 1994 by Brad Gilbert, one of the game's premier coaches. Gilbert has since coached several world class players, including current top 10 pros Andy Roddick and Andy Murray.

As a player, Brad Gilbert didn't have the weapons of his contemporaries - the enormous serve of Becker, the smooth net game of Edberg, the shotmaking genius of McEnroe. Yet he managed to stay near or in the world's top ten for large stretches of his career, and reached the quarterfinals of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, mostly due to his grasp of tennis tactics (here's Gilbert holding his own with Boris Becker).

"Winning Ugly" relates many of those important lessons - how to weather periods of on-fire play from your opponent, how to make people play shots they aren't comfortable with, how to make sure you're mentally plugged in before a match even starts. Some of it borders on gamesmanship, but Gilbert's advice is sound and will help most club players who want to win matches.

My favorite part of the book is actually the end, where Gilbert breaks down the strengths of all the top men's players from the '80s and '90s - Courier, Agassi, Lendl, Sampras, and more. There's a note of humility and reverence here, because while Gilbert is a great coach and a good player, he never had a signature weapon that could hurt the top guys (he never beat Ivan Lendl, for instance, despite playing him 16 times over a period of nine years).