Anton Chekhov is the top seed but is knocked out by James Joyce before the final game, set and match. Charlie Chaplin’s trousers fall down as he stretches for overhead shots, while Pablo Picasso, knocked out in the second round, is negotiating a lifetime sponsorship deal worth an estimated $400 million. Such is the scenario imagined by writer John Clarke in a forthcoming novel about the 20th century’s greatest cultural influences battling it out in a tennis tournament. ‘‘It’s about 150 years of ideas,’’ Clarke said. ‘‘I thought that breathing a bit of life into them and having them run round in a modern tennis tournament would be pretty good,’’ he added. Some 128 players from Louis Armstrong and Franz (‘‘a loner off court’’) Kafka to Albert Einstein and Amelia Earhart (‘‘whose best results have not been on any surface at all’’) serve and volley their way through the pages of The Tournament, which is being published to coincide with the world’s major tennis competitions. It was published in Australia late last year, in Britain in June and is being published in the US in September by Theia books. British writer Virginia Woolf, the world ladies No 2, is mysteriously seeded seventh; and playwright Oscar Wilde, an observer rather than a competitor, remarks that ‘‘one should always attend events in which one has no possible interest.’’ Unseeded British writer George Orwell prevails over Ireland’s James Joyce in a tough five-set final after realising that although ‘‘Joyce’s odyssey would continue unabated, Orwell could win only by playing the big points better.’’ Russian poet Anna Akhmatova triumphs in the women’s finals. (Reuters)
