Allison Danzig began covering sports for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in 1921. For the next forty-seven years, forty-five of them at The New York Times, he specialized in writing about lawn tennis and indoor racket sports such as court tennis, squash racquets, and squash tennis, making himself, in the words of tennis authority Bud Collins, "the widest regarded literary voice of the game." Danzig wrote about tennis, as well as about football, crew, and the Olympic Games, in a straightforward and authoritative style that was backed up by a keen knowledge of the sports and their players. "If I didn't know what I'd seen," he remarked to Joy Duckett in a 1981 World Tennis magazine interview, "I shouldn't have been writing about it." Danzig's opinion of a tennis match carried special authority: like actors reading theatrical reviews, players would gather at newsstands the day after a match to see what...