Courts of Babylon: Dispatches from the Golden Age of Tennis

No sport has gone through the seismic changes that rocked tennis when the game, long a holdout against professionalism and creeping commercialism, abandoned its roots as a genteel, amateurs-only enterprise and became a pro sport, vying for the heart of the public with rivals like soccer, NFL football, or NBA basketball.

Peter Bodo, who has covered tennis since the dawn of this "Open" era as the chief writer for TENNIS magazine, was there to witness this transition and what it promised, wh...