Sports Fact and Book Rec of the Day 9/19/2007

9/19/1970:
Only a week after completing a Grand Slam of all four major women's tennis titles, Margaret Smith Court is upset by Chris Evert in the clay-court Carolinas Classic. Yesterday, the 15-year-old from Florida beat Francoise Durr with a patient, deliberate baseline game, and today she shocks the tennis world by outlasting the all-time leader in major singles titles, 7-6, 7-6. Evert will lose to Nancy Richey in the finals here tomorrow, but the high school sensation from Fort Lauderdale will go on to an extraordinary career of her own, winning 18 major titles, fourth on the all-time list.

Birthdays:
Willie Pep b. 1922
Andre Boudrias b. 1943
Joe Morgan b. 1943
Sidney Wicks b. 1949
Randy Myers b. 1962

SPIRITUALITY

“An astonishing book, unsentimentally, baleful, yet oddly affecting. I have never read anything quite like it.”—Witold Rybczynski

“Infinitely moving and powerful, just dead-on right, and absolutely original.”—Joan Didion

“Like his neighborhood, the author’s book is organized into small numbered lots...and in them he seeks to find his own place in the spiritual grid.”—The New Yorker

Suburban California is brilliantly evoked in Waldie’s series of short, taut essays. You’ve never read a memoir this original or atmospheric.

s	HOLY LAND: A SUBURBAN MEMOIR, by D. J. Waldie (St. Martin’s Griffin, 1997)