Episode two of our quartet campaign, and (how shall I put this?) things take a slight turn from “creaky knees and committee politics” to “arson charges and incarceration.”
Welcome to The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player, where Nick Owen doubles down on the central proposition of the series: that the human mind, when cornered by mediocrity, will build itself a private Wimbledon and move in permanently.
Our man this time is Andrew Murray—a protagonist so devoted to the fantasy of sporting greatness that he upgrades himself into “Lord Andrew Murray”, an unreliable narrator with impeccable self-belief and absolutely catastrophic life management. In his telling, he’s collecting imaginary scalps at the majors, gliding through tournaments as if destiny has a wildcard with his name on it. In reality, he’s navigating a much less glamorous circuit: legal consequence, mental unravelling, relational wreckage… and prison.
(Podcast generated by Julian Pilkington-Sterne with a little help from Mork and Mindy down in the basement).
The book plays this brilliantly in a picaresque, comic-surreal mode: big, swaggering inner monologues colliding with the hard surfaces of courts, cells, and consequences. And crucially, Andrew isn’t only witnessed through his own delusions. He is tracked. Documented. Observed.
Enter Phoebe, an amateur ornithologist who records “sightings” of Andrew like he’s some endangered and baffling species – rare, volatile, and liable to appear suddenly in the wrong habitat. And alongside her: Evelyn Williams, writing letters that try (and sometimes fail) to make emotional sense of a man who is both magnetic and impossible.
What you get, in short, is a sequel that turns the dial from midlife sporting fantasy into something darker and stranger: a pataphysical journey where imagined glory keeps trying to outrun the literal bars of reality—and keeps, inevitably, running straight into them.
So: laugh, wince, and keep your belongings close. Because in Courting Lives, the line between creative imagination and psychological collapse isn’t merely thin. It’s… being called in by the authorities.
The Courting Lives of an Ageing Tennis Player
“Tennis belongs to the individualistic past – a hero, or at most a pair of friends or lovers, against the world.” (Jacques Barzun)
