Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life
James Blake's life was getting better every day. A rising tennis star and People magazine's Sexiest Male Athlete of 2002, he was leading a charmed life and loving every minute of it. But all that ended in May 2004, when Blake fractured his neck in an on-court freak accident. As he recovered, his father—who had been the inspiration for his tennis career—lost his battle with stomach cancer. Shortly after his father's death, Blake was dealt a third blow when he contracted zoster, a rare virus that paralyzed half of his face and threatened to end his already jeopardized career.
In Breaking Back, Blake provides a remarkable account of how he came back from this terrible heartbreak and self-doubt to become one of the top tennis players in the world. A story of strength, passion, courage, and the unbreakable bonds between a father and son, Breaking Back is a celebration of one extraordinary athlete's indomitable spirit and his inspiring ability to find hope in the bleakest of times.
Product Details
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
Tennis champion Blake, who has appeared on Oprah and The Tonight Show, shares his string of hard-won successes both on the court and in his personal health. A child of a black father and white British mother in Fairfield, Conn., Blake hooked into serious tennis playing by age 11, when he was paired with coach Brian Barker, who remained his gentle mentor for the duration of his career. Having turned professional by his sophomore year of college at Harvard in 1991, Blake had mixed success on the pro circuit for the first few years. Sustaining confidence seemed to be Blake's biggest challenge, as he struggled to follow the advice of his father, Tom, who was fighting a losing battle with stomach cancer: You can't control your level of talent, but you can control your level of effort. At age 23, he decided to shave his trademark dreadlocks. Soon after, he ran into a steel net post during a practice game in Rome, fracturing his neck vertebrae. Blake was later diagnosed with paralyzing zoster, or shingles. His memoir is an inspirational account of overcoming the odds to return to competitive playing by 2004. (Aug.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Bruce Schoenfeld
The zone of unreality that often separates important politicians from the real world is nothing compared to the cocoons that surround top professional tennis players. As teenagers, they're already getting handed off from tournament director to tournament director, lodged in luxurious hotels and catered to by sponsors, agents and tour officials while the endorsement checks accumulate. Any interaction with normal people in the cities they pass through is fleeting.
James Blake has always been different -- but not that different. Raised by an African-American father and white mother in an academic-minded household in Fairfield, Conn. (his middle-class parents awarded him $25 for every 100 books he read), he wasn't shipped off to a tennis academy at the first sign of precocious talent; he actually played on his high school team. For two years, Blake attended Harvard and became the best collegiate player in America. But after a flurry of interest from some of the world's biggest management groups, which saw in him the sketchy outline of a Tiger Woods of tennis, he turned professional in 1999.
Before long, he was tucked into the same cocoon as the tennis lifers, partying with Giorgio Armani, meeting the pope, accepting as his due the perks of his profession. "Life out on the tour," he admits early in Breaking Back, his chronicle of a 2004 season filled with distress, injury, illness and -- ultimately -- insight, "is often one long dream." Four years into his professional career, he'd won only a single ATP Tour event. He routinely stayed up all night after each loss, distracting himself with hours of video poker. Yet as he shamefully realized, as of December 2003, his biggest decision was whether to shave off the dreadlocks that had become his signature look and risk losing endorsement dollars in the process.
During the annus horribilis that followed, Blake came to understand the shallowness of such an existence. First his father, an ex-soldier called "iron man" by his wife, fell ill with stomach cancer. He was already deteriorating when Blake suffered a freak accident on a practice court in Italy that fractured a vertebra. Then he contracted zoster, or shingles, which rendered half his face immobile, forced him to shuffle down hallways like an invalid and threatened to end his career.
The fracture had a silver lining: It enabled Blake to spend his father's last weeks with him. And in the midst of his own recovery, Blake experienced an epiphany: "[I] thought about how many matches I had squandered or let go out of impatience or frustration . . . how little I had bothered to learn about all the cities I'd visited. I thought about how truly unique my position was, and yet it was not until then that I'd ever recognized it as such."
As his run of misfortune continued, so did his philosophical journey. When he attempted to push through a comeback session against his doctor's recommendations, he found he could hardly hit the ball. "That was the first time when I really came to recognize the limits of willpower and resolve," he writes, words of true wisdom that I've been waiting years for any athlete to utter. (Next on my list: "God had no interest in the outcome of this game.") Ultimately, it became clear to Blake that his former concerns were hardly concerns at all. "When you play tennis for a living," he writes, "the world is pretty simple; it's the rest of the world and the rest of life that's much more complicated."
Not since Courting Danger, Alice Marble's 1991 tale that revealed (or perhaps invented) her undercover work as a World War II spy, has a tennis autobiography offered its readers so little tennis. By the time Blake offers detailed play-by-play of a match 186 pages in, we're ready for it -- and firmly on his side. Befitting the heightened state of Blake's enlightenment, the book's climax is a defeat: to Andre Agassi, in a U.S. Open semifinal.
Yet in true Zen fashion, by relaxing his grip, Blake began to succeed as never before, winning two more tournaments and earning a ranking in the world's Top 25. Taking stock of his success in December 2005, he asked Brian Barker, his longtime coach, if he was truly "bound for bigger and better things than either of us really thought were possible." Barker's response serves as a fitting coda for this admirably unusual sports memoir: "He looked at me incredulously. 'I have no idea,' he said."
Copyright 2007, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Review
"Blake is a champion—in every sense of the word." -- Anna Wintour, editor-in-chief of Vogue
"I’ve known James since early childhood...James’s rise to international success is as stunning as it was predictable." -- John Mayer
"The grace and dignity that James has shown during some very difficult times has been a source of great inspiration." -- Andre Agassi
"Through Blake’s commitment and passion, he tells the story of the life lessons he learned while facing difficult personal challenges." -- —Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe, wife of the late Arthur Ashe
"[James Blake] has inspired young people everywhere with his story of courage and determination." -- —former president George H.W. Bush
Customer Reviews
On Human Spirit
When I learnt that James Blake, the author of the book, whom I have admired as a good tennis player, suffers from a condition which affects me as well, I was surprised and decided to pick up this book hoping to gain some insights by learning how he managed to stay fit enough to become a tennis pro....
Though little has been discussed about Scoliosis,there is enough in the whole book, which I thoroughly enjoyed reading. The fundamental aspects which have governed the life of James Blake are seemingly obvious but hard to stick to and implement during trying times like the ones he had to face up in 2003 with a broken neck and losing his hero, his dad, to cancer - accepting what has transpired, taking one step at a time, focusing on process rather than results, count one's blessing rather than brooding what could have been, and simple things like these...
It seems to me that we are good at learning things when we can tie them to experiences, both direct and vicarious. The lessons that I take away from the life of James Blake - how he dealt with career threatening injury in neck, a viral attack that left him paralyzed in left side of the face and made a comeback within a year, how his dad, who really comes out as a super hero as described by James Blake, dealt with imminent death...
I would highly recommend this auto biographical account to anybody who is concerned about gaining some insights into what really defines the strength of one's character...
Inspirational
I learned about James Blake last year when I started watching tennis matches on the Tennis Channel. The book is easy to read. I highly recommend it.
Broring and obvious
The most boring tennis book I ever read.I bought almost every single tennis book Amazon has to offer, and this one is by far the dullest one.This book is not aimed at the serious tennis player.You'll learn nothing new from it.It's just a personal journal where he keeps trying to take the focus away from tennis. The only conclusion I arrived to is that Blake's life without tennis is boring as hell.
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