Author: Federico Ferrero

This is a photographic and anecdotal journey through an explosive and somehow unique gesture in sport: the racket smash.

Why smash a racket? Why did some tennis players never even think they could do it? All tennis players – even amateurs – have had a moment of rage when, for the first time, their precious racket ended up in smithereens.

Filippo Trojano has shot dozens of studio pictures of smashed rackets, turning them into full-blown portraits; Federico Ferrero has complemented each shot with anecdotes and historical references. Rounding out the narrative are the words of tennis greats and archive photographs from the 1930s to the 1970s. The centrepiece, through and through, is the tennis racket.

Foreword by Marco Lodoli.

The riveting history of tennis – a game steeped in tradition but still ever –evolving.

Tennis is the summation and expression of man, what he has been and what he wants to become, solving numerous conflicts and developing a game that depends on the net sum of his qualities and shortcoming; that very sum then has to be turned into an identity complemented with ideas and strikes, tweaking, fine-tuning and even discarding them as needed, in order to identify the optimal strategy for each match. This is the only way to overcome one’s opponent and be the first across the line. It is an individual struggle that concerns everyone because human expression can only endure if it draws in its contemporaries and generates an economy that is advantageous for its performers, its organisers and its followers.

In this growing need for exasperation, Roger Federer appeared – the last monkey. But what kind of evolution can there be after him? This book attempts to answer this question beginning with the origins of man’s evolution.