"Take your seats for the most unusual tennis tournament in the history of the world. Paris has gone crazy, flags and banners are everywhere. Every hotel is booked out. Queues at the stadium are huge, and the worldwide television audience is tipped to be in the billions." "Each nation is fielding its great names: the American team boasts Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Amelia Earhardt and many others, while British stars include PG Wodehouse, Enid Blyton and James Joyce. 'Supertom' Eliot is on sadly indifferent form, 'Because I did not serve too well. / Because I did not serve'. Groucho Marx confuses Heidegger - 'By the third set Marx was running around his backhand. By the fourth set he was running around his accountant. He was trying to get his accountant to run around his backhand when the match finished.' You've never seen anything like it." (Publication summary)
'What an extraordinary fellow John Clarke was: a comedian who savoured poetry, a political satirist who didn’t do impersonations, a comic genius who was genial. When Clarke died in April, aged 68, while tracking down his beloved birds in the bush, it was apparent he was special to a great swag of people. He was special to people because he was special in himself.' (Introduction)
'The Tournament is one of the oddest and funniest books ever published in Australia. It’s like Afferbeck Lauder’s Let’s Stalk Strine, or the poems of Ern Malley: we could never have predicted its existence, but it allows us to see and hear ourselves differently. John’s early drafts made it plain that he was doing much more than imagine the great minds of the century playing each other at tennis. That would have been peculiar enough, but it would also have been merely amusing, a charming gesture.' (Introduction)
