Red Dirt: A Tennis Novel

I recently tried to re-read one of the Chip Hilton books that I loved as a kid. If you're not familiar with Chip, he's the main character in a series of sports-themed novels for boys by Claire Bee, a Hall of Fame basketball coach, published in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Chip, a teenager, excels in all sports and, through his superior morals and work ethic, invariably leads his basketball/football/baseball teams to the championship despite the calamities that always seem to befall someone en route. Either the books haven't aged well, or I haven't, because I could barely make it through one chapter.
Jaxie Skinner, the protagonist of Joe Samuel Starnes's new novel Red Dirt, is no Chip Hilton. For one thing, he's a grownup, professional tennis player looking back at his career that began when he was three years old and his father, having watched a thrilling Borg-McEnroe match on television, was inspired to build a tennis court into the red Georgia clay of the family's back yard. For another, he makes a long, self-destructive detour from his career, including a very un-Chip-like brush with alcoholism and numerous brief sexual encounters that demonstrate exceedingly poor judgment.
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The full review is here: Review of Red Dirt