Overview
It's 1996 and enigmatic tennis professional Richard Blanco is enjoying a late-career run, reaching the Wimbledon quarterfinals. What no one knows is that he's hearing voices again. It won't be long before the ghost of punk rocker Luke Scream starts whispering dark nothings in his ear.
Over the summer, Blanco hopscotches the circuit from Los Angeles to the tennis academy where he's trained since childhood, but his brilliant play will be overshadowed by the escalating chatter in his head. By turns hilarious and dark, Moving in Stereo is a vivid portrayal of an athlete eyeing the end of his career while seeking the dignity that would make his dead father proud.
Advance Praise for Moving in Stereo
“Tom Trondson uses his considerable first-hand knowledge of professional tennis—its history, psychology, mores, and endorsement deals—for this seriocomic bildungsroman. His protagonist, Richard Blanco, is an erratic also-ran of the pro circuit: capable of winning on Centre Court but more likely to flame out spectacularly. Trondson has given us a persuasive, compelling bad boy: a caddish libertine and a haunted searcher who might be careening towards some sort of enlightenment. A crosscourt winner.”
— Dylan Hicks, author of Amateurs and Boarded Windows
“Having been a tennis coach for over 60 years, I've had my share of difficult students who've struggled to overcome their personal challenges. Tom Trondson's deep knowledge of professional tennis brings to life the story of a talented but dangerously troubled bad boy, who desperately needs to mature.”
— Nick Bollettieri, Internationally renowned American tennis coach and developer of the world’s first tennis academy.
Inside Moving in Stereo
“Three beers later, somewhere over the Atlantic, I opened the London Times sports page. I’d purposely held off reading what’d been written, afraid of what I might find. My instincts were correct. For there on page one was this enormous snapshot of yours truly. The photograph took up half the page, shot from across the court, bird’s eye view, wide lens. And the colors were tremendous. Imperial greens that gave way to paler jades that washed soft gray and stained white, a speck of red in the crowd like a drop of blood. I stood next to the net post, back toward the camera, in my tennis whites. Sir Hartley listened in. The fans in the background were like a Greek chorus. High above it all sat the heavy-lidded Sverdes.
It was how I looked that shamed me. I appeared enraged (the raised fist didn’t help). I was the embodiment of the solitary man, captured in all his impervious captivity. There I was—and there was everyone else. The whole world. And me.”