At its core, I’ll Take the Sunny Side is a book about storytelling, the importance of social connection, and the search for purpose later in life. Tennis provides the connective tissue, but it is not the engine driving the narrative. This is a book about how people make sense of the lives they have already lived.
Readers familiar with Gordon Forbes will inevitably approach this book with expectations shaped by his earlier book, A Handful of Summers. When I picked up I’ll Take the Sunny Side, I assumed I was in for another unsparing account of life on the professional tour. Having just finished another “life on the tour” book last week, I even viewed this one as a logical follow-on. Although it includes some stories about Forbes’ time on the tennis circuit, it is fundamentally not a book about that topic.
From the outset, Forbes makes it clear that this book occupies the interstitial space between fiction and non-fiction. While largely grounded in fact, the author is refreshingly honest about the liberties taken in the service of a good story. The men who gather for the recurring seniors’ buffet lunches at their club are not interested in letting a few inconvenient facts interfere with narrative flow. That framing is important because the book is less about documenting events than about examining how stories function within friendships and over time.
Those lunches form the structural backbone of the book. Forbes and his companions, a group of writers, scholars, and editors, wander through conversations about politics, books, sport, and aging. Beneath the surface, however, they are repeatedly circling the same questions. What does achievement mean once the obvious ladders have already been climbed? What does purpose look like when there is nothing left to prove? What, exactly, constitutes a life well lived?
Forbes once understood the idea of “reaching the top” in a very literal sense through tennis. His friends apply that concept more broadly, and more gently, to happiness, contentment, and fulfillment in later life. There is no single prescription offered. Instead, the value lies in the questioning itself. Anyone who is in or approaching the later phases of life will recognize both the uncertainty and the comfort in those conversations.
Tennis, of course, remains a recurring reference point. There is a shared belief among the group that the game was more entertaining in earlier eras and that modern players are too similar to each other to consistently produce compelling matches. That perspective is undeniably influenced by nostalgia. Even so, their discussion of how television has impacted tennis, influenced style, and shaped on-court personas that panders to fans raises thoughtful and surprisingly current questions about what is gained and lost when sport becomes modern.
One of the most resonant moments in the book comes in a piece of advice Forbes recalls receiving from his father when he left home for boarding school. “When you come to forks in the road be sure to read the signposts, and think carefully, ‘is that the way I want to go?’ You may not have the answers, but make sure you ask the questions.” It is advice that echoes throughout the book, not as a grand philosophy, but as a quietly practiced habit. By any reasonable measure, Forbes followed this advice well.
Ultimately, I’ll Take the Sunny Side is not a book about winning, or even about tennis in the competitive sense. Rather, it is a book about defining your own version of the top, and about recognizing that happiness, thoughtfully achieved, may be the highest destination of all.
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