Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played. L. Jon Wertheim. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 211 pages. $24.

On a spring morning in Paris last year, Sports Illustrated writer L. Jon Wertheim was hoping to write a book about an incredible tennis match. Amazingly enough, one was served up for him a month later at the 2008 Wimbledon men's singles final -- a five-set epic between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal that justifiably was dubbed an instant classic.

Strokes of Genius describes the drama of this match in lively detail. Wertheim's grasp of tennis is informed not just by the many players and events he has written about for more than a decade, but also by a keen sense of its essential grammar. ''They're out there alone, cordoned off from outside influence,'' Wertheim writes of tennis players. ``Unlike golf, the competition is simultaneous. . . . Tennis is the most gladiatorial sport going.''

As naturally occurs in any competitive battle, the contrasts are most obvious. There's the right-handed Federer, the dominant, cucumber-cool, elegant Swiss who had won five straight titles on Wimbledon's velveteen grass. ''This isn't Everyman,'' writes Wertheim. ''It's Superman . . . moving gracefully to deifying, classical music.'' There's Nadal, the contender, at once visceral and humble, out to win his first major on a surface other than the rough-and-tumble clay where he had rapidly become a legend.

Wertheim's easily accessible match detail is richly supplemented with biographical portraits, covering such topics as Federer's youthful temper, Nadal's athletic family and, as each rose up the ranks, their similarities. As Wertheim writes, Federer and Nadal shared ``a similar sports code, a shared sense of how a top athlete ought to comport himself.''

Along the way, Wertheim deftly touches on all the defining factors of contemporary tennis. But most of all, it's the incredible match that's the centerpiece.

Joel Drucker reviewed this book for The San Francisco Chronicle.

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