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Short Circuit, my most successful and simultaneously most catastrophic publishing experience, started with a miracle and ended with a welter of legal actions and lunacy.

In the summer of 1981, I was living in London trying to persuade a publisher to finance a book about the man’s professional tennis tour. I conceived of it then as a species of travelogue, a bit like Paul Theroux’s Great Railway Bazaar, but with tennis instead of trains as the unifying principle. For six months, I would globetrot with McEnroe, Borg, Connors, Lendl and crew, writing up my impressions of people whom I regarded as an international tribe with distinct mores, quaint mating habits and a ritualistic worship of money.

My agent reacted to the proposal as though hit by a tranquilizer dart dosed with Thorazine. Too bored to bother submitting the idea to editors, she encouraged me to occult thrillers. When I lamented her indifference at a dinner party, a stranger, a fellow named Jerry Epstein, professed to find the notion of an inside look at pro tennis fascinating and potentially very profitable. Although not an agent per se – he worked in theater and films – he said he had brokered a few book deals, including the biography of Charlie Chaplin, and he bet he could get me a contract.

I accepted his wager and next morning I accepted his invitation to meet an editor at Collins Publishers. By lunchtime I had received an offer of a $30,000 advance. While I pride myself on being poker-faced, I didn’t care to risk overplaying my hand. I cared even less to give the editor a chance to reconsider his decision. I insisted we sign a deal memo on one of the restaurant’s monogrammed napkins.

The miracle didn’t end there. Within weeks I had lucrative contracts in the United States and France. Then when I set out on the tour with credentials from Associated Press, I learned at the first tournament that top pro players routinely take under-the-table guarantees, tank doubles matches, split the publicly announced prize money and sometimes orchestrate the action to make it more exciting or to fit a television time slot. Visions of succès de scandale and a bestseller fizzed in my brain like one of John McEnroe’s mesmerizing second serves. I felt I had first-rate material and the timing was just right. Although there had long been rumors of financial and ethical improprieties in pro tennis, no reporter had been able to pin them down, naming names, events, offenses and dollars and cents figures as I was prepared to do.

The early signs were all encouraging. The Book of the Month Club made Short Circuit a summer alternate and serial rights were sold to newspapers and magazines throughout the world. Excerpts were bought by Harper’s and the Washington Post in the U.S.A., Stern in Germany, Lui in France and Playboy in Italy. Negotiations with the Daily Express in London had reached the point where a fee of £40,000 seemed possible. BBC, NBC Nightly News and CNN were planning special coverage. Newsweek, Associated Press, UPI, People, US, the London Sunday Times, the Observer and a host of sports magazines had requested interviews. A promotional tour, starting with the Today Show during the first week of Wimbledon, was scheduled to keep me on the road for three months. David Susskind agreed to devote his entire 90-minute television show to Short Circuit and said he wanted to make it into a movie.

For the first time in my career, I had the sense that I was in the driver’s seat. Little did I imagine that I was actually in the death seat. Worse yet, I was about to be shredded under the wheels. What happened hit me so fast and hard, doubled me over and circled back to hit me again with such ferocity, I immediately lost all power to comprehend, much less defend myself. While any description of events will sound sequential, it’s crucial to keep in mind that much of what follows occurred virtually simultaneously, like nuclear fission that results in an enormous explosion.

Harper’s, which had contracted to publish a 5,000-word excerpt from Short Circuit, wound up running almost 12,000 words and these it characterized as “abridged.” This was a euphemistic way of saying they weren’t the words that I had written. Sentences and whole paragraphs were added, significant transitions and qualifying phrases were deleted, the chronology was rearranged and interviews were edited so that questions were mixed up and linked with the wrong answers. What’s more, many of the names of players and sources whom I had quoted were left out.

This allowed people in pro tennis, not to mention some reviewers who read the abridged section instead of the book, to criticize me for not naming names. In the coming months, other magazines, acting without approval or payment, ran excerpts based on the error-ridden Harper’s hodgepodge, each version veering farther from what I’d written.

Since Harper’s had lifted material from every chapter of Short Circuit, reassembling it in a shape that suggested the entire book had been condensed into a Reader’s Digest edition, my publisher felt its rights had been abrogated and complained that they would have difficulty selling for $16.95 a story whose essence had already been distributed for the price of a magazine. My agent disagreed. He felt Harper’s was great publicity and a good bet to give me future assignments. They had, he said, already asked me to cover the Humor and Satire Festival in Bulgaria – which itself struck me as a joke. But he swore he was serious.

Meanwhile, Andrew Nagorski, Newsweek’s Rome correspondent, had read the galleys of Short Circuit, interviewed me at length and filed a story which, he swore, gave me full credit. But, as rewritten in the New York office, the article cited me only in passing and never mentioned the title of the book. Instead, it appeared that Newsweek had been out on the tour investigating corruption in pro tennis.

Nagorski, an honorable man, promised he’d correct this false impression and force the home office to make it clear that the article was based entirely on Short Circuit. But he succeeded only in getting my name mentioned a few more times and having the title listed in a footnote. He did assure me, however, that Newsweek intended to do another article on the book.

That they did, but not before Newsweek sold the reprint rights to its article to the Daily Express, which decided it was foolish to pay me £40,000 for the serial rights to Short Circuit when it could publish a detailed synopsis of the book for a few hundred pounds. Eventually Newsweek did do a second article – this one by the late Pete Axthelm who quoted and paraphrased my book freely – which concluded that pro tennis had serious problems but dismissed Short Circuit as naïve.

Twice burned by Newsweek, I decided it was time for more emphatic action. I threatened suit, accusing the magazine of plagiarism and passing off my material as its own. In lieu of financial compensation, Newsweek agreed to give Short Circuit a review, which seemed the very least it could do.

By now, Stern had run an excerpt – under the name of one of its own staff writers. No mention of me or Short Circuit. Already reeling over the Hitler’s diary debacle, Stern quietly paid an out-of-court settlement.

When the Washington Post published its three-part serialization, it was punctilious about identifying the book title and the author’s name. But like Harper’s, the Post unilaterally decided to delete the names of players and sources I had identified.

* * * * *

Playboy Italia, for reasons never explained, didn’t run the excerpt they bought. But a tennis magazine in Milan published extensive quotes which it attributed to another American journalist. It took a year and the intervention of a lawyer to persuade the magazine to pay for what it had printed.

I had high – and misplaced – hopes that television would redeem some of the depredations of the press. When a BBC camera crew, producer and commentator came to interview me in Rome, I spent a day answering questions, giving them names and phone numbers of sources who could confirm my allegations and providing a videotape of an interview with Arthur Ashe. The BBC professed to be pleased with the material and asked to refuse all other television interviews until their program aired.

During Wimbledon, BBC broadcast what it referred to as its own special investigation of pro tennis. I played what might most politely be called a peripheral role. Identified as “the most hated man in tennis,” I was shown on camera for one minute during the course of the half-hour program and my book was never mentioned. Instead BBC trotted around to the same sources I had tapped for Short Circuit, asked the same questions and, miracle of miracles, made the same discoveries.

Worse was to come. Associated Press, which had provided me with press credentials and paid me to file stories as a stringer during the early stages of my research, publicly denied that I had ever worked for the news agency and claimed that I had had no right to apply for credentials through the AP. In a letter to the International Tennis Federation, AP’s European sports editor disavowed any connection between me and his organization. The letter was photocopied and widely distributed during Wimbledon, then at the U.S. Open.

Again, it took months, the threat of legal action and a lawyer’s ministrations to convince AP to issue a correction and come to an out-of-court settlement.

By then I was in Paris for the publication of the French translation of Short Circuit and my editor, an urbane and philosophical soul, listened patiently to my complaints and agreed, “It’s a shame, but you’ve got to realize the place of books today. As a writer, you’re in the research and development department of the entertainment industry. Your job is to produce raw material. After that it’s out of your hands. As far as anybody in the media is concerned, the material doesn’t belong to you any more than a diamond belongs to the poor black South African miner who digs it up.”

I was content to come away from France with that one nugget of wisdom. But I received an unexpected bonus. A magazine in Paris published the best photograph of me ever taken. Nearly life-size, printed in full color, it hangs framed on the wall of my office and its caption, in prominent block letters, reads: “MEWSHAW: PARANOID?”