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A consumer’s guide to the best and worst of sports media and merchandise. Ground rules: If it can be read, heard, observed, viewed, dialed or downloaded, it’s in play here. One exception: No products will be endorsed.

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What: “Game, Set, Match: A Tennis Book for the Mind”

Authors: Charlie Jones and Kim Doren

Publisher: Andrews McMeel

Price: $14.95

Much of tennis is simply reflex, but there also is a mental aspect to the game. That is what is dealt with in this 200-page book, which is a compilation of advice from many of the biggest names in the sport.

Jones, a veteran sportscaster, and Doren, a motivational speech writer, have collaborated on four other books, including “Be the Ball: A Golf Instructional Book for the Mind.”

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Golf may be more of a mental game than tennis because you have more time to think between shots, but one’s psyche plays a big role in tennis as well.

“It’s not like golf, where you’re playing the course,” Tony Trabert says.

“You are mano a mano. That’s part of why it is a mind game.”

Mark McCormack, chairman and CEO of International Management Group, notes: “In tennis, when you’re on the court in a match, you’re hitting the ball 5% of the time, and 95% of the time you’re either in changeovers or between points. The flaw players have is they spend 99% of their time practicing the 5% and none practicing the 95%.”

Pam Shriver offers: “Once you understand your fears, your emotions, it’s easier to conquer them.”

Charlie Pasarell, noting everybody gets nervous, passes along some advice from Pancho Gonzalez: “To be able to use that nervousness and channel that nervousness in a positive way, to make yourself stronger and faster, to make yourself think clearer, is really something you have to work at.”

Regis Philbin readily admits he doesn’t handle the frustrations of the game very well, that he is always throwing his racket.

He talks about a game he had 30 years ago at a friend’s house and he threw his racket on a neighbor’s roof. “To this day, you can still see my racket sitting up there.”

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