Local author’s book shares tennis pro Roscoe Tanner’s faults, redemption off the court

Encinitas writer Mike Yorkey has co-authored the new book “Second Serve: My Fall from Grace and Road to Reconciliation” with Roscoe Tanner, the former professional tennis player who was once one of the top players in the world. Tanner won a grand slam title in the Australian Open in 1977 and then in his post-tennis life suffered financial faults that led to divorces, painful estrangement from his children and prison stints in both Germany and the United States.

“The book is full of ‘you can’t make this up’ stuff,” said Yorkey.

Yorkey said it’s a great story of a guy who was bowing to royalty on the lawns of Wimbledon, reaching the finals against Bjorn Borg in 1979, to 25 years later being in a jail cell in Germany and sharing a toilet. It’s also a story about family and reconciliation as Tanner sought to repair fractured relationships with his five daughters. One daughter Tanner reconnected with in 2024 after 20 years without speaking.

“I’m very proud of Roscoe trying to make amends; he made some bad decisions and we confronted that,” Yorkey said. “There’s no sugar coating…people can smell that a mile away.”

The new book is the culmination of a partnership that started over 20 years ago between the tennis player and the author. Yorkey, a lifelong tennis player, even got to share a court once with Tanner.

“He has a very famous serve,” Yorkey said of the left-handed serve that was clocked at 153 miles per hour, a world record through 2005. “He had the fastest serve in tennis for a long time and to see that thing race by me at an incredible speed was a thrill.”

A La Jolla native and Encinitas resident for the last 27 years, Yorkey has been an author for 30 years, writing or co-writing 125 books on a variety of topics from World War II to NFL players to parenthood.

At the start, he really wanted to be a sportswriter and while still at La Jolla High, even covered the high school football and basketball games for the La Jolla Light.

“I remember being paid 14 cents a column inch for my football stories for the La Jolla Light. I think an average story was 10 column inches long, so I was paid $1.40 an article,” he recalled.  “I wasn’t complaining, though, because I got a byline! But when the production crew chopped off two or three inches of my story to make it fit a certain space, that cost me 20 or 30 cents!”

After graduating with a degree in journalism from the University of Oregon, he moved to Mammoth Lakes for the skiing. He taught tennis lessons and did real estate before joining the staff of the small town newspaper, where he would eventually become editor. In Mammoth, he also met his wife Nicole, a Swiss ski instructor whom he married in 1979.

Yorkey eventually transitioned from newspapers to a magazine career with Focus on the Family publications. He started writing books in the early 1990s as a way to earn some extra money. One of his first books he wrote with friend Greg Johnson. Called “Daddy’s Home”, the two 30-year-old fathers asked fellow fathers about the best parenting advice they could offer.

“One thing that stood out was that the hours between 5 and 8 p.m were really important,” Yorkey said. “If you missed those with young children in the home, you missed a lot. Those were the golden hours.” The father of two adjusted his schedule to get off at 4:30 p.m. so he could be there for those golden hours.

In 1997, Yorkey moved back to San Diego from Colorado Springs for a job at a magazine called Family University. The job disappeared but his literary agent has kept him busy writing books ever since.

Yorkey has written a lot of self-help books over the years, on topics like health, organic eating and parenting, but he has really found a knack for co-writing memoirs. His first memoir was a partnership with former San Diego Charger kicker Rolf Benirschke, whom he connected with through “Daddy’s Home”, when Benirschke’s wife bought him the book and he recognized the author’s name from La Jolla High.

The book, “Alive & Kicking”, was a way for Yorkey to channel his inner sportswriter as he helped Benirschke tell his story, which was actually about more than just football but his experience overcoming ulcerative colitis.

Typically, Yorkey likes to spend six months to a year working with his subjects, drawing out their stories and learning their language, to truly capture their voice.

“Obviously, trust must be gained, I have to be empathetic. I also have to remind Roscoe or whoever I’m working with that there’s a goal and the goal is to make the reader have an experience almost like watching a movie so I need them to tell me what they’re feeling and seeing, tell me the conversations they had,” Yorkey said. “I also compliment them when they tell a story, if they get real…I feel that I have to lift them up and compliment them and make them feel good about the direction they’re going.”

Working with Tanner was one of his more unique experiences as the pair first met in 2004 when Tanner got out of prison. They were connected through Chico Hagey, a former professional tennis player whom Yorkey played doubles with back at La Jolla High.

Tanner had kept a diary in prison and wanted to tell his story—they worked together on “Double Fault”, which was published by a minor publisher, but at the time the book didn’t take off for various reasons.

“All these years later, we knew so few people got to hear the story… and a lot had happened in 20 years,” Yorkey said. “‘Double Fault’ had a much different ending. It turned out Roscoe wasn’t done with prison time, he had to do another stint, this time in Florida.”

This spring he met Tanner in Tucson, where he was giving a series of clinics to underprivileged kids at the University of Arizona. They spent four days together, where Yorkey got caught up on the last 20 years.

“Second Serve” goes into Tanner’s childhood in Tennessee and his climb to the top of the game, which includes some fun stories about players like Borg, Jimmy Connors and Arthur Ashe, his doubles partner. The book unapologetically dives into his post-tennis life of three marriages and divorce, losing money, missing child support payments, and buying a boat that he shouldn’t have which landed him in prison for passing a bad check. Yorkey helped Tanner paint a vivid picture of prison life, what he was eating, thinking and feeling: “I wanted to place the reader in the cell.”

The book explores the loss of his father, another marriage imploding and Tanner becoming a single parent dad. Now living in the Orlando area, Tanner is 73 years old and has a 19-year-old daughter that he got custody of when she was eight.  She now plays collegiate tennis.

While Yorkey has spent many years telling other people’s stories, he said it is doubtful he will ever write his own memoir.

“I didn’t do anything quite as exciting. I like kind of keeping things calm,” said Yorkey, now a grandfather to six grandkids. “I’m very thankful I get to do what I get to do and I get to meet a lot of interesting people and that’s the best part of the job.”

Find “Second Serve” on Amazon and learn more about the author at mikeyorkey.com