TENNIS players eat, sleep, practice, play, shop, shake sponsors' hands, lift weights, fiddle with Nintendo ... what else?

They're always lolling in the players' restaurant, showing tremendous hand-to-eye coordination as they text at 100mph, and watch television till their brains switch off. But do they ever read?

Most athletes swear they never read about themselves, but they all seem to know when something rude has been written about them. Perhaps that's the coaches' job. Fix the backhand, take the abuse (some players shout at coaches during matches) and read the papers.

But athletes do read, sometimes the strangest of things, and at the strangest of times. Dinara Safina apparently is being inspired by books her coach, Zeljko Krajan, once read, though he told a local newspaper: "I'm not going to mention them because maybe all of a sudden it gets out and everyone knows her secrets."

Notes are somewhat common on court. Pete Sampras once read one from his wife at Wimbledon, which began ""My husband, 7-time Wimbledon champion Pete Sampras." Alas, he promptly lost in the second round. Serena Williams pulled out a notebook at the US Open one year and looked through it, which earned her repimand from the umpire. As she said then: "He told me I couldn't use my notes. I was like, 'Well, it's not like I'm Harry Potter and my dad can magically give me notes to read.' It's something that I write myself. Just little things. What if I were to take a paper on the court and write something, what's the difference?"

The most bizarre story, of course, involves four-time grand slam champion Jim Courier, who is in Australia fulfilling his role as a television commentator. Once during a match, he actually pulled out a book, Maybe the Moon by Armistead Maupin, and started to read during changeovers. Perhaps he was simply bored with his game.

A cursory check of players at this Australian Open has revealed two fellows with startling reading habits. Croat Roko Karanusic is keen on Russian writer Fyodor Dostoyevsky and German-Swiss poet Hermann Hesse, while Serb Janko Tipsarevic lists the psychiatry books of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche and German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe as among his favourites. Both men, of course, will have enough time to read, for both have already lost in the singles.