Why does summer fly by so much more quickly than any other
season? It’s July 4 before I know it, it’s August 1st before I know it,
it’s—give me strength—time for the U.S. Open before I know it. This phenomenon
is obviously tied up with our memories of summer vacations as kids, when three
months of freedom weren’t squandered riding subways, holed up in offices,
sweating on city streets. Summer doesn’t speed up for adults, it just doesn’t
melt into one long block of time the way it once did.
For a tennis player, especially one whose courts remain tragically
unlit, the passing of June 21st is the worst of all. Talk about coming early:
How can the days start getting shorter, and my chances to play after work start
to dwindle, before I’ve even found my slice serve? Yet it’s happening as we
speak. Lights or no lights, though, this has been a productive season so far.
I’ve discovered a new racquet, made by, of all companies, Yonex. I’ve hit a few
topspin backhands into the court. I’ve run myself perilously close to dizziness
on a couple of brutally humid afternoons. And I’ve had the satisfaction, on one
occasion, of giving that aforementioned Yonex a good heave when I just couldn’t
take it anymore.
Until last month, I thought that I was the only player at my courts who had ever thrown his racquet. Where I play is not a country club, but
it isn’t a park, either—in other words, you don’t need to wear whites, but you do have to keep
your shirt on. The crowd is mostly older, and the competition consists primarily
of friendly pick-up doubles matches. This combination doesn’t lead to many
full-blown meltdowns or hostile confrontations. But the other day my partner
and I found ourselves delaying our match as a tall, gawky guy, who neither of
us knew, ranted and raved through what seemed at first glance to be just
another social doubles outing on the court next to ours. His screams resounded, his curses lingered in the air. Finally, the inevitable came: He lifted his
racquet over his head and slammed it to the ground. My opponent and I watched
all of this from our respective baselines before going ahead and playing a
point. When we came to the net to collect the balls afterward, each of us had the same question: “Who’s the jerk?”
Unfortunately, another thought crossed my mind as I walked
back to the baseline: “Is that what I look like when I throw my racquet?” The idea was embarrassing enough to make my face burn. How ugly and stupid it
looked from the outside. I had no excuse, though; I’d been throwing my racquet—sporadically,
not chronically—for years. These days I might do it two or three times a
season. I’d like to say that I didn’t start out as a thrower, and actually I
didn’t. I started out as a racquet kicker.
While my childhood hero was Bjorn Borg, I can remember seeing John McEnroe in
his 1977 Wimbledon debut deliberately riling up the stunned fans at the All
England Club by bouncing his racquet on the court and then kicking it along the
grass. McEnroe has said that hearing their boos and hisses made him want to kick some more. In the summer of Johnny Rotten, another rebel Johnny had been born.
There were no boos in my case, but I can also remember spending a large
part of at least one meaningless practice match in the early 80s kicking my
racquet around a cracked court at my local park. Every few games brought
another terrible error, which in turn brought my racquet to the ground, where I
would then spin it, boot it, virtually torture it with my foot. At one point,
nearly in tears, I sent it all the way from the net to the back fence, one
small but enraged kick at a time. Afterward, one of the women who had
been playing on the next court—and who knew my mom—walked over and told me
she’d never seen anything like that, and that I’d ruined her weekly tennis
game. Even my opponent, a friend, said, “You know, there’s something called
restraint in this game.”
My losses of restraint were mostly reserved for the practice
court. I wasn't the second coming of Superbrat; like I said, Borg remained my
idol. Slowly, though, I began to add the occasional racquet toss to my
repertoire. In high school, some of the lower-ranked players on the team—their parents had obviously made them join to keep them out of trouble in the afternoons—specialized in sailing their racquets into the playing fields below the courts.
(The fact that the girls’ track team practiced down there may have had
something to do with it.) But those guys were hacks compared to a college
teammate of mine. An upperclassman, you would see him start to play on a far court. Then you would hear him
start to lose. Then, after have an hour, you would look down to see his racquet
twirling elegantly over the far fence. There was something cool, rather than angry or
embarrassing, about the nonchalant way he launched it and then, without hurry, opened
the gate to retrieve it. A good, cathartic heave looked like just another part
of the game.
Every so often, I made it part
of my game. As I’ve written here before, after losing a doubles match at a
national championship, I smashed my Sampras Pro Staff until it broke, sent it
into orbit, and watched in terror as it barely avoided the windshield of an
oncoming car. I did something similar after an away loss in California; and it
wouldn’t have been a serious team practice if a stick didn’t fly somewhere, at
some point, from someone.
You might say this is bad form in a gentleman’s sport. You
might also say that it’s dangerous. You wouldn’t be wrong on either count. But first I would answer
that jettisoning an offending piece of equipment is not just a product of the bratty professional era. Ken Rosewall, of all people, bounced and kicked his frames all over
the grass. Second, I would say that it depends on the throw. I was appalled to
see Rainer Schuettler haul off and fire his racquet into a tarp at Key Biscayne
a few years ago. It was all rage, no style. Marat Safin was the most famous
stick-swatter of them all, and it was fun to see him take a defenseless frame
by the throat and put his whole body into maiming it. But there was also something
despairing and depressing about his approach. I liked
the no-nonsense, no-expression finality of Roger Federer’s Key Biscayne crush
job a few years ago—you get it all out and move on. I liked Vera Zvonareva’s
three-act breakdown in Charleston this year, though having that happen every
match wouldn’t be good for her or for us. I also like that the worst that
Rafael Nadal can do after a bad miss is scrunch his eyebrows and give his
racquet a swift, fed-up swish through the air. (Is there such thing as an
“uncle’s boy?”) I’m sure I’m blanking on the other great and notorious racquet chuckers off all
time, but I’ve always liked Andy Roddick’s style and timing. On most occasions,
though not all, he does it when I think I might do it, he snaps the frame down
with conviction but not ugly rage, and he gets it over with in a hurry. I’m
left nodding in recognition, rather than shaking my head in disgust.
For my own part, I’ve decided that, as a moderately
socialized adult, smashing my racquet on the court, and/or the tossing it over
the fence, is too much. Never mind that you can’t open the fence at my club, so
I would never be able to recover the thing anyway. Never mind that it would only
make me ashamed rather than relaxed. The important thing is that bashing or
chucking your racquet with that much energy, when you’re playing a match that
doesn’t even count, makes everyone around you feel worse. You’ve broken the
code that keeps friendly competition from turning into bloody murder.
Still, in my experience there are times, once a month or so,
after a double fault or a lucky break for my opponent or an overhead that
didn’t even reach the net, when the racquet must go. They say that if you play
enough, your frame becomes an extension of yourself. For example: Doesn’t it
feel inexplicably great to pick up your racquet and walk around with it in your
house, even if it’s just to take a few shadow strokes? However, the
reverse is also true. Your racquet is the easiest part of yourself to
sacrifice. It’s not like you’re blaming it. You’re blaming yourself, but you’re
also trying, in a literal way, to let go of your frustration.
A few weeks ago, I served for the match against a regular
opponent of mine. At 40-30, he came to the net, head-faked me into hitting the
ball right to him, and volleyed it away to make it deuce. I was quietly
infuriated about being duped like that, and the fact that he does that kind of
thing all the time just made it worse. I lost the next point and let out a yell
of frustration. I knew what was coming, but I was powerless to stop it: I
double-faulted to be broken. The fake-out, the double fault, the blown lead, it
was too much. Even before my second serve landed long, my racquet was whirling,
in a low line, toward my sideline chair. I didn’t throw it hard; it was a
simple and, I thought at the time, discreet flick of the wrist, like skipping a stone across a creek. We were also
playing on the last court, next to a fence, so there was no chance of it
hitting anyone. The Yonex landed in the clay without a sound. But, as I found
out later, it didn’t go unnoticed. A teenage girl playing next to me caught
the whole act. “Ooh,” she asked her playing partner in surprise, “does he
have a temper?” I’d obviously set a bad example. But after burying my head in
my towel for a second, I came back to break serve for the match.
Did that heave help me? I don’t know. I don't plan to employ it as a strategy in the future. What I do know is that, for a second or two, I enjoyed
watching my racquet sail. Where else in life do you get a chance to let your anger go, and then watch as it whirls in circles farther and farther away from you?
If only you didn't have to go pick it up.
***
Have a good weekend. See you Monday to talk about Stanford and L.A.
Tennis in Los Angeles lives on. We have this week's men's event, as well its defending champion, Sam Querrey, of nearby Thousand Oaks. But no one is pretending that it's quite like it used to be. The city was once the site of the most prestigious American tournament outside of the U.S. Open, the Pacific Southwest Championships, played at its most prestigious address, the Los Angeles Tennis Club. More important, the club was also the Bollettieri Academy of its day, if Bollettieri's only pumped out American champions. To celebrate the history of the sport in the city, I'm posting an article that I wrote on the club, its legendary major domo, Perry Jones, and its four greatest male players, Ellsworth Vines, Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer, and Pancho Gonzalez, for a recent issue of Tennis Magazine. As you'll see, it was a different world—tennis and otherwise—in those Depression and World War II era days.
***
As the United States lifted itself out of the Depression and triumphed in war, four middle-class kids were being lifted off the public courts of Los Angeles and into tennis immortality. The last of this pioneering group, Jack Kramer, died in September. We look back on their story, and how they changed the sport.
***
On Tuesday, October 29, 1929, shares in the New York Stock Exchange, which had climbed to dizzying heights over the previous six years, began to crater. This is commonly thought of as the moment when the United States took a collective leap out of a Roaring ’20s skyscraper and landed flat on its back in the dust bowl of the Great Depression. In reality, what would be called the Great Crash was a disastrous moment that lasted for nearly three years. The long slide in share prices wouldn’t hit bottom until July 1932.
It’s a measure of how far the aftershocks from this economic earthquake traveled that even the seemingly safe and staid confines of amateur tennis felt the effects. Six weeks before the Crash began, Bill Tilden, a child of Philadelphia society, had won his seventh and final U.S. Championship. Two months after the market bottomed out in the summer of ’32, Ellsworth Vines, the son of a single mother from working-class Pasadena, Calif., won the second of his two U.S. titles on those same grass courts at Forest Hills.
Tilden had been a glamorous symbol of the 1920s Golden Age of Sport. By 1932, he was a figure from tennis’ past, a symbol of its slowly receding Gilded Age origins. He would be the last champion to learn the game in an East Coast cricket club. The future would belong to Vines and others like him.
Through the Depression and war years, while the nation’s wealth was vanishing and about a quarter of its country clubs were being shuttered, the sport’s center of gravity shifted, from East Coast to West, from grass courts to cement, from the upper crust to the middle class. Three players who followed Vines off those cement courts in Southern California would become tennis immortals: Bobby Riggs, Jack Kramer and Pancho Gonzalez. Seeing the sport as a way to raise themselves up, the four of them, along with Northern California’s Don Budge, would help democratize and professionalize—Americanize—tennis at the same time that the country was raising itself out of the Depression, triumphing in war, and prospering through the 1950s. While they weren’t exact contemporaries—the L.A. four were born over a 17-year period— they would form their sport’s version of our “greatest generation.” With the passing of its final living member, Kramer, last September, we look back at their era and their accomplishments in an America very different from the one we know today.
At first glance, they seem to have been an accidental generation. None of the four were born into a family of serious tennis players; each came to the game in his own serendipitous way. It was Vines, and his world-class athleticism, who blazed the trail the others would follow.
Born in 1911 and abandoned by his father at a young age, Vines worked to supplement the income his mother made as a department store clerk. Sports were his escape. Tall and fluid, he excelled at basketball at the University of Southern California and later became a professional golfer.
Vines’ mother bought him a $10 racquet, and with little coaching he threw himself into this sport as well, developing a gambling power game based around his serve and forehand. At 19, in 1930, Vines was sent “back East” to represent the Southern California Tennis Association in the East Coast amateur summer circuit that was still the ticket to big-time tennis in this country.
The circuit wound through old-line grass-court clubs in the Northeast before culminating at Forest Hills. It was more than a tour in the money-seeking sense; it was part of a traditional social ritual. The country’s best players came to a club for a week, mingled with the members’ families, attended its parties, and played a tournament. In the process, raw young men of various backgrounds absorbed the standards—of sportsmanship, dress, manners—of the upper class.
This was foreign territory to the kids from L.A., and they would eventually find a way to circumvent it. For his part, Vines was homesick out East, and he wrote a steady stream of love letters, sometimes two a day, to his future wife, Verle. But nothing stood in the way of his talent, which shot him to the pinnacle of the game in 1931, when he won the U.S. Championships at age 20. The next year Vines reached a peak few would ever match when he beat Britain's Bunny Austin in under an hour, 6-4, 6-2, 6-0, in the Wimbledon final. Vines finished with a flourish: Austin said he never saw the ball that his opponent aced him with on match point.
Still, the gentlemanly Californian was destined to be a transitional, rather than a transformational, figure in American tennis. By the 1940s, he had grown bored with the sport. Kramer, his lifelong friend, summed it up: “Elly was a lazy guy.” But Kramer also said, “On his best days, Vines played the best tennis ever.”
Bobby Riggs and Jack Kramer, born in 1918 and 1921, respectively, came of age on opposite sides of a similar World War II-era coin. Kramer was tall, lean and blond; Riggs, at 5-foot-8, was scrappy and impish. Both were sports-mad as kids, and they loved to play the odds. Both did a hitch in the Pacific during the war.
Riggs was a minister’s son and the youngest of seven children. At 11, he followed one of his brothers to a tennis court, where he acquired his first racquet after seeing it on the ground and outrunning a dog to it. “I could use the racquet better than the dog can,” he said. Kramer was the only child of a railroad worker. A baseball lover, he picked up tennis because it was something he could do with his father. But it wasn’t until he was 14 that Kramer would hear of the man who would become his tennis father. Stung by a first-round loss at a tournament in Santa Monica, Kramer came back the next day to watch the better juniors. He asked where he could learn to hit the ball the way they did. Go see Perry Jones, he was told.
Perry Jones was, in the words of Los Angeles sportswriter Jim Murray, the “last of the Victorians,” a fussy, natty, snobbish bachelor and lumber executive who lived for tennis. More specifically, Jones, president of the USLTA’s Southern California section, lived for developing tennis talent. From his office at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, he made the section his fiefdom. Along the way, he also made the LATC an incubator of tennis champions, all of whom knew him as “Mr. Jones.” It was the Bollettieri academy, the dream factory, of its day.
“Factory,” however, wasn’t the right word to describe the Jones method. Saying he “was more interested in how [his players] live than how they play,” he tried to transport the high-toned atmosphere of the All England Club and the East Coast grass circuit to the hard courts of Los Angeles. He turned the Pacific Southwest Championships, which were held at the LATC, into a powerhouse. Seating members of L.A.’s fashionable society on one side of the court, and movie stars like Marlene Dietrich and Douglas Fairbanks on the other, Jones made the tournament a signature event of the city’s social calendar.
The Pacific Southwest also gave Jones’ young players a glimpse of top-flight tennis. On the more class-stratified East Coast, it was virtually impossible for a player who started on a public court to be taken in by a private club. But the doors at the LATC were open to talented kids wherever they could be found—as long as they played by Jones’ rules. In his autobiography, Don Budge recalled winning a match as a junior at the LATC and being summoned by Jones afterward. “I hustled over to him to pick up a compliment,” Budge wrote. “Instead, with a distinct frown, he looked me up and down. ‘Budge,’ Mr. Jones finally snarled, ‘those are the dirtiest tennis shoes I ever saw in my life. Don’t you ever—don’t you ever—show up again on any court anywhere at any time wearing shoes like that.’ . . . I know it made an impression on me, for I’ve never gone on court since that day with even scuffy shoes.”
Not all of Jones’ kids were so amenable; he and Riggs would clash for years. In 1930, as a 12-year-old, Riggs dominated his age division, and his first coach, Esther Bartosh, secured him a junior membership at the LATC. While Bartosh believed that Riggs, who was crafty and consistent but terminally undersized, had serious potential, Jones and the SCTA didn’t share her faith. “They like their players long and rangy, husky and powerful,” Riggs said of California officials. “I didn’t fill those basic requirements at all. All I could do was beat the people the big shots were sure I couldn’t beat.”
Riggs kept beating them, and the powers-that-be kept writing him off. He was put on the Davis Cup team one year only to be relegated to practice-partner status. “Every time I turned my back, they gave me a kick in the pants,” he said. Finally, in 1939, the USLTA bigwigs caved and let him have a crack at playing Wimbledon. Riggs tried to place a bet on himself to win the singles, doubles and mixed—he was allowed to bet on only one—and then did just that, recording a rare Wimbledon triple.
The rangy and hard-serving Kramer, on the other hand, fit the Southern California ideal to a T, and his respectful attitude made him a favorite of Jones at the LATC. That’s where Kramer met an older member and student of the game named Cliff Roche. The two men would change how the sport would be played for decades.
Roche, a hydraulic engineer in his 40s, had observed the tactics of the world’s best players as they passed through the club. He evolved a strategic theory that Kramer would call “percentage tennis.” More popularly known as the Big Game, the style made the serve and volley a core tactic, but it wasn’t about blind aggression. The goal was to put yourself in a position where you were most likely to win a point. “Cliff Roche showed me that the odds on a court could be the same as with a deck of fifty-two,” Kramer said.
As a player, Kramer was a pioneer of pragmatism; the Big Game would dominate the sport through the 1960s. Tilden, the emblematic player of the amateur ’20s, considered himself an artist on court, even a scientist of tennis. He believed that the goal should be never to miss. Kramer, who left the amateur circuit behind after winning Wimbledon and the U.S. Championships in 1947 for the kill-or-be-killed wilderness of the pros, believed in trade-offs and percentages. He was happy to take it easy on return games if it would help him save his energy for holding serve— in the days before tiebreakers, if you were never broken, you could never lose. It was a mind-set that another champion from Southern California, Pete Sampras, was still putting to good use 50 years later.
Kramer was equally pioneering off the court. He played, promoted and organized on behalf of the professional game for decades. But he may have made his biggest splash in his first year as a pro, in December 1947, when he and Riggs kicked off their two-man tour at Madison Square Garden in New York. A crowd of 15,000 fought their way through a blizzard to watch.
That auspicious beginning aside, Kramer and Riggs were 20 years ahead of their time; the amateur establishment would survive until 1968. It’s an historical irony that the next, more rebellious tennis generation, led by Billie Jean King, which brought the amateur establishment down for good, also ended up rebelling against these trailblazers of the pro game. King, like Riggs, was a pugnacious, undersized Southern Californian who had never forgotten her childhood clashes with Jones. In 1970, along with Gladys Heldman, she founded the WTA tour after leading a boycott of Jones’ crown jewel, the Pacific Southwest. By then it was run by Kramer, and it was paying its men’s champion nearly 12 times more than its women’s winner. Three years later, King would slay another of the LATC fathers when she trounced Riggs before a worldwide audience at the Astrodome in Houston. The Battle of the Sexes was fought in 1973. Vietnam was winding down, Watergate was winding up, and trust in authority was taking a nosedive, much like it has in recent years. None of that could have been foreseen in the 1950s, when, after the democratizing influence of Franklin Roosevelt and a new level of post-war prosperity, confidence in government was high. The democratization of tennis at mid-century would peak with two events: the breaking of the sport’s color barrier by Althea Gibson at Forest Hills in 1950, and the rise of the first Mexican- American champion, Pancho Gonzalez, who would win the U.S. Championships in 1948 and ’49.
Gonzalez, an L.A. native, chose to open his 1959 memoir, Man with a Racket, at the Los Angeles Tennis Club, where he was preparing for his first adult tournament. “Deep inside,” he wrote, “something seared me with its white heat. I’ve heard it described as desire.”
It was a white heat that would take Gonzalez from his Mexican neighborhood in L.A. to the top of the sport, where he remained for more than a decade. Starting with a racquet that was even cheaper than Vines’—it cost his mother 51 cents— Gonzalez, a lean serve-and-volleyer and famously vicious competitor, would win the U.S. Professional Championships eight times.
Gonzalez’s white heat also burned up everything around him. As a teenager, he was banned from SCTA events by Jones for chronic truancy, and his reputation grew darker through the decades. Even his friend Pancho Segura said, “the nicest thing Gonzalez ever says to his wives is ‘shut up.’” Gonzalez would die in 1995 in poverty, estranged from most family and friends.
There's no reason to doubt this version of Gonzalez’s story, but another side of him emerges in Man with a Racket. A product of his era, he respected the concept of authority even as he fought it. Discussing his early ban by the “brass hats” of the USLTA, he writes, “I caused trouble. To some of the disgruntled, a brass hat is a cuspidor upside down. To me it was a badge of authority placed on an intelligent head . . . somebody had to wear those mythical hats.”
What comes through more than rebellion is a discomfort with all types of formal society, with anything that hems him in or slows him down. Gonzalez can’t stand neckties—they “bind me,” he says. He has no patience for cocktail parties, where he feels trapped. On the pro tours, he drives from match to match in his own car, on his own schedule.
Gonzalez likes, more than anything, to be alone on one side of tennis court, where he controls every inch of ground and moves through it at will. The sport was the perfect vehicle for this particular American immigrant’s dream. “Pancho Gonzalez is America,” Segura writes in his introduction to Man With a Racket, “and America is Pancho Gonzalez. Here is a man who does what he wants to do in a nation where he can do it.”
It could also be said that Gonzalez was American tennis, and American tennis was Gonzalez. A product of Jones’ ideals, the competition at the LATC, and Kramer’s pro tours and Big Game, Gonzalez left them all behind. While he died virtually alone, he also became the ultimate lone wolf in a lone wolf’s sport, the greatest of the greatest generation, a man who loved the solitude of a tennis court because it was the only place where he could do whatever he wanted, in a nation that let him do it.
We’re used to measuring with a big scale in the United
States. World-domination big. Anything less than total victory in international
competition is looked at as a symbol of moral decline, another sign of a tottering giant that's being pulled to the ground by a globe filled with hungrier and smarter
Lilliputians. We shake our heads: How can we, the United States, with all of
our money, not win every gold medal, every basketball trophy, every golf major,
every tennis Grand Slam? We’re famous for being optimistic, but we’re equally,
and rightfully, famous for being paranoid.
Which means that Sunday’s men's final in Atlanta won’t send any
shockwaves through the country’s sporting world—the New York Times gave it only
the barest of mentions. And it was hardly an earth-shaking event. The
tournament was modest and the draw American-centric. The finalists, John Isner
and Mardy Fish, weren’t ranked in the Top 10, and it’s a stretch to think that
either of them will ever win a major, let alone reach No. 1 in the world, our
preferred status. But looked at through a more realistic, glass-half-full lens,
it was a good day for the sport in the U.S.
A year after Indianapolis, a stalwart of the men’s tour
for decades, was unable to find a title sponsor for its event, Atlanta brought
that tournament and the pro game to a town that loves tennis. The stadium wasn’t huge, but the
seats were close, and when I watched they were full. The fans, in that
American tradition, cheered as if the U.S. players were family members.
After one bad miss by Fish on Sunday, several people in the crowd called out
sympathetically, “Come on, Mardy,” as if he’d been hurt, as if he needed a little emotional support from a friend.
And while, like I said, neither player is going to be the
next Roger Federer—Isner is a young-looking 25, Fish a grizzled 28—they’re both
playing the best tennis of their careers. What’s more satisfying, and, in
the end, entertaining, is that each of them is visibly making changes to
improve their games. Isner is quicker and more decisive getting around the
ball to hit an inside-out forehand than he once was—at times, he can even look,
well, explosive. And intelligent: Yesterday Isner used looping ground strokes
on first balls to push Fish back and set up his forehand gun. He put together one
very fine drop shot-lob volley combination, and, as always, he competed well. It
looked for most of the match that Fish would never find an answer to his
high-bounding kick serve on break points in the ad court. The ability to wipe
away breakers with one swing is crucial at this level, and Isner’s
kick gives him a safe way to do it (he’s ninth on tour in break points saved,
at 67 percent). For long periods of this match, Isner fully utilized his size
advantage and played the points on his
terms.
Maybe it was the friendly fan support, or maybe it was the
improvements Fish has made to his own game, but he did find the answer,
however briefly, to Isner’s serve. He began charging the kick in the ad court
and opening up points by sending his backhand down the line, a smart play
considering that Isner is a little slow covering that part of the court.
This allowed Fish to take control of a few rallies and finally get the big guy
moving side to side. Like Isner, Fish appears to be a new player this year.
He’s lost 30 pounds; he almost looks too skinny compared to his old self. I
guess it shouldn't be a surprise that shedding that much weight can do a lot for your
game, but Fish is a different, much spryer—and potentially opportunistic—player
after the serve now. We might ask why he didn’t lose the weight before
he turned 28. On the other hand, looking ahead, we might wonder how much more
his game could change in his improved condition. What will Fish be able to do that
he couldn’t do before, and how can he exploit the possibilities? Will he lose
anything in the process? As a kid, he was seen as Andy Roddick's equal in terms of tennis talent. Since Wimbledon, he’s beaten Roddick and won two straight tournaments for the first time in his career.
Still, I thought Isner was going to win this one. He
appeared to be the mentally stronger and more stable of the two, dictating play
and finding ways to hold serve just when the momentum seemed ready to go against him. When
Isner went down a break in the third set, he immediately revived himself and
even held break point at 4-4. Even though he looked gassed by the end, I
expected him to find a way again. Tiebreakers are where he lives, but he
couldn’t survive this one. Isner said that he was particularly disappointed yesterday, because it’s the third very close final he’s lost in 2010 (the first
two defeats came to Sam Querrey). I don’t think this is due to choking. When you live
on the edge as often as Isner does, you’re going to fall off of it now and
then. His falls have come at the wrong time, but you do wonder whether they’ll
begin to affect his mindset in future finals.
Let those worries remain in the future for now. The
important thing, from an American-tennis standpoint, is that Isner is making
finals, and Fish is winning them. We hear a lot about how the U.S. players aren’t
as entertaining, style-wise, as the current group of Europeans. And for the
most part it’s true; Americans play a heavy-serving, heavy-footed brand of tennis. But
there are more ways to entertain a crowd of paying customers than hitting a
flowing backhand. One is to make us feel like you care enough about your games
to make them better, to give us a new wrinkle or a new commitment to
fitness. This year Fish and Isner have shown us that one other reason we watch
tennis, and sports in general, is to be reminded that our efforts can lead to
success—sometimes pain really can mean gain. That's something even an American fan should be able to celebrate.
Tennis on film doesn’t have a happy history. Spring
Break, Players, and Tennis,
Anyone are all deservedly forgotten, Wimbledon isn't far behind, and even the
supposedly classy Match Point by
Woody Allen was a weird dud. In recent years, the sport has found its niche as a symbol of ironic hipster nostalgia—think Royal Tenenbaums and The Squid and the Whale—rather than as a movie’s central subject. What's been missing from all of them is the sport's most fundamental but underrated quality: its interior viciousness.
In fact, a philosophy professor has written a full-blown treatise on why a legitimate movie on the pro game cannot and will never be
made. His main point is that the sport can’t be faked; there will never be an
actor who will make you believe he can play like John McEnroe. To which there’s
only one answer: What if John McEnroe is in your movie, playing tennis? Not
just playing tennis, but having a prolonged and slightly disturbing meltdown while losing to Ivan Lendl at the 1981 French Open.
I know you’re thinking hard courts right now, but allow me to reach
back for some dirt one last time in this post. The above clip of Johnny Mac—as
well as Jimmy Connors, Lendl, and Jose-Luis Clerc—is from William Klein’s
documentary The French, made at Roland Garros in ’81. A friend described it to
me 10 years ago, and I’ve been trying to get a glimpse of it ever since.
This week I accidentally discovered that a bunch of scenes have made it to
You Tube. Which is nice for me, because I’m currently writing a book about tennis in
that era, the tail end of what we now think of as the sport’s golden era. This
movie brings us the game in a way we’re not used to seeing it presented. A few
thoughts as I was watching:
—First, it’s a revelation after all these years to see a
match from net level, with the camera isolated on one player. I don’t think I've ever realized how static the sport appears on TV, where you watch virtually every
point from above. The artistic quality of the documentary is evident in the
shot of Connors losing it and slamming a ball into the court. You don’t hear what he says, or see his face as he says it, which makes the motions of his
outburst seem a little surreal and more dramatic. He looks like an actor playing a tennis player.
—Clerc is a sort of forgotten man from this period. But you
have to love his strokes; he could obviously hit the one-hander with power, and
construct a point. I also like the little shuffle-step victory dance he does
after he sees that his last forehand will be a winner.
—Then it's time for Johnny Mac, who comes on skinny and coiled
and agitated—like one of the Rolling Stones in a Davis Cup uniform. The voice is
unmistakably New York; it cuts through the air, even if he sounds at times like
a little kid here. He’s agitated for a lot of reasons. In his autobiography, McEnroe says that this tournament marked the beginning of the end for his relationship
with Stacy Margolin, and that even then he was worried about Wimbledon. He knew
he should beat Borg this time, but he had to make it happen. He was also
playing Lendl, a junior rival who he never really respected, but who he would always measure himself against.
—Funny that the chair umpire does what McEnroe tells him to
do every time. They talk about a breakdown in authority in general during this
era, and you can see it here. The players were running the show. I wonder how an ump would react today? Probably the same way?
—Then McEnroe goes out to play, and the film reminds you again, but in a new way, of how unique he is. Unique first in the way he hits the ball. He said that from the beginning he could feel the ball on the strings up into his arm; the
way he describes it, I know I’ve never felt that myself. The stark contrast
with the heavy-footed and heavier-hitting Lendl is already apparent, though
Lendl doesn’t appear to have the edge to his personality that he would develop
when he became No. 1—he doesn’t say a word in this clip. McEnroe has him on a
string for many of these points, but Lendl wins a lot of them anyway. He’d
eventually win the match. You can see the sport's future in his game, and in his
open-throated adidas racquet.
—From this vantage point, it seemed like McEnroe almost
played this match to lose. He complains about the court as a distraction from
his own anxiety. He has said his anger generally came from his nerves,
which has always seemed odd to me. I think of nerves as making people quieter.
McEnroe also says he regrets now that he was never able to joke around at all
on a tennis court. He considered it work, and something to be serious
about. He thought any joking had to be phony, and phoniness was the enemy. This
film lets you get a sense of the self-torment the guy went through out there,
and how the storm gathered over the course of a match. It’s hard to watch, but
can you turn away? Here it is at last: The interior viciousness of tennis.
—There are other clips from The French out there that are
also must-sees. Borg and Noah describing a point they played against each
other; Borg at a promotional hitting session; Harold Solomon’s coach reacting
to his mistakes; the Evert-Mandlikova final; and a pretty embarrassing sweet 16
photo-op with Andrea Jaeger and an impossibly young-looking Jimmy Arias. (You can find most of these on the YouTube page with the clip above.) It was
a colorful period, and tournament, and it’s no surprise that the sport’s only great movie
would have come out of it.
***
Have a good weekend. I’ll be back on Monday to talk
about Atlanta and Hamburg.
It’s been especially slow these past couple of weeks, hasn’t it? Slower than I remember the tours being in other years at this point, even though the post-Wimbledon schedule, or relative lack thereof, remains largely the same. It feels like we built up to one crescendo at Wimbledon, met with a long silence afterward, and now we can hear a few scattered notes gathering again for the next run-up. Kind of like—and I'm sure you've made this same comparison—the part at the end Television’s “Marquee Moon” where the guitar clouds have burst, and there are all these tiny notes and droplets floating and sprinkling all over the place. Then, just as they seem about to evaporate, the hard beat from the beginning of the song starts up all over again. It may be faint, but you can hear the tennis beat starting again this week.
Right now it’s coming from Atlanta, where Andy Roddick, John Isner, Lleyton Hewitt, and a few other notables, mostly American, are getting an early jump on the US Open Series—or, as you’ll see and hear it called many times over the next month, the Olympus U.S. Open Series (I’m defying the USTA by putting periods after the U and the S). The music gets progressively louder from there. Next week the women join in Stanford, while the men, led by the first top-tier European to make the trip over, Novak Djokovic, are in Los Angeles. After that, Soderling, Berdych, and a full American crew go to D.C., while the women are at a new/revived event in San Diego. In August, the international touring band revs back up in Canada and Cincy, and sends us off to the finale in Flushing Meadows.
First, who’s not joining our annual road trip through the hottest and most humid locations imaginable? The absences of Serena Williams—her foot injury that has the tennis world appropriately baffled—Justine Henin, and Juan Martin del Potro will leave us with a sizeable quality gap this summer. Del Potro, in particular, has thrived during this part of the season. And you can pretty much bet on more pullouts as we go. But after the nerve-wracking peaks of Roland Garros and Wimbledon, it’s nice to take our leisurely time before getting to anything crucial. Here are a few questions to ponder as we make our way to New York.
Now that the fates and rankings of Federer and Nadal in 2010 have been flipped, what can we expect from each when they get to North America?
The top guys were in the same position—Nadal on a roll, Federer struggling—two years ago. That season the schedule was more packed due to the Olympics, so neither player had as much down time. In Federer’s case, that meant less time to shake off a painful loss in the Wimbledon final. He hit bottom during the hard-court swing that year, losing to Simon, Karlovic, and James Blake at the Olympics (wouldn’t it be better if we could call it the Olympus Olympics?), before resurrecting himself in a hurry at the U.S. Open. In Nadal’s case he kept rolling, to wins in Toronto and Beijing, before hitting the wall in the semis at Flushing Meadows.
Traditionally, Nadal has started to wear down after Wimbledon, but he’s held it together in Canada, where he’s won twice. This time he comes in with the experience of having been No. 1 in 2008, and having been in total control of both the French and Wimbledon finals this year, against guys who have troubled him in the past. He’s had his knees worked over—what do these platelet injections do for him?; it reminds me of a treatment that was supposed to cure tennis elbow once upon a time—and he’s had plenty of time to rest. So far this year Nadal has done what he’s usually done; now he’ll have to break new ground. Now we’ll begin to get a clue as to how good he might be for the next few years. Will he be a 12-month No. 1, a guy who wins everywhere, the way Federer has? Or will he always have his peaks and valleys? Hard courts are still not his favorite surface; he moves more naturally on the soft stuff. So it will be an effort. But it will also be the best chance he’s had to show off his best on this continent.
It’s been the opposite case for Federer the past few years. He’s had better results in Cincy, including two titles, after re-acclimating himself to competition. What will be interesting this time is how he fares against the guys who have had breakthrough wins against him recently. It's not a short list: Soderling, Berdych, Baghdatis, Gulbis, Davydenko, and, hey, maybe even Montanes, won’t think of him in quite the same way this time around. How will Federer feel about playing them? Less sure of himself, or more motivated by his recent run of mediocrity? Both, I’m guessing.
Without Serena or Justine, what we can look for on the women’s side?
Big names falling, other players pulling themselves out of slumps, surprises all around. Or maybe it will all play out according to the seeding plan. It’s impossible to tell. Which, depending on your view, will make a summer without Serena or Justine seem either fresh and entertaining, or blandly beside the point.
A few possibilities. Marion Bartoli may be a name you hear again. Last year she beat Venus in Stanford. What about Jelena Jankovic? She’s No. 2 after, after, doing what, exactly? However she got there, her presence always brings campy drama with it. Kim Clijsters seems like a good bet to play well on U.S. hard courts, though it’s been hard to bet on Kim so far this season. At Wimbledon, just when she looked ready to go farther, she didn't. Vera Zvonareva, Wimbledon finalist, also likes the sure bounce of asphalt. Ana Ivanovic will need to qualify in Canada; it really has reached that point. The rises of Caroline Wozniacki and, even more so, Victoria Azarenka, who is currently ranked No. 18, have stalled. Can they avoid burning out under the U.S. sun?
Within all of this nebulous flux, two women to watch should be Sam Stosur, French finalist and Wimbledon flame-out, and Maria Sharapova, who has been getting there for a while now, but who is still not there. Is New York her there?
The two big Americans, Isner and Querrey, come back to the States. Who’s going to stand taller at home?
It was an excellent European adventure for Sam and John, wasn’t it? One of them threw in the towel and then came back two weeks later better than ever, while the other made himself into a household name across the United States.
Isner, who is in Atlanta this week, has started to get a little tired of the notoriety and the questions. But the guy is good at focusing; I’m always impressed by how darn serious he is about his game. Still, it was Querrey who came closest to reaching a new level at Queens and Wimbledon. Which is the real Sam, the one who always appears to be calm under pressure, or the one who, appearances aside, can get so negative that he can’t stand to be on the court for even one more day? For certain moments against Murray at Wimbledon, it seemed like he was ready for the big time, a Slam semi. He’s mastered the 250 this year; is he ready to Master a Masters event? No one is going to want to face either of these guys.
What are the moments to look forward to in U.S. summer tennis, 2010?
The San Diego event: The city was a mainstay of the WTA for years; now they’ll be heading back to those friendly confines. Ditto Stanford: Always a good atmosphere in that compact stadium, no matter who’s playing. Night matches from Cincy: After the brutal heat and sparse main-stadium daytime crowds, the evening session looks like a relaxing yet energizing relief. Day matches from D.C.: Nothing in the game, even Australia, looks quite as brutal. I’m amazed the guys can keep it together for three sets in that swampy air. Some of them, like Roddick, seem to relish it.
Finally, I’m looking forward most of all to Toronto. I'll be at the event for the first time, from the 8th to the 15th. I hope the air conditioning in the press room won't be too brutal for me.
It's not easy to jump into the comments section of this blog after I've put so much—of my thoughts, my opinions, myself—into a post. The first negative one feels like
a slap across the head. I don’t mind a harsh critique by email, but in
public it can be cringe-worthy. Then, at some point while I'm scrolling, I get used
to it. I have to, I guess. The comments generally get more negative as they
go on. Still, I’ve got nothing to complain about. The fact that I can write a
2,000-word post about an obscure event from my own tennis past and have at least a few people
read the whole thing is incredible.
For such a slow moment in tennis, last week was busy around
here. I discovered how busy this morning. I had no idea this round of the Federer-Nadal war lasted as long or got as contentious as it did on “The Extraordinary Age.” I
should have known. These fan battles are a blessing and a curse. I’m glad there’s a topic
that makes people that passionate, and I’m amazed at the amount of thought and
emotion that goes into each side’s arguments. But those arguments eventually end up going
in circles. There’s only so much material—H2H, knees, excuses, Slams, Masters, knees, back, knees, Mono—to
work with.
Since it’s still slow on court at the moment, I’ll use today
to talk about a few of the subjects that cropped up in the comments last
week.
***
From Tari, on "The Extraordinary Age":
“I’m completely
convinced that there are very few truly objective fans of Rafa or Roger. We’re
all going to see it through the prism of our fanship.”
Anyone who likes pro tennis to the point where they become
fans of certain players—which is everyone here, including myself—is going to
have their judgment influenced when it comes to analyzing their favorites and
their rivals. Your relationship with that player is probably more emotionally unconditional than it
is with anyone else in your life. There’s no jealousy,
the way there is with friends. There's no daily negotiating over who does the dishes,
the way there is with spouses. Your fave player is a little like an idol, but
unless he commits some kind of crime, he can’t let you down the way an idol who's actually part of your life can—losses won’t make you any less devoted. A fan is closer to a parent than anything else. Your favorite player is
like your kid; you get nervous for him in the same way, and you forgive what
other people see as his flaws, because you’ve watched him so closely for so
long that you feel like you understand him better than anyone else. You
understand that he’s not really making excuses or feigning modesty or
being disingenuous, even if that’s the way it may sound to the rest of the
world, to all those people who don't love him the way you do.
And you aren’t necessarily wrong. The insight that fans can
have into their favorites was brought home to me while watching the Aussie Open final this
year. Click here for the post, called "Bias Case," that I wrote about watching Federer as a
fan in that match, and what it taught me. I’ll give you the short version here.
While I do root for players in matches—I can’t help it, I like tennis too much
to give up being a fan—I had rarely rooted for Federer in the past. I typically
don’t root against him either. He’s a guy who I admire and respect, and who I
like to watch, but he never really seemed like he needed another fan. He had it
all under control on his own. But for some reason that I can’t explain, I was pulling for him
in the Aussie final against Andy Murray. And suddenly I felt like I understood
his game, his mindset, his weaknesses, his strengths better than I ever
had. I’d never thought that he got particularly tight in matches, at least to the point where
it adversely affected his game. Of course I know everyone gets tight, but I
always believed Federer had such a rock-bottom confidence in himself that he
could overcome nerves much more easily than others. Not true—I could tell when he
was nervous in Melbourne, because, as a fan that day, I was nervous for him, with him. It
made me think that if I could make myself into a fan of every player, I’d be a
better tennis writer. Weirdly enough, right around the time of that match,
Federer’s mother was interviewed about what it’s like to watch her son, and she
said something about always being able to tell when he’s nervous. His mom is, among other things, another fan.
The upside is that watching one player that closely and sympathetically can give you
insights into him or her that more objective eyes won’t decipher. The downside is
that it can make you blind to other players’ virtues and get you to read sinister
intentions into their words when they aren’t there. For example, Nadal is not
falsely modest, the way his critics and some Federer fans maintain. Rather, he (1) legitimately believes
he can and should lose matches, because that’s part of sports; (2) doesn’t want
to motivate his opponents with that they call “bulletin board” material in pro
football; and (3) is superstitious enough to err on the side of being
too worried for a match, rather than overconfident. Hence his reluctance
to call himself the “favorite,” even at the French Open. Nadal knows that in
reality there are no “favorites.” It’s not a term that has any meaning for a
player. There are seedings, and then there are matches to be played and won, and
that’s it—anything else is just fan and media chatter and has nothing to do
with how he approaches an event. To Nadal, the minute he began to think of
himself as the “favorite,” is the minute he would begin to practice as if he
were the favorite, and then play as if he were the favorite, and then lose as
the favorite.
Likewise, Federer’s critics were wrong to accuse him of
playing mind games with Murray before the final of the Aussie Open. Where
Nadal goes for modesty, and his detractors see it as false, Federer does the
opposite: He reflexively blurts what he considers to be the truth, even if it
sounds immodest, and his detractors see it as either arrogance, excuse-making,
or a head game. Before that final, Federer said it would be harder for Murray
to win his first major against him than it was for Federer to win his first
against fellow neophyte Mark Philippoussis at Wimbledon in 2003. In other
words, he was saying, experience counts for something in these matches. That’s hardly a
radical concept, and it couldn’t have been a stunning, will-weakening
revelation to Murray.
Taking the good with the bad, the insight with the
blindness, being a fan opens one eye wider at the same time that it
makes it harder to see out of the other. As a writer who tries to be as objective
as possible when it comes to putting my analysis down on paper, I listen to
what fans say about their favorites, and take what they say about their rivals
with a very large—like Guinness Book of World Records large—grain of salt.
As the old song goes, "To Know Him is to Love Him." (Though Phil Spector wrote those words, so their validity may be questionable.) When it comes to tennis players, the better phrase may be: To love him is to know him.
***
From Rodrigo Guidolin, on “The Best of Her Time”:
“Thanks,
Steve, but there is no chance I could ever beat Budge, Tilden, or Gonzalez if
we played with their gear. I think you’re overestimating how much athleticism
means on the tennis court and underestimating those champions’ talents. Not fair
dude.
The rest of your analysis I liked.”
Dude, let me start by saying that I appreciate the last line you added
there, about liking the rest of my analysis. Disagreeing with me is fine, but
it’s aggravating to read a comment that singles out a tiny aspect of a post and
attempts to rip it to shreds without mentioning anything else about the other
99 percent of my argument. So I thank you for doing that, Rodrigo.
Anyway, I’m guessing that you are also the 500th-ranked
player in the world. I stated last week that I thought that you could beat Don
Budge “like a drum,” even if Budge was playing with modern equipment. I admire
your modesty. More important to my argument from that post, I said that I
thought Serena would crush Margaret Court and Chris Evert, and beat Navratilova
and Graf most of the time.
First, let’s agree that the idea of time-traveling a
champion from the past to the present day is absurd. If Margaret Court were 20
years old right now, she would have used different racquets from the beginning of her life, been
coached to hit different shots, and trained completely differently. Her name
probably wouldn’t even be Margaret. It would be Morgan, or Peyton, or
Samantha—or maybe she would have been named after Evonne Goolagong or Steffi
Graf, who knows.
Second, if we follow Wertheim’s hypothetical concept of
giving those old players modern equipment, the next question is: How long do we allow them to
practice with that equipment? For the sake of this parlor game, let’s say that Don Budge kept
his 1930s game, but grew up using a modern racquet (an impossibility, but it's just a game). Maybe he would have been able to hang with you, Rodrigo, I
don’t know. Maybe I over spoke. I’ve always thought that Rod Laver, if he had played with a current stick from the beginning, would have been able to use his game
effectively today, even though he was only 5-foot-8. And in the past I’ve
written about the continuity of champions in the Open era: Laver played Connors tight; Connors
played Agassi tight; Agassi played Federer tight. Ditto for the women's side: Evert
played close matches with Graf, and Graf played close ones with Serena. Within
the Open era, there has been evolution in the sport, but there also been an
ability by the best players to match their games up with the best from the next
generation.
A good example of this is Evert. The soft-hitting Chrissie who
won the French Open in 1975 with a wood racquet was not the same player who
lost to Graf in the Aussie Open final 13 years later. Evert went down in that match in
straights, but, using a graphite mid-size, she had made herself into a much
stronger player, a much more modern player, than she was when she first turned pro.
In
the end, it’s probably best just to forget about asking which player of today
would “beat” or "crush" which player from the past. There’s a reason why time travel is impossible.
***
From Northern Boy, on “Playing Ball: In a Dark Time”:
“I’m
curious, Steve, which parts of your story were ‘slightly fictionalized.’”
Everything in it was true, or as close to true as a
20-year-old memory can get, except for “Grimes,” my high school English teacher.
And everything he did and said really did happen; it’s just that he was put
together from the personalities and body types of two of my English teachers. One was the intimidator, the other was the
modern poetry lover. I thought the composite was more entertaining.
***
I'll see you Wednesday with a preview of the hard court season.
I'm off on Friday, but here, for the weekend, is a slightly fictionalized story from my tennis past.
In the spring of my junior year of college, I took an
English class that had something to do with the Renaissance. I can’t remember the
title of the course, and most of the reading we did also escapes me. I know
there were discussions of Don Quixote and Petrarch, but beyond that what I
recall most was sitting with five or six other students once a week for three hours, all of us huddled around a small
table, in a bare-walled room inside the campus’s rickety Humanities
building. The school I went to was liberal arts and Quaker, so no matter how
much tuition it charged, the style was ascetic, and comfort wasn’t a
priority. The one person in the room whom I do remember vividly, though, was
our professor, a gray-haired woman of 60 or so.
She had a nervous, distracted air. She talked slowly,
fluttered her hands, stammered a little, and looked down at the table as she spoke. Her customary red sweater, which was always wrapped around a black
collared shirt, had a layer of fuzz on it that can only be described as
academic. Maybe I noticed her discomfort because of my own nerves; I hated the
thought of talking in front of other people, even four or five other people,
and I spent most of my time staring at the table in front of me as well. But it
didn’t seem to be anxiety, exactly, that bothered her. It seemed to be
something deeper and harder to identify, something fundamental.
My own nerves weren’t helped by the fact that I was
hopelessly unprepared for most of the classes. I lugged Don Quixote and
Petrarch and whatever other ancient and seemingly irrelevant European
tomes—Rabelais’ name is coming back to me as I write this—we’d been
assigned to the library. I even sequestered myself on the top floor, in a
distant, spookily silent set of carrels. It didn’t work. It would take only a
couple of pages for my mind to begin wandering, and for the library’s many
other possibilities to begin calling me. Soon I was hunting through the aisles
and stacks for writers that I did like at the time—Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Robert
Lowell, Theodore Roethke, none of whom I was actually reading for a course.
Each week I returned to class, and to the small table and my fellow students,
having barely cracked the book we were discussing. I’d spend the entire time avoiding all eye contact, which is an immensely awkward thing to do for three hours in a room with just five
other people.
My professor was a tennis fan. That spring I
would look up on a blustery afternoon at practice, or during a match, and see
her and the head of the English department, a short, high-strung gray eminence, in the bleachers above the courts. One day after class,
fidgeting with her books as we walked into the hall, she mentioned that she
could spend hours watching the sport, live or on TV. “It’s soothing,” she said.
She liked the new kid, Sampras. I said I liked Agassi, but that I was using Sampras' racquet. We both said we liked Steffi
Graf, who wasn’t far removed from her Golden Slam. It was more words than I’d uttered in
four weeks of classes.
One evening that semester, up again on the
library’s fourth floor, I pulled down a biography of Roethke. I’d been
introduced to his poetry by my 12th grade English teacher three
years before. In his mid-30s, a frustrated poet with a receding hairline, beady
eyes, and a fleshy face, Mr. Grimes (as I’ll call him) had been as irascible as
any English teacher is supposed to be. He’d started the year by intimidating
us—“cutting our heads off and watching them fall into our laps,” was how he put
it. In the first week, he’d asked me to get up and read a soliloquy from
Sophocles. I stood and mumbled in a monotone for a few minutes before I was
interrupted by what I thought were the sounds of someone weeping in the back of
the room. It was Grimes, holding a handkerchief, pretending to be crying over
my stumbling recitation. “It’s just so moving!” he cried out sarcastically as
my classmates’ laughter filled up my ears. A few days later, a pretty girl,
Maria, was slouching in her chair in the front row, her legs stretched in front
of the desk. “Well, that’s a very provocative position!” Grimes bellowed in her face. She sat up ramrod straight. We were the only
two students that he gave A’s to that semester. Later that year, as I was writing an absurd farewell note in Maria's yearbook, I happened to flip to the page with Grimes's photo. She's written "I LOVE YOU!" in huge capital letters across his fat face. Was that what girls liked? Bellowing intimidation? I didn't ask her about it.
Near the end of the year, once he’d covered Chaucer and
Hamlet and all the proper high school English books we needed to cover, Grimes
had rearranged our desks into a circle. He sat up on one of
them, his legs dangling, and began to talk about what he really liked, modern
poetry. Lowell, Plath, Stevens, ee cummings, Ashbery, Crane, Sexton. The poems
were hard to penetrate; they seemed determined to ward the reader off. I had
trouble coming up with much to say about them on the spot, and never really
added much to the discussion. But it was a thrilling and
eye-opening the experience nonetheless. Slowly getting to the root of a poem like
Lowell’s “Rounds, Rounds” (I don't think that's the actual title) felt like discovering something at the root of your
own brain that you’d never known was there.
Roethke had been a favorite of Grimes’. He took special
pleasure in pointing out the sexual metaphors in his nature imagery. To an
adolescent mind, Roethke had a lot to offer. Not only was he a poet, which
meant he had a spiritual access to life that the vast majority of us lacked,
but he also an alcoholic and a chronic depressive, both of which were
undeniably cool.
Now, reading Roethke’s biography on the floor of my college library, I learned that those things might not have been so cool, at least to him. He'd been a hard drinker, but his instability was a little scarier than I'd realized. In the middle of teaching a class, he might open
the window, climb out on the ledge, and make lunatic faces at the
freaked-out kids inside. I also found out he’d been the tennis coach at Penn
State, a school 50 miles from where I grew up.
That night, after having read absolutely nothing for my class , I got back to my dorm room late. Unable to sleep, I fished out a dog-eared Norton poetry anthology from high school, and read
the half-dozen Roethke poems that were included. The rhythm of one, “In a Dark
Time,” was immediately familiar:
In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood—
What’s madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day’s on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall
Did I feel this way sometimes? College wasn’t easy, and I
was certainly drifting in this class, a class I needed for my major. But
depression wasn’t in the cards for me, which was somehow disappointing. It was
a little like Woody Allen’s mock lament about never being able to commit
suicide because he was “too middle class.” Still, I understood the rhythm of this poem, and vaguely linked it with my English professor.
I handed in my first paper for her class a full week late.
I’d thought this wouldn’t be a big deal, but she looked hurt and angry. She looked down and shook her head as I handed it to her. I
don’t know what I thought she would do, but I was stunned by her reaction. My
failure came home to me. At the end of class the
following week, she handed it back to me with an oversize C in red ink at the top. Short
of not doing the assignment at all, this was pretty much lowest grade that it was possible to get.
A dark time, a dark moment, but something in the
reading for her class finally connected. It was one of Petrarch’s
over-the-top, desperate love poems, and it clicked with me as a dead ringer for
the thoughts and atmosphere of the Roethke poem—this was the rhythm I'd immediately recognized. Petrarch’s verses were Renaissance and lyrical, and
his dark moment was tied to a woman. Roethke’s desperation was 20th
century, hard, and existential. No woman was needed to send him to the ledge, to pin
him to a sweating wall.
I took the two poems to my professor’s tiny office, with the idea of comparing the two
of them in my final paper. It was my last hope in the class. When I got there, she was scrunched
at her desk between towering piles of books and papers, humming to herself as
she read an article. She looked a little shocked to see me, the underachieving jock.
I handed her the beat-up Norton anthology and showed her the Roethke poem. She
read it and began to shake her head. It wasn’t a shake of dismay this time, but
appreciation. When she finished, she dropped the book in her lap, leaned back,
and began nodding quickly. “It’s good, very good, you’re right.” She gave me
the go-ahead to write the paper. I left right away. There was something
intimidating about her, something too
painfully grown-up and and heavy for me to face as a 20-year-old.
I worked
obsessively on the paper. The time in the library was suddenly a pleasure, the productivity a refuge from the feeling of academic failure
that had been building that semester. I spent hours in the silent carrels on
the top floor, writing it by hand, in pencil, rewriting, the
graphite caked onto the far edge of my left hand. When I handed it in, I got the barest of smiles from my professor. She looked more distracted, less happy, than
ever.
That year the NCAA Division III tennis championships were
held at our school. We won the team event, though I didn’t spot anyone from the
English department at the matches. The next week, my partner and I were in the individual
doubles tournament, and in the middle of one of our
matches, I looked up to see four English profs, including mine and the chair of
the department, in the bleachers. The match went to three sets, and I began to serve out of my mind in the third. I couldn’t miss the wide one in the deuce
court. In these moments, in these meaningful matches, your mind doesn’t wander a whole lot; time seems compressed, to be running a little too fast, as if you can feel all the practice you’ve done beforehand, as well
as all the second-guessing you’ll do for days after, pressing together and making this moment, the one that counts, incredibly urgent—you can't quite believe it's happening right now. Still, after hitting
an ace and walking to the other side of the court, I wondered for a second if
those English professors, who must have known I was no star of their
department, were thinking, “So that’s how he got in here. It must have been
his serve.”
We lost anyway. We got close, but we couldn’t finish it.
Which was especially appalling, considering that one of the guys we were
playing was a first-class a—hole who my partner and I detested. When it was over, I walked to the back of the court, smashed my Pro Staff on the
asphalt, and threw it over the fence. There was a frightening moment, as it
hurtled end over end though the air, when it looked like it might land on
the windshield of an approaching car. I covered my head, but it missed by a
couple of feet. I looked up to see the English department collectively staring at the racquet
as it bounced into the bushes across the street.
There was one seminar left in our class. It was scheduled to
be held at our professor’s house, a few blocks from campus. The other students
and I met up and walked together. When we got there, the place was empty, so we
sat in a circle in the chairs in her living room. After 15 minutes, the chair
of the department drove up and walked in the front door. He said that our professor wouldn’t be here today, that we wouldn’t see her again this year, and
that we would get our final grades back from her by mail. That was it, that’s
all he said. I never found out what happened.
A month or so later I was back at my parents place, lying on
the couch, reading. It might have been something from the Renaissance class; I
could always concentrate on books better when they hadn’t been assigned. An
envelope from my college arrived through the mail slot. Inside were my grades for the semester. My eyes flicked down
the list: B-, B-, C+. Total mediocrity, as expected. The last grade was from my
English class. It was the only A+ I ever got.
“Serena Williams: Love Her, Hate Her, She’s the Best Ever”.
That’s the line that greeted us on the cover of last week’s post-Wimbledon issue of Sports
Illustrated. It was a surprise in one
sense. Serena, despite her continued dominance, has yet to match the career
totals—the Slam wins, the tournament titles, the weeks at No. 1—of past greats
like Margaret Court, Martina Navratilova, Steffi Graf, and Chris Evert. In
another sense, though, it wasn’t all that shocking. This is a magazine cover.
As anyone who has ever read a fitness magazine and tried to get a “6 pack in 6
days” knows, covers are all about exaggeration.
But once we’re inside the magazine, we can come back down to
earth. Why does L. Jon Wertheim suddenly believe, now that Serena has won her
fourth Wimbledon and 13th major, that she should be elevated above
Court (24 Slams), Graf (22), Navratilova (18), and Evert (18)? Why not also say
that her fellow Wimbledon champion, Rafael Nadal, is also the greatest ever, even though he lags behind Roger Federer in Slams? I
respect Wertheim’s writing and trust his judgments on most occasions, but I
can’t join him here. Maybe he pushed the envelope on this a little because it was a
cover story. Or maybe this is what it takes to get tennis onto the cover of SI in the first place. Or maybe he just believes it. Let’s look at the arguments.
“Williams plays in a far more competitive and demanding
era.”
The game is global now, there’s more money in it, and the
women hit harder and play a more physical brand of tennis. But has that
produced more Hall-of-Fame level players? We’ve spent the latter half of this
decade bemoaning the lack of new blood at the top of the WTA—the only multiple
Slam winner to turn pro after the year 2000 is Maria Sharapova. Court did win
many Aussie Opens (11 in total) against weak competition, but Serena has won
Slam finals against less-than-Olympian names like Safina, Jankovic, and
Zvonareva. As far as the demanding part goes, it’s true that the sport is tougher on the body now and requires a high level of athleticism, but each of those former champions—Evert and Navrailova in
particular—played more matches per season than Serena does.
The more important point, though, is that the perceived level of
competition in every era is skewed by the level of dominance of the top player.
If Graf had never existed, Gabriela Sabatini would likely have been a
five-six-seven-time Slam winner rather than a one-timer. If Court had never
existed, we’d be talking about Billie Jean King as the best of all time.
And while Serena has been the best player of the last decade and of her era,
she hasn’t dominated the best player not named Williams, Justine Henin. Serena
is 8-6 overall against Henin, but 2-4 at the majors.
The bottom line is that in each era, the women we’ve
mentioned took on the best competition in the world at that moment and raised
themselves above it. That’s all you can ask.
“None of the others had to play her sister in a final.”
True, Venus is also an all-time great, and it’s a unique
psychological struggle for Serena. But Court had King, Navratilova had to beat
17-time Slam winner Evert over and over, and Graf had to overcome
Navratilova herself to begin her reign.
“She has also won 12 major women’s doubles titles, two major
mixed titles, and two double gold medals.”
The Williams sisters will go down as one of the greatest
doubles team of all time. But bringing doubles into this particular conversation
isn't going to help her cause. Court won 19 doubles Slams and 19 mixed-doubles Slams.
Navratilova won 177 doubles titles in total. As for the Olympics, Graf owns a
singles gold.
“She’s been winning them since she was 17.”
Graf won her first Slam at 17, and her last at 29, Serena’s
current age. There’s no doubt that Serena can win them for years to come, and
her longevity could eventually make her a candidate for greatest player ever. But during
her 20s she wasn’t as dominant as Graf. Steffi won her famous Golden Slam in
1988, but she also won three majors in a year on four other occasions. Since
her Serena Slam in 2002-3, Williams has never won three in a season (that could
change this year). Before last year, she hadn’t won two in a single season. But
if you want to talk crazy dominance, nobody can match Navratilova in her prime.
From 1981 to ’87, she went 432-14. You read it right: 432-14.
Incidentally, Graf and Serena played twice, and, if the
WTA’s website is correct, split those matches by the same score, 6-2, 3-6,
7-5. Both matches occurred in 1999, Serena’s first big year, and Graf’s last.
(See the end of their second match, in Indian Wells, here.)
“The most important stroke in tennis is the serve, and
Williams’s is the most fearsome in women’s history.”
Agreed, Serena’s serve is the best ever, and if there were
no other shots in tennis, she’d have the Goat title locked up. But by most
measures Ivo Karlovic has the most devastating serve in men’s tennis at the
moment. Should we ignore his results and hand him the No. 1
ranking every year? Plus, Graf and Navratilova also had the most effective
serves of their eras.
“If you matched tennis’s female legends head-to-head—all at
their best, with identical equipment—Williams wouldn’t just beat the others;
she’d crush them.”
Serena would crush Court and Evert, I agree, and beat Graf
and Navratilova most of the time. But I would also say that the 500th-ranked
man on the ATP tour right now would beat Don Budge—at his best, with identical
equipment—like a drum. Does that make No. 500 from 2010 a greater player and
champion than Budge, or Tilden, or Gonzalez?
Every player, obviously, is a product of his or her era. The
best player of any era has trained and designed her game to beat the opponents
she has to face on the court—nothing more, nothing less. You can’t penalize
Graf and Navratilova for not making themselves good enough in their primes to
beat a hypothetical future opponent. If Serena had made her debut, say, three
years after Graf’s debut, and Serena had started taking Slams from her, Steffi
would have been forced to change her game to meet this challenge. We’ll never
know how that would worked out, so all we can do to compare them is to look at
their overall records during the times when they were playing. And as with the Federer-Nadal head-to-head argument, the fact that someone can beat another player doesn't make them "greater"—top players play to win tournaments, not beat certain individuals.
The same will be true when a young serve-and-volleying
Russian starts racking up Slams 15 years from now. We won’t be able to look
back and penalize Serena for not having made her game consistent or versatile enough to have beaten her.
***
Slam totals are what we generally go by to judge all-time
greatness. There’s a vogue right now for saying that they shouldn’t matter so
much, because the best players skipped the Aussie Open in the 70s and 80s. And
it’s true, the Aussie was not really a major title for 20 years, and the “it’s
only the Slams that matter” attitude didn’t get started until the Ivan Lendl
era, when the top players became rich enough not to have to worry about
anything other than prepping for and winning those four tournaments. But that
doesn’t change the fact that from the earliest days of the sport, the
Slams—which were each of the big tennis nation’s national championships—were
the events that the players wanted to win most. That’s why they remain the
benchmark.
But there are other markers of excellence. There’s time
spent at No. 1: Graf finished eight seasons there, Navratilova seven. Williams
has done it twice. There are total titles: Navratilova ended with 167, Graf 107;
Williams has 37. There’s excellence on all surfaces: Serena has won all four
majors at least once; Graf won all four at least four times (her signature achievement,
IMO).
None of this is a knock on Serena. She’s the best of this
generation and a tremendous athlete to watch. She’s also never been too
concerned with the No. 1 ranking, or total titles, and she hasn’t had the
relentless, long-term, week-to-week drive for dominance that characterized Graf and Navratilova. And as it stands now, Serena’s best years may be ahead of
her. You can’t fully measure a career against the sport’s past until that career
is over.
In a way, it’s only fair to Serena that we not jump the gun
on her place in history. Next thing you know, in 10 years, we’ll be celebrating
a young American champ as “Better than Serena ever was!” after she wins her fifth
major. Sounds like a good line for a magazine cover.
The book club returns this week, as freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I talk about Patrick McEnroe's "Hardcourt Confidential," written with Tennis Magazine's Peter Bodo.
Hi Steve, I know you haven't yet read Andre Agassi's book because of all the hoopla that surrounded its release, so it's interesting that both the Pete Sampras and Agassi anecdotes you picked out have a lot of resonance with what's in Agassi's book, Open.
Sampras' bad tipping has been throughly hashed by this point, but the tales of how Agassi destroyed the Davis Cup team atmosphere in the 2005 quarterfinals are fresher and very entertaining -- definitely the best section of the book, and a must-read for anyone who watched that infamous loss. As McEnroe relates, Agassi spent a lot of time haranguing Bob Bryan about his "actress chick." It clearly wasn't a one-off thing -- in "Open," Agassi makes a similar crack about actresses when Sampras tells him about his relationship with Bridgette Wilson. Brooke Shields really scarred him, apparently.
I did enjoy Hardcourt Confidential -- Pete Bodo kindly let me cajole his copy and I read it in snatches during the French Open. And why not? This is essentially an industry book, and not too many of those come our way.
It's chatter about pro tennis -- players' games, their personalities, matches, tournaments, player development, Hawyeye, strings, trends -- the kind of shop talk we have ourselves, and the kind of things that are interesting if you're interested in tennis. And because Patrick is a thoughtful guy with well-considered views, it's a good conversation. There's some generic filler, but you're always going to get that unless the person writing is utterly unconcerned about sales.
The theory in the book I found most compelling -- and embedded immediately -- relates to Sampras' and Roger Federer's Grand Slam tallies. Roy Emerson's record of 12 Slams stood for three decades before Sampras broke it with 14 Slams the early 2000s. Then Federer came along and moved the bar up to 16 just a few years later.
The way McEnroe looks at it, it's not that Sampras and Federer's totals are outsize -- everyone else in between was too low. We often talk about how players didn't play this Slam or that Slam in the past, and so their totals are lower than they might have been. But the flip side of that is that players now play every Slam, and build their whole season around the majors. It's only natural that they'll rack up more. (You could say the same for the Masters events, where both Rafael Nadal and Federer caught up relatively quickly to Agassi, who set his record at a time when the events didn't have the same participation they do now.)
"Emmo's record would have fallen more quickly, and new records would have been established on more of a steady curve, had the Australian Open evolved as a "can't miss" Grand Slam event along with the other three. The truth is that for almost two decades we were living in a world with just three majors." McEnroe definitely doesn't bare everything. He keeps his own family life largely private and has mostly praise for his current employers. (Though there is a description of the frazzled debate at ESPN during the U.S. Open over whether to ask Serena about the 'foot default' in the doubles trophy presentation the next day.)
But he also says a lot of things he doesn't have to, either. Given how demure Patrick has been in the past, there are a surprising amount of shots at his brother John (they really don't seem to be getting along these days, do they? Maybe Patrick is less inclined to be a doormat for the sake of keeping the peace). On two occasions he also sharply criticizes one of his Davis Cup stalwarts, James Blake. These aren't entirely new sentiments -- he's called John difficult and Blake stubbon before -- but here we get some examples of what's been driving those earlier comments.
"There was only one problem [with his father recommending him for a job on Don Imus' radio show]. When my brother John got wind of the idea, he blew his stack. 'Why didn't you throw my name out there,' he complained.
Dad was smart. He said, 'John. The job pays something like two hundred bucks a day. Do you really want to establish that as your market value?'
'Maybe you're right. Maybe it would be a good thing for Patrick.'" ...
"I learned quickly that James needed to be handled with kid gloves, and tried to remember it in every subsequent tie. Some time later, we finally got James to drop down to a compromise 64 pounds of string tension. We almost threw a party to celebrate." So there's quite a bit of substance here, but skillfully packaged so as not to be too noticeable. A bit like Patrick himself.
However, as you said, there's a lot of Pete Bodo in the book too. That was one of my side amusements -- going through the book thinking, 'That's pure Pete,' then, 'This is Patrick'...'and Pete again'...'Patrick.'
The comments about Cincinnati and Monte Carlo you quoted are prefect examples of Pete's fingerprints showing through, and I wonder whether its content Patrick actively or passively accepted. There's a section on Toni Nadal that seems to draw directly from Pete and Jon Wertheim's interesting interview with him at Wimbledon a couple of years ago, and a part on anti-doping that also has familiar ehoes (including a couple of errors about technical details, unfortunately).
Of course, it could cut both ways. They say that couples become more alike over time -- I don't know if that applies to writer-ghostwriter combos, but that's what I found myself thinking when I saw Pete write a piece a few days ago on revamping Davis Cup format. He's always been a staunch Davis Cup traditionalist (I'm one too), but Davis Cup captain Patrick advocates reform because it's a challenge to get the top players to play all the time. So who knows, maybe Patrick sees the appeal of a plain, simple life with limited cultural amenities in Cincinnati.
Some will be annoyed by the way the book jumps from one topic to another without much of an overarching structure. I don't entirely understand it myself, though it does add to ther eminscing, memoir feel. As long as it's an honest attempt to communicate the person's thoughts and experiences, I'm pretty easygoing about the structure and content of such accounts.
My earlier reservations about the Patrick-Pete interweaving aside, these kind of books are appetizing because you get to go back and fill in pieces of the historical puzzle, adding knowledge about new details of matches you saw and players you remember.
We've already had books from three of the fab four of U.S. tennis -- Sampras, Agassi and Chang (his was a while back), with Jim Courier the only holdout. (Come on, Jim, we want to hear your Bollettieri stories, too.) Now here's Patrick McEnroe's, which adds another set of memories, another career (his own), and also kicks off the process of looking at the next generation -- Andy Roddick, Blake, etc. Interestingly, Pete Bodo has ghostwritten two out of these four chronicles -- Sampras and PMac -- ironic perhaps, because as I understand he was focused on thigns other than tennis for part of this period.
The result of this literary influx, though, is that we've gotten a lot of added background on this era -- their early memories, what was going on in their personal lives at various times and their feelings towards one another.
Agassi's book was full of these little new details, often rather memorable ones. 'A wig? A wig?!!''No underwear?!!!''Tanking the AO semifinal against Chang?!' PMac's book won't rock your preconceptions about him or his brother John or anyone else in quite the same way, but it adds a little gleams of color to most of the big names he discusses, as well as the nature of his own varied work in the field.
"In my role as head of USTA player development, I run into dozens of guys who were good players, even name players; a number of them were so talented it could take your breath away. And now they're working at clubs, feeding balls to little kids, looking for a way to get back into the action. Some of them are now living with their parents. They hit me up for jobs, and it hurts a little to say no to them." ... "The Bryans are technical, like golfers. Mike likes to have some little thing every week, especially if you can pack it into a neat slogan: Stay down on the return, like you're sitting in a chair... Most Davis Cup weeks, Mike likes to take a day off. I'd gladly give it to him, too, only he never comes right out and asks. He find something wrong, some that needs fixing instead... [he] always tries to sneak his girlfriends into the hotel for the week, even though my 'official' policy always was no wives or girlfriends until the tie is about to begin. Mike tries to hide his girls, so they end up stuck in his room, watching TV, while we have a good time at our team dinners... What makes it doubly funny is that Andy Roddick, even after all these years, and after getting engaged, still called me before the team dinner on Saturday night in Birmingham and asked, "Is it okay if (my fiancee) Brooklyn comes along?" ... "Brazil won the doubles, so the tie was still live on Sunday. Like an idiot, I decided to wear a nice blue shirt to work. Within minutes of arriving on site and just as I was about to go on air, I started to get those black sweat stains on my shirt. I put on my jacket, tugged it this way and that, but it was no use; I couldn't disguise the stains... Suddenly, I had a brainstrom. I asked for a bottle of water. I took jacket off, unscewed the cap and dumped the water all down the front of my shirt." ... "He told me Roger didn't have anyone to warm up with for the final. Would I mind hitting with him?... I was eager to "feel" what his shots were like. It may be hard for a spectator to tell, but every player's game is like a fingerprint... I wanted to touch his genius, even if it was at racket's length... He works at the ball, it's like the thing has different properties every time he addresses it. One moment, it's shaped like an egg from topsping; the next, it's got so much backspin you can almost hear it purring. What I felt, mostly, was his control; the ball seemed to follow a different command with each shot... It felt like my side of the court was twice the size of his." What anecdotes did you mine for your memory bank, Steve?
The book club returns this week, as freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I talk about Patrick McEnroe's "Hardcourt Confidential," written with Tennis Magazine's Peter Bodo.
Kamakshi,
“The smaller the ball, the better the writing.” That was
George Plimpton’s theory of sports journalism, anyway. There’s a snobbish ring
to the phrase, which isn’t surprising considering the source. And I’m not sure
it’s technically true. I haven’t read a whole lot of memorable ping-pong
literature, have you?
But, relatively speaking, tennis uses a small ball, and it
has produced some great writing, journalists and observers who stand with the
best—Deford, Forbes, Bodo, Rex Bellamy. What it seems to do as
well as any other sport these days, though, is the memoir, both from its stars
and its second-tier players. In the past few years, we’ve had Andre Agassi’s confessional blockbuster, James Blake’s personal history, Vince Spadea’s edgy tour diary,
and now Hardcourt Confidential. For a niche sport, that seems
like a pretty high story output.
McEnroe’s stories mix the personal with the observational;
the most memorable feature him as a witness to the whims and quirks of
the more talented players around him. McEnroe and his ghostwriter, Pete Bodo,
chose to build it as a series of non-chronological vignettes, which was a
smart move. It gives the book a breezy feel; you aren’t forced, the way you are
with the standard autobiography, to slog through his early days before you get
to the “confidential” stuff. This approach also fits with the youngest McEnroe’s
personality, which has always been to play the friendly, rational kid brother
to the more self-absorbed genius of Johnny Mac.
Speaking of Pete, knowing him far better than I know
Patrick, I can see a lot of his worldview in these pages. For example: The ATP’s Cincinnati
tournament inspires this musing about Europeans' misapprehension of Midwestern
values: “They don’t understand how we actually like a plain, comfortable life, even if it lacks many of the cultural amenities they’re used to.” Contrast that with a description of the Monte Carlo event: “The Monte Carlo Country Club is
an enclave of the rich, royal, and powerful. Patrons and club members regularly
have lunch on the terrace while watching the players—or is that peons?—grunting
and sweating on the main stadium court.” Remind you of anyone?
It’s hardly a surprise that there would be a lot of Pete
in the book—he wrote the sentences, and he and Patrick share a down-to-earth
sensibility. Pete also brings his biggest strength, that is, his
perceptiveness about people’s characters, and the ways those characters can be
contradictory. Early on, McEnroe’s doubles partner, Richey Reneberg, is
described as a “calm, nice guy who had a rebellious streak,” someone who, under
his friendly veneer, liked to invent nicknames for his opponents. It took Patrick's memory and Pete's storytelling skill to put that mini-portrait of Reneberg together.
From there Patrick and Pete move on to the bigger fish—Sampras, Agassi, Blake, Roddick, etc. These stories will be the highlight of the
book for most fans, and Patrick, while respectful as always, isn’t afraid to
shed a little negative, human light on each star.
He says that one part of Sampras enjoys being a jerk, a hard a---. He’s
had to learn to say no to people, and he’s come to relish the role a little. We knew
he was cheap, but I don’t think I understood how deep that streak ran until I
read McEnroe’s story about how Sampras, when they were teammates at the Word
Team Cup one year, called Patrick afterward, claiming he had “gotten too much money” for what he'd contributed.
But the best section of the book belongs to Agassi, and how he helped wreck the U.S. Davis Cup team’s camaraderie and mojo during their
loss to Croatia in 2005. Agassi, high maintenance, high-strung, and controlling,
hates the courts Patrick has selected. (“I can’t get any progress!” he shouts to
his coach, Darren Cahill; meaning, in Agassi-speak, that he can’t get the ball
to penetrate.) He comes unglued in his loss to Ljubicic and screams in agony at
Cahill. He insists on ordering for everyone at dinner and having a lengthy group wine
tasting at the table, while the rest of the team, who are essentially college
kids, just wants to get the hell out of there. And he rides Bob Bryan so hard about
his actress girlfriend (“when are you going to dump that actress chick?”) that
Bob loses confidence on court, he and his brother go down in the doubles, and Croatia
walks away with the upset.
While the book isn't exactly a "confidential" in the sexy sense—though we do learn that Patrick had a fling with a swimsuit model in Paris (nice work!)—the Sampras and Agassi stuff is worth the price of
admission. Patrick, through Pete, plays the role of the normal guy who has to deal with the quirks of genius. He’s the right guy for
this job, since he’s had to learn to live with the quirkiest tennis genius of
all, his older brother. Still, what he’s willing to reveal about that brother
seems to have its limits. I was ready for more crazy, and maybe ugly, Johnny
Mac stories, and also for some insight into the difficulties that must come
with living in such a colossal sibling shadow. Patrick does acknowledge being called, insultingly, a “professional brother” at one point, but we don’t get much
soul-searching on the subject. That’s not the book he chose to write, and
it’s really not his or Pete’s style.
The most vivid McEnroes are the parents. John Sr., drives both of his boys crazy with his mania for family, and
for tennis. A child of Irish immigrants, he became a partner at a prestigious New York law firm and built a family compound on Long Island—he’s
the Joe Kennedy of tennis, and his pride in his boys’ accomplishments is
touching. But it’s Kay, Patrick’s mother, who seems to have had the more lasting influence on her youngest son. She labelled him a “plugger” when he was a kid—he wasn't overly talented,
but he kept pushing. Patrick seems to have lived
that concept of himself out every day of his life. And it's worked: It's given him the level-headed perspective needed to live inside his brother's shadow, and make the most of it.
OK, Kamakshi, I know you were enjoying this book as you read
it. Was there anything that surprised you, about Patrick or the people he
describes? Was it confidential enough for you?
