about tennis and a new piece in The New Yorker

The Australian Open men's final this year was awesome. The Russki, Daniil Medvedev, is a funny, quasi-villain and impending champion, and Rafa Nadal, in his mid-30s now, is the sport's older statesman—older even beyond his tennis years because his unrelenting hustle and highly physical style of play has worn down his body. But Medvedev had the harder journey to this final, and Nadal is still a champion. Here is how a piece from The New Yorker summarizes Nadal's winning tactics:

Nadal’s topspin forehand gets a ball to not only bounce up but penetrate deeper wherever it’s headed, and he sent Medvedev chasing angled shots that bounded beyond the sidelines. He moved Medvedev forward and back with short slices, followed by deep, out-of-reach groundstrokes.

And then here is the column denouement:

Nadal spoke before the tournament began about how majors are bigger than any one player, and how generations of players come and go but the game remains. He also talked about how tennis is, as he put it, “zero important” compared with the pandemic that has swept the world. This was his way of talking about Djokovic, whose arrival, unvaccinated, in Melbourne, and subsequent deportation dominated coverage of the sport in the week before the Australian Open began, and threatened to cloud it afterward. That it didn’t—that the tennis was just too good not to become what mattered—was due in great part to Nadal and to Barty. That’s what the greatest champions can do.

 

Note: The final was played on January 30, 2022.

 

about "Open" by Andre Agassi

When it was released, this autobiography by American tennis player Andre Agassi was scandalous for the insulated world of professional tennis--a sport in which cussing umpires is a serious offense. The scandal was that Agassi confesses to experimenting with meth, a hard amphetamine, during his pro career. Truth is he did it twice, mostly out of boredom on the spur of the moment. And while high, all he really did was clean his house. So controversy is not the real story--that's the advertising.

The real story is that Agassi, like most other tennis pros, was mercilessly raised to succeed in professional tennis. His father drilled him on a home court everyday for years. Forever after Agassi resented his father and hated tennis. Nevertheless the experience left Agassi super-competitive and as he came of age he desperately wanted the coveted rankings of more consistent players in his era like Pete Sampras, his main rival. Unsurprisingly, Agassi traces his own inconsistent performance (more than once he fell from the top to the bottom) to his lack of confidence and poor sense of self. But these flaws, though nearly universal in their appeal, are never fully explored in Open.

The book's gossipy nuggets are these: Agassi hated Jim Courier until retirement (now they're friends); he never liked Michael Chang, chafing at the way Chang repeatedly thanked God every time he won; he declares Jimmy Conners a major irredeemable asshole (a judgement corroborated by many others); and he thinks Sampras, his career-long rival, is robotic, focused solely on tennis to the exclusion of all else. Ironically, Agassi's first wife, Christie Brinkley, seems to think the same of Agassi--that he's guilty of tennis tunnel-vision. Agassi doesn't seem to notice this irony. Ultimately the high-profile couple separated because they had nothing in common and each of them was focused on their respective careers.

This was a fine book, a good tour through a tennis life, but Agassi's Open is further evidence that autobiographies by musicians and, more so, athletes, are often boring. These gifted people have a hyper-focused passion and goal--to be the best, and they rarely put in the time and get the perspective needed to examine and expand their story into an insightful dialectic ready for the bookshelves.