A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (58 page)

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In the yore days before wide-body ceramic racquets and scientific strength-training, the only two venues for hitting winners used to be the volley—where your decreased distance from the net allowed for greatly increased angle (get that protractor out)—and the defensive passing shot… i.e., in the tactical language of boxing, “punch” v. “counterpunch.” The new power-baseline game allows a player, in effect, to punch his opponent all the way from his stool in the corner; it changes absolutely everything, and the analytic geometry of these changes would look like the worst calculus final you ever had in your life.

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This is why the phenomenon of “breaking serve” in a set is so much less important when a match involves power-baseliners. It is one reason why so many older players and fans no longer like to watch pro tennis as much: the structural tactics of the game are now wholly different from when they played.

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© Wichita KS’s Koch Materials Company, “A Leader in Asphalt-Emulsions Technology.”

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John McEnroe wasn’t all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived—the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.

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One answer to why public interest in mens tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty
thuggishness
about the power-baseline style that’s come to dominate the Tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime—for so small a man and so great a player, he’s amazingly devoid of finesse, with movements that look more like a Heavy Metal musician’s than an athlete’s.

The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge. But what a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.

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(compare Ivanisevic’s at 130 mph or Sampras’s at 125, or even this Brakus kid’s at 118).

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The loop in a pro’s backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of same, not unlike the five-star chef’s quick kiss of his own fingertips as he presents a pièce or the magician’s hand making a French curl in the air as he directs our attention to his vanished assistant.

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All serious players have these little extraneous tics, stylistic fingerprints, and the pros even more so because of years of repetition and ingraining. Pros’ tics have always been fun to note and chart, even just e.g. on the serve. Watch the way Sampras’s lead foot rises from the heel on his toss, as if his left foot’s toes got suddenly hot. The odd Tourettic way Gerulaitis used to whip his head from side to side while bouncing the ball before his toss, as if he were having a small seizure. McEnroe’s weird splayed stiff-armed service stance, both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze. The odd sudden shrug Lendl gives before releasing his toss. The way Agassi shifts his weight several times from foot to foot as he prepares for the toss like he needs desperately to pee. Or, here at the Canadian Open, the way the young star Thomas Enqvist’s body bends queerly back as he tosses, limboing back away from the toss, as if for a moment the ball smelled very bad—this tic derives from Enqvist’s predecessor Edberg’s own weird spinal arch and twist on the toss. Edberg also has this strange sudden way of switching his hold on the racquet in mid-toss, changing from an Eastern forehand to an extreme backhand grip, as if the racquet were a skillet.

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Who looks rather like a Hispanic Dustin Hoffman and is an almost unbelievably nice guy, with the sort of inward self-sufficiency of truly great teachers and coaches everywhere, the Zen-like blend of focus and calm developed by people who have to spend enormous amounts of time sitting in one place watching closely while somebody else does something. Sam gets 10% of Joyce’s gross revenues and spends his downtime reading dense tomes on Mayan architecture and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met either inside the tennis world or outside it (so cool I’m kind of scared of him and haven’t called him once since the assignment ended, if that makes sense). In return for his 10%, Sam travels with Joyce, rooms with him, coaches him, supervises his training, analyzes his matches, and attends him in practice, even to the extent of picking up errant balls so that Joyce doesn’t have to spend any of his tightly organized practice time picking up errant balls. The stress and weird loneliness of pro tennis—where everybody’s in the same community, sees each other every week, but is constantly on the diasporic move, and is each other’s rival, with enormous amounts of money at stake and life essentially a montage of airports and bland hotels and non-home-cooked food and nagging injuries and staggering long-distance bills, and people’s families back home tending to be wackos, since only wackos will make the financial and temporal sacrifices necessary to let their offspring become good enough at something to turn pro at it—all this means that most players lean heavily on their coaches for emotional support and friendship as well as technical counsel. Sam’s role with Joyce looks to me to approximate what in the latter century was called that of “companion,” one of those older ladies who traveled with nubile women when they went abroad, etc.

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Agassi’s balls look more like Borg’s balls would have looked if Borg had been on a year-long regimen of both steroids and methamphetamines and was hitting every single nicking ball just as hard as he could—Agassi hits his groundstrokes as hard as anybody who’s ever played tennis, so hard you almost can’t believe it if you’re right there by the court.

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But Agassi does have this exaggerated follow-through where he keeps both hands on the racquet and follows through almost like a hitter in baseball, which causes his shirtfront to lift and his hairy tummy to be exposed to public view—in Montreal I find this repellent, though the females in the stands around me seem ready to live and die for a glimpse of Agassi’s tummy. Agassi’s S.O. Brooke Shields is in Montreal, by the way, and will end up highly visible in the player-guest box for all Agassi’s matches, wearing big sunglasses and what look to be multiple hats. This may be the place to insert that Brooke Shields is rather a lot taller than Agassi, and considerably less hairy, and that seeing them standing together in person is rather like seeing Sigourney Weaver on the arm of Danny DeVito. The effect is especially surreal when Brooke is wearing one of the plain classy sundresses that make her look like a deb summering in the Hamptons and Agassi’s wearing his new Nike on-court ensemble, a blue-black horizontally striped outfit that together with his black sneakers make him look like somebody’s idea of a French Resistance fighter.

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(Though note that very few of them wear eyeglasses, either.)

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A whole other kind of vision—the kind attributed to Larry Bird in basketball, sometimes, when he made those incredible surgical passes to people who nobody else could even see were open—is required when you’re hitting: this involves seeing the other side of the court, i.e. where your opponent is and which direction he’s moving in and what possible angles are open to you in consequence of where he’s going. The schizoid thing about tennis is that you have to use both kinds of vision — ball and court—at the same time.

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Basketball comes close, but it’s a team sport and lacks tennis’s primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close — at least at the lighter weight-divisions—but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful: a level of abstraction and formality (i.e. “play”) is probably necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).

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For those of you into business stats, the calculus of a shot in tennis would be rather like establishing a running compound-interest expansion in a case where not only is the rate of interest itself variable, and not only are the determinants of that rate variable, and not only is the interval in which the determinants influence the interest rate variable, but the principal
itself
is variable.

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Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-gurus eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.

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In the Qualies for Grand Slams like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, players sometimes have to play two three-out-of-five-set matches in one day; it is little wonder that the surviving qualifiers often look like concentration-camp survivors by the time they get to the main draw and you see them getting annihilated by a healthy and rested top seed in the televised first round.

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Meaning a two-handed forehand, whose pioneer was a South African named Frew McMillan and whose most famous practitioner today is Monica Seles.

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The idea of what it would be like to perspire heavily with large amounts of gel in your hair is sufficiently horrific to me that I approached Knowle after the match to ask him about it, only to discover that neither he nor his coach spoke enough English or even French to be able to determine who I was, and the whole sweat-and-gel issue will, I’m afraid, remain a matter for your own imagination.

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What Joyce has done is known as “wrong-footing” his opponent, though the intransigent Francophone press here keep calling the tactic a “contre-pied.”

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Who is clearly such a fundamentally nice guy that he would probably hit around with me for a little while just out of politeness, since for him it would be at worst somewhat dull. For me, though, it would be obscene.

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The example of Michael Joyce’s own childhood, though, shows that my friends and I were comparative sluggards, dilettantes. He describes his daily schedule thusly: “I’d be in school till 2:00. Then, after, I’d go [driven by father] to the [West End Tennis] Club [in Torrance CA] and have a lesson with [legendary, wildly expensive, and unbelievably hard-ass Robert] Lansdorp [former childhood coach of, among others, Tracy Austin] from 3:00 to 4:00. Then I’d have drills from 4:00 to 6:00, then we’d drive all the way home—it’s like half an hour—and I’m like, ‘Thank God, I can watch TV or go up and talk with [friends] on the phone or something,’ but Dad is like, ‘You didn’t practice your serve yet.’ At twelve or thirteen [years old], you’re not going to want to do it. [No lie, since two hours of serious drills alone were usually enough to put your correspondent in a fetal position for the rest of the day.] You need somebody to make you do it. [This is one way of looking at it.] But then, after like a hundred or so serves, I start to get into [standing by himself out on the Joyces’ tennis court in their backyard with a huge bucket of balls and hitting serve after serve to no one in what must by then have been the gathering twilight], I like it, I’m glad I’m doing it.”

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An important variable I’m skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they screw up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game. Feelings of self-disgust at his errors, or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have “bad luck” or an “offday” would mount until usually by sometime in the second set he’d sink into a kind of enraged torpor and
expect to
miss, or occasionally he’d even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racquet-hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college only genuine head-cases could be counted on to get so mad that they’d basically make themselves lose to an inferior player (viz. me). It’s something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round Qualies opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rainout, Joyce’s third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw’s first rounds are beginning. Joyce’s opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, 25, the 1986 U.S. Junior Indoor Champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world’s top 200, somebody on Joyce’s plateau.