I stopped drinking thanks to tennis. It’s a little more complex, actually, but let’s say that this sport had a lot to do with it: I started playing it when I was just a child in my native Manizales, in the early nineties, with a discipline that sometimes overwhelmed me. I was never particularly good, but, beyond those minutiae, tennis accompanied me for much of my childhood and early youth. I remember the weekends we spent on the courts emulating our idols back then: Pete Sampras, Jim Courier, Goran Ivanisevic and, of course, Andre Agassi.
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The famous Kid from Las Vegas was for me – and for the vast majority of my playing partners – the brightest star of that tennis universe. His rebellious figure, his long hair that later turned out to be fake, his boots and jean shorts represented everything we wanted to be. (Many years later, when I excitedly read his Open biography of him, I was surprised to learn that Andre always hated tennis and played it forced by a tyrannical father.)
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Then came adolescence. And the brandy. We began to discover the world with drinks and tennis was left behind. I put the racket away. Stop playing. The only thing that remained with me was the pleasure of watching the grand slams thanks to the figure of a young Swiss boy whose career began to take off at the beginning of the new century, when in the 2001 Wimbledon tournament he eliminated Pete Sampras in the round of 16 in the which would be, in the end, the only confrontation between the two. It was Roger Federer. For just over two decades, the Swiss was one of the few things that kept me tied to the world of tennis (the other, of course, was Nadal) and the main reason to continue turning on the television with the hope of watching him play. A lot of things happened during those twenty years – I started working, I lived abroad, I got married, I had a child – but I never lost track of him. Roger was the ultimate expression of beauty in a sport that is beautiful in itself. The closest thing to game perfection.
Therefore, the announcement that the 2022 Laver Cup would be his last tournament as a professional came as a bombshell. “Something in me sank,” all tennis lovers think, evoking the words of John McEnroe after that legendary Wimbledon final against Björn Borg, in 1980, when he found himself lost in the fifth set; It was an unrepeatable match and was the material for the 2017 film: Björn-McEnroe.
The Swiss did not do very well in the Laver Cup and lost his last doubles match against the pair of Jack Sock and Frances Tiafoe, but that photograph remained for history in which he holds the hand of Nadal, his friend and archrival, while They both cry. The most beautiful way to end his career.
***
Random House has just published in Spanish a book by the English writer Geoff Dyer that has a title that is difficult to ignore: The Last Days of Roger Federer. A brief look at the back cover was enough to convince me to buy it. “What happens to great artists and athletes when they reach old age?” said the first sentence on that flap.
The book is not particularly exciting – it gets lost in disjointed digressions, for my taste – but it has good reflections on tennis. Dyer talks about Federer, how the beauty of his game dazzled us all at some point, and his decline and miraculous resurgence in 2017, when he returned from various injuries to win the Australian Open, Indian Wells, Miami and his eighth and last Wimbledon.
“The real triumph was beyond statistics and calculations,” he writes. He had once again proven that the most efficient way to play tennis was also the most beautiful, and vice versa. Aesthetics and victory could go hand in hand.”
Of all, however, one phrase stuck out to me about a topic that I had already thought about more than once since I returned to playing tennis with the same perseverance as before and that precarious level that has never abandoned me: “It is often said that In the end, in tennis only one point matters: the last one,” Dyer writes. And although it refers to the “match point”, it seems to me that, if we apply that logic to the last point played, the issue is rather the opposite: in tennis, that last point no longer matters.
The most important point is actually the one that is about to be played for the simple reason that in this sport – as in life – everything begins again when the last ball is finished. To put it another way: the last point is not necessarily the end. And whoever comes always represents a new opportunity. Roger knows this well, who throughout his career won matches that he thought he had lost, but was also defeated in others in which he had victory by just one stroke, for example, Dyer reminds us, that Wimbledon final in 2019 when He had two championship points against Novak Djokovic in the fifth set and ultimately lost.
It is also true that in tennis, as in life, you lose more than you win.
***
Unlike boxing, tennis is not a sport about which much has been written. The person who tried to approach it with more interest from literature was David Foster Wallace, who wrote several books about it and a memorable essay about the 2007 Wimbledon final between Roger and Nadal – which Federer won – and which was the preamble to the match of matches. from the 2008 final.
There are some novels – The Only Story, by Julian Barnes, or The Tennis Players, by Lars Gustafsson – but it is true that writing about tennis is not only complex, but it is still a sport that is associated more with the elite than with passion. popular. Hence it does not arouse as much fervor as others. In any case, a good recent approach is The Return of Carrie Soto, by the American writer Taylor Jenkins Reid, which tells the story of the greatest grand slam winner who, after her retirement, sees her record threatened by a young tennis player who does not It will take time to overcome it. Hurt to her pride, she decides to return to the circuit to try to avoid him. An agile novel that addresses, among other topics, the unhealthy desire to win that consumes modern society, how difficult it is for women to stand out, and the complex task of accepting that we are not the same as we age.
There are also several biographies – that of Nadal written by the British John Carlin (author of The Human Factor) or that of Federer by Christopher Clarey, who covered the tennis source for three decades for the New York Times – but, of course, Of all of them, the best remains Open, by Andre Agassi, written in collaboration with Pulitzer winner JR Moeringher. A masterful example of literary journalism in which Agassi clearly remembers the first time Federer beat him: “I approach the network convinced that I have lost against the one who was the best, against the Everest of the next generation. I feel sorry for young players who have to compete against him. I feel sorry for the man who is going to play Agassi against his Sampras. Although I do not mention Pete by name, I have him above all in mind when I declare to the press that it is very easy: almost everyone has weak points; “Federer, no.”
And it is surprising that there is still no in-depth biography of Novak Djokovic, who after winning the US Open just a few weeks ago, became the tennis player with the most grand slam titles, along with Margaret Court (a tennis player today quite discussed by their homophobic and racist positions).
The story of the Serbian, with two more ‘greats’ than Nadal and four more than Federer, has all the elements of a good novel: a childhood in poverty in the middle of a country devastated by the Balkan war in the nineties, where a little boy who dreamed of being a tennis player took refuge from the bombings in his grandfather’s house. No one in his family before him had ever held a racket.
***
In The Last Days of Roger Federer, Dyer states that “with Roger’s gradual decline, the reign of beauty is coming to an end.” It is clear that, when he wrote those pages, he had not yet seen Carlos Alcaraz play.
As Roger neared the end of his career, I continued drinking. I had not picked up a racket for many years – decades without doing any type of sport – until one afternoon, while I was hanging out with my son in a park near the house that used to belong to my in-laws, a man in a sweatshirt approached me and told me that They taught classes on a nearby field. The idea stuck with me. I suggested that my son attend and we managed to take him to several before his passion for football ended up demanding him. But I was excited about the possibility of playing again. I no longer had a racket, much less sports clothing. So I bought the basics and scheduled a class.
More than three years have passed since then. I didn’t stop drinking right away, but I started to get more and more excited about tennis: I bought clothes, a better racket, special shoes. I met a group of people that I now play with. I entered tournaments. And then life itself showed me that drinking had lost its charm. That I was no longer the same. Other things happened, of course, but several months ago I gave up alcohol completely. And I don’t regret it for a single second. I think now that, as in tennis, the important thing in life is not the point that has already passed: that is behind us.
The one who really matters is the one who comes.
MARTIN FRANCO VÉLEZ
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2023-10-07 19:16:48
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