The author together with Alex and Iván Corretja
Love. Rip. Advantage. Sudden death. “It can’t be a coincidence that tennis uses the language of life,” he says. Andre Agassi in his autobiography, Open, one of the best ever written by an athlete. He knows it well because, despite winning sixty titles and becoming the best in his sport, his history reads like a series of defeats.
So many that, when the actress Brook Shields asks for a divorce, the American tennis player tries to save his marriage with the desperation of a match ball. Not because he believes that his relationship or his wife are worth it, but to avoid “a new defeat.”
Tennis is a brutal sport. When you tell it to people who don’t know the competition, they look at you in disbelief. What could be so hard about spending the day working out, visiting Monte Carlo, New York and Melbourne, winning a fortune and signing autographs? The truth is that, with the imbalances in prizes, only a small elite at the top earns a good living. The rest survive poorly in a sport that does not allow, even the great champions, to savor the triumphs.
It doesn’t matter that you won on Sunday, on Monday you will be getting on a plane to another place to avoid losing points, defend a title, protect your place in the ranking. And, during breaks, training so as not to miss the train. Eleven months a year. Every day.
Tennis has been designed, from its endless calendar to that scoreboard that uses the terminology of life, for the greater glory of defeat. And, since it is an individual discipline, this one hurts more: you can’t share it with your teammates. You can hold no one but yourself responsible for it. It’s yours and no one else’s.
Their bitterness lasts longer, much longer, than the joy of victory, says Agassi. When the tennis player wanders around the court like a boxer about to be knocked out, talking to himself and looking with his eyes for the coach or his father, for someone to help him, facing the loneliness of defeat. It is the ability to overcome that fear that turns the loser into a winner, the unknown player into a champion, the champion into a legend. And to legends in Roger Federer o Rafael Nadal.
Agassi only overcame the fear of losing at the end of his career, after several retirements, experiences with drugs and once beginning to appreciate a sport he had hated since childhood. The court where he learned to play, built by his father in the garden of his Las Vegas home, was for him a prison where he was forced to spend his childhood. The ball throwing machine with which he trained a “dragon” that gives him night nightmares.
His coach in Florida, already in adolescence, a tyrant against whom he felt the need to rebel. For much of his career he felt so unhappy that, when he finally reached number 1 in the ATP, after a youth of sacrifices, years of training that destroyed his body and countless truncated personal relationships, he came to the conclusion that he had not deserved the sorrow. He receives a call from a journalist who asks him how he feels from the top. “Nothing,” he tells himself before giving a predictable response about the reward of the dream achieved. “I do not feel anything”.
I, unlike Agassi, did want to be a tennis player. While my schoolmates dreamed of being soccer players, my fantasies took me to the final of Roland Garros. Childhood friends, like Alex Corretja o Sergi Bruguera, they made them come true. Those of us who lacked his talent or determination lost more often, and each defeat put our dreams into perspective.
Many years would have to pass before, when I looked back on my best sporting failures, I would understand how much they had helped me in life. Heartbreak, disappointment at work, or a friend’s betrayal are less so when you have become familiar with defeat and have stopped fearing it. If you have learned to endure it. When, without realizing it, you make the quote yours Samuel Beckett what Stanislas Wawrinka He has a tattoo on his forearm: “You always tried. You always failed. It doesn’t matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.
Maybe I like tennis over team sports like soccer because it hides a lesson that can be applied to almost everything we do: it is up to you to decide how you send the ball to the other side, not how it will be returned to you. The only thing you can do is prepare as best as possible to receive the next blow. Blow, did I say? It cannot be a coincidence that tennis uses the language of life.
2024-04-12 05:58:13
#bearable #loneliness #defeat #tennis
