The Paris Review

Everyone will be watching Vera Zvonareva. Photograph by Christian Mesiano.

A win is just a win. But a loss—a loss can be pain. When Vera Zvonareva was defeated by Flavia Pennetta in the fourth round of the Open last year, she suffered, and it was real suffering. She had six match points in the second set and converted none. That’s when the fear set in, and the doubt. She cried on the court. She pulled off the tape wrapped around her knees. She begged the chair umpire for scissors to cut the tape and then cursed at him when he denied her. She cursed and screamed, she fell, she beat her bleeding legs. Her grunts were howls. She smashed her racket into the net post. She paced and paced. When she sat in her chair during the changeover, she put a towel over her head. She wanted to disappear. She wanted not to lose. She lost the third set 6-0.

Now, Vera Zvonareva is about to face Kim Clijsters in the final of this year’s U.S. Open. So far, Zvonareva has been the picture of poise. The wind? No problem. The no. 1 seed, Caroline Wozniacki? An easy victory, in a quick 85 minutes. While the stars have showed off their florescent hotpants and specially-designed dresses, Zvonareva has been wearing a white long-sleeved shirt, as if the matches were no big deal, only warm ups. She’s letting opponents beat themselves, playing high-percentage shots while they rack up errors. “I know I’m not going to play perfect tennis all the time,” she said after her win yesterday. She just wants to play well enough to win.

This is admirable maturity. And yet, in my little warped heart, I can’t help but hope to see some flicker of fear in her eyes tonight. Not because I want her to lose—I want her to win. And not because she doesn’t belong out there, because she does. She was a finalist at Wimbledon; she's a big hitter and an extraordinary physical specimen.  I want to see the fear because that fear is honest. She is afraid, no matter what she says in those post-game press conferences. She has to be. She is facing the defending champion. Everyone will be watching her for some sign of cracking. It's human, that fear. One second, everything is going right. The next, you’re in tears. And there’s nowhere to hide from your failure.

I'll be cheering for her.

I’m on my way to the Open! It will be, I’m embarrassed to say, my first time inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. During previous years, I’ve been out of town or out of money. Decent seats during the second week were beyond my reach, and if David Foster Wallace is right that “TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love,” then I figured that the promenade—the more-affordable upper deck—meant the disappointment of an unrequited crush.

Excuses, excuses. This year, I’ve sprung for Loge level tickets. Stanislas Wawrinka, the 25th seed best known as the Swiss player who’s not Roger Federer, is facing the 12th-seeded Mikhail Youzhny. An improbable quarterfinal matchup, but I’m looking forward to it. Wawrinka and Youzhny have two of the best one-handed backhands in the game. Neither man, though, will probably move the ball as well as the wind will.

I’ve avoided talking about the weather, since you’ll have heard about the weather. Every story about the Open has discussed it; every TV commentator has obsessed over “the conditions.” First, it was very, very hot. Then there was talk of hurricanes. Finally, came the devastating winds.

But the weather cannot be avoided. Nor should it. “We are physical beings in a physical world,” the poet Wallace Stevens once wrote to a critic. He also said, “The state of the weather soon becomes a state of mind.” The wind has turned the tennis ugly. Letting blown tosses fall, servers can’t find a rhythm. Topspin shots that should arc inside the lines fly long. Routine groundstrokes become hard to handle. Any ball that floats begins to flutter. Last night, Robin Soderling netted an overhead hit from a squat. Against the third-seeded Novak Djokovic, the Frenchman Gael Monfils became so rattled by the swirling air that he tried trick shots when regular strokes would do, swinging through his legs instead of hitting a normal forehand. “I was completely lost,” he said afterward. “Can’t serve. Can’t really use my forehand. You run for what?”

You run for what? And yet, the winners run. They adjust their angles, shorten their toss, and smile when the wind redirects a crosscourt shot down the line. Yesterday, the 7^th-seeded Vera Zvonavera and the top-seeded Caroline Wozniacki hit fewer than half as many unforced errors as their opponents. While Wozniacki’s opponent, Dominika Cibulkova, smashed and slashed her racket, as if she could cut the wind, Wozniaki calmly braided her errant hair.

But no one has been immune to the wind like Roger Federer. Last night, he struck his shots so cleanly, his serves so sharply, that I wondered if he inhabited a different atmosphere. “The conditions” did not apply to him. Federer had 16 more aces and 20 more winners than Soderling. Even more arresting, though, than his play was his look of calm. “By now, I see playing in the wind as a challenge—an opportunity to play differently,” Federer said after the match. “It's not easy, you know…. I used to dislike it so much that I've been able to turn it around, and now I actually enjoy it."

Reading Federer’s words, I thought of Stevens’s masterpiece, Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction:

The weather and the giant of the weather,
Say the weather, the mere weather, the mere air:
An abstraction blooded, as a man by thought.

A player has to confront the fact that she's out there by herself. A doubles player does not. Photograph by Drew Douglas.

There are doubles matches being played in the U.S. Open. By good players. A trophy will be awarded. And no one seems to care.

On The New York Times tennis blog, Times Magazine editor Gerry Marzorati asked the art critic Michael Kimmelman why that is. Kimmelman suggested that tennis is “aspirational.” Many tennis fans—recreational doubles players themselves—are the kind of people who live in “modest homes and cook modest meals” but read Architectural Digest and study sous vide cuisine. They grew up dreaming of being the best, and the best play singles. “Doubles reminds them that they’re no longer young, that life can be disappointing, that not all dreams come true, and that not anything is possible,” Kimmelman wrote. “Well, maybe that’s a little too Dostoeyevskian, but you get the point.”

Well. Of course tennis is aspirational; most sports are. But the “modest home” theory seems a little weak (especially considering the stratospheric prices of Open tickets!). I suspect that the real answer is simple: doubles is ridiculous. It’s fine to play—if you have four people, only one court, and bad knees. But let's not pretend that it's something more exalted.

I’m told that true tennis fans love doubles. The intensity, the strategy, the quick hands! The all-around quality of the game! So it may be that I’m discrediting myself. It may be that you will no longer take me seriously. To you serious people, I say: I’ve tried, I really have. I’m still trying. Yesterday, even though Rafael Nadal was playing and Andy Murray was down, I watched Vania King and Yaroslava Shvedova, the Wimbledon champions, take on Barbora Zahlavova Strycova and Iveta Benesova. The match, won by King and Shvedova in a third-set tiebreak, was as good and thrilling as doubles gets. Watching the players demonstrate their shifting formations, deft adjustments, and quick reflexes was exciting, like watching President Obama swat a fly. But how many times do you really want to watch Obama swat a fly?

What really bothers me about doubles, though, is not boredom. It's more fundamental. The problem is that doubles is played by partners. Two people simply should not stand on the same side of the net. Part of the reason tennis is so compelling is that a player has to confront the fact that she's out there by herself. A doubles player does not. Consider the Bryan brothers, the best doubles team playing, one of the best teams ever. One is left handed, one right; one is Bob and one is Mike. Otherwise, they pretty much share a life. The zygote did not fully split. They always have each other. They are never, ever alone.

Playing singles, you cannot seek advice from a teammate or a coach; you cannot punch or taunt or chase your opponent. You can only hit the ball. Sometimes, your greatest competition is yourself. Tennis, to me, is Jelena Jankovic, shrieking in desperation as the wind whipped her ponytail and her shots. It's Ana Ivanovic—talented, sweet, pretty, a former No. 1—chasing bad service tosses under pressure. It's Rafael Nadal, touching his face and plucking his shirt, the tennis player's way of crossing himself. Even when the stakes are nonexistence, the isolation can be hard. I like to play with the sun to my back, and not only because it’s easier to see the ball. I want to watch my shadow. It keeps me company. Overcoming loneliness can be the greatest challenge, and the most important one.

Serena Williams’ withdrawal leaves the field wide open. Photograph by Rob Young.

It’s a weird moment for women’s tennis. Not bad, but weird. Watch the bizarre slow-motion video montage of “women who hit very hard” on the Times website. Then watch it again. Underneath the glitter, these Amazons are straight out of Herodotus. But with the exception of the Serena Williams and perhaps the leonine Kim Cljisters, the glittering women here (Dementieva, Jankovic, Stosur, Azarenka, and Zvonareva) are mostly unknown to Americans. Serena’s withdrawal from the 2010 U.S. Open—she needed surgery after cutting her foot—and the absence of Justine Henin, the Belgian known as “the sister of no mercy,” has left the field wide open.

They say that the U.S. Open, with its fast and reliable surface, is the place where the best usually win. But in this year’s hobbled women’s draw, all bets are off—and, though Venus Williams, even with a bum knee, and the resurgent Russian Maria Sharapova, are always contenders, it will most likely be a woman whose name most Americans can’t pronounce, let alone remember. The men have Rafa and Federer; the women . . . Wozniacki and Clijsters?

The Women’s Tennis Association is no doubt praying for the requisite underdog to emerge, preferably an American under six feet tall. Melanie Oudin, last year’s darling, is apparently the most sought-after woman in the tournament, despite the fact that she’s ranked 43rd in the world. Oudin, the sunny, blond, all-American raced to the quarters of the 2009 Open wearing rose and honey-yellow Adidas sneakers inscribed with the word “BELIEVE.” But nobody believes she can do it again; the eighteen-year-old has a 17-20 record this year and came into the tournament on a four-match losing streak. So why is she so popular? Her success last year only accounts for part of it. Unlike the women in the Times video, who look more like LeBron James than Chris Evert, she’s diminutive, scrappy, and has a reassuringly all-around game. This morning, in the showcase Arthur Ashe Stadium, she filleted the court, demolishing the qualifier Olga Savchuk with the kind of tennis that defeated four Russians in a row at the Open last year. (For those who don’t have the Tennis Channel, you can watch many of the matches live on usopen.org.) It’s easy to see Oudin’s appeal—and her potential, if she can develop a big weapon that will counter some of her disadvantage in size—but it’s also hard not to wonder if some of it doesn’t come from a reaction against the rippling quads and veiny biceps of some of the more powerful girls, and against their consonant-laden names. The contrast between Oudin and Serena, the reigning queen of American tennis, can’t be missed either. When Serena lost in the semis at the Open last year after a profanity-filled rant against an official who called her for a foot-fault cost her match point, tournament director Jim Curley called her behavior “threatening.”

I, for one, am rooting for muscles. We’ve always wanted our beskirted players to be pretty; why not gorgeous? And is there anything more astonishing than the wave moving through Samantha Stosur’s quadriceps, echoed by those flowing pink pleats? She has the flanks of a thoroughbred, and the beauty.

Off to the races.

Louisa Thomas is a contributing editor at Newsweek. Her book, Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists, One Family—A Test of Will and Faith in World War I, will come out in 2011.