{"id":38371,"date":"2012-09-12T14:30:32","date_gmt":"2012-09-12T18:30:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=38371"},"modified":"2021-07-09T12:58:11","modified_gmt":"2021-07-09T16:58:11","slug":"stage-struck","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/09\/12\/stage-struck\/","title":{"rendered":"Stage Struck"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Most of what I read about professional tennis, particularly the profiles of the game\u2019s biggest names, appears around the Grand Slams, three of which are played over the summer here in the northern hemisphere. This was the summer of Roger Federer, Andy Murray and his new coach Ivan Lendl, and Venus and Serena Williams. Novak Djokovic, the world\u2019s top men\u2019s player when the summer began, had had his moment in Vogue<\/em><\/a> in May 2011, during a season when, at one point, he\u2019d string together forty-three straight victories and lose only six matches.<\/p>\n

Near the end of that season, about a month after Djokovic saved two match points against Federer\u2019s serve to win their U.S. Open semifinal, the New York Times Magazine <\/em>ran an essay by Adam Sternbergh called \u201cThe Thrill of Defeat<\/a>.\u201d The occasion for the piece was the \u201c278 million to 1\u201d odds against the Boston Red Sox\u2019s \u201cepic\u201d collapse during the 2011 pennant race. To a Federer fan looking back to the Open, though, those odds seemed about right. What also seemed right were Sternbergh\u2019s thoughts about the basic absurdity of sports and, my affinity for Bart Giamatti notwithstanding, the \u201cterrible sportswriters\u201d who \u201cargue that sports are a grand metaphor, a stage on which we witness essential narratives about determination, bravery and heart.\u201d Whatever narratives we see playing out on the field or on the court are ones we put together while we watch; after all, where one fan might see bravery and heart in an endless string of Barry Bonds home runs, another may see deceit, cowardice, and greed. Same goes for that cheater Lance Armstrong.<\/p>\n

Sports broadcasters are guiltier these days than sportswriters of the \u201cgrand metaphor\u201d approach where tennis is concerned. Following the major tournaments this summer on television, I\u2019ve heard again and again of the history about to be made: Rafael Nadal\u2019s seventh French championship (history made), Djokovic\u2019s career Slam (history not made), Murray\u2019s becoming the first Brit to win Wimbledon since 1936 (nope). Even Federer\u2019s thirty-first birthday was seen as historic, according to a certain fan site<\/a>: \u201cGod is too an imaginative word, rather I would call him a \u2018Prophet\u2019 \/ Someday the prophet will make Tennis the most loved sport, I bet.\u201d The language of \u201cbravery and heart\u201d was applied particularly to Murray, whose loss to Federer in the Wimbledon final was vindicated first with Olympic gold, and then with a victory over Djokovic in the U.S. Open final. With Andy Roddick\u2019s retirement during the Open, we were also treated to any number slow-motion montages of the American\u2019s days in the sun. (Even Roddick remarked during one interview how moving those montages can be.)<\/p>\n

Magazine writing doesn\u2019t do montage well. Instead, we\u2019ve lately gotten storylines, and sometimes whole stories, that explore the quasimetaphysical existence of what has been variously called, among other things, \u201cthe kinesthetic sense\u201d (David Foster Wallace<\/a> on Federer) and \u201cphysical genius\u201d (John Jeremiah Sullivan<\/a> on the Williams sisters)\u2014the very thing slow-motion replay is meant to reveal on television.<\/p>\n

Explaining such physical genius in writing, however, has come to require an exploration of the mental state that supports such prowess. To that end, we have accounts of the \u201cemotionless gaze\u201d (Geoffrey Gray<\/a> on Federer), a version of which all the great tennis players these days seem to have. In Freedom<\/em>, Jonathan Franzen calls this the \u201calert drowsiness or focused dumbness\u201d of being in the zone. Both Gray and novelist Peter de Jonge<\/a>, in a profile of Murray and Lendl, also argue that any emotionlessness in the face of a tennis player is actually a mask. Lendl\u2019s was about intimidation. Federer wears a mask, Gray says, \u201cto dam the torrents of rage that destroyed his ability to win matches early in his career.\u201d<\/p>\n

Make no mistake. I read these articles and return to them because they can be very enjoyable. Of those I\u2019ve mentioned from this summer, Sullivan\u2019s piece about the Williamses is, by far, the best, perhaps because he only alludes to the sisters\u2019 physical genius in the profile and refers to it directly in a behind-the-scenes interview<\/a> with the Times Magazine<\/em>\u2019s blog.<\/p>\n

Gray\u2019s profile is the worst of the summer, which is only partly his fault: as Wallace found, reporting on Federer from Wimbledon in 2006, getting access is \u201crather like the old story of someone climbing an enormous mountain to talk to the man seated lotus on top, except in this case the mountain is composed entirely of sports-bureaucrats.\u201d Gray found the man sitting lotus, too: Federer \u201csat in a small plastic chair, one leg crossed over the other just so, his arms crossed over his chest. He didn\u2019t squirm around in the chair to get more comfortable, or gesture with his hands.\u201d Still, no sports bureaucrat is responsible for the phrase \u201cdam the torrents of rage.\u201d<\/p>\n

Perhaps because he\u2019s unable to say much that\u2019s new, though, Gray wants us to see that there\u2019s something simply unknowable about Roger Federer\u2014even to Federer himself. It\u2019s there in the very first line: \u201cOne night, at a hotel in Tokyo, Roger Federer woke up and had no idea where he was.\u201d It happens that this unknowability, like the mask of emotionlessness, is not so uncommon among all-time great tennis players. Take, for instance, the beginning of Andre Agassi\u2019s memoir: \u201cI open my eyes and don\u2019t know where I am or who I am.\u201d (It also happens that J. R. Moehringer<\/a>, Agassi\u2019s wonderful and irrepressible ghost, shared a similar experience in his own memoir: \u201cI closed my eyes and laughed and for a few moments I forgot who and where I was.\u201d)<\/p>\n

About a month after Sternberg\u2019s story about the Red Sox, John McPhee described<\/a> in The<\/em> New Yorker<\/em> the formula he developed in the late sixties for the double profile, where, in the end, \u201c1+1 = 2.6.\u201d (\u201cIn any case, one plus one should add up to more than two.\u201d) The subjects for his first double profile came to him in 1968 while he watched a men\u2019s semifinal of the first U.S. Open, between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner. McPhee came to believe that \u201cin the resonance between the two sides, added dimension might develop,\u201d and by his own assessment\u2014in the case of Ashe, who was black and whose \u201cswinging freely is something that scares players of all nations,\u201d versus Graebner, white, whose strokes made other players sometimes believe he was \u201ctrying to kill them\u201d\u2014the first try at the double profile \u201cworked out.\u201d<\/p>\n

That magazine profile in The<\/em> New Yorker <\/em>became the book Levels of the Game<\/em><\/a>, which has as its setting the late-sixties \u201cmegagame\u201d of tennis: big serves and short, explosive points. At one level, the book is a play-by-play, beginning with the \u201chigh and forward\u201d toss of Ashe\u2019s first serve, to Graebner\u2019s backhand. Then a little back and forth before: \u201cFifteen-love.\u201d There\u2019s some discussion of strategy\u2014\u201cJust hit the ball in the court, Clark\u201d\u2014and the sizing up of an opponent. But for McPhee the \u201cadded dimension\u201d that results from Ashe plus Graebner has nothing to do with history, mythology, or metaphor. There\u2019s simply a great deal to see in a game when we really look at who played and how it went.<\/p>\n

The piece worked because McPhee uses the sport, and this single match, as a way to get at characters\u2014men on a stage, to be sure, but also just simply that: men. Indeed, the very moment we see Graebner imagining himself as a \u201cGreek tragic hero getting pushed around by the gods,\u201d we learn from his Davis Cup coach that this habit is \u201chis greatest weakness.\u201d For Ashe, a lieutenant in the U.S. Army and a liberal whom Graebner describes as \u201can average Negro from Richmond, Virginia,\u201d tennis is a means to an end: \u201cWhat else is there to life,\u201d Ashe says, \u201cbesides a family and financial security?\u201d<\/p>\n

While McPhee\u2019s profile describes players who have reached a certain level of excellence, what\u2019s remarkable and refreshing from our perspective is that there\u2019s no talk of being in the zone, no \u201calert drowsiness\u201d that makes these players like each other but unlike us. Instead, Ashe is a daydreamer who spends his matches thinking about what\u2019s for dinner. In Levels of the Game<\/em>, there are no ruminations on the religious experience that is the Graeber serve. Instead, it\u2019s just \u201ccrunch.\u201d (Agassi says something similar about a barrage of shots from Federer: \u201cNow the shit is rolling downhill and doesn\u2019t stop.\u201d) There\u2019s nothing metaphysical in Ashe\u2019s game; his iciness and elegance are matters of character, keeping his cool, like his habit of wearing sunglasses indoors. As Graebner says about Ashe, \u201cHe plays the way he thinks,\u201d which means that playing is more than just moving; it\u2019s about thinking and appearances: \u201cHe doesn\u2019t want to be seen as a grubber.\u201d And with Ashe, the happiness that comes with winning a tournament is not earth shattering or indescribable. After only five minutes, \u201cit\u2019s all gone.\u201d<\/p>\n

McPhee writes about tennis with the belief that there\u2019s nothing essentially unknowable about an athlete and that a game can actually tell you something about the character of real living, breathing people. His 1965 account of basketball great Bill Bradley promises as much in the title: A Sense of Where You Are. <\/em>And the revelation of a person him or herself, not the breathlessness of a writer chasing down the Buddha, is the point of a profile. Believing this provides for the little bit extra we get when doing the never simple math of 1+1.<\/p>\n

Scott Korb is the author of <\/em>Life in Year One and the forthcoming <\/em>Light Without Fire: The Making of America’s First Muslim College.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Most of what I read about professional tennis, particularly the profiles of the game\u2019s biggest names, appears around the Grand Slams, three of which are played over the summer here in the northern hemisphere. This was the summer of Roger Federer, Andy Murray and his new coach Ivan Lendl, and Venus and Serena Williams. Novak […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":408,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[931],"tags":[8628,8634,8626,8629,8632,8633,154,8630,8627,1577,8625,818,8631,816,1119,788,730,8623,8624],"class_list":["post-38371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-on-sports","tag-adam-sternbergh","tag-andre-agassi","tag-andy-murray","tag-andy-roddick","tag-arthur-ashe","tag-clark-graebner","tag-david-foster-wallace","tag-geoffrey-gray","tag-ivan-lendl","tag-john-jeremiah-sullivan","tag-john-mcphee","tag-novak-djokovic","tag-peter-de-jonge","tag-rafael-nadal","tag-red-sox","tag-roger-federer","tag-serena-williams","tag-us-open","tag-venus-williams"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nStage Struck by Scott Korb<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"September 12, 2012 \u2013 Most of what I read about professional tennis, 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