The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  Straight sets: To win a match without losing a set.

  Stringbed: The perpendicular crosshatch of tensed strings threaded through the oval frame of the racket head.

  The T: Where the centerline and service line on a tennis court meet, forming a T on the court.

  Tiebreak: Played at the end of a set that has ended with both players having won six games apiece (6–all). The winner is the first to arrive at seven points or win by two points, whichever comes first. Unlike a normal game, in a tiebreak the player who serves first gets only one serve, after which the players alternate serve every two points. When a player wins a point on the opponent’s serve it’s known as a mini-break.

  Milos Raonic in trophy position. Roland-Garros, Paris, France, June 2017. (Photograph by Martin Sidorják)

  Topspin: When the ball spins in the same direction in which it’s traveling. This causes the ball to dip quickly either just past the net or just before reaching the baseline, depending on the depth of the shot. Topspin also entices the ball to bounce off the court at a higher angle. Racket and string innovations have led to an exponentially greater use of topspin in the game.

  Triple break point: See Break point.

  Trophy position: The part of the service motion when the ball has been tossed into the air, the server’s arm that tossed the ball is still straight, and the arm with the racket is bent behind the body. The service motion of a player is idiosyncratic, but all players pass through trophy position at some moment in the service motion. Derives its name from being the typical pose used for tennis trophies.

  Tweener: A trick shot hit while the ball is between the legs. Two variations exist. The classic one involves running back from the net toward the baseline to chase down a lob and, instead of spinning to hit the ball back across the net, the player attempts to hit the ball between the legs while still running back toward the baseline. Brought into fashion by Guillermo Villas in the 1970s, who dubbed the shot the Gran Willy. The later version involves, while standing in normal ready position, hitting the ball between the legs during a normal rally for absolutely no reason at all, as both Gaël Monfils and Nick Kyrgios have on occasion.

  Unforced error: An error made by a player that is not due to anything the opponent did during the point. For instance, hitting a sitter into the net or sending an easy forehand far over the baseline would be considered unforced errors.

  Unseeded player: An entrant into a tournament who is not a seeded player, a qualifier, or a wild card. Unseeded players navigate the no-man’s-land of a draw where they can be pitted against any type of player in the first round of the tournament. That said, this is still better than being a qualifier because the unseeded player hasn’t expended physical and emotional energy playing qualifying matches.

  Volley: A shot hit before the ball bounces, usually but not exclusively while the player is near the net. Different from a groundstroke, a volley typically has neither backswing nor follow-through. An increasing number of players are making use of a swinging volley, which is when a player takes a full swing at the ball before it lands in the court. Players who are strongly associated with the swinging volley include Andre Agassi, Maria Sharapova, Serena and Venus Williams, and Novak Djokovic.

  Walkover: A player’s uncontested victory due to the opponent’s inability to begin the match; usually, although not exclusively, due to injury. See Retire.

  Wild card: A player invited directly into the main draw of a tournament. Reasons for a wild card vary. Sometimes wild-card invitations are given to promising young talents from the country in which the tournament is held to provide them with early opportunities in ATP events that they otherwise would not have had. In a similar vein, some tournaments offer wild cards to young foreign talents as acts of reciprocity. Some wild cards are given to players who are only recently returning from injury and therefore do not have the requisite ranking points to qualify for direct entry but whose presence the organizers believe will benefit the tournament as a whole. And sometimes a top player decides late to participate in an upcoming tournament for one reason or another and, if the tournament has reserved a wild card, it will be extended to the player.

  Winner: A shot that lands inside the opponent’s court and that the opponent does not reach, and that by consequence wins the point for the player.

  WTA: The Women’s Tennis Association. The principal organizing body of women’s professional tennis. Its counterpart for men’s professional tennis is the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).

  Ready … Play

  WIMBLEDON

  The 2017 Wimbledon Championships began on the third of July. The day prior, the President of the United States sent out via Twitter an edited video image of himself delivering a staged beating of former wrestling executive Vince McMahon on the outskirts of a ring, with the logo of the cable news network CNN superimposed over where McMahon’s head belonged; and the then-governor of New Jersey, Chris Christie, was photographed in a bathing suit, baseball cap, and T-shirt enjoying a lovely summer Sunday with his family on the beach of a state park that, like all of them, he had shut down due to a budget impasse. Independence Day in America was a day away, and luckily I was far away. I turned on the television set.

  I was in the mountains, not far from towns with names like La Nou de Gaià, Masllorenç, Salomó, and Tamarit, where all the vertigo-inducing, winding roads lead downhill first to Torredembarra and on to Tarragona. Another summer in Catalonia: north of Barcelona, south of Barcelona, a few scattered weeks of Barcelona in between.

  Here is where, year after year, Wimbledon happens for me.

  This also means that my Wimbledon has been seen through the lens of this place, my second home, for a good chunk of my life. For instance, every year during the thirteen days of the tournament, some 150,000 servings of the fabled fresh strawberries from Kent County, England, partnered with generous helpings of sweet clotted cream, are consumed on the Wimbledon grounds. It’s as iconic as Cracker Jacks and hot dogs at a baseball game and mint juleps at Churchill Downs. And every year the Spanish television network goes through the trouble of having a correspondent who is covering the tournament try the dish live on the air just to point out that the strawberries, though good, can’t hold a candle to the strawberries grown in Huelva, where 96 percent of the 250,000 tons of strawberries produced annually in Spain are grown, making it the second largest source of strawberries in the world as well as the biggest exporter of them on the planet.

  You can imagine what being here for the 2008 Wimbledon final was like. Often referred to as the greatest tennis match of all time—though I’m not buying it—this final was the moment when the Federer-Nadal rivalry became something greater than a rivalry: it became a notch on the cultural time line. It played out over four hours and forty-eight minutes—6–4, 6–4, 6–7 (5–7), 6–7 (8–10), 9–7—extending so late into the day that a visible darkness descended ominously over Centre Court. The points played long, with Rafa constantly escaping near-death situations by retrieving balls that looked certain to get past him and using his lefty-spin serve in do-or-die moments to live to see another point. I’ll never forget the numerous, varied, and unreserved nervous breakdowns of the Spanish broadcasting team, who, unlike their American and English counterparts, never bother with any silly charade of impartiality when it comes to important matters such as these.

  After having lost two straight Wimbledon finals to Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, known as Rafa, won, and in the process broke a string of five straight titles at the tournament for Federer. It seemed at the time like one of those self-contained victories, a bauble, a blip, a skip of the record: Nadal showed the world that he was much more than a clay-court specialist and, in defeating Federer at his most cherished venue, that he was more than a muscle-shirt-wearing impediment to Federer’s historical legacy. He was that afternoon at Wimbledon a harbinger of change. For, although Federer would take the title back the following year and win it again in 2012, all of the other Wimbledons from 2
008 to 2016 were won by Nadal, Novak Djokovic, or Andy Murray, players who are variations on a theme of a similar style far removed from the classic serve-and-volley tactics that are the roots from which both Federer and Wimbledon itself have flourished. The sea change after Nadal’s 2008 win was so sudden, strong, and convincing that Federer’s 2012 Wimbledon victory, a mere four years later, was generally greeted with surprise.

  When the 2017 tennis season started, the aftershocks of Nadal’s intervention in 2008 were still being felt on the Wimbledon grass. Nadal himself couldn’t sustain the brief success he had enjoyed on the surface, but both Djokovic and Murray continued to carry the torch there for the defensive baseliners. Despite game resistance from Federer in the 2014 and 2015 Wimbledon finals, Djokovic’s wins felt like a fait accompli. As did Murray’s 2016 title against big-serving Milos Raonic.

  In Rafa’s absence, the Spanish broadcasts focus on strategy and technique, they intone on the history of head-to-head matchups, recent performances, and how these may affect a player’s psychology at a high or low moment in the match. The forehand is “the right” (or, for the English, “the drive”), whether you use your right or left, whether you’re conservative or liberal; and the backhand is “the other side” and the same word for “setback,” “misfortune,” or “hitch”—as early as 2004 you’d hear the intrepid suggestion that a player who could repeatedly successfully attack Federer’s backhand would be able to knock him off his perch. The story behind Federer’s return to dominance in 2017 was his ability and, it has to be said, his willingness to finally figure that out.

  Summer 2017. Half the year gone, and where were we? Federer sweeping away all before him on the hard-court swing of the first quarter of the circuit, Nadal not far behind. Then, during the second quarter of the year, the clay-court swing, Federer takes a pass and Nadal does the same. Except for Rome, where he lost in the quarterfinals to one emergent talent, the powerful Dominic Thiem, and saw Sascha Zverev beat Djokovic in the final to become the youngest player since Djokovic to win a Masters 1000 title. Was it Zverev’s time now? Were the young legs of the tour gaining strength as the circuit approached summer? Was winter and spring’s fountain of youth drying up? Was it in the cards for Zverev to be a threat at Wimbledon? His record thus far in Grand Slams was abysmal, and he followed up the biggest win of his career in Rome by losing in the first round in Paris to the thirty-three-year-old Fernando Verdasco. So probably not.

  The grass-court season weighs heavy on the imagination of the tennis lover, but it’s a blip on the circuit: the middle of June to the middle of July, three concurrent pairs of 250- and 500-level tournaments—’s-Hertogenbosch and Stuttgart, Halle and the Queen’s Club in London, then Eastbourne and Antalya—all serving as summer warm-ups for Wimbledon. Most players tend to play two tournaments in the grass-court season: one of those six grass warm-ups and then the big one, Wimbledon. Some of the Americans and big-servers tack on a third by signing up for the one grass-court tournament after Wimbledon, the Hall of Fame ceremonial tournament in Newport, Rhode Island. All of this is to say that Wimbledon is a tournament that sneaks up on you. Unlike the French and U.S. Opens, there aren’t a bevy of big similar-surfaced tournaments leading up to it. In the past twenty years only seven men have won it. To put this in proper perspective, despite Nadal having won ten titles in Paris, ten men have won the French Open in the past twenty years. So who was the favorite coming into Wimbledon? Federer was just starting to play again, and besides, how could he keep up that pace? Nadal was the hottest player on the circuit, but it seemed wistful to think he’d win Wimbledon, considering he’d only made it out of the second round of the tournament once since 2012. Was it then the top-seeded, still-top-ranked and defending Murray, who had thus far been struggling all year to find the best form? Was it Djokovic, who had just won the warm-up in Eastbourne and was returning to the site where his 2016 season went from glorious to ungainly and mysteriously fell off the hinges?

  That Wimbledon was the strangest I’d ever seen and the most important one in my life. I remember thinking how strange it was to be listening to match commentary in English. It had been so long. And it made the game feel like it was being played in a different dimension. I lived in a Wimbledon haze; every match seemed like a green thought in a green shade, and I couldn’t walk or feel my leg.

  I spent Wimbledon 2016 alone in New York, living on the sofa. My left leg was a lamppost: it was wrapped in a soft cast and numerous spools of gauze in order to protect the threads and staples holding together the frayed halves of my Achilles tendon, which had snapped and left both my leg and my summer dead.

  They say that when you tear your Achilles it feels like you’ve been shot in the back of the leg or jabbed by a knife. But it wasn’t like that. I was playing basketball—the wrong sport at the wrong time—and it just went, simple as that. It was more as though the tendon were a venetian blind being opened quickly, harshly, the way you do it when you want to wake someone up. I’d never really been injured before. I asked my surgeon if I could have done anything to prevent it. He said, Be younger. I’m only forty-one, I said. Exactly, he said. I sighed.

  The 2016 Wimbledon Championships started the day before I went under. I remember watching the American Sam Querrey beat the Czech Lukáš Rosol in an absolute thriller—12–10 in the fifth—and thinking he couldn’t ask for more excitement at Wimbledon than that. Of course, he was destined to defeat Djokovic in the third round (over three days!) and snap the Serb’s remarkable thirty-match Grand Slam winning streak.

  Along with every other match at that Wimbledon, I watched both of those Querrey matches thrice in their entirety. I had nowhere to go and no way of getting there. So I lived in stasis on the sofa with Wimbledon on live and Wimbledon on replay, day into night and night into day, with an endless glass of lemonade, four pillows to prop up my leg, and a bottomless prescription of oxycodone with instructions to take a dose every few hours or, you know, simply when it felt like some pain was on the way. Admittedly, this is a very messed-up way to watch Wimbledon. Nevertheless, that’s how I took it all in: the tense Serena-Kerber women’s final, Federer’s fall (literally and figuratively) in the men’s semis, Murray making the most of his chance to consolidate his status with a second title, and the beginning of Djokovic’s strange wane. I watched them all three times. There was also a reconnection with a part of me I didn’t even know I had lost. I used to watch tennis all the time—just without the devastating injury, abject loneliness, and highly addictive painkillers. I used to get up at all kinds of absurd hours for matches and record them on VHS and then record over those when I didn’t have any more VHS tapes. I used to hit tennis balls against a handball wall, against a metal gate, simply into the distance—whatever it would take to have a racket in my hand. Tennis was the one sport my parents and I would watch together. My father would actually suggest this—Hey, Agassi-Edberg is about to start, let’s watch it—which I had forgotten. I had forgotten it all. I don’t know how or why, but tennis slowly became a private joy. I kept watching, by myself. I stopped playing. I never competed. I’m not very competitive. Now I spend hours hitting with my friends. When we play points we rarely keep score. At some point that private joy became something I wanted to share again, and so when my leg was good enough to handle the strain I started to play again. And even before that I knew I wanted to write it out, have an experience in words, which is the best and most genuine way I can think of sharing. Wimbledon was at the middle of all of this. I smelled the grass, and I saw on the flatscreen thousands of shades of green.

  Regardless of the outcome, Wimbledon 2017 was already different. Not only had tennis done something strange—both change by going forward and change by going back—but so had I. Back in the mountains, not far from towns with names like La Nou de Gaià, Masllorenç, Salomó, and Tamarit, where all the vertigo-inducing, winding roads lead downhill first to Torredembarra and then to Tarragona, it was a half hour past noon. I looked over the schedule of play
to see what matches were set to start the tournament off—Jo-Wilfried Tsonga vs. Cameron Norrie; Pierre-Hugues Herbert vs. Nick Kyrgios; Camila Giorgi vs. Alizé Cornet; Sam Querrey vs. Thomas Fabbiano; Dustin Brown vs. João Sousa—and then I picked one. And bided my time.

  PART ONE Winter

  JANUARY 1, 2017: BRISBANE 1.0

  Break point. Match point. Brisbane.

  The first tournament of the year. The first day of the first month of 2017.

  I had been waiting for this moment since last summer—my summer, in June; not this January Australian summer—back when my Achilles tendon tore in two and I was confined to life on a couch. I watched every single match of Wimbledon in 2016 prone and mostly alone, my family already in Barcelona when I broke myself. I was stranded but for the kindness of my neighbors and occasional visits from a few family members and friends. Unable to do much of anything else but tread through the day in a soupy haze of painkillers, I watched tennis all day, every day, to pass the time away. Singles, doubles, and then replays of the day’s singles and doubles, with nowhere to be and nowhere to go, drifting in and out of sleep. As the weeks went by, I discovered that I had changed in some way that I couldn’t quite describe. Following the ups and downs of players as they followed the sun from tournament to tournament, seeing them find their groove and lose it, sometimes from one venue to the next, sometimes from one match to the next, sometimes in the middle of a point, to watch someone lose something that no one among the thousands or millions watching could see but all can feel, as though the gravity’s been turned off around that player and that player alone. To watch her float into a negative zone, pulled by a phantom thread into a black cloud bank of bad results. Or, sometimes, the welcome reverse: a golden period where everything feels right, everything falls inside the court, once-impossible angles suddenly simple and seen, a reserved pocket of power found, that moment when the game becomes less about backswings and string tensions and follow-throughs and almost entirely about the feet, and eyes, they see everything early and take you there effortlessly; that moment when even the net seems on your side and bows ever so slightly as the ball you send its way passes over its thin white line. This book, in its essence, is about the things we can never quite describe but should try to because they’re fleeting. I couldn’t describe the tennis I was watching despite having all the time in the world to do so and oh so wanting to make sense of seeing Federer fall, a beatable Serena, Nadal all but vanish into thin air, a mojo-less Djokovic fall down a rabbit hole, and Murray finally make it to the top of the mountain. I made myself the promise that someday I would. Someday, when I could walk again and my mind wasn’t saddled with sedatives, I would focus on a year and, like the players, follow the sun from beginning to end.