THE PERFUME OF NARCISSUS: INDIAN WELLS
March, and the middle ground between winter and spring. The Australian Open recedes into the past, and on the near horizon ahead, red as the setting sun, you can already see a hint of the clay-court season. But first the circuit stops in the United States for an early and rather short stay for what’s commonly called the Sunshine Swing through the American hard courts: there’s the stop in Key Biscayne and before that at the more prestigious BNP Paribas Open, known casually by the name of the small fifty-year-old resort town in the Coachella Valley where it takes place—Indian Wells, California.
I flew in from New York for the men’s and women’s quarterfinals and decided to stay for the rest. And as I watched the tennis press feverishly filing match reports and injury updates, and tweeting about whatever nuggets they could unearth during press conferences, I wondered what it would be like to write—how shall I put it—off the beat, out of sync, out of time. I have a friend, a distinguished historian, who goes out of his way to keep his comments on current events to the bare minimum. He thinks it takes fifteen to twenty years before we really know what any happening actually was. Gregarious and outspoken by nature, he shows a different self when the news of the moment comes up among friends and colleagues. This is when he tends to let others do the talking, for the most part chiming in with a “We won’t know for a long time what was going on” or “That seems to be what happened, but we don’t know yet what it means” or, particularly when the hot takes start flying around, “Meh.”
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With apologies to the Western & Southern Open in Cincinnati, Indian Wells is the second great American showcase of tennis. The BNP Paribas Open is a Masters 1000 event on the men’s ATP World Tour (one of eight such on the ATP) and a “Premier Mandatory” event on the women’s WTA Tour (one of four). After the four majors—the Australian Open, the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open—and the end-of-the-year ATP World Tour Finals (a specialized tournament specifically for the top eight players), these Masters 1000s and Premier Mandatory tournaments are the next big thing. And among them all, Indian Wells has managed to distinguish itself: it draws more spectators than any tennis tournament outside the four majors, and among permanent tennis stadiums only New York’s Arthur Ashe is larger than the Indian Wells Tennis Garden’s 16,100-seat main stadium. The tournament is casually referred to in tennis circles as the fifth major. This is noteworthy in no small part because the four majors are long-standing celebrations of the metropolis, while Indian Wells was incorporated into a city just fifty years ago and the 2010 U.S. Census put its population at 4,958 inhabitants. Tech billionaire Larry Ellison bought the tournament and the grounds on which it takes place in 2009 for $100 million. Since then it has grown—bejeweling itself with such trappings of wealth and lavishness that approach rivaling tennis’s temple to consumerism, the U.S. Open. This includes sprawling versions of both Spago and Nobu on the grounds, the former with table-side views of the main court. Both restaurants are open for just the two weeks of the tournament.
If you compare the size of the main stadium to the size of the city, it quickly becomes clear to you that the tournament is a destination event. I was struck by the number of people in the place who walked around the area—which includes Palm Desert and Palm Springs—with rackets and racket bags. They were at the airport, on the streets, loaded up in cars, gathered in hotel lobbies, and on the grounds themselves, where they could take lessons or even get a game in on one of the practice courts. It is a Shangri-la for the tennis weekend warrior and the tennis-loving retiree. It dawned on me that the city is a tour stop as much for the fans as for the players themselves, that the interest shared between fans and players here reaches the peak of shared intensity. In this sense, the tournament at Indian Wells is a mirror of its community, or at least the community it most wants to project out to the world: unlike the great urban tournaments, Indian Wells is a celebration of the sporty resort and of the way of life that keeps it running; tennis being both flattering mirror and stage for performers who play the roles of younger, better-playing versions of the audience.
Confetti after the men’s singles final at the BNP Paribas Open, Indian Wells, California. (Courtesy of the author)
Maybe this was at the root of the 2001 crowd turning so savagely and unfairly on the Williams family. That year, Venus and Serena were to play each other in one of the women’s semifinals at Indian Wells. But, citing a case of tendonitis in her knee, Venus pulled out of the match four minutes before it was set to begin. This led to a tremendous amount of outrage that culminated in the fifteen-thousand-person crowd for the women’s final showering a continual torrent of abuse at Serena on the court and their family, including Venus, in the stands. It was a bad enough situation for both sisters to boycott Indian Wells from 2002 to 2015. For all of the sport’s beauty and grace, the perfume of Narcissus exudes from tennis crowds at matches of this level. They tend to love what they see when they can think that, if they squint long and hard enough, they see themselves. And the epitome of this is Roger Federer.
When Roger Federer plays a tennis match, the questions are almost all about Roger. And when Roger Federer doesn’t play a tennis match, the questions are almost all about Roger. At Indian Wells, I was witness to this up close, and words fail to explain the phenomena. I worry for any tennis pro armed with high aspirations and the initials R.F., because he or she will no doubt end up facing four to five questions per match about how they handle the pressure of having the same initials as Roger Federer, if they asked Roger for advice on having the initials R.F., and if a name change was ever under consideration.
No player has suffered the slings and arrows of Not-Being-Roger more than his Swiss compatriot Stan Wawrinka. Just before Stan stepped foot onto the court for his quarterfinal match at Indian Wells, ESPN’s Pam Shriver wanted to ask him an important question: Had he seen Federer’s demolition of Rafa Nadal the night before? Wawrinka had to remind Shriver that, no, he in fact didn’t see Federer play … because he himself was playing on another court at the same time. Shriver, a former player who spent her long career in the shadow of Martina Navratilova and Chris Evert, was somehow neither unbowed nor empathetic: she followed up with another question about Federer. Wawrinka is a three-time major champion, having won the Australian Open in 2014, the French Open in 2015, and the U.S. Open in 2016. And none of those wins came via a fortuitous draw: he had to get through Djokovic and Nadal at the 2014 Australian Open, Federer and Djokovic at the 2015 French Open, and resurgent 2009 U.S. Open champion Juan Martín del Potro, 2014 U.S. Open runner-up Kei Nishikori (who had just beaten Andy Murray in the previous round), and Djokovic again at the 2016 U.S. Open. If Wawrinka wins Wimbledon he will attain the extremely rare career Grand Slam; to put this in perspective, Andy Murray is nowhere close to achieving this. And yet, here he was fielding still another question that for all intents and purposes began with, “Stan, we know you’re Swiss and you don’t really exist, so tell us about Roger…” Wawrinka retweeted a summary of the pregame exchange with Shriver, laughing it off as a “new level” of what’s long been par for the course for him. At this year’s Australian Open, a spectator wanted to show his support and so between points yelled out, “Let’s go, Roger!” The only problem was that it was Wawrinka who was playing, not Federer. “He’s not here, he’s on Rod Laver!” Wawrinka coolly replied. Rod Laver is the main court of the Australian Open where all the highlight matches take place.
That Wawrinka would end up losing the final at Indian Wells to Federer wasn’t a surprise to anyone. Federer had just beaten Wawrinka in the semis of the Australian Open, and of the twenty-three times the two have played, Wawrinka has only won three—all of them on clay. Still, his 4–6, 5–7 loss to Federer at Indian Wells clearly stung. He had taken measure of Roger in Australia and after losing the first two sets stormed back to win the next two before running out of gas in the fifth and final set. And while Federer managed to beat Wawrinka in str
aight sets, most of the games were closely disputed and came down to a stray return of serve or forehand here or there. At 5–all in the second set Stan lost his serve, which all but sealed his fate. Wawrinka had broken Federer earlier in the match, becoming the only player to break his serve in the entire tournament, but doing so a second time in the match was asking too much. Match point was a microcosm of the entire match. Federer lived between the baseline and the net, pushing his opponent back, robbing him of both time and space. During his press conference after his semifinal win the night before, Federer had recalled first hitting with a young Wawrinka many years back and noting how far back behind the baseline he stayed, the strategy of a clay court specialist, which was what, at the time, Federer thought Wawrinka was destined to become. While that hasn’t proven to be the case—the obligations of the tour now force players to compete on all surfaces in order to have a fighting chance for higher rankings and higher seeds—I noted during the final that Federer had turned Wawrinka back into the kid playing ten feet behind the baseline again. A fact that wouldn’t have been missed by the astute but on this day helpless Wawrinka. The statistics showed that he hit the ball harder than Federer throughout the match, but Federer hit more winners; Wawrinka’s magisterial backhand in particular misfired to the tune of eight unforced errors to only two winners.
The grass courts of the Desert Springs PBI Tennis Club. (Courtesy of the author)
After the match, during the on-court ceremony Wawrinka accepted his runner-up trophy choking back tears. He of all people knew how much closer he was, how far he’d come, the string of tough three-set matches prior to the semifinal, staring numerous match points down like a fistful of dwindling firecrackers, while Federer had the unexpected good fortune of getting a walkover in the quarterfinals because the electric and mercurial Nick Kyrgios, who had just routined Djokovic for the second time in two weeks, had to withdraw the day of that match due to illness. Stan stepped to the mic and said that his emotions were the result of being “tired after ten days.” Then he said, “I would like to congratulate Roger. He’s laughing: he’s an asshole.” Federer later clarified that he was making faces trying to lighten his friend’s mood. It was the only question about Stan that Roger would get.
The men’s final pitted Swiss against Swiss. The women’s final pitted Russian against Russian: Svetlana Kuznetsova and Elena Vesnina. A flag, however, always only tells part of the story. Federer is from Basel, and his first language is Swiss German; Wawrinka is from Lausanne, and his first language is French. Kuznetsova was born in St. Petersburg (then Leningrad) but is a sketch of Spain: she moved to Barcelona when she was thirteen and speaks Spanish with her coach with native fluency; Vesnina was born in Lviv, Ukraine, studied sports psychology in college, and talks the way she plays: quick, steady, and upbeat.
One of my favorite behind-the-scenes moments of the tournament was when an employee interrupted a triumphant Vesnina’s post-match press conference and took the Indian Wells trophy away from her. You see, they only had one actual trophy and they needed it down on the stadium court for Roger Federer’s presentation. Vesnina laughed it off with a brightness that came easy to her. You’d think it was the adrenaline of winning, but the truth is that she had been like that for the entire time I was at the tournament. At thirty she has an all-time career high singles ranking of thirteen. The Indian Wells title is only the third singles tournament she’s won in fifteen years on the pro tour. Everything clicked for her. Miami might prove to be a different story, but her approach in general set her up for a second spring into her thirties.
I arrived at the stadium court hours before the finals and discovered Vesnina and Kuznetsova sharing the court to practice services with their hitting partners as their coaches looked on. Kuznetsova was peppering the T with serves from the ad court, while Vesnina parted the middle of the deuce court time and again working on her body serve. For a second I thought they were giving away their strategy, but then I recalled that, like Wawrinka and Federer, these two are international teammates in Fed Cup competition. They must have hundreds of hours of shared court time between them if they have any at all. So there they were, together but hardly conscious of the other, sharing the space they would in a little while vie for. Vesnina had endeared herself to the crowd with her solid play and constant post-match expressions of gratitude to the audience. When she played Venus Williams in the quarterfinals she was up against a wall of sound encouraging Venus on. Vesnina won in three hard sets as Venus somehow miraculously fought off some injuries that were clearly hampering her, to extend the match to the maximum. After she won, Vesnina noted what a champion Venus is and thanked the crowd for their great support. This was somewhat of an invention, but it paid off. The crowd embraced Vesnina like one of their own in the semifinal and in the final. Well played, I thought. And then, as I watched the Vesnina-Kuznetsova match stretch out over three exciting hours of tennis and people began to wonder when Federer-Wawrinka would start, I began to wonder whether that match could live up to this one. I remembered the cliché being batted around in the press, given that all four finalists were over thirty: thirty is the new twenty-one. But as I took in player interviews, players’ body language between games, the chess battle of mature point construction that the younger players treat like a coded language, I knew that that’s not it at all. Thirty is the new thirty. Someone just needs to say it. What was so great about being twenty-one anyway? As my friend the historian might say: Meh.
TENNIS VANITIES COME TO DUST IN MIAMI
After the Indian Wells finals, I flew from Palm Springs back to New York and the circuit continued on to Miami. Another ninety-six-player-deep Masters 1000 tournament was waiting there for the men, another ninety-six-player-deep Premier Mandatory for the women, the last big hard-court tournament before the seasons of clay and grass. It’s hard not to wish that the entire year was like this: the men’s and women’s tours barnstorming the world together, sharing the spoils and thriving side by side. But malfeasance, logistics, indifference, sloth, and here we are: two tours that flare out into the year only to cross paths like the two strands of a double helix.
The tour will follow the sunshine through the spring and summer until October comes and it resigns itself to life indoors. When I stepped off the plane and out again into Northeast March with its imperfect Northeast weather, I realized how much my sense of tennis is informed by both the weather and distance. Tennis is as much a temperament as a sport to me. And, as much as I had enjoyed being at Indian Wells, I felt a profound happiness in getting back to watching tennis on television in the midst of a changing season instead of a perpetual one.
When I’m at a tournament I tend to find myself a place in an elevated corner and perch there. Many people prefer to be low and close to the court. But I love the geometries of the game and those structures that find their form in the interchange of shots from point to point. That’s difficult to see from down on the court. What you see from down close is speed and spin, which is harder to see on television. But what you miss is the geometry, that long game the mind plays as the body’s stuck in the short game of swinging and running, swinging and running. Everything has its expense. Proximity is no different. This plays itself out in a large-scale sense of place and fate when it comes to the Miami Open, formerly known as the Sony Ericsson Open, formerly known as the NASDAQ-100 Open, formerly known as the Ericsson Open, and originally named the Lipton International Players Championship.
When, in the summer of 2010, LeBron James announced to a national television audience that he was leaving the Cleveland Cavaliers to sign with the Miami Heat, he famously smiled and said that he was taking his talents to South Beach. The Miami Heat play in AmericanAirlines Arena on Biscayne Boulevard in downtown Miami. South Beach is across the water, twenty minutes or so away depending on the traffic. To arrive there from where the Heat play you’d have to cross Biscayne Bay, either via MacArthur Causeway or, if you don’t mind the tolls, Venetian Way. As of the 2010 census the
population of Miami-Dade County was 2.5 million; the population of South Beach, 39,186. Unless you work there, nothing compels you to take your talents to South Beach aside from the sun or the rhythm of the night.
But you know what he meant.
By the 1980s, South Beach had already long ago broke bad, but then it broke bad beautifully. Miami Vice was as much a play on words back then as “I’m taking my talents to South Beach” would be to anyone now. It’s easy for Miami to become, like Barcelona, a beach with a few tall buildings behind it. Beaches don’t grow, they shrink. And so, eventually, how can you not feel hemmed in if you think of a city first and foremost that way? Metropolitan Miami spans out for fifty-six square miles, most of which is landlocked. South Beach stands in for Miami Beach which stands in for Miami which stands in for South Beach. The Miami of the mind is a ring of sunshine that glistens and tightens around the temples. It can be a halo or a crown or it can slip down and become a noose. In the end, four years was enough for him, and James found his way back to Cleveland, not University Circle or Buckeye-Shaker—just Cleveland.
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