Joyce’s response to this line of inquiry strikes me as both unsatisfactory and marvelous. Because of course the question is unanswerable, at least it’s unanswerable by a person who’s already—as far as he understands it—“chosen” Joyce’s answer is that it doesn’t really matter much to him whether he originally “chose” serious tennis or not; all he knows is that he loves it. He tries to explain his feelings at the Nationals in 1991: “You get there and look at the draw, it’s a 128 draw, there’s so many guys you have to beat. And then it’s all over and you’ve won, you’re the National Champion—there’s nothing like it. I get chills even talking about it.” Or how it was just the previous week in Washington: “I’m playing Agassi, and it’s great tennis, and there’s like thousands of fans going nuts. I can’t describe the feeling. Where else could I get that?”
What he says aloud is understandable, but it’s not the marvelous part. The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it: his eyes normally have a kind of Asiatic cast because of the slight epicanthic fold common to ethnic Irishmen, but when he speaks of tennis and his career the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who are so religious they’ve devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s “choice” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest… since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.
25 (aka serve-and-volley; see Note 22)
26 I don’t know whether you know this, but Connors had one of the most eccentric games in the history of tennis—he was an aggressive “power” player who rarely came to net, had the serve of an ectomorphic girl, and hit everything totally spinless and flat (which is inadvisable on groundstrokes because the absence of spin makes the ball so hard to control). His game was all the stranger because the racquet he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that’s one of the single shittiest tennis racquets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something. Connors was addicted to this racquet and kept using it even after Wilson stopped making it, forfeiting millions in potential endorsement money by doing so. Connors was eccentric (and kind of repulsive) in lots of other ways, too, none of which are germane to this article.
27 In the yore days before wide-body ceramic racquets and scientific strength-training, the only two venues for hitting winners used to be the volley—where your decreased distance from the net allowed for greatly increased angle (get that protractor out)—and the defensive passing shot… i.e., in the tactical language of boxing, “punch” v. “counterpunch.” The new power-baseline game allows a player, in effect, to punch his opponent all the way from his stool in the corner; it changes absolutely everything, and the analytic geometry of these changes would look like the worst calculus final you ever had in your life.
28 This is why the phenomenon of “breaking serve” in a set is so much less important when a match involves power-baseliners. It is one reason why so many older players and fans no longer like to watch pro tennis as much: the structural tactics of the game are now wholly different from when they played.
29 © Wichita KS’s Koch Materials Company, “A Leader in Asphalt-Emulsions Technology.”
30 John McEnroe wasn’t all that tall, and he was arguably the best serve-and-volley man of all time, but then McEnroe was an exception to pretty much every predictive norm there was. At his peak (say 1980 to 1984), he was the greatest tennis player who ever lived—the most talented, the most beautiful, the most tormented: a genius. For me, watching McEnroe don a polyester blazer and do stiff lame truistic color commentary for TV is like watching Faulkner do a Gap ad.
31 One answer to why public interest in mens tennis has been on the wane in recent years is an essential and unpretty thuggishness about the power-baseline style that’s come to dominate the Tour. Watch Agassi closely sometime—for so small a man and so great a player, he’s amazingly devoid of finesse, with movements that look more like a Heavy Metal musician’s than an athlete’s.
The power-baseline game itself has been compared to Metal or Grunge. But what a top P.B.er really resembles is film of the old Soviet Union putting down a rebellion. It’s awesome, but brutally so, with a grinding, faceless quality about its power that renders that power curiously dull and empty.
32 (compare Ivanisevic’s at 130 mph or Sampras’s at 125, or even this Brakus kid’s at 118).
33 The loop in a pro’s backswing is kind of the trademark flourish of excellence and consciousness of same, not unlike the five-star chef’s quick kiss of his own fingertips as he presents a pièce or the magician’s hand making a French curl in the air as he directs our attention to his vanished assistant.
34 All serious players have these little extraneous tics, stylistic fingerprints, and the pros even more so because of years of repetition and ingraining. Pros’ tics have always been fun to note and chart, even just e.g. on the serve. Watch the way Sampras’s lead foot rises from the heel on his toss, as if his left foot’s toes got suddenly hot. The odd Tourettic way Gerulaitis used to whip his head from side to side while bouncing the ball before his toss, as if he were having a small seizure. McEnroe’s weird splayed stiff-armed service stance, both feet parallel to the baseline and his side so severely to the net that he looked like a figure on an Egyptian frieze. The odd sudden shrug Lendl gives before releasing his toss. The way Agassi shifts his weight several times from foot to foot as he prepares for the toss like he needs desperately to pee. Or, here at the Canadian Open, the way the young star Thomas Enqvist’s body bends queerly back as he tosses, limboing back away from the toss, as if for a moment the ball smelled very bad—this tic derives from Enqvist’s predecessor Edberg’s own weird spinal arch and twist on the toss. Edberg also has this strange sudden way of switching his hold on the racquet in mid-toss, changing from an Eastern forehand to an extreme backhand grip, as if the racquet were a skillet.
35 Who looks rather like a Hispanic Dustin Hoffman and is an almost unbelievably nice guy, with the sort of inward self-sufficiency of truly great teachers and coaches everywhere, the Zen-like blend of focus and calm developed by people who have to spend enormous amounts of time sitting in one place watching closely while somebody else does something. Sam gets 10% of Joyce’s gross revenues and spends his downtime reading dense tomes on Mayan architecture and is one of the coolest people I’ve ever met either inside the tennis world or outside it (so cool I’m kind of scared of him and haven’t called him once since the assignment ended, if that makes sense). In return for his 10%, Sam travels with Joyce, rooms with him, coaches him, supervises his training, analyzes his matches, and attends him in practice, even to the extent of picking up errant balls so that Joyce doesn’t have to spend any of his tightly organized practice time picking up errant balls. The stress and weird loneliness of pro tennis—where everybody’s in the same community, sees each other every week, but is constantly on the diasporic move, and is each other’s rival, with enormous amounts of money at stake and life essentially a montage of airports and bland hotels and non-home-cooked food and nagging injuries and staggering long-distance bills, and people’s families back home tending to be wackos, since only wackos will make the financial and temporal sacrifices necessary to let their offspring become good enough at something to turn pro at it—all this means that most players lean heavily on their coaches for emotional support and friendship as well as technical counsel. Sam’s role with Joyce looks to me to approximate what in the latter century was c
alled that of “companion,” one of those older ladies who traveled with nubile women when they went abroad, etc.
36 Agassi’s balls look more like Borg’s balls would have looked if Borg had been on a year-long regimen of both steroids and methamphetamines and was hitting every single nicking ball just as hard as he could—Agassi hits his groundstrokes as hard as anybody who’s ever played tennis, so hard you almost can’t believe it if you’re right there by the court.
37 But Agassi does have this exaggerated follow-through where he keeps both hands on the racquet and follows through almost like a hitter in baseball, which causes his shirtfront to lift and his hairy tummy to be exposed to public view—in Montreal I find this repellent, though the females in the stands around me seem ready to live and die for a glimpse of Agassi’s tummy. Agassi’s S.O. Brooke Shields is in Montreal, by the way, and will end up highly visible in the player-guest box for all Agassi’s matches, wearing big sunglasses and what look to be multiple hats. This may be the place to insert that Brooke Shields is rather a lot taller than Agassi, and considerably less hairy, and that seeing them standing together in person is rather like seeing Sigourney Weaver on the arm of Danny DeVito. The effect is especially surreal when Brooke is wearing one of the plain classy sundresses that make her look like a deb summering in the Hamptons and Agassi’s wearing his new Nike on-court ensemble, a blue-black horizontally striped outfit that together with his black sneakers make him look like somebody’s idea of a French Resistance fighter.
38 (Though note that very few of them wear eyeglasses, either.)
39 A whole other kind of vision—the kind attributed to Larry Bird in basketball, sometimes, when he made those incredible surgical passes to people who nobody else could even see were open—is required when you’re hitting: this involves seeing the other side of the court, i.e. where your opponent is and which direction he’s moving in and what possible angles are open to you in consequence of where he’s going. The schizoid thing about tennis is that you have to use both kinds of vision — ball and court—at the same time.
40 Basketball comes close, but it’s a team sport and lacks tennis’s primal mano a mano intensity. Boxing might come close — at least at the lighter weight-divisions—but the actual physical damage the fighters inflict on each other makes it too concretely brutal to be really beautiful: a level of abstraction and formality (i.e. “play”) is probably necessary for a sport to possess true metaphysical beauty (in my opinion).
41 For those of you into business stats, the calculus of a shot in tennis would be rather like establishing a running compound-interest expansion in a case where not only is the rate of interest itself variable, and not only are the determinants of that rate variable, and not only is the interval in which the determinants influence the interest rate variable, but the principal itself is variable.
42 Sex- and substance-issues notwithstanding, professional athletes are in many ways our culture’s holy men: they give themselves over to a pursuit, endure great privation and pain to actualize themselves at it, and enjoy a relationship to perfection that we admire and reward (the monk’s begging bowl, the RBI-gurus eight-figure contract) and love to watch even though we have no inclination to walk that road ourselves. In other words they do it “for” us, sacrifice themselves for our (we imagine) redemption.
43 In the Qualies for Grand Slams like Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, players sometimes have to play two three-out-of-five-set matches in one day; it is little wonder that the surviving qualifiers often look like concentration-camp survivors by the time they get to the main draw and you see them getting annihilated by a healthy and rested top seed in the televised first round.
44 Meaning a two-handed forehand, whose pioneer was a South African named Frew McMillan and whose most famous practitioner today is Monica Seles.
45 The idea of what it would be like to perspire heavily with large amounts of gel in your hair is sufficiently horrific to me that I approached Knowle after the match to ask him about it, only to discover that neither he nor his coach spoke enough English or even French to be able to determine who I was, and the whole sweat-and-gel issue will, I’m afraid, remain a matter for your own imagination.
46 What Joyce has done is known as “wrong-footing” his opponent, though the intransigent Francophone press here keep calling the tactic a “contre-pied.”
47 Who is clearly such a fundamentally nice guy that he would probably hit around with me for a little while just out of politeness, since for him it would be at worst somewhat dull. For me, though, it would be obscene.
48 The example of Michael Joyce’s own childhood, though, shows that my friends and I were comparative sluggards, dilettantes. He describes his daily schedule thusly: “I’d be in school till 2:00. Then, after, I’d go [driven by father] to the [West End Tennis] Club [in Torrance CA] and have a lesson with [legendary, wildly expensive, and unbelievably hard-ass Robert] Lansdorp [former childhood coach of, among others, Tracy Austin] from 3:00 to 4:00. Then I’d have drills from 4:00 to 6:00, then we’d drive all the way home—it’s like half an hour—and I’m like, ‘Thank God, I can watch TV or go up and talk with [friends] on the phone or something,’ but Dad is like, ‘You didn’t practice your serve yet.’ At twelve or thirteen [years old], you’re not going to want to do it. [No lie, since two hours of serious drills alone were usually enough to put your correspondent in a fetal position for the rest of the day.] You need somebody to make you do it. [This is one way of looking at it.] But then, after like a hundred or so serves, I start to get into [standing by himself out on the Joyces’ tennis court in their backyard with a huge bucket of balls and hitting serve after serve to no one in what must by then have been the gathering twilight], I like it, I’m glad I’m doing it.”
49 An important variable I’m skipping is that children are (not surprisingly) immature and tend to get angry with themselves when they screw up, and so a key part of my strategy involved putting the opponent in a position where he made a lot of unforced errors and got madder and madder at himself, which would ruin his game. Feelings of self-disgust at his errors, or (even better for me) bitter grievance at the universe for making him have “bad luck” or an “offday” would mount until usually by sometime in the second set he’d sink into a kind of enraged torpor and expect to miss, or occasionally he’d even have a kind of grand Learesque tantrum, complete with racquet-hurling and screamed obscenities and sometimes tears. This happened less and less as I got older and opponents got more mature, and by the time I was in college only genuine head-cases could be counted on to get so mad that they’d basically make themselves lose to an inferior player (viz. me). It’s something of a shock, then, to watch Joyce do to his third-round Qualies opponent what I used to do to twelve-year-old rich kids, which is essentially to retrieve and avoid errors and wait for this opponent to have a temper tantrum. Because Sunday was a rainout, Joyce’s third round is played Monday at 10:00 A.M., at the same time that some of the main draw’s first rounds are beginning. Joyce’s opponent is a guy named Mark Knowles, 25, the 1986 U.S. Junior Indoor Champion, a native of the Bahamas, now known primarily as a doubles player but still a serious opponent, ranked in the world’s top 200, somebody on Joyce’s plateau.
Knowles is tall and thin, muscular in the corded way tall thin people are muscular, and has an amazing tan and tight blond curls and from a distance is an impressive-looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who, I can tell, is spring-loaded on a tantrum. There’s a chance to see Knowles up close because he and Joyce play their match on one of the minor courts, where spectators stand and lean over a low fence only a few yards from the court. I and Joyce’s coach and Knowles’s coach and beautiful girlfriend are the only people really seriously standing and watching, though a lot of spectators on their way to more high-profile matches pass by and stop and watch a few points before moving on. The constant movement of civilians past the court aggrieves Knowles no end, a
nd sometimes he shouts caustic things to people who’ve started walking away while a point is still in progress.
“Don’t worry about it!” is one thing Knowles shouted at someone who moved. “We’re only playing for money! We’re only professionals! Don’t give it a second thought!” Joyce, preparing to serve, will stare affectlessly straight ahead while he waits for Knowles to finish yelling, his expression sort of like the one Vegas dealers have when a gambler they’re cleaning out is rude or abusive, a patient and unjudging look whose expression is informed by the fact that they’re extremely well compensated for being patient and unjudging.
Sam Aparicio describes Knowles as “brilliant but kind of erratic,” and I think the coach is being kind, because Knowles seems to me to belong on a Locked Ward for people with serious emotional and personality disorders. He rants and throws racquets and screams scatological curses I haven’t heard since junior high. If one of his shots hits the top of the net-cord and bounces back, Knowles will scream “I must be the luckiest guy in the world!” his eyes protruding and mouth twisted. For me he’s an eerie echo of all the rich and well-instructed Midwest kids I used to play and beat because they’d be unable to eat the frustration when things didn’t go their way. He seems not to notice that Joyce gets as many bad breaks and weird bounces as he, or that passing spectators are equally distracting to both players. Knowles seems to be one of these people who view the world’s inconveniences as specific and personal, and it makes my stomach hurt to watch him. When he hits a ball against the fence so hard it seems to damage the ball, the umpire gives him a warning, but in the sort of gentle compassionate voice of a kindergarten teacher to a kid who’s known to have A.D.D. I have a hard time believing that someone this off-the-wall could rise to a serious pro plateau, though it’s true that when Knowles isn’t letting his attention get scattered he’s a gorgeous player, with fluid strokes and marvelous control over spin and pace. His read on Joyce is that Joyce is a slugger (which is true), and his tactic is to try to junk him up—change pace, vary spins, hit drop shots to draw Joyce in, deny Joyce pace or rhythm—and because he’s Joyce’s equal in firepower the tactic is sound. Joyce wins the first set in a tiebreaker. But three times in the tiebreaker Knowles yells at migratory spectators “Don’t worry! It’s only a tiebreaker in a professional match!” and is basically a wreck by the time the first set is over, and the second set is perfunctory, a formality that Joyce concludes as fast as possible and hurries back to the Players’ Tent to pack carbohydrates and find out whether he has to play his first round in the main draw later this same day.
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