A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again (56 page)

And they drink enormous amounts of water, staggering
amounts. I thought I was seeing things at first, watching matches, as players seemed to go through one of those skinny half-liter
Evian bottles every second side-change, but Michael Joyce confirmed it. Pro-grade tennis players seem to have evolved a metabolic
system that allows rapid absorption of water and its transformation into sweat. I myself—who am not pro-grade, but do sweat
like a pig—drink a lot of water a couple hours before I play but don’t drink anything during a match. This is because a
couple swallows of water usually just makes me want more, and if I drink as much as I want I end up with a protruding tummy
and a sloshing sound when I run.

(Most players I spoke with confirm, by the way, that Gatorade and All-Sport and Boost
and all those pricey electrolytic sports drinks are mostly bullshit, that salt and carbs at table and small lakes of daily
H2O are the way to go. The players who didn’t confirm this turned out to be players who had endorsement deals with some pricey-sports-drink
manufacturer, but I personally saw at least one such player dumping out his bottle’s pricey electrolytic contents and replacing
them with good old water, for his match.)

²²
The taller you are, the harder you can serve (get a protractor and figure it out), but the less able to bend and reverse
direction you are. Tall guys tend to be serve-and-volleyers, and they live and die by their serves. Bill Tilden, Stan Smith,
Arthur Ashe, Roscoe Tanner, and Goran Ivanisevic were/are all tall guys with serve-dependent games.

²³
This is mind-bogglingly hard to do when the ball’s hit hard. If we can assume you’ve played Little League or sandlot ball
or something, imagine the hardest-hit grounder of all time coming at you at shortstop, and then you not standing waiting to
try to knock it down but actually of your own free will running forward
toward
the grounder, then trying not just to catch it in a big soft glove but to strike it hard and reverse its direction and send
it someplace frightfully specific and far away.

²⁴
Something else that’s hotly debated by tennis authorities is the trend of players going pro at younger and younger ages and
skipping college and college tennis and plunging into the stress and peripatetic loneliness of the Tour, etc. Michael Joyce
skipped college and went directly onto the pro tour because at 18 he’d just won the U.S. National Juniors, and this created
a set of overwhelming inducements to turn pro. The winner at the National 18-and-Under Singles automatically gets a wild card
into the U.S. Opens main draw for that year. In addition, a year’s top junior comes to the powerful but notoriously fickle
and temporary attention of major clothing and racquet companies. Joyce’s victory over the 128-man National field at Kalamazoo
MI in 1991 resulted in endorsement offers from Fila and Yonex worth around $100,000. $100,000 is about what it takes to finance
three years on the Tour for a very young player who can’t reasonably expect to earn a whole lot of prize-money.

Joyce
could have turned down that offer of a three-year subsidy and gone to college, but if he’d gone to college it would have been
primarily to play tennis. Coaches at major universities apparently offered Joyce inducements to come play for them so literally
outrageous and incredible that I wouldn’t repeat them here even if Joyce hadn’t asked me not to.

The reason why Michael
Joyce would have gone to college primarily to play tennis is that the academic and social aspects of collegiate life interest
him about as much as hitting 2500 crosscourt forehands while a coach yells at you in foreign languages would interest you.
Tennis is what Michael Joyce loves and lives for and
is
. He sees little point in telling anybody anything different. It’s the only thing he’s devoted himself to, and he’s given
massive amounts of himself to it, and as far as he understands it it’s all he wants to do or be. Because he started playing
at age two and competing at age seven, however, and had the first half-dozen years of his career directed rather shall we
say
forcefully
and
enthusiastically
by his father (who Joyce estimates spent probably around $250,000 on lessons and court-time and equipment and travel during
Michael’s junior career), it seemed reasonable to ask Joyce to what extent he
“chose
” to devote himself to tennis. Can you
“choose
” something when you are forcefully and enthusiastically immersed in it at an age when the resources and information necessary
for choosing are not yet yours?

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
called 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.