Tag Archives: tennis

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Picked up Pieces from Olympic Tennis 2012

Few thoughts about the weekend after Andy Murray’s 6-2, 6-1, 6-4 evisceration of Roger Federer:

  1. It is interesting the contrast between the gold medal matches in the men and women’s – although both were fairly profound beatings.  Serena Williams’ 6-0, 6-1 wipeout of Maria Sharapova was – at its heart – a truly great performance.  Some critics on the Twitterverse were all too pleased to dance on Maria’s grave and her performance.  Indeed, I was perplexed how often she was wrongfooted on ad-court serves from Williams.  However, Williams when her serve was on like that is pretty much unstoppable.  Williams’ biggest weakness can be spraying shots since she goes for so much – but that requires getting balls back and it requires Williams missing.  Yesterday, neither happened – and so we have a blowout.  Could some other woman have provided a better challenge?  Really, whomever was across from Serena was the Washington Generals yesterday.  Honestly, Maria Sharapova should be proud – she won HER tournament, Serena was out there doing something else.
  2. Serena is not the greatest player of all time, though her best is clearly THE best the women’s game has seen.  But, like Andre Agassi, tennis’ importance in her psyche has fluctuated wildly. (of course Agassi was tortured by tennis, and Serena fluctuations seemed more voluntary but whatever) As a result much of the bulk that an all time career has is missing – nothing like Pete Sampras’ 6 straight year-end #1, nothing like Federer’s 287 weeks at the top.  But the majors are there obviously, and like Agassi, the lack of punishment she has taken due to the oscillating motivation level in her career leaves her far better equipped than her peers to be a truly successful 31 year old.  One envisions a Navratilova-Rosewall-Agassi level third act – and the early evidence is pretty special.
  3. On the other hand, the Murray victory was really about a truly horrible performance from Roger Federer.  Whether he was pressing – which is certainly something he has done before – or whether he had trouble with the wind, or the Davis Cup level opposing crowd, Federer played a pretty horrible match.  The last time he was blown out in such a spot was by Nadal in the 2008 French Open final – and that game was Nadal having an ethereal day.  This performance was really about his ineptitude.
  4. That said, Murray was excellent, a little better than he was in his inspired run at Wimbledon a few weeks earlier.  Whether this is a culmination of a career or a breakthrough is a bit hard to say.  This is still not a major – and Murray has won events approximately as “big” as the Olympics before with his numerous “1000 Series” wins.  Hell, he is now 9-8 lifetime against Federer.  That said, tennis being what it is in terms of profile – clearly this is the most visible great performance he has strung together.
  5. It is easy to be happy for Murray – as he has suffered far too much criticism as not being up for the moment and other such convenient announcers cliches.  His career in a lot of ways is rather criminally underrated.  This is a guy who has gotten to #2 in the world, has won more worldwide titles than Patrick Rafter and Gustavo Kuerten, has a career winning record against Roger Federer.  His real crime was being born into an era where two all time greats have rode roughshod over the competition – and a third’s all time great credentials are still being written.  Is there any doubt Murray would have won a major or three in the pre-Fed/Nadal era?  This is not a choker, jut a guy who is excellent without being all time great.
  6. For Federer it continues one of the greatest, yet simultaneously most curious careers of all time.  The majors and wins are beyond reproach.  He is the greatest talent to have played the game, and his week to week professionalism is the best ever.  Like Pete Sampras, Federer IS a true professional tennis player, and has churned out results with metronomic efficiency.  His streak of slam quarterfinals is amazing – and he almost never has bad losses.  However, we remember amazing shotmaking, amazing consistency.  But his career is also notable for a general lack of – well, mental toughness misstates it – examples of really digging deep.  His wins over Djokovic in the 2011 French and 2012 Wimbledon as notable exceptions, but by contrast, Serena Williams would have been much better equipped to turn that match around today.  Against similarly caliber players, Federer has shown to be a frontrunner of sorts, and clawing is not something where there are many examples – no Pete Sampras vomit game, no Sampras sobbing match, no Jordan flu game.  On the other hand, kicking away leads against Del Potro, Djokovic, being utterly unable to figure out Nadal after all of these years (and indeed in some matches looking thoroughly spooked) have all littered his resume.  He is the greatest player of all time – but without a lot of the anecdotes that the greatest player delivers.  It is not a knock, just a peculiar quirk.
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Open: An Autobiography

It figured that the most tawdry of the revelations was the one that caught the news media’s eye first.  In a way, it is hard to blame Agassi or the publishers of Open: An Autobiography for excerpting those passages.  After all, with an advance of five million bucks, gotta make it back somehow.   The media also ran with the revelation that Agassi hated tennis and that his father may have given him speed.  However, the tone of most of the reaction to the revelations are your typical kneejerk reactions that media types seem required to have in order to write columns – I wonder how many took the time to read the volume.  The hyperbolic reaction to little tidbits is symptomatic of what society expects from its celebrities – we demand that a guy or gal be “down to earth” and then when a full unvarnished memoir is in fact written, we criticize the demythifying aspects and revelations.

Really, Agassi stood to gain very little from a truly different autobiography – simply stop at the revelations like the ones made above, but sort of skate by as a non entity.  Any non-by-the-numbers revelations could only chip away at whatever he had built mystique-wise.  That would have made Open like every other sports ghostwritten autobiography – essentially a holy book at the altar for this idol.  However, Open is aggressively NOT that autobiography, and as a result it is probably the best (ghostwritten memoir) of its kind in the last God knows how many years.  First of all, Agassi given a huge advance, picked a terrific collaborator in Pulitzer winner JR Moehringer.  Over the year of interviews and shaping and whatnot, Moehringer succeeds in writing the autobiography in the present tense, in a fairly plausible version of Agassi’s voice.  Second, the book avoids cliche, and more strikingly (for a sports book) avoids a lot of pumped up moments.  Agassi not demystifies his career and image, but also smashes the notion of the glamor and mystique of his own life.  Finally, there is Agassi’s own ambivalence about his career but passion about his life – as he explains, his life is not reinvention (the common theme of his rise from 141 to #1) but just personal discovery – he is still figuring things out.

Agassi starts at the beginning of course.  We all know that he had paddles put into his hands at the age of 3 and was raised by his father to fulfill his vision – the American Dream through tennis.  We are reminded of how similar stories have been written about Tiger Woods, and how he has carefully protected his childhood imagery, and how Earl Woods was sainted.  However, Agassi is uncompromising in describing his hatred for the task, his father’s obsession, and for tennis itself.  He was the object of his father’s vision – it was not a vision of his choosing.  He discusses how his father would make him hit thousands of balls from “the dragon”, the tennis ball machine he crafted – how he would pull Agassi out of school to hit, how he had destroyed relationships with his other children over the obsession.  He also includes a funny anecdote about Jim Brown trying to play him, and how much raw talent he had.

The relationship with his father takes up perhaps the first half of the book, rumbling below the surface, if not actually in the foreground.  Mike Agassi, a boxer from Tehran represented his country in the Olympics and then came to the US to chase the American Dream and ended up doing so in Las Vegas.  He had always seen tennis as a way to rise out of relative poverty and it was an unrelenting obsession – that and his competitiveness in general.  As mentioned above, his obsession chewed up Agassi’s older siblings, and it threatened to do the same to Andre, the most talented of the crew.  The early revelations in the media involved him hating his father – which is not really true.  He hates how his father drove him into tennis without a choice, and without affection – but he also highlighted his father’s hopeless devotion to it and his pride (a recollection of his father on the phone after winning Wimbledon was kind of perfect).  The feelings about his father – a tough stage parent – are complicated, and in a way that says more than anything – even if some reviews of the book present it more simplistically.

Really the book more than anything is about steps and missteps by Agassi trying to figure out what he wants and how to escape a life that he did not choose.  Obviously matches are recounted too, but Agassi and Moehringer tend to breeze past some and linger on others – and not the ones one would think.  His obsession with Boris Becker and the defeat at Wimbledon trumps his win over Sampras in 2000 (one of his greatest wins).  However, the book is vigilant in avoiding the normal athlete bio of having climaxes and conflicts around specific matches (aside from some inevitable ones like the 1999 French Open).  For Agassi is a sensitive narrator, who let personal issues with Brooke Shields (portrayed as an archetypal Hollywood sort) get in his way – and was not gifted at overcoming personal adversity on the tennis court (unlike Pete Sampras, this is the essence of Agassi’s complicated compliment of Sampras “lack of need for inspiration”).  When the real triumphs occur, they are personal ones, for things Agassi has figured out about himself and his life – and settling on his relationship with tennis.  Once again, Moehringer’s description of these resolutions are candid and complicated.  Agassi’s biography is messy and neither he nor his writer try to neaten things up.

Open tells a complicated story about a complicated guy who was raised from the start in a life that it took him nearly 30 years to square himself with.  Agassi did not have a straight path (indeed, he still doesn’t) and to his credit, he bares most in the book.  The book might not be a tell-all, and really a true tell all might be 1000 pages.  However, it is a very unvarnished window into the soul of a man who is in the process of figuring things out.  While not all of the revelations are flattering and might make the neat story of his “resurrection” harder to reconcile – that his story is not a plain arc makes the appreciation deeper and more substantive.  You want a book that digs beneath the empty headed cliches of celebrity – this works quite nicely.