The summer I graduated from college I started freelancing and took up tennis. The first venture was understandable\u2014I wanted to be a writer, a still viable if inherently unstable profession in 1974\u2014while the second was not so obvious, as we were still a few years away from America\u2019s tennis boom. A Swede who looked like a Norse-god-turned-rock-star had won the French Open that spring, providing a hint of what was to come, but Bj\u00f6rn Borg was not the reason people gravitated to the three public courts in my new Washington, DC, neighborhood. Most came for the exercise and the camaraderie; those courts were the only ones I\u2019ve ever found that you could go to alone and find someone to hit with. Often, people playing singles would invite those waiting to join them for doubles.<\/p>\n
Writing and tennis became my two passions. Both require intense concentration, in order to be any good, and diligent practice, and both make use of imagination\u2014which in tennis takes the form of anticipation\u2014and creativity. And back then they each employed a soon-to-be-obsolete tool: My wooden Slazenger made hitting winners difficult in the same way that my humming Selectric made rewriting sentences cumbersome. Unlike tennis players, writers can correct their unforced errors.<\/p>\n
There are other differences of course. Writing is a solitary, sedentary, indoor activity while tennis is a social (certainly at those Quebec Street courts), active, outdoor pursuit. It produces sweat while writing has been associated with blood. (\u201cJust sit down,\u201d Red Barber explained the process, \u201cand open a vein.\u201d) In fact, writing and tennis sometimes seemed more conflicting than complementary; I was often on the court working on my backhand when I should have been at my desk developing my voice.<\/p>\n
Tennis took off in this country in the late 70s with the emergence of attitude, which replaced, or at least challenged, the old decorum. Martin Amis, writing years later about this phenomenon in The New Yorker, confessed that the word \u201cpersonalities\u201d\u2014when used in sentences like \u201cModern tennis lacks personalities\u201d\u2014translated in his mind to one that also serves as a synonym for anus.<\/p>\n
Prominent among these were John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors, whose mutual loathing and on-court confrontations brought to mind\u2014at least some minds\u2014the televised clashes of Norman Mailer and Gore Vidal. On the women\u2019s side, Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova began an intense rivalry that could have made them the Mary McCarthy and Lillian Hellman of tennis if not for the fact that they became good friends.<\/p>\n
All the rejections that came before are, miraculously, rendered meaningless. Writing, like tennis, allows for remarkable reversals of fortune.<\/p>\n
The writing I lost to playing tennis suffered further from my watching tennis. Though, with some of the big servers, in those serve-and-volley days, I could at least catch up on my reading as only the last few games of a set, and the tiebreakers, were essential viewing. I was heartened to learn, from a magazine profile of Samuel Beckett, that he too wasted hours watching televised matches. Good thing there was no Tennis Channel then.<\/p>\n
In 2011 my two passions merged when I got an assignment to cover the US Open for a now defunct online magazine. Arriving at the media center, I picked up a request form for player interviews. Roger Federer, I figured, would be unavailable\u2014which was ok, as he\u2019d already been dissected by David Foster Wallace\u2014so I wrote down the name of the only other player I really wanted to meet: Andrea Petkovic, the buoyant German whose favorite writers, according to her website, were Goethe and Oscar Wilde.<\/p>\n
I got the interview, but was joined by two other writers who, unfortunately, were more interested in tennis than literature.<\/p>\n
In recent years, changes in the game have distanced it even further from writing. The top players now have teams\u2014coach, hitting partner, physio, nutritionist, sometimes a psychologist\u2014which lessen their lonely crusader status. They lose a big point and gaze up imploringly at their boxes. Writers also experience frustration\u2014blocks, editors\u2014but have no one to turn to for support. Though some now look to ChatGPT.<\/p>\n
Technology is no stranger to tennis. Graphite rackets have contributed to more virtuoso shot-making, which has increased the opportunities for showboating (a plus for lovers of \u201cpersonalities\u201d now that automated line calls have eliminated the most common cause of on-court outbursts). A player will hit a spectacular winner and then half-fold one ear with his forefinger (it\u2019s only the men who do this, the women apparently are less needy), eliciting even louder applause, a greater acknowledgment of his greatness. I could parade around the room after writing a brilliant sentence, but it would be a silent, unseen strut.<\/p>\n
This year\u2019s Wimbledon, however, reawakened me to the abiding, fundamental connection between writers and tennis players. It was during the ladies\u2019 singles final, or, more accurately, the award ceremony following it, when Iga \u015awi\u0105tek joyously lifted the silver salver. \u015awi\u0105tek had been having, by her standards, a miserable year, winning no titles, not even the French Open, which had become her master class.<\/p>\n
As she stood on the worn grass of the world\u2019s most famous tennis court, her face alight with an exultant smile, all the year\u2019s losses faded away.<\/p>\n
Writers watching felt some kinship. Few of us win a Nobel (writing\u2019s Wimbledon), but most of us eventually do get published. And, like tennis players with their championships, we achieve this after months, sometimes years, of failure. The fields are lush with talent. Of the dozens of players who enter a tournament, all but two of them end it in defeat; the odds for freelancers are even more grim. We submit our work and the overwhelming majority of us get shot down. It\u2019s as depressing as it is inevitable. We have an off day, we get outplayed, an editor\u2014it happens!\u2014makes a bad call.<\/p>\n
But then one says \u201cyes,\u201d and everything changes, life fills with sweetness. All the rejections that came before are, miraculously, rendered meaningless. Writing, like tennis, allows for remarkable reversals of fortune.<\/p>\n
This is not to discount the value in making one\u2019s peace with failure. The great Irish tennis fan Samuel Beckett wrote: \u201cEver tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.\u201d The great Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka had the words tattooed onto his forearm.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The summer I graduated from college I started freelancing and took up tennis. The first venture was understandable\u2014I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":135484,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[72],"tags":[99,428],"class_list":{"0":"post-135483","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tennis","8":"tag-sports","9":"tag-tennis"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135483","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=135483"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/135483\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/135484"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=135483"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=135483"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=135483"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}