Tennis is a Game of Opposites
LOUIS ARMSTRONG STADIUM, US OPEN, QUEENS.
In tennis, love equals zero.
A cut shot nullifies a heavy roller.
To combat power, one strategy is taking pace off your opponent’s ball. This is harder than it sounds.
There’s a strange dichotomy in sports. Winning=Elation=Relief. There’s also a form of emptiness in winning. And fear. You ask yourself—what next? How do I top that?
Silence during points is sacrosanct. That’s what tennis players are taught. Well, you wouldn’t know that sitting ten rows up during the round of sixteen matchup between the Russian Andrey Rublev and Cameron Norrie, who hails from Britain via New Zealand. It was incredibly loud. On a changeover KISS’ “Rock and Roll All Nite” played over the PA system. Several fans sitting in front of us shopped for running shoes on their smartphones during points. Those shoes couldn’t wait until a changeover?
The big story going into this year’s Open was Serena announcing her retirement at the tournament’s end. After twenty-seven years on tour and twenty-three Grand Slam singles titles she was calling it quits. She lost the third round to an Australian with a Russian sounding name. At times, the Serena of old thrilled both audience and TV viewers alike. She went down swinging like the champ she is.
Tennis and boxing have more in common than you think. Just look at the sport’s greatest rivalries: Laver/ Rosewall, Navratilova/ Evert, McEnroe/ Borg, Seles/ Graf, Nadal/ Federer—it’s lefty versus righty, exploiting strengths and hiding weaknesses.
Opposites attract.
There was a brief rain delay after officials poorly timed the closing of the stadium roof. The Russian roamed the baseline like a prowling lion. Norrie sat in his chair staring straight ahead like a loyal subject of the monarch. Tennis, at its best, has an improvisational quality equivalent to jazz. No two matches are alike, much less two points.
Tennis is a game of opposites. Take Arthur Ashe. He was the first Black player selected to play United States Davis Cup. He won the US Open, Wimbledon and Australian Open. He wrote columns for The Washington Post. He was a civil rights leader once arrested in Washington D.C. protesting outside the Embassy of South Africa at an anti-apartheid rally. He died from AIDS at age forty-nine several years after receiving a contaminated blood transfusion during heart surgery. What would he think of Arthur Ashe Stadium? With a capacity of 23, 771, it is one of the biggest, baddest, loudest tennis arena in the world. Fans chug beers to crowd chants during changeovers if their picture is projected on the big overhead screens. During a lull in the quarterfinal matchup between the game’s current bad-boy, Nick Kyrgios and the Russian, Karen Khachanov, a barber was giving a young man a fade wearing a Louis Vuitton cutting cape. At the last major of the calendar year, anything goes.
FOREST HILLS
Since the US Open’s inception in 1881, the tournament has been played on grass, Har-Tru (green clay), and acrylic hard courts. The current surface is faster than the grass at Wimbledon. Now, there’s a head scratcher. Yeah, tennis is a game of opposites.
If you see footage from old reels of the US Open played at West Side Tennis Club, Forest Hills, the men in the crowd wear summer suits and Oxford bucket hats. The sartorial choice of middle-aged men these days is ball caps, T-shirts, and long-ass shorts. When was it okay for men to dress like little boys?
In describing tennis in its heyday (the 70s and early 80s), we might use words like balletic, controlled aggression, or sublime. Tennis in the 21st Century is best classified by explosive power and blistering foot speed. These modern players aren’t your stereotypical country clubbers. They’re athletic and tenacious. They run down balls no mortal creature has a right to. They also counterattack in a way that leaves a spectator speechless and wanting more.
We’re seeing a resurgence on the American side with ten guys in the top 100. Sure, it’s not 1984 when nearly half the world-ranked players were from the States (48 out of a 100.) But it’s a start. The women in the post-Serena era are faring even better. There’s the uber-talented Coco Gauff, Jessica Pegula (her parents own the Buffalo Bills and Buffalo Sabres), Danielle Collins, and Sloane Stephens, who won the 2017 US Open. Things are looking up.
CLOSER TO HOME
I’ve taught tennis all over the world, but nothing can beat my time spent at Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy in Bradenton, Florida, when Agassi, Courier and Seles trained there. I made $250 a week (about $5 an hour). The harder they worked me, the more fulfilling it was.
Unlike most sports, tennis has no clock. The player who wins the final point moves onto the next round. And if you lose? Well, as my dad used to say, “Salvage the doubles.” My first tennis memory was shopping with my mom for the appropriate attire: white knit shirt, white cotton shorts, white canvas sneakers. My stick was a wood Jack Kramer Autograph. I was seven. The group lesson that followed wasn’t anything to write home about. Tennis just wasn’t as exciting as snagging baseballs in the backyard.
Two moments stand out from my junior tennis days. The first was playing a USTA sanctioned event in Bowling Green, Kentucky. My first round opponent owned three Prince Woodies and was dressed head-to-toe in Lacoste. My dad, who’d driven me from our home near Nashville, took one look at the kid and said, “It’s not how they look, it’s how they play.” I won in straight sets. Lesson learned.
The second big moment was the day Borg beat McEnroe to win his fifth consecutive Wimbledon championship (with the heralded 18-16 fourth set tiebreaker). I was fourteen and home alone for the weekend, having bowed out of a family trip. It was the first time in my life a sporting event got to me. I don’t think the experience would have been as powerful if I weren’t on my own.
Eighteen.
That was the number my dad threw out one night at the dinner table. It was like he was saying, “If you don’t beat me by then, then you’ll never reach your potential.” Right around the same time he was diagnosed with Guillain-Barre syndrome, a disease that affects the limbs and can cause paralysis. He recovered, but physically he was never the same guy. And all that talk about #18? It just didn’t matter anymore.
My dad and I attended the 1991 US Open together. I was working in Boston at the time and drove up with another teaching pro. We spent two days on the grounds. We had our differences, but you wouldn’t know it if you saw us watching the game we loved. He died ten years later, a month after 9/11. America lost its way that early morning in September. Thirty days later, I was lost, too.
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“The force of the ball on the racquet is equal and opposite to the force of the racquet on the ball.” - The Physics and Technology of Tennis by Howard Brody, Rod Cross and Crawford Lindsey, a book I used in research for my novel about a troubled 90s tennis star.
In my dad’s office, along with family photos, a fancy pen holder, and awards of recognition from the insurance industry where he worked for thirty years-plus, was a Newton’s Cradle, a device made of five steel balls set on a pendulum. The game demonstrates the conservation of momentum and the conservation of energy. Pull a single ball sideways then let it go. It swings freely back and forth like a pendulum. The ball on the farthest side—let’s call it ball #5—also swings back and forth with the same energy and speed. Use any variety of balls—two balls, three balls, four balls—and you get the same result.
As a teenager, I was mesmerized by the device, the way it sounded like a ticking clock, the consistent, efficient movement. Newton’s Cradle was the most perfect toy ever designed. It was like hitting the racquet’s sweet-spot on every swing. It was like never missing. I would end up trying to create my tennis game based on its design. No shot was ever flawlessly struck. I was critical of my play even when my results were better than expected. Playing perfectly was all I thought about. But tennis doesn’t work like that. Life doesn’t work like that. That’s why we keep playing the game.
TOM TRONDSON’s debut novel, Moving in Stereo, won the American Writing Awards “Best Sports Fiction 2022.” He lives in Minneapolis and teaches creative writing at Hamline University.