Australian Open 2009

By tomorrow, which is the day after tomorrow, in the middle of winter, which is the summer, we will have two more rounds until the tournament ends. Unlike the three other majors, which thrive on the irrelevance of history, the Australian Open has no reputation to defend, and thus no inheritance to justify. Among the snooty forums of professional tennis, only Rod Laver Arena owes its charm more to the throbbing, disorderly progress of its patrons than to the civil, pseudo-aristocratic cavil of its sponsors: it regularly scrambles the seeds until their numbers mean nothing, brings fit men and women to bouts of one hundred degree heaves, replaces spectacle--think the US Open in all its Pattonesque pageantry--with character, and as for the unities of time and place, there aren't any. While the French, British, and American slams protect their capital by the privileges of earth, air, and "here's a lot of money, so win" water, respectively, the Australian Open lets everything burn, consumes tradition, scatters sense, and comfortably means nothing; it works by fire, and as the master teachers, fire is the first element.

Think Wilander in 1988, or Agassi in 2003, or Federer whenever (not 2005). Imagine a tournament in which the man who most deserves to win, and who does win, commemorates his victory by recognizing that he should not have won--that statistical whimsy has caused his competitors to faint, or fall down, or fail, and he, the most probable of champions, must face in the final match a half-mannequin or twelve year old blind child in a wheelchair, because at the end of two weeks, only those unlucky things remain. To beat this poor mathematical person, whose defeat implicates him and his vanquisher, and us all, in the strange wonder and accomplishment of fate, is no easy or satisfying task. And by resolving to complete what no intelligence began, by consenting to his humiliation, the champion wills his way out of this underworld of inversions and miscalculations and ascends to another, very different level of athletic purgatory: the clay courts of Europe.

Upsets at the Australian Open are routine. In the early rounds, facing unpredictable young talents and unprepared for the extreme conditions, veteran players and favored seeds evaporate like so much moisture in the sun. What climate doesn't compromise, competition withers. First round matches tend to play quickly, fiercely, and violently. By the second round, when the serious moral purpose of the heat has declared itself, they become heavier, slower, less deliberate--experiments in endurance. In the third round, fatigue turns desperate, and the quality and intensity of competition suddenly spikes as the seeds realize that in order to justify this terrible human treachery they need either to win the tournament outright or to lose in the next ten minutes. Third round matches are luminous like flares and burn so singly, so splendidly, and so coldly that they feel stopped in time--matches played somewhere inside God's memory or at the end of existence. They are mysteries and calamities--grave miracles--and they pulse with a supersensory strangeness.

By the fourth round, only inertia and accident determine who advances to the quarterfinals and who goes home. Players retire, or get injured, or fake an injury, or they win. Competitive logic still works, but it works wrong.

So this morning Andy Roddick did not dismiss Novak Djokovic but he nevertheless did advance to the semifinals. In about an hour Federer will defeat Del Potro in four sets. Tomorrow night Little Ali will strip naked, skin, and cannibalize Fernando Verdasco, his putative opponent, and Rafael Nadal will avenge his semifinal loss in Madrid by overwhelming Gilles Simon, who did not beat Gael Monfils--do you follow?--and will in turn lose to--did I say lose to? I mean sent backward through time by--Joey Jo Jo Ali Tsonga. In the final, who cares, because Andy Murray lost in the fourth round to a glitch in the divine supercomputer, and the defending champion got sick and gave up. I predict Federer over Tsonga in four sets, but without Federer finally meeting Nadal in a slam hardcourt final, his fourteenth win will mean as much as all the ones after fifteen, which is zero.

So, Serena Williams goes through thanks to Azarenka's walkover. Roddick earns the right to lose to Federer yet again, who himself should have lost to a then-not-imploding Tomas Berdych. And the final match everyone expected between Murray and Federer, which Murray would have won, will not take place.

Thus the Australian Open triumphs over all other sporting events. Its rules are natural rules, and as cast in every spontaneous vital error that increases life, rules are probabilities, not laws. In Australia, tennis is not a sport but a prediction. It is a bet. And the best part about this gamble, as is true of any gamble, is the utter unmeaning of its end: whoever wins does so by chance as much as talent. Had Wilander faced a healthy Lendl or Edberg or anybody but the hometown Cash, he would have lost; had Agassi met a rested Roddick instead of diminutive teuton Rainer Schuettler, he would have lost; had Federer sparred with a real opponent instead of the untested Baghdatis, the unremarkable Gonzalez, and the perennially deflated Safin, he would have lost. A decorous style takes the Wimbledon title; at Roland Garros, victory goes to the beast of burden; and at Flushing Meadows, where everybody wants to be Donald Trump, only the playboy takes the trophy. But in Sidney, and now Melbourne, success is a lottery, and like all lotteries, the winner can be neither proud nor modest, nor merit the occasion; all he can do is stand still and be fortunate.

Good luck to all the remaining men and women except Dinara Safina, who frightens me. I wish her nothing but invisibility and good manners. And as for you, Andy Murray, prepare for a long season of letting people down until July--coincidentally the month when you start to defend your precious ranking points. Earn my respect again, you casualty.

Good night from the computer at my desk.

Slothrop: Koko has gone all fuzzy on us, most likely because his hatred of all things Swiss, including Slothrop's water bottle full of the Swiss Alps, has made him Proud (where his wit failed). So Tennis in Australia is a prediction, yes? A chance. It matters not your ranking or your fortitude, you win through a combination of merit and blessing. So, then, why this sentence: "I predict Federer over Tsonga in four sets, but without Federer finally meeting Nadal in a slam hardcourt final, his fourteenth win will mean as much as all the ones after fifteen, which is zero"? Why does everyone get to win and be lucky to have done so except Federer who, if he wins, wins only through a lower caste of luck, not worth a celebratory couplet? And why his Proud hatred of Andy Roddick, who, from where Slothrop is sitting, is the clear favorite to win because he is Tennis's Alexander Pope, especially in post-game interviews of games which he lost, especially if he lost to Federer which he won't this time around, despite Koko's insouciant dismissal. And if the inflammatory nature of the Aussie Open is as Koko claims, why the vitriol against Murray? If nothing else, should not Koko be more sympathetic (not less sympathetic) to an athlete who lost a match against the Sun?

Koko: First, if you'd read as carefully as you've written, you would have noticed that I placed Federer in the same class of player as Agassi and Wilander, two of my most obnoxiously touted supermen. My prediction favors the grand cosmological gamble rather than the tiny human element that thrives or wastes by it; deserve, Slothrop (and Little Bill), has nothing to do with it, which means, by implication, neither does its contrary. So whether the Swiss Miss wins a fourth title there or disappoints, he satisfies the Great Wheel; either opportunity fulfills its purpose, which is indifference.

Second, big opinions from a man who hasn't stayed awake until 6:30 every morning watching the live feed from Melbourne, only to shuffle dejectedly to his bed, sleep until 10:30, wake again, and take the bus down I-35 to campus in order to confuse stray souls uninterested in the tenets of national socialism or sacred neoclassical aesthetics. (At least it's an ethos!) Some of us have, and we, I expect, having witnessed the events and not merely read them as reported, judge with a greater authority than those who have not. In his match against Verdasco, Murray yielded; he did not "lose." That much was clear to me, as it was to the weeping Brad Gilbert and to the ever philosophical Cliff Drysdale. It was also clear to Verdasco, who immediately broke him and then served, successfully, for the match.

And did you watch the after-interview with Djokovic? (Of course you didn't.) He blamed his loss on everything but hobbits and bees. Unwilling to accept the fact that he was beaten by an inferior talent but a fitter body, he used every excuse he could think of to ignore the obvious: next time, try harder. Even Mary Carillo, for once, said something relevant: "I mean, he's the defending champion, and he's not even going to finish?" Besides, conditions today were hotter than yesterday (108F at 5:30pm), and Dementieva not only survived to finish her match but positively bloomed. Yesterday, under a cooler sun, Roddick looked like an oak, growing for a thousand years and impervious to time, while Djokovic shriveled like a sapling. That was his choice; he did not lose a match "against the sun" but he did, like Monfils in the fourth round, imagine a pain that he felt into existence, felt and suffered for, until it, and not he, overcame its opponent. After his match, at least, Mofils admitted that "maybe the pain was in my head."

Third, if Andy Roddick acts the pretender to any personality in that poem, it is Fungoso, not Pope, because by his candid intelligence and refusal to win anything, he almost seems doomed and noble, but not really, because he looks like a mushroom. He's clever and modish and we all enjoy his antics, but in the end, Andy makes you dandy.

Kind thoughts to Little Ali this morning, who, like Djokovic and Murray, those tender flowers, wilted in the elements. Unlike them, though, Tsonga, who's no flower but a raging industrial dicht, ran his engine all the way out, and that, my friend, makes all the difference. Organisms perish, which is their particular virtue, but machines must go, and that is theirs. Speaking of machines, in a few minutes Nadal plays the cute Simon boy from across the street, so shall we test the second half of my prediction to see if it too is baseless? We shall, and it is.

A Federer-Simon final is the sure sign of apocalypse. Why not just hand the racket to one of the ball kids and let him go a round? Sampras did it once.