Wimbledon Final

In order to watch the Wimbledon final, I had to punch a bunch of Krauts in the nose as they insisted that horse jumping was more important than Andy Roddick. And so but to commemorate good Andy's honest and full-blooded performance, Slothrop hereby commits himself to a full year of tennis-puker sessions under Koko's tutelage, should Koko have him. Training would commence on August 12th, out in the hot sun. Slothrop is serious about this. Below, as a bribe to his sensei, Slothy offers a vision encountered on his nightly perambulation through the red-light district of Buntwerp:

Koko: Probably conspicuously, I've been blank about this for six weeks, which is, it seems, as long as I can grieve for an American. Before commenting on this baffling event I needed to process it and come to some kind of conclusion. Well, I did, and I have, so get ready.

"Wimbledon 2009: Fuck you, personally, Nick, again":

For twelve days I delighted in the resurgence on my favorite German headcase, Tommy Haas, who, with Marat Safin, is the most naturally gifted athlete on tour and the quickest fuse ever to ignite for no reason whatsoever. His breathtaking one-handed backhand, overearnest and impetuous service motion, backward hat at 31, the very fact that he IS 31 and still kicking ass, and his doomed, cursed, cosmically middle fingered bad luck with injuries--what was I saying? Right, for all these reasons, I adore him. Coming in to the tournament seeded twenty-fourth, Haas stunned Marin Cilic in an epic, unpredictable upset and then played some of the most inspired and elegant tennis I've ever seen to defeat Novak Djokovic in the quarterfinals. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, he was fire: cool, translucent, dangerous. Then Coyote peed on him. Ditto Andy Roddick. (On account of his scavenging at the French Open, we now refer to R.F. as Coyote.)

That was hard for me. Add to that Del Potro's premature exit in the second round at the hands of Lleyton "I'm an obnoxious disease" Hewitt, and you can understand my disappointment. And then came Andy, like a ghost of tennis past, avenging Del Potro's embarrassment, spanking Braveheart in front of all the white little ladies and gentleman, revolutionary, blazing, swift, complicated (complicated?), clever, tactical, playing the game in a smarter and quieter way than he ever had before. He greased Murray--absolutely out-Murrayed him--and for four and a half hours in the final outplayed from the ground the greatest shotmaker in history. Will we remember this year's championship for its cruel irony? Roddick moved better and hit trickier than Federer, who, in his right, outserved Roddick. WTF?

So we watched as Roddick took the first set, at which point, we mused silently, "Hmm. Now it will go four. How interesting." About fifty minutes later, Roddick held FOUR set points, when, at 6-2, Federer hit a defensive pass from behind the baseline, which floated up, a sitter, which Andy promptly volleyed out--so far out that it actually left the TV screen before bouncing, a real god's honest shank. That set, and an unstoppable two sets to love lead, Andy lost. Had he put away that easy winner, that goddamn routine baby volley, the kind of volley even I don't miss in matches, he would have won the match in four after breaking Coyote for the second time. My heart stopped when he missed that volley at 6-2. Literally. I felt it. I can't even describe what kinds of crazy, life-poisoning hormones and chemicals flooded my brain and body, making me seize up like a sea clam under threat of being poached. I stayed locked like that for the rest of the match, looking like a deranged fetus next to a rabbit.

We all knew Coyote would break the record. Now, or next time, or in five years. It didn't matter. Andy may never get so close again. It felt, to me, as though I were watching the last match he would ever play, and to see him fight so hard for so long against such odds broke my heart. It was even more heroic than tiny, cramping, shit-out-of-luck Michael Chang short-circuiting Lendl at the 1989 French Open. Truly awesome.

And yet, I will never feel totally satisfied with this match. Much of it was awkward and surreal. Coyote's groundstrokes were cautious and often clumsy or improperly timed; I could feel in his late swing and unusually indecisive footwork the moment crowding him, distracting him. It all seemed unnaturally or artificially historic--a suspicion confirmed by the endless masturbatory parade of past masters and wizards at the trophy ceremony. Everybody waiting for history, nobody invested in the present. Except Andy, who played like a total stud, an unmovable but invisible force. I have never seen anyone make Coyote hesitate like that, not even Nadal. He confused him. And when all is accounted for, all the stats and stages and star-mocking pomp, that confusion reminds me of what, exactly, bothers me about the 2009 final. Tennis has one fatal flaw. A Frankenstein with no real athletic talent except his seven foot, Abe Lincoln lookin' totem pole of a body can serve his way through better players. (See Ivo Karlovic.) Coyote served over fifty aces in a match whose rallies consistently fell within Roddick's control. His serve, not his game, won him the match. Because of this flawed design, tennis contests come with luft, and I always feel stomach-sick in that particular air pocket. It's like a loophole in a contract.

Anyway, it was a funky tournament preceded by an even funkier tournament. But, when the dust finally settled and I took stock of the situation, I found I'd learned a few things from the Wimbledon debacle:

1. Every real sport, and you can measure a sport's athletic integrity by this rule, begins and ends with stamina: the body enduring stress that it should never, in any actual life situation, need to experience. A sport is a cultivated discomfort. The winner of any athletic contest, usually, is the fitter of the two, or, in the case of gay team sports (you know who you are), which team has superior conditioning. Technique, intelligence, and reflex all come down to fitness. In a sport like tennis, whether you pull up too early on a forehand or drop your wrist on a low volley has nothing to do with how good you are--everybody at that level is preposterously good and no one makes mistakes from bad technique--and everything to do with how much stamina and attention, which is just another kind of stamina, you can retain as the contest steals it from you. The final reminded us of this truth in the cruelest way possible. Roddick, who hadn't been broken the entire match, eventually hit the wall in that thirtieth game of the fifth set, and he lost because when your stamina goes, so do your balance, reaction time, and swing motion. You shorten your swing and rush your rotation; you lose focus; you hit balls long. If you recall, match point handed Coyote the win when Roddick HIT A BALL LONG. Depth, and the first serve, is the first thing to go when you get too tired.

Roddick won that match. He did. Coyote just lasted longer.

2. True aficionados enjoy every aspect of their interest. People sometimes forget this, especially with snob sports like tennis and golf, where fans cluster around the four majors like buzzards waiting for the animal to die. Tennis is not about the top ten men or women winning four big tournaments each year. Tennis is thousands of men and women, each one a fantastical talent, competing in obscure Ural towns and bloc countries for purses that, if actually won, just may cover your airfare to and from the event. It's the dozens of sad, second-rate dreamers who struggle through two weeks of unrecognized warfare only to emerge triumphant as a qualifier for the main draw where they will lose in the first round to some dick who's been eating tacos and shopping all week. Minor tournaments in tennis--all the Country Classics and Gstaad Opens and Free-Falafel-with-First Place bonanzas--make the sport healthy and variegated and REAL. True fans stare wonderingly at the 304th and 305th ranked players in the world as they slug it out for a wildcard to next year's tournament in Casablanca, where the prize is twenty bucks and a horse. I love--LOVE--watching college kids, futures players, challengers, not just the ATP myrmidons, and certainly not just Achilles and Patroclus. Such pomposity, in my opinion, sucks, and I insist we distinguish between genuine fans who jump in and asshole clowns and dilettantes who only tip their toes in the shallow end, where the water is warm and light and navigable. Fans want to get lost in the dark uncertainties; they want to perish in them.

3. In the end, all you are is a spectator. All your happiness and despair is another person's accomplishment or failure. What they do has nothing to do with you. Marvel at their brilliance and be grateful. Then, unappreciative parasite, go play your own game. Since Nadal lost back in May, when I had to totally reconsider my relationship with tennis and eventually had this revelation, while at Deep Eddy, blinking at the lush deciduous monsters overhead and wanting more breeze and less sunlight, I've learned to cherish pro tennis as the magnificent, alien audit of my own miserable progress. I should learn from them, not hold them up as Bronze Age warriors or stage supernatural coups, each against the other like some retarded ancient reckoning. So I turned inward, dedicated myself to my own game, and began to train seriously. Now, every time Nalbandian flattens out a groundstroke, I see it, feel it, from the inside. When Rafter bends his back in that special Australian reverse C during service, I follow in my muscles and motor cortices the ball's kick. Watching old videos of Edberg and Courier or new broadcasts of Seppi or Simon, I touch and make serious, sure contact with the match. I respect it.

You can thank me later for not elegizing the occasion in verse.