Rules of the Game: 2009 US Open men's 4th round

Yesterday afternoon, as Kim Clijsters scared the bejeezus and about fifty unforced errors out of first ever Chinese quaterfinalist Li Na, something hijacked Andy Murray, causing him to acquire autism, try too hard to pop his ears, melt, mutate into the mask from Scream, or enter some frozen psychological limbo after repeating the letter "ah" as in "father" continuously for four hours when his Power Tennis by Sesame Street DVD skipped and trapped him in a never ending loop of low back vowels and lunacy. Whatever happened, he got his ass kicked hard by this guy:
He's Marin Cilic, koala bear guru and lanky Croatian, who with this win over Murray advances to a Major quarterfinal for the first time in his teenage career after being blockaded at the fourth round in four previous attempts. Now, having upset the tournament favorite, Cilic goes on to face Juan Martin del Potro, who will mope him into submission, in a "no one under 6'6 battle of the giants" death match. Seriously, they some tall motherfuckers, gonna hit some.

So besides news, this question I bring you: do other sports suffer from the same deification paradigm as tennis, and if not, then why are we cursed with it? In their constant effort to turn athletes into profit superheroes, our broadcasters resort to a "god when he's winning/chump when he's losing" tactic useful for marketing and communicating the game's interest but distracting and just wrong for anything else. The rhetoric isn't new. It started in the early 90s, in tennis, at least, when commentators and sport historians, impressed by its marketing potential, began cultivating the "rivalry" between Agassi and Sampras as another incarnation of Hector and Achilles. "Who will be victorious and emerge as the greatest player of all time?" Asinine. Even in the age of New Critical canon makers no cultural arbiter dared rank the great talents, as though he and he alone, endowed with the privilege of history and the infallibility of close reading, could summon the perspective needed to touch all of time and space, evaluate its properties, and order them into a precise hierarchy. Nobody, not even the worst among them, was that reckless or stupid. What criteria would we use? Most books written? Hardest rhyme? Most precariously sustained Homeric simile? It's a fool's question and a salesman's task.

So why do we tolerate this insipid shit from sportscasters? Or is the swirl of empty accolade and calumny stirred only in the wilderness of gentlemen's sports? Slothrop, do baseballers argue over the historical import of every hit, strike, out, and walk? Every win and every loss? Do they invent new and unnecessary bombast for their endless coronations and coups, their witless rhetorical ceremonies of priestly self-justification? I really do wonder whether the surge in rivalry-riling over the last twenty years in tennis has anything to do with the contemporary spread of unneeded, unwanted, positively uneducated commentary. Is sportscasting the new medium between us, poor earthly innocence, and the mighty unknowable of beyond? Are twats like Chris Fowler the new clergy, intervening on our behalf to administer the rites, speak the liturgy, and deliver the grace? I don't know, but whatever is going on, I'm sick of it.

So Andy Murray lost. It happens. He's no better or worse than he was three days ago, when he was the ATP darling. Great athletes and artists, scientists, or philosophers aren't pez dispensers or loaded dice; they don't produce the same values, of the same quality, under the same conditions every single time. Yes, Roger Federer reached a buzillion consecutive Major semifinals. He also lost to nobody, know-nothing Guillermo Canas in back to back tournaments in 2007, totally whiffed a ball at Wimbledon, 2008, off a solid bounce, blew a match point against Safin at the Aussie Open, 2005 going for the crowd-pleaser instead of the smart shot, broke his racquet in Miami, 2009, etc., etc. Borg set a record no one, probably, will ever equal, let alone break, only to retire, attempt a comeback, lose every single match, and re-retire. People, even great people, the immortal ones, are animals and goofs. Socrates spent his final living minutes drawing inaccurate analogies between musical instruments and human souls. Goethe, a sage if ever one lived, inferred the principle of natural selection from the diversification of European plants over seventy years before Darwin published his theory of evolution; but he also believed in his last days that if the room darkened he would die in it.

I complain because with Andy Murray's surprising but by no means unprecedented exit from the 2009 USO we hear all the familiar neverminding and nonsense. When he's on a role, they claim him as the heir apparent, the terrible one, the next Titan. When he stumbles, they berate and infantilize him. It's all very prophetic and moralizing. What gives? But isn't that what we expect from the clerisy: sermons?

For all its disturbing chaos and rude energy, the problem, thank God, knows an elegant and available solution: shut the fuck up. Let players play. We do not need to sanitize chance, make history into an art or competition into a story. Compelling narratives arise out of the accidents of circumstance, and when they do arise, we recognize and appreciate the fineness and rarity. But when we argue events into coherence or gloss their strange interpersonal cipher into uniform readability; when we manipulate the beauty of labor and creation to commercial ends, and exclusively to those ends--adaptable, predictable, desirable--when we exchange complexity for literacy, then we engineer what we truly extol in competition--its contest--not forward to the sublime plasticity of the pure possible but back to the crude serial order of conformity: to the organism an impossibility as real as death. Among life's virtues, repetition--rule--is the least.

Which is why last night, of all possible nights, sitting on the couch with Seorin, both of us delirious with joy, I discovered one more reason why, for us, Rafael Nadal, the man, more than any of his achievements, or those of any other man, more than any other man, in fact, embodies the spirit and significance of human greatness: why he is more interesting, illuminating, entertaining, and inspiring than anyone else we know of, athlete or no. With his win over Gael Monfils last tonight he reclaimed the number two ranking, a perk Daren Cahill made sure to mention during the on-court interview following Nadal's match. When asked to respond, Nadal, embarrassed, as always, by praise, stuttered, "I don't know. For me is always this point, this match." Then a crazed fan broke through security, rushed Nadal, gave him a lustful, fanatical hug, kissed him, and got his Nadal-lovin' ass thrown right the hell out. As security moved in to separate them, Nadal tried gently to pull the guard's arm back, gesturing that all was okay, he was fine, and however in love with him this particular guy may be, there's no need for such overstatement or intervention. Nevertheless, security wrestled the fan away, Nadal confusedly reaching after him like an indecisive lover pursuing an affection he's not entirely sure he feels. It was cute, adorable even, and very awkward, and totally human. Gradually, as the guards ushered the fan off court, Nadal's outstretched arms relaxed into a shrug, and he smiled, then laughed, and then looked down and smiled again, this time to himself, not to the public, pleased and bewildered, I think, by the myriad truths and trials that accompany us in strange wonder.

I'm glad that he's back and that he's playing well, but more than that I'm deeply happy that he's enjoying his game again. He seems peaceful now, and even grateful. With everything he's gone through since May, and especially with his parents separating, a little blessed humor is no small thing.