September 8, 1989
What is it about Lendel and Becker and Agassi? What is it about players so good they seem flawless and invincible? While we watch them we think we could do what they do, though. Don’t you? Sure. But that’s impossible, you think. But wait, wait, I could get that if I concentrated. That’s the trouble. I don’t pay attention on every point. I don’t always look at the ball. Dammit, I know I should look at the ball, at the ball, not where it’s going to go. Those guys always look at the ball, right? Well, not every time. They can just put the racquet in the neighborhood, at the spot, and the ball will hit just right and go over the net. It’ll just bounce exactly right off those strings and zip! But wait, those guys can do that because they’ve looked so many thousands of times, trillions, maybe, that their racquets know where to be. They got that good because they looked and looked and looked and now it’s not exactly automatic but it sure is reflexive and almost…instinctive. Could that be? It seems instinctive, but you know that holding a paddle with strings on it and reaching for a small flying globe and running and jumping within a confined space just to reach that speeding fuzzy yellow sphere, twisting your delicate knees and rotating your arms and scrunching up your fingers and wiping sweat out of your eyes and tugging your sopping shirt off your sticky shoulders and chest and bouncing up and down and swaying and sometimes even crashing to the ground, you just know, to tell the truth, that this can not be a matter of instinct. Practice is the point. Talent that is practiced, that is, is the cause.
And those guys want to win. They must want to win. We play for fun, right? Well, so do they. But the fun is the winning. To be a winner you have to practice every day. Every day. We can’t…won’t. But we don’t have the talent in the first place, so why bother? Because getting the ball over, just over the net, or rifling it down the line just past your opponent as he stumbles toward it off the wrong food because he thought you were going the other way with it, seeing the yellow blur kiss and skip off the green hard macadam just inside the white border line, teasingly low, as if it insidiously twisted itself a teeny bit to one side and then up under the back of his racquet, doing that all in a matter of two and a half seconds is a thrill. It’s a shot in the arm, a whiff of laughing gas, a ripple up your spring from a kiss you’ve longed for. It’s a rush of joy juice that makes you blush. It’s a feeling of invincibility. For that moment you are flawless. So that’s it. Lendl and Becker and Agassi are addicts, too, we who must watch these guys. They thrill us. They thrill us because they do what seems impossible. They thrill us because we share their thrills. They thrill us because we share their thrills. They thrill us because for a little while on each flawless point we feel as we watch, anyway, that we could do that. WE are addicted to their addiction, but without the aches and soreness and hangovers. Unless we think we are those guys. Unless we go out, the next morning, thinking we are that good and strain to do what they do. I won’t. It’s enough for me that they strain and win and let me watch. That’s what it is.