“What, you’re rooting for Isner?” my girlfriend Julie said in outrage. It was Saturday night, and I’d just hung my head in disappointment after the American giant had missed his umpteenth volley against Andy Roddick.
“Yeah, you have to root for Isner,” I said without thinking. There really did seem to be no question about it.
“Why?”
“Because . . . “ I began confidently, but it quickly became clear that I had nothing to back it up.
“I thought you liked Roddick,” she pressed.
“I do, but Isner . . . Isner is the underdog,” I finally decided. That was the best explanation I had, but it couldn’t have been the whole story. I would spend the next afternoon rooting for two decided overdogs, Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal, and all I wanted out of the Sunday evening match was for Taylor Dent to make it interesting against the No. 2 seed, Andy Murray. A Dent win would have been a crowd pleaser, but I like Murray and I wanted to see him take his finely honed game into the later rounds.
The later rounds of a tournament aren't typically a concern of mine when it comes to choosing a player to root for in a match. Even the word “choosing” doesn’t describe the process accurately; it’s more instinctive and immediate. But what does go into it? It’s a question I ask myself whenever I’m in a press room at a Grand Slam, packed elbow to elbow with reporters who constantly voice their opinions—quite often negative, quite often more than a little bit cynical—of various players. They aren’t exactly acting like fans; the cliché is true, journalists like a good story as much as anything else, and I fall into that mindset when I’m watching a match at my desk or sitting in a press conference. In both cases, I find yourself hoping for something crazy and memorable to happen. But I was a tennis fan long before I wrote about it, and I’ve retained that sensibility; it rides, on the same train but in a separate mental compartment, alongside my journalistic sensibility. I like and root for certain players mainly because I can’t help it. I’d hate to think what working in tennis would be like if I didn’t have such visceral and passionate reactions to the sport.
This instinctive support for a particular athlete isn’t something that’s allowed to play out in most other sports, whether they’re played by professional teams or by individuals in international competitions. There, where you’re from determines whom you like. As a native of Chicago, say, you get to be part of the Chicago Cubs; your home is right there in the franchise name. Tennis is hurt by this lack of easy fan identification. We have to rely much more often on the quality of play or the drama of a particular match for our entertainment. Imagine if the same were true in baseball—the sport wouldn’t exist. This also makes it hard to build a base of fans who follow tennis year-round; events, namely the Grand Slams, are what drives tennis among casual fans.
But there’s an upside to this for tennis devotees: We’re free to follow and root for whomever we want. You don’t have your player chosen for you; you bring something of yourself to the decision. And this means that you reveal something about yourself—something other than where you live—in whom you support.
As I tentatively stated above, unless I have a clear-cut favorite in a match, I’m usually going to be partial to the underdog; it’s more exciting to see something unexpected. But when I think about the players I’ve instinctively rooted for over the years—Borg, Evert, McEnroe, Wilander, Graf, Agassi, Hingis, Nadal—I have trouble finding an obvious pattern. Some were natural overlords, others were perpetual insurgents. And when I expand that list beyond tennis, my reasons become even murkier to me. I never failed to root for Michael Jordan, even when he was going for his sixth NBA title, but I’ve rarely, if ever, wanted Tiger Woods to win. The Pittsburgh Steelers may represent working-stiff underdogs everywhere, but there are few groups of fans I dread seeing walk into a sports bar more than theirs. Of course, this may be a personal issue. I grew up in a town in the middle of Pennsylvania where the townies, like myself, were fans of the Philadelphia Eagles, and the country kids worshipped the Steelers. Their style of fandom always seemed wild and anarchic to me, without the grounding bitter streak that runs through all followers of Philly sports. Now, after their two recent Super Bowl wins, being a fan of the Steelers, a team that dominates while maintaining its everyman, smashmouth, no-coat-in-winter style, just seems smug. Kind of like pretending the Boston Red Sox are lovable, cursed idiots rather than a massive corporate entity with a colossal media backer in ESPN.
So my loyalties, probably like yours, are difficult to categorize. Narrowing the options should help. In the rivalry between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, I was an admirer of Sampras, but I was an instinctive fan of Agassi. The same is true for Federer vs. Nadal. Again, I’m an instinctive fan of the No. 2 guy, Nadal, and an admirer of the No. 1, Federer. In both cases, I identify with the slightly less gifted, slightly less self-assured player; I like the underdog in those rivalries, though you can't say Agassi and Nadal are underdogs as people or players—they were both destined and groomed for greatness from an early age. Rather, I like some combination of their human quality, their expressiveness, their work-heavy, aesthetically imperfect games, and their lack of lordliness or entitlement. It has nothing to do with their off-court personalities: I don’t like or dislike Federer more as a person than I do Nadal. My rooting interest is ultimately impossible to put into words,, which may be the best thing about being a tennis fan.
What do these reflexive, undefinable reactions say about my personality outside tennis? It’s been pointed out to me, by more than one person, that I’m a connoisseur of revolution. It’s no accident that I wrote an article last year about the beginning of the Open era in the context of the rebellions of 1968. There will never be enough books and documentaries about that tumultuous year to satisfy my curiosity about it. For example: This weekend I watched a movie about the Harvard-Yale football game of '68, and the book I’ve been reading on the train to the Open is How Far Can You Go? by British author David Lodge. It's a novel about how Catholicism transformed itself during those revolutionary 60s—basically, how hell disappeared.
From this evidence, and from my predilections as a tennis fan, I can see that I'm drawn to those moments when old assumptions of what is true are suddenly proven false. If I were a Supreme Court justice, I’d be an anti-originalist. In tennis-fan terms, I don’t believe, as some do, that you should always root for the “better player"—the theory is that by rooting for the underdog you’re essentially rooting for someone to lose. There are no “better players,” only matches, which begin with both players on even terms. I like upsets because they prove this again, just when you may have forgotten it. They prove that everyone is human, that no hierarchy is eternal, that no truth is fundamental, that what you thought you knew was wrong. Sports are one of the few places that offers this thrill.
The best moments for me are the periodic one-person revolutions, when someone completely new arrives and topples all the dominoes. Becker in 1985, Seles and Sanchez-Vicario in ’89, Nadal in 2005 were all impossibly fresh-faced teenagers impervious to nerves. We’re seeing another one those moments at this U.S. Open.
On the afternoon that Becker won the ’85 Wimbledon final, I went out to play tennis. I found myself unconsciously copying his deep knee bend on his service toss. At one point a kid rode by on a bike along the street above the courts. He looked down and yelled, “Boris Becker!” as he flew past—there was really nothing else to say. Yesterday, Julie played tennis in Brooklyn after Melanie Oudin beat Nadia Petrova. She said there was a little girl there with a pretty mean forehand. After she hit one for a winner, she yelled, “Just like Oudin!”
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Why do you like who you like? I'll be out at Flushing this afternoon to see another favorite of mine, though I'm more of an admirer of Andy Murray than an instinctive fan—there's something too self-assured about him for me to love. And he's no underdog at the moment; in fact, Murray is playing some of the best tennis I've seen this year. He'll be facing another career moment soon. Is he ready for it this time?