The Rally returns today, with a discussion between freelance tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I on the 2016 season that just was. Below is the first of three parts.
Hi Kamakshi,
We’ve done it. We’ve made it all the way to another offseason. Or off-month, anyway. That’s still a ridiculously short amount of time to be away from the game, for both players and fans, but I’m happy that there aren’t as many complaints about the schedule’s length as there once were. Maybe it helps that the game’s aging legends—Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Serena Williams—have reached the point where they can pull the plug whenever it’s physically necessary and no one is going to say a whole lot about it. They’ve earned the right to make their own schedules.
I enjoyed the 2016 season as much as any other; good and bad, it was an especially eventful one. But my attitude toward the sport, and sports in general, was different this year because of the U.S. presidential election. Games offered no escape or symbolic triumphs this time. I’m not sure how you felt in Canada, but to me, tweeting tennis scores and results didn’t seem like an adequate response to what was happening in the United States. The election made me understand the limits of using sports as a metaphor for life.
That said, we’re here to talk tennis, and there’s plenty of it to discuss. This is the time of year when I look back and realize how much a single season can contain. The match-fixing story that broke during the Australian Open? The Cinderella saga of Marcus Willis at Wimbledon? Novak Djokovic doing what no man had done since Rod Laver? Monica Puig winning Puerto Rico’s first Olympic gold medal in any sport? Juan Martin del Potro playing his first match in two years in Delray Beach? Maria Sharapova standing up in front of that ugly hotel-ballroom carpet to tell us she had failed a drug test? Yes, all of it happened in 2016.
Let me start by asking what you thought the biggest story of 2016 was. I can cite two that stand out for me, for opposing reasons.