The Warrior Generation

Given some of the issues we've been talking about these past few days, I thought it might be interesting to post the essay I wrote for the current issue of Tennis, as it doesn't appear at the magazine's website. This essay was part of a big package we did on the the generation led by Andy Murray, Marcos Baghdatis, Noak Djokovic et al. You can find my  Q and A interview with Murray at the website.

When my editor James Martin came to me and asked how I felt about writing an essay highlighting what I felt the new generation of young 'uns could learn from past champions, I answered, "sure." Of course I had no idea where I would go with that, and this is one of the great pleasures of writing an essay.

One of the reasons I've stubbornly continued to be a writer is because writing about something is the best way I know to figure out how I really feel about it, and I'm the sort of person who always likes to be able to say why he likes - or dislikes - something.  I don't know, just because I like it, just doesn't cut it.  And trying to write clearly and logically tends to be a pretty good check on prejudice and preconception; it's amazing how often I'll write a few sentences and then realize that they don't really stand up to close scrutiny.

It may seem strange for a writer of commentary and opinion to put it this way, because I imagine the popular assumption is that I have my ideas and theories, and then try to articulate and justify them in prose. That happens, sometimes. But most of the time, writing is a journey of discovery. I finish a story, or post, or scene in a novel and realize it went somewhere entirely different from where I vaguely expected it to go. So here goes my Advice to the Love-Forty Lorn.

The Warrior Generation

What the latest group of whiz kids can learn from those much-missed legends of the 1970s.

After Jonas Bjorkman was blown to pieces by Roger Federer in the Wimbledon semifinals last July, the popular Swedish veteran graciously sang the praises of the greatest precision instrument out of Switzerland since the timepiece. It was a command performance that enthralled the assembled reporters in the pressroom.

But as I wandered away from this exercise in hagiography, I couldn’t help but remember a similar scene that transpired many years earlier in what was then a far smaller interview room located in a bunker deep beneath Centre Court. It was just after the 1978 men’s final, in which Bjorn Borg had dismantled Jimmy Connors with relative ease.

When Connors was asked if he would consider lifting his boycott of the Australian Open if it meant getting another shot at Borg in a Grand Slam venue, his leg began to twitch and his face colored. He said he would do anything to get another crack at Borg. He vowed, “I’ll follow [him] to the ends of the earth . . .”

t may sound like hyperbole now, but the comment trailed Connors for years, and today it serves as the defining quote for a generation—perhaps the greatest generation of warriors, male and female, that the game has produced. Connors’ generation included Borg, John McEnroe, Ivan Lendl, and Mats Wilander; on the women’s side, it featured Chris Evert, Martina Navratilova, Tracy Austin, and Evonne Goolagong. Statistically, the Warrior Generation may be in a dead heat or even a nose behind Pete Sampras and his merry band of Grand Slammers, but no group of outstanding players ever came as hungry for battle and as indifferent to all the other things a player can be besides a champion: gentleman, well-rounded individual, friend, spokesperson, ambassador, fashion plate, icon.

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While some of those constituents managed to maintain a civilized face—Wilander never tried to decapitate McEnroe with a forehand, as Lendl often did, and Evert played it so cool she was nicknamed the “Ice Maiden”—they had an appetite for combat that players in successive generations have been hard-pressed to match. That, in a nutshell, is the chief challenge facing the 10 players we’ve just cited as potential generation-shaping competitors.

This isn’t an easy issue to frame, given the new status quo. Federer has lulled the vast majority of his rivals into the slumber of also-rans and blunted even his most combative of rivals with the lethal weapon of friendliness. Over in the glittery WTA ghetto, playing your most fearsome and stomach-wrenching rival at nearly every tournament (à la the heyday of Navratilova and Evert, who faced off 80 times) is out, and multitasking in Hollywood is in, along with playing just enough to remember how to keep score.

It used to be different in tennis, at least for the Warrior Generation. This was a group that competed with gusto. Doing so was both a top priority and a value unto itself. Borg spent his entire oddly asymmetrical career bound like a slave to the master of competition. Winning was all he did; it was how he defined himself. The same could be said for Evert. Oh, tennis players longed to be rich, and they hoped to be stars, but back then your best chance to get the bling was to win, and then win some more.

This was partly because, in the pre-Kournikova 1970s and early ’80s, the major financial opportunities were more closely tied to performance and concentrated near the top of the rankings. Connors was curiously driven in the dazzling early part of his career by an apparent conviction that
if he didn’t grab that next $25,000 payday, he may never have a chance for another one. Now that’s incentive. Granted, there’s nothing romantic or noble about this attitude (are we talking warriors or grubbers here?), but you can’t overestimate the role hunger for financial security played in shaping a guy like Connors and, to an even greater extent, Lendl and Navratilova, who grew up in dark times in the nation formerly known as Czechoslovakia.

Another trademark of the Warrior Generation was its embrace of animosity as a motivating factor. The men had a healthy disdain for one another. Tracy Austin took her cues from them, and the women she sometimes bad-mouthed, Evert and Navratilova, did a fair share of sniping at each other before the proverbial light bulb went on over their collective head. In making peace and cultivating friendship, each of them could double her fan base, as a world once divided between Chris and Martina fans suddenly became a planet of Chris vs. Martina fans.

Note to ambitious girls: Evert and Navratilova arrived at that point organically, by working through their issues while maintaining a steady, grinding excellence—not through transparent photo ops or the calculations of agents.

But while the Warrior Generation competed with gusto, the players were defined first and foremost by their love of the game. It’s so simple that it’s almost hard to understand.

Navratilova and Lendl were pioneers of cross-training, while Connors, McEnroe, and Wilander did little but play to keep themselves fit between tournaments. But all of them reveled in the act of striking a ball.

The trend these days is to play a safe, sane schedule and save your “game” for the majors, but to the Warrior Generation that would have been like an opera star fighting the urge to sing along with the car radio because her Nissan isn’t the big stage at the Met. For the Warriors, hitting a tennis ball wasn’t part of the job description; it was part of the life description.

And that, ultimately, is where the Warrior Generation has its most striking edge on successive generations. We’ll never know how they would have turned out if they had come along later, but their passion for the sport was unqualified and authentic, transcending friendship, wealth, calculation, and celebrity. Above all else, these were tennis players and, knowing that, they tended to forgive all else, including each other. In today’s endorsement-rich tennis world, the hardest virtue to cultivate may be fidelity to a simple mission: to play and win, play and win, until it’s as natural as drawing breath.

It’s a long way to the ends of the earth, but somebody’s got to go there.