Sharing the Weight

NEW YORK—Mardy Fish understood when he came to Flushing Meadows this year that his last tournament wouldn’t have a storybook finish.

“This isn’t a sports movie, of course,” he wrote this week in "The Weight," a first-person article for The Players’ Tribune about the anxiety disorder that essentially ended his career in 2012. “And there won’t be a sports movie ending. I won’t be riding off into the sunset, lifting a trophy...But that’s fine by me.”

Fish was right; there was no feel-good ending, or even feel-OK ending, for him. By the fifth set of his second-round match against Feliciano Lopez on Wednesday, he was staggering across Louis Armstrong Stadium, the victim of a debilitating set of cramps. He requested a trainer, but by the time one made it across the grounds, it was 20 minutes later and the match was over.

Worse, Fish had played well, well enough that Lopez told him “you deserved to win” when they shook hands. He had reminded many of us of what a pleasure it had been to watch his flowing, attacking game when he was comfortable and in a groove, the easy and elegant way he leaned in and timed a two-handed backhand approach. But when he served for the match at 5-4 in the fourth set, Fish froze and was broken at love. The crowd that had chanted “Let’s go, Mar-dy!” for two hours could only watch in apprehensive silence over the last four, painful games. Even by Fish’s realistic expectations, this couldn’t have been the way he pictured walking off after his last match.

If it wasn’t the ideal ending for him, though, the manner in which he lost to Lopez wasn’t an inappropriate one, either.

Fish will be remembered as a natural athlete and talent, an American No. 1 and Top 10 player, and someone who can retire without regrets. He reached his potential belatedly, but he reached it. By making this last-hurrah tour of the U.S. summer season, though, and choosing to speak publicly about his anxiety, he has made himself into something more.

Now Fish will be remembered as someone who showed us just how hard tennis can be—physically, psychologically, in ways that we can see, and ways we can't. It was true for him right down to the final set of his career. By showing us his frailties, he’s made it a little easier for other athletes and non-athletes to admit that they have them, too.

After the match, Fish was asked what part of his life, as opposed to his tennis, he wanted fans to remember.

“Just that I was helpful to other people,” he said, “that I was open and honest about a topic that is not supposed to be masculine.”

"We’re trained as tennis players from a very young age not to show weakness,” he continued. "I was very good at that throughout my career. I wouldn’t complain very much if I didn’t feel well."

“I’m here to show weakness," Fish wrote in the Player Tribune. While I knew his story long before I read the article, I was still a little taken aback by seeing those words. The idea of showing vulnerability really does go against the grain of what we think of as normal male behavior, and, as Fish said, what we think of as normal behavior for tennis players. While the sport has a reputation for being effete, it also has a macho, deeply individualistic side to it. This is the game where having a coach on court with you is seen as a weakness, after all. In tennis, everything is kept to yourself.

The classic, old-school description of what it feels like to play the sport was written by Gordon Forbes in his classic amateur-era memoir A Handful of Summers. Anyone who has ever tried the game can attest to the truth of his words.

When he won, Forbes said he felt, “Loneliness, plus Courage, Patience, Optimism, Concentration, a Calm Stomach, and a Quiet, Deep Fury."

When he lost, he said he felt, “Loneliness, plus Fear, a Hollow Stomach, Impatience, Pessimism, Petulance, and a Bitter Fury at Yourself.”

The one common denominator is impossible to miss: Loneliness. Traditionally, sports fans and commentators like to focus only on the emotions that come with winning. We want to see, and learn from, people who show courage. Fish made it OK to talk about the other side of that equation; he’s helped us learn from someone who showed fear.

Is this something Fish’s fellow pros can also learn from and use? I thought I detected a little of his influence in Donald Young's words after his comeback win over Gilles Simon on Tuesday.

“Mental has been a struggle for me,” Young admitted. Then he smiled and talked about how he was working hard to get better on that front. It was a confession you don’t often hear from a player. At the same time, Young sounded more upbeat than normal about his ability to improve.

Today, Fish finished his final press conference with this statement.

“I’m sort of out there with that part of my life because it helps me a lot when I talk about it,” he said. “Makes me feel better when I talk about it. I want to help people that have gone through it and try to be a role model for people that are deep into some bad times, that they can get out of it, because I was there. They can conquer it.”

The assembled press in the room sent him off with a round of applause. I walked away thinking that this was not what I would have predicted for Fish when he first blew by me, laughing loudly, at a Davis Cup tie a dozen years ago. In those days, he was the long-haired class clown of his generation, the one who was quickest with a joke or a prank, the one who snuck into a press conference of Andy Roddick’s and dumped a bottle of liquid—I forget exactly what it was—all over his head while he wasn’t looking.

But over the years Fish had changed, and when I interviewed him at his hotel in Paris in 2012, he was much more thoughtful, serious, even guarded and halting. On the outside, his life and career were flourishing, but on the inside the anxiety attacks may have begun. Later that summer, he would back out of possibly the biggest match of his career, against Roger Federer in the round of 16 at the Open. It was the match he had worked his life to play, but he couldn't bring himself to play it.

This isn't how Fish wanted it to end, but from the perspective of a sportswriter and fan, the story of what happened to him and how he grew means more than most happier tales of triumph. He was someone who grew first as a player, with his late-career success, and then as a person, with his admission that this success had, in the end, been too much for him to handle. In that admission, Fish has expanded what an athlete can help tell us about ourselves.

Fish was right, he didn't have a storybook ending. He had something better this summer. He had a real one.