In the late 1980s, as a high school writer-wannabe from Central Pennsylvania, I made a dead-of-winter pilgrimage to the East Village apartment building of my favorite rock critic, Robert Christgau of the Village Voice. I stood for a few minutes in the freezing cold, with my hands buried in my coat pockets, and looked up at what may or may not have been his window. Then I got back on the subway.
If I had been in high school during the last four years, I may have made that same pilgrimage to wherever *Grantland* had its offices. Along those same lines, if I had graduated from college in 2012 instead of 20 years earlier, Grantland, rather than Sports Illustrated or Rolling Stone, probably would have been the place where I most wanted to work. As a writer over these last few years, it has been heartening to know that an outlet still existed where more, rather than less, was encouraged—more thought, more flair, more creativity, more intellectual roaming, more room to experiment and make mistakes. Even if you didn't write for Grantland, you knew it was there.
At the same time, I can't say that the site was part of my regular reading rotation. That’s not because I disliked its approach or its mission or the articles that I did see. In fact, the ballistic-nerd writing style that it seemed to cultivate was one that I’ve also aspired to in the past. As a reader, though, the Grantland brand probably came too late for me to develop a loyalty to it. At this point, I get most of my general sports “writing” from another ESPN product, Pardon the Interruption, a show starring two long-in-the-tooth newspaper columnists from an earlier era.
I also never developed a loyalty to the fan-centric musings and rantings of Grantland's founder, Bill Simmons, but I appreciated the scope he brought to his website. (His 30 for 30 documentary series also happens to be the best thing ESPN has ever created.) One of my favorite articles of 2014, on any subject, was the movie writer Mark Harris’s explication and defense of Selma. And, of course, there was Grantland’s tennis writing.
For those of us who love and are involved in the game, it’s a bonus to have any mention of it at all from a national publication in the States. As I’ve written before, the rest of ESPN, despite its many hours of tennis coverage, seems to go out of its way to try to hide tennis. Grantland, again, brought more to the game. Essays by Louisa Thomas and Brian Phillips, in particular, humanized its players in a new way, deepened the sport’s significance, and, I believe, broadened its appeal to a younger audience. The freedom that Grantland allowed paid off: Unlike classic newspaper columnists, where burn-down-the-house, no-second-thoughts-allowed opinion is the law of the land, Grantland’s tennis writers were free not to judge the athletes they wrote about. They were free not to rip them for their supposed shortcomings. They were, instead, free to relate to them.
“Freedom” happened to be the word at the heart of Phillip’s essay on Serena Williams as she came to the U.S. Open this summer to try to complete a calendar-year Grand Slam. The piece starts, perhaps, a little too audaciously. “There is so much to say, an infinite amount,” Phillips begins, before going on to compare Serena’s quest to The Iliad. But a few paragraphs later, he zeroes in on something that I had been thinking about Serena for a long time:
“But I am thinking of freedom," Phillips wrote. "Of course no one on earth is ever perfectly free, and there are as many ways to be unfree as there are people: your debt, your depression, your unreturned love, your job, your worry, your longing. One of the ways to be unfree, I think, is to be obliged to mean something. Freedom is the freedom to be meaningless....
“Serena’s burden of meaning places her a long way away from this kind of discretion. Her importance is too great. She faces expectations that I can barely imagine, and she lives up to them. One of the things I love about her, though, is that she still insists on her freedom to be meaningless, pointedly, in public, Serena refuses to be flattened into significance. She doesn’t shirk her cultural role but she also protects—and doesn’t hide—her own inner galaxy of humor, anger, sexiness, goofiness, sadness.”
Similar thoughts about Serena had been scattered around my own mind for years; Phillips's piece articulated them for me.
Serena's fearlessness about expanding her horizons, and her ability to live up to the expectations of others while still being her goofy self, had always impressed me, and made me smile. She has learned French and lived in Paris. She's sold clothes on QVC. She’s talked about being addicted to the Mexican food at a stand near the Staples Center. She loves Green Day and has tried her hand at guitar. She loves Oslo in winter. She shows us everything on court—as one photographer says, “No one gives it up like Serena”—but doesn’t smooth out her rough edges just so people will love her more.
As Phillips says, “In a world where many NFL rookies are playing characters in the media, Serena is only playing herself.”
Now I’m thinking about freedom, too. The freedom to write about sports—or anything else—with this kind of nuance and empathy, and make a modicum of a living while you're at it. I hope all of Grantland’s writers, as well as all the high school writer-wannabes they surely inspired, find other places where they can do that.
And as for Grantland’s readers, I hope they remember how much tennis, and its players, can mean.