That’s “thoughts” in Italian, not pennies. While custom has it that they're of equal value, thoughts are still, more than our offices or our cities or our houses, where we have to live.
They're also where we watch a tennis tournament. Whether we're at an event or seeing it on TV, we experience it mostly as the focal point for a chain of our own loosely related thoughts. If I’m at a tournament in a foreign city, especially one where I don’t speak the language, these thoughts tend to stretch into a wide mental canvas. I don’t view the event; I walk around inside it. When I watch a tournament on TV or on my computer at work, the way I have this week, it comes to me as a signal surrounded by all the other noise of my normal life. It gets dropped into the mix.
Before it blows away into distant memory, the way all tournaments do no matter how gripping or luminous they seem at the moment, let me try to reconstruct some of my 2010 Rome experience, in 10 pensieri.
Wait . . . Verdasco?
It began to germinate in the back of my head on Sunday in the Barcelona final, and as hard as I tried to kill it off, it continued to grow through the week: Is Fernando Verdasco turning into—am I allowed to say this?—a winner? I mean, like a guy who knows how to win. He got better last year, but only now does he seem to have learned to manufacture victories when he’s not at his best, or when he could easily pack it in after having played virtually every day for three weeks. In the third set against Soderling in Barcelona, he didn't take any of the many opportunities that the Sod gave him to gag away his single-break lead. A couple of times in Rome, I’ve thought that he looked ready to call it a tournament, but he didn't. Let’s hope Verdasco doesn’t take another humiliating beating at the hands of Nadal in the final, and wonder why he bothered getting there in the first place.
Roy Emerson, Meet Your Great Grandfather Ralph Waldo
What would the Emmos have had to say to each other? For some reason, Ralph Waldo (love that name, right?) in my mind as I watch Gulbis-Volandri. He’s gotten there, I think, because the trees outside my window remind me of the description of the area in New England where he lived, which I read in an English-class textbook in 10th grade. How the hell does that happen? But I can't recall the quote of his that had been a favorite of my 16-year-old self. That year, I had been exhilarated to discover through reading books that life was dark and difficult and lonely—really, I can still remember how exciting that revelation had been. Emerson's quote had something to do with slime, I think . . . (I didn’t get any further, so I looked it up later: “Each man sees over his own experience a certain slime of error, whilst that of other men looks fair and ideal.” Wow, that is exhilarating to me now, but I'm a little worried for my 16-year-old self that he liked it so much back then. Maybe I just liked saying "slime.")
Not All Clay is Created Equal
I’d never noticed it before this week, but the players don't slide as much on Roman clay as they do in Monte Carlo and Paris. This looks harder dirt, drier, thinner, quicker, more packed down. But still slippery.
Honorary American
I’ve tried to put my finger on what separates Ernests Gulbis, as a personality, from other Eastern Europeans for me. He’s Latvian, I know, but now I think I realize the difference: He acts and talks and walks, in my mind, like an American—an American college kid. He’s loose, he’s rich, he’s sarcastic, he’s trying to grow up and do things the right way, but it’s not easy pounding the laziness out of him. He admits that the demands of the sport can be a drag. Sidenote: I like his coach, Hernan Gumy’s, demeanor in the box. I don’t know how he stayed so calm during the Federer and Volandri matches.
Message from the Moon
The Euro clay Masters tournaments give you that rare chance to get up and immediately flick on a tennis match with your coffee, instead of hearing about a murder in the Bronx. One day this week, while I was making the coffee, I caught a glimpse of the moon out my back window. At night it appears to be paper thin, and it glows. In the day, though, it loses its glow and reveals itself to be a big white stone in the air. On that morning, it looked like it had been caught without its makeup. What is the moon’s message? Would it be different if there were two of them? There aren’t, there’s just one: The moon, like a tennis player, like anyone else, has to go it alone, too.
When in Rome
When in Rome, if you’re a couple in the stands at a tennis match, you wrap your arms and legs around each other, you sit in each other’s laps, you slouch in your dark clothes, you look, on the whole, somewhat better than the fans at a Philadelphia Eagles game. Does any sport, from its players to its fans to its playing surfaces to the motions its athletes’ make, look better than tennis? Can there be more color on display at a sporting event than there is at a European clay Masters? Even Djokovic’s Tacchini shirt, with its biker tattoo logo, looked good in its stinging yellow version this morning. Over the course of a week, with HD flat screens and live streams at work, the blazing color from Rome seeps into my life, and enrich its, even from thousands of miles away.
Flawed Gods
Two weeks ago I wrote that the center court in Monte Carlo put me in mind of a Greek theater by the sea. Or maybe it was just Novak Djokovic, and not the court, because I thought the same thing watching him on Friday against Verdasco. In one sense, now that the Greek gods are all gone, the pros, when they walk on the court by themselves, get to take their places. They walk in front of us, but they also walk above us; we single out tennis players, literally. But we also watch, and wait, to see these Gods reveal their flaws to us. One of them always does. Today, as I saw Djokovic’s brow beading sweat in the first game—it wasn’t exercise sweat; it was ill sweat—I wondered if he might have some kind of Sampras-like blood condition. It happens to him too regularly to just be nerves, doesn’t it? Later, though, I felt like his fatal flaw is that he is a conflicted competitor. Djokovic can get stronger and surer as a point goes on, or a game goes on, but just when you think he’s all there, he serves up a hasty, panicky drop shot just to get the point over and relieve the tension. Is there something Nastase-like about his jangly nerves? Verdasco looked like a rock of calmness by comparison.
Good Band Name Alert
While watching Nadal and Wawrinka in the corner of my computer screen at work, I received an email ding. Despite oceans of spam over the years, I still like the sound of the ding—it beats the dead thump you get hit with when you have no mail. That sound hurts just a tiny bit, doesn't it?
What’s worse is when I see that there are four new messages, and all of them turn out to be spam. On Friday, however, I received one that's remembering: “Come to Northern California’s Tarantula Festival next month!” Tarantula festival? Do other people get invited to these things?
She Was Good at What?
On the shelf below the flat-screen in the living room is a big book of poems by Sylvia Plath. My eye flicks down to it every time I watch anything. It has a nice cover, and I remember from high school that the poems are very good. I remember that they were pretty scary, too—“blood-soaked” is how another writer described them. I like that the book is there, a deadly vision of life wrapped up in a somber and stylish package, reminding me that there's depth below every surface, even below the TV screen. But I just can’t open it and dive in. What happens instead is that I read her name on the spine and begin to sing a song, called “Sylvia Plath,” by Peter Laughner. It begins with this comically somber opening line: “Sylvia Plath/Was never too good at math.” Everyone thinks I'm making it up, but you can hear Laughner sing it here.
Finding the Next Next Level
Rafael Nadal looked good in Monte Carlo last week, calm and confident. Today against Stan Wawrinka, who came out firing from the start, he appeared to ascend another step closer to his 2008 form. It’s one thing to go for your shots, and make your shots, when you’re trailing. It’s another to go for bigger shots, and still make them, when you’re down break point. That’s how Nadal overcame and eventually ground down Wawrinka. That’s what he did when he was at his best. That’s what No. 1 players have to do, and which Nadal hasn't done for months. You know Rafa has it going when Uncle Toni, world-famous hard-a$$, is out of his seat and nodding.
We’ll see if he's out of his seat again this weekend. Enjoy it; enjoy Stuttgart. See you Monday.