Mornin', folks. During a brief break in the rain, I finally went out to Centre Court for the first time since the roof was ripped off. Unfortunately, the sun was so bright - yes, believe it - that I could barely see anything. This right off the bat was a shocker: I never realized the extent to which the roof line served as a border between sky and stadium, much like a black outline serves to add definition to a child's simple, coloring-book picture.
The old, dark roof, while neither very long nor significantly pitched served to throw the entire upper half of the small stadium into shadow, increasing that sense of separation and heightening the contrast that made Centre Court seem so dramatic. The roof was the donut through which the sun, when you had it, shined like a spotlight. I'd like to have a painter's opinion (not a house painter, either; I mean one one of those intense bourgeoisie rebel dudes from Brooklyn) about all this, but it seems that contrast increases intensity and focus - are you listening, David Nalbandian, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Marat Safin?
Anyway, Jon Wertheim and I dropped in on the battle between Amelie Mauresmo and Nicole Vaidisova. A little later, Charlie Bricker joined us. Mauresmo was way ahead in the first-set tiebreaker (6-3), I believe, but Vaidisova clubbed her way back into it. At times, Vaidisova can look awfully good, and now she's added to her repertoire a new grunt. In a world full of shriekers who sound an awful lot like banshees, she does a two-part grunt - ah- oooouy! - that sounds like an actual word.
The capacity of the Centre Court is 13,791; but with the roof gone it seems a lot smaller - too small, it seemed to me, and perhaps to you watching on television as well. From what I see on my press-room monitor, one aspect of the hatless venue is that you now see an awful lot of sky - not necessarily a bad thing, although it does tend to diminish the significance of two or four figures scampering around on the greensward, like a couple of nurses looking for a hemostat. I like nature, so I wouldn't ordinarily mind this kind of set-up. But when you're actually in the stadium, the upper edge, although reasonably finished off, is uneven, irritating and troublesome. You'd think somebody had blown off the entire upper half of the stadium, an image that sits uneasy at the moment in London.
However, all that sky, filled with scudding layers of clouds ranging from dazzling white in the upper atmosphere to pewter below is impressive in a distinctly British way. Altogether, it's like a painting by Turner - until the ceiling closes down and the skies turn simply gray - as they soon did.
Vaidisova fought off a few set points and won the tiebreaker. Although Mauresmo battled back to take the second set, Vaidisova closed her out decisively. Mauresmo is a truly puzzling player, and the way she surrendered her title today made me think that, contrary to my feelings of a year ago, she hasn't really changed much at all. She plays a tournament like a hurdler who's earned the right to run in the Olympic Games and wakes up on the morning of the semifinal heat to discover that they raised the obstacles by a good 12 inches. She makes easy shots look difficult and challenging ones appear a piece of cake; but there isn't a shot she can't flub when making it really counts.
More and more, I think you can divide the players into two distinct categories: the performers and the competitors. The performers are far less predictable, and they have a perverse appeal because you can't trust them as far as you can throw them. They are human tennis roller coasters, inviting you to hop aboard. If you like drama - in someone else's life, if not your own - you can't go wrong with the performers. They probably care about winning as much as the competitors do, but not to the point where they're actually willing to do anything about it. Winning, actually winning, just isn't that important to them, bad as they may feeling about losing.
The competitors, by contrast, care only about winning, and I'm surprised more people have not remarked that one reason they tend to be less "creative" or "inventive" than the performers is because they are driven by a higher purpose than making a pretty or impressive shot. I don't mean that in the micro-cosmic sense, either. Rafael Nadal and Maria Sharapova play the way they do because their strokes and strategies were shaped and honed on the competitor's lathe. Then you have Roger Federer, Justine Henin and Serena Williams, who are who are performers trapped in competitor's minds and bodies - much to their good fortune.
Reviewing the Comments in the Serena's Movable Feast entry this morning, I was struck by a few things in the debate over gamesmanship and sportsmanship in general. I had no doubt then or now about the legitimacy of Serena's injury, and to some degree everything that transpired afterwards was driven by that occurrence. I realized late last night that I neglected to write how the bathroom brouhaha actually ended, with Serena forgetting her need of the moment. That, to me, was a comment on her determination and focus, rather than the smoking gun demonstrating that her desire to relieve herself was some kind of sneaky attempt at gamesmanship.
I like to think I have a healthy respect for sportsmanship and impeccable behavior, but one of the compelling things about tennis is that it can be - and at the best of times, often is - a war out there. And anybody who thinks war isn't full of surprises, shocks, inexplicable actions and, in general, chaos, doesn't know much about war.
Everyone, I think, would like to win pretty, with surgical precision. Tennis is a war game, made palatable to us through the enforced (and basically perverse) set of rules we establish. We want it both ways. We want a war, but we want it to be fought in a modulated, socially acceptable, convention-bound format - like tennis. And usually that's what happens, and we can walk away from a Nadal-Federer or Williams-Henin match feeling like we just watched something we can feel good about, although why exactly we want to watch two players have at it each other until one clearly subjugates the other is something we don't often ask ourselves.
The saving grace of a match like the Williams-Hantuchova affair yesterday is that it ripped away that cozy veneer of acceptability, yet not in distasteful or ugly way. And just as we do not know quite how to react when it really is war, as opposed to clean, tidy, pretend war, we are discomfited by the visceral realities of the battlefield. It's important to understand that when it comes to real war, even on a tennis court, the victor is going to be the party who knows that there is no place in the midst of all this chaos for hesitation, indecision, or passivity. You throw your heart and soul into it; you fight until you're killed off and there isn't a danged thing that matters. Nobody, but nobody, goes into a tennis match hoping it becomes a war; wars are bad for everyone involved. But once you're in one, you had better act like a warrior or you're going to wind up just a casualty. Hence expressions like, Whatever it takes. . .Stuff happens. . .lead, follow, or get out of the way.
I like tennis for the same reason I like boxing. It's a showdown. Sometimes a well-orchestrated fight becomes an all-out brawl, and when that happens my sympathies are with the combatant who throws him or herself into the fire instead of shrinking from it. And that's where the line between the competitor and performer sometimes becomes most conspicuous. I prefer the competitors to the performers. I had no second thoughts about Serena yesterday (although I've had plenty of them in the past), and no interest in dissecting her toilet habits.
But then, I put a higher premium on courage than almost any other quality, even though sometimes courage isn't pretty. To me, though, it's always prettier than the alternatives.