PARIS—“You come over here and you want to do well, and you don’t do that well so you have long days. I just let it, this whole trip, get to me. It’s the absolute wrong thing to do. It’s very bad on my part. I never felt like I was in a good rhythm at any point. I guess I've been over here for four weeks.”
These were the self-lacerating words of John Isner, his baseball cap turned backward and a morose look on his face, after his defeat at the hands of Paul-Henri Mathieu yesterday. There was none of the fanfare of his last marathon against a Frenchman, Nicolas Mahut, which had not only made history, but had ended in a win for the American. This was just a very long loss, after a very disappointing stretch of the season for Isner.
Disappointing, but it shouldn't have been surprising. Before he came to Europe, Isner, with his recent wins over Roger Federer and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and runner-up finish in Houston, all on clay, was touted as that tennis equivalent of a UFO: an American with a shot at going deep in Paris. As Isner said, though, things changed quickly when he showed up in Madrid at the beginning of May. He lost his opener there to Marin Cilic, looked sluggish at best in winning his one match in Rome before being upset by Andreas Seppi, and by his own admission, “didn’t do the things I was supposed to do” for the better part of six hours against Paul Henri-Mathieu. By the latter stages of that match, it appeared that Isner was just waiting for Mathieu to find the nerve to deliver the death blow. Afterward, Isner sounded as if he had hardly had a chance in a match that he lost 18-16 in the fifth.
“I just couldn’t free myself up the whole match,” Isner said. “He’s a good player, and he was better than me today. He deserved to win.”
You might think four weeks in Europe is not an exceptionally long time for a professional tennis player to be on the road. But American men have a long tradition of getting homesick, and surface-sick, and even food-sick, in the spring in Europe. When an 18-year-old John McEnroe told his older friend Vitas Gerulaitis that he was going to play the French Open for the first time in 1977, a helpful Gerulaitis let the rookie in on what he could expect. Vitas said, and I’m paraphrasing only slightly, “You’re going to go over there on clay, you’re going to play some guy whose name you can’t pronounce, and you’re going to get your ass kicked.” It has, with a few exceptions, been ever thus for young Americans in Europe.
In his first French Open runs, Andre Agassi subsisted on cheeseburgers from McDonald’s; he lost twice in the finals despite being the overwhelming favorite. Sam Querrey, after doing the full clay tour in 2010, was so fried by the time he lost here that he bailed on the doubles with Isner and flew back to California. Pete Sampras’s slog through the fall European indoor circuit in 1998, in a successful attempt to finish No. 1 for a record sixth straight year, was portrayed as something akin to the seven labors of Hercules. The worst place on earth for Andy Roddick appears to be Court Suzanne Lenglen. When Michael Chang became the first American man in the Open era to win at Roland Garros, as a 17-year-old in 1989, he did it in Tiananmen-inspired defiance against the locals, who jeered him. As Ivan Ljubicic said in his final statement on Twitter last month: Americans don’t travel well, or sometimes at all, especially when they have to travel on clay.
Last year I interviewed Mardy Fish, another American who, like Isner, struggled after becoming the country's No. 1 player, at his Paris hotel before the French Open. He was on his own latest European adventure: The GPS in the car that he and his crew had taken from Düsseldorf had been on the fritz and gotten them lost in Paris, and he was dying for a Starbucks coffee. “You can never get it right,” Fish said of the Americans' yearly attempts to master the spring Euro swing.
If you scheduled lightly, you inevitably ended up with too few matches and, as Isner said, too much time on your hands. One year, Fish and Roddick had spent more than a week in that same Left Bank hotel before the French Open doing little but hitting with each other for four hours a day. But if you went with a heavy schedule, you could get ground down, as well as lost outside of Paris two nights before the French Open started, without having had a practice session at Roland Garros.
Fish claimed that it wasn’t just the Yanks who got homesick. He said that if you went up a set on a European player in Miami, the last leg of the spring U.S. hard-court circuit, you knew that he would be thinking of home, the same way Americans think of home when they’re struggling in Paris. But there’s no question that the clay season serves as a particularly big roadblock for the Americans—it’s the place where their early season momentum goes to die. One thing that makes it tougher for Statesiders is the language barrier. Most of us never make ourselves learn any others, and thus feel especially foreign anywhere English isn’t spoken first. It may not be a coincidence that the only U.S. man to win more than one title at Roland Garros in the last 50 years, Jim Courier, also developed a worldly spirit and learned to speak French.
Maybe it’s part of the country’s exceptionalist psyche, which is well represented in athletics. Tennis is one of the few sports where Americans mix in on the same tour with the rest of the world. For the most part we play ours—U.S. football, basketball, baseball—while Europe and the world play theirs—soccer, cricket, rugby. In golf and race-car driving, there are separate U.S. and European tours. In tennis we're forced to be part of the society of nations.
Isner acknowledged his failing—“It’s the absolute worst thing to do. It’s very bad on my part.” It seemed, one short month ago, that he might be different. But in the end the Law of Vitas held true once again. Isner lost to Paul-Henri Mathieu, a guy whose name is tough for us to pronounce. For Americans, is learning to win on clay, or least learning to enjoy the grind over here, the equivalent of having to learn a foreign language? If so, we’re in trouble.