By Andrew Friedman, TW Contributing Writer
Did you know that Juan Carlos Ferrero owns a hotel? It represents the kind of commitment that most professional athletes are reluctant to take on until they retire. But a few years ago, Ferrero's coach told him, "Tennis is short." And Ferrero paid heed to the warning.
The Spaniard, a former no. 1, Roland Garros champion, and the no. 24 seed here at the US Open, thought about his future, and decided to invest heavily in what became Hotel Ferrero , a 12-room boutique hotel in the mountains of Sierra Mariola, outside Ferrero's hometown of Valencia. It's but one of the projects that the 29-year old former finalist here plans to spend time on when he moves on.
But is tennis really, necessarily short?.
Fabrice Santoro, whom Ferrero defeated in straight sets Wednesday afternoon, has had an uncommonly long professional adventure, but this was, he promised, his last slam singles match after 21 years as a Tour-level player. In his press conference, Santoro was asked to pick the word that personified his career and he replied, “Passion. I love my sport. I did it in this life for so many years. I was so happy to be on the court. You can’t do it if you’re not completely in love with your sport. Can you do it for 2, 5, 8 years? Maybe. But not 21.”
Those of us who enjoy Santoro’s game are eternally grateful for that passion. I spent two hours watching his match Wednesday, and allthough he lost, he didn’t disappoint, producing his usual assortment of slices, spins, miracle retrievals, and improvisations. Right to the end, he was having fun out there, and it occurred to me that one reason Santoro has lasted so long is that stress can shorten your tennis life just as it can abbreviate your mortality. Have you ever seen Santoro look pained or miserable on court? I haven’t. Tennis really does seem like a game to him.
This was spectacularly evident from beginning of Santoro's clash with Ferrero on Wednesday. During his ring their warm up, with Ferrero at the net practicing volleys, Santoro launched a ball at him by hitting it behind his back. Ferrero tried to look manfully annoyed at the trick shot, but after a second he couldn’t help but crack up. Two hours later, after match point, Santoro—the son of a soccer player—dropped a ball to the ground and played with it with his feet, keeping it in the air like a veteran hacky-sack player as he walked to the net to shake hands.
At certain key moments during the contest, I wondered if, given the circumstances, he would well up with emotion. What was going on in Santoro’s head, in what was shaping up as his very last Grand Slam singles match? I couldn’t find signs of anything especially significant. It was his time to go - and he seemed utterly at peace with it.
At peace, but also a bit at sea. Passion can blind you, and Santoro's abundance of it has left him unsure of what he’s going to do next. He’s eager for a “normal” life, but doesn’t know what that means. Listening to him grasp for what was ahead for him, I was reminded of a movie-cliché, the ex-con who’s released from prison only to find that he’s ill-equipped to function in the outside world. (Most heartbreaking rendition, for my money, was James Whitmore in The Shawshank Redemption.)
“I pick up a racquet when I was six, almost seven,” he said. “Thirty years later, I’m going to quit. During thirty years, every morning I was having my bag, put the shoes in the bag; your racquet; your strings; you go to practice; you’re going to play some tournaments; you travel; you win matches; you lose some. You go to the hotel and you travel again, and that was my life for thirty years.
“Now I’m going to change and I want to be home. I want to spend more time with my daughter. I want to live like normal life. But that’s the question: What is a normal life?”
!90307752 The ruminations of Santoro and Ferrero on life during and after tennis, left me feeling unexpectedly sympathetic for Marat Safin, who was sent out of his last slam by Jurgen Melzer on Louis Armstrong stadium this afternoon. While watching Ferrero and Santoro on Court 11, I heard a snippet of the ESPN coverage in the little radio headset American Express offers on the grounds of the tournament. Brad Gilbert summarized the opinion that just about every tennis pundit has been repeating for the past several years: when Safin came along everyone thought he’d be a major force, can’t believe he only has two slam titles, shocking in retrospect, etc., etc.
“He just didn’t have the passion,” said Gilbert. It struck me that, unlike many tennis writers (myself included), he made the comment dispassionately, and that none of his fellow commentators engaged in any Marat bashing. Former players all, they clearly understood something about the game that many of us who think about it all the time do not: if the passion ain’t there, you just can’t manufacture it. Simple as that.
“My head is already in afterwards tennis rather than here,” Safin said in his presser. When a reporter asked him if he was bored, he replied, “What it has to do with being boring? Boring is not the right word. I think it’s just enough.”
It’s tough for those of us who love tennis to fathom that anybody sufficiently gifted and fortunate to play the sport for a living could simply wake up one day and realize that the love was gone. But that was the impression I was left with today. For some, the candle can burn for more than two decades; for others, it flickers out after one - or less. There’s no point examining it. It’s just the way it is.
Santoro and Safin both gave us plenty to appreciate. One might have given it for longer. But each, at the end of the day, gave us all he had to give. Let’s not question why. Let’s just accept it, thank them, and wish them both the best as they navigate the joys and wonders of the normal life the rest of us know so well.