!91186219 Howdy, everyone. With a little help from the gods, Saturday turned out to be a beautiful day here in game-rich Andes, after a week-long forecast of rain. The fall foliage is at it's colorful best, and generally peaks in this neck of the woods on Columbus Day weekend - which is next week.
I'll miss it this year, because Lisa, Luke and I are going to Boston for one of the "Geezerpalooza" weekends that Lisa's college friends organize, whenever seems like a logical or good time for the lot of them to get together. It's a nice tradition, and a great weekend, especially now that so many of her friends also have kids. But in all honesty, the entire concept is a little foreign to me. Unlike my wife, I'm not in regular contact with anybody with whom I went to school - high school or college. Which makes me wonder which way y'all swing on that subject.
For me, it's not a policy, just the way things worked out. And it's not because I live too much in the here and now; I have some good friend whom I've known for ages, but none of them date back to my school years. I seem to be more of the type who forms new relationships as he goes along. Friend relationships are funny; I think there's an inner dynamic that makes them last, or not, and it's got nothing to do with the depth or authenticity of the relationship. Some other, largely automatic factor(s) determine the arc of any given friendship. Maybe the lack of a core group of friends makes it easier to expand your base of friends. This weblog has certainly broadened my pool people I happily call my friends.
Well, maybe that's a good basis for a Sunday Brunch conversation, maybe not. In either event, there's also some tennis to talk about, what with Gilles Simon in the final at Bangkok and Ana Ivanovic pulling the emergency brake of her career in Beijing, citing an upper-chest respiratory infection. Does anyone else reading the bare-bones AP report get the feeling that there's a little spinning in progress here? What seem like a simple story of a withdrawal due to illness really becomes the story of Ivanovic acknowledging that her year has been dog doo-doo. In a way, it's a fitting end to a year she'd rather forget, and citing a shoulder injury that inhibited her post-Wimbledon performance is another item that suggests that she wants to control the damage.
I don't doubt the authenticity of her complaints, but it seems pretty clear that Ivanovic has seen the light, and the word it illuminates is "regroup." Ivanovic won the French Open in 2008, but she's lived in a vale of tears most of the time since then. It's certainly a cruel but not by any means unusual fate; just when a player reaches the top of the mountain, a number of unanticipated factors, ranging from injury to the unexpected pressures that come with the top position kick in. I don't know how you prepare for that, but it seems to underscore the counter-intuitive theory that you must be very careful not to be too goal-oriented.
Everybody wants to play great, that's a given. But some players seem to focus on achievement to such a high degree that realizing their ambitions leaves them on the edge of the motivational precipice. Or maybe it's the consistency precipice.
If your life's dream is to win Wimbledon, the toughest fate that may befall you is. . . winning Wimbledon. I'm not saying that this is the case for Ivanovic, but there's also no doubt that her fall from the top has been swift and hard enough to make you wonder about her bedrock psychology. If she played great and lost matches, that's one thing. But long before she began to complain of injury, it was fairly obvious that she had a difficult time handling the pressure once she won a major and reached no. 1.
That loss of nerve - for that's exactly what it appears to have been, has been the dominant theme in her struggles, and refusing or failing to face up to the basic problem is a long-term negative. I'd feel better about her future if she had come out somewhere (any help, anyone?) and admitted that the pressures of being the top player simply overwhelmed and crippled her. Trying to rationalize her troubles, or position them as injury-related, only makes it less likely that she'll overcome them. So, while I don't doubt that she's hurt, or that she really wants to regain her former status, I think the road back to the top will have to begin with a look in the mirror. That she has said nothing about failing to adjust to the new, increased demands and expectation she faced as a Grand Slam champion isn't a good sign, for the most overlooked aspect of the champion's mentality is honesty.
And yes, I know it's easy for me to say that. But that doesn't mean it isn't true.
-- Pete