Consider me the type of fan who likes having an off-season. Who likes, for one month, not having to discover out of the corner of his eye on Tennis.com that Mathieu beat Ferrero 6-4, 6-1 in Lyon, that Azarenka withdrew from Linz, that Nestor and Zmonjic were upset in the quarters of somewhere. At some point late in the year, the drip-drip-drip of daily results—does any sport have as many results as tennis?—begins to make the tours seem like a daily job for player and spectator alike. It’s not a coincidence that the tournament I’m always most excited to watch is the Australian Open, which comes after a six-week break from the sport—anticipation is half the fun of anything, right? I know my friend Pete Bodo has been talking about lengthening the season (to 13 months? did I read that right?). That may or may not be OK for the players, but I know it wouldn’t be good for me as a fan.
Watching tennis is my job, of course, but I still enjoy it and don’t want to think of it as an occupation—I want the results to mean something to me. With that in mind, I find December a relief from the indoor season just past. This fall I often wondered how much even the biggest indoor events meant to the top players. I realized why, perhaps for the first time: These tournaments, while they include two Masters and a couple of Tier 1s, don’t lead to anything that matters. The clay events in spring and the hard-court events in summer mean something in part because we know the players are doing more than just trying to win them. They're also trying to find their best form for the tournaments that matter in the long run, the majors. Along with the excitement of the Rome and Hamburg finals, we also get the speculation, hype, anxiety, rage, fear, loathing—all healthy things for any sport—about what the results of those matches mean for Paris.
As for Indian Wells and Key Biscayne, they’re both dual-gender and played at sprawling facilities, so they feel like mini-Slams in themselves. Plus they come early in the year, which means they matter as potential predictors for the season ahead. The fall tournaments, by contrast, come after all the Slams and lead to the Masters Cup and the WTA championships—both big deals, both worth a lot of money, but do we ever get the feeling that the top players are tuning up for those tournaments? Whatever the Masters Cup or WTA Championships mean to them, this much we know: No player would trade a Slam for them; I doubt any player would trade a Slam for three of them. Replace those events with a fifth major, an end-of-year indoor Slam, and the entire fall would instantly become more meaningful.
Anyway, that’s all over now and . . . and I don’t have any tennis to watch. No, that’s not quite true. There is, on my computer and yours, a perpetual history of the sport endlessly playing out in highlights and home-movie clips. Call it the You Tube history of tennis—what it lacks in comprehensiveness and order it more than makes up for in surprise. Not just the surprise of seeing a 4-year-old Steffi Graf hitting a shot behind her back, but the surprise of actually getting to witness the classic 1977 Wimbledon semi between Bjorn Borg and Vitas Gerulaitis, with the original announcers, as it was broadcast. After reading about it all these years, to see it in front of you is a new and obviously much more immediate experience.
So for the next couple weeks of the off-season, I’m going to watch a tennis clip on You Tube each (working) day and talk about it here. I’ll start this week and some of next week with a retrospective of perhaps the most popular tennis player on You Tube, Bjorn Borg, beginning with his 1973 debut at Wimbledon as a 17-year-old. Click on the clip—put up by “leelinus” in January—at the top of this post to see the closing moments of his quarterfinal loss to Britain’s Roger Taylor.
So what did you think? Pretty cool, huh? My first thought was: Many elements of Wimbledon have changed, but in the bigger picture, it hasn’t changed at all. The tournament has a genius for that balancing act. White balls, yellow balls; drab ball-kid outfits, spiffy ball-kid outfits; incompetent, borderline-senile officials, well-trained officials—it doesn’t matter, Centre Court remains Centre Court. It’s still a bright mix of green and gold, the sun still wafts in and out of the clouds the same way, and the crowds still pack themselves as tightly as they can.
Here are some other thoughts that struck me over the course of these 5 minutes:
—Taylor, a product of the amateur era, looks distinctly regular-guyish compared to the sleek Borg, whose shirt fits him much better. You can see the professional era, of which Borg was one of the first pure products, encroaching on the amateur era in this match. The pro game is creating a higher level of athleticism and innovation—Borg was early to the two-hander, the Western grip, and the baseline game in general. Taylor, old school all the way, does none of these things. Though also notice that Borg serves and volleys here (and dumps a volley into the net to be broken), something he would continue to do to a surprising degree at Wimbledon.
—What racquet is Borg using? Is his shirt Slazenger or something else?
—Taylor’s lefty serve is a wonderful thing to watch, particularly when he hits the heavy one wide in the ad court. There’s very little of his skinny legs in his motion; he seems to get his power and spin with the big corkscrew motion of his upper body.
—Borg as a 17-year-old was, not surprisingly, more erratic and human. He dumps a limp backhand pass into the bottom of the net, then follows it up with a spectacular full-run, full-swing crosscourt forehand pass winner. He didn’t have those point-to-point ups and downs as he got older.
—Borg as a 17-year-old had also yet to develop his famous mask of impassivity. When Taylor mishits an overheand for a winner, Borg looks, as commentator Dan Maskell says, “shattered.” He feels sorry for himself for a split-second, and he shows some real anger at the aged linesman who makes a bad call at match point. On his final swing, he seems almost distracted by the turn of events as he sends a lame return floating well wide. Later Borg would become the paragon of stoic self-sufficiency on court.
—This was Borg in his “Teen Angel” phase, the matinee idol of the moment. He already looks hardened to it. A girl runs onto the court to get his autograph and some others follow him off the court. He pretends they aren’t there.
—In recovering this day from Borg’s career, we also get a long look at Roger Taylor, someone I had never seen play. Thirty-five years later, he almost steals the moment. Watch his reaction develop as he realizes that his serve on match point is out, and that he’ll have to give the point back. He grimaces, drops his head, then does his duty. We’ve read about how tennis during the amateur era was a gentleman’s game. To me, the highlight of this highlight is seeing that gentlemanly spirit in action.
Let me know what you thought; tomorrow I’ll catch up with Borg a couple years later.