!Rena by Pete Bodo
I have a confession to make right up front. While commenting on the Australian Open these past few weeks, I've more or less avoided beating my breast about being a good soldier, rising at 3:30 a.m. each morning to dial up those video holograms of Roger and Rafa, Serena and Svetlana, P-Mac and Enberg. You could say I had an ulterior motive in this holding-back, if being too lazy to ever actually make that effort to get up at what has to be the absolutely worst start-time for a broadcast can travel under the guise of "motive."
I couldn't even roust myself to set that alarm for Blake vs. Tsonga, which has great match-up written all over it. Who's gonna hit James off the court, Tsonga or. . . Blake? Or would Blake satisfy his legion of fans by adding to his fairly meager book of Grand Slam statements?
Instead, I routinely got up at my usual 7 a.m., popped Luke's chocolate-chip waffles into the toaster oven, and fired-up Tennis.com to see just what Tom Perrotta or Abbey Lorge had to say about things. For a while early this morning, I almost regretted making the dawn patrol effort for the women's final. That hour between 3 and 4 is tinged with melancholy and ideal for getting bushwhacked by Regrets (that's no typo) and doubts, and generally tip-toeing around the edges of the hollow spots in your life and sneaking a peek over the rim. As an outdoorsman, I know that pre-dawn hour well, and thank God it's gnawing interrogatives are held in check by the merciful to-do list: you're too busy making lunch, checking your gear, and figuring out a strategy for the day to sweat your goblins.
And there's this: isn't TV something you're supposed to do before, not after, you go to sleep?
In fact, early in the women's Australian Open women's final, I thought that maybe it was a mistake to get up to experience the event,"Live" (is there a more preposterous lie than television's claim to be bringing you something. . . "live"?). That was at about the time that Serena was already up a break, and I found myself being subjected to about the fifth commercial offer of help in relieving my staggering credit-card debt, promising a magical way for me to save my home, enticing me to dip a toe into the soothing waters of. . . debt consolidation. I almost found myself wishing I'd blown my kid's college education on the purchase of an 18,000 square-foot McMansion, so the message of these extravagant good Samaritans might resonate with me, instead of transforming me into a doubting Thomas wondering how these loan sharks can possibly live with themselves.
Harsh, huh? It was the hour.
Besides, nothing I saw on the small screen seemed to demand my attention, at least not until about six games in, by when it was abundantly clear that poor Dinara Safina was in way, way over her head, no matter what anyone had been saying or thinking, and that Serena's passion for kicking buttski is so pure and refined by now that it doesn't even seem personal. Sorry, Dinara, that it had to be you, but get a load of this one: ka-boom! Then she smiles to herself, that big, elastic smile, and takes those oddly stiff, small steps back to the baseline. Oh, it's not as if the match lacked intensity, but it was packaged more as a monologue than a dialog. At one point, we had a close up of Serena shaking her head after she barely missed a winner, and the rebuke in it was so severe that I wanted to insert my two cents: Hey, take it easy there, girl. It didn't miss by that much.
I imagine that some people are going to rake Safina over the coals after her performance, but then anyone who doesn't step onto the court to face Serena with at least a vague sense that she might be better off being somewhere else is insufficiently tuned to the vibrations. You're in the Australian Open final, girl. Against Serena Williams. And in keeping with tradition, your final meal will be. . . whatever your heart desires!
Safina is a big girl, and she seemed to be making an effort to "play big" - as evidenced by that prodigiously stretched-out service motion and ball toss (I had to wonder, do the ballkids spray the ball with wing de-icer before bouncing it to her?). The scary thing is that bringing a 2XL game probably is not just the right the right thing to do but, under the circumstances, the only thing to do. Safina's going to be just fine next time, if you ask me. So long as it isn't Serena she has to play. This was more about Serena's strengths and assets than Safina's weaknesses, physical or mental. It was about Serena's 3XL game.
All of this brings us to That Which No Longer Can be Written, or the cyclical attempt to say something original or searingly insightful about Serena Williams. You know what, I got nothin' for you. But sometimes, backtracking to the basics is at least a way to write your way out of a piece, so let's really strip it down and return to a basic. Serena's greatest asset as a competitor is her courage - her ability to dial up her game when it's most appropriate to do so. It's easy to take this facility for granted, or to under-estimate the degree to which Serena has it. You can write volumes about topspin backhands, or a lethal service action. But how do you spin out a long digression on something as fundamental, and cherished, as . . . courage?
This is a woman constantly in search of an occasion to rise to, and perhaps that also explains her indifference to all the filler stuffed into the tennis calendar between Grand Slam events. But pause for a moment to savor the rarity of a courage of this magnitude. It's nothing less than the magic elixir every players wishes to taste before setting foot on a court, and nobody drinks from that cup as deeply and lustily as Serena. We've seen it time and again, and while there have been exceptions to the pattern, they're few and far between. So let's not talk about anything else - why diminish so fine and rare a thing as her courage with distractions?
It was over fast, that's about the best you can say for Serena, and we in the USA were left listening to a weird argument between Mary Carillo and Chris Fowler, when both of them should have known that the moment was Serena's, not theirs. Everybody, I guess, has his or her 3:30 a.m.