Here in Shanghai he was continuing his resurgence, after numerous surgeries on both wrists. Federer may have slowed del Potro’s momentum, but it was good to see him back. He’s a problem for any top player, not merely a bad matchup for one or two. Any draw is richer with him lurking in it. Hopefully, by the time you’re reading this, resurgent isn’t a word accompanying del Potro. Hopefully, he’s simply there. If there is such a thing as simply being there.
TWILIGHT INDOORS
There are stories. And then there are stories. The twin reemergence of Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal in 2017 has been one of those story-stories, full of wait-that’s-not-alls and tell-me-what-happened-nexts. Their return to form together has been as emphatic, as unexpected, as a jolt of sun at the start of a strange year.
When the two faced off in the final of the Australian Open back in January—which Federer won in a tense five sets 6–4, 3–6, 6–1, 3–6, 6–3—there was the sense that the stars had simply happened to align for one last, fleeting time. Federer was ranked and seeded seventeenth at the time; Nadal hadn’t reached the semifinal of a major since 2014. It was supposed to be lightning caught in a bottle, something to be savored before reality set back in.
But since then Federer and Nadal have played three more times, including in two other finals. They even played on the same team—as doubles partners, no less—in a team-tennis enterprise in Prague dreamed up by Federer called the Laver Cup, after the Australian great Rod Laver. Most recently, they played in the final of the Rolex Shanghai Masters. Nadal was in imperious form coming into that final, having just won the previous tournament in Beijing and the one prior to that, some minor summer event played in Queens. When they flipped the coin at center court in Shanghai, Nadal hadn’t lost in seventeen matches. Federer won in straight sets in barely over an hour: 6–4, 6–3.
The last time they’d played before that was in the final in Miami in late March: Federer won in straight sets in barely over an hour: 6–3, 6–4. Prior to that they had played only a couple of weeks earlier, with Federer winning in straight sets … in barely over an hour: 6–2, 6–3.
In other words, the last three times they’ve played, Federer has dry-erased Nadal. And in the only close match they played, in Melbourne, Federer sped past Nadal in the final five games. The severity and consistency of these beatdowns have been aided greatly by the fact that Federer had skipped out on the clay court season entirely and watched from afar as Nadal won his tenth title in Monte Carlo, his tenth in Barcelona, his fifth in Madrid, and, in Paris, his tenth French Open. So, where exactly are we with these two? Quiet as it’s kept, we’re at the point where we can’t tell if it’s better that these two keep playing each other, or whether they should be kept as far apart from each other as possible. Nadal is ranked number one in the world. Federer is number two. Nadal at this point can’t touch Federer. Federer may never again play on clay. And, aside from a moment of divine intervention on the other side of the net, the other players on the tour can’t keep up. Another story in the story of 2017. And all this with winter coming.
Grigor Dimitrov, Nitto ATP Tour Finals, London, November 19, 2017. (Photograph by Naomi Baker / Getty Images)
Now, after ten straight months of chasing the sun and living in a floating bubble of perpetual summer, the ATP World Tour—the official name for the highest category in tennis of the men’s professional circuit—has turned the final corner and veered, at last, into autumn. Call me strange and unredeemable, but this is one of my favorite times of the tennis season. The grand narratives of the majors—who will win or not win what? how will that affect this person’s or that person’s legacy?—have come and gone. We know by now all about the miraculous returns of Roger Federer and Rafa Nadal. Not only did they split the four majors up for grabs this year, they’re certain to end the season ranked in the top two. Most of the remaining hierarchy—Djokovic, Murray, Wawrinka, Nishikori, Raonic—have been out injured. The others—Čilić, Zverev, Thiem, del Potro—have alternately flickered and faded on the biggest stages. Nothing has come close to vying with Federer and Nadal for the spotlight, and nothing that happens between now and the end of November could possibly change that.
Therefore, aside from some vague love of tennis for its own sake, what really matters now, with the U.S. Open fairly far in the year’s rearview mirror? And what about it is beautiful, now that 2017’s story has been all but written, the matches from now until the end of the year being played out in the dreary pall of one indoor arena after another?
Exactly.
This is the time of the tennis season that has fewer of the fun baubles of tennis in it—no cheery sun, no wind, no anachronistic traditions, and match after match on one unremarkable, and for the most part interchangeable, indoor backdrop after another. No more late-winter dreamscapes of the Coachella Valley, no more Mediterranean vistas behind the mezzanine in Monte Carlo, no more impossibly red strawberries on beds of frothing cream in the thimble-sized London summer. This is the tour distilled to its most unromantic elements under the advancing autumn nights and the encroaching darkness of Moscow, Antwerp, Stockholm, Basel, Vienna, and—like lovers who didn’t know better than to leave well enough alone—less-sexy second swings through Paris and London in November to close out the year.
And in the end, the end was like the beginning: the same player who won the first tournament of 2017 won the final tournament of 2017. Bulgaria’s Grigor Dimitrov, aka Baby Fed, defeated David Goffin in the London final, a futuristic affair played under electric-blue atmospheric lighting. How fitting that a player who modeled his game on Federer would bookend the year, and not Federer himself. Or Rafa. At its heart, the 2017 year in tennis is about inspiration, not supplication; renovation, not repetition. Time will tell if the year of Roger and Rafa was really under the surface the year of Grigor and David; or Sascha, Nick, and Frances. That’s a question the next cycle of seasons will answer. In tennis and in life.
Now is the time when life starts to press closely. And tennis seems more momentary, more fleeting, the pastoral sucked from it. It’s a sober denouement back to a Europe of clenched fists, toxic fear of its own shadow, and the bleating cacophony of useless, cowardly politicians. Tennis comes back to this like a returning prodigal. It, too, has had its role to play in what 2017 was and will be remembered as. Just remember: this is not the dawn of heroes, it’s the dusk.
That is, if we let it be.
So don’t let it be.
ALSO BY ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
POETRY
Heaven
The Ground
PROSE
When Blackness Rhymes with Blackness
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Rowan Ricardo Phillips is the author of Heaven (FSG, 2015), an NPR Best Book of 2015 and a Washington Post Best Poetry Collection of 2015, and The Ground (FSG, 2012). He is the recipient of a Whiting Writers’ Award, the PEN/Osterweil Award, the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, the GLCA New Writers Award for Poetry, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. He lives in New York City and Barcelona. You can sign up for email updates here.
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CONTENTS
FRONTISPIECE
TITLE PAGE
COPYRIGHT NOTICE
DEDICATION
EPIGRAPH
PREFACE
A BRIEF NOTE ON SCORING
A GLOSSARY OF TENNIS TERMS
Ready … Play
Part One: Winter
Part Two: Spring
Part Three: Summer
Part Four: Fall
ALSO BY ROWAN RICARDO PHILLIPS
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
175 Varick Street, New York 10014
Copyright © 2018 by Rowan Ricardo Phillips
All rights reserved
First edition, 2018
Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Why I Am Not a Painter” from The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara by Frank O’Hara, copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith, Administratrix of the Estate of Frank O’Hara, copyright renewed 1999 by Maureen O’Hara Granville-Smith and Donald Allen. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
E-book ISBN: 978-0-374-71867-1
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Frontispiece: Photograph (detail) by Ed Lacey / Popperfoto / Getty Images.
* David Foster Wallace’s “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” originally appeared in The New York Times’ short-lived Play magazine on August 20, 2006, and has been subsequently collected in String Theory: David Foster Wallace on Tennis (New York: Library of America, 2016).
The Circuit Page 20
