A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again
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Michael Joyce is listed in the ATP Player Guide as 5′ 11″ and 165 pounds, but in person he’s more like 5′9″. On the Stadium Court he looks compact and stocky. The quickest way to describe him would be to say that he looks like a young and slightly buff David Caruso. He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee of somebody who isn’t quite able yet to grow real facial hair. When he plays in the heat he wears a hat. 19 He wears Fila clothes and uses Yonex racquets and is paid to do so. His face is childishly full, and while it isn’t freckled it somehow seems like it ought to be freckled. A lot of professional tennis players look like lifeguards—that kind of extreme tan that looks like it’s penetrated to the subdermal layer and will be retained to the grave—but Joyce’s fair skin doesn’t tan or even burn, though he does get red in the face when he plays, from effort. 20 His on-court expression is grim without being unpleasant; it communicates the sense that Joyce’s attentions on-court have become very narrow and focused and intense—it’s the same pleasantly grim expression you see on, say, working surgeons and jewelers. On the Stadium Court, Joyce seems boyish and extremely adult at the same time. And in contrast to the Canadian opponent, who has the varnished good looks and Pepsodent smile of the stereotypical tennis player, Joyce looks terribly real out there playing: he sweats through his shirt, 21 gets flushed, whoops for breath after a long point. He wears little elastic braces on both ankles, but it turns out they’re mostly prophylactic.
It’s 1:30 P.M. Joyce has broken Brakus’s serve once and is up 3–1 in the first set and is receiving. Brakus is in the multibrand clothes of somebody without an endorsement contract. He’s well over six feet tall, and like many large male collegians his game is built around his serve. 22 At 0–15, his first serve is flat and 118 mph and way out to Joyce’s backhand, which is a two-hander and hard to lunge effectively with, but Joyce lunges plenty effectively and sends the ball back down the line to the Canadian’s forehand, deep in the court and with such flat pace that Brakus has to stutter-step a little and backpedal to get set up—clearly he’s used to playing guys for whom 118 mumps out wide would be an outright ace or at least produce such a weak return that he could move up easily and put the ball away—and Brakus now sends the ball back up the line high over the net, loopy with topspin, not all that bad a shot considering the fierceness of the return, and a topspin shot that’d back most tennis players up and put them on the defensive, and but Michael Joyce, whose level of tennis is such that he moves in on balls hit with topspin and hits them on the rise, 23 moves in and takes the ball on the rise and hits a backhand cross so tightly angled that nobody alive could get to it. This is kind of a typical Joyce-Brakus point. The match is carnage of a particular high-level sort: it’s like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator. Brakus looks pissed off after Joyce’s winner, makes some berating-himself-type noises, but the anger seems kind of pro forma: it’s not like there’s anything Brakus could have done much better, not given what he and the 79th-best player in the world have in their respective arsenals.
Michael Joyce—whose realness and approachability and candor are a big reason why he’s whom I end up spending the most time watching and talking to—will later say, in response to my dry observation that a rather disproportionate number of unranked Canadians seem to have gotten wild cards into the Montreal Qualies, that Brakus “had a big serve, but the guy didn’t belong on a pro court.” Joyce didn’t mean this in an unkind way. Nor did he mean it in a kind way. It turns out that what Michael Joyce says rarely has any kind of spin or slant on it; he mostly just reports what he sees, rather like a camera. You couldn’t even call him sincere, because it’s not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or nonsincere. For a while I thought that Joyce’s rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright. This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn’t go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics (stuff I know because he told me it right away). 24 What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole, and that Michael Joyce’s affectless openness is a sign not of stupidity but of something else.
Advances in racquet technology and conditioning methods over the last decade have dramatically altered men’s professional tennis. For much of the twentieth century, there were two basic styles of top-level play. The “offensive” 25 style is based on the serve and the net game and is ideally suited to slick (or “fast”) surfaces like grass and cement. The “defensive” or “baseline” style is built around foot-speed, consistency, and groundstrokes accurate enough to hit effective passing shots against a serve-and-volleyer; this style is most effective on “slow” surfaces like clay and Har-Tru composite. John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg are probably the modern era’s greatest exponents of the offensive and defensive styles, respectively.
There is now a third way to play, and it tends to be called the “power-baseline” style. As far as I can determine, Jimmy Connors 26 more or less invented the power-baseline game back in the ’70s, and in the ’80s Ivan Lendl raised it to a kind of brutal art. In the ’90s, the majority of young players on the ATP Tour now have a P.B.-type game. This game’s cornerstone is groundstrokes, but groundstrokes hit with incredible pace, such that winners from the baseline are not unusual. 27 A power-baseliner’s net game tends to be solid but uninspired—a P.B.er is more apt to hit a winner on the approach shot and not need to volley at all. His serve is competent and reasonably forceful, but the really inspired part of a P.B.er’s game is usually his return of serve. 28 He usually has incredible reflexes and can hit winners right off the return. The P.B.er’s game requires both the power and aggression of an offensive style and the speed and calculated patience of a defensive style. It is adjustable both to slick grass and to slow clay, but its most congenial surface is DecoTurf, 29 the type of slow abrasive hard-court surface now used at the U.S. Open and at all the broiling North American tournaments leading up to it, including the Canadian Open.
Boris Becker and Stefan Edberg are contemporary examples of the classic offensive style. Serve-and-volleyers are often tall, 30 and tall Americans like Pete Sampras and Todd Martin and David Wheaton are also offensive players. Michael Chang is an exponent of the pure defensive style, as are Mats Wilander, Carlos Costa, and a lot of the Tour’s Western Europeans and South Americans, many of whom grew up exclusively on clay and now stick primarily to the overseas clay-court circuits. Americans Jim Courier, Jimmy Arias, and Aaron Krickstein all play a power-baseline game. So does just about every young new male player on the Tour. But the style’s most famous and effective post-Lendl avatar is Andre Agassi, who on 1995’s summer circuit is simply kicking everyone’s ass. 31
Michael Joyce’s style is power-baseline in the Agassi mold: Joyce is short and right-handed and has a two-handed backhand, a serve that’s just good enough to set up the baseline attack, and a great return of serve that’s the linchpin of his game. Like Agassi, Joyce takes the ball early, on the rise, so it always looks like he’s moving forward in the court even though he rarely comes to net. Joyce’s first serve usually comes in around 95 mph, 32 and his second serve is in the low 80s, but it has so much spin on it that the ball turns weird shapes in the air and bounces high and wide to the first-round Canadian’s backhand. Brakus stretches for the ball and floats a slice return, the sort of weak return that a serve-and-volleyer’d be rushing up to the net to put away on the fly. Joyce does move up, but only to midcourt, right around his own service line, where he lets the floater land and bounce up all ripe, and he winds up his forehand and hits a winner crosscourt into the deuce corner, very flat and hard, so that the ball makes an emphatic sound as it hits the scarlet tarp behind Brakus’s end of the court. Ballboys move for the ball and reconfigure complexly as Joyce walks back to serve another point. The applause of the tiny crowd is so small and sad and shabby-sounding that it’d almost be better if pe
ople didn’t clap at all.
As with Lendl and Agassi and Courier and many P.B.ers, Joyce’s strongest shot is his forehand, a weapon of near-Wagnerian aggression and power. Joyce’s forehand is particularly lovely to watch. It’s more spare and textbook than Lendl’s whip-crack forehand or Borg’s great swooping loop; by way of decoration there’s only a small loop of flourish 33 on the backswing. The stroke itself is completely horizontal, so Joyce can hit through the ball while it’s still well out in front of him. As with all great players, Joyce’s side is so emphatically to the net as the ball approaches that his posture is a classic contrapposto.
As Joyce on the forehand makes contact with the tennis ball, his left hand behind him opens up, as if he were releasing something, a decorative gesture that has nothing to do with the mechanics of the stroke. Michael Joyce doesn’t know that his left hand opens up at impact on forehands: it is unconscious, some aesthetic tic that started when he was a child and is now inextricably hardwired into a stroke that is itself unconscious for Joyce, now, at 22, after years of hitting more forehands over and over than anyone could ever count. 34
Agassi, who is 25 (and of whom you have heard and then some), is kind of Michael Joyce’s hero. Just last week, at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington D.C., in wet-mitten heat that had players vomiting on-court and defaulting all over the place, Agassi beat Joyce in the third round of the main draw, 6–2 6–2. Every once in a while now during this Qualie match Joyce will look over at his coach next to me in the player-guest section of the Grandstand and grin and say something like “Agassi’d have killed me on that shot.” Joyce’s coach will adjust the set of his sunglasses and say nothing—coaches are forbidden to say anything to their players during a match. Joyce’s coach, Sam Aparicio, 35 a protégé of Pancho Gonzalez, is based in Las Vegas, which is also Agassi’s home town, and Joyce has several times been flown to Las Vegas at Agassi’s request to practice with him, and is apparently regarded by Agassi as a friend and peer—these are facts Michael Joyce will mention with as much pride as he evinces in speaking of victories and world ranking.
There are big differences between Agassi’s and Joyce’s games, though. Though Joyce and Agassi both use the Western forehand grip and two-handed backhand that are distinctive of topspinners, Joyce’s ground-strokes are very “flat”—i.e. spinless, passing low over the net, driven rather than brushed—because the actual motion of his strokes is so levelly horizontal. Joyce’s balls actually look more like Jimmy Connors’s balls than like Agassi’s. 36 Some of Joyce’s groundstrokes look like knuckleballs going over the net, and you can actually see the ball’s seams just hanging there, not spinning. Joyce also has a hitch in his backhand that makes it look stiff and slightly awkward, though his pace and placement are lethal off that side; Agassi’s own backhand is flowing and hitchless. 37 And while Joyce is far from slow, he lacks Agassi’s otherworldly foot-speed. Agassi is every bit as fast as Michael Chang, and watch A.A. on TV sometime as he’s walking between points: he takes these tiny, violently pigeon-toed steps, the stride of a man whose feet weigh basically nothing.
Michael Joyce also—in his own coach’s opinion—doesn’t “see” the ball in the same magical way that Andre Agassi does, and so Joyce can’t take the ball as early or generate quite the same amount of pace off his groundstrokes. This business of “seeing” is important enough to explain. Except for the serve, power in tennis is a matter not of strength but of timing. This is one reason why so few top tennis players are muscular. 38 Any normal adult male can hit a tennis ball with pro pace; the trick is being able to hit the ball both hard and accurately. If you can get your body in just the right position and time your stroke so you hit the ball in just the right spot—waist-level, just slightly out in front of you, with your weight moving from your back leg to your front leg as you make contact—you can both cream the ball and direct it. And since “... just the right...” is a matter of millimeters and microseconds, a certain kind of vision is crucial. 39 Agassi’s vision is literally one in a billion, and it allows him to hit his groundstrokes as hard as he can just about every time. Joyce, whose hand-eye coordination is superlative, in the top 1% of all athletes everywhere (he’s been exhaustively tested), still has to take some incremental bit of steam off most of his groundstrokes if he wants to direct them.
I submit that tennis is the most beautiful sport there is, 40 and also the most demanding. It requires body control, hand-eye coordination, quickness, flat-out speed, endurance, and that strange mix of caution and abandon we call courage. It also requires smarts. Just one single shot in one exchange in one point of a high-level match is a nightmare of mechanical variables. Given a net that’s three feet high (at the center) and two players in (unrealistically) a fixed position, the efficacy of one single shot is determined by its angle, depth, pace, and spin. And each of these determinants is itself determined by still other variables—for example, a shot’s depth is determined by the height at which the ball passes over the net combined with some integrated function of pace and spin, with the ball’s height over the net itself determined by the player’s body position, grip on the racquet, degree of backswing, angle of racquet face, and the 3-D coordinates through which the racquet face moves during that interval in which the ball is actually on the strings. The tree of variables and determinants branches out, on and on, and then on even farther when the opponent’s own positions and predilections and the ballistic features of the ball he’s sent you to hit are factored in. 41 No CPU yet existent could compute the expansion of variables for even a single exchange—smoke would come out of the mainframe. The sort of thinking involved is the sort that can be done only by a living and highly conscious entity, and then only unconsciously, i.e. by combining talent with repetition to such an extent that the variables are combined and controlled without conscious thought. In other words, serious tennis is a kind of art.
If you’ve played tennis at least a little, you probably think you have some idea of how hard a game it is to play really well. I submit to you that you really have no idea at all. I know I didn’t. And television doesn’t really allow us to appreciate what real top-level players can do—how hard they’re actually hitting the ball, and with what control and tactical imagination and artistry. I got to watch Michael Joyce practice several times, right up close, like six feet and a chain-link fence away. This is a man who, at full run, can hit a fast-moving tennis ball into a one-foot-square area 78 feet away over a yard-high net, hard. He can do this something over 90% of the time. And this is the world’s 79th-best player, one who has to play the Montreal Qualies.
It’s not just the athletic artistry that compels interest in tennis at the professional level. It’s also what this level requires—what it’s taken for the l00th-ranked player in the world to get there, what it takes to stay, what it would take to rise even higher against other men who’ve paid the same price he’s paid.
Bismarck’s epigram about diplomacy and sausage applies also to the way we Americans seem to feel about professional athletes. We revere athletic excellence, competitive success. And it’s more than attention we pay; we vote with our wallets. We’ll spend large sums to watch a truly great athlete; we’ll reward him with celebrity and adulation and will even go so far as to buy products and services he endorses.
But we prefer not to countenance the kinds of sacrifices the professional-grade athlete has made to get so good at one particular thing. Oh, we’ll pay lip service to these sacrifices—we’ll invoke lush clichés about the lonely heroism of Olympic athletes, the pain and analgesia of football, the early rising and hours of practice and restricted diets, the privations, the prefight celibacy, etc. But the actual facts of the sacrifices repel us when we see them: basketball geniuses who cannot read, sprinters who dope themselves, defensive tackles who shoot up bovine hormones until they collapse or explode. We prefer not to consider the shockingly vapid and primitive comments uttered by athletes in postcontest interviews, or to imagine what impoverishments
in one’s mental life would allow people actually to think in the simplistic way great athletes seem to think. Note the way “up-close and personal profiles” of professional athletes strain so hard to find evidence of a rounded human life—outside interests and activities, charities, values beyond the sport. We ignore what’s obvious, that most of this straining is farce. It’s farce because the realities of top-level athletics today require an early and total commitment to one pursuit. An almost ascetic focus. 42 A sub-sumption of almost all other features of human life to their one chosen talent and pursuit. A consent to live in a world that, like a child’s world, is very serious and very small.
Playing two professional singles matches on the same day is unheard of, except in Qualies. 43 Michael Joyce’s second qualifying round is at 7:30 Saturday night. He’s playing an Austrian named Julian Knowle, a tall and cadaverous guy with pointy Kafkan ears. Knowle uses two hands off both sides 44 and throws his racquet when he’s mad. The match takes place on Stade Jarry’s Grandstand Court, which seems more like a theater than an arena because it has seats and bleachers only on the east side. But the Grandstand’s also more intimate: the box seats start just a few yards from the court surface, and you’re close enough to see a wen on Joyce’s cheek or the abacus of sweat on Herr Knowle’s forehead. It’s not as hot here at night, but it’s humid, and the high-power lights all have those curious rainbow globes of diffraction around them, plus orbiting bugs. The Grandstand can hold maybe 1500 people, and tonight there are exactly four human beings in the audience as Michael Joyce basically beats the everliving shit out of Julian Knowle, who will be at the Montreal airport tonight at 1:30 to board the red-eye for a kind of minor-league clay tournament in Poznan, Poland.