Ad In Ad Out: Collected Tennis Articles of Michael Mewshaw 1982-2015. Michael Mewshaw
have been defaulted.
As a sport/business, pro tennis has a notoriously short attention span and a long-standing nonchalance about breaking the rules it has written for itself. Like a lot of its other inconvenient rules, the one concerning medical treatment was eventually changed. These days it’s not uncommon for matches to be interrupted for fifteen or twenty minutes while a physio is fetched on court, or a player is escorted to the locker room long enough, it sometimes seems, for an appendectomy. How many of these injury time-outs are medically urgent or even necessary is debatable. How many are actually gamesmanship, lame attempts to get a little rest or change the momentum of a match must be a matter of serious suspicion. To cite one notorious example, again at the French Open, with match point against him Marat Safin demanded to be treated for blistered fingers. After the delay, his opponent, Potito Starace, lost the point and then the match.
Whatever the impact on the players or the effect on the final score, these interruptions are an aggravation to fans, a distraction from the game’s natural rhythms, and a diminishment of its enjoyment. On the thirtieth anniversary of the celebrated 1980 Wimbledon final between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, it is worth remembering that during the splendid long tie-break in the fourth set, neither man ever toweled off or dawdled between points or paused during the change of ends to eat a banana or slug back some magic elixir. They played on, and as they did so, the intensity increased stroke by stroke, point by point until it reached a pitch of emotion that’s impossible today when players waste half a minute or more pulling up their socks or picking at the seat of their pants between serves. Surely if pro basketball players can move the ball up court and shoot, all in twenty-four seconds, tennis players can serve in that time.
Of course there is a rule that dictates that they should do just that. But it remains for the umpire to enforce it, and all too often the chair ump is reluctant to impose a penalty. At this year’s French Open, in Fabio Fognini’s match against Gael Monfils, Fognini argued and refused to play on for over ten minutes in the fifth set. As the sky darkened and conditions deteriorated and fans froze in their seats, the supervisor and the umpire dithered before finally penalizing Fognini a point and threatening to default him. Why not simply put a clock on court, and when the buzzer rings, impose a penalty on the stalling player?
When rules are ignored or openly flaunted, one has to wonder what happens off court. To get back to bathroom breaks, in view of Donald Dell’s decades-late confession about the 1983 US Open Final, can one really trust that contemporary players are receiving no coaching, no treatment and no medications? When they’re out of sight, who enforces the rules? Who enforces the enforcers? And if the rules are violated now during delays for intestinal distress, would we again have to wait a quarter of a century to find out the truth?
LA BELLA FIGURA OF GABRIELA SABATINI
World-class tennis players are tribal creatures who, regardless of national origin, share the same mores, totems, and taboos. Whatever language they learned in childhood during those fleeting days before they left home for the accelerated training of a private academy or government-sponsored camp, they eventually wind up speaking a subdialect of English that has no codified grammar, no written literature, and, frequently, no distinction between past and present tense. Much depends on the repetition of key phrases that convey meaning through altered intonation. “Go for it” and “Just do it” appear like punctuation marks in almost every sentence.
Forced by circumstance to travel and live together, the tennis tribe places a premium on patience, discretion, and tolerance—tolerance of bizarre behavior, irrational outbursts, and varying sexual appetites. Players stay at the same hotels, eat the same food, and wear much the same clothes on court. Yet all this sameness serves to reiterate an obvious difference: At each tournament there are dozens of losers and only one winner.
In this tiny nomadic society, the migratory patterns are as inflexible as the scoring system. Thus it was that in early May 1991, Gabriela Sabatini departed from her home in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and flew to Rome for the Italian Open. She had won the title there twice and was determined to do it again and build on her record, which was the best in women’s tennis this year.
Yet one couldn’t blame her for looking beyond the Italian Open to the three upcoming Grand Slam events. Now was the time, experts agreed, for her to take over the top spot in tennis. Ever since she was fourteen, people had predicted she would become number one. With her heavy-topspin ground strokes, she had the baseline game to win the French Open. With her improved serve and volley, she looked capable of dominating players on Wimbledon’s grass. As for the hard courts at Flushing Meadow, she had won there once and could do it again.
Although the U.S. Open was four months off, Sabatini sensed the arc of the season, the arc of her entire career, inclining toward the tournament, where, in 1990, she had finally triumphed over a host of real and imagined demons to win her first major title. Now at every press conference, journalists asked how she intended to repeat the victory, how she intended to cope with Monica Seles, Martina Navratilova, and Steffi Graf.
Upon her answers depended more than the odd tennis article or TV sound bite. If Gabriela hoped to command the kind of coverage that would carry her out of the sports ghetto and onto the style page, into the fashion section, and onto the late-night and early-morning talk shows, she had to do something besides wallop forehand winners and say, “I hit the ball hard. I feel a lot of confidence today.”
With most players, victory ensured favorable exposure. But with Gabriela there had always been the danger of a boomerang effect. Her halting, monosyllabic encounters with the media often led to an unflattering picture that risked putting off sponsors and undermining her morale. So as Dick Dell, her agent at ProServ, screened the requests and contracts that blizzarded his desk during the months leading up to the U.S. Open, he had to weigh the downside against the possible advantages to his client.
Dell had done what he could to tidy up Sabatini’s image. Along with PR people from the Kraft General Foods World Tour, title sponsor of women’s tennis, he had studied tapes of her press conferences and passed on tips about how she could punch up her performance. As her game began to show greater fluency and grace, he spread word that she was playing better because of a sea change in her personality; she was more confident, mature, outgoing, and articulate, Dell claimed.
One offer that intrigued Dell and excited Gaby was a proposed feature on Sabatini in the September issue of Vogue, which would hit the stands at the start of the U.S. Open. Because of the magazine’s long lead time, Vogue had set up a photo session in Florida, dressed Gaby in evening gowns and cocktail dresses, and shot roll after roll of film.
Unfortunately, Vogue’s editor, Anna Wintour, didn’t care for the photographs. She felt that Sabatini looked too meaty and muscular, too awkward in high-fashion wear. Wintour favored killing the project, but Peggy Northrup, the Health and Fitness editor, argued that Gabriela represented a new type of female beauty, a challenge to the hackneyed notion that an attractive woman had to be willowy thin and weak.
Peggy Northrup convinced Anna Wintour to postpone any decision until she had read the article that would accompany the photographs. Then Ms. Northrup asked me to write the piece. I was to meet Sabatini in Rome and spend forty-eight hours learning about her like and dislikes, aspirations and fears, and, most important, the changes in her personal life that had allowed her to achieve her full potential in tennis.
Because I was about to do a book on the women’s tour and knew it was harder to gain access to a top player than to line up an audience with the president or the pope, I viewed the assignment as a godsend—one that could save me weeks of wasted motion. Then, too, I was fascinated by the internal debate at Vogue. It seemed to reflect larger debates echoing throughout society. Was women’s tennis part of a feminist breakthrough? Had female athletes truly come a long way, baby? And if so, what price had they had to pay? Did they, like legions of female doctors, lawyers, and business executives, have to fill dual roles—money-making professionals outside the home and traditional mothers-wives-lovers and nurturers in the home? Did they even have homes?
A flurry of phone calls interrupted my packing. Peggy Northrup said she had dropped my name to Dick Dell and he seemed to have misgivings.