By Thomas Swick
Tennis is a game of losers. If you don’t lose today, you lose tomorrow (or the day after). You travel from tournament to tournament and, unless your name is known to millions, you generally leave early.
One hundred and ninety-two players arrived in Key Biscayne last week and, as I write on Tuesday morning, 24 remain. (I’m not counting the doubles players.) This weekend tennis fans will cheer the two winners – one male, one female – and few will think of the 190 losers.
But they, more than the winners, represent the reality of tennis. Every sport has its winners and losers, but few have the on-going cycle of ultimate defeat that tennis does. A tennis tournament is a mix of March Madness and Groundhog Day, for it combines brackets and a one-strike-and-you’re-out system with monotonously repeated reminders of one’s inferiority.
Sports writers always say that it takes a special toughness to win a tournament. But it also takes a special toughness to leave a tournament in the first round, pack your bags, return to the practice court, and then fly off to the next city with the next gathering of sneakered assassins, knowing, as the vast majority of players do, that they are headed to another massacre.
Positive players (is there any other kind?) surely tell themselves that this time they will advance farther, improve their ranking, make a run. And some of them do. They find themselves on the stadium court giving a former champion a scare. But if, through nervousness and unforced errors, they give the match away, it makes the losing even harder. And it reinforces the Sisyphean nature of the game, the idea that you can push the rock only so far up the hill before it inevitably rolls back down.
Maverick sports writers have said that the loser’s locker room is more interesting than the winner’s (a once original thought that has become a bit of a cliché). This always sounded suspect to me, and when I got credentials to attend press conferences (I’m not allowed in the players’ realm) I started attending, in part, to see for myself.
Though I hate sitting in front of the freshly-defeated. The atmosphere is glum and, notebook in hand, I feel as if I’ve come to a funeral to grill the widow about her inability to keep her husband alive. The immediate aftermath of a loss, especially a heart-breaking one of squandered chances, seems a time for sympathy, not an inquisition.
It’s even worse, of course, if I’m the only reporter in the room, as I was for the press conference with Dominika Cibulkova. A short while earlier she had been up 5-2 and serving for the match against the world’s #1, Victoria Azarenka, only to lose that game, and the next three games, and eventually (inevitably?) the match. My first question was a natural (under the circumstances), almost parental, “How are you doing?” Another reporter joined us, which was lucky for me (if not for Cibulkova) because about the only other thing I had for her were my condolences.
Aleksandra Wozniak also had a seemingly clear but self-denied taste of victory against Venus Williams, and her press conference afterwards was so small, with a few reporters sitting around her in folding chairs, that it had the air of an intervention. She laughed frequently but it wasn’t a joyful sound; it seemed rather a defense against tears. I asked if it had been her first time on the stadium court and when she said “Yes,” her eyes lit up briefly in a way that made me think it was the best question I would ever ask an athlete.
At his press conference following his 3rd round loss to Andy Roddick, Roger Federer looked more accepting of defeat than he had at the U.S. Open (where he lost to Novak Djokovic in the semis). Repeatedly voted tennis’s “Sportsman of the Year,” Federer is more gracious in victory than he is in defeat. After a win he is voluble, sometimes almost giddy (especially in on-court interviews), while a loss makes him look as if he’d prefer to be alone. Nothing surprising in that, though it does make me question the validity of the locker room comparison.
Tuesday none of the day matches were riveting (only one went three sets), which meant the press conferences were relatively painless. Roddick was thoughtful, and Serena Williams moderately conciliatory, as they joined the other 188 losers.
