Gladiators at the net let down on the page
By Mary Jo Murphy |
August 16, 2009, Sunday
|
Print Edition
Print Edition
RAFAEL Nadal indulges in "man-scaping" (he waxes or shaves his molded limbs) and "knicker-spelunking" (he plucks at the pantaloons caught between his cheeks). This we know from "Strokes of Genius: Federer, Nadal, and the Greatest Match Ever Played," by L. Jon Wertheim, a writer for Sports Illustrated. Likewise we know that Roger Federer cries rather easily and once responded "don't know him" when a questioner mentioned Freud (Federer quit school at 16 to focus on tennis).
What we most likely knew before opening the book was the title match itself, the gentlemen's final last year at Wimbledon. We knew its likable protagonists, its trajectory, its feats, its outcome, its brilliance. If we didn't, chances are we wouldn't be reading about it. We wouldn't care about having the match replayed for us, stroke by magnificent stroke, on paper.
But that is what Wertheim sets out to do, because singular sporting events sometimes require a written record, preferably an elegant one, even if the DVD is an Amazon click away. Here is where you lay the flowers to mark the memory of awesome. Here is the tattoo that says Rafa-Roger Forever.
In this sense the book undoubtedly delivers. Wertheim ably chronicles the contrasting styles of his gladiators: the Swiss Federer is "a delicate, brush-stroking impressionist," and the Spanish Nadal is "a dogged, free-wheeling abstract expressionist."
The contest is "Middle European restraint and quiet meticulousness versus Iberian bravado and passion." And threaded through the recounting of the five sets that ended in Federer's dethroning are solid sections on themes like racket technology, wagering, doping and chair umpiring. (That the umpire, Pascal Maria, skipped his double espresso and urinated 10 times as part of his match preparation might fall into the more-than-we-need-to-know category.)
At only one brief point does Wertheim try to argue the case that this match was the greatest by actually discussing another contender. Toward the end, he briefly mentions the Wimbledon final of 1980 between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe but dismisses it as not matching the "qualitative excellence" of this one.
It is one of those accidents of publishing that Wertheim's is one of two recent books that purport to be about "the greatest match ever played," the other being Marshall Jon Fisher's "Terrible Splendor," which follows a 1937 match between Don Budge and Gottfried von Cramm. Both books acknowledge a debt to a lean classic written 40 years ago by John McPhee: "Levels of the Game," also a stroke-by-stroke recounting of a tennis match, this one the semi-final at the first US Open, in 1968, between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe.
This is where the good and the great part ways. Wertheim's book has neither the heft of history nor the force of personality to give it anything but structure in common with McPhee's tale. "Levels of the Game," a book of astonishing candor, allows the rivals to sum each other up.
The most we get from Wertheim is Nadal on Federer: "He's the perfect player. Perfect serve. Perfect volley. Super-perfect forehand. Perfect backhand." Wertheim points out that McPhee had access inconceivable today. True, but consider the protagonists. Ashe's improbable rise in a white sport from the segregated South, the seeds of his activism sown on the Forest Hills grass, has no parallel in the Nadal-Federer narrative.
There is very little interesting biography or social context in "Strokes of Genius," but really, who needs to know more about Nadal's fondness for PlayStation'
What we most likely knew before opening the book was the title match itself, the gentlemen's final last year at Wimbledon. We knew its likable protagonists, its trajectory, its feats, its outcome, its brilliance. If we didn't, chances are we wouldn't be reading about it. We wouldn't care about having the match replayed for us, stroke by magnificent stroke, on paper.
But that is what Wertheim sets out to do, because singular sporting events sometimes require a written record, preferably an elegant one, even if the DVD is an Amazon click away. Here is where you lay the flowers to mark the memory of awesome. Here is the tattoo that says Rafa-Roger Forever.
In this sense the book undoubtedly delivers. Wertheim ably chronicles the contrasting styles of his gladiators: the Swiss Federer is "a delicate, brush-stroking impressionist," and the Spanish Nadal is "a dogged, free-wheeling abstract expressionist."
The contest is "Middle European restraint and quiet meticulousness versus Iberian bravado and passion." And threaded through the recounting of the five sets that ended in Federer's dethroning are solid sections on themes like racket technology, wagering, doping and chair umpiring. (That the umpire, Pascal Maria, skipped his double espresso and urinated 10 times as part of his match preparation might fall into the more-than-we-need-to-know category.)
At only one brief point does Wertheim try to argue the case that this match was the greatest by actually discussing another contender. Toward the end, he briefly mentions the Wimbledon final of 1980 between Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe but dismisses it as not matching the "qualitative excellence" of this one.
It is one of those accidents of publishing that Wertheim's is one of two recent books that purport to be about "the greatest match ever played," the other being Marshall Jon Fisher's "Terrible Splendor," which follows a 1937 match between Don Budge and Gottfried von Cramm. Both books acknowledge a debt to a lean classic written 40 years ago by John McPhee: "Levels of the Game," also a stroke-by-stroke recounting of a tennis match, this one the semi-final at the first US Open, in 1968, between Clark Graebner and Arthur Ashe.
This is where the good and the great part ways. Wertheim's book has neither the heft of history nor the force of personality to give it anything but structure in common with McPhee's tale. "Levels of the Game," a book of astonishing candor, allows the rivals to sum each other up.
The most we get from Wertheim is Nadal on Federer: "He's the perfect player. Perfect serve. Perfect volley. Super-perfect forehand. Perfect backhand." Wertheim points out that McPhee had access inconceivable today. True, but consider the protagonists. Ashe's improbable rise in a white sport from the segregated South, the seeds of his activism sown on the Forest Hills grass, has no parallel in the Nadal-Federer narrative.
There is very little interesting biography or social context in "Strokes of Genius," but really, who needs to know more about Nadal's fondness for PlayStation'
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