Glory and Pain at the Australian Open
Madison Key’s three-set win in the ladies’ final at the Australian Open over defending champion Aryna Sabalenka is a textbook case of couldn’t happen to a more deserving lass. The one-time golden teen of American tennis, expected to be the heiress of our reigning queen Serena, reached her second major final at long last and this time took it all, a couple months after becoming Mrs. Bjorn Fratangelo and hinting that being married to the man she loved might be better than being wed to a sport whose peak kept eluding her.
Djokovic has fair reason to be aggrieved, seeing as how he was targeted by Australian bureaucrats and let down by Tennis Australia in 2022.
Did that wise insight serve as the missing link to glory? At any rate, she played fearless and nearly flawless tennis, her big forehands and huge serves leading her famous offense, to take down the funny but saturnine, temper-and-nerve prone, even bigger forehanded star from the deep East, untouchable on hard courts for the past two years, world No. 1. And she did it after holding off world No. 2 Iga Swiatek in the semis, whose own nerves folded under Madisonian steel in the best match of the women’s draw at Oz.
Wizardry it was not, Maddy was mighty, plain and simple; she played the game she always played and believed — with only-too- human bouts of doubts — would bring her to the top.
Holding the Daphne Akhurst Memorial Cup, she congratulates Aryna (who has recovered from a racquet-smashing fit of temper at Maddy’s brilliant diagonal winner to clinch, and is back to her good-sport self), thanks everyone, tells her husband wittily how she loves him and adds she’ll be back. Class act.
Novak Djokovic’s exit from the tournament in the semis was, earlier in the week, a class act in grace under pressure. Badly injured (hamstring tear, reportedly), in the quarter finals he had outthought and outplayed the mighty Carlos Alcaraz, fifteen years his junior and one of the fastest all-court get-every-impossible shot man in the game. Their four fantastic sets will be in every anthology, but now he is up against the German power machine Alexander Zverev and the thigh brings him too much pain. He plays through it, point for point, all the way to a tiebreak that goes the distance. Set Zverev. and Nole calls it a match.
Even iron men, including the most successful in the history of the sport, reach a point where they feel the corrosion in bones and sinews, and they know they must let the body recover and live, if not to make a comeback — by no means unthinkable — then surely to protect hearth and home and family. And for this the crowd at Rod Laver Stadium — or, to be fair, some in the crowd — has the effrontery to boo the man who, with ten wins here, has a claim to fame worthy of the man after whom it is named and who one is certain would be embarrassed for his countrymen were he not absent this year.
Djokovic, who earlier in the tournament had applauded American Danielle Collins‘ defiance of harassment by lowbrains and refused to speak to official Australian broadcasters for the insults they directed at the contingent of his Serbian supporters, says it is understandable fans want to get their money’s worth (tickets have gone up in price along with everything else in tennis, including players’ cash winnings, but this is another matter), and he has done his best and knows they know he does not quit unless unable to move, and that is all he will say.
In fact, they all saw how he lost that first set with a miss no one could remember, or imagine, him making, an overhead smash into the net. It could be the last ball hit in match play by the only one still standing among the best of his time, for Andy Murray — who is coaching him — Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal, one by one have laid down their racquets. The normal reaction would have been to stand quietly and weep. And then cheer.
“Tennis fans understand their sport has it all,” George Vecsey writes somewhere, explaining the sport’s perennial hold on our imaginations, “love, power, sex, money, violence, aggression, manipulation — the whole spectrum of human behavior, even the occasional sporting gesture of human touch.” Vecsey, giving baseball some of its best reporting while covering many other sports and other beats too, ought to know. Sports includes the cultivation of mores and traditions specific to each, by fans and supporting establishments as well as players.
Djokovic has fair reason to be aggrieved, seeing as how he was targeted by Australian bureaucrats and let down by Tennis Australia in 2022, when he was prevented from playing, indeed detained and deported, for rejecting the vaccination mandate during the Covid hysteria, despite having the same medical exemption as several others who stayed and played. With fans, he has sustained, in New York, Paris, and London, as well as Melbourne, loyal support as well as low snubs, as befits a great winner who speaks his mind rather than in platitudes and cliches.
Djokovic says he may return next year, might not — clearly indicating the issue is his health, not the discourtesies to which he can whisper the Serb equivalent of “Sticks and stones… ” As a sports writer I hope so and respect him either way.
The People of Australia … in France
As to Australians, of whom I have never known one I did not want to meet again, I prefer to remember a couple of young fellows whom I met while out with a pretty thing one night in Paris. They decided our ordinary courtesy in translating their orders to the barman — he was fine but their accents flummoxed him — obligated them over our protests to put us on their tab for the rest of the night.
They taught me lessons in cheer as well as drinking. We sang Dancing Mathilda, raised glasses and shed tears to the men who died for empire in the African veld and at Galipoli, went from bar to bar to the lyrics of Fields of Athenry and I Am Australian and Come Out ye Black an’ Tans, and when at last I helped my girl stumble into a cab they insisted on hailing another one to follow us and make sure we got home safely. We promised to write and I like to think they were up there in the bleachers at Rod Laver Stadium, telling some lout that if he wanted to come outside and mix it up a bit they would oblige.
And what I like to think even more is that with Maddy’s belated Cinderella win, and next up a thrilling passing-of-the-baton match in the men’s final, those mates of mine reckoned it was not worth it. The world is on its way back to normal, or as normal as can be, and tennis with its thrills and tears, its glories and its shame, will be a fair measure of how that goes.
READ MORE from Roger Kaplan:
Boualem Sansal and Freedom of Conscience
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