Pictured here with friend (confidant?) and Vogue editor Ana Wintour, Roger Federer seems like he’s capable of being surrounded by people, and yet so alone. I think this image along with the Canadian soccer star Christine ‘Sinky’ Sinclair (I’m not comfortable with that nick-name), might just help explain how tennis and soccer are two entirely different sports. It’s true.
Tennis
Yesterday was the first time in Wimbledon history that Serena and Venus Williams both lost matches on the same day. It seemed as though Venus’s knowing that her sister had been eliminated from competition made it all too lonely a prospect for her to continue on. Mardy Fish is faced with a similar prospect, he’s already noticed the lack of ‘his guys’ being around (Andy Roddick where are you). “Lonely,” Fish says. “It doesn’t feel great.”
Sure tennis players have friends, family and supporters around. But do you remember how much sense it made when Luke Wilson’s character, Richie Tenenbaum, in The Royal Tenenbaums, breaks down on the court (due of course to the trauma of seeing his sister in the crowd with her one-time psychiatrist, then husband)? It’s the monodrama of the lonely tennis player. The symbolism is heightened because of the fact that Luke Wilson is being stared at by his opponent across the net, he’s being stared down on by the spectators. Cameras are on him, commentators are scrutinizing his actions. And for his part, Luke Wilson fully demonstrates how alone he truly is on that court. He breaks down as if he was in the privacy of his own room, sits on the ground, takes off his shoes. It’s a depressed tantrum. An announcer wonders out loud if the tennis star might even have started to cry.
A sports writer named Brian Philips has been chronicling Roger Federer’s tournament over at Wimbledon by dissecting each of Federer’s matches with an eye for the symptoms of waning light in Roger’s autumnal reign. No one right now, not the Williams sisters, not Marty Fish, not ‘lonely-at-top’ Nadal, is lonelier than Roger Federer. While he has never suffered a defining moment of being usurped as the patriarch of professional tennis (Philips argues that even after the year that Federer lost to Nadal most convincingly at the French Open, then went on lose to him at Wimbledon, Federer still came back and won the next time around), he’s not the top player in the world. So he’s alone on the court, and he’s alone in the twilight of his career even though it’s a twilight that almost any player would happily accept as his or her entire career. Philips also argues that tennis players suffer acutely from the prevailing conditions of always being out on the court completely alone against an opponent and the world (he unapologetically discounts doubles tennis), as well as playing almost every match as sudden death. Pretty much any loss ends a tournament for you.
Summing up more than just Federer’s career, but also the inscrutable (dis)appearances of the Williams sisters, the psychologically-layered intensity of coach-player relationships (and vice-versa), the players who have career-long battles with an entire tournament (it’s almost too bad we don’t have more Richie Tenembaum moments in the world of real tennis, because there seems to be more than ample material), Philips offers a good descriptive category for tennis as a sport: “It’s a tragedy that’s trying to be a comedy” (A-ha!) But I do enjoy the tragedy of tennis.
Soccer
At the FIFA Women’s World Cup, Canada’s game against the powerhouse Germans offered soccer as a counter-example. Soccer is a comedy that’s trying to be tragedy. This is not to imply that soccer is any less serious a sport than tennis or anything else. But the game between Canada and Germany on Sunday promoted veteran forward and Canadian team captain Christine Sinclair into a spotlight of adulation, despite anything she endured. The game saw her lead her team, break her nose, return to score the only goal scored against Germany in a FIFA World Cup match since 2003, and ultimately lose to the heavily favored Germans.
These two teams on Sunday, as with any soccer team, or just about any sports teams at all for that matter, had no motivation other than to compete. I’m not trying to make the argument that the glory of competition is a moral victory (I would never say that’s not true, but there’s definitely more to it at the level of professional sports, or under an umbrella like the FIFA World Cup). But all of the talk after the game was about the heroics of the Canadian team captain. She did what a captain is supposed to do, but the sacrifice of her own well-being (to get back on the field with a clearly broken nose) was never part of a narrative of isolated turmoil or introspection.
Sinclair went out and did what she felt was needed to keep her team together. But then the crux of it all was that the team went out and made good on her efforts, by scoring on Germany and breaking the 679 minute streak of soccer in which the Germans hadn’t given up a single goal.
And it makes a difference that it’s soccer and tennis we’re talking about, rather than simply any team sport versus any individual sport. In soccer, it’s acceptable to celebrate a beautiful goal (and Sinclair’s was) even if it doesn’t win you the game. (Celebrating a great dunk in basketball when your team is clearly losing makes you kind of an idiot.) So there is a quality to soccer that at the very least is other-than-tragic. And boxers just don’t seem as lonely to me as tennis players.
