Hi Kamakshi,
Let me start by saying that I agree with you, though I think you may have misinterpreted something I wrote. The fact that the J-Block is predominately white is, like you said, due to the fact that Blake grew up predominately with white friends—I didn’t mean to suggest any deeper reason. I brought it up initially to contrast Blake’s life with Barack Obama’s as he relates it in Dreams From My Father. The possible next U.S. president, who also went to a high school with few other blacks, sought out an African-American heritage in part because he felt, often unconsciously, the absence of his Kenyan father. From what we can gather in Breaking Back, Blake never had the same searching quality, the same need. I can only speculate that this was because his own black father was emphatically present. Like we’ve both said, it’s a tribute to the power of the family to create the most solid identities of all. In that sense, Blake and Obama have been equally driven, but by opposing family forces—Blake by his father, Obama toward his father.
Let’s move on to Blake’s game, which you touched on in your last post. When I think of his tactics over the years, I come back to tennis’ old chicken-and-egg question: How much of a player’s success derives from personality, and how much from technique and athleticism? If Steffi Graf taught us anything, it’s that greatness is about everything except technique. Still, watching Blake, I wonder about how much he can do, from a tactical perspective, with the technique his uses on his forehand. The closed racquet face; the way he comes over the ball so quickly; the lack of variety in his swing path: All of this makes it hard for him to hit a forehand that isn’t go-for-broke. If you want to begin to know why he’s never going to be Roger Federer, you can throw out all the mental aspects of the sport and just look at how much smoother and more flexible Federer’s forehand is—he has many more options built right into his technique.
While Blake and his coach, Brian Barker, would never say it, I think they work with the assumption that his tactical options are more limited than some of his fellow Top Tenners. What comes across as a stubborn refusal to be more patient and construct points can also be seen as a deliberate decision to focus on Blake’s big strength, his explosiveness, which few players can match. Hence the all-out attempts at return winners off opponents' 130-m.p.h first serves. Blake has been successful with this approach, but it has also led to lots of preventable losses. I’m one of the “experts” who has said he should be more patient, and I still think he should be against lesser players. Chipping returns back and using a couple more balls to construct a point before pulling the trigger might prevent a few of those bad losses. But against the best guys, I have trouble faulting Blake’s and Barker’s go-for-it mentality. That’s what his game is built to do.
You’re right that Blake doesn’t seem to have a need to blast the ball the way Fernando Gonzalez. Blake seems to blast to keep his nerves at bay. When he’s going bad, it's his personality, not his technique, that hurts him. Blake is too emotional, too prone to doubt, too ready to hang his head, too much of a nice, normal guy rather than an arrogant, self-motivated warrior. At times in Breaking Back, I wondered if the self-reliance Blake had been taught by his father somehow has had a reverse effect on him. During the period that this book covers, Blake comes across as someone who is never quite sure of his place on the tour. He seems to live for nods of approval from fellow pros. After edging him in a close match in Cincinnati, Patrick Rafter pulls Blake close to him at the net and says, “You could have beaten me today.” It’s a nice, human moment of encouragement from a star player, and it has a deep effect on Blake’s ambition, which had wavered in the past.
The other moment comes when Blake, after being off the tour for months, beats Paul Goldstein in the final of a Challenger event. Goldstein greets him at the net with a big smile and says, “Great to have you back, man,” as the two shake hands. Blake feels more than ever that he belongs on the tour, which fires his ambition once again.
This need for peer approval may be common to all pro tennis players, no matter what we say about the tour's every-man-for-himself culture. But Blake’s lack of arrogance, and his desire for acceptance, is not what we associate with the great American players—Connors, Sampras, McEnroe, Gonzalez, and even Roddick played with a sense of entitlement (maybe it makes sense that Blake most revered Andre Agassi, who also never had that unshakable self-belief). When Blake gets down in a match and down in the mouth, I find myself wishing he had a little more of it. But that wouldn’t be James. He was brought up too well to be entitled. His sense of self comes more from belonging than it does from dominating.
Reading his book and the posts we’ve written in the last week, I’ve wondered how Blake will be remembered as a player. I wondered if there would be players, black or white, who got into the game because of him? This morning my question may have been answered. I watched a young black Frenchman, Josselin Ouanna, play in Paris. Ouanna has a shaved head, wore a headband high up on his forehead, and tried a jumping one-handed backhand return from in front of his body that looked very familiar. I don’t know who his tennis idols were, but I have to believe that he’s watched James Blake very closely over years. And why not? While he hasn’t been the Next Great America—or even a Grand Slam semifinalist—Blake has offered tennis fans an explosive game and a sense of normalcy among the superjocks. Blake has made his mistakes—accepting, for a time, an unearned wild card in Las Vegas among them—but there are less intelligent, less resilient, and less likeable role models to have in tennis than James Blake. His father might be proud of that more than anything else.
Thanks for doing this book club with me, Kamakshi. We may have a word or two in the comments below from Blake's co-author, Andrew Friedman, who has spent a lot more time with the man than we have.
As for the future, have you started Infinite Jest yet?
Steve
