For the last week, in the latest installment of the TENNIS.com Book Club, online editor Kamakshi Tandon and I have been discussing “Break Point,” the 2006 tour diary by Vince Spadea with Dan Markowitz. Your comments are welcome as well.
Hi Kamakshi,
Well, my last response to you appears to have been lost to the web gods, wherever they may be (I’ve heard the whole thing is run out of northern Virginia; is that right?). This is doubly disturbing, and doubly wasteful—not only did I spend a good chunk of a day analyzing the many meanings of Vince Spadea, but now my deep insights vanished from the face of the earth.
But there is a silver lining. In trying to discover whether Spadea qualifies as “cool”—sort of a “neither here nor there” question, really, but I thought it was funny to consider—I neglected to address the themes and questions from your last, perceptive (naturellement) post. Now, with the weather gods raining holy hell down on my apartment windows, I have my chance.
Your last question first, Kamakshi. You asked whether I thought there should a code of silence among the players—should what happens among them stay among them, in other words. And I would say, yes, there should be. Some of the these guys are friends, and friends anywhere have each others backs, or the word has no meaning. More commonly, though, they’re competitors. To air a competitor’s dirty laundry seems equally treacherous; it could be done as revenge or pique or to get, unfairly, inside another guy’s head. That said, I don’t think Spadea crosses the line here. Yes, he describes an on-court episode that reflects poorly on James Blake; but as Spadea said when he was asked about it later, he did that because it showed that Blake, despite the public image, is not always Mr. Nice Guy. That’s hardly a dirty secret, just something of interest to any fan. Other than that, I feel like Spadea keeps more secrets than he tells: He says Roddick may have had a “run-in” with a famous “sitcom actress”; and he alludes, cryptically and creepily, to a “tireless” former world No. 1 who was rumored to prey on hotel maids. I really didn’t expect more. Did you?
Your other question concerned Spadea’s seeming split personality: Is the rapping-clown persona part of the real Vince; is it a publicity stunt; or is it a twisted form of self-entertainment?
Spadea clearly loves and uses hip-hop. It gets him pumped up, and I think he relates (or tries his best to relate) to the music's up-from-the-streets element. Most of all, it has allowed him to create a new persona. This is of particular importance to Spadea because of what his old persona was: The man who lost 21 matches in a row, the most in tennis history.
In the book, Spadea generally avoids mentioning the streak—I think it gets one line in the first 100 pages or so—but he does remember what he was called in the British press when he finally broke it. “Rusedski Loses to the Worst” one London paper bellowed after Spadea beat the Brit at Wimbledon and ended his losing skid. For a sensitive guy who had succeeded at every level of the sport, this had to be crushing.
So it makes sense, I guess, that the first time I can recall Spadea rapping (maybe a better term would be “rhyming”) was during the qualifiers at the U.S Open a few years ago, as he was beginning his long comeback from the abyss of his losing streak. He had been to the bottom, which seemed to liberate him—he could act out, invent a new personality, act the fool, what did it matter? At least it was better than being “the worst.” I think sinking that low also made Spadea desperate to find anything that would help him competitively. Creating a new, comic-fantasy version of himself as a word-slinger really did help his confidence ("ain't afraid a ya" is his motto now). He mentions in the book that he liked Gustavo Kuerten’s look when he let his hair get really wild. Spadea thinks it helps Kuerten intimidate his opponents, and says he’s going to grow his hair wild to see if he can scare people on court.
Is Vince-sanity the real Spadea? I think it is now, just like a lot of adult personalities compensate for adolescent insecurities. Vince, a one-track athlete as a kid, just found his a little later than most of us. Spadea mentions in passing that he was a fat kid in school. He seems to have solved that by developing an obsession with proper nutrition that sounds something like an eating disorder. Most important, the Crazy Vince we see in the video clip below has, against all odds (and perhaps taste), worked for him. He’s resurrected his career, and while he still own the longest losing streak in the sport, he will no longer be solely remembered as “the worst.”
Steve