Carlos Moya, who announced his retirement from tennis this week at age 34, was a lot of different things as a player. He was a physical force, with a low-to-the-ground solidity, a talent for backpedaling, and a live right arm; the Spaniard was an early adopter of the sleeveless look. I’ve been told that he was, and, I suppose, still is, handsome. So much so that he inspired one former female employee of Tennis Magazine to travel from New York to Key Biscayne for the sole purpose of attending his press conferences (and sitting on the beach during the hours when he wasn’t giving one). At the same time, there was an Old World reserve to the way Moya carried himself. In that way, he was the opposite of his fellow Mallorcan Rafael Nadal, who lets you know what he’s feeling with every snarl and eyebrow-raise. Moya kept things back.
His record could be seen as surprising. He finishes with 575 match wins, which puts him fourth on the ATP career list (can that be right?). That’s a testament to his longevity and his consistency over 15 years on tour, but the fact that the number is surprising is also, unfortunately, a testament to how little Moya did at the majors for most of his career. After reaching the Aussie Open final in 1997 and winning the French Open in 1998, he never threatened at another one. He turned, mysteriously, into a perennial quarterfinalist. Something, or someone, always got in his way in that round. That might make you think of Moya was a “transitional figure,” that the physical baseline game he brought to the sport in the late-90s quickly passed him by. It’s true, except that every tennis player is a transitional figure to some extent. From an historical perspective, Moya may be remembered best as the guy who made Rafael Nadal believe he could be a pro.
I liked to watch Moya play. He was calm but not boring, a little remote but still engaging. He played classic baseline tennis but he wasn’t robotic about it. It was fun to see how far he would go to his left to hit a forehand—would he climb into the stands? That, I suppose, is why he didn’t win more majors. He had to throw himself so far out of position so often that his game became riskier and more easily exploited than it should have been.
Seeing him over the years, it became clearer that Moya held back a lot. Like my former colleague, I liked to go to his press conferences, too. He had his monosyllabic moments, but I was always surprised by how articulate he could be in English. He came across as reasonable and mature. And funny—this week Moya said that he had “played his best tennis last century.” And maybe even goofy. I called his phone in Mallorca once for an interview and was greeted by an answering-machine message that he and his roommate—Carlos Moya had a roommate?—did as a back-and-forth rap. He liked to have a good time, and that may also explain why he fell from the heights he reached so young.
Two moments stick out, though, that showed how emotional Moya was about the sport, whatever his flaws or shortcomings. A few years ago, he won a minor tournament in South America. He hadn’t won anything for a while, and it was clear how much it meant to him. He didn’t just celebrate; he exulted from somewhere deep—he looked moved by winning a tennis match, as if it was a gift he never expected to get. (There’s some of that in the way Nadal celebrates as well.) But as deeply emotional as Moya was in victory that day, it paled in comparison to the depths of pain that registered on his face after he lost to Guillermo Coria in the quarterfinals (of course) at the French in 2004. Staggering to the sideline after shaking hands with Coria, Moya looked simply broken, his eyes hollow. It went past disappointment to . . . I don’t know, somewhere I never want to go myself, that’s all I can say.
Moya was first upstaged by the overweening excellence of Roger Federer (Moya called him “Feddy” and said, with a smile, that deep down he was “crazy”; takes one deep character to know another, I guess). And then he was upstaged by the brilliance of his kid brother, Nadal. It was in talking about Nadal, though, that Moya made my favorite comment of his. He was asked whether his willingness to practice with Nadal when Rafa was very young had helped his friend get better more quickly. Moya immediately answered, “Well maybe, but he helped me get better, too, even then.”
'Dios, Charlie. Thanks for showing us how deeply tennis can cut, in both directions.