Howdy, Tribe. I'll be posting an on-the-spot report on the Paris Indoors, courtesy of Rosangel, a little later today. Tomorrow, we'll begin coverage of the WTA Championships in Madrid. I'll be out of the office Thursday through next Tuesday, but you will have Crisis Center posts for the YEC, and more.
Last week, I indulged in a little navel-gazing while contemplating the unrelated plights of Martina Hingis, who stands accused of having tested positive for cocaine ingestion following the results of her drug test at Wimbledon, and Nikolay Davydenko, who has troubles of a less specific but multi-fronted nature. In contemplating those situations, I speculated a little on the harsh demands of "professionalism." To what extent should we expect our tennis heroes to lead exemplary lives, and hold them to a standard we don't necessarily apply to ourselves? Sometimes, on-the-job performance clashes with our personal needs, or even our not-entirely-healthy indulgences. Who among us hasn't failed to perform his or her job obligations with complete dedication and efficiency at one time or another?
Now, thanks to the way David Nalbandian has been playing, we can include him in this discussion. I have new post up at ESPN on Nalbandian's most excellent European indoor adventure, and I'm using that as a jumping off point for this discussion. Many of us enjoy tweaking the Plump Prince of the Pampas, and if you read these posts and comments too literally, you could easily decide that we're too busy ridiculing Nalbandian to truly appreciate his talents.
Actually, the truth is that we stand in awe of the sleeping tiger that is occasionally roused in Nalbandian, but having a little fun with him is irresistible, for reasons that go right to the heart of the relevant issue, which is: how much quintessential "professionalism" do we really have a right to demand,or need, when it comes to heroes in short pants? The bar for professionalism has been set impossibly high in recent years by the likes of Justine Henin, Roger Federer, Maria Sharapova, Rafael Nadal and other marquee names. That makes it curiously refreshing to have among us players who have all too human foibles and sometimes mortifying lapses of "professionlism", including (cigarette) smokin' Svetlana Kuznetsova, peak-scaling Marat Safin, Fatty Nalbandian, suspected depressive Patty Schnyder, and even sun-and-fun lovin' Marcos Baghdatis.
When you think about it, the number of players for whom life sometimes gets in the way of tennis is a rather long list, peopled with some of the most engaging and likable personalities of our time. When I conceived this post, I had planned to lament the demise of a once ubiquitous tennis character - the tennis bum. The tennis bum, originally, was the amateur-era tennis nut who traveled the globe, often living hand-to-mouth, simply because he or she wanted to do nothing but play tennis. But most tennis bums didn't want to just play tennis, contradictory as that may sound. What they wanted was to travel the world, experiencing all that it had to offer, using their racquets as excuse and entre. To wit: Lennart Bergalin, a fine player whose accomplishments were eclipsed by the job he did as Bjorn Borg's coach, allegedly met a girl on the Australian grass-court tour. He bought a motorcycle and, with his new squeeze, took off on a "discover Australia" tour. None of his fellow tennis bums heard a word from him for weeks.
Although the Open era threatened to put an end to those kinds of Livin' Large shenanigans by raising the dedication bar for pro players impossibly high, the tennis bum tradition was never entirely extinguished. Italy contributed a fair number of pasta-slammin', skirt-chasing, practice is for "domani" (tomorrow) warriors over the years. Vitas Gerulaitis really did spend numerous nights in nightclubs, sampling all the attendant vices, only to go out and play tennis matches the morning after. A fine female player (who shall remain nameless) once was so enchanted by a ballboy at the Italian Open that she went on her own "Discover Italy" tour, sans motorcycle.
We tend to love players who love life, and the extent to which we call them out, or even just have a little fun with them, is a sign of the degree to which we have been mesmerized and turned into sanctimonious weekday preachers by the icy professionalism has become coin of the realm. Back in the day, players would sit around in the locker room telling stories that often began something like this: We were just going to grab a quick bite, but then this guy we met at the bar. . . and ended with something like this: So there I was, without my gear, fifteen miles from the hotel, when I heard I was first on in 45 minutes on center court. . .
It's heartwarming to see that tradition live on, although it's kind of a shame that the pressure on the players to "act professionally", combined with and driven by the intensity of the media scrutiny, keeps us from ever really hearing the juicy details when a player strays from the straight and narrow. Instead, we just see the evidence in the heft of the pot belly, the stringy, unwashed hair, the inexplicable nose-dive in the rankings (has anyone heard a peep from Xavier Malisse lately?). Where we once celebrated the real lives of tennis players, we now count beans and bow humbly before their on-court statistics. It isn't really our fault and it isn't theirs, either. We only know what we know.
So what's up with Nalbandian and this sudden surge of interest, ambition and, well, "professionalism"? Why this run, at this time of year? Here are some theories, feel free to add some of your own:
1 - Contract time. Most players have incentives in their racquet and clothing contracts, as well as some of their ancillary endorsement deals. Remember Andrei Medvedev, the amiable, life-loving Russian who became an international sensation at age 17? He more or less fell off the tennis front pages not long after he signed an extremely lucrative long-term deal with Fila. Word around the locker rooms and player lounges when he made that late-career run that landed him in the French Open final opposite Andre Agassi was that he was playing less for Grand Slam glory than bargaining power as his contract was up for renewal. Granted, that's a rather scurrilous interpretation and its impossible to fact-check it. But there's the theory.
2 - Nalbandian rented a DVD of the movie, Shanghai Surprise, and somehow got into his head that Madonna is actually living there, and he wants to meet her.
3 - He needs to raise capital to put together a rally-racing team.
4 - Somebody pointed out that he was behind in his head-to-head with The Mighty Fed, and that put a bee in his bonnet.
5 - He's got nothing better to do, what with the next World Cup competition still a couple of years away.
6 - Swimming with the sharks (the kind with fins) in Melbourne and bungee jumping in Vienna (he once hurled himself off the 152-meter high Danube tower) just doesn't float his boat anymore.
Whatever the case, tennis bum David Nalbandian has decided to act interested again, and we're all better off for it. Gotta love the boy, although I have a feeling that TMF and Rafael Nadal are having a gross of Krispy Kreme donuts delivered to his hotel room in Shanghai on the eve the Masters.