No rest for player or writer or fan alike: Key Biscayne is upon us. But I'm not quite ready to be upon it. I'll do a women's preview tomorrow and a men's preview Thursday, but for today I'll wrap up the last loose ends and thoughts from my 10 days in Indian Wells.
*
It’s very difficult to imagine a lifestyle different from yours until you try it. How, I’m always wondering, do tennis players spend so much of their time in transitory spaces—taking cars to airports, sitting in airports, flying on planes, taking shuttles to tournament sites, checking into the next hotel? It sounds like a life of non-stop hassle, not glamour.
Sometimes it even seems perilous. My first flight yesterday was in a prop plane from Palm Springs to Las Vegas. It was fine, except for those moments when the little tin can was rocking so severely that the world outside the windows became blurry. Oh, and except for that loud, unexplained ringing that began when we reached what can euphemistically called our “cruising” altitude. And except for the fact that, when we landed, we spent a fair amount of time rushing down the runway with just one of the wheels on the ground. One thing you can say for prop planes, with the roar and blinding brightness through the windows, you really do feel like you’re in the air—but I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. As for airports, I’m glad they exist in a way: They make me thankful for every moment I’m not in one.
Hotels are a different story. I’ve always loved them, their deluxe hospitality, their anonymity, their beds. I stayed at a middle-of-the-road chain hotel in Indian Wells, where a tiny ant or two could be spotted around the sink, but I looked forward to getting back to my room after the day was done, lying in bed and doing nothing more than zoning out to a basketball game. I can see the appeal of this part of the lifestyle: You live a little more lightly in a hotel than you do when you’re at home. You don’t feel the weight, the permanence, of your surroundings. And you have a maid who comes every day.
*
Each year there’s one morning when I walk into the Indian Wells Tennis Garden around 9:00, an hour or so earlier than normal. The sun is rising, the birds are singing, the mountains are still there, there’s quiet all around. The loudest sounds are the grunts and sneaker-squeaks of the players on the courts. Every year these sounds remind me all over again that there is one other aspect to being a professional tennis player that I would find extremely difficult to endure: I’m talking about practice. Specifically, early-morning practice. Seeing the players out running, swinging, sweating, hitting ball after ball at that hour makes me realize how much of a chore this thing that goes by the name of a “sport” can be.
When you and I play, we do it for recreation. All of our exercise is recreation, which means that it’s fun or relaxing or sanity promoting or something similarly salutary—in short, it’s not work. But what if it were work? Everyone knows that the minute a hobby becomes a job, the nature of it changes and some of the pure enjoyment goes out of it.
I got a little taste of that feeling in college, when I had to go to practice each day. The toughest thing for me was getting started, getting my body into it and the blood flowing all over again every 24 hours. So whenever I see a pro getting loose and warming-up for yet another practice session, I cringe. The repetition, of ball after ball after ball, must be mind-numbing. And while sweating feels good even if it’s done for work, a sense of pointlessness can invade even the most productive practice session after a certain amount of time. You know that no matter how many good shots you’ve hit, perfect shots even, you're not doing it when it counts. I sometimes found practicing well to be a burden. It only made me more disappointed when I couldn’t reproduce that form in matches. All of those great practice shots had been exposed as an illusion. Worse, they showed me what my potential was, and exactly how much my nerves kept me from reaching that potential.
Anyway, those are the thoughts that I happily leave behind as I walk away from the practice courts and all that early effort. I’m off to have my breakfast, which this year consisted of two donuts and a cup of coffee. These I consumed in a room manned by volunteers, ladies in green Indian Wells jackets and khaki capris. I enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversations. Nothing was left unsaid.
“I think the licorice jar needs to be refilled.”
“More people are eating it today than yesterday, I think.”
“I love licorice. I could eat that whole jar myself if you let me.”
“Well, let me go back and get some more, before there’s nothing left.”
“It’s empty much earlier than yesterday.”
*
Do tennis players really hate to lose? Sometimes it seems to come as a relief. And do they really despise facing the press after these losses? For three players are Indian Wells, their pressers served as therapy sessions; each left much happier than when they came in.
After Jelena Jankovic’s dismally tame defeat at the hands of Ana Ivanovic, Jankovic could be heard outside the press room loudly telling someone, “I don’t know what to say to them!” Not surprisingly, her first few answers were a little grim. Halfway through, JJ’s face brightened. She began to enjoy talking about what she had done wrong. She left with a smile.
Ditto for Maria Sharapova. You would have thought that her even-more-dismal semifinal defeat at the hands of Caroline Wozniacki would have left her a broken shell of a player. But perhaps because it was so bad, she was relaxed about it afterward. Rambling and giggling, she didn’t seem to want to leave the interview room.
And how about Rafael Nadal? After each of his wins last week, he faced the press with a mix of concern and cautious optimism. At no point was he as free and easy as he was after losing the final to Djokovic. Nadal sat sideways in his chair, smiling and shaking his head. When someone asked him if he thought Djokovic or Federer would end up No. 1, Nadal joked, “So you don’t think I have a chance?” Watching him, I almost get the feeling that defeat somehow confirms Nadal’s exceptionally realistic worldview. As he might say, defeat, rather than victory, is the “true” of the world.
*
One of the nicest things, from my point of view, about Indian Wells is the tournament’s annual award for lifetime achievement to a deserving journalist. This year it went to Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times. He’s a legend in the area, and I was honored to watch a few NCAA buzzer-beaters with him in the press room this year—“Wow, I’m watching a game with Bill Dwyre.” He’s also one of the few veteran sportswriters who has never lost his love for tennis, though there are tradeoffs. I was standing next to him for the end of the Karlovic-Nadal thriller. If Rafa lost, both us were going to have spend a couple of extra hours going to pressers, dissecting the upset, and trying to figure out when it meant for Nadal's future. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect for anyone in the room (now you know how journalists root in tennis; for the result that doesn’t force them to start a new article at 11 P.M.) At one point, Dwyre turned to me and said, “Late-night tennis. It’ll make you grow old fast.” My favorite moment of the tournament was sitting out in the press seats with all of my colleagues and having Dwyre, while receiving his award, gesture to us in fittingly nonchalant solidarity.
*
We’ve already talked airplanes, so all that’s left for this last Indian Wells is to talk a little music. I mentioned earlier that I was stuck with the horrors of Palm Springs radio, and as hard as I tried to be democratic and non-snobbish and to figure out what the heck teenagers listen to now and why, it was mostly a vast wasteland to my ears. L’il Wayne, OK, will check him out some more. But Enrique Iglesias? Not so much. The one newish pop song I liked was about a girl who’s been good all her life but now she’s going to be bad.
But there were two moments, two oases in the desert. One was a set of songs featuring Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich that I’d never heard before. At night, on the road, their music cut through everything, and came slamming right into you (see Parker and Rich together here).
The second moment came in the bright morning sunshine, as I was leaving Indian Wells and driving to the airport. It was a weird coincidence. One day during the Australian Open, I was walking through a Melbourne park when I had—as I’m sure you’ve had many times—an overwhelming urge to hear “Little Doll” by the Stooges. It didn’t happen then, but I got my wish in California. Someone, deep on the left side of the dial, must have taken pity on me and my plight with the car radio, because as I turned onto the highway, “Little Doll” came crashing through the speakers. I’d like to say I was driving off into the sunset when I heard it, but it was too early for that. Either way, hearing those immortal, and immortally dumb, opening lines—“Little doll I can’t forget/Smoking on a cigarette”—was a great way to go out.