This week’s You Tube post comes with a personal agenda. Yesterday was my birthday—let’s just say that rather than pushing 40, 40 has finally pushed back—and I wanted to find a clip taken from that day, May 7, 1969. The closest I could get was the above video from the French Open final between Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, played in early June of the same year. Not that I’m complaining—it’s hard to find two players from any era that are more enjoyable to watch roam a tennis court.
I was asked yesterday if I “felt different.” I spent some time thinking about it this morning and decided that, if anything, I feel more like I always have. Forty is just what it claims to be: 20 times 2. I could be two 20-year-olds stacked on top of each other: The same desires, fears, mystifications, and occasional moments of happy abandon I felt at that age have only doubled in the time since.
The highlight of the day was my first dinner at the famed Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan. Finishing up the main course, thinking how the food was so good it almost seemed silly, some bittersweet words from Bob Dylan came to mind: “It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be.” Leave it to Dylan to put his finger on what really hurts: It isn’t the knowledge that life is so bad, it’s the knowledge that it can be so good, if only you could make it that way.
Anyway, how about some Rocket vs. Muscles?
—Let me start with a pointless but to me interesting aside: Steffi Graf was born one week after this match.
—These guys both strode around with sloped shoulders between points—so much for the usefulness of intimidating body language. In Laver’s case, he looks relaxed and unhurried. In Rosewall’s, he looks beaten down. Which is not surprising considering that he is down two sets and a break when the clip begins. The other thing I immediately notice is the plainness of their all-white clothes. That’s not a tennis tradition that I miss.
—Laver’s service trademark is the quick step forward with his back foot. He begins the wind-up languidly, then kicks into gear with his left foot. He seems to hit an accelerator mid-serve, and that ability to shift into a higher gear mid-way through a point is characteristic of his game. I’m surprised by Rosewall’s lack of upward extension on his serve. He seems content to get it in deep, but without much force.
—Laver serving and volleying on clay. A nice half-volley; he has no trouble keeping his body moving forward through it. You can see his great feel for the ball in this shot, and in the compact way he snaps off his forehand ground stroke with little backswing. If Nadal does it with biceps, Laver did it with that tree-trunk forearm.
—Love the Laver backspin. The slice deep in the court is the most aristocratic of strokes. But he could come over the ball as well. Like Federer, Laver seems to be in a constant transition game, always ready and able to turn a point on its head, even on clay.
—No sitting down on the changeovers. You can see why every round at men’s tournaments was once 3 out of 5 sets. They took so much less time between points and games in the pre-TV era.
—It’s instructive to watch the game’s legends in real time, rather than through highlights of their best moments. Not only do you learn from their methods, but you realize that they were human, and no more perfect than today’s players. Laver is cruising until he serves for the match; then, out of nowhere, he’s broken. Rosewall then takes the serve and proceeds to play a horrible game of his own to give the title to Laver. The Rosewall backhand is one of the consensus greatest strokes in the sport’s history, but he could also dump it in the middle of the net with an ugly swing on a big point, as he does in the final game of this match. More than that, Rosewall is visibly negative in this clip. He threatens to bang a ball out of the stadium, Safin-style, after one error. For some reason, seeing this from a vaunted Aussie legend makes me feel good. Even he could let his emotions get the best of him.
—Laver was an athlete to his core. You can see it in the way he backpedals for an overhead, as if he’s relishing every step as well as the chance to jump back and smash the ball inside out. The Rocket was a down to earth guy who played percentage net-rushing tennis, but you also get the feeling he loved to do the spectacular. At the start of his career, he had to learn to rein that tendency in.
—Rosewall had beaten Laver in the final at Roland Garros the year before, in the first open Grand Slam. In '69, Laver turned the tables and went on to win the Grand Slam. Rafael Nadal may leave this year’s French Open with the same opportunity. That fact is the same, but you can see that almost everything else about the sport has changed radically, from the clothes to the strokes to the championship celebrations. If tennis on YouTube shows us anything, it’s that a lot can happen in 40 years.
Included in my ongoing birthday celebration will be a trip to Madrid next week. I’m going for vacation, but I’ll be at the tournament for at least one day. I'll do a draw breakdown this weekend and be back later with a report from inside the confines of tennis' newest, most futuristic, and best-named three-retractable-roof facility, the Magic Box.
Have a good weekend.