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If I’m remarking on tennis more than usual over the last few weeks, put it down to both to my love for the sport and the Australian Open tournament. And bear with me.
Something remarkable played out in the Australian Open. Of the eight singles semi-finalists—the women, the men—only two were below 30 years old (Coco Vandeweghe and Grigor Dimitrov). Those two and another semi-finalist, Mirjana-Lucic Baroni, were the only ones who had not already won a Grand Slam. In fact, the other five (Serena and Venus Williams, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka) had each won multiple Slams: Wawrinka, with three titles, was the least accomplished of the lot.
What’s my point? In tennis, we seem to be in an era not just of several all-time great players, but one in which older players are dominating the game. That’s what’s remarkable.
But some perspective, first. It’s not that older players haven’t turned out in other sports. Arjuna Ranatunga played Test cricket well into his 37th year; Sachin Tendulkar till after he turned 40; Graham Gooch into his 42nd year; Misbah-ul-Haq will turn 43 this year; and from a previous era, and famously, Wilfred Rhodes played his last Test at the age of 52.
But that’s cricket. There are reasons it was once called the gentleman’s game. Only in the last 20 or 30 years, arguably, and perhaps especially with the coming of T20, has there been a premium on youth and fitness. Today it is impossible to imagine a 52 year-old playing a Test, and Misbah is an anachronism in more ways than one. That’s cricket today.
There’s also (American) football. The upcoming National Football League’s Super Bowl will see the New England Patriots playing the Atlanta Falcons. At quarterback for the Falcons is Matt Ryan, who is 31. Tom Brady is the Patriots’ quarterback, and he’s 39. Plenty of other footballers have played into their 30s as well.
But apart from those two sports, I cannot think of another—or at least, one involving the level of exertion that tennis demands—in which the best players are all deep into their 30s. Can you? Not squash, not football, not track and field, not hockey.
And yet what makes tennis today stand out even more is that the story of the game over the last 30 years or so has generally been of stars making their mark young. John McEnroe, Jennifer Capriati, Boris Becker, Martina Hingis, the Williams sisters, Nadal, Michael Chang, Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras—all came to professional tennis in their teens. Think of it: Becker won Wimbledon at 17 in 1985; Chang won the French at 17 in 1989. Following those and other triumphs, the conventional wisdom was that this was now no game for old men and women.
The game had evolved to where ever-younger players—with their power and energy—were bursting on the scene, challenging the older and more established stars. One sign of this was that the best young players began skipping college—in the US at any rate, a remarkably competitive training ground for the game—to turn pro. McEnroe was one of the first high-profile tennis stars to do so—he actually enrolled at Stanford, won the national collegiate championship (the NCAAs) and then dropped out to join the pro circuit.
But take Andy Roddick. His brother John had been a tennis star at the University of Georgia. But Andy got so good so young that he didn’t even consider college—in fact, he turned professional before he was even done with high school, in 2000. (Three years later, he won his only Grand Slam title, the US Open.)
A game for the young, we followers of the game thought through much of the 1990s and 2000s.
Two names probably began changing that idea: Serena Williams and Roger Federer. Both have been dominant for years, beating off repeated challenges from emerging stars. With Federer, he was so good that when a few other players finally reached his level and began beating him—Nadal, Djokovic, Murray, Wawrinka—they too dominated the game in their turn for several more years, together beating off still more emerging stars.
You could make a similar case for the women’s game. Only in 2016 did a serious contender for the post-Serena best in the world emerge, Angelique Kerber, and she was already 28. Besides, she lost early in this Australian Open anyway. To no tennis fan’s surprise, Serena was still there at the business end of the tournament (and went on to win it, reaching a record 23 Grand Slam titles).
Over the last decade and more, the men’s game, especially, is littered with highly-touted young prospects who couldn’t quite penetrate that inner circle at the very top and who are themselves now getting close to their 30s. Think of Monfils, Tsonga, Baghdatis, Isner, Dimitrov, Gonzales… The fallout is what we see today: the game dominated by a clutch of older players.
Despite this attempt at analysis, I’d like to think there’s a reason for this phenomenon in age itself. In years gone by, a younger player might have simply been able to blow an older one off the court with power and fitness. That’s what marked the emergence of Jimmy Connors, Becker and Pete Sampras, as well as Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams. But today, fitness levels have progressed so much that they are no longer much of a factor in a top-level tennis match. Everyone hits the ball with ferocious power. Including the old fogeys.
In such a climate, perhaps there’s a premium on experience and thinking: the very qualities that players who have been around for years are able to call on. They can work out a plan for how best to beat the newest hotshot, and then put it into effective action.
You can almost see this happen at times. Take, for example, the way both Murray (the final of Wimbledon last year) and Nadal (quarterfinal of this Australian Open) simply dismantled the game of a fine young Canadian, Milos Raonic. Raonic has all the tools, and has noticeably improved his volleying in the last year or two. Yet on the biggest stage, for the biggest stakes, Nadal and Murray knew what they had to do to win. After his victory, Nadal even revealed that he had decided to stand closer to the line to receive Raonic’s massive serve—a counterintuitive move if there ever was one, but just part of his successful plan.
The older you get, the more you’re willing and able to bring to your game the intangibles. Which is why I think we’re going to see at least a few more Grand Slams go by without the young whippersnappers breaking through. As I whirl through the years myself, there’s something almost satisfying there.
Once a computer scientist, Dilip D’Souza now lives in Mumbai and writes for his dinners. His latest book is Jukebox Mathemagic: Always One More Dance.
His Twitter handle is @DeathEndsFun
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