The mastery and music of movement

"Stick it.”

“Keep dancing.”

Muhammad Ali never did just one thing. If he’s skipping, then he’s also talking, offering defiance, poetry, prediction.

The video is from October 1974, days before he fights George Foreman in Zaire.

Rope taps ground, sweat drips, words rain.

“I’ll be dancing all night.”

Of course once the fight starts, he decides instinctively not to dance and leans against the ropes and fools everyone and exhausts Foreman but that’s another story. But in his prime, he was shuffling, circling, leaning, darting, swaying, dodging, ducking, as if he was moving to music.

We’re always watching hands (and faces) in sport, the swishing bat, the dexterous racket, the feinting fist, but the legs are the soldiers. You see it in the sumo pushers and the quarterback shufflers. In swimmer Katie Ledecky subtly altering the beat of her kicks, and Al Oerter, four-time Olympic discus champion, working in the 1970s with an instructor in movement studies. Sometimes it’s obvious as in fencing, other times invisible, like water polo players— large people in dainty caps—doing an egg-beater kick to stay afloat.

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“Flighty steps, unsteady steps, and stomping steps are to be avoided,” wrote the ancient Japanese swordsman Miyamoto Musashi. He would have approved of D’Artagnan in the movies, or Michael Jordan and Lionel Messi in real life, all of them studies in body control and deceit. Ten years ago the Argentine felled Jérôme Boateng without even touching him. A dart, a dribble, and the defender, confused, unbalanced, fell over. Later, Boateng shrugged: to be embarrassed by Messi was a strange sort of honour.

This week the French Open is in full, dusty flow, the clay streaked with effort, slashed by the feet of the ambitious, and you can almost read movement in the markings, in the long slides, the braking, the semi-circular tap-dance to get around a backhand. Tennis players on the move are now physically comparable to any athlete, though Mahesh Bhupathi will tell you they’re incomparable.

“Five hours, dude,” he sighs impatiently.

As in who else runs so bloody fast for so bloody long.

“The javelin takes seconds,” he says. “Football, 90 minutes. And when you’re tired in tennis, you can’t high-five someone and sit on a bench. You have to finish the match.”

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He has a point, though marathoner Eliud Kipchoge might want to argue, and so might boxers. After Ali and Joe Frazier’s brutal bout in Manila, 1975, Mark Kram’s story in Sports Illustrated quoted Ali the next morning: “I heard somethin’ once. When somebody asked a marathon runner what goes through his mind in the last mile or two, he said that you ask yourself why am I doin’ this. You get so tired. It takes so much out of you mentally. It changes you. It makes you go a little insane. I was thinkin’ that at the end. Why am I doin’ this? What am I doin’ here in against this beast of a man? It’s so painful. I must be crazy.”

In Paris, there’s pain, too. There’s long days and points that refuse to finish and ice baths and mutinous shoulders. Then, says Somdev Devvarman, some days it’s cold and it rains and the ball turns heavier and the rallies slow further.

Bhupathi, four times doubles champion in Paris, talks about clay-court art—“slide, stop at the right time to hit a shot, then recover”—and Gaël Monfil’s raw speed and The Big Three who’d “defend, defend, defend, then take two steps in, cut a corner and turn defence to offence”.

Ask Devvarman, an analyst and a coach, if he watches feet, and he says, “100 per cent. I coach feet”. He played the Big Three in singles and remembers Federer’s gliding fluency, Djokovic’s flexibility (“creating power from parts of courts no one else could”) and Rafa’s doggedness. Every point played like a sacred pledge taken.

Once, Devvarman and his pal, the Taiwanese Lu Yen-hsun, sit down and analyse video of Federer’s footwork on the backhand. “It’s so smooth, so efficient, you sort of didn’t pay attention to it,” he says. “His genius was to hit a backhand near the alley and in a blink of an eye get back to where he needed to be, ready to attack the next ball. Most people take an extra step and are out of position.”

Devvarman understood the degree of difficulty because he and Lu, top 100 guys then and no slouches, tried to imitate this on the practice court.

“Close to impossible,” he laughs now.

Everyone has favourite movers, for me in the old days Miloslav Mečíř, a sleepy fisherman come to graceful life on court who was known as Gattone. The Big Cat. Bhupathi, who reduces tennis to “head, heart, legs”, ruminates about Boris Becker, a truck of a man with a sportscar engine, lunging, diving, at the net “impossible to get through him”.

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Now, says Bhupathi, Aryna Sabalenka is a “formidable athlete”, while Devvarman is impressed by Coco Gauff. In the men’s field, the choir boy-faced Jannik Sinner has legs like stilts but accelerates as if on skates, but it’s Carlos Alcaraz, moving faster than a lit trail of gunpowder, whose flamboyant style, sideways and forward, catches attention.

Recently, in a Tennis Channel discussion, Andre Agassi, a part-time Yoda, said of Alcaraz on clay and grass, “You get to anything slippery, and it seems like Alcaraz’s movement doesn’t diminish nearly as much as anybody else. It’s almost like he’s a spaceship playing against normal airplanes or something.”

These athletes are rugged, explosive products of practice sessions involving bungee cords, stretch bands, agility ladders, cones. Except just when they think they’re running hard, they might slide into a plaque that’s recently been embedded into Court Philippe-Chatrier.

It’s got Rafael Nadal’s footprint on it and it rests there not just as a tribute but as a reminder, a provocation, an inspiration and a command.

Vamos. Let’s go.

Rohit Brijnath is an assistant sports editor at The Straits Times, Singapore, and a co-author of Abhinav Bindra’s book A Shot At History: My Obsessive Journey To Olympic Gold. He posts @rohitdbrijnath.

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