Sometimes to win a match you need to swallow your vomit.
This isn’t pride, it’s a tactic.
Somdev Devvarman, on his way to becoming a full-time tennis coach, is re-telling a tale he heard on the tennis tour from 20 years ago about two top players.
It’s Miami, a cruel heat rising, the match tight. One player looks like he’s going to pass out. The second, who’s throwing up in his mouth, notices this. If he lets the vomit go, his rival might notice it and get a second wind. So he swallows it and comes out of the changeover walking with an exaggerated sense of well being.
He wins, his rival retires, and this is quick thinking in distress. It’s what the best sport asks: can you, alone, suffer and solve all at once?
All of us on the outside are trying to get inside sport. Find someone to take us within the lines and let us taste the constant choices they make, the pain they wear, the instincts they trust. The astute journalist Prem Panicker says that wrestler Sakshi Malik, with the aid of the excellent Jonathan Selvaraj, does it in her book, Witness (next on my reading list).
Eventually competition involves rapid interpretation of a constantly altering puzzle. Roger Federer, in an explanation to comedian and television host Trevor Noah about people he often played against, spoke of “chess” and “patterns”.
“It’s very clear what he wants. It’s very clear what I want. The question is, is one of us going to back out of it, or are we just going to say, like, OK, let’s see what you got on the day. He might not have the best day. Maybe I don’t have my best day.”
Should one stay with a pattern and when should one change?
“If he goes short-angle cross court,” said Federer, “do I have to go back cross-court and let him try to thread the needle up the line? Or do I take charge and...go up the line and break it up? But then, does it look like an escape from me? Or is that a specific play I use?”
Questions. Quandaries. All at 150 kmph. The player alone. The match slipping away. After a 15-20 shot rally, he searches for oxygen, towel, an idea. Instinct is one thing, intelligence another.
Recently on a plane Devvarman replayed the tape of his match against Rafael Nadal in Indian Wells and realised the commentators never mentioned the wind which affected play. But on court he was thinking: Which side are the errors coming from? If Rafa is playing with the wind, and his errors are generally long, what shots do I need to hit to elicit those errors?
Devvarman speaks about a life of untangling riddles on the run. One year he plays Björn Phau at the Australian Open and his brain is gauging and calculating. “He wants width. Don’t give him angles. Serve to the body. Make him feel he has to hit 3-4 great shots to win a point.” Devvarman wins easily and says, “from the outside it must have looked boring, from the inside it was fascinating”.
At dinners on tour, solving situations is all he talked about with coaches. “Ask any player and they’ll tell you it’s uncomfortable to play against a rival who’s injured. Do you play the injury? How injured is he? If you’re injured, how much do you show or fake it?”
But on court, all this you had to compute yourself. In a way, this sport was always played single-handed. If your tactics were a dud, or you couldn’t read a serve, or your mettle was corroding, too bad. Sure, coaches were trying to surreptitiously pass signals, but primarily you were on trial alone.
Of course not all tradition in sport is precious but in tennis this was sacred: One vs one in its purest sense never involved more than two people.
But of course they’ve ruined it.
The International Tennis Federation (ITF) has decided off-court coaching—which has been trialled on some tours—will be allowed in tennis from 2025. Now signals from coaches are fine. Now brief chats are permissible between points and longer ones at the change of ends. You can tell a player his rival is cramping in case he missed it. You can adjust his court position. Used to be a time when all frustrated players could do was throw up their hands. Now someone is there to hold it.
This column is a lament. Self-reliance was written into tennis’ specific culture. It wasn’t a better sport, just different. No caddie to advise, no boxing second to say “go to the body”, no badminton guru to reassure mid-match. McEnroe had to solve Borg alone (there were no real entourages till Pat Cash arrived with his posse in 1987). Players barely looked at their boxes once. Now you can ask your data-scrolling coach where you should lean for a serve at breakpoint. Left, sonny.
Coaches have become gods and brands. They’re essential to the sandpapering of athletes but pampering must have a limit. High-wire walkers cross gorges unaided, but tennis players now get a safety net?
The ITF says this will “make tennis fairer and, potentially, more entertaining”. No, watching a player’s sweaty, solo struggle to interpret a rival is entertaining. And in an already uneven sport, where some athletes can barely afford coaches and others travel with the equivalent of a minor king’s retinue, this widens the unfairness. And let’s not even start with the possible mayhem in junior tennis.
Gifted players will remain agile decoders of rivals. Jannik Sinner will still have to think for himself mid-point and detonate pin-point forehands. But now there’s the reassurance of help courtside to lean on and it gently dilutes the edgy, taut beauty of gladiatorial combat. My friend Panicker found the perfect phrase for this altered world. Tennis by committee.
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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