We blew it.
No question about it.
Call it neglect or indulgence, or simple short-sightedness — whatever. But tennis is facing a crisis. All our great characters — those bigger-than-life entertainers who captured our imagination with far more than forehand winners are now an endangered species.
Right there — on the dreadful edge of extinction — is perched that unique sub-species of humanity, those let-er-rip tennis players in the tradition of Ilie Nastase, Vitas Gerulaitis, Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Yannick Noah and Goran Ivanisevic, great personalities who continually brought sass ‘n sizzle to stuffy ol’ tennis; fellows who insisted that life was just too short to be reigned in by dreary rulebooks, bothersome code penalties, snooty suits in flawless blazers or, God forbid, the game’s longstanding ethos/post-Victorian propriety — “Well-played, lad. Well-played.”
Now we will be left to stare into a certain gray monotone, the humdrum of reality. The last of the great characters, Marat Safin, is fading in the dusk, on the dreary cusp of retirement.
Whether winning when he wasn’t supposed to (the ‘00 U.S. Open against Sampras) or losing when he should have won (the ‘02 Aussie Open final against Thomas Johansson) — Safin was always good value. Who else could confide about a match: “I was trying to give up, but I couldn’t.” Only Safin could give us possibly the best existential take on confidence in the history of sport. “Confidence is like love,” he informed us. “When you look too hard, you don’t find it. When you let it come naturally, it happens.” Of one loss to a journeyman, he said, “I didn’t like playing today. I am not a morning person.” He was once fined for not trying.
Like Nastase, Safin had a penchant for mooning linespersons (just ask those red-faced French Open officials). Like Gerulaitus, he liked the ladies. His Friends Box (often crowded with the curviest of young lasses in high stilettos and low cut frocks) was a gawker’s delight. Like Noah, he could be the life of the party. Like Connors, he saw the game as entertainment. He had a droll sense of humor, like Ivanisevic, that reduced cynical writers to belly laughs. And as with Mac, he felt it his sworn duty to crush rackets: he smashed an unofficial record of 48 in ‘99 and heartily defended his swath of mass destruction by playing his chi or shakti card. “I’m not a complete nutcase,” he argued. “Sometimes breaking a racket…let’s out the bad energy and then you get calmer.”
Sunken eyes, somber woe-is-me voice, brooding and put upon ‘tude, for Safin our world was both a whimsical farce and a cautionary domain — unfair and imposing.
Yes, his game was erratic and his career arc wobbly. After he shocked Sampras to win the ‘00 U.S. Open, conventional wisdom insisted he would soon be The Next Great One. But little did we know this was Marat Safin. Soon his career was stalled by a string of injuries and a less-than-intense work ethic. Yes, he won one of the most well played matches of the decade, a classic five-set victory over Federer in the ‘05 Aussie Open semis, and went on to ruin the dream of Lleyton Hewitt, the seemingly unconquerable local hero.
But all the while he was consistent in launching controversial opinions. Here was an equal opportunity abuser.
Of the U.S. Open he said, “There are constant transport problems…The food is unbearable. You get dried pizza, which has been lying around for about five hours, coffee is black water. And after September 11, the police have become animalistic — they are everywhere, questioning you…If you say something wrong you will be taken to police headquarters. You’re forced to take shoes off at the airport…This makes me mad.”
Not that he was a Wimbledon cheerleader. While many adore the First Church of Tennis, Marat complained, “You have to wear white, be nice and polite to people.” And then there was his infamous spaghetti rant: “I do not like this tournament. We get 20 pounds for lunch. I have a coach and a masseuse, and one portion of the most uneatable spaghetti costs 12 pounds. A portion of tasteless strawberries with cream from a sachet costs five pounds, coffee, another five. The rest of the food is horrible-fish and chips…What’s really unappealing is disrespect. How can you give such a treatment to people?”
Perhaps, not surprisingly, Safin had a resonance with the people of France. There, claimed writer Andrew Parker, it wasn’t hard to “see why the Parisians were so keen on him. He shares many of their qualities, being mercurial, grumpy, dramatic and occasionally prone to staying out late. Added to which, he’s named for a hero of the French Revolution, Jean-Paul Marat.”
Historians will inform you that Jean-Paul Marat was famous for his impassioned protestations. And so was Marat Safin. His basic take on tennis was simple. It had suffered dearly from the triumph of the control freaks. “All the people who run the sport have no clue,” asserted Safin. “It’s a pity that tennis is going down the drain…You’re not allowed to do this, you’re not allowed to do that. You’re not allowed to speak…It’s just ridiculous…Every year it gets worse.”
But mighty Marat — no matter how dishwater-dull tennis may have become, it’s still a game of results and the erratic results of a former No. 1 (who both heroically led his nation to Davis Cup triumph over France in ‘02 and Argentina in ‘06 saw his ranking dip to No. 104 in ‘06 and lost to the virtually unknown Jesse Levine in the first round this year at Wimbledon) drew a wide range of overly simple or perhaps far too complex analyses.
Marat himself was fond of accessing his losses by simply stating the obvious. “Whatever I did was wrong,” he would proclaim. And his sister, Dinara Safina — the ‘I-too-can-brood’ world No. 1 (who in some ways is a less intense, less flamboyant female version of her older brother), famously quipped, that whatever Marat has done, she wants to do the opposite.
But others were prone to impose nuanced complexities on his game and why he fell short. For instance, of Safin’s two-fisted backhand, John Jeremiah Sullivan wrote: “He pounds to a stop at the last second and performs the daintiest little touch-drop volley. The effect of this maneuver is a bit like seeing a pterodactyl that was flying straight at you suddenly shift into a moth and flutter away.”
To Sullivan, “Safin’s relationship to the game is fundamentally aesthetic…What he cares about most is playing beautiful tennis, which for Safin means playing perfectly. That he occasionally achieved this is sort of cruel…[his incredible play at] the U.S. Open final against Sampras in 2000 had hurt…Every time he stepped on a court he expected to play that way.”
Many observers simply dismissed Safin as an underachiever. Unlike the greats — Roger, Rafa, Pete, Andre and Lendl — Marat only had indifferent ambitions and squandered his abundant talents. Life was just too alluring. Yes, his mother was a severe tennis taskmaster, Russia’s answer to Gloria Connors – with a tennis academy. But Safin was just not the type to buy into the sometimes soul-deadening lockstep of fierce conditioning and laser-like focus that produces that most rare of diamonds – the dominant champion.
Of course, Safin adeptly spun how he lost the cruelest battle in sports — the game of expectations. He didn’t hesitate to remind critics of his many injuries, especially his knee, and how for years he played in pain. Then he would follow up with a disarming theory. “You know what,” he contended. “In the history of tennis, everybody’s an underachiever — every single player. Agassi should have been winning, I don’t know, 15 Grand Slams. Sampras should have been winning 20. Federer should have 25. [Marcello] Rios at least five…It’s like everybody’s underachiever. Everybody could do better.”
But now it’s clear. There is no one on the scene now who can step up with personality, originality and charm to fill the critical role of “tennis character” as Marat has done for many a season. The Mighty Federer is Swiss-contained, a smoothly run brand. Rafa is way beyond polite. Murray is a sober, sometimes sullen Scot. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils are French works in progress. Yes, Roddick has a wicked, frat-boy humor, but now he’s a married man deep into his career whose wild and crazy side is primarily in evidence in the locker room and his pressroom zingers don’t really translate into some sort of broadly defined rebel, comic or character. As for Novak Djokovic, the once hilarious mime, with his spot-on imitations, was a spontaneous delight before certain of his fellow players, with their penchant for control and propriety, bristled no way and he reigned himself in.
Yannick Noah once said players each have their own roles: the clown, the rebel, the robot. And with Safin’s pending retirement we mourn the departure of what may be the game’s last true character: moody Marat with his lovely ladies, predictable protests and sky-is-falling mindset; a Russian soul minted in Moscow’s deep winter angst and shaped by the high intensity spotlight of international sport, the high-life joys of metro discos and the ‘Melbourne today, Monte Carlo tomorrow’ jet set ethos; a big appealing charmer who simultaneously cherished fun and perfected the craft of compulsive complaint.
Yet, in the end, even morose Marat conceded, “I can’t complain, I’ve managed to do pretty well in my career.” After all, he admitted, “tennis saved me from a life of picking up bottles in Moscow.”
LA Tennis Open Presented by Farmers Insurance Group
July 27-Aug. 2
LA Tennis Center at UCLA
Players: Bryan Brothers, Fernando Gonzalez, Marat Safin, Tommy Haas, Mardy Fish, Sam Querrey and more.
Tickets: latennisopen.com
