Andre Agassi on hating tennis. He had to face the dragon (a souped up ball machine modified by his father that would shoot at 110 mph) at seven (!) years old:
My father has deliberately made the dragon fearsome. He’s given it an extra-long neck of aluminum tubing, and a narrow aluminum head, which recoils like a whip every time the dragon fires. He’s also set the dragon on a base several feet high and moved it flush against the net, so the dragon towers above me. I’m small for my age, but when standing before the dragon, I look tiny. Feel tiny. Helpless.
My father wants the dragon to tower over me not simply to command my attention and respect. He wants balls that shoot from the dragon’s mouth to land at my feet as if dropped from an airplane. The trajectory makes the balls nearly impossible to return in a conventional way: I need to hit every ball on the rise, or else it will bounce over my head. But even that’s not enough for my father. Hit earlier, he yells. Hit earlier.
My father yells everything twice, sometimes three times, sometimes 10. Harder, he says, harder. But what’s the use? No matter how hard I hit a ball, no matter how early, another ball comes back. Every ball I send across the net joins the thousands that already cover the court. Not hundreds. Thousands. They roll toward me in perpetual waves. I have no room to turn, to step, to pivot. I can’t move without stepping on a ball—yet I can’t step on a ball, because my father won’t bear it. Step on one of my father’s tennis balls and he’ll howl as if you stepped on his eyeball.
Holy crap.
What can you do against a guy who makes shots like this? Not much, I guess. Roger Federer is the athlete I'd most like to see live, and I have no particular love for tennis over any other sport. (via kk)
Update: I just got an e-mail with a link to a Federer between-the-legs winner.
Like the Roger Federer piece (which you really should read, as it cast tennis—which I've always enjoyed watching—in a whole new light for me), this ought to be good for fans of sports in general, not just tennis aficionados...
First up, this is a terrific tribute to the many comebacks of Andre Agassi's career:
The most important thing I've learned from watching him is how to defeat winning and losing.
That piece links up this interview with Agassi following his loss to Federer at the US Open final last year. Fantastic, and more weight behind the "Federer is possibly the best ever" camp.
Finally, check out this composite photo of an Agassi vs. Pavel point. I'm guessing Agassi controlled that one.
Roger Federer as Religious Experience by David Foster Wallace. He uses the first paragraph to lovingly describe an amazing "Federer Moment". He then concludes:
Anyway, that's one example of a Federer Moment, and that was merely on TV—and the truth is that TV tennis is to live tennis pretty much as video porn is to the felt reality of human love.
I don't know where that puts YouTube on the video porn/actual sex spectrum, but they've got a clip of that exalted Federer Moment, starting at 8:10 in. I think YouTube might be off the bottom end of the metaphor, actually, and the moment strikes me as one of subtle greatness, only really appreciable by fans. Love the article, though.« via kottke »
I promise I'll get back to real posts after just these few more quick links that caught my sportsman's (such as I am) eye:
- Agassi to retire after Wimbledon, U.S. Open. A great champion, and being the oldest guy to hold the #1 ranking is very inspiring in a sport that tends to retire 'em young.
- Chessboxing!
- Fascinating steroids perspective over at De Vany's blog, from a guy with some noteworthy qualifications:
I should tell you that I was the Anti-doping Commissioner of the International Triathlon Union (ITU) - a relatively new sport within the Olympic Family - for nearly 13 years. I had to act as "prosecutor" on many doping cases (doping = drugs in sport). Prior to that, I helped write the first set of "anti-doping" rules for triathlon in 1988. Before that, I was an elite marathoner (2:18) and triathlete (4th Place Ironman Hawaii) in the '70s and '80s, so I have accumulated a fair amount of "inside information" regarding drugs in sport at the Olympic level. I also own a supplement company and have done extensive research on performance enhancement in pursuit of natural, legal alternatives.
