all this and heaven too

go back and tell it

Andy Roddick in his podcast said the most liberating thing about retirement is that you can actually TALK about tennis with the people you played with your whole career.

Tennis is the most physical non-contact sport. Especially in the early 2000s before sports analytics took over, a lot of the game strategy is based on how a certain opponent 'feel' when you play against them, how they hit the ball, approach a serve, react against your forehand, etc (see Federer's interview with Trevor Noah for reference).

When you play them long enough, say like Federer, Nadal and Djokovic, you knew your rival's entire gameplan and became strangely intimate with their tennis vocabulary. It's like having a silent 20 year long conversation with someone through your racket and strings alone.

What's fascinating is both side of the players would know exactly what's going on but this wouldn't be obvious to the outside eyes. Both Federer and Nadal, in completely separate interviews, different times after they retire, describe their match-up in exactly the same words.

They specifically use the term "a game of chess", where they both know each other's strategies: Nadal trying to damage him against his backhand, open Federer wide enough so he can pass him down the line or force errors, Federer trying to take the ball early, hit aggressive with his forehand and break his rhythm.

Then it comes down to a battle of wills, each trying to dominate the match with their strategy, seeing who will relent, who plays better that day and on which surface. As Nadal said, "there wasn't any secrets", and when Federer was asked whether there's anything from Nadal's game that still surprises him, he said that after 20 years he "knows everything there is to know."

Courtside tennis and tv coverage don't really capture the nuances of how this game is played at a pro level. A tennis match, especially at tour level, is almost like a silent 4-5 hours mental debate in front of millions of people where only two people are privy to what's actually being said.

I don't think people grasp how intensely intimate career-long rivalries are and how soul crushing it is to lose them. When Federer retired, Nadal said that he'd have a really tough time coming to terms with never being able to 'feel the feeling of playing against Federer' again. Beyond the mental loss, it's also a profound physical loss, where each player's style of play is almost unreplicable in a top 100 level.

It's the grief of knowing that in one day, it'll be the last time you're on the receiving end of that forehand, almost like an end to a 20 year long conversation you've been having with the same person on the greatest stadiums around the world.

Interview references:

are you good at staying still?