Deuce
landoscar, E, alternate universe - tennis player, wip (4/8)
Thirty-four tournament finals. Twelve Grand Slams. One rivalry that divided the sporting world. In a series of separate interviews, two former champions attempt to tell the official version of a career spent across the net from each other — the finals, the rumours, the marriages, the silence. But memory has never been particularly interested in the official record. This is the oral history of Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri: the two stars who ruled tennis for more than a decade, and spent the rest of their lives pretending it was only ever a game.
Chapter 1: The Initial Serve
To the modern sports historian, the period stretching from 2020 to early 2030s is classified quite simply as the Golden Era of the ATP Tour. It was a brutal, dazzling stretch of a decade defined almost entirely by a singular, polarizing binary: Lando Norris and Oscar Piastri.
Their names became shorthand for an ideological divide in modern tennis. You were either a devotee of Norris — with his explosive, emotional baseline play, his high-risk winners, and the volatile charisma that kept the British tabloids in business for a decade — or you aligned yourself with Piastri, the Australian phenomenon whose clinical precision, icy temperament, and tactical genius earned him the locker-room moniker of The Architect.
Together, they contested thirty-four tournament finals, twelve of them Grand Slams, effectively dividing the sporting world into two fiercely warring factions.
Today, at forty-six and forty-five years old respectively, both men inhabit lives that are surprisingly domestic, heavily insulated, and entirely detached from the relentless traveling circus of the professional tour.
Lando Norris was the first to depart the stage. He retired at thirty-seven, his body finally giving out after years of an aggressive, punishing style of play that left him with a chronic, degenerative meniscus tear in his right knee. The transition from global sports icon to private citizen was, by all public accounts, seamless. Married since the age of twenty-six to Margarida Corceiro, a Portuguese model and actress, Norris is a fixture of the wealthy enclave of Surrey. He is the father of two children, a daughter and a son, currently twenty and nineteen. To the casual observer checking the sports pages, he is a contented patriarch, occasionally spotted in the Royal Box at Wimbledon or playing low-stakes golf with retired footballers.
Oscar Piastri, true to his nature, outlasted his greatest rival on the court by nearly two years, extending his professional career until the age of thirty-eight. His retirement was characteristically unsentimental; he announced it via a two-paragraph statement on social media hours after a quarterfinal exit at the Australian Open, packed his bags, and never looked back. He had married at thirty, a quiet, low-profile English engineer named Lily Zneimer, and together they share two daughters, aged thirteen and ten. The Piastri family resides year-round in a high-security apartment overlooking the harbour in Monte Carlo.
On paper, they represent the absolute pinnacle of athletic success: two legends who conquered their sport, secured their fortunes, and retired into the quiet bliss of conventional family life.
Yet, a glaring anomaly persists within the official archive of their careers. For exactly eight years — since the moment Norris walked off the court for good — the two men have never been seen in the same room. They have declined every invitation to joint gala appearances, refused to participate in retrospective documentaries, and explicitly banned tournament organizers from seating them within the same VIP boxes. The tennis world accepted this as the natural hangover of a bitter, historic rivalry. The assumption was that they simply loathed one another.
When I began compiling data for this oral history, the parameters for their participation were non-negotiable. There would be no joint sit-downs, no shared Zoom calls, and no cross-examination. The interviews had to be conducted in total isolation from one another — separate countries, separate weeks, with neither man privy to the transcripts of the other’s testimony.
I began the process with Lando Norris on a Tuesday morning in London, inside the stark, minimalist home office of his townhouse. The room was quiet, smelling faintly of expensive wood polish and old tennis leather. Three days later, I took a late-afternoon flight to Nice and drove across the border into Monaco to sit across from Oscar Piastri in his study, where the only sound was the distant hum of yachts in the marina below.
The following transcript represents the first time their individual accounts of the past have been laid side by side.
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