by Pete Bodo
Afternoon, everyone. I've been out of touch most of the weekend, but I seek our Social Director Jackie-Oh! has hosted the Deuce Club weekend party with her usual flair. I thought I'd drop by to let you know I'll be attending that fierce intra-Gotham World Team Tennis clash between the New York Sportimes and New York Buzz tomorrow evening. The player roster includesJohn McEnroe, Martina Hingis and Kim Clijsters. I'm really curious to see the new Randall's Island Sportime facility, not least because it's be the site of McEnroe's nascent tennis academy.
I'll have a post on that, as well as some thoughts on the differences between tennis and Major League Baseball as a spectator-fan experience, over the next two days. You may remember I took some out-of-town friends to the New York Yankees game on Friday night; it was my first time to a MLB game in about three decades, when I last wrote about baseball.
But today, let's just pause to celebrate the marriage yesterday of Czech players Radek Stepanek and Nicole Vaidisova. We like to see stories have happy endings, and Vaidisova certainly struggled enough in recent years to earn one. And that's what a proper marriage (in this case, in St. Vitus Cathedral, the Czech Republic's largest and most storied church) is supposed to portend. A large, formal marriage doesn't guarantee anything, nor does it appeal to all lovebirds. But the very fact that the newlyweds endured and survived the planning, negotiations and inevitable disagreements that go into a big marriage production is already a stepanek in the right direction.
Best of luck to the happy couple.
You may remember that Vaidisova went into an astonishing tailspin not long after she reached no. 7 in the world in 2007 and had semifinal appearances at the Australian Open and Roland Garros to her credit, and struggled mightily – and unsuccessfully – until she retired a few months ago. I wrote a fairly detailed feature for Tennis magazine on the strange, (somewhat) sad tale of Vaidisova, which remains one of the most baffling personal histories I've ever had the discomfort to write about.
I say discomfort because there was no obvious reason for Vaidisova's apparent loss of interest and confidence, and nobody in her camp, including Vaidisova, was willing to talk about just what went wrong (or right, if you don't necessarily believe that achieving in tennis is the end-all and be-all of human existence). I studied Vaidisova closely during the U.S. Open qualifying almost a year ago, where she lost a match while playing for brief stretches like a surefire main event semifinalist. I was hard pressed to tell that anything was wrong, at least with her technique and those weapons – that big serve and forehand.
What was striking, though, was the sense that she was abstracted if not exactly distracted. Sitting in her hair during a changeover, she gazed off into the distance as if she were a beauty sitting on a beach in a Zen-like state, watching a tropical sunset. That's not necessarily a bad mode for a tennis player, but in Vaidisova's case it suggested a complete detachment from what she was doing – an unexpressed and perhaps unacknowledged desire to be somewhere, anywhere else. Or maybe it was just that something deep inside her would not permit her to become engaged in what she had forced herself to do, yet one more time.
I walked away thinking the competitor in the girl had shut down, which is different from being burned out, even if it leads to the same terminus.
Ultimately, most of the people I spoke with felt that growing up and being in a relationship with Stepanek was probably most responsible for her quiet rebellion against tennis. Up to that point, the most important man in her life seemed to be her stepfather and off-again/on-again coach, Ales Kodat. But Vaidisova herself, even when she retired earlier this year, said nothing about any of that. She quit, she said, because she had "lost interest."
It's a terrible thing, to lose interest, especially for or in something that has been as large a part of our life as tennis has been to Vaidisova. And surely she knows the perils in store for someone who loses interest in marriage, another enterprise which begins with passion, love, and an insatiable appetite (in the case of tennis, for success). I hope her experience in tennis helps her navigate the shoals of this new relationship. I suppose we'll be seeing her accompanying her new husband, who's struggled with injuries this year, on the tour in the near future. Perhaps her appetite will be rekindled; after all, she's only 21.
Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, I'll be back with a post tomorrow around midday.
— Pete