Warriors in the Open
STERN, RICHARD
Perspectives WARRIORS IN THE OPEN BY RICHARD STERN THE 1995 US. Tennis Open is history. Steffi beat Monica; Pete walloped Andre. The winners took in over a half a million dollars, the losers...
...Monica took the second set at love, while her rival rested...
...In the Women's Final she faced her old German rival...
...The TV network motormouths—only John McEnroe's was bearable—told us the big story was the comeback of the Yugoslav-born Monica Seles...
...They warmed up, then started, slowly, feeling each other out, not extending themselves, as if points didn't count, as if to show they could win them whenever they needed to...
...The word she used most often was "fun...
...At night, while Steffi hid in her apartment and watched television, Monica was on television presenting an MTV award...
...Still, Agassi, tutored by the shrewd Brad Gilbert—his version of the Persian King Xeres' wise uncle, Artabanus (Herodotus, Persian Mars, VII)—knows he can find ways to use the Hellenic Sampras' moodiness to trigger slippage and collapse...
...Perhaps by the next Open microphones will be in their pockets or on their rackets, and we will share not only their ardor but their whispered, monosyllabic poetry...
...The winners took in over a half a million dollars, the losers nearly 300 grand...
...Winners, they have had much experience with losing, especially losing to each other...
...For all recent opponents other than Sampras, he has the untrumpable self-assurance of the hole card ace...
...After a while, she worked it out...
...Then, on April 30,1993, back on the Continent, in the country of her chief rival, the knife attack...
...They had brought her to America years before the fires burst out again from the ethnic embers of the old Austrian empire...
...When she served again Steffi won the point, and then the set...
...She was not beating her opponents' brains out...
...It was not at all clear what would happen when these two wounded young veterans met...
...Bone spurs were brushing nerves in her back and cutting into her feet...
...Now she had not merely returned to tennis...
...Caroly i Seles...
...Except on the court...
...the rapid, pigeon-toed Agassi was a cross between a rooster and a last-minute plane catcher...
...His serve got stronger and sager...
...When it was over, Monica was at the net congratulating Steffi, embracing and kissing her...
...A media darling whose breakouts from tennis prison have been puffed up by ad agencies into Declarations of Punk Rebellion, he has accepted, challenged and, of late, mocked such depictions...
...After that, Sampras coupled power with shrewdness...
...They traded services till the break point of the ninth game, an exchange of 18 marvelous ground strokes capped by the 19th, a Sampras backhand that won the game and broke Agassi's spirit...
...In the sunny, blonde tennis camps of America, they watched her turn into a court monarch...
...Agassi's shaven, balding, earringed head sweated and sank lower...
...The first set was so close that Monica thought she had won it with an ace, and did a little jig of joy...
...They fight our battles as well as their own, transform and cleanse our frustration, anger, incapacity...
...Prior to the Open, each had won and lost eight matches against the other...
...When she tossed the ball for a serve her soft, almost-pretty face sharpened and twisted in a rage that seemed to have nothing to do with fun...
...In any case, she could not bear to watch tennis on television...
...In the third, Steffi beat her clearly with a great forehand here, a powerful serve there...
...it was fun...
...power she felt inside as she pulverized tennis balls have anything to do with the horrors out there...
...Not content with riding behind our warriors in the battle they had fought—our own battles mostly dodged, and, when not, often lost—we wanted their gnomic selves, their very beings...
...Games before the end, Monica recognized what was happening andstarted smiling, laughing, telling herself to remember this was, after all, just fun...
...In the stands, watching their remarkable golden goose of a daughter, sat Mr...
...Her competitors visited and called...
...She was approached by sponsors...
...may caution otherwise...
...He is therefore far more attentive to Sampras than Sampras is to him, though the latter's cancer-stricken coach, Tim Gullickson...
...In a few weeks the back wound healed...
...New York was fun...
...Monica didn't...
...Steffi had not been literally knifed in the back, but her father, Peter, who handled her money as he had once handled her career, had depressed and distracted her by earning himself imprisonment for tax evasion...
...Or she was attending Broadway shows, or signing autographs, or getting photographed: smiling, tittering, laughing...
...He is what he is: an original tennis genius whose special gift is amazing eyesight and coordination, and the magical court sense built from them...
...The sole turnabout came in the third set: Sampras slumped...
...At 21 she was taller, stronger, and her serve was better...
...Monica, playing in Hamburg, the embodiment of controlled aggression, between sets encountered the absurdity and terror of the real thing...
...The World's Best, yet there is modesty as well as confidence in them...
...What she felt and did on the courts was not aggression, rage and hatred...
...Aside from a warmup tournament in Toronto the week before, she had been out of match play in the 27 months since a deranged fan of Steffi Graf stabbed her in the back in Germany...
...and Mrs...
...From them came no Selesian babble...
...THE NEXT DAY Pete and Andre, American Greek and American Persian, took over the main court...
...He used the swirling, curling wind, looping wobbly parabolas that disrupted Agassi's timing...
...Sampras is bigger, stronger, a better athlete, a better tennis player (which doesn't mean a greater winner...
...When Agassi adjusted, Sampras blasted backhands and running forehands down the line...
...she was playing more fiercely than ever...
...For us courtside customers, couch potatoes, tennis hackers, passive combatants, it was beautiful...
...A few hundred miles away, her family's old neighbors were shooting, raping, torturing, and murdering each other...
...The match was over, the twin stars shook hands and exchanged amiable, inaudible words at the net...
...Did the RICHARD STERN, the University of Chicago's Regenstein Professor of English, has written 18 books, including Noble Rot and Golk, The most recent, A Sis-termony, won the 1995 Heartland Prize...
...Yet you felt even this was controlled—that some alert Hellenic gene was telling him, "Don't humiliate him with a straight set loss or it'll rouse an unstoppable fury in him in the next Grand Slam...
...And why not...
...Monolingual multimillionaires, Sampras and Agassi are self-made, self-absorbed, their faces, bodies, words, and deeds the stuff of 10.000 stories in a hundred languages...
...These two were our champions, our girls, our belles ladies...
...Her family nursed, consoled, listened, advised...
...The dark, wire-curled head of Sampras was low on his slouching, seemingly unwilling body...
...So they walked on court...
...just their tennis games?games played with fluffy golden balls on carefully lined courts in the comfortable precincts of the world's finest towns...
...She had been attacked in the place where she was most at home, where her form of rage was not only tolerated but rewarded...
...And something even more intimate was doing her in: her beautiful, powerful tennis body...
...Playing tennis was fun...
...What was this world about...
...She underwent a course of psychotherapy...
...The multilingual multimillionaire also babbled and giggled even more than previously...
...We, the Vegetable Viewers of the World, wanted to hear those words too...
...What was she herself about...
...But no, the serve had been a fault...
...Only in their mid-20s, they carry the victory-defeat veneer of grizzled vets, and maybe something else, the warrior genes of ancestors whose wars Herodotus chronicled...
...They were professional, businesslike, taciturn, although Agassi has become publicly introspective and often delights in exhibiting an amusing, charming fluency...
...When she hit her ground strokes, particularly at crucial points, she emitted a bestial, orgasmically passionate grunt-screech that dominated every sound in the National Tennis Center at Flushing Meadows...
...No luck this time...
Vol. 78 • October 1995 • No. 8
