The New Yorker:

The two young champions, who met as teen-agers, are expected to face off at this year’s U.S. Open. A new book by Giri Nathan tracks their parallel ascent.

By Hua Hsu

“A person’s tennis,” John McPhee writes in “Levels of the Game,” from 1969, “begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play.” Your style is an expression of your innate self, a product of small decisions, such as the way you hold your racket, your second-serve philosophy, your tendency to patrol the baseline or rush the net. “If he is deliberate,” McPhee continues, “he is a deliberate tennis player,” just as a flamboyant person plays flamboyantly; these self-discoveries emerge over thousands of hours of practice. But, in order for these styles to mean anything, we require a rival. We need someone else to draw out the unique shape of our play.

McPhee was focussing on a single match during the 1968 U.S. Open, between Arthur Ashe and Clark Graebner, exploring how these young players’ contrasting identities—Black vs. white, liberal vs. conservative—manifested in each shot. It’s an alluring habit of sportswriters and fans to try to turn fandom into something ethical: we want the teams to embody the places they represent, and for the players’ decisions to say something about our own identities. It could be argued that tennis, more than other sports, lends itself to this kind of head-to-head character interpretation. After all, Tom Brady and Peyton Manning were never on the field at the same time, and Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi, arguably the two greatest attackers in the history of soccer, are rarely within five feet of each other on the pitch. In tennis, all the pressure and lore attaches to a single person, and there are no teammates to hide behind. Players might first become legible to us thanks to clumsy national stereotypes—the hotheaded American, the precise German—but at the highest strata they are reduced to a name: Novak Djokovic became more Joker-like as time went on, just as Roger Federer, as Geoff Dyer once wrote, will always seem to be “Roger, always and only Roger.” Calling Rafael Nadal by his full name sounds downright hostile when you could opt for the boyishly innocent Rafa.

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