Aussie Open: Go to Your Rooms! No, Seriously

Part of me thinks it's pretty noble, trying to play an international tennis event in a pandemic. If they can have the Super Bowl, right? 

Even if the event goes off without a hitch, there are players who aren't going to have fond memories. Several players had to lock themselves in their hotel rooms for two weeks of hard quarantine after a case arose on a flight to Melbourne. First, let me congratulate Australia for taking a pandemic seriously. Not everyone has. (In America, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention just recently issued a mask mandate on public transportation and flights. We're almost a year into this thing and that would have been useful advice about a year ago.) A few players who flamed out early are blaming this hard quarantine -- they literally couldn't leave their rooms to practice -- and yeah, it's a tough situation. You can't bend the rules for one group and not the other, but on the other hand, these people came here just to play in a tennis tournament and they're not being allowed to practice? You can see both sides of it and there's no easy answer -- except to not play a Grand Slam right now. Obviously, no one is going that route.

This quandary has led to several early-round losses that are a surprise -- Angelique Kerber and Victoria Azarenka among them. Both directly cited the quarantine as a problem. Then again, so did Tennys Sandgren, but ... well, I don't know how else to say this, but when you don't exactly have a reputation for being very good, claiming that quarantine hampered your prep sounds more like an excuse than a real reason. 

But presuming no one gets sick, I am here for this version of the Australian Open. I just need to retrain my body for this tournament. You know, staying up until 3 a.m. in the early rounds to watch Novak Djokovic get pushed to the limit by Frances Tiafoe, then chugging copious amounts of coffee to achieve baseline usefulness at work. I just need, like, one more day to get adjusted. 

I never did get around to doing predictions for this tournament, but I realized that the first Slam of the year usually is a waste when it comes to forecasting. Usually, the one thing you can predict is early-round drama in a Stan Wawrinka match and that thing had more twists than fame achieved via TikTok. (I told you I've had no sleep.) I mean how do you come from the brink of defeat to force a tiebreak, gain a huge lead in the tiebreak and then just drop the tiebreak? Well, at least it was entertaining? 

It wasn't as entertaining watching Venus Williams last night. And everyone here knows Venus is my girl. But there is persistence and there is stubbornness. If you can barely walk on a tennis court, where's the nobility in saying, "Hey, at least I finished the match?" when you are not mounting a real challenge? Sure, her movement seemed to loosen up after rolling her ankle, but it was never enough to play the way she did in the first round. Where's the wisdom in risking further injury? I always wonder if she does things like this because she knows she's going to retire soon, but I've had this thought for three years, so I'm thinking sheer stubbornness. And also, like, where did Sara Errani come from again all of a sudden?  

Speaking of throwbacks, I just finished reading this Stephen King book called Revival. Pretty good book. The premise is that there's this guy, Jamie, who keeps running into this other guy throughout his life. Jamie refers to this person as his fifth business, as a person who isn't part of your everyday life, or even someone you randomly encounter in a coffee shop. No, this fifth business person's role is to simply bring drama to your doorstep. Kaia Kanepi is the fifth business for top-tier women's tennis. There you are, being Sonia Kenin, the Aussie Open defending champ, and you walk into your second-round match to encounter a very unseeded player. Sixty-four minutes later, you're done, having lost to the woman who has snatched the likes of Naomi Osaka, Petra Kvitova, Caroline Wozniacki, Angelique Kerber, Sam Stosur and Justine Henin out of tournaments at the height of their games. Kanepi is 35, so she's developed a bit of a reputation for this kind of drama, and no one knows what's happening at this tournament anyway, so it does feel like this is a good time and place for fifth business-y antics.

Therapy with TWA: The Opponent

Sometimes, after a tennis match, I’m approached by opponents or match observers who tell me that they liked my serve, my groundstrokes, my defense, whatever worked that day. And for most of my nearly 20 (!) on court, I have poo-pooed those compliments, even taken the opportunity to point out my flaws. I’ve thought that my tendency to do this was due to this voice in my head that said that I wasn’t very good and that any good shots were a result of luck. Recently, I came to realize that that voice didn't originate in my head, but it was nestled there, pretty deeply. 

That voice came from someone who has been saying for years that there’s something not quite right with my forehand, that my second serve is weak and no different from my first, that I don’t have enough topspin on my groundstrokes. I believed these things about myself despite all the evidence otherwise -- regularly having to restring my racquets because of all the topspin I was hitting, what others said about my game and winning matches (sometimes). That commentary from that person – a real person – has been running on background loop in my brain ever since I started playing tennis and it’s part of the reason I can’t take a compliment. I thought, for years, that there was something not quite right about me -- on the court and off. 

This person wanted me to be a carbon copy of him and if I wasn't doing it his way, then it wasn't right. I was deemed unteachable -- because I'd rather not be told what to do after every. single. point. He'd give me lessons and stopped because I questioned some aspect of the practices we did -- I was branded "uncoachable" and he actually told other people this, while I was playing. I could hear him on the sidelines, mocking my groundstrokes, my net game. Once, I played a match against this person's doubles partner and after I lost, he virtually ignored me at court side, ran to her to tell her how great she was, and spirited her away. I left the court alone and humiliated. It has taken years to acknowledge that first of all, that hurt, and second, that this person wasn't always right -- and he wasn't right about me. 

It’s going to take a long time to silence that voice because even though I’m removing that person from an active role in my life, I have actually believed these things. So now I have to unlearn them and that's not going to be easy. A few of weeks ago, I played in a round-robin event with 11 other women, and when one told me I was a strong player, the criticism from myself about myself came out so quickly that it didn't make sense. It was embarrassing.

So anyway, I have been trying to teach myself to believe in my abilities and that came in really handy in a recent match. Anyway, our opponents started slowly and we started fast. I had my kids with me and after the first set, I was optimistic that I'd have them home pretty quickly. You know what happens when you start looking ahead. Of course, the second set was a dogfight and for a stretch there, no one could hold their serve game. 

There was a point where I'd made a really dumb unforced error at a key stretch of the game. I was about to fall into the you never win the close ones mindset when another thought planted itself: You can stop doing stupid things right now at this very moment. You can do that anytime you want. I admit, I took myself aback here. Whoever this was sounded very smart and someone I should get to know. And she calmed me down, even as we advanced to a tiebreak. And I found myself standing at the baseline, serving for the set, which is never a situation I like to find myself in, especially because I think I might have hit somewhere around 10 double faults that night. But I stepped up and hit two solid serves to win the match. It only took about two hours! 

Why am I saying this. Sometimes, as a writer, if you don't tell the truth at top of mind, you become unable to say anything else. Also, this is a tennis blog. The head game is approximately 92.54233 percent of tennis and if your mental game is off, well, so goes everything else. In addition to that, something tells me that I'm not the only person who's had someone in their lives who spews negative toxins with no regard of where it lands. I'm here to tell you that you are really good at what you do. People who take the time to attempt to dismantle you do so because it's easier than taking out their own garbage. Just remember that.

The other thing is that removing this person from my life has sort of taken the priority right now, so my dress project is in a box somewhere, and I don't know where that box is yet. I'm settled enough to watch tennis clips on YouTube and still trying to decide if I think Pandemic Slams are a good idea. I'll probably have a better idea of that by this weekend, when I'll post my picks (assuming the tournament happens). 

So, uh, rather belatedly, Happy New Year!