A cynical optimist

O Fortune, Fortune! All men call thee fickle

I am an optimist. I am also a cynic. How do these two things go together? I’m glad you asked. Let me explain.

Our beliefs are shaped by our environment. The people we meet in passing, the people we see every day, the things we witness, the things we experience. For a longest time, my environment was the tennis world. In the world of tennis you will almost always lose the last match you play at a tournament. I am not talking about a Novak Djokovic here who lives in the 0.01% of tennis players. I am talking about everybody else. Let’s take my friend Angie Kerber for example (the poor woman has to make a cameo in almost every single one of my texts). She is one of the very best players of the last two decades - a hall-of-fame candidate, a triple-major-champion, a former world number one, a silver medallist at the Olympic Games. She has won fourteen titles in total. A tennis player averages around twenty tournaments a year. Angie played on tour for nearly twenty years and yet, only fourteen times over the course of her entire career did she settle into the dry air of a plane knowing a metal trophy was bopping around the overhead compartment, knowing she had won the last match she had played. No regrets, no what-ifs.

I played on tour for sixteen years and nearly every week of those sixteen years a big ol’ loss, a failure, a short-coming, a defeat was the only and all-encompassing thought I left the tournament site with. Not a metal trophy bopping around the overhead compartment. So, you work hard, you train harder, you do breathing and focus exercises, you go to the gym, you take care of your body, you sleep eight hours a night, you don’t go out, you don’t have sugar, you don’t drink alcohol, you don’t see your friends and in the end you lose. You can see how it would make one a cynic.

I did start this piece with another sentence though. I am an optimist. A true sentence, I dare add. Tennis works harder than the devil to render its citizens cynics but one of its unforeseen consequences is optimism. Sometimes fate conspires on your behalf and there is nothing tennis can do to stop it. I can almost see it grinding its teeth in disgust.

I won seven titles over the course of my career and every single time there was a moment during the week where I just knew that it was destined to be my week. A warm, fuzzy feeling would come over me morph into a certainty and manifest as a sign from Tyche herself, a café nearby named Andrea for example. It was like having an imaginary protective shield around me, every billiard ball finding the right opening, every arrow shooting toward red, every decision the right one. For the longest time, I thought having had that feeling gave me the belief and confidence to act as if everything was going my way hence everything did go my way. No bizarre heavenly movements, just a self-fulfilling prophecy. But then I retired and I started seeing patterns in magical runs. I will give you three examples.

tyche, the greek goddess of chance

Number one: Rafael Nadal at the 2022 Australian Open. Didn’t it somehow feel like it was meant to be for him to win the Australian Open that year? Novak Djokovic’s visa gets cancelled, he gets Matteo Berrettini in the semis who just by shear match-up considerations is a good draw for Rafa (weaker backhands tend to struggle against Rafa’s leftie forehand spin) and then Daniil Medvedev chokes a two-set lead away which he had never done before.

Number two: Stefanos Tsitsipas at this year’s Monte Carlo tournament. Stefanos played the best tennis I had seen him play in two years but the difficulties of said years seemed to still be in his head. In the semis, when he lost the second set to Jannik Sinner you could see the doubt of the last two seasons creep back into his demeanour. He hadn’t framed a single ball all match long but suddenly it entirely went back to frames and faults and franticness. Being down a breakpoint in the third set to go double break down, he serves a double fault, the chair umpire misses the call, Jannik confused by the non-call misses the next shot and Stef holds. Jannik is still the better player, holding comfortably until, out of nowhere, HE STARTS TO CRAMP. Coincidence or a heavenly conspiracy? Stef wins, meanwhile Novak miraculously loses in the other semifinal to Casper Ruud who he had 11:0 sets against, and Tsitsipas wins Monte Carlo.

Number three: Marta Kostyuk just last week at the Porsche Tennis Grand Prix in Stuttgart. All I can say is - you had to be there. I was working at the tournament and I so happened to see every single one of her matches. It truly was a magical run. She saved match points, set points, was down a set and a break thrice, was nearly down double break in the third set multiple times. She beat three Top 10 players in a row, two of them current Grand Slam champions, and it totally seemed like there was an enchantment placed on her. A positive one if that makes sense? I could almost see balls that were flying out of bounds be curved down to hit lines by invisible hands. She didn’t win the tournament. Only Elena Rybakina proved to be better. It takes a dry, surgical-precise tennis like Elena’s to cut right through a spell. Elena’s tennis doesn’t need magic. She’s good enough by herself.

“how does it feel to have a defensive game? i wouldn’t know”

Magic only comes into play when you need a little bit of help. Rafa was not at his best at the Australian Open 2022 so he needed a tiny shove. Stef was good enough in Monte Carlo but he didn’t believe it yet. And Marta, well Marta, deserved all the curve-bending she could get after a great start to the season and her constantly and actively working against her inner turmoils - not always successfully. At times in Stuttgart, you could see her face distort from the mental struggle she was fighting against her own negative inclinations. Fate rewarded her. The tennis needs to be there, courage under pressure needs to be had. The quality of play is still shaped by one own’s hands. Just sometimes, just sometimes, you need a little push on your behalf.

And that’s why the optimist in me outweighs the cynic (most times). I will sometimes be helped and sometimes be left out to dry (most times). I choose to remember the times I was helped out (mostly). Can I call myself a cynical optimist at least?

I picked a quote by Shakespeare as my subtitle today. Shakespeare believed that people ended up in certain places and at certain times by predestination. But he also believed the choices they made were theirs. Golly, this text could have been so much shorter!

Things that make me happy:

I had my first day off in months and I spent it eating Pizza and watching Seinfeld. I wonder if fate brought me here?

seinfeld meets tennis

Things that make me unhappy:

The negative backlash Darwin Blanch got after losing to Rafael Nadal in Madrid made me sad. I agree that the system of giving out wildcards needs some serious overhaul which we won’t get as long as agencies who represent players also own tournaments. There were many smart people on social media who criticised precisely that: the system. But some oddballs decided to attack a 16-year-old kid who was just elated to get a chance to play a legend of our sport before Nadal retires, tarnishing the experience for him on top of the beatdown he had already gotten on court. It made me unhappy.

But remember: I am an optimist at heart. I am certain of it because it is always much harder for me to find things that made me unhappy compared to things that made me happy over the course of a week. A good sign, I suppose. I hope you have Advil in your pocket because it can truly save a day! See you all next week.

Yours truly, Andrea