Do not go gentle into that good night

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

To retire is to die. When Claude Monet’s ability to paint began to dwindle due to sickness and, frankly, just plain ol’ age, he is reported to have said this. It must have felt to him like it. It felt like it to me at times.

This week, Andy Murray announced that he was unlikely to play past this summer. It was at a press conference in Dubai after he had lost a match and for a moment I hoped it was just that. A frustrated tennis player who retires himself after a tough loss, only to un-retire a mere week later. This time, however, it felt real. Being painfully aware of the finiteness of your endeavours as an athlete is part of being an athlete, maybe the essence of it. There is a reason why this publication is called Finite Jest. David Foster Wallace might have believed that jest in tennis is infinite but I can assure him it’s not. Knowing his sense for irony I believe he knew it, too.

Old age comes early in a tennis player’s life. While others have just begun their professional aspirations, full of hope and optimism for what the future will bring just before people start framing them as middle-aged, tennis players have already been called “veterans” by TV announcers for a few years. Clearly, I’m not over it. I can forgive but I won’t forget. I was 28!

The interesting aspect of age in an athlete’s body is the slowness with which it comes at first, tricking you into thinking you might just get away with it. There will be enough progressive recovery treatments and surgeons, enough supplements and healthy foods for you to scrape by and then one day you wake up and it has come for you with a thump. Age so far has gotten all of us, even the quickest ones.

All sports are firmly built on the foundation of youth. When I had my first big success in Australia in 2011, reaching the quarterfinals of a major tournament for the first time, breaking into the TOP 30, there were already plenty of 18-year-olds all around the world ready and waiting to push me out. Vague, quivering shadows, hard to make out but always there and multiplying by the hour. Every match you play, every training session you finish, is a defeat in the career-lasting war of attrition with your body. At the end of which awaits retirement.

There are many reasons as to why it is so hard to let go when from the outside it can look very simple. There are two reasons in particular, however, that make it especially hard. It has become increasingly difficult to separate the tennis player persona from who you are as a person. Living a tennis player’s lifestyle is strongly intertwined with your identity. The way you eat, how you sleep, what you do in your leisure time – all of these aspects done wrongly can have a direct impact on your performance on court. Or done rightly just so. Hell, even reading an annoying text message moments before you go out to play can be your downfall. If everything you do is for tennis, everything you are is for tennis. And if everything you are is for tennis, now when you take tennis away – what remains?

The other reason which makes it hard for tennis players to let go is that tennis players are maybe the most delusional creatures to ever walk the earth. They have to be. The tennis season begins in January and lasts deep into November. Most weeks of the season end with a loss for each and every player except the one holding the trophy. There are a lot more losses to be had than victories to be celebrated (unless you’re one of the immortals - you know who you are). You have to be somewhat delusional to keep going, to keep pushing, to keep believing. That knack for delusion comes in handy when age starts catching up with you, starts breathing down your neck, cold and wet, smelling of decay. You keep calm, ignore it and carry on. Just like you do after a rough loss when the next tournament is a few days away. Until one day it has caught up with a thump.

There is a study in baseball which shows that batters’ explosiveness begins diminishing when they turn 23. 23 is the age of peak performance from a biological standpoint. Most players, though, hit (pun intended) peak performance around age 28. The experience gained outperforms the loss of quickness. But there comes a point in an athlete’s life when no experience in the world can make up for a decline in fast-twitching muscle fibres. In a more complex sport like tennis (not me throwing shade at baseball) where endurance plays an important part in the makeup of the sport you can delay peak performance even further. In the end, however, age comes for all of us. In the end, age is just what it is: a process of biological decay which ends in death. How depressing.

Yet it really mustn’t be. In the four months prior to retiring I was crying on a daily basis. I was angry and sad when I went to bed and I woke up angry and sad. I could see my career, my identity, slipping through my fingers and there was nothing I could do about it. There was no comfort to be found. Every match I played, every locker room I changed in, came with a farewell stitched into it. But on my last official day as a tennis player after my last official match at the US Open - the last time I would have ball kids and lines people and a chair umpire, an opponent to overcome - I felt relieved. It was over. Half a life behind me, yes, yet half a life ahead of me.

To retire is to die because a part of your identity does die. And it needs to be grieved. It’s a process.

Eventually, I did find comfort: When you rid yourself of an identity you thought was inherent, you become free. Free to take on any freaking identity you damn well please.

Andy Murray will come out of it alive, possibly the better of it, but the process still needs to be had. He will feel sad and angry when he goes to bed and sad and angry when he wakes up. But eventually, it will be over and he will be free. This too shall pass. The only thing we can do to help him is to cut him some slack and leave him be. The next person to ask Andy Murray about retirement shall have an itchy toe for one hour.

I picked a Dylan Thomas quote to open this newsletter. It’s from a beautiful poem about death and how life is worth fighting for. Accepting finiteness as an athlete means accepting finiteness as a human being. We all have to do it. Tennis players just a tad bit earlier.

Things that make me happy:

I worked out every single day of this past week but that is not what makes me happy, nay, working out every single day of the past week means I could have cake for breakfast. Which i had. Twice. The wonderful side of being retired.

retirement at its sweetest

Things that make me unhappy:

This pimple right here. Don’t look at me! Probably the cake, right?

attention! image might be disturbing to some viewers

May your coffee be particularly frothy this week! Until then.

Yours truly, Andrea