How to pull a tennis player
A guide in jest
As I sit on my favourite black chair (too low and backache inducing but it spins) in rainy New York City watching Indian Wells, memories of a time long past jump at me with the force of a tiny little rubber ball. The first time I played at Indian Wells was the first time I ever attended a combined event - a tournament that features both male and female players - outside of the Grand Slams. The reason it still remains with me today was the hotel situation. Let me explain.
In order to understand how playing a combined event outside of the Grand Slams is different to playing a Grand Slam is to consider the way these tournaments structure their coverage of hotel rooms. Grand Slams pay players a per diem and players pick the accommodation. There are hotels Grand Slams feature as “official hotels” that might offer a special rate but generally speaking, you can take the money and sleep in your car for all they care.
At ATP and WTA events, however, matters lie differently. These tournaments offer a hotel (sometimes two, maximum three), you book the amount of rooms you need and the WTA or ATP pays the player’s room directly. You obviously still have to cover your coach’s and physio’s and in Carlos’ case 17 more rooms for friends and family (I love it) but your personal room is being taken care of by the tennis organisations. If you choose to stay someplace else, you’ll have to pay for your own accommodation.
Mamma mia, all these words to basically say that Indian Wells was the first tournament at the onset of my career where I shared a hotel with male tennis players. There we have it. Every year, when I see the bright purple tennis courts of tennis “paradise” (have we seen the wind?), I think back of the moment I entered the hotel lobby of the Grand Hyatt in Indian Wells for the first time and saw more or less ten to fifteen women of striking beauty sitting at the hotel bar. At first, I thought nothing of it. Coincidence, the desert makes them pretty, everyone looks good on vacation - things like that.
A week into the tournament, I realised that these women were there to pull a tennis player. I wouldn’t necessarily call them groupies as there was no music involved but they were tennis groupies, alright.
This piece is for those women and everybody else who is interested. While we may not have had men waiting for us in this world’s hotel lobbies, most of these points stand for female tennis players as well. It’s spring, it’s mating time and after all, Indian Wells is the place Flavia Pennetta and Fabio Fognini fell in love (if I remember correctly).
Lesson 1: Unless they’re Jannik Sinner, Carlos Alcaraz or Novak Djokovic, tennis players’ egos are fragile. All of their self-worth is tied up in their results and results in tennis are more fickle than Alexander Zverev is in interviews. While they may be on top of the world one day, everything can change at the flip of a coin. If you’re thinking, ugh, I’ll better not compliment them, they get compliments all day. You’re wrong. You should compliment them. But be creative with it. Don’t tell Jakub Mensik you admire his serve, tell him you like his headband. Don’t tell Grigor Dimitrov that he’s handsome, tell him he’s eloquent.
Tennis players are almost exclusively put into the category of “athletic, good at tennising” - try to look beyond it. What else is important to them?
This goes especially for female tennis players. Everyone always tells them how independent and strong they are. They know that. Try to see the woman in the tennis player and you’ll fare a lot better. What I’m trying to say: Tennis players are human beings, often times very young human beings, remind yourself of that. They are not superheroes except if you think playing video games for six hours straight is superhero worthy.
Lesson 2: You’ll have to work… hard. Let’s not beat around the bush here, tennis players are kind of dull (not all tennis players, of course, but generally speaking they are). Hey, it’s not a knock on them, they have to be. They like sports, they like to train, they like to eat and sleep. That’s it and that’s how it should be in order to be successful. There’s still plenty of time to develop a proper personality after they retire. So, you will need to bring the personality. You have to be the one to ask questions, suggest movies, research restaurants (unless you want to eat in the hotel restaurant every day) and crack jokes. If you’re thinking, “wow, I’m having a really nice time”, it’s probably because you’re enjoying your own company. Good for you - that’s how it should be.
Lesson 3: This one’s along the same lines of lesson 2. Tennis players are basic. They don’t care about the band Geese or Cameron Winter or the new Richard Linklater movie about Jean-Luc Godard. They don’t know who Jim Jarmusch is or that Greta Gerwig used to be an actress and made the black and white movie Frances Ha (great movie!) Keep it simple. They like Drake and David Guetta, their favourite series is Breaking Bad or Prison Break, they probably think Wuthering Heights was good and their favourite movie is definitely Braveheart (Millenials) or F1: The Movie (Gen Z). Don’t try to impress them with your obscure pop culture knowledge. Ask them who their favourite football club is (Europeans) and what their team is in the NFL (Americans), compliment their Van Cleef & Arpels jewellery and you’ll have things to talk about for days.
Lesson 4: You have to move quick. You know how they tell you to wait three days before you reply to a text message? Pretend to be busy with life during the week? Well, guess what. If you wait three days to reply, the tennis player in question has already traveled on to the next city in the next country on a whole different continent. There’s no time to lose. You have one week to seal the deal and if you decide to make your move after they have lost and their ego is at their most vulnerable (you sly little shit), then you have exactly one night. There are no games to be played with someone who makes money playing games. Move quick, be ruthless and good luck!
Lesson 5: Congratulations, you have bagged a tennis player! And now what? I got you so far, you are on your own from now. All I can say is, performance is king. If you are conducive to their tennis, you will stay around for a long time. If you are not, don’t fret, I have some more tips up my sleeve on how to pull musicians (talk about fragile egos, am I right?). I hope you like sports, travel and video games, and if so, you have a bright long future with your tennis player ahead of you.
P.S. A last warning from your big sister (me) before we go: They may or may not be selfish but you haven’t heard that from me. Bonne chance.
Things that make me happy:
Two comebacks in the tennis world make me extremely happy this week. Jenny Brady and Jack Draper! Both players are remarkably gifted tennis players and athletes. I will always remember what a famous German veterinarian once told me. He said, Andrea, great athletes are like great horses. Their bodies work so closely to the physically impossible that sometimes the Gods get mad and need to take them down a peck. Let’s hope the Gods have gone to therapy and worked out their anger issues because we need both Jenny and Jack to stay around for a little while longer this time.
Things that make me unhappy:
I’m already anticipating that some people will take this piece way to seriously and yell at me for writing “a guide on how to pull a tennis player” and how I’m dehumanising them. First of all, tennis players are fine, they don’t need your wrath on their behalf. And secondly, if you subscribe to Finite Jest the emphasis will always lie on jest. I strongly believe that as long as we focus on the jest we keep the finite at bay.
Apologies for last week’s skip, it will never happen again, I promise! May you have stale bagels, cold coffee and purple courts en masse this weekend. Because that’s exactly what I will have.
Yours truly, Andrea
Yes, THIS is the tennis content that I guarantee 100% of your readers actually want, whether they admit it or not! And, so glad the phrase you chose was the rather odd "how to pull a tennis player" instead of the far more scandalous "how to tug a tennis player".
“There’s still plenty of time to develop a proper personality after they retire” Damn. Watching interviews I’ve always had the impression that players have little interesting to talk about and this confirms it to me. And I’ve always noticed how the stronger a player is, the less interesting things they will tend to say (I’m thinking of Nadal in Rome answering a question from the press with “… so we are in Rome”), trading personality for performance must be brutal.
Though I guess it has an upside; it all reminds me of what my school philosophy professor taught us about Schopenhauer’s ascetic, the one that fills their life with routine actions in order to avoid the existential pain that life brings, getting as close as possible to a state of “nothingness” as only this can bring us peace in our minds.
And this means truly “living in the present” I guess ^^
Anyway, I loved reading this glimpse into the tennis athlete’s mind, it feels like being there!