On Andy Roddick

Apologies for such a long gap; I used up all my writing beans on a) trying to protect myself from the global pestilence, and b) doing a Masters.

I rarely read about sport. Sport, which constitutes the only compelling reason for having a television in the house at all, fascinates and absorbs me, but it is something that people tend to write about in one of two ways: over-emphasising the physical, or over-emphasising the emotional. Recently, however, I read an article by Sean Manning in which he interviewed Andy Roddick and several people from of his professional and personal support network. Manning strikes a delicate balance between describing the sheer physical ability and endeavour required to pursue elite sport, and the emotional dangers of so much attention, such high expectations, and every disappointment taking place in public. The article ranges widely over his life and career, but what has stayed with me is how hard Andy Roddick he found it to enjoy his success. His trainer at the time, for example, describes Andy Roddick losing the 2009 Wimbledon final to Roger Federer. The match was an absolute epic, lasting well over four hours. Roddick lost, 14-16 in the fifth set. Afterwards, he sat in the shower for twenty minutes, distraught and unmoving, letting the water stream over him. Roddick himself describes that match only in terms of pain, speaking of his team as “hurt[ing] as much as I did in that moment”; there is no sense that, having recovered from the initial disappointment, he was able to reflect on the game, recognise that he played out of his skin and take comfort from the many, many good things he did in that extraordinary final, and indeed across the rest of the tournament to get to the final at all. At the very least, one would expect him to recognise that he played well: well enough to take the best player in the world at the time right to his limit; well enough, in fact, to win more games in the final than Federer did (Roddick won thirty-nine, Federer thirty-eight. Proof, if proof were needed, that what matters is not how many points you win, but which ones). Surely there can be no disgrace in losing to Roger Federer at the height of his powers? And yet Roddick remained unable to feel good about any aspect of his role in that jaw-dropping match for many years because he didn’t win. He set the tone immediately after the match when he was asked to describe his performance, saying simply “I lost”. Winning is all, and losing is worse than nothing; a kind of abjection in which every defeat is dragged around forever as a mark of not being good enough. The question I’m interested in here is implied throughout the article (and, I think, throughout Andy Roddick’s career in professional sport, and the sporting careers of so many others), and it’s this: what is the correct mental attitude for a competitive athlete to take towards competition itself?

Roddick and others describe him as hyper-competitive, the same naked compulsion to win (and win utterly, annihilating, crushing and demoralising his opponents) expressed in everything from Grand Slam finals to supposedly casual games of Scrabble. He recalls his last year on tour, tortured, dissatisfied and unhappy, not yet thirty years old. Rafael Nadal, Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer were all steaming up in the outside lane, ready to overtake (and, as he saw it, humiliate) him, no matter how hard he worked. It’s worth remembering here that Nadal, Murray and Djokovic are all four or five years younger than Andy Roddick, but Federer is actually a few months older. Moreover, all those players I just named are European, while Roddick was the sole representative of his sports-obsessed nation. This, then, did not look or feel like a timely and appropriate changing of the guard; rather, it was framed by the press as the end of an era that had barely started. Roddick continued to win matches, but under so much pressure to take responsibility for the whole of American men’s tennis, winning lost its flavour. He says, of another, un-named player on the tour that year, “I see this guy floating around and he’s like #25 in the world. He’s the happiest guy I’ve ever seen. And I’m just like … I just want one more look at the basket. I’ll do anything.” In a recent article by Donald McRae, the swimmer Adam Peaty describes feeling godlike before races, a sensation that was ‘built on a consuming obsession to be the best. Even another world record, or gold medal, was never enough.’ McRae then outlines Peaty’s more or less total mental and emotional breakdown, after years of the strain of feeling, as Peaty puts it, ‘under siege’ by the quest for physical perfection. So, while relentless competitiveness can drive a person to work harder, to make greater sacrifices, to achieve more, it remains a deal with the devil. Nothing other than total, eternal, indisputable success will do. That means winning at all costs, while at the same time those wins mean less and less. There is no good or good enough, but only the best. Number twenty-five in the world won’t do. Number five in the world won’t do. Number one in the world won’t do, because you can’t stay there long enough. There is no long enough. Long enough means forever. Even winning itself won’t do, because every win must be followed with another win, a better win, a more prestigious tournament, a more fearsome opponent, a new combination of major championships. So, good enough can never be reached: the satisfaction and serenity that one might expect to accompany a win are drained away. Roddick himself says “there’s relief when you win, not out-and-out joy”. This kind of competitiveness, then, goes well beyond a healthy wish to work hard and be appreciated for doing so. Like a curse in a fairytale, it becomes something very much darker, and very much harder to escape or switch off: a mountain that can never be scaled – or, rather, a mountain that can be scaled, but from the peak of which the view is only clouds.

Manning describes Roddick and his team being asked, from the very early days, whether he was “the next Agassi” or “the next Sampras”, as though he couldn’t just be the first Andy Roddick and have that be enough. It’s worth reminding the reader here that Andy Roddick is both blond and white: a classically American white man. Much as the British media foams over the idea of a British person winning Wimbledon (‘our’ tournament), the way that the American media relentlessly pushed Roddick to surpass those that had gone before him, and Agassi and Sampras in particular is, I suggest, a subtle form of racism, assuming that a blond, white man will naturally overtake players who were embraced as American heroes very much in spite of their immigrant heritage. Even though I despise big serving, I thoroughly enjoyed watching Roddick play. As a player, he was never less than entertaining, physical and committed, and I always felt sad for him when he was compared to his heroes (or, rather, invited to make such a comparison himself), at such a young age, and in such a crass way. The 2009 match mentioned above was the win that took Roger Federer past Pete Sampras in terms of the number of majors won, and Sampras was courtside to see him do it, presumably hoping that whole time to see Andy Roddick prevail. Sampras’s presence also gave the whole thing the slightly uncomfortable feel of a tennis-based production of Macbeth: Sampras, weirdly anonymous in a suit and tie, fades in and out of focus, while endless journalists prepare to yell their single line (“are you the next Banquo?”) at the victor. This hyper-competitive world does not allow one to simply turn up and be whomever one is; clearly delineated from those who have gone before; eager, unashamed and comfortable with one’s flaws and quirks; and above all grateful for whatever one is able to achieve. It’s also a world in which one cannot say “look, it’s just a person hitting a ball at another person” and have such a statement taken at face value. I don’t reduce tennis to a person hitting a ball to devalue the achievements and sacrifice of professional athletes; rather, I am pointing out that treating sport as life and death, and in particular treating defeat as death, is clearly incredibly bad for the mental health of those that make a living from playing sport. Moreover, the way that female athletes in particular have been criticised for prioritising and protecting their mental health (the tennis player Naomi Osaka springs to mind, as does the gymnast Simone Biles) is not unrelated here. It’s almost as if even mentioning the idea that elite sport is undertaken by people, who have emotions, desires and frailties, is in bad taste. This is also related to our tendency to see sport as a substitute for military conflict, in which we are encouraged to support those from our own nation against everyone else, lumped together as foreign, Other and therefore somehow undeserving of victory. In such a black-and-white model, nuance (such as the idea that sport might not be the only thing in a person’s life) finds very little purchase. Being Good At Sport is seen as an athlete’s whole being. Roddick’s wife Brooke Decker describes the change in her husband when he left that world. She says, “it was like a light switched on in him. And he became the person who I knew and fell in love with. And after some time I realized, Oh, this is a man who was suffering and really grappling with the end of his career. And the end of that identity.”

This, I think, is key to how we think about sport: as a problematic source of identity, both for those that play it and those that watch it. I think this is particularly true for men, simply because women are not expected to watch sport (not out of choice, anyhow). It’s very rare that, on hearing that I watch a lot of sport, a person responds with anything other than incredulity. They immediately seek explanations. Does your husband watch sport? Not without me, no; in fact, before we met, I don’t think he had ever watched any sporting fixture of any kind all the way through. I once sat in a pub, knitting a sock, watching a Six Nations game and patiently explaining crossing to my husband (who would have been an excellent number 8 were he not bespectacled, fat and greatly averse to physical discomfort). Did you used to do competitive sport yourself, then? No, not really; certainly no more than anyone else does at school, and no more competently than anyone else. Do you follow a particular team or player? Again, the answer is no, and listing the sports that I enjoy watching (rugby, tennis, athletics, gymnastics, snooker) only makes it worse. Not football? they screech. Not even the World Cup? This feels to me like yelling at an atheist for not going to church (not even midnight mass?) – and not just any church, but our church, our local, personal church at which we worship just the religious figures with whom we identify most closely.

Think about how we choose a team or a player to support. One, there are circumstantial factors: our nation, region or city; the team our friends or family support, or took us to watch at an impressionable age; a person who seems to represent or speak for us who also does a sport that we like. These things have nothing to do with our chosen team or player as such – they either happen to match us in a grand game of Sporting Snap or they don’t. Two, there are emotional factors: our sense of how a game should be played; an interview we watched in which this person or that was funny/generous/insightful; a vague sense that, were the world to be rearranged, we might play a bit like/be best friends with that person; a nice voice; a nice haircut; and so on. Most of that is bullshit, though, because we have no idea what that person is really like. What we are seeing of them is partial, and heavily filtered. And yet, we will sit on our sofa and watch hour after hour of them Being Good At Sport, maybe well into the night because the sport is taking place in another time zone, yelling and clapping and slapping the furniture because somebody did something with a high degree of skill and enthusiasm, and we appreciate their endeavour. How, then, can it be fair to demand that this person account for themselves by attempting to answer banal questions like “are you the next Simone Biles?” or “are you the next Serena Williams?”? I’ve deliberately chosen two women of colour, each of whom is very unlikely to be surpassed any time soon, in order to illustrate how utterly inappropriate and stupid such questions are. Whatever answer is being invited is completely uninteresting: obviously the only possible answer is to be gracious and respectful towards the person one has just been invited to consider. What is really being gestured at, underneath the lazy journalism, is something like “are you going to fill the role in my life currently filled by someone else? I’m basically unable to cope with change” and “do you think you can be the best person ever ever EVER to do the thing you get paid money to do?”, as if we were all eight years old and trying to decide who was the fastest runner or the best at spelling, and then following that up with a discussion of whether any of us could possibly grow up to run the fastest, spell the best – run and/or spell so well, in fact, as to eclipse all runners and spellers, both past and future.

There is, I think a further confusion in such questions. Firstly, sport (an endeavour that prides itself on notions of fair competition) and sportspeople are not treated fairly by journalists. The article that prompted this post is unusual in that Manning treats Andy Roddick like a fully rounded person, with a personality that goes beyond tennis and thoughts and feelings of his own, rather than little more than a container for the sloshing, incoherent hopes and fears of those that have chosen to ‘follow’ that athlete, and who is expected to feel some sense of responsibility towards that faceless crowd. Roland Barthes notes in an essay on wrestling that ‘out of five wrestling matches, only about one is fair’ (Mythologies, pp.11-12), and suggests that this unfairness is what makes a match interesting, giving us a clear sense of who ‘should’ win and who should not, and thus allowing us to become more fully emotionally engaged because we have picked the ‘right’ person to support. I don’t think Barthes is entirely correct here (because we cannot be in possession of all the facts – we can’t know just from watching a wrestling match whether one of the combatants has taken performance-enhancing drugs, for example, and therefore might unwittingly choose to support the ‘wrong’ person), but even if he was, his idea that we need to identify (and have an opinion about) who ‘deserves’ success doesn’t apply to the unfairness I’m describing here. That unfairness is itself getting in the way of the sports spectator forming an accurate view of who does or does not ‘deserve’ to be in a team or to represent a nation; who does or does not ‘deserve’ to win; who does or does not ‘deserve’ to have their personal life discussed in public; and in Andy Roddick’s case, who does or does not ‘deserve’ to be tasked with resolving a crisis in a particular sport, saddled with a reductive nickname or photographed endlessly without a shirt. Secondly, the “are you the next x?” question conflates the emotional and physical (because the athlete should want to be ‘the best’, whatever that means) but also neglects the emotional in favour of the physical (because the athlete is being encouraged into deeply unhealthy mental habits, dismissing or flattening what they have already achieved by comparing them to someone ‘better’, whatever that means). Thirdly, the timing of such questions is deeply unfair. As noted above, many professional athletes are very young when they start being asked if they are the next big thing, but I’m also talking here about post-competition interviews, when the athlete hasn’t had time to register what has just happened to them, nevermind what it might mean or form a coherent sentence in which to express some of that. It isn’t fair to shove a microphone into the face of someone who is sweaty, exhausted and deeply disappointed, so that you can ask them existential questions about their relationship with whomever it was that most recently did the thing they have just attempted. Those questions can wait until the athlete has had a wash, a clean set of clothes, a drink, a decent meal and time to quietly reflect on what this defeat or success means for them, in the context of their career (not someone else’s).

bell hooks speaks about the cure for patriarchy lying in men, and specifically in learning to accept criticism with gratitude. Similarly, it seems to me that learning to accept a sporting defeat with grace and thoughtfulness (and perhaps even gratitude) would be a far more constructive attitude, allowing an athlete to process losses and then move on from them as a better, more stable player. I’ve made a related point with regards to my own profession and how much academics get paid in another post, and it’s this: be satisfied. Be satisfied with what you have already done, where you are, what you are doing now. Be present. That doesn’t have to mean complacency, laziness, settling, or even becoming one of those dreary people who can only talk about how good they used to be. It means finding contentment in how good one already is and taking reassurance and confidence from that as a way to improve, rather than using discontent and imposter syndrome to frighten oneself into chasing a hypothetical ‘better’. Roddick played twenty-four matches against Roger Federer, and won three of them. That seems extraordinary to me when we remember just how startlingly good Federer was in the five or six years leading up to the 2009 Wimbledon final mentioned above, and just how dominant he was – how rare it was for anyone to push Federer to his limits. However, it’s not as extraordinary as the fact that Andy Roddick, despite being one of the best players of his day, has only just come to terms with the idea that he is, and always was, good enough.