There is No Such Thing as Perfect, in Tennis or in Life

While watching Naomi Osaka battle back against Victoria Azarenka in the second round at Roland Garros, I was struck not by her flair but by her flaws.  I had just spent the weekend at a junior tennis tournament where I would tsk and sigh when my Junior Tennis Star hit a ball out of bounds or into the net.  As Osaka clawed back the match, I began to pay attention.  No one, not even the pros, have a flawless performance.  I’ve touched on this before (see my February 10, 2019 post), but I could not let this perspective go as I continued to watch the French Open. 

The next match was the Federer-Wawrinka match.  Roger Federer is as close to perfect as you can come in my book, but he, too, had a battle against Stan Wawrinka, who for much of that match, despite his loss, was guided by the tennis gods.  So, I wanted to know:  in tennis, is there such thing as perfection?  In bowling there is the 300 game (and, apparently, it’s all about how quickly you can bowl the perfect game — 74.9 second on June 5, 2017), and in baseball there is the no hitter, but tennis? 

My research uncovered what is called the “golden set.”  I know your mind just went to R. Kelly, but focus here!  A golden set is a set which is won without losing a point.  This means 4 points in each game times 6 games, or 24 flawless points without conceding a point to your opponent.  That sounds easy enough, right?  It’s the same as carrying two cartons of eggs home from the grocery store without cracking an egg.  Or not checking FaceBook for a full day, or 24 hours.   

But in tennis, perfection is elusive.  In pro tennis, only three golden sets have occurred.  In 1943, Pauline Betz won the Tri-State tournament in Cincinnati, defeating Catherine Wolf which included a first golden set, and Bill Scanlon had a golden second set in his win over Marcos Hocevar at the 1983 Delray Beach WCT event.  More recently, Yaroslava Shvedova had a first golden set in her win over Sara Errani in the third round at Wimbledon in 2012.  Shevedova was unaware she made history with her flawless performance until she got back to the locker room.

The New York Times reporting of Shevedova’s performance, well worth the read, reminded me of a passage from one of my favorite novels, Brideshead Revisited, where Charles, at Sebastian’s urging, paints a landscape on the walls of the office at Brideshead:   “Here, in one of the smaller oval frames, I sketched a romantic landscape, and in the days that followed filled it out in colour, and by luck and the happy mood of the moment, made a success of it.  The brush seemed somehow to do what was wanted of it.  It was a landscape without figures, a summer scene of white cloud and blue distances, with an ivy-clad ruin in the foreground, rocks and waterfall affording a rugged introduction to the receding parkland behind.  I knew little of oil painting and learned its ways as I worked.”  If you have ever taken paint to paper or canvas and were pleased with the result, you would grasp this elevated, outer-body feeling of being guided by a larger force captured so perfectly by both Evelyn Waugh and the New York Times

But I say this for myself, especially, but also for you:  do not chase perfection because you will never catch it. Martina Navratilova, Roger Federer, Steffi Graf or Serena Williams never did. Stop worrying about your hair or the dust bunnies in your kitchen.  Don’t fret about your junior tennis star’s mis-hits into the net or wild wacks out of bounds because they will always occur.  Think, just think right now, what at this moment is making you happy and focus on it…   

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Ya Better Hurry Up, French Federation of Tennis

by Net and Clay in Paris, France

The French Open is from May 26 to June 9, 2019, but the French Federation of Tennis better pick up the pace of construction.  On our trip to Paris, we attempted to tour Stade Roland Garros, but it is closed to the public outside of the French Open, and has been since 2015.  We were like religious pilgrims during this week before Easter and Passover, deprived of seeing our clay court Mecca and relegated to scouring the perimeter to get a peek at something to report.

Stade Roland Garros is in the outskirts of Paris, easily accessible by the Metropolitan, next to the lovely Jardin de Serres d’Auteil.  The stadium is named for Roland Garros, an aviation pioneer and decorated fighter pilot killed in combat during the Great War, who had been imprisoned with Charles de Gaulle.  Other than his impressive military and aviation accomplishments, it’s unclear why the stadium is named for someone who had no connection to tennis. 

With only a month away, the new Philippe-Chatrier central court looks skeletal from the outside.  It is huge, though.  Reports say between 800 and 900 workers have been working “day and night” on the site, and we can attest to seeing the housing for the workers in the residential containers or trailers, stacked two high.  Were we viewing the underbelly of professional tennis, as we would by getting a glimpse of the lifestyle of the backstretch workers at a thoroughbred racecourse in the United States, where the workers are migrant, under-compensated and unseen in so many ways in the midst of such wealth and celebrity?  We certainly hope not, since this year’s French Open purse increased 8% from last year’s, to a total of 42,661,000 Euros, with winners taking home the tidy sum of 2.3 Euros.  The defending champions are Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep. 

The current footprint of the stadium and the beginning of the modern French Open harks from 1927.  After a hiatus during the second World War, the Australians, including Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall and Margaret Court (still holding the most titles – her name might have something to do with it), took the limelight, but when the sport became professional in 1968, Björn Borg and Chris Evert dominated the event.  Even though Rafa’s name comes up in Google searches for French Open titles, his 11 titles are two shy of Margaret Court’s 13.

We got a glimpse of the delightful signs that point to Wimbledon at 365 kilometers away; Flushing Meadows, 839; and Melbourne Park 16,950 kilometers.  We also saw the charming Tudor-style ticket booths, as well as the historical Orangery in the adjacent gardens, built in 1898 and recently restored according to archival architect drawings.  And we also got a glimpse of the old arena, fashioned in the Brutalism style of architecture, where the names of the winners are recessed in the concrete frieze.  True to the name of the architectural style, what I saw was: 1977,  Borg above Ruzici and 1978, Borg above Lloyd.  Man over woman.  Maybe in the new Phillippe-Chartrier stadium, with the retractable roof coming in 2020, they’ll put the names of the women’s champion over the men’s.  I’m not trying to be a detractor:  I’m simply being contemporary.  Truly, though, the burnt sienna colors of the signage gave me goosebumps, and I hope to be back for the French Open sometime very, very soon.  And, as promised, I am bringing back some authentic French Open merchandise for this website’s friends and supporters. 

P.S.  Last evening we went to the Montparnasse Tower to have a counter-perspective of the sights we saw the day before from the Tour Eiffel, and were shocked to see Notre Dame burning.  Our words cannot adequately express what we saw.

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