remocpi's review against another edition
4.0
Pat McEnroe, el "malo" de los McEnroe, tuvo una interesante carrera como profesional, mucho menos laureada que la de su hermano, pero llegó a ganar Roland Garros (en dobles). Aquí nos encontramos ante una autobiografía profesional (con algunos trozos que no pegan ni con cola sobre cómo se prometió a su mujer) bastante entretenida, en la que el autor entremezcla recuerdos de sus etapas como jugador individual, de dobles, como capitán del equipo USA de copa Davis y como periodista deportivo, primero en CBS y luego en ESPN.
El libro está muy bien escrito (al negro lo han puesto en la portada, por lo que no es un negro-negro) y tiene partes fantásticas. El autor habla con mucha sinceridad, sin rodeos, de muchas cosas:
Describiendo el juego de Agassi:
Usando de vez en cuando fina ironía
Hablando de unos de mis jugadores de tenis favoritos:
(A Mansour lo podemos ver en su salsa aquí o aquí)
Y su carta de amor a Nadal:
3.5 estrellas, muy entretenido.
El libro está muy bien escrito (al negro lo han puesto en la portada, por lo que no es un negro-negro) y tiene partes fantásticas. El autor habla con mucha sinceridad, sin rodeos, de muchas cosas:
Describiendo el juego de Agassi:
Andre’s talent as a hitter helped shape his game, which became surprisingly one- dimensional (if effective) in the second half of his career. To me, it bordered on boring, insofar as such precision and consistency could be called that. But his game plan was simple: I’m gonna go crosscourt, time and again, until I get my opening, then I’m going to go down the line for the winner or to force an error. It’s a color- by- numbers formula, but don’t underestimate the skill it takes to pull it off consistently. His results spoke for themselves.
Usando de vez en cuando fina ironía
My first assignment as captain was to lead Team U.S.A. to Switzerland in early 2001 to meet a team featuring some promising young kid named Roger Federer.
Hablando de unos de mis jugadores de tenis favoritos:
In the final, we played Eric Winogradsky (who now coaches the talented Jo- Wilfried Tsonga) and Mansour Bahrami, a self- made doubles specialist from Iran. Bahrami had fled Iran, and he spent time sleeping on park benches in Paris as he worked to realize his goal of becoming a pro tennis player. Mansour had remarkable touch and ball- handling skills, but he was older, and never rose higher than no. 192 in singles. His payoff came in the mid- 1990s, when he carved out a niche for himself at veterans’ events and exhibitions as a kind of Harlem Globetrotter of tennis. He was a very entertaining, charismatic guy.
(A Mansour lo podemos ver en su salsa aquí o aquí)
Y su carta de amor a Nadal:
I watched Nadal, and his entourage suffering in the player’s guest box, intently as the young Spaniard flopped into his chair on the changeover at the end of the fourth set of the Wimbledon final of 2008. Toni Nadal, Rafa’s coach and uncle, dropped his head to the railing in the player guest box. Rafa’s father, Sebastian, stood up and he must have told Toni not to do that, because in a moment his brother was bolt upright again. It was a momentary lapse, a show of despair from a straightforward, even-tempered guy who’s anything but obsessed with winning and losing. What he’s obsessed with—and it shows in his nephew’s conduct and words—is character. Toni Nadal used to make Rafa play with poor quality equipment, just to show him that he had to buck up and play with the tools at his disposal. He forbade Rafa jamming his feet into his shoes without untying the laces: “Just because you get them for free doesn’t mean you can ruin them; many people work very hard just to be able to afford the shoes you get for free.” He made Rafa sweep the court before and after practice session, even after the boy had become a Grand Slam champion. And he made Rafa carry his own bags. In 2005, Rafa scored one of the first big titles on hard courts, winning the big Masters 1000 event in Montreal over Andre Agassi. My ESPN booth-mate, Cliff Drysdale, and I groused and complained about having to be at the airport to catch a flight on a small commuter airline at six in the morning after the Montreal final, and when we got to the airport Toni Nadal and Rafa were already standing in line, patiently waiting to check their bags. “Well,” I said to Cliff, “if Rafa can do it, I guess we can, too.” By then, Rafa’s great rival, Roger Federer, was traveling exclusively by private jet; in fact, after Novak Djokovic beat Rafa and Roger in back-to-back matches at the same Montreal event in 2007, Roger decided to spare Rafa the indignities of the Com-Air check-in line and gave him a lift to the next event in his private jet. I imagine Toni appreciated the gesture, too. He’s salt of the earth, a man of good intentions and conscience who always seemed interested in turning his nephew into a good man, not merely a great tennis player. He was working with good clay. If Toni had surrendered to despair at the end of that fourth set of that epic 2008 Wimbledon final, I could only imagine what Rafa himself felt. But it was impossible to tell. Beads of perspiration dripped from his damp, dark hair as he sat. He looked curiously at peace with himself, not by any means resigned. He held his chin high and gazed off into the distance, as if he were watching some strange object crawling across the horizon. He was devoid of visible emotion, although he had plenty of reason to be captive to feelings, most of them bad. Nadal had won the first two sets by identical 6–4 scores, setting the stage for the one thing no one had expected: a blowout. A comprehensive beat down of the man who, many had already decided, was the greatest player ever to swing a racket. A year earlier, Rafa had lost his second consecutive, heartbreaking five-set final to Federer on Centre Court at Wimbledon. Alone in the shower, he cried. Yet there he was, granted a tennis player’s most profound wish—a chance to play the same guy under nearly identical conditions, for almost exactly the same stakes, one more time. A third time, no less. Third-time lucky, or three strikes and you’re out, it was going to be one or the other. And as Nadal sat on that changeover, who could imagine it would be the former? He’d been a hair’s breadth from winning this match in straight sets, 6–4, 6–4, 6–4. But he faltered, ever so slightly, and lost his momentum. With the help of rain delays, Federer had found a way back into the hunt. He chipped away at Nadal’s huge lead, and won that third set. And not long after that he had stared down one match point and faced another in the tiebreaker. All day, Nadal had been scoring big with his topspin forehand to Federer’s backhand, and he went to the well once again on that second match point. As the ball left Nadal’s racket, I thought: This is over. Federer hasn’t made a backhand down the line all day. Anticipating Nadal’s shot, Federer ran toward his backhand corner, loaded up, and hit down-the-line for a clean, sizzling winner. I’ll always remember that stroke as the single greatest shot of that Wimbledon fortnight, and the perfect symbol of Federer’s genius. It was a gorgeous swing and a perfect placement, and it was the most difficult of shots, made under the most intense pressure a man can face on a tennis court. I turned to Dick Enberg, my colleague in the ESPN broadcast booth, and just asked: “How does this happen? How does he make that shot?” Dick, I think, was speechless. After Federer hit that frozen rope down the line to wipe away the second Nadal match point, he went on to win the tiebreaker and level the match at two all. Nadal was powerless to do anything but slump into his chair to await the start of the fifth and final set. This was the match, and the tournament, that Nadal most powerfully burned to win. It was on a pale green field of battle, where, for years, no one had really expected him to do well, much less emerge as the champion. Legions of Nadal’s gifted, Open-era countrymen, all of them proficient and deadly on slower clay surfaces, were routinely shot to pieces by efficient, aggressive, attacking players employing the shorter backswings, penetrating serves, chip returns, and flatter shots that can pay big dividends on surfaces faster than clay. Yet there he was. More than once during the match, he’d taken a covert glance at the Royal Box, where his eyes must have picked out King Juan Carlos of Spain, seated in one of those dark green wicker chairs with the green and white stripes. Nadal had been introduced to him, and sheepishly admitted that they were something like buddies. One of the main reasons Rafa wanted to win Wimbledon was to bring honor to Spain, to show that a Spanish player could win at Wimbledon, even though none had managed it since Manuel Santana in 1966, in an era that might have been three hundred years ago. And there he sat. He was, at least, taking that third strike like a man, with stoic equilibrium. Throughout that final, the new-era grass at Wimbledon had enabled Rafa to use his best weapon against Roger with deadly efficiency. Rafa lashed that high-bouncing, topspin forehand to Federer’s backhand side, both on the serve and in their baseline battles, and he scored with it, thanks to the altered playing properties of the grass. That shot was Rafa’s magic bullet on slow clay, where it was even more lethal, as demonstrated by his domination of Roger in four consecutive French Opens starting in 2005 (one semi and three finals, in that order). The only thing more surprising than Nadal’s proficiency with that shot has been Federer’s seeming refusal to do anything that might counteract it. Most great champions have a broad and deep stubborn streak, and all of them want to win on their own terms, as if adjusting or adapting to an opponent is somehow a confession of weakness. The last thing a champion wants to do is let an opponent—especially a rival—feel that he’s forcing you to get out of your comfort zone and making you try things you wouldn’t ordinarily do. Great players just don’t like to capitulate to a rival’s terms, but they will sometimes accept the challenge, just to show they can still win. For an all-out attacking player like my brother John, that was out of the question and in many ways it made his life easier. He was coming right at you with the serve and aggressive net game. If you could pass him more often than he could destroy your defenses with his volley and overhead, you had him. More than likely, he would take away your game and shut you down. Great talents who lean more to the all-court or baseline game, like Federer and Pete Sampras, are less aggressive and thus more inclined to let you choose your weapons and take it from there. Pete Sampras used to do that, sometimes to the dismay of his coach, Paul Annacone. Pete occasionally decided that he was going to beat an opponent at the guy’s own game, instead of making his own life easier by taking the guy out of his comfort zone. You may remember that now legendary U.S. Open quarterfinal match between Pete and Àlex Corretja—the one that cemented Pete’s reputation as a warrior of unparalleled grit. It was a brutal five-setter that Pete won despite growing woozy and vomiting in the early stages of the fifth set tiebreaker. He would close out the match with a combination of an ace and a double fault by Corretja to end the tiebreaker 9–7. Annacone had encouraged Pete to attack Corretja, and take away the set play off which Corretja lived. He liked to get a good kick on his serve to the backhand, which gave him enough time to run around all but the most aggressive return and dictate with his forehand. Paul had all kinds of ideas about how to neutralize that strategy, but Pete decided not to follow any of them. He wanted to beat Corretja at his own game, and he finally did—but we all saw what it cost him. Roger took much the same attitude into his matches with Rafa on clay. It got to the point where many pundits suggested that Roger was simply living in a state of denial, unwilling to admit that there was no way he could play on Nadal’s terms and still win. I understand the mind-set, and I’m always reluctant to advise a player to try to outfox an opponent. Trust your game—it’s an important lesson to learn. Have faith in your best shots and do your best to create situations where you can hit them, but be open to making adjustments if you need a Plan B to fall back on. That Nadal topspin forehand to the Federer one-handed backhand, high, was a gift that just kept giving, and the cornerstone of Nadal’s successful game plan against Roger. There comes a point where even a talent like Roger has to recognize reality and formulate a counter-strategy, even if it’s as simple as adjusting your receiving position to make it easier to step around the kicker to the backhand and hit a forehand return. On those few occasions when Roger did surprise Rafa by stepping around the backhand, he won the point. Early in the Australian Open final of 2009, Federer stepped around a high-bouncing serve to his backhand and just powdered the ball. I thought, Okay, here we go. Roger has seen the light. But he didn’t follow up with more of the same. He immediately fell back into the old, familiar pattern of sticking to a game plan that worked against everyone else on the planet. And he lost the match. The weird thing is that Roger is a pretty mellow, rational guy. He never acts like he’s got anything to prove, and seems to enjoy winning in a surgical, clean way. He’s the one guy who, despite or because of his sheer brilliance, you expect to make adjustments that demonstrate his mastery of strategy and tactics. But it isn’t like Federer didn’t benefit from the properties of grass, 2.0, either. One of his most effective shots is the short, crosscourt slice, and he hits an amazing forehand; because of his racket head speed, he gets a lot of spin—action—on the ball but it still travels with a pretty low trajectory, unlike typical topspin shots. The grass rewards those shots. The 2008 Wimbledon final was a fine example of the way a court with great playing properties gives with one hand, and takes away with the other, even when the players have dramatically different styles. And it doesn’t get much different than Federer vs. Nadal. Everyone knows how that 2008 final turned out: Nadal finally won it, 9–7 in the fifth, under light conditions so poor that had it not developed into the greatest tennis match of our time, it might have been called because of darkness before the last ball was hit. I was really curious to find out what Nadal had been thinking on that changeover at the start of the fifth set, and I learned soon enough. He told us in response to the very first question asked at the official post-match press conference. Did you think you’d blown it after failing to convert those two fourth-set match points? These were his exact words: “I just reminded myself that I am still here. The match is not over, we are at two sets all. When I lost the fourth set I was sitting down, and just say [to myself], ‘Well, I am playing well, I am doing well, I am with very good positive attitude, so gonna continue like this and wait, wait what’s happening. I felt confident with myself, so for that reason I was confident on the match….” And that, right there, is one of the keys to Nadal’s success and a pretty good explanation of how the guy was able to complete what started out as an impossible mission—to catch and eventually eclipse Federer (albeit briefly), and to bring him down on his own turf. Every player in a tough match, even at a small club tournament, tells himself: Hey, it’s about now. Forget what happened two moments ago, or back in the first set. Stay in the now. Love the game, indulge your passion for it. Players strive mightily to think that way, and it’s a message I’m always trying to drill into my kids. But it may be the hardest of all things to do in this game. And Nadal had the poise, mental discipline, and the deep confidence to not only think but live that mandate in what had to be the darkest hour of his career. And it was all the more astonishing because there’s a real chance that Nadal might never play another Wimbledon final. He certainly escaped some treacherous times on his way to that title, and as much as the grass playing field has been leveled, I wouldn’t call his style ideal for grass. The injuries that would prevent Nadal from defending his Wimbledon title and enabled Federer to re-claim his no. 1 ranking in 2009 also must be taken into account. Rafa knew how rare an opportunity he faced, and you can bet it was going through his head as he watched the chalk dust fly after a Federer ace, or another of those wicked, penetrating, forehand winners. Sitting on that changeover after set four, Nadal had every reason to channel my brother at that French Open of 1989, and think: This was my shot. This was my window of opportunity. Nadal believed in himself to an extraordinary degree at Wimbledon in 2008. But even that deep feeling of confidence isn’t enough to get the job done, because in tennis you’re always a victim of changing circumstances. You face unpredictable developments (like squandering match points) that can make you do crazy things—panic and overreact to a lost opportunity, retreat into a shell of false bravado, play passive tennis because you think you can always come back to win, or just because you’re, well, scared stiff. You can undermine yourself in a dozen insidious ways, especially if you act for the sake of acting. It’s much tougher to say, as Nadal did, just wait…be patient…see how things work out and focus on the immediate task at hand. It’s funny, but there’s nothing earth shattering or especially insightful in Nadal’s explanation of what he was thinking. If you’re unfamiliar with tennis, you might even shrug and say it amounted to a string of typical jock clichés. Some players say something like that, and you think, The guy is full of shit. He’s just talking. But when Nadal says such obvious, simple things, you really believe him. When he says he feels content even though he lost in the semifinals of the US Open because “being one of the last four is good, no?,” you believe him because—because you just know it’s coming from his heart, and because he’s right. He makes his point in a way both innocent and preemptive, like a wise child pointing out the obvious to a confused and overly analytical adult. Nadal told himself, during that fourth-set changeover, you’re playing great tennis, just keep going. Any other tennis player on the planet would have been more likely to think: Holy shit! I just fucked that up. I blew my chance to become a Wimbledon champion…. How do I get out of this without losing too much face? If I had to choose a match to serve as the template for greatness, Nadal’s performance in the 2008 Wimbledon final would be at the top of the list.
3.5 estrellas, muy entretenido.
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