Best in the World
Last week I spent a day at Indian Wells, the ATP Masters 1000 and WTA 1000 tennis tournament located 2 hours east of Los Angeles. It was my first time watching professional tennis in person.
I watched in awe as stars Carlos Alcaraz and Novak Djokovic played on the practice courts and signed autographs. We sat on hot metal benches and sweat under the desert sun watching seventeen year old Iva Jovich in her WTA 1000 debut. And later we shivered in the cold of the desert night to see Frances Tiafoe beat Damir Dzumhur. We attended early in the tournament so many of the seeded top players were still tearing through the lower ranked players who had to qualify to get into the tournament.
To prepare for our time at Indian Wells, I read David Foster Wallace’s essay on tennis professional Michael Joyce, who he profiled while attending another Masters 1000 event, the Canadian Open, in 1995. Wallace is one of my favorite writers and many consider him one of the best tennis writers, if not sports writers, of his time.
While Michael Joyce was a world class player who ranked inside of the top 100 in the 90s, he is by no means a household name. Wallace invites the reader to “try to imagine what it would be like to be among the hundred best in the world at something. At anything. I have tried to imagine; it's hard.” Just to have qualified or been seeded in a Masters 1000 event like the Canadian Open or Indian Wells implies a staggering number of hours of tennis played and opponents beaten and skills honed to a level that most people could never consider achieving.
Even more so, all of these world class players have lived their entire lives with tennis at the epicenter of their days since they were three and four and five years old. While watching these incredible athletes at Indian Wells I was reminded of this passage from Wallace on Michael Joyce’s response to the question of whether he chose the life of serious tennis at such a young age. He describes “the way Joyce's face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it–you can see this in his face when he talks about it…the eyes get round and the pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any of the loci of intensity that most of us choose to call the things we love. It's the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who've been married for an incredibly long time or in religious people who are so religious, they've devoted their whole lives to religious stuff: It's the sort of love whose measure is what it's cost, what one's given up for it. Whether there's 'choice' involved is, at a certain point, of no interest ... since it's the surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.”
If you would like to read the rest of Wallace’s incredible essay on Michael Joyce and the Canadian Open, you can find it here.