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Tuesday
The last of the year’s four great tennis tournaments ended this past weekend, and we were fortunate to be treated to sublime performances by the top players in the game. The epic rivalry between Jannik Sinner and Carlos Alcaraz has, as commentator John McEnroe observed, consoled us to losing “the big three” of Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic. (Djokovic, while still competing, can no longer hold his own against the world’s best.) In the Alcaraz-Sinner match, the players couldn’t rely on errors from the other but had to go all out on every point. When mistakes were made, it was often because anything less than a perfect shot would be insufficient. One doesn’t often see this.
The one finalist this weekend still without a championship to her name was the American player Amanda Anisimova, who hits with remarkable power but could not match the power + variety of Aryna Sabalenka. Although Anisimova acquitted herself much better than she did in the Wimbledon finals, where she suffered a humiliating double bagel (6-0, 6-0), she still lost in straight sets. Because she bounced back to reach the U.S. Open finals, however, a Samuel Beckett quote applies especially to her.
Beckett was a tennis fan (I learned this from Thomas Swick in a Literary Hub tennis article for Literary Hub), so maybe it makes special sense that the Swiss tennis player Stan Wawrinka would have the following Beckett quote passage tattooed on his arm.
Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better. (Worstward Ho!)
Anisimova failed better this time.
Wawrinka himself had a very un-Beckett turn in his career. After toiling for years in Federer’s shadow, he suddenly stunned the tennis world by wrestling titles away from Nadal and Djokovic, one of the few to do so in the Big Three era. In other words, we can look back at two instances where he didn’t fail.
Wawrinka is the exception, however. Most athletes can look forward only to final failure, which means that Beckett usually gets the last word. In Waiting for Godot, his best known and most accessible work, Vladimir and Estragon never get what they are waiting for. At the end of the play, a messenger boy may tell them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you that he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow,” but the “surely” gives away the game. It’s like the Minnesota Vikings awaiting a Super Bowl win.
There’s another Beckett line that may be even more applicable to those who play sports. It’s from Beckett’s novel The Unnamable, a fragmented monologue of someone grappling with identity, existence, and even basic syntax. It ends with a pages-long sentence, which itself ends with:
where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.
Forget about confidently striding across the finish line, as Alcaraz and Sabalenka did over the weekend. For most of us it’s a slog just to survive.
An earlier line in Unnamable can also be applied to tennis, which is one of the loneliest sports, comparable to boxing. There are no teammates to bolster you so that, in the end, there is nothing to cushion you against a bad performance. At the highest levels, every mistake is magnified, and if you start spiraling into a 6-0, 6-0 defeat, you may experience a particular kinship with Beckett’s narrator when he declares, “I am of course alone. Alone. That is soon said.” Or for that matter with Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner when he intones,
Alone, alone, all, all alone
Alone on a wide, wide sea.
To be sure, we can fend off Beckett’s Theater of the Absurd pessimism by recalling that it’s the journey, not the destination, that is the point. For all the stress on winning, it’s good to recall the lovely moments along the way. After I’ve played a tennis match, I dwell less on the outcome and more on recalling my best shots, which are often brought out by the heat of competition.
Maybe we don’t need Godot to show up.
