French Open: Getting personal with tennis, up close and real

Suzlanne Lenglen – Roland Garros – French Open 2014

There is a certain utopia with sport that is difficult to capture in words. As anyone with a taste for it might reason with you, sport is an organism with which you could fall in love over and over again, without ever tiring of it. Sometimes though, an overdose of sport on television can interfere with this experience.

I realize as much after a journey of rediscovery these past few days walking around the altars of dirt inside this temple called Roland Garros. Admittedly it is through the DNA of tennis inside the womb of this French Open. But rest assured that tennis is as beautiful a prism as you might acquire to peer into the heart of sport even as you dissolve in its infinite embrace.

Oh yes, a vast majority of these gladiators do whip the ball as hard as you think, maybe harder. We can see that on television, besides the editor’s view and selection of emotions captured in the rich pixels of our modern screens.

We can also appreciate at times the brutal battle for a single point or the supreme aesthetic of a genial stroke conceived and caressed under our eager gaze. But what we cannot see or experience on television are the many myriad details that go into the construction of this richly layered play.

A spiritual experience such as that is only possible when you are deep inside these theatres of modern excellence. Each act is an orgasmic play of nature – with a pair of resplendent athletes at the centre of a certain vividly beautiful space in the confines of time.

Under severe duress from this divine prisoner called time, the athlete as artist turns space into her canvas. A graphite racket harder than all the jaws that drop in awe turns into her inspired brush. A fuzzy sphere, mostly yellow is all the colour she needs.

Of course, not every work is a master piece, it never was and never will be. Alas an athlete is human too, filled with sundry thoughts, only some useful in striking a symbiotic rhythm with the nuanced physics needed to complete the work at hand.

God is in the many details that go into an athlete’s work – footwork and movement, the winding up, release and follow through of the racket before, during and after the stroke besides the decisions that need to be made about this moment and the next complicate this magnificent script just as it is written before your very own eyes.

Even as the mind collects and delivers information from one moment to the next, neither the athlete nor the voyeur know or understand the shape or flow of this work. It is these finer details that you are able to appreciate while seated on a perch not too far from the heavy air that fills the nostrils of the artist herself.

The exasperated grunts lend the work its voice. The agony and ecstasy of the men and women who raised her – parents and trainers add to the chorus. The boundless cheers, the mirth and grief surround the work with the musical notes that provide it flesh and body.

Produced on a theatre, filled with people just as willing to bust their lungs as the artists themselves it makes for compelling experience. The deafening applause of an adoring public, the hopeful urging of the parent or a coach and the self-muttering noises from the strained athlete provide punctuation and emphasis.

All of it is engrossing; consuming the voyeur into a gravitational vortex that has this magical power to satiate, enthrall and gratify all at once. In a vicarious way it is an experience that is at once satiating yet appetizing. Just as you might find some of those brush strokes brutally gory, yet gloriously aesthetic.

Some of it, well most of it is beyond the grasp of our finest display units. Modern television is certainly in your face bringing us as close to the action as possible, but for all its myriad camera angles, it is just a sullied experience of sport.

As with perfume, the experience of sport in flesh compared to it on television is a little like the choice between a bottle of Clive Christian and one from Christian Dior. The latter is good too, let us not take that away but then it is also shorn of the many subtle details that distinguish the material from the spiritual.

As consummating as this experience is, I wonder what my spouse would make of it when she reads this and realizes that her man is sinking deeper into this relationship with sport. Perhaps she can take heart from knowing that in learning to love again and again, I might love her too more than I already do.