Open: An Autobiography

Sprinting all-out for my backhand drop, he has the racket gripped in such a way that he’s going to have to dig, but instead he gets there so fast he doesn’t need to dig. Meaning, the ball is on him and he has the wrong grip. Instead of crushing the ball, as he should, he’s forced by his grip to punch the ball. Then he holds ground at the net, and I lace a backhand up the line.

It passes him by a fair margin.

Now he’s serving at 6:7. I have match point again. He misses the first serve. I have a nanosecond to decide where he’s coming with his second serve. Aggressive? Safe? I decide he’s going to err on the side of safety. He’s going to roll it to my backhand. So how aggressive do I want to be? Where do I want to station myself? Should I make an irrevocable decision, stand where I can kill the ball if I’m correct, but where I won’t be able to reach it if I’m wrong?

Or should I split the difference, stand in the middle ground, where I’ll be able to hit a moder-ately good shot on most serves, and a perfect shot on none?

If there is to be a final decision in this match, one final decision on this night of 100,000

decisions, I want that final decision to be mine. I irrevocably commit. He serves, as expected, to my backhand. It hangs just where I thought it would hang, like a soap bubble. I feel all the hairs on my body rise. I feel the crowd rise. I tell myself: Quality cut, rip it, rip it, rip it, you fuck.

As the ball leaves my racket I track every inch of its flight. I see the shadow of the ball conver-ging with the ball itself. As they slowly become one, I’m saying aloud: Ball, please please find a hole.

It does.

When Blake hugs me at the net, we know we’ve done something special. But I know it better, because I’ve played eight hundred more matches than he has. And this match stands apart from the others. I’ve never been more intellectually aware, never felt the need to be more intellectually aware, and I take a certain intellectual pride in the finished product. I want to sign it.

After they cut the tape off my feet, after the news conference, Gil and Perry and Darren and Philly and I go to P. J. Clarke’s for food and drinks. By the time I get back to the hotel it’s four in the morning. Stefanie is asleep. As I come in she sits up in bed and smiles.

You’re crazy, she says.

I laugh.

That was unbelievable, she says. You went places out there.

I did, baby. I went places.

I lie on the floor next to the bed, try to fall asleep, but I can’t stop replaying the match.

I hear her voice in the darkness somewhere above me, like an angel.

How do you feel?

It was a pretty cool way to spend an evening.

IN THE SEMIS I’m due to play Robby Ginepri, a touted kid from Georgia. CBS wants mine to be the late match. I go to the tournament director on my knees. I tell him, If I’m lucky enough to get through this match, I’ll have to come back tomorrow. Please don’t make a thirty-five-year-old man get home later than his twenty-two-year-old opponent in the final.

He reschedules my match, makes it the early semi.

After two five-setters in a row, no one gives me a chance against Ginepri. He’s fast, solid off both sides, playing the best tennis of his life - and young. And even before dealing with Ginepri, I know the first thing I’ll have to do is chisel through a wall of my own fatigue. The last three sets against Blake are the best tennis I’ve ever played, and the most draining. I tell myself to come out against Ginepri and manufacture adrenaline, pretend I’m down two sets, try to relocate that mindless state I found against Blake.

It works. Feigning urgency, I win the first set. Now my goal is to conserve energy for tomorrow’s final. I begin to play safe tennis, thinking about my next opponent, and of course that lets Ginepri swing freely, take chances. He wins the second set.

I banish from my mind all thought of the final. I give Ginepri my full attention. He’s gassed after expending so much energy to tie the match, and I win the third.

But he wins the fourth.

I need to start the fifth with fury. I also need to acknowledge that I can’t win every point. I can’t run after everything, can’t lunge for each dink and drop. I can’t go full-speed against a kid who’s still teething. He wants to be out here all night, but I have forty-five minutes of energy left, forty-five minutes of a functioning body. Or maybe just thirty-five.

I win the set. It’s not possible, but I’m in the final of the U.S. Open at thirty-five years old.

Darren, Gil, and Stefanie scoop me off the locker-room floor and go into triage mode. Darren grabs my rackets and runs them to Roman, the stringer. Gil hands me my Gil Water. Stefanie helps me to the car. We race back to the Four Seasons to watch Federer and Hewitt fight for the privilege of playing the old cripple from Vegas.