Serena Agonistes / Kyrgios Triumphant — Touched with Fire Media

1. Serena Agonistes

The greatest tennis player of all time — measured against her peers — was in trouble this morning. She was down two breaks in the third set, a point away from going down 0-4 to a little-known Briton who had never beaten a world top-5 player, never gone beyond the third round in an Open, and who had never crossed my field of attention. I will admit that I was rooting for the kid — I almost always root for the underdog, and there can be no greater underdog than an unranked player up against Serena Williams in a Grand Slam. Heather Watson had reached that point through a combination of guts and, let’s face it, luck — just before she served to go up 0-4, a graphic flashed on the screen: Serena had made 22 unforced errors to Watson’s 4. Give credit to Watson for playing nearly perfectly, but she was up against an uncharacteristically erratic champ.

The game went almost ten minutes. I lost track of the number of times the two players tangled at deuce. Ultimately, seemingly impossibly, Serena found something that Watson couldn’t answer, and won the game. And I thought, She’s going to win this match. It just seemed inevitable. We’ve seen her do it so many times.

I’m usually resistant to that kind of thinking — momentum, in most sports, is a bullshit dump for the inexplicable combination of chance and talent that sometimes results in spectacular runs of great play by ordinary players, or savage doldrums like the one Serena had been in since the second set. But Serena is so great, and has been for so long, and we’ve seen things like this from her so many times, that it was hard not to think it.

And win she did. It wasn’t easy — Watson broke her again later and served for the match up 5-4 — but Serena won 7 of the last 9 games and staggered into the second week of Wimbledon after a gruelling, sometimes dazzling, sometimes ugly match against a woman ten years her junior. Throughout much of the third set, Serena was in obvious physical pain, gasping for air, straining to the limits of her strength and reach to hit balls she might not always get to, make plays she doesn’t usually have to. I have to say, despite my instincts, I started rooting for the old girl. (Old, ha — she’s a year and a half younger than me. Only in sports could you call her old.) That she was so obviously struggling made her victory all the more compelling.

When people talk about sports — especially about tennis — so often what they talk about are speed, grace, creativity. These are words associated, broadly, with beauty. Serena at her best has exemplified these more than any other woman in history, and as much as Federer or Nadal, her direct male contemporaries. But that’s only a small part of what we want. The matches we remember, the ones we tell each other about, are so often the gruelling struggles, the moments when great players face defeat (and sometimes, even, meet it): Agassi digging deep against Baghdadis in ’06, Djokovic and Nadal going six hours in Melbourne in ’12, the relentless Wimbledon final in ’08 in which Nadal finally broke through against Federer. The ends of these matches were not notably graceful or creative. You can’t play tennis that hard for that long and not suffer.

And why do we like the suffering? Perhaps it’s a narrative instinct programmed into us over hundreds of thousands of years of evolution. Maybe it’s that we like to believe these athletes are just like us. Or maybe — just maybe — there’s a sense in which sports, at least the taxing and intimate ones like tennis, are a sort of ritual sacrifice, a way of warding off infinity, and sometimes we like to see that our sacrifices are feeling pain.

2. Kyrgios Triumphant

It’s tempting to contrast the styles of Nick Kyrgios, the young phenom from Australia, and Milos Raonic, the robotic heavy server from Canada. Raonic is the more accomplished player, and there’s something of the Terminator in his demeanor: he’s blankly handsome, immaculately shaven, black hair greased firmly into place. He hits hard, he doesn’t get upset. He’s the kind of guy that garners a certain kind of respect among people — and there are a lot of people in tennis like this — who believe that reserve is an important and positive quality for a person to possess.

Kyrgios has none of that. Though he’s had rising success of late — in fact, he may be the most successful young male player since Federer — he’s still at the level of a prospect. What he’s famous for is his flamboyance. He jumps, he gesticulates, now and again he hits a shot between his legs. He panders to a passel of yellow-clad Aussies who seem to follow him everywhere. He is, in short, eccentric. And I love it.

I had expected to find the announcers for his match today against the catatonic Canadian to react repressively: Wimbledon is the sport’s oldest and most conservative venue, and players who make a display of themselves there tend to be met with a wave of snipped British condescension. Instead, they seemed to enjoy it as much as I do: they giggled as he lined up hilariously deep, almost against the back wall, after being overpowered by Raonic’s serve in the second set; they cheered him on as he ran a strange, banana-like route across the court in hopes of disturbing Raonic’s calm on an easy smash winner; they even forgave him when he bounded into the air for one of his signature between-the-legs shots during a competitive game.

I think there are two reasons he gets away with it. The first, and most important, is that he is not among the class of those who will turn his energy against the crowd or the umpire. Players who routinely scream and swear at the officials earn a special place in the bowels of tennis’ Hall of Shame. Because tennis is such an intimate game, because there are so few people who matter on the court, when one of them loses his cool with another, the outburst is loud and unavoidable — so in your face. It invades your space. Kyrgios, for all his effervescence, doesn’t do that.

And then there’s this: he’s truly a magnificent player, once the ball is in play. He’s tall and fast, and his arms seem bizarrely long, so that he has the reach of a fir tree with massive branches. He has amazingly quick wrists, quicker than any I’ve seen, and he uses them to whip his racket around with vicious speed — this results in rocket-speed shots, nasty slices and hard dives. He’s not always sure where it’s going, I don’t think, but his ball moves unlike any other player’s.

His greatness seems part-and-parcel of his personality, too. He takes risks other players don’t take. He plays fast and doesn’t waste a lot of time thinking. And so much of the time he’s visibly having fun. I think that’s really it: people watch tennis because they love tennis. Nick Kyrgios also loves tennis, probably more than just about anybody. That buys you a lot of wiggle room.