Write about things you really know, was the advice Papa Hemingway offered wannabe writers, so here goes: The French Open is still on, Wimbledon is coming up, and I’ve just read a lament by some Frenchwoman about how professional tennis and big-time sports have become ever more ubiquitous and ever more out of reach. Duh!
A former model by the name of Géraldine Maillet has made a documentary about the 2015 French Open, not exactly a stop-the-presses kind of story as it hit the video shops just as the 2016 Open began. The French Championships, as they were back then before the Open era of 1967, was my favorite tournament—Paris being Paris, the Parisian girls being, well, beautiful and easier than most, and a very laissez-faire attitude among tennis officials making it so.
Needless to say, the French Open is now a very different affair. Top players are multinational corporations, marketing is a sine qua non, and if one wants to speak to a player, one goes to his agent’s agent and negotiates an appointment. Everything is machinelike: the play, the way players act, their training, even the umpiring, with Cyclops overruling the human error. Players are protected from prying eyes inside the locker room, and from getting in each other’s heads by their limited access to them. Coaches, trainers, gurus, and dietitians make sure of it. Tennis is a soulless game made so by technology and hucksters who sell it to advertisers who in turn sell it for big corporation dollars. Hype rules supreme and debase the game. Everyone, with very few exceptions, looks and plays the same. The banalest questions precede and follow the matches by hacks who are basically cheerleaders. Welcome to the modern game of pro tennis. And we also have the elephants on the court: doping and betting. The last two were Greek to the old-timers. No longer.
Maillet regrets she didn’t have the access one William Klein had back in 1982 when he made a documentary about that year’s French Open. It was still tennis back then, with Borg and McEnroe and Connors and their wooden rackets and the tantrums on the court of the last two, but even then players were becoming more out of reach. Sure, he filmed Nastase smoking in the locker room and coaches openly discussing strengths and weaknesses of their players in the competitors’ section just above the center court, and one sees a much slower game with guile and touch being as important, if not more so, than sheer power. But it was already a professional game played by pros.
