I've never been a sports person. I was an unathletic kid that grew into an unathletic adult and sports has never held any interest for me, with one exception: the annual family tradition of watching Roland-Garros and poking fun at the way tennis players moan and grunt.
It was then that I watched someone lose a match in such devastating fashion that you could see it plainly on his face; a certain slump of the mouth and the eyebrows and the look of a doomed man in his eyes, body language that in this line of work smells like blood in the water.
Mentality matters. That’s why the current men’s and women’s No. 1 players, Daniil Medvedev and Iga Świątek, are working with sports psychologists; why Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, the Big Three, are often called mental giants. You can argue that mental toughness is the result of exceptional technique, that the greats have such confidence in their skills that it creates the illusion of mental strength; but the easily rattled won't be able to perform at their best in high-pressure moments, whatever their best may be.
Tennis is unique in what it demands. Whatever belief you can muster, you have to be able to sustain through a lengthy match, aware that, unlike other sports, your coach isn’t allowed to talk to you and there are no teammates to keep your spirits up. It’s just you and the worst of your thoughts and every mistake wears you down just a little more, fraying the nerves.
Tennis at its best and most gladiatorial is pure theater, a battle of the wills against two evenly matched opponents who both refuse to give up; the nearly six-hour-long Australian Open 2022 final would be a good example. But I am a sadist and, by nature, and I consider weakness to be more compelling than strength. I start looking out for it: I watch Stefanos Tsitsipas lose to Novak Djokovic at the Roland-Garros 2021 final, his confidence permanently shaken; and one month later I tune in to watch Alexander Zverev play Wimbledon.
Wimbledon 2021, round four. Zverev is a lanky 6'6" monster of a man (the surname in Russian apparently means beast) and his typical 130 mph first serves keep hitting the net. He's making unforced errors, giving away free points. It looks like he's losing.
The point of a first serve in the modern men’s game is to be virtually unreturnable. If you miss, you get a second chance—the second serve is usually weaker, slower, because missing would mean double faulting, losing the point entirely. Double faults happen to everyone, but not like this.
The men's world No. 3 makes a total of twenty double faults. He's a mess. He's a Tesla crash-and-burn in slow motion, and I am captivated.
He's talented, dedicated, a marvel of sports biomechanics—and he's a headcase. He was hailed as the next Federer, once, before the domestic abuse accusations and on-court temper tantrums. But Zverev has the yips—in fact, he's had the yips for a few years now.
Tennis yips “manifest in the form of the player all of a sudden consistently failing to execute a serve, leading to a torrent of consecutive double faults.” About 30% of cases are neurological—a condition that affects athletes and musicians called focal dystonia—but most are psychological. It’s easy to tell them apart by when and where they make their appearance: in high pressure moments, important tournaments, against high-level opponents and young upcoming talents.
Attention is redirected to thoughts of past and future failure—the hows and the whys and the what-ifs. Those prone to anxiety are familiar with how coordination suffers, how muscles and nerves and breathing seem to seize up. Someone who plays tennis once told me that the more you think, the more you miss; the more frustrated you get, the more you miss; you can't think of anything but the ball, or you'll miss.
Zverev loses his nerve, he chokes, he's a choker. To choke in sports means to underperform relative to your real skill and in French you can say perdre ses moyens; to lose your means of doing something, your capacity or capabilities; to become flustered, to go to pieces, to lose control.
Over time I became familiar with the strange and horny ways of tennis lingo. “He drills the ball so deep and so hard”, says a commentator as Dominic Thiem hits his (admittedly) stunning backhand. In the Olympics the camera comes closer, lingers molasses-slow on Maria Sakkari's sculpted arms and Tsitsipas' golden curls and the trail of Chardy's salt-and-pepper chest hair.
Tokyo is hosting the Olympics—one year late, ongoing pandemic and all—and I'm watching a semifinal that feels like a final. It's Djokovic against Zverev, and Zverev doesn't stand a chance, I don't think, but I hope he’ll make it interesting.
Djokovic wins the first set easily. Zverev doesn't think he stands a chance, either, and that resignation loosens something in him. No longer is he the most promising Next Gen player, the next Grand Slam champion, the next Federer. The pressure lifts just enough that he plays like he's not afraid to lose, and he ends up getting the gold.
“What you're looking at is a server who is severely depressed.”
The commentator is tennis legend John McEnroe. It's September 2021 at the US Open and it's Djokovic against Zverev (again), and Zverev's confidence is failing him (again).
Zverev came close once before, in the 2020 US Open final against Dominic Thiem. In an almost empty stadium in mid-pandemic New York he became the first person in history to blow a two-sets-to-love lead in a US Open final.
Players often try to camouflage their yips by changing strategies—in golf that means changing grip or switching hands, a superficial solution to a mental problem. Zverev appears to have fixed his yips in the interim but the nerves are still there, plainly obvious in the defensive, passive way he plays. Zverev loses, Djokovic advances to the final, and Medvedev gets his first Grand Slam title.
Had I started watching tennis fifteen years ago my eyes might have been on Guillermo Coria, another player who suffered from service yips. Some have called Coria "the best that never was," and he might have been, but it’s a pointless discussion.
People deal with pressure in all sorts of ways. Some find a comfortable space there, in the what-ifs and could-have-beens, because feigning nonchalance is easier than trying and failing, a more comforting story than having potential and being too afraid to ask the question. And it’s easier to look for something or someone to blame. As soon as he starts losing, Nick Kyrgios starts shouting—he shouts at the grass, he shouts at his team, he shouts at the umpire, he shouts at the crowd.
The allegations against Zverev paint a picture of someone deeply insecure—insecure the way narcissists tend to be, arrogant but fragile, struggling to sustain an ego that says “You're destined to win a Grand Slam.” When that overinflated ego is threatened people either lash out, or they crumble.
Why did I end up fixating on Zverev? He interests me because he has the potential and he asks the question and, despite his mental issues, he has the ranking; and he interests me because I think the way he falls apart under pressure is funny. Most importantly, because his professional problems and his off-court problems are, to me, two sides of the same coin—and there is something poetic about that.
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