Part 1 and Part 2
What about James' game?
He plays right-handed and has a one-handed backhand. He is very fast, especially considering his size (about 6'1" and 180 pounds). His game is somewhere between that of an aggressive baseliner and an all-court player. The tennis season is so long that there is no off-time in which to make the major change to an all-court game though. James goes all out for every shot. He has no real weakness, but his opponents stay away from his forehand and try to attack his backhand.
According to his coach, Brian Barker, the most defining thing about his game has been a series of brief periods of tremendous improvement.
The first occurred while James was in high school. He was one of those small, slight boys that you hardly recognize by their senior year, due to a huge growth spurt. He grew 8 or 9 inches and filled out in his junior year. Before that, because of his size, he had the scrappy game of a small and very fast player. But now he had muscle too, muscle he could spend on topspin, making his shots big and heavy. Consequently, his game acquired an unusual combination of characteristics. Result? He went from losing in the first round of the national junior finals in Kalamazoo to making the championship match the following year.
It's easy to jump to the conclusion that this improvement was due to his growth, but possible explanations for his other improvement spurts have no such easy-to-jump-to conclusions about what caused them.
The second spurt of improvement came while he played for Harvard. He went from being just another player on Harvard's tennis team during his freshman year to being the top-ranked collegiate player in the country at the end of his sophomore year.
What caused that? Unless you know the details of Blake's story, you can't even hazard a guess. But note that Brian Barker was still helping James during this time. And note also that James says Harvard was a humbling experience, because there you find yourself among people who have written novels at the age of ten and found cures for diseases. That puts your great tennis play in perspective. It ain't so hot in an environment like that.
The third great spurt was in about 2001, after several years of getting nowhere on the pro tour. James would get very upset about his losses and try to distract himself by staying up all night playing poker afterwards. Then he decided to face facts and got Barker to travel with him the whole season, not just 15 weeks per year.
Well, OK, he also decided to cut off those beautiful dreadlocks (sigh) = be himself, not a sex symbol.
Zoom, another improvement spurt. Was it the dreadlocks? Or was it Barker promising to jump out of an airplane at 10,000 feet if Blake ever won a title?
I kid you not. Sometimes motivating people is as simple as that.
Barker is obviously an important factor in Blake's success. Blake also cites his family. I suspect that Barker's influence is more than just technical.
James Blake, by his own choice, is a thoughtful person, not just a weathervane blowing in the wind. What you get when he speaks is the real him, not a parrot or someone whose behavior is calculated for effect rather than a natural expression of what lies within.
His coach and his family are likewise thoughtful people, who have provided a healthy environment for James to grow in, and they unselfishly have provided good guidance for his sake, not their own. I think that along the way, they have helped him discover important things about himself, life, and competition. Things that have helped him mature psychologically. It seems that, whenever he has learned something important that makes his attitude toward the game more logical and healthy, the next thing you know, he's beating opponents who used to beat him. The confidence he gains from that fuels the afterburners, and he then experiences one of these improvement spurts.
I think what's happening is simply that he suddenly starts playing closer to his potential.
Few players play anywhere near their potential. Players at the top of the Pro Tour are probably all playing at better than 90% of their potential. The rest of us are probably playing at closer to 50% of our potential – except in those rare moments when we get "out of our minds" and "into the zone."
Some reach the top of their potential briefly by pure psych jobs they do on themselves and their opponents, but players like Pete Sampras and James Blake are just really that confident and needn't make-believe they have any supernatural powers :)
So, they last. Barring any more catastrophes, you can expect to see James Blake at the top of the game for years to come.
He is currently ranked 10th in the world and battling for a spot among the top 8 in the Masters Cup to be played in Shanghai. He represents the United States (along with Bob and Mike Bryan and Andy Roddick) on the Davis Cup team, which will be playing Russia in the final on November 30.
If you are interested in him, check out his book, Breaking Back: How I Lost Everything and Won Back My Life.
Which reminds me that, about halfway through this profile, I realized it had never occurred to me to mention something. So, I decided to leave it until the end for those who think his color matters. James' mother is white, originally from England, and his late father was black. So, I guess if he was African-American by virtue of his race, she is European-American by virtue of hers.
Which reminds me of the hilarious effect of the term "African American" becoming synonymous with "black." It is the famous blunder by French TV anchors who use the term even when referring to FRENCH blacks.
Asked by
Sports Illustrated whether his success has changed or impacted his racial identity, James replied ...
It's definitely something I think about. It's funny because it's always "first African-American to do this or that" or "first African-American since Arthur Ashe." It's great to mentioned in the same sentence as him but I -- my mom especially -- gets antsy. "Why can't I just be American? Haven't I achieved enough on my own to just be James Blake: American?"
Part of me is African-American, but it's not the only part. My mom was like, it was one thing when you were first coming up and there was novelty or whatever, but she feels, "You've done enough to warrant just being called an American." I tell people over and over, "I grew up in Connecticut," but it always ends up as "Harlem to Harvard, Harlem to Harvard."
I love Harlem, I love the Harlem Junior Tennis Program, but I grew up here and I'm not going to deny it to make a better story. To me, the story should be about the No. 6 guy in the world, and not where I'm from or not from.
Ah, what a breath of fresh air.
Which in turn reminds me of one of Martin Luther King's speeches in which he repeated his often-repeated "I have a dream" theme. He said that he had a dream in which one day two people would stop dead in their tracks two steps after passing each other on a sidewalk – realizing that they had not noticed the other person's color.
'Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished.
Almost all the other nations in the world are, or till recently were, the product of an ethnic bloodline. But we are a creature of our Constitution. We are African Americans, Asian Americans, Native Americans, and European Americans = all just Americans.
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