I think this post,
Requiem for a Heavyweight, by Peter Bodo is an excellent piece of technical analysis. So, I'd like to highlight and carry further a couple of his main ideas.
First, this match between Andy Roddick and Richard Gasquet was a good match. Andy had a good strategy and played it well. In fact, as Bodo says, it was THE best game plan (though I don't like all those crosscourt approach shots), and Andy played it well. He just didn't win, that's all.
If a player misses most of many break point or set point or match point opportunities, he has a problem in that department.
But to make a big deal of just a couple such lost points confesses both simplism and ignorance of the game. Since when has it become a sin to ever lose a break point or a set point in your favor? I say to the press, "Give us a break, please."
Why does it constantly try to make something out of nothing? As in this requiem for Roddick the press has composed in its "story" of this match.
This is what I mean when I object to the use of fiction writing techniques in journalism. Ever since the 1970's, "telling a story" instead of "reporting the facts" has increasingly become the name of the game in journalism. Why? To make the news juicier. And so we have infotainment. Rather like Verdi on steroids.
Why? To sell a product, mainly through its curiosity provoking, emotion provoking, and controversial entertainment value.
But this match was great. It makes a great story without doctoring the plot to make some magnificent theme of moral weakness in Andy's loss.
But mediocre writers find it much easier to tell a negative story, because anyone can make a negative story interesting.
It reminds me... There's Faure's Requiem and Mozart's Requiem, and then there's Verdi's. Which is a litmus test for good taste. If you understand the Latin, it cracks you up laughing at the "climax" in "passus...passus...passus et sepultus est!" when the extravagantly overblown melodramma makes that bass sound like HE's dying.
Of course the press isn't the only guilty party. The fans, where they get to mouth off on the web, do the same thing. I guess that giving people a bullhorn is what causes them to kinda make up and embellish the world as they go along.
Worse, the resulting meme is superstitious. It supposes that some incorrect choice or character weakness is to blame for every loss or failure. Baloney, that's no different than a mendacious preacher proclaiming that, if you are good and God likes you, you will succeed in business. Superstition be damned: bad things happen to good people, and sometimes you do everything right and still lose.
The converse is just as true: good things happen to bad people, and sometimes you do everything wrong and still win.
As Bodo says, that match "is what it is," not what anyone chooses to make of it.
Indeed. I will go further and be blunt. When fictionalizing nonfiction is done in sports, it is just aggravating. When it is done in global matters of life and death, it is unconscionable.
The press has also used the fiction writing technique of building suspense through foreshadowing by making a huge deal out of the bitter disappointment Andy suffered in this loss. The subliminal suggestion is clear: "Stay tuned, folks, we may be about to see a tennis god fall!" Why? Because that's how you make a page-turner out of fiction and sell tomorrow's newspaper.
(The press blows the same artificial gasp every time Roger Federer loses a match.)
Again, this is manufacturing something out of nothing. Andy's bitter disappointment is no big deal. It's no life-changing moment, for crying out loud. It's just what happens when you work and play your heart out for something and lose. It's perfectly natural. It's what you risk by competing in sports. It's just a feeling. And it passes.
You don't get to the top of this game if you can't handle defeat better than the press seems to think anyone capable of handling it.
It was a just great match. And Richard Gasquet had far, far more to do with Andy's loss than any failing or flaw in Andy or his play.
Poor Gasquet doesn't get his due. He wins and yet somehow it's all about Andy. Not about Gasquet's tremendous achievement – just about Andy's mythical fall. The vultures.
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tennisLabels: Andy Roddick, Richard Gasquet, Wimbledon
