Last week upon learning we had access to my mother-in-law’s cable TV account, I became fully absorbed in the men’s side of the US Open (following Serena’s exit of course). Overwhelmingly, the talk was about a new generation of players, following the extreme domination of Roger Federer (who hasn’t played for a year while recovering from a knee injury), Rafael Nadal (who lost in the quarterfinals), and Novak Djokovic (who wasn’t allowed to play because he remains unvaccinated).
The player I was rooting for was a young Spaniard named Carlos Alcaraz who would go on to win the tournament and is now the number 1 ranked player in the world at age 19. He’s wickedly fast and spectacularly reflexive and hits forehand wins at mind-bending angles. More notably, in order to get to the final—against another very young player, 23-year old Casper Ruud from Norway—he had to win three five-set matches in a week’s time, spending just shy of twenty hours on the court, with two matches that were closing in on 3 a.m. New York-time.
Alcaraz consistently appeared to be having a great time even when splayed out on the court after diving for and then missing a return, and would frequently look to his box for reassurance and to reassure his coach and family who were sitting there. When asked at the start of the tournament who would win, he picked himself, and when asked how he won five-set-match after five-set-match, he stated his strong belief in his abilities, coming across as both extremely confident and extremely humble.
I grew up playing a fair amount of tennis because it was readily available in the suburbs, and relatively inexpensive to play compared to other sports. There were multiple places within a few miles with open courts that were never full, and I had two brothers who could also play so always had someone to hit with. At first we did recreational camps, followed by many years in middle and high school of going to the courts to rally balls back and forth. We rarely played actual matches or competitive sets—I was a weak and inconsistent server—but we did play games up to 21 points and truly never bored of the back and forth and back and forth of just hitting baseline rallies as consistently as we could for hours and hours on end.
In middle school, my mom somehow found a coach who was giving lessons in a local park three days a week for three hours at a time. In my memory it was about $20 a lesson, and for kids who couldn’t afford it, the coach—Jim—would have you help with lawn-mowing and weeding around the courts and then you could join the lesson. I remember feeling very athletic for the first time in my life, playing upwards of twenty hours of tennis a week when I was 13-14-15-16, hitting ball after ball after ball with a highly routinized cadence, even though I was far from any level of excellence on a competitive level.
I wikipedia’ed Alcaraz and Ruud while watching the matches, because the idea of how one achieves world-class athletic greatness—or greatness of any kind, particularly at a young age—is fascinating to me. How much is nature and how much is nurture — and is your kid who is extremely good at monkey bars missing an opportunity to be a world class gymnast? Might your young soccer player be a great future striker, if you were only to put your mind and wallet and time into it? How much greatness is never discovered because of kids who don’t happen to be nurtured into their talents or their parents don’t have the money to send them to specialized training camps?
This is obviously a futile and anxiety-inducing mental exercise to partake in, and a lot of undue pressure to put on your child, yet is an impulse that feels like it fuels a very American parent mindset. That having a thing you’re really good at is essential to your identity which is essential to your individualism which is essential to your success. There’s a feeling of trying to balance exposure with persistence, trying to observe what they take to, trying to differentiate what they’re good at—and could excel at—from what they want to do just because it’s more available. There’s also perhaps the more valuable choice which is that they can learn to do a lot of things for fun, potentially become competitive, than just have the ability to play tennis or piano or chess as a general life skill.
Somewhat disappointingly but also unsurprisingly, I discovered Alcaraz’s dad was the tennis director at the local club where he grew up in Spain and Ruud’s father, Christian, was himself a professional player. This did nothing to disprove my hypothesis that zealousness and nurture matter tremendously and I considered that there wasn’t really a thing I had this zealousness about.
Laying in bed after the finals, I told Julian I was thinking of playing tennis again at the tennis center near our house. I asked him if he wanted to play, not out of any quest for greatness but because I remembered it being fun.
“Oh no, he said. I don’t think I’m going to do that.”
“Why not?,” I asked, curious because he’d seemed intrigued at watching the matches the week prior.
“Because I’m too busy training to be a young Jedi,” he said, “so I won’t really have any time for that.”
Recommendations:
To read: “This Time Today, Tomorrow"(Vulture): Writer Emma Straub’s beautiful remembrance of her father, Peter Straub (also a writer), who passed away last week.
The IG account: Recess Therapy, which if you don’t follow, is a real dose of perpetual joy.
Kids’ Shoes: Blundstones for kids. Splurged on a pair of these for Ada last week (the rose glittery ones obvs) and it’s all she wants to wear. Waterproof, lightweight, all-weather shoes FTW.
This is a celeb newsletter now: Olivia Wilde responding to everything in Vanity Fair. Harry Styles joking about spitting on Chris Pine at MSG. Now I want to see Don’t Worry Darling even though it’s purportedly not very good? We did watch and I’d recommend “Honey Boy,” which Shia LaBeouf wrote in rehab and is pseudo-autobiographically about being raised by his ex-convict dad and living in a motel as a kid.
Reading: Multiple books by the recently passed Barbara Ehrenreich including Natural Causes, about our obsession with the wellness industry and the business of medicine, and Had I Known, her collected essays.
The kids are reading: This very sweet graphic novel (series), The Postman from Space by Guillaume Perreault and the Amulet series.
Newsletter: Haley Nahman’s newsletter on the new quantified self and quantity-over-quality super-readers (200-300 books a year!). I relate to so many things in this essay.
We just got a new oven that has a built-in air fryer and I have no idea what to do with it. Send me your best air fryer recipes! Otherwise, see you next week-ish.
Thank you for introducing me to Recess Therapy. Corn Kid is so much joy.
this is great, thanks Youngna.