sports: a soap opera

But to Nadal, any admission of superiority would have been a sign of weakness, not strength. As he once explained it to me, “If we have no doubts, it means that we are the arrogance ... So for me, living in constant doubt is good, because it means that we have to ask things of ourselves. We have to wonder, is this right? Is this wrong? What I'm hea... See more

Even for a sport that traffics heavily in phenoms and next-big-things, that throws around the anvil of expectation as if it were weightless, Nadal was a next-level prospect. It didn’t hurt that Nadal was more like a fantastical creation than a sports prodigy. Yes, he was torrentially talented. But his game and his backstory were both sui generis , ... See more

The basic arc of Andy Roddick’s life goes something like this:

One day you’re a chirpy, hot-shot teenager with a thunderclap serve, who wears a baseball cap on a tennis court before that becomes a thing, and then one day you’re not good enough anymore, because inevitably nobody is. In between, you go to the top of a sport that doesn’t love chirpy te... See more