Asshole of the Century

Saturday, March 21, 2009

Jonesing for Patty Schnyder

We just got back from our annual trip to California, where I satisfied one of my sports obsessions: I got to watch Patty Schnyder play tennis.

Patty Schnyder hails from Basel, Switzerland, which is also the home of Roger Federer. She is officially listed as 5’6”, but having seen her in person convinces me that she’s more like 5’4”. Schnyder is a lefty, with a nice topspin forehand that she hits with an extreme Western grip, but Schnyder lacks a big power shot, other than a down-the-line counterpunch that uses her opponent’s power to her advantage. Actually, Schnyder’s best weapon might be her quick feet, her ability to get in position to return a shot or, when that fails, flick her racquet in a last-second lunge to keep the ball in play, something she’s forced to do a lot against some of the game’s more powerful players. She’s been around the pro tour for over a decade now, has beaten most of the big names of her era at least a time or two, and has outlasted most of her peers. Schnyder has won a handful of tournaments and has spent several years in the Top 20, but she never quite made it into the top tier and has never won a Grand Slam.

While not your typical beauty, I think Schnyder is really sexy. With her long, curly brown hair that sometimes clumps together, she looks like a girl you might meet at a rave. Patty is so unlike all the cutesy Florida types, the tall blondes, and the Amazonian Slavs that dominate today’s women’s tennis tour. She flies a different jib than most tennis players, and I’ve always imagined that she must be a little crazy, in a good, FTW kind of way.

Seeded 13th at Indian Wells, Schnyder earned a first round bye and then drew China’s Na Li in the second round. My favorite part of Indian Wells is going to some of the back courts, where you can sit in the first couple of rows and watch one of the Top 30 players in the world from a better vantage point than you can watch the pro at the local club hit back home. Schnyder was playing a late-afternoon match on Court 4, an intimate, open court whose back bleachers are rarely full. I got there just in time to watch the end of their warm-up and chose a chair in the second row, close enough to see the beads of sweat on the players’ faces but a couple feet up so I that had a good view of the entire court.

I had never seen Li play, but she has powerful groundstrokes, and it was clear from early on that Schnyder would be playing much of the match on counterattack. This suits her style of play, so I was not worried when she struggled through the first few games, often having to block back defensive shots just to stay in the point. Li and Schnyder had each broken serve early in the set, and when Schnyder broke Li a second time to go up 5-4 in a long game that featured several 15 to 20 shot rallies, it looked like she was well on her way to winning the match. But Schnyder served a weak game after that, got broken back, and Li was again on serve, at 5-5.

It was then, while struggling gamely to stay in the match, that I really began to appreciate the style of Schnyder’s game. Li would hit hard, relatively flat balls down the line, driving Schnyder back, forcing her to pop up these defensive floaters, balls that had an uncanny ability to land within a couple of feet from the baseline, and the rally would continue. Then Schnyder would counter, setting up with a forehand crosscourt before smacking her own shot down the line for a seeming winner, which Li would then retrieve. It was intriguing stuff, with Schnyder using her experience to cope with the younger, stronger Li. Unfortunately, Schnyder couldn’t seem to win any of several game points, eventually losing the first set 7-5.

Schnyder then picked up her serving pace, winning her first couple of service games in the second set and threatening to break Li to go up 3-2. Again, there were several pretty amazing rallies, but Li won the key break points and ending up holding serve. This gave her confidence, and Li then began blasting away at Schnyder’s serve, hitting a couple of returns for outright winners and putting Schnyder back on her heels with several more. Li broke Schnyder, going up 4-2.

Schnyder dug in and began hitting a little harder, with a little more topspin, essentially overhitting to try and stage a comeback against a competitor who was now clearly feeling it. At a key moment, Schnyder took one of Li’s few short balls and tried to drop shot her. It was a deft little shot, but Li got to it, flicking a half-volley for what looked like a winner down the line. Schnyder scrambled and just got to the ball but couldn’t control it, hitting it out and then scrambling towards my spot in the second row, just on her side of the net. Schnyder almost ran into the guy in front of me, then looked up at us, her face flushed and kind of mottled, the growing realization, almost an anguish, of having to endure this first round loss against an unseeded player, seemed to flicker in her eyes. It felt almost obscene to witness Schnyder’s duress. She lost that game, once again after multiple deuces, going down 5-2, and then fought gamely but again lost her serve to lose the second set 6-2.

While I really would have liked to watch Patty Schnyder stage a comeback, I was strangely satisfied having watched her struggle. I think that’s what I like best about athletics, the struggle against odds, the ability to use wit and guile to combat a seemingly superior foe. I rarely root for the superior athlete, but the clever one, the defiant, the determined. When I was growing up, my favorite baseball player was Brooks Robinson. I loved the way he could spring up from his crouch and snare a ball, diving to the ground and then getting up in time to throw out a batter. He seemed so cool, way cooler than the big stars with the more obvious skills, the home run hitter or the strikeout artist.

I guess that I tend to root for a different kind of athlete than most people, or at least most Americans. As a teenager, I rooted for UCLA and their clever passing attack during an era where the college game was dominated by running backs, in particular the tailbacks of rival USC. I was also a big fan of the Bruins basketball team, which was in the midst of the Wooden dynasty, but even though they were usually the favorite, I always felt like the Bruins were a step away from disaster, kept at bay only by the superior strategy and discipline of the Wooden system (of course, having athletes on your side like Lew Alcindor and Bill Walton didn’t hurt). One of my favorite boxers was Thomas Hearns. I liked how this tall, skinny guy would go toe-to-toe with the bruising Marvin Hagler or the smooth and speedy Sugar Ray Leonard. In fact, I think Hearns-Hagler might be the best eight minutes in the history of boxing, and even through my guy lost, what a way to go, trying to out-punch one of the toughest guys in the history of the sport.

As a child, I never understood the appeal of Superman. Here was this guy with overwhelming strength, superior speed, and an ability to fly through space by himself, unaided. He had no psychological flaws, just a consist determination to do good, like a programmed robot. His only weakness was kryptonite, which I always felt was kind of a bullshit weakness, a cop out. Nuclear waste, hey no problem it’s Superman, but watch out for that kryptonite! But for some reason people liked this guy, they rooted for him, while I was drawn to the more vulnerable superheroes like Spiderman (just a guy with relatively normal strength who happens to be able to spin webs and act like a spider) or to odd birds like the cartoon-version of the Pink Panther, who I guess technically isn’t a superhero but who I thought was pretty cool, nonetheless.

A lot of today’s sports stars, at least in America, are like Superman, these guys with incredible physical talents, with the crowd on their side. But I rarely root for the favorite. It’s just too boring. I don’t understand the mindset that roots for the New York Yankees to buy themselves another World Series title. In fact, I’m thinking about becoming a Milwaukee Brewers fan, just because I think the Cubs are turning into a Midwestern version of the Yankees.

Ladies tennis today is dominated by these tall, muscular women whose best attribute is that they can hit their serves and groundstrokes almost as hard as the men. In this world, Patty Schnyder is a throwback, and if they forced the women on today’s tour to use the old-school wooden rackets with the small frames, rackets that put a premium on shotmaking as opposed to today’s tactic of just hitting the hell out of the ball, I think Schnyder would have won that elusive Grand Slam title. As it stands, she remains a remarkable athlete in a sport whose advancing technology has conspired against her.

After watching Patty Schnyder play in person, I did a little research on her. I’ve always suspected that Schnyder was a little off-balance, but in a good kind of way. Watching her face during a match is like watching the character in a Doestoevsky novel, except one in a skimpy tennis outfit, if that makes any sense.

It turns out that Schnyder is working on a book about her life with her husband, an investment analyst and private investigator named Ranier Hoffman. The book, which is a mélange of poetic musings melded into an autobiography and remains a work in progress, is tentatively titled “The White Mile”. It has its own website, which features Schnyder in tennis gear standing forlorn in front of a rotting house with big spiders and creepy-crawly things running across it, with ambient, haunting music in the background. Here’s a link to the site: http://www.the-white-mile.org/whitemileenlish.htm

There isn’t much content on the site, but what there is I think is awesome. It reminds me of the crazy Swiss girls who used to come by an old bachelor pad I lived in back in graduate school, with their stream-of-conscious raps in broken English about death, or food, or wanting to climb the trees on Logan Boulevard at 3 o’clock in the morning. I really hope that Patty and Ranier finish their book for, as they note, “What do we say in a world of silent cries? Hunting season is launched or the rabbit is running.” Will this book be an existential cry for our age or the confused rantings of a minor sport celebrity run amok? I don’t know, but bring it on because, man, I need something to satisfy this major Patty Schnyder jones.

Labels: , ,