Several psychological factors distinguish tennis: you never know how long the match will last. If two hours, or three, or four. If two sets, or three, or five (in the Grand Slams). To win that match, you must award yourself the last point.
If a tennis match was played to 100 points, and you were winning 99-0, you still wouldn't have won it.
To solve it, you are alone.
If your setbacks don't come in that day, Michael Jordan won't come to win the game for you. Leo Messi will not appear to cover your back. Not Wayne Gretzky. Not Joe Montana.
The tennis player plays and the world (or the public in the stands) watches him for two hours or more. She contemplates him and his rival, as no other element distorts the stage. As props, there is hardly anything else. Just a net, a rectangle with white lines, a chair umpire and a fan of ball boys that run around and kneel in the confines of the set.
The tennis player plays and the world watches him, and sometimes the tennis player wants to disappear, because he dislikes what is happening, the image he is projecting, and no one is going to come to his rescue.
(...)
At the beginning of January, in her first match of the year, Garbiñe Muguruza (29) seemed to keep Bianca Andreescu at bay. She had scored the first set 6-1 and was up 5-2 in the second, and the doomsayers began to pick up the candles and visualized the rebirth of Muguruza, perhaps nothing to do with the thick and asymmetric tennis player of 2022.
Very fast.
Too fast!
Suddenly, Muguruza was misconfigured and Andreescu recovered, saving that set and winning the next one to end up knocking down the Spanish.
He left her a flan.
Well, until that moment, Muguruza was winning 99-0 (let's leave it at 95-50, it's more coherent).
Muguruza, at the foot of the horses.
She lost that match, lost the next one to Bencic, and the next one to Mertens, and the last one to Noskova, who came from the small infield, and fell to 87th in the WTA, who would have said it in other times, when she was leading the circuit (2014).
Now, Muguruza has said that it stops.
He doesn't know until when or for how long, but it is evident that he is doing well. Plunged into tennis and vital chaos (she alludes to personal issues), no one else is going to come to her rescue, no one on the court. Neither Jordan, nor Messi, nor Gretzky, nor Montana. Sitting on the couch, she will spend time resetting herself.
Control Sub-Supr.
Agassi did it. Federer did it.
