I have been really into tennis lately. It started because I am living in a household that is into tennis. I figured I might as well try to enjoy it if it was going to be on the TV all the time anyway. It is for this reason that I have also started to follow hockey, kind of. But I have now lived in Ottawa for two Grand Slams (the US Open in September and the Australian Open, which ended today) and large chunk of the NHL season and I like tennis way more than I will ever like hockey. Hockey is too impersonal, there are a lot of players and you never really see their faces. You don't get to know the players unless you invest a lot of time and attention in watching the games and in listening to other people talk about the games. Also, there is a lot of fighting, which I think is stupid.
Tennis is like the opposite of hockey in a lot of ways. The skill of professional tennis players is astounding, but it is their personalities that make them interesting. Seeing how the players react in certain situations, knowing which players have long-standing rivalries and watching them form new ones, I find it all completely fascinating. Whenever I am watching a match I find myself wondering what is going through the players heads. Unlike in team sports, once the match starts a player is totally on their own and it the idea of being so isolated and while also being under so much pressure is completely terrifying to me. Agassi talks about that a lot in Open, and his descriptions of his mental state during his matches, and his relationships with the other players, are my favourite parts of the book. Matches that take place later in the book, when he is playing people like Federer, Roddick, and Baghdatis, are especially interesting, because those are the players that I have been watching. My favourite players to watch are the ones who seem to struggle with their emotions a little bit as they play (which is why, as amazing as he is, I find Federer a little bit dull to watch sometimes), so I wish I could have seen Agassi play live.
After I finished reading the book I watched this and it made me cry:
Page count: 400
Up next: Eating the Dinosaur by Chuck Klosterman
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