January 1st. The start of a New Year. However, for me and thousands of other people across the globe, it signifies the start of something else: something that will be the cause of tremendous amounts of stress, exhaustion and (hopefully, though not often in my case) joy between now and November. What am I talking about? The tennis season.
For a lot of people, in the UK especially, this might come as a surprise. Tennis? Tennis doesn’t happen all year round. It only happens for two weeks in the summer, and on those randomly-placed other days when Andy Murray inevitably blows another Grand Slam final. Ah, how nice it must be to have that mindset. How nice it must be to not have 2-3 new tournaments to worry about on an almost weekly basis. How marvellous to not have to wake up at 3am every day in a blind panic about the latest scores. Some tournaments, even amongst us hardcore, seem on the surface to not matter; it’s the week after a Grand Slam, in the middle of Slovakia, and the top seed is ranked number 40 in the world. A few days in though, and a story will develop. A player who had fallen on hard times will be in the quarter-finals, perhaps, or a promising youngster will be blasting everyone aside on the way to their first tournament victory. Basically, what I’m trying to say is…IT NEVER ENDS.
Well, that’s a slight lie. It ends for a month. December, Glorious December. The players get to go on vacation for a few days, and unless you’re even more insane than me (Futures tournaments, the lowest level of professional tennis, are played across the year meaning it is possible to follow tennis the whole year round), fans get to have a breather too. It isn’t much of a breather-it feels like no more than two days since the season ended-but it’s a breather. And now, the fun and games begin again. There are four competitive tournaments being played this week, one next week…and then the Australian Open begins. That’s two weeks of the season, before being thrown into one of the four biggest events of the year; an event that could shape a player’s whole career, never mind their season. Now, I have spent most of this article talking about what hard work the tennis season is for a fan, but just imagine you’re a player ranked around 70-80 in the world; a player who needs good Grand Slam results to drag themself into the upper echelons of the game. Or you’re Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer…a bad result against your main rival in Australia, and you’re psychologically on the back foot for potentially the rest of the season. The pressure is immense, and it’s things like that which make tennis so bloody addictive.
When you’ve followed the sport for long enough (around fifteen years, in my case), it’s not just the weekly tournaments that have a story. You get to know every player, every career, every style, every rivalry, every friendship. This is even worse when, like me, you are an ardent supporter of the WTA (the women’s tour). It’s not always as exciting as the men’s tour in terms of brilliant matches, but the drama is quite literally insane. Imagine a bunch of bitchy, competitive, extremely talented women battling each other almost every week of the year, and that’s the WTA. Even the dresses are important, especially come Grand Slam time (honestly, Grand Slams are like the Academy Awards in terms of fashion). All fans have their little groups: the players they worship, the players they like and want to see do well, and the players they utterly despise and want to see fail at every opportunity (oh hi, Roger “The Devil” Federer). And once you’ve fallen into that trap, once you’ve developed those attachments, there’s no going back. You’re stuck for life.
I’m not ready for the new tennis season. Not even remotely ready. However, I know that within a couple of days, I’ll be literally banging my phone off my head as I flick on my livescore app and see my favourite player losing in spectacularly embarrassing fashion once again. And come two weeks, when the Australian Open draw is being made, I will be glued to the computer screen analysing every player’s potential run to the final and crying over the inevitable first round pairing of ‘my two all time bestest players in the whole wide world’ and what a cruel, cruel world it is that makes me have to root for one against the other. I can’t not care, and believe me, I’ve tried. I can complain, I can state that I’m never watching another tennis match for as long as I live, but it’s all meaningless. There’s no overcoming this addiction.
(Check back in a few weeks, when I’ll be updating you on the season so far. Admittedly, it might just end up being one long ‘WHHHHHHHHHYYYYYYYY?’, but you never know. This cruel sport might yet surprise me.)
