Tennis and the art of losing

Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.

These words by famous playwright Samuel Beckett are inked deep into Stanislas Wawrinka’s arm. The reigning French Open champion knows a thing or two about losing, about losing well and thus about winning.

"It’s how I see life and tennis," Wawrinka has been quoted saying about the tattoo. "The meaning of the quote doesn’t change no matter how well you do. There is always disappointment, heartache. You are losing almost every tournament. You need to just accept it and be positive because you are going to lose and fail...In life you are always going to have some problem or pain and you have to live by this quote. It’s still not easy but I’m dealing better with it all."

Wawrinka was just a couple of months short of his 29th birthday, when he shunned failure and emerged a Grand Slam winner at the Australian Open in 2014. It took him twelve years on the pro tour and conquering endless doubts to get there.

But the week in-week out intensity of tennis demands that getting there is not enough. You have to keep going, another day, another week, another tournament. You are only as good as your last tournament.

Wawrinka’s fellow Swiss Roger Federer has won 17 Grand Slams and 85 tour titles, the last of which was the Istanbul Open on Sunday, May 3. But till he wins another one, he will be persistently questioned, directly or subtly, about the ones he has missed so far this year.

That monster Federer famously spoke about after his 2008 semi-final loss to Novak Djokovic at the Australian Open – “I've created a monster, so I know I need to always win every tournament,” were his exact words – is still alive and well. A Federer defeat may not create waves anymore, but it still sends a ripple. Or grabs headlines at the least.

The man himself has learnt to get over it, and get over it quickly.

After losing 6‑3, 6‑7, 6‑2 to the same Djokovic at this year’s Indian Wells final, Federer said he would forget about the match “in like 25 minutes or so.” “I'm not going to look back on that match, on that moment very long,” he said in the post-match press conference.

It’s been a long journey for the Swiss, who once claimed that he cried “after I lost every single match from eight to basically 15.” In an interview last year he said that the defeat which hurt most was the one against Tommy Haas in the semi-final of the 2000 Sydney Olympics.

"I was really inconsolable...When I lost I curled up in a corner like a child for a long time. I could not stop crying. That defeat marked me. I lost the next day against (Frenchman) Arnaud di Pasquale and again I wept the whole day,” he recalled. Eventually, he got up and won the world.

The way the game is structured, players are going to lose points, games, sets and matches. In a calendar year, when they play almost every alternate week, they are going to lose more tournaments than they win. Federer is the most successful Grand Slam player in the history of the men’s game, but he has still lost more majors than he has won. At the end of a Slam fortnight, there are 127 losers and only one winner.

“You win five matches and lose one and you’re a loser,” Andre Agassi had said during an interview, just before his autobiography ‘Open’ was to be released in 2010.

“You can win six matches and lose one and you’re a loser and you can win a tournament and have to play the next tournament and lose and you’re only as good as your last results. So there was always that never ending kind of pressure that came along with it that seemed to carry the day at the end.”

In the book itself, he writes: ‘I've been let in on a dirty little secret: winning changes nothing. Now that I've won a slam, I know something that very few people on earth are permitted to know. A win doesn't feel as good as a loss feels bad, and the good feeling doesn't last as long as the bad. Not even close.’

It presumably gets more difficult more players as you go further down the rankings; the losses really start to stack up. Half way through the 2015 season, this is how the win-loss record stand on the ATP tour: world No 1 Novak Djokovic is at 41-3, world No 10 Nadal is at 33-10, world no 24 Bernard Tomic at 24-14, world No 37 Jeremy Chardy at 14-14, world No 62 Santiago Giraldo at 15-16, world No 83 Denis Istomin at 6-14 and world No 96 Ruben Bemelmans at 0-5.

A former player on the ITF Futures (lowest rung of pro events) tour, Vaja Uzakov had, in 2008 summed up the feeling of the players who are restricted to the fringes of the game. “After practicing so much, working so hard, you dont win. Then you think what are you doing here? People who are not broken in the mind continue, the others stop playing,” Uzakov had said during an ITF $15,000 even in Mumbai. The Uzbek could never really break out of the losing cycle, reached a career high of 698 in 2010. He is 27 now and already out of the game.

Rafael Nadal has also had to develop resilience towards defeats recently. Almost unbeatable on clay in the last decade, the Spaniard won only one tournament on the red dirt this season. At the French Open, where he had won nine titles in 10 years, he was beaten in straight set by a rampaging Djokovic in the quarterfinals.

“Everybody lose in every place,” he said after the defeat on June 3, his 29th birthday. “I lost not many times here, and that day arrived today. Again, accept like I always accept the defeats, and the only thing (that) is there: I want to work harder even than before to come back stronger.”

Nadal has won 33 and lost 11 this year, the latest being a first-round loss against Ukraine’s Alexandr Dolgopolov in the first round of the Queen’s tournament.

Every loss hurts, some more than the other. Players cry, whine, sulk. Learn. They develop an arduous relationship with defeat, one that is often laced sense of with inevitability. It is a professional hazard. They know the cloak of invincibility eventually wears thin.

“You have to learn to lose well,” Andy Murray, a two-time major winner, said during the Dubai Open, which ran from February 23-28.

“If you can't do that, then you're going to be very disappointed most weeks and not get much enjoyment out of playing tennis. There's 32 players here, that’s excluding the qualifying. Only one person can go home happy in that sense. It's important to understand that it's possible that each week you can lose. The goal is obviously to try to win the event, unfortunately not everyone can do that.”

Murray’s contemporary Djokovic was probably handed the most difficult task. He had to break the stranglehold of arguably two of the best players the game has ever seen—Federer and Nadal—to claim glory. The Serb lost to them enough times, before he finally learnt how to win.

“I remember when I was coming up and playing against Roger, Rafa, in big matches, I felt like the whole tournament I played great, and then against them, for some reason, it doesn't happen the way you want it,” he said, also in Dubai. “Doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to stay like that. You need to be the one making an impression on the court and showing you are there to win. That's what gives you that push.”

Djokovic, now 28, is an eight-time Grand Slam champion and has joined Federer and Nadal in the race for the greatest of the generation.

“It is a very mental game,” Djokovic concedes about tennis; a game of narrow margins. And one in which the difference between losing and losing it is a hair’s breadth.

Retired French tennis player Marion Bartoli knows all about being burdened by defeat. She lost in 46 successive Grand Slams before she finally won the 2013 Wimbledon Championships. A record in the women’s game.

“It takes a lot of courage, patience and love of the game to be able to live like this. Sometimes for 15 years in a row,” Bartoli, 30, said during her visit for the Mumbai Marathon in January. “I had some very tough moments, tough losses. But I always had this dream, and this fire inside me that I wanted to achieve so much that I did not want to give up till I made it happen.”

Bartoli has been there, done that.

On June 29, her fellow tennis players will line up again at the gates of Wimbledon’s Centre Court in the hunt for glory. Hoping they can live by this maxim, an extract from Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘If’, that greets them at the Players’ Entrance: ‘If you can meet with triumph and disaster, and treat those two impostors just the same.’

Goran & Wimbledon: An affair to remember

There will be drama. You know there will be drama. Goran Ivanisevic is on the tennis court.

So people are here to watch him, even if he is only playing the doubles legends event at the French Open. Watch him win, lose, rifle aces, break a racket, make a racket. He is sharing court with three former champions: Michael Chang, Juan Carlos Ferrero and Carlos Moya. Ivanisevic still draws the loudest cheers. He’s the funny man holding court. For most people present there, he’s also the prince charming of tennis’ favourite fairytale.



A tear-stained Ivanisevic winning the 2001 Wimbledon title, the only wild card and the lowest ranked (125) player to do so, was nothing short of a miracle. It was an emotional, triumphant end to his often tumultuous journey at the grass-court Grand Slam. “Unbelievable” is the word Ivanisevic uses the most while describing it.

Almost 14 years after the day, his eyes still light up at the mention of Wimbledon. On a relaxed Thursday afternoon, with his protégé Marin Cilic already out of the French Open, Ivanisevic, sporting a bright red T-shirt, sits down at the Player’s Lounge at Roland Garros, to talk about the biggest moment of his career, one that people have still not stopped talking about.

“Nobody believed I could do it, even I didn’t believe,” says Ivanisevic. “I was just happy to get the wild card, to be back at Wimbledon. I was not expecting much, just that I didn’t want to do too badly.”

Since he was not among the top-100, he was unable to make a direct entry into the draw. Ivanisevic was given a wild card on the basis of his performance at earlier Wimbledons. He had made the finals thrice—1992, 1994 and 1998—and lost all of them, the first to Andre Agassi and the others to Pete Sampras.

“After losing three finals you really start doubting yourself,” says the Croat. “It was difficult to keep myself motivated. Getting to the final, it was like seeing the big mountain from the distance, and climbing it. And every time you think you are close to the top, Whoosh! It’s like someone hitting you in the head and you have to start all over again.”

The biggest blow was the 1998 final, when Ivanisevic defeated former champion Richard Krajicek in a marathon five-setter in the semi-final to set up a title clash with Sampras. The tall lefty with a monster serve stretched Sampras, the best grass court player on the planet then, to the fifth set. But that’s when things started to unravel, and the legs gave in.

“The grass, it looks really nice and green from the outside,” he says. “But it is really difficult to play on. It’s hard work. The ball is low, you have to bend. Not good for the knees”

Sampras said it was the toughest challenge he had ever had on grass till then. Ivanisevic declared, “I can only kill myself.”

It was always a matter of extremes for Ivanisevic: The “good Goran” who played like a champion; the “bad Goran”, who raised hell with his temper tantrums. Rarely anything in between. He did end up almost killing his career after the match.

“I thought that’s it,” he says. “I thought I would never win Wimbledon after this. It was a big blow; my career just went downwards after that. The reality of our sport is that no one cares about who came second best, no one remembers them.”

Fame was not what he craved though. “I was famous even before I won Wimbledon,” Ivanisevic says. “I was popular. People used to come to watch me, like they still do, because they knew I would say something, do something. They thought I was crazy, I only thought I was different.

“Before 2001, I was already having problems with my shoulder. So I was thinking, ‘Just give me one more chance.’”

Wimbledon stepped away from tradition and rather than awarding the wild card to a young and upcoming talent, they gave it to the 29-year-old, faded-out Ivanisevic. The charismatic Croat survived the first week, then in the second, beat Britain’s own Tim Henman in a rain-interrupted semi- final that was played over three days.

“Yes, I did think like fate was lining up,” he recalls. “I thought everything was happening for me ever since I won the second round (when he beat Moya). Then against Henman, I was two sets to one down when it started raining, I think it helped me. I was lucky to win that one.”

Ivanisevic had been on the verge of disintegrating when the heavens first opened up. He had won all of four points in the third set, which went 6-0 Henman’s way. Once they were back, the Croat dug himself out of the hole, and went on to win the match 7-5, 6-7, 0-6, 7-6, 6-3.

Rain proved his ally once again. The final was delayed to Monday, the tickets were given out at the turnstiles for £40 (around Rs.4,008). The Wimbledon final wasn’t an exclusive event open only to the royalty and celebrities any more. Almost 10,000 fans crammed into Centre Court. Against him was the universally liked and gifted serve-and-volleyer from Australia, Pat Rafter.

“It was a great final. It was played on a Monday. That will never happen again because the Centre Court now has a roof,” says Ivanisevic.

“But that was the people’s final and the atmosphere was nothing like I’ve seen at Wimbledon. I was playing against someone whom I really admired. He had already won two US Opens though, so I was thinking just let me win this one.”

Like it usually is when Ivanisevic is involved, it was a nerve-racking match. Both players struggled to handle the massive occasion, stamp their dominance. The Aussies were out with their inflatable kangaroo toys and big voices. Cricketers Shane Warne and Steve Waugh (who donned his baggy green), lent more weight to the Aussie support.

Ivanisevic and his box, with his father present, were letting emotions run over as the match veered towards its conclusion. On the last game, with Ivanisevic serving, he almost threatened to melt into a pool of tears.

“It was emotional for all of us,” says Ivanisevic. “Growing up, that is the only tournament I dreamed of.”

At 40-15, up two match points, he served two double faults. On the third, Rafter scored a winner. Ivanisevic crossed himself, sent a kiss to the heavens. The fourth, a 109 miles per hour (around 175km per hour) unreturnable second serve, finally did the job. After more than 3 hours, he had won 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 2-6, 9-7, tugging at his fans’ hopes and fears along the way. Prone to expressing every single thing he felt on the court, Ivanisevic was one of the rare talents who reeled people in with his vulnerabilities. They felt his triumph as much as they had felt his heartache before. He was the people’s champion.

“Winning Wimbledon...I made peace with myself and everyone else.” “I didn’t care what I did after that,” he says, admitting that winning Wimbledon had quite possibly killed his ambition of wanting to win anything after. With the shoulder injury flaring up regularly, he finally quit in 2004.

Ivanisevic will return to London this month hoping to guide Cilic to a Wimbledon win, after having coached him to an unlikely victory at the 2014 US Open. Cilic, whose temperament is a polar opposite of his mentor’s, has the big serve that could well be trademarked by Croatia, but mainly controls the game from the baseline. Will we see a classic serve and volley player rise on the Wimbledon grass anytime soon?

“No,” says Ivanisevic. “The game has changed. No one plays serve and volley any more. They can’t win by playing serve and volley. But it doesn’t matter. Because Wimbledon will still be Wimbledon. There will be grass, there will be rain. People will still queue up overnight, they will eat strawberries. And whoever wins will be known as a Wimbledon champion forever, champion of the biggest tournament in our sport,” he says, before reflecting back on his unlikely victory.

“I won it when no one thought I would. I don’t know how to explain it...” he says, shrugging his broad shoulders. “But I don’t have to. Because I already did it.”