Fountain of youth
Tennis has become the Ponce de León of sports: for the last decade, it has been searching in vain for the fountain of youth. Judging by this year’s Wimbledon, it may finally be time to stop worrying and embrace the Age of the Aged.
In the men’s semi-finals on Friday, 32-year-old Kevin Anderson will face 33-year-old John Isner; they’ll be followed by 32-year-old Rafael Nadal and 31-year-old Novak Djokovic. Fourteen years after he joined the Tour, Djokovic can still say he’s the youngest of the final four at Wimbledon. On Wednesday, the two best quarter-final matches were between Anderson and Roger Federer, 37 next month; and Nadal and Juan Martin del Potro, who is 30 in two months.
The story is much the same on the ladies' side. In Thursday’s semi-finals, 36-year-old Serena Williams beat 29-year-old Julia Goerges, while 30-year-old Angelique Kerber knocked off the only spring chicken in the group, 21-year-old Jelena Ostapenko. Once upon a time, when Serena and Maria Sharapova - and Monica Seles and Steffi Graf and Chris Evert - were winning major titles in their teens, it paid to be young and spry and fearless in tennis. On Thursday, as Ostapenko found out in her error-filled defeat, it pays to have been there before. Or, in Serena’s case, to have been to 34 major semi-finals before.
This is part of a long-running trend; 40, it seems, really is the new 30 in tennis. Yet every season there’s a point when it appears as if the long-awaited tidal wave of youth is finally about to break over the sport. With its “Next Gen” brand, the ATP has gone to extensive lengths to make us believe that the Tour really does have a future.
And it does. Alexander Zverev, Dominic Thiem, Nick Kyrgios, Hyeon Chung, and Kyle Edmund are all under 25, and have all made significant inroads at big events. The same goes on the women’s side. Last year Ostapenko and Sloane Stephens won major titles, while under-25ers Daria Kasatkina, Madison Keys, and Naomi Osaka have all cracked the WTA top 20.
Most of these players will be playing for major titles eventually. But why would we want to shove the current generation, the one in contention at Wimbledon, off the stage? There’s still a sense in tennis that its stars should be young. After Evert reached the semi-finals at the US Open as a 16-year-old in 1971, tennis became famous for producing prodigies - in the US, Tracy Austin, Andrea Jaeger, and Jennifer Capriati all followed in Evert’s teen footsteps.
More recently, fans still have the memory of seeing child quasars like Seles, Sharapova, Nadal, and Martina Hingis come flying in from nowhere and become major champions before they finished high school. Because the prodigy was such an ingrained element of the sport for long, many people assume that if tennis isn’t producing them anymore, it must be withering in some way.
But maybe it’s a sign of evolution instead. Maybe it’s a sign that the top players are more professional and committed than ever, and that the game has grown too complex and involved, mentally and physically, to master at a young age.
And maybe it’s time to recognise the benefits of an “aging” group of elite players.
The most obvious of those benefits is that there’s simply more time to enjoy watching your favourite players. The biggest star of the first half of the Open era, Bjorn Borg, was gone by the time he was 26; the biggest star of the second half, Federer, has already been on the Tour for 20 years, and could easily play until he’s 40. As for Serena, we’ve seen her win as a brash teenager, as a dominant 28-year-old, and now, at this Wimbledon, well into her 30s. We’ve seen the woman she’ll face in the final on Saturday, Kerber, fulfill her long-dormant potential and reach No.1 in the world in her late-20s.
For fans of the game itself, what could have been better than the match between Nadal and Del Potro on Centre Court on Wednesday? Knowing their personalities so well, and having seen them in these situations so many times before, only deepened our appreciation for their play, their showmanship, and their sportsmanship. It’s safe to say that watching Rafa and Delpo will never get old.
Finally, over on No.1 Court on Wednesday, we could see what time and experience can do for players who haven’t always been stars. Neither Isner nor Anderson reached a Grand Slam semi-final in his first 10 years on tour. Now, against all the odds of age and time, one of them will play for the Wimbledon title on Sunday.
The future will come in tennis; it always does. For now, there are a lot of reasons to love the present.
