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Magazine
Into the sunset
ROHIT BRIJNATH
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Agassi, Navratilova and Schumacher: their fans are not poorer for their retirement, but richer that they came at all.
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PHOTOS: REUTERS AND AFP
INSPIRATIONAL CHAMPIONS: Michael Schumacher.
WHEN the great athlete exits, we do something we would not for the average athlete. We pause. Briefly. Eventually life and sport continues on its cycle, and we are distracted and then refreshed by the new hero. But for a moment we halt, in celebration, in remembrance, in gratitude, reflecting on their lives and in a way also ours, for when we look back at Andre Agassi in 1986, for instance, we are also peering at our own pasts. We do not know Agassi, yet we are old friends who have journeyed together.
A long time we have known this tennis monk, and that old lady there with the veined forearms and fogging spectacles and eyes still glinting at the idea of competition, and this red-suited, no-mirth-smiling, on-the-edge Formula One driver. Some of us have introduced our children to Agassi, 36, and Martina Navratilova, 50 in October, and Michael Schumacher, 37, three enchanting, inspirational champions who this month have put in for their pensions.
Extraordinary trinity
For a while it appears Sundays, our day of communion with greatness, will never be the same again. This was an extraordinary sporting trinity, whose prowess in sporting arenas ensured they shared similarities, of focus, dedication, discipline, courage, work ethic, toughness, but there it ends and differences emerge. Agassi enhanced his sport, coloured it, lifted it, but with eight grand slam titles never dominated it, as did Schumacher, who won seven world titles, and Navratilova, whose records require their own storage cupboard. Amidst the 18 grand slam titles, seven years as No.1, 13 titles won in a row once, a single statistic rules. In 1983, she won 86 matches and lost but one.
Martina Navratilova.
No one's strokes were as gleaming and polished as Agassi's; no one owned a bat-like radar like him while returning. He was tennis' professor, in the interview room in later years where he dispensed wisdom, and on court where he held one-man seminars in constructing points. Asked on his last day at the U.S. Open this year to draw some parallels between tennis and life, he said: "You're out there alone. You're playing a sport that requires you to problem solve. It requires you to do it in a somewhat emotional state. It is a bit of life there. You learn to trust yourself and you learn to push yourself." Although he is one of only five men to win all four grand slam tournaments (Australian Open, Wimbledon, French Open, U.S. Open), and the only one to win them on four different surfaces (earlier only the French was not held on grass), no one ever called Agassi the best. But last fortnight itself, Billie Jean King called Navratilova the greatest women's player of all time.
Then Tiger Woods declared that neither he nor Roger Federer were the greatest athlete of this era, but Michael Schumacher. Said the golfer: "In my eyes, Michael Schumacher has to be. His consistency does it for me. He's performed year in, year out, in a sport watched globally, under immense pressure." This difference between the trio as performers is sweetly exemplified in their departures. The day he announced this year was his last, Schumacher won his 90th grand prix race; Navratilova farewelled the courts with victory in the U.S. Open mixed doubles, her 59th grand slam title (18 singles, 31 doubles, 10 mixed), second only to Margaret Court with 62. Agassi finished with a loss, in the third round. Yet, he had a weeping world in the palm of his blistered hand.
Easily, Agassi was the most loved because in front of us he had found salvation; his life was a redemption tale that was impossible to turn away from. Long-haired rebel with questionable manners becomes tennis' balding reverend with goddess wife. No life is ever this neat, yet everyone adores fairytales.
Navratilova's departure caused the least kerfuffle because she has retired before, and anyway tennis is primarily a singles pursuit and that segment of her career truly ended in 1994. Still, to see her not so much continue but compete till 49 (Lindsay Davenport, 30, was not born when Navratilova entered the tour) is uplifting. Athletes constantly profess a love of sport, but Navratilova's life has defined it. She has been the most valued of sports people, the honest competitor. The most telling photo of the impetuous, emotional, bright Navratilova's life is from 1974, when she won her first pro title in Orlando, and this Czech in America, with no friend, nor family, hugged the closest thing to her. A light pole. She defected, she ate too much, she struggled with her sexuality (costing her millions in sponsorships), she sparked the greatest rivalry tennis has seen (McEnroe-Borg was 7-7, Navratilova-Chris Evert was 43-37).
But most of all she altered tennis with her athleticism, a finely muscled, limber, powerful, inventive, serve and volleyer. Yet now she bemoans (and so do we) the passing of her multi-dimensional style, for women's tennis is all baseline grip, rip and grunt. Still, she leaves content, saying: "When you have 10-year-olds saying, `Ms. Navratilova, can I please have your autograph, you're the greatest', I'm like, `Okay, this is cool, another generation that I've introduced to the game I love and show it how it can be played'." Agassi and Navratilova separate themselves a little from Schumacher because their private lives were very much linked to their professional ones, and mostly they grew up in public. We knew every detail of Agassi's early foolishness, his dating, his dress. Schumacher, of course, was locked into a cockpit, the invisible hero, a man who seemed to weld himself to the machine to become one ferocious, driven, soulless, red object.
Schumacher was interesting not because he made the society pages, but because he was ruthlessly efficient. The first part is not irrelevant, for in an age of absurdly wealthy, coddled athletes, who embrace excess, Schumacher has been notable for his quiet married life off the circuit. A man who beckons controversy when engines roar has shunned it once the engines go silent. There is much to be said for this.
Objects of affection
Andre Agassi retired in a blaze of glory.
In time, Agassi and Navratilova changed, dramatically, physically and otherwise, and gradually became objects of great affection. Perhaps because we do not really see the helmeted Schumacher, we are unsure if he has changed. Certainly, he is less beloved than the other two, especially among his peers, perhaps because being liked was never as important to him as it was for Agassi. Schumacher, you sensed, was there to win, all else, even etiquette and ethics occasionally, were extraneous. Wearing Ferrari red was apparently God's little joke because truly this man flirted with danger. He has the most world championships, pole positions, fastest laps, podium finishes, but for all his statistical domination not all are convinced of his place at driving's apex. Anyway, so primary is the car's role that no definitive judgment is possible.
Schumacher did not endear himself to his fellow drivers (Fernando Alonso recently said he is the most unsporting driver in the history of Formula One), but if his manner was not becoming, his skills were. On wet tracks his control was sublime; he overtook with a nerve a fighter pilot might envy; he drove with an intensity, day in, year out, that was staggering.
What compelled us was his fearless hurtling around the tracks, into corners and out, squeezing, finding, taking every last ounce of power the car could give him and commanding it precisely. On land, he was top gun. "It has been an exceptional time, 30 years in motor sport," said Schumacher, who got into his first kart before he was five. "I have loved every single moment, the good and the bad ... the day has to come. I felt this was the moment. I wanted to go out at the top. Not with my best days behind me." He has a chance to finish this last year of his with an eighth title and who dares not watch.
All three athletes are notable for their charity work, and it will continue. Agassi said it will be nice to get up and not worry if his worn muscles feel all right. Schumacher's nostrils will learn to live without the scent of engine oil and perhaps he will now drive only to where his children tell him, like school and back. Navratilova will still roam, surely, for she is the essential nomad.
We do not grudge their exit from the arena, for while their long journeys don't show on their faces, it does on the body and the mind. A lifetime of raising the bar has exhausted them. We will pause some Sundays to remember them, then the sound of growling engine and splat of racket meeting ball will steal away our attention. Truly, we are not poorer for their going, but richer that they came at all.
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