about the end of my tennis career because the joking helped to take something of the sting out of the moment, which was painful. It hurt more than a little again when, later that month, in New York, I confirmed to the press that I had retired from playing the game as a professional.
In fact, I merely confirmed then what I had already admitted in a letter to twenty-two friends and associates. “A long time ago in my Sunday school classes,” I had written, “I learned that ‘for every thing there is a season.’ From today on, I will end my nonstop Odyssey in search of the perfect serve and retire from competitive tennis. In case youwere wondering about my health, I plan to live to be 100 years old.”
When a reporter telephoned me about the letter, I was equally jaunty about how long I would live. “The doctors say I will live to be 100,” I assured him, “but they won’t put it in writing.”
ONE LIFE HAD ended, and another had not yet quite begun. For some years I had known this moment would come, but now it was here in earnest. I had to negotiate the middle passage between the old and the new. Quite consciously, I gave myself a period of about three months simply to think about the past and about the future. At this crucial point in my life, I did not want to make any major mistakes.
Looking back on that period, I see only one thing clearly: that it seemed to me quite possibly a developing crisis. I felt a subtle but pervasive dissatisfaction with my life up to that point, and a deep confusion about what the rest of it would, and should, look like.
How could I be dissatisfied, even subtly, with my life to that point? I had lived, many people would say, a fantasy of a life. I had won a measure of international fame many people would die for. I had traveled all over the world, and often in grand style. Relatively speaking, I had made a great deal of money. I had won a large number of friends. How could I be dissatisfied?
But I
was
dissatisfied. Who knows what force gnaws at us, telling us that our accomplishments, no matter how sensational, are not enough, that we need to do more? Some psychologists, and some poets, talk about the rage for immortality that operates like a dynamo in the hearts and minds of men and women despite all we know about the transience of glory and the inevitability of death. I don’t think I wanted to be immortal, not in any literal sense. Although I enjoy receiving honors and awards, I am not obsessed by the question of whether or not people would know my name a hundred years from now. But I did wantto achieve something more than I had accomplished on the tennis court.
For one thing, I had been a professional athlete, and as far as I was concerned, few people took professional athletes seriously. At that time—perhaps it is somewhat different now—I thought that professional athletes were the modern counterpart to minstrels or
jongleurs
in the Middle Ages. All we needed, I sometimes believed, was the pointed hats and the curved shoes tipped by little balls to be complete fools. From start to finish we were entertainers, with essentially clownish roles assigned to us, for which we were handsomely paid. But the lavishness of the payment did not change the role.
I wanted to be taken seriously. In part, I had been instructed by the efforts of other athletes who had begun to tear themselves out of the clown’s costume in my own time. From the social and racial remove of the almost entirely white, upper-class stratum that is the tennis world, I had looked with fascination on athletes who had stood up defiantly and protested against social injustice. Cautious about getting involved in politics and protest myself, I couldn’t help but admire impetuous men such as Muhammad Ali, who struck me as menacing and purposeful even when he was amusing, a charming man but also unmistakably defiant; or the somber, black-gloved athlete-protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who turned the victory
In fact, I merely confirmed then what I had already admitted in a letter to twenty-two friends and associates. “A long time ago in my Sunday school classes,” I had written, “I learned that ‘for every thing there is a season.’ From today on, I will end my nonstop Odyssey in search of the perfect serve and retire from competitive tennis. In case youwere wondering about my health, I plan to live to be 100 years old.”
When a reporter telephoned me about the letter, I was equally jaunty about how long I would live. “The doctors say I will live to be 100,” I assured him, “but they won’t put it in writing.”
ONE LIFE HAD ended, and another had not yet quite begun. For some years I had known this moment would come, but now it was here in earnest. I had to negotiate the middle passage between the old and the new. Quite consciously, I gave myself a period of about three months simply to think about the past and about the future. At this crucial point in my life, I did not want to make any major mistakes.
Looking back on that period, I see only one thing clearly: that it seemed to me quite possibly a developing crisis. I felt a subtle but pervasive dissatisfaction with my life up to that point, and a deep confusion about what the rest of it would, and should, look like.
How could I be dissatisfied, even subtly, with my life to that point? I had lived, many people would say, a fantasy of a life. I had won a measure of international fame many people would die for. I had traveled all over the world, and often in grand style. Relatively speaking, I had made a great deal of money. I had won a large number of friends. How could I be dissatisfied?
But I
was
dissatisfied. Who knows what force gnaws at us, telling us that our accomplishments, no matter how sensational, are not enough, that we need to do more? Some psychologists, and some poets, talk about the rage for immortality that operates like a dynamo in the hearts and minds of men and women despite all we know about the transience of glory and the inevitability of death. I don’t think I wanted to be immortal, not in any literal sense. Although I enjoy receiving honors and awards, I am not obsessed by the question of whether or not people would know my name a hundred years from now. But I did wantto achieve something more than I had accomplished on the tennis court.
For one thing, I had been a professional athlete, and as far as I was concerned, few people took professional athletes seriously. At that time—perhaps it is somewhat different now—I thought that professional athletes were the modern counterpart to minstrels or
jongleurs
in the Middle Ages. All we needed, I sometimes believed, was the pointed hats and the curved shoes tipped by little balls to be complete fools. From start to finish we were entertainers, with essentially clownish roles assigned to us, for which we were handsomely paid. But the lavishness of the payment did not change the role.
I wanted to be taken seriously. In part, I had been instructed by the efforts of other athletes who had begun to tear themselves out of the clown’s costume in my own time. From the social and racial remove of the almost entirely white, upper-class stratum that is the tennis world, I had looked with fascination on athletes who had stood up defiantly and protested against social injustice. Cautious about getting involved in politics and protest myself, I couldn’t help but admire impetuous men such as Muhammad Ali, who struck me as menacing and purposeful even when he was amusing, a charming man but also unmistakably defiant; or the somber, black-gloved athlete-protesters Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who turned the victory
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