If tennis is an individual sport, what the hell does a doubles player paint?
I was thinking about it the other Tuesday, in Paris, while I was talking with Marcel Granollers.
Granollers is 37 years old and has a magnificent service record in the individual draw (he has four ATP titles; in 2012 he had become the 19th racket in the world).
But, as a doubles player, he has gone much further.
In doubles he has been fourth in the world (today he is sixth), he has won 24 tournaments, he has played four Grand Slam finals and today, partnering with Horacio Zeballos, he will play the Roland Garros semifinals.
As I chat with Granollers, I remember an episode that I had experienced in his company, more than a quarter of a century ago, when the man was a kid from the Gimeno Academy.
Collaborating with La Vanguardia Magazine, we had selected a range of tennis players of the future.
We had chosen six.
Granollers was one of them.
At that time, Granollers confesses to me, that boy that he was and attended me with a flute voice hardly dreamed of having fun as a tennis player, an individual sport par excellence.
–But if tennis is essentially an individual sport, has specializing in doubles required different mental conditions? I asked him this Tuesday in Paris.
–A change of chip! When you play a singles match, you decide everything and everything happens around you. But in doubles, you have to put yourself in your partner’s place. Especially when things are going wrong.
It is there, when things go wrong in doubles, when the tennis player enters the unknown dimension.
Well, that tennis player who on a bad day shows himself to be a failure tends to curse himself, to throw in the racket and the towel, to get carried away and change strategies without rhyme or reason, under his sole responsibility.
But if you are playing as a couple and things are not going well, what should you do?
–First, think that we all want to do well. I want to do it and my partner wants it. And the next thing, keep yourself from shouting at your partner and try to get the best out of him. If you don’t understand him in all situations, you may end up blocking him.
So the doubles player, a discipline alien to the popular imagination (we all follow the exploits of Alcaraz; we have barely found out that Granollers is two steps away from winning the Grand Slam in doubles), is essentially a tennis player by vocation. Neither he is famous, nor is he a billionaire nor has he become a tennis player to be a doubles player.
Against all odds, the doubles player plays tennis to have fun: exactly what that boy called Granollers was asking for.
