If tennis is an individual sport, what does a doubles player look like?
I was thinking about it last Tuesday, in Paris, while talking to Marcel Granollers.
Granollers is 37 years old and has a magnificent track record in the individual field (he has four ATP titles; in 2012 he was ranked 19th in the world).
But, as a doubles player, he has gone much further.
In doubles, he was fourth in the world (today he is sixth), won 24 tournaments, played in four Grand Slam finals, and today he is paired with Horacio Zeballos and will play in the Roland Garros semifinals.
While chatting with Granollers, I remember an episode that I had lived with him, more than a quarter of a century ago, when the man was a child of the Gimeno academy.
In collaboration with La Vanguardia magazine, we had selected a range of tennis players of the future.
We had chosen six.
Granollers was one of them.
Then, Granollers confesses to me, the boy that he was and he attended to me with a fluted voice just 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 on 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 shoes. Especially when things go wrong.
It’s when things go wrong in doubles, when the tennis player enters the unknown dimension.
The tennis player who has a bad day tends to curse, to throw in the racket and the towel, to get carried away and change strategies without letting go or turning around, under his sole responsibility.
But if you are playing as a couple and things are not going well, what should you do?
-First, to think that we all want to do well. I want it, and the partner wants it. And then avoid yelling at your partner and try to get the best out of them. If you don’t understand it in all situations, you can end up blocking it.
So, the doubles player, a discipline foreign to the popular imagination (we all follow the feats of Alcaraz; we have just learned that Granollers is about to win the Grand Slam of doubles), is essentially a tennis player by vocation. He is neither famous, nor a billionaire, nor did he become a tennis player to be a doubles player.
Against wind and tide, the doubles player plays tennis for fun: exactly what the body of the boy named Granollers was asking for.
