A racquet is strung, a guitar tuned, everything is in its rightful place – and the song comes to life.
You up and leave me
you never call me… I miss you… I miss you…
that lucky woman
I am the most envied woman… they say about me…
but I already miss you
Loredana Bertè wrote this while trying to understand what happened to Bjorn Borg, “the tennis player” as she calls him. The marriage between the iconic tennis champion and the singer spurred headlines all over the globe. Loredana, who had already appeared years before alongside Adriano Panatta, must have had a proclivity for this sport. She always looked beautiful as she sang, with a physicality that felt almost intrusive to the listener. A stormy character, a famous sister, a complicated family history and there you go – a character is ready-made. Loredana sang with her soul, a rebellious one. How did someone cut from such a cloth end up in the hands of Borg, the prototype of the serious, scrupulous, rational, cynical, and cold sportsman? On the court, Borg had sedated a monster within himself that sooner or later would come out to exact its revenge. Borg’s career was amazing but did not last long, replaced by excesses and financial disasters as conspicuous as the Grand Slams he won. An author isn’t always the lyrics to his songs.
A backhand touch volley to softly close the net, a rock poem: if Borg is there, McEnroe must be too, just like a verse always invokes its chorus.
Take me now, baby, here as I am
Pull me close, try and understand
Desire is hunger is the fire I breathe
Love is a banquet on which we feed
Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen, Patti Smith sings. The Boss had written it for her, but legend has it that it did not fit on his own record and, rather than shelving it, he thought of giving it to the girl who was recording in the next room of the same studio. Patti accepted, thanked, adapted the lyrics and made it a worldwide success.
In this case, the cross-contamination with tennis with tennis owes to paronomasia, because one evening at a party, Patty Smyth, a little less known than her almost homonym – of Irish origins and a rock music background – was introduced to John McEnroe. Love at first sight, even if it would take some time to admit it to each other. John would also have probably wanted to ask her to tour and record with her, since he had always harboured the dream of becoming a rock star, but Patty, much wiser, would never have asked John to play in the mixed doubles at Wimbledon with him.
John also recorded an album and promoted it on the tennis tour, but he decided, at Patty’s behest, to continue to devote himself to the strings that gave him the best sounds, those of his Dunlop. A lover of art and entertainment, John came off a failed marriage with Tatum ‘O Neil, daughter of Ryan, and herself a purported Hollywood hopeful. Are there many tennis players who could have combined the worlds of sport and art more than Supermac? The answer is no, to be honest.
Andre Agassi was a tennis player in punk rock outfits, even though by the 1980s punk rock had become so mainstream that it was difficult to understand where the limit was between meaning it, sporting its looks, or just looking like something else entirely. The myth of the young man armed with a guitar had certainly not dried out yet, but it had changed, passing from the flower-shooting axe of the Summer of Love to the nail-y one of an anarchist London Calling, less sober, decidedly noisier, flashy, and paradoxically consumerist. Agassi didn’t have a knack for music like Jim Courier and Pat Cash, the latter a melodically less capable (and less famous) pirate than Little Steven or, of course, than that divinity who goes by the name of Keith Richards, to whom the character of Jack Sparrow in “Pirates of the Caribbean” should erect a monument. Andre the newcomer, though, he was so cool and youthful, and solved the issue by dating the admirable voice of Barbra Streisand.
A Woman in Love can accept that her man should like to indulge in childish play by shooting fuzzy balls like bullets, but Andre was also unfortunately much younger than her, and the spark fizzled lost. He later gave himself to the screen as much as he had to songs, marrying the virginal, at least according to the tabloids, Brooke Shields. It would take a tennis player’s sharp backhand slices to get him on the right track for good. It could be deduced that Steffi Graff was as adept as any at the fuzzy bullet-shooting.
Yannick Noah has always been the larger-than-life type and has never chosen musicians as life companions because he preferred to do it all by himself, singing included. Once he hung up his racquet, he climbed the charts with his records, something he’d already achieved while still a tennis player. Yannick was born a performer, both with racquets and mics, with a timing that could have only been bequeathed to him by fate. The most successful single of his second career, “Saga Africa”, was released in 1991, the year of a French Davis Cup win, becoming an anthem sung and danced during the Lyonnaise celebrations of those days.
From Bobo Zivojinovic of the once Yugoslav Republic, to the forever rising (and perhaps never blooming) Grigor Dimitrov, the liaison between tennis and the music world in terms of sentimental relationships has several paragraphs in between the chapters of the novel that is the never-ending intertwining between sports and entertainment. Pop and popular events that often meet halfway because they are never too far apart, especially in the Image Society, now magnified by the presence of social media and by the value of a “like”. A racket is strung, a guitar tuned, everything is in its rightful place – and the song comes to life.
Translated by Matteo Pelliccia; edited by Tommaso Villa
