I picture grown-ups huddled around a table in a kitchen. Other rooms dark. Half of the adults smoking, slurping cups of coffee. Children ask for things. The experience of a hard day, hard week, ebbs away, while the sun slots itself behind tall buildings. The noise of cars has died down, fewer people are outside. The sound of the radio, however, is different: it has the sound of presence, of crowds.
Radio broadcast is probably my favorite way to enjoy sports when I’m not playing them. For baseball, it’s background during work or cooking. For college basketball, it’s often more thrilling and less likely to raise my blood pressure.
Weirdly, radio is probably the most frequent way I follow tennis when the Majors are playing – I put it on during breakfast, while I drive, practically all day long.
For tennis, it makes the least amount of sense. The best way to experience high-end tennis is to see it up close. To watch top players hit from less than fifty feet, even Division I college players, is to experience their discomfort, the scrapping, not to mention you get to understand the crazy, high-speed violence of the ball-striking. I’ve been courtside for Rafael Nadal and it’s unworldly. Televised tennis doesn’t carry any of that. It flattens speed and spin. The angles are all wrong, they look like Nintendo.
The novelist David Foster Wallace, overrated in a lot of ways but not as a tennis writer, wrote about this in his 2006 profile of Roger Federer:
TV’s priority, during a point, is coverage of the whole court, a comprehensive view, so that viewers can see both players and the overall geometry of the exchange. Television therefore chooses a specular vantage that is overhead and behind one baseline. You, the viewer, are above and looking down from behind the court. This perspective, as any art student will tell you, “foreshortens” the court. Real tennis, after all, is three-dimensional, but a TV screen’s image is only 2-D. The dimension that’s lost (or rather distorted) on the screen is the real court’s length, the 78 feet between baselines; and the speed with which the ball traverses this length is a shot’s pace, which on TV is obscured, and in person is fearsome to behold.
Anyway, the difference on TV between an amateur match and a pro match, for the uninformed eye, is probably negligible. But if you’re familiar with what you’re seeing, or sitting up close, it’s like comparing a pro boxing match with two people playing catch with a balloon.
And tennis radio, when it’s good, puts you somewhere in the middle. Similar in manner to an audio book, but alive in time, with more perspectives. The Slams – the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, US Open – broadcast free radio coverage, with knowledgeable people on-site calling the back-and-forth. The French Open, concluding this weekend, and Wimbledon, around the corner, do an excellent job. (The Australian Open’s version is decent. The US Open, not so much.) And when it’s great, it’s riveting. The color commentary fills in data bits and storylines. The play-by-play explains things unseen by cameras. I had to pull over this week because the Nadal-Djokovic match was too exciting.
This may seem obvious, but sports on radio is a place asking for imagination. The game is arranged for you, for the audience, but the present moment in that place needs your mind to make it material. When I visit, I’m engaged, no longer in the room. Maybe I don’t quite remember what happened a few moments ago, but that’s trivial. It’s not so much transportation as a dream.
In tomorrow’s Sunday supplement for supporters: Recent articles that were great, an interesting example of an unreleased soundtrack, a poem for Summer 2022, and good new movie trailers.
And hey, if you want some French Open radio, it’s over here. (Go Gauff. Vamos Nadal.) The Wimbledon broadcast kicks off next month.
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Meditations in an Emergency is a micro-essay published Saturdays by novelist Rosecrans Baldwin about things he finds beautiful, with a longer essay once a month for subscribers, written in the woods.
Also for subscribers: a Sunday supplement three weeks a month, with three-plus ideas of things to love, no paid placements 💀
Rosecrans is the bestselling author of Everything Now: Lessons From the City-State of Los Angeles, winner of the 2022 California Book Award. It’s available from Bookshop, Amazon, and (preferably) your local store. Other books include The Last Kid Left and Paris, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down. His debut novel, You Lost Me There, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.
Books mentioned in this newsletter are featured on a Bookshop list.