JessicaRulestheUniverse.com

Being a tennis fan, even a tennis fan who does not play (I don’t like sweating, which is probably the only thing I have in common with Roger Federer) is a grueling hobby. You get jet lag without leaving your house (12 hours’ time difference during the US Open, 6 during Wimbledon), and the emotional toll is high (You can be glum for days after the player you root for loses a big match. I submit that this vicarious form of tennis is more painful than losing a match yourself because it is totally beyond your control, jeez, you’re not even holding a racquet).

I’ve been a Federer fan since 2001 (Like many who watched the Sampras passing-the-torch match at Wimbledon, I feel like I discovered him), and around his 18th grand slam I figured my emotional investment had already paid off and I stopped watching tennis altogether. Periodically I would emerge to gloat, but I was largely over it. Post-Federer (a period that is still continuing because the old man still has a few slams in him, assuming you let him rest for six months) I didn’t take up a new fandom (Never liked the way Nadal plays—see sweat and visible effort, yeah it’s too late to pretend not to be an elitist; admire Djokovic’s ugly-beautiful style but not enough to root for him). Touch, the quality I like watching, has largely disappeared from the current power game.

Having retired from watching tennis, I’d never even heard of Naomi Osaka until Raul mentioned her at lunch last Saturday. Well.

She was ready, and she knew it. You could see it in the steely look she gave Williams when they met at the net before the match began. And Williams knew it, too, or learned it quickly. Osaka’s service returns were coming back at Williams’s feet, not giving her time to recover, nor letting her exploit an angle. Williams started to press. She had been making nearly eighty per cent of her first serves in this U.S. Open; against Osaka, she made a little more than half of them. She started double-faulting. Osaka’s own serve, meanwhile, was humming. And, as has been true all throughout the tournament, her serve was perhaps most dangerous in the toughest situations. She saved four of five break points, while winning five of six break points on Williams’s serve. Off the ground, too, she was outplaying Williams, moving better while matching her for pace, angles, and depth. In almost every statistical category, Osaka had the edge. Osaka took the first set, 6-2. Coming into the match, she was 31-0 when winning the first set this year. Still, no one doubted that Williams had the capacity to turn things around.

Read Louisa Thomas’s thrilling article about the US Open final.

And this prescient NYT article, Naomi Osaka’s Breakthrough Game.

This year he has won the Australian Open and Wimbledon. Next month he turns 36.

A few days ago he won Indian Wells for the fifth time. I’m caving in and buying an RF jacket.

To start, Federer looked relatively normal when we met, and definitely Swiss: dark turtleneck sweater, crisp wool pants, black boots. Hiking is Federer’s favorite hobby (his only hobby), but snow was falling and his legs were tired from Australia, so we went out to lunch, for raclette (at his suggestion), a traditional Swiss dish for après-ski, basically a plate of melted cheese. Not what I expected. But what did I expect, really? On the court, Federer is known for almost inhuman focus. Humorless determination. A steel-cut perfectionist with a stevedore’s nose, the finest forehand of all time, and the coiffure of James Bond circa Timothy Dalton. In the stiffest of all countries, why should he be any different? But frankly, he was so easy going from the start, so relaxed, for a second I thought he was stoned. (He wasn’t stoned.) He drove us to the restaurant in his Mercedes. We chatted about our families. I wound up telling a story about the time I did heroin by accident—look, it was in South Africa, and Federer’s mother is from South Africa, and I was trying to find some common ground out of the gate, the way you do when you’re riding in a gargantuan vehicle with a global celebrity you’ve just met—and he barked out laughing. Federer, a big laugher, who knew? Though it got to a point, by mid-meal, where I started to get suspicious—was it for show, to play the Everyman? Who likes melted cheese like the rest of us? (Maybe he was stoned?) This is a guy, I’d learn, who still makes reservations at a nearby public tennis facility rather than build his own private court. Think about that. Consider the fact that Federer has made over $100 million in career prize money, never mind endorsements. Now imagine being the local dude who has to kick Roger Federer off a tennis court because his practice session goes a little long.

Read the story in GQ.

It’s illogical to say that Roger Federer has returned to top form because reading the daily news gives us nervous breakdowns and we really need him to win. But we’re fans and will make the connection.

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

I didn’t watch it. Longish story, tell you later. Going to sleep.

Happy New Year to us all! One day you feel the world is rushing to oblivion, and then Federer wins a grand slam again and suddenly everything will be fine. Sport: the great metaphor.

* * * * *

The match everyone thought would never happen again, where everything turned out the way I have always wanted while agonizing through every Federer v Nadal match in the last ten years, and I missed it.

I was in Thailand for work. Periodically I would check the results from Melbourne but was vewy vewy quiet because I didn’t want to jinx it. Sports fans maintain the irrational belief that their actions affect the outcomes of matches. But it was all Federer and Nadal. They are the best emotional investment we tennis fans have ever made, and they’re still paying off.

Okay, it’s been over 24 hours. We now return to the resistance. Now we see why superhero movies and dystopian narratives took over popular culture in the last decade. The writers could see it coming. We’re living in it now.

The Cat’s Eye Nebula, from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.

On Thursday we mark the 9th anniversary of Jessica Rules the Universe. We started blogging quite late, after having declared that we would never blog. At the time, we did not anticipate that we would join the ranks of the unemployed, and that if our byline did not appear in a newspaper every week, readers would simply assume that we had moved to another country and forget that we exist.

Our first blog was on blogspot and it was called Twisted by Jessica Zafra. Once, as an experiment, we turned off the comment moderation. The section was quickly overrun by trolls so we abandoned the blog altogether. In 2006 Melo Villareal offered to host our site, which he continues to do to this day. We couldn’t use our own name because someone had bought the domain name back in the mid-90s, so we decided on Jessica Rules the Universe.

On this blog we cover our personal interests: Books, Movies (and lately, TV), Travel, Tennis, Music, and of course, Cats. Occasionally, when riled, we write on Politics and Current Events (mostly Traffic). We also hold Contests, do Group Translations (See Camus in Tagalog, above), and organize Reader Support Groups when we take on books that require extra attention (War and Peace, Blood Meridian).

To mark our 9th anniversary, we’re showcasing 9 representative blog posts over the next three days. If you have any particular favorites, let us know in Comments.

Cats
From 2010: Emotional Blackmail

Mat the Cat: I would like a treat, please. (My cats are haughty but polite.)
Me: This is not a treat day. Your next treat is on Friday.
Mat: I would like one now.
Me: No, we don’t want you to get super-fat.
Mat: I am not fat, I am big-boned.
Me: This is not a negotiation. No treats till Friday.
Mat tries poor, pitiful expression (See photo).

Tennis
From 2012: Roger Federer, we release you

Before Sunday, Roger Federer’s last grand slam victory was at the Australian Open in 2010. Since then it’s been two and a half years of mental torment, recrimination and self-doubt—not for Federer, whose perfect hair remained unruffled by the dominance of Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, but for Federer fans like myself.

I hope you’re a better human than I am, because I was reduced to hoping that Nadal’s knees would fall off (Not impossible, given the way he plays) or that Djokovic would split in half (Not impossible either—his upper torso goes left, his legs go right, boom! Manananggal). Sportswriters wrote Roger off (He’s 30)—I stopped reading them. He got cranky after his losses—I figured he’d been babysitting his twins. I watched the grand slams almost furtively, lest others gloat that he’d become “vincible”.

Movies
From 2010: 86. Try A Little Suicide (Danny Zialcita’s Tinimbang Ang Langit)

Victoria sees Sandra and has a fit of jealousy, or maybe she just had some bad shrimp for lunch, it’s hard to tell. Joel takes off to a beach resort to write songs, and he’s so distraught he walks around in shiny gold hot pants.

Excerpts from Brian Phillips’ wonderful essay in Grantland

Four years ago, trying to comprehend the phenomenon of Federer’s late career, which even then seemed like it had lasted an astonishingly long time, I wrote that the best athletes usually have a “still” phase. First they’re fast. Then they’re slow. In between, there’s a moment when they’re “still” fast — when you can see the end coming but can’t deny that, for now, they remain close to their best. Federer, I wrote, had spent longer in that “still” phase than any great tennis player I could think of.

The slow-motion euthanasia that time inflicts on athletic talent is, for me, the hardest thing to watch in sports. But time is treating Federer with a tenderness that almost defies reason.

Because the truth is that while we talk about his late career as if it were a sort of beautifully written epilogue, a casual marvel, it has now lasted longer than his prime.

These days, though? Federer’s career doesn’t seem so sad. Partly this is because other top-rank tennis declines — specifically Nadal’s injury-aided shuttlecock dive to the bottom of the top 10, but also arguably including Andy Murray’s failure to emerge as a consistent threat after winning Great Britain’s first Wimbledon men’s singles title since the boyhood of Æthelred the Unready — have been so much more dramatic (and therefore so much more consistent with how tennis careers usually end, i.e., not gently and with years of further sustained success). But it’s also because Federer seems to be enjoying himself so much.

What you take from watching him now is not so much a sense of tennis, the abstract world of angles and pure calculation that he seemed to represent in his youth, but the sense of a life. You watch him, and even though his physical signatures are the same, even though he tucks his hair behind his ear with the same patient care and spins his racket with the same agitation and hops along the baseline with the same sprung tension in his legs, what you think about, because he’s been around long enough for you to know him better, is also what’s offscreen.

Read The Sun Never Sets: On Roger Federer, Endings and Wimbledon in Grantland. Thanks to Rossan for sending us the link.