Playing the game with perseverance

We have started a summer of sport – the Euros, then Wimbledon, Tour de France, and of course, the Paris Olympics.  Tennis especially seems to be having a cultural moment.

‘Tenniscore’ has now been fashionable for months thanks to the film ‘Challengers’ with its tennis-based love triangle that was a huge hit at the end of April. In June Serena and Venus Williams served up some sport couture in Paris, as they walked the runway at Vogue World, with Venus wearing a dress made from recycled tennis bags. Now, tennis is about to takeover the small screen – with not only the traditional two weeks of Wimbledon, but some behind the scenes documentaries, offering further insight into what it takes to get to Centre Court. 

First, we have Roger Federer: Twelve Final Days (over on Amazon Prime), which shows us the period between the Swiss tennis great's retirement announcement and his final match at the Laver cup in September 2022.  We see a mature, composed man, confident, and perhaps overly stage-managed.  In today’s PR-focused world, his retirement isn’t so much announced to the world, nor shared, it is ‘launched’.  He has fought hard to get where he has, but that fight seems to have gone almost unnoticed by others.  He remembers being told he didn’t battle enough after a loss, saying ‘I didn’t quite understand what that meant: do I have to grunt, do I have to sweat more, do I have to shout more, do I have to be more aggressive towards my opponents?  I tried, but it was all an act. I’m not like that.’

During the documentary, Federer's coach comments that ‘athletes die twice’. For Federer, and the trio with him at the top – Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray, the question facing them after retirement seems to be ‘what next’.

Murray, too, has his own documentary out on the BBC, looking at how he rose to the sporting heights he has, just as he too reaches the end of his singles career.  There is moving early years footage, and we see some of his grit and character that enabled him not only to rise to the top of his sport from his childhood in Dunblane, but also to recover from pioneering surgery giving him a metal hip.  Unlike Federer’s smooth grace and seemingly effortless game, we are shown Murray’s very human emotions.  He is frustrated, biting, terse.  He was accused of being boring and anti-English.  His mum acknowledges that ‘it’s a complete and utter grind… you become public property’.  But he goes onto golden triumph.  His trick?  Andy says ‘I think I persevere and that’s really been the story of my career’.

Running with perseverance

The mental control and discipline required to play tennis at a top level is immense – the single-minded focus perhaps useful as a reminder that we are called to ‘run with perseverance the race marked out for us, fixing our eyes on Jesus, the pioneer and perfecter of faith’.  Centre Court is of course what many of us will tune in to watch this Wimbledon – to see some of those tennis greats that have fought to reach great heights.

But on Wimbledon’s outer courts, lesser-known names are playing for their livelihoods – fighting to stay in the game, literally and figuratively.  We don’t know what is at stake for them in each game they play, nor what step it represents on their journey.  In our own lives, each of us must do our best to persevere on the race set before us, not for a court full of fans, but for what Rick Warren calls ‘an audience of one’.