Going Down Swinging
ALISHA SULLIVAN
Someone left a comment recently asking why Wyatt doesn’t seem to coach from the side of the court when most others say at least something.
The answer is simple.
Naomi doesn’t want to hear it.
And if Wyatt really wants to get a point across, he makes some kind of hand gesture that Naomi understands in a way I never will, and they move on with their lives. It works most of the time because he never repeats himself.
The main reason they’ve reached a point where they don’t need to talk on court (unless they really need to) is because of all that boring stuff I talked about before.
They spend ages reviewing everything. They literally schedule it into the day somewhere around lunch, just before we throw heavy weights around.
Data. Opponents. Other stuff I don’t understand because, although I’m a tennis kid, I’m not that kind of tennis kid.
They talk in technicalities I can’t even begin to understand.
Then it’s just muscle memory for Naomi. She has the kind of retention for knowledge I can only dream of. And it’s matched by the fact that she can problem-solve like nobody’s business.
That skill really came into play multiple times in Washington.
Conditions changed the way the ball moved, and that affected the way players could hit it.
There were rain delays, and Naomi played a whole match where the sun was directly in her eyeline, which resulted in an adjusted ball toss for the serve.
And a whole bunch of other small things that meant that no one really played the way they wanted to, and everybody had to problem-solve in some way, to varying degrees of success.
It just so happened that the person Naomi had to problem-solve against in the semi-final was the one person who is just as good at doing it as she is.
But the beauty (and horror) of this sport is that they get to do it all over again next week.
Until next time, from an airport in D.C.