Marat Safin Says Farewell After Defeat in Paris

The boy couldn’t think of anything as hot as the clear skies that followed a rainstorm in South Florida. Every surface in Okeeheelee Park conspired with the sun. The stucco on the pragmatic little outhouse bathroom, though not quite white, still did its best to reflect and amplify the sun’s rays. So did the cement pathways. The black metal chain-link fence surrounding the tennis courts got so hot that, when entering, you used your elbow to undo the latch and kicked the door open with your shoe, careful to keep your hands from contact with the metal.

The court, too, naturally, obviously, was in cahoots with the rest of the park. Its faded red and green asphalt—with its loose topsoil of sand particles which blew in from the train tracks—got so hot that, in the summer, the boy had to replace his tennis shoes every month, holes wearing in the white rubber outsoles twice as fast as they did in the winter.

Key to the heat’s oppression was its omnipresence. It descended from the baby blue skies, bounced off the ground, then caromed off the fence and the walls and the cars until it was coming at you from every direction and the air itself was heat.

The chain-link fence at Okeeheelee Park was not covered with the rectangular green mesh screens found at nicer parks, which meant that even the little shade that did exist, provided by the fence’s silhouette, was perforated and unsatisfying. On the few short breaks that Vanya gave him each practice, the boy could neither sit on the asphalt (and burn his ass) nor lean against the fence (and sear his elbows). His resting pose, as a result, consisted of doubling over, hands on his knees, eyes on his toes, the sweat pooling at the hem of his shirt and in his pockets and running down his neck and then dripping off his nose until a small puddle formed beneath him. Then Vanya would chastise him for doubling over. You have to stand up straight, he’d say. That’s the correct way to catch your breath. The boy would nod and duly walk his hands up his thighs until he was at something approaching erect posture. Then Vanya would say Viprimis! And place two fingers underneath his chin, as if the boy needed to hear it in Russian, as well, to fully understand.

Viprimis, came the call, followed by the two fingers. Today, however, the boy didn’t assume military posture immediately upon his father’s command. He was focused on the adjacent court, the only other occupied court out of the eight at Okeeheelee, where two men—one a thin, white man in his fifties, storky legs smothered in zinc, and the other a heavy-set black man in a Ricky Williams jersey, around the same age, wearing the wrong kind of sneakers—were midway through a sweaty, uncoordinated match. The game was friendly, though. They took long breaks between games, laughing over sips of Gatorade from a wheeled cooler, complaining about the heat and the shape they were in. The boy’s attention snapped back to his own court (the intended effect) as his father’s hand swatted the back of his head. Viprimis.

Are you ready?

The boy nodded.

What?

Nothing.

Do you think you’re going to break your record?

I don’t know.

Do you think that’s how players think?

I don’t know.

Or is that how campers think?

I don’t know.

Vanya loved this dichotomy, between players and campers. Players referred to the players who lived year-round at tennis academies. Players embraced the heat, the pain, the anxieties of competitive tennis with a smile—or, even better, no reaction— on their face. Players—the category—was aspirational. Campers—which Vanya occasionally elongated to ‘happy campers’, the addition of the ‘happy’ evoking even more disgust on his round, sunburned face—referred to the droves of mediocre athletes that arrived at academies in June, their parents having signed them up for summer camp to give them something to do, to get them outside, and left in August, with a tan and a marginally-improved backhand. Campers enjoyed themselves, made friends, took long breaks and called their parents when the heat got too unbearable.

You’re such a camper.

No I’m not.

Prove it.

Vanya nodded towards the baseline, indicating it was time to resume their work. For the last three months, their work had not involved a racket or indeed, in the boy’s mind, the sport of tennis in any way. What it had involved was spiders.

Spiders were a sprinting exercise Vanya had done in Russia as a child, one which had clearly left an indelible mark on the young Soviet. The runner begins at the center of the baseline. On ‘go’, the runner sprints to the right sideline, touches the line with their hand, then hustles back to the center. Then up to where the right sideline meets the service line, then back to the center, up to the center of the service line, back to the center, then the same on the left side of the court, all in all sprinting to and from—and, importantly, touching—each corner in the box formed by the baseline, service line, and sidelines: the exercise, overall, loosely resembling a spider weaving its web.

If there were a more nauseating exercise—physically or mentally—the boy had yet to hear of it. The constant changes of direction meant you were never able to get up to full speed for more than a step. As soon as you did, you were already at the corner and heaving your bodyweight back in the opposite direction. By now, the boy knew the spider’s cadence so well that he knew not only how many steps—and with which leg— each portion of the sprint required, but where, approximately, each step had to land in order for him to maintain his pace.

For the last three months, every day, Vanya had picked the boy up from school, brought him to Okeeheelee park, and looked on—a dictator with stopwatch in hand—as the boy ran spiders for the rest of the afternoon. On weekends, they did this twice. 

Each week, the boy had to drop his time by a tenth of a second. Each day, he had to get within a twentieth of a second—Vanya’s cutoff for human error—of his best time the day before, or else he was regressing.

They would stay at Okeeheelee for as long as this took. Usually between two and three hours, but one day it had taken until nine o’clock at night. The boy’s mother had made him soup when they got home. He remembered his legs shaking underneath the table and his hand quivering as he brought each spoonful to his lips, and he remembered trying to quell both so that Vanya wouldn’t see. In any case, Vanya was in the next room with the boy’s mother, arguing in hushed Russian. Much later that night, the boy was awakened by his mother coming into his room. With one hand on his shoulder, she gave him a weary malishka—baby—but didn’t say anything else.

The boy finished another spider, his twenty-fourth of the day. Vanya shook his head as he checked the stopwatch. Thirteen point two eight. The boy’s personal best was twelve point nine six.

As Vanya launched into a motivational speech about the boy’s laziness, his ungratefulness, and Eddie the Eagle—the Quixotic English ski jumper whose nickname Vanya unwittingly abbreviated to Eddie Eagle and to whom Vanya often compared the boy—the boy let his mind wander off until his father’s words had no individual meaning. Whereas he used to take each word to heart and chastise himself, he had begun to do this now when knew his father was going to be yelling for a while. It wasn’t like he was thinking about anything in particular. He just kept his eyes on his father, nodded occasionally and wasn’t there anymore.

On days like this, the boy liked to imagine the sun becoming so strong that it vaporized everything at Okeeheelee park in an instant. Or, on the worst days (which he could discern instantly because his father wouldn’t say a word during their entire car ride from school), he’d gaze out the window of their Ford Windstar and imagine getting rammed by a semi-truck as they passed through an intersection. The boy might survive, he might not, but Vanya would be pronounced dead on impact. Or he would be comatose for years, maybe forever, surviving off a tube in the hospital. The boy and his mother wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. The boy wouldn’t have to play tennis anymore because there would be no one to coach him and she’d let him play soccer and piano and have a phone and go to the other kids’ birthday parties. 

Eventually, the boy had run enough spiders—he had, uncharacteristically, lost count today—that Vanya decided it was time for a break. The boy was doubled over, watching his feet, when he heard his father curse. Blyatz. Fuck. The boy looked up, and Vanya had evidently spilled a few drops of red Gatorade on his white Yonex shirt. He cursed again and then walked off the court, heading for the bathroom.

The white Yonex shirt was one of his father’s favorites. It was one of the shirts Vanya had received during a brief period of being sponsored by Yonex as a young tennis player himself (which he was, and reportedly a good one at that, until a bad shoulder injury ended his career).

Vanya wasn’t the type to reminisce about his playing career or claim he would’ve been a contender, but the boy knew it was on his mind every day. Vanya showed it in the way he still only wore his old Yonex shirts to practice, the way he used the same racket he used as a teenager despite the stiff frame hurting his elbow, the way he constantly compared the ever-moving ‘bar’ to where it had been when he was young (it was, against all odds, lower now). When the boy’s ranking had won him a Prince sponsorship—meaning he received a package of free clothing, rackets, and shoes every few months—Vanya explained that it was easier than ever to get sponsored, these days. Every camper, every loser, every Eddie Eagle could finagle their way into a sponsorship, these days. And anyway, Prince was a second-rate company. Think, he told the boy. How many of the pros wear Prince? Would Marat—as in Marat Safin, the best tennis player Russia had ever produced—wear Prince?

But then again, on the day the first Prince package had arrived, Vanya had had the boy’s mother take a photo of them together, with the contents of the package spread out across the kitchen table. The boy remembered seeing the photo on his mother’s red Nikon camera: the glare of the flash in their eyes, Vanya’s arm awkwardly around the boy, neither smiling, the boy’s already skinny legs looking like chopsticks in the baggy shorts that were taped to his stomach (Prince had accidentally sent him a package of adult medium instead of youth medium-sized clothing, but Vanya had insisted he put it on for the photo, anyway). But there had been something in the way Vanya had meticulously arranged the Prince products on the table, so that each of them would be individually visible in the photo, a measure of care approaching pride.

That was the thing with Vanya. Part of the reason the boy regularly felt a wave of guilt, late at night, after lying awake for an hour imagining various ways—death, sickness, prison—his father might leave his life, was because every once in a while, with no apparent reason or explanation, Vanya would be different. He would take the boy to McDonalds after practice and tell stories about his childhood in Russia or his shoulder-brushes with the boy’s idols, like Hewitt, Coria, or Agassi, over quarter pounders. He would play Led Zeppelin in the car and take the boy to Books-A-Million, where they would sit and read for an hour or two. On those days, they would chat during the breaks in practice and they might even play some points at the end. 

Sometimes, on those days, Vanya would even tell the boy stories about Marat—never Safin, always Marat. Vanya had been best friends with Marat Safin as a child; the two had grown up playing together at Shiryaevka, the Spartak Tennis Club in Moscow which Marat’s father managed. Vanya freely admitted that Marat, two years his younger, beat him every time they played. But with Marat’s alien talent immediately apparent to anyone who watched him play, he had visibly outgrown Shiryaevka’s capacity as an incubator by thirteen and within another year, he had been whisked away to go train at an academy in Spain. Vanya and Marat stayed in touch for a few years, with phone calls and postcards every once in a while, but Vanya, an only child, had lost his little brother.

Whenever Vanya spoke about his playing days, it was either through the lens of Marat or to lament that his own parents knew nothing about tennis. Vanya said he had received good coaching through his proximity to Marat, but that had disappeared in 1994, along with Marat. 

Among the coaches and players who knew him, Vanya’s own ability as a coach was universally agreed upon—he was a masterful, obsessive technician—but so was his negative capacity for social tact. For years, since the boy could remember, Vanya had trained a Czech girl named Andrea, coaching her to number thirty-seven in the world before an abrupt, unexplained, and unacknowledged falling out. Overnight, Andrea had gone from being someone the boy saw as an older sister—she lived with them when training in the states, her own family back in the Czech Republic—to no one at all. When Andrea won a major tournament, skyrocketing her ranking to top ten in the world, the boy had watched a youtube video of the highlights of the match along with Andrea’s victor’s speech. He had been imagining that Andrea would say something to him in her speech, but she just thanked her parents, her boyfriend, and her current coach: a surly freckled Australian in wraparound Oakleys. Hell would freeze over before Vanya admitted he ever thought about Andrea, but one night, a few months later, while stealing away to the kitchen for a cup of water, the boy had caught his father watching a taped replay of the match.

Other coaching stints had been far shorter, the break-up with Andrea seeming to have honed Vanya’s rougher edges like a whetstone. He would announce to the boy and his mother that he was training this or that player, and then inevitably, within a few months, Vanya would dig in his heels in some argument with the player’s family, or their physical trainer, or just the player themselves, and things would descend from there. Eventually, the boy suspected, Vanya just wasn’t getting calls anymore. The boy, however, was different. Vanya never had to soften his viewpoints, his methods, his criticisms. The boy was a blank canvas, on which Vanya could paint his perfect tennis player.

Hey. Little man.

The boy was so lost in thought that he hadn’t noticed the man from the adjacent court, the heavy-set one, had made his way onto their court. The boy’s immediate reaction was a panicked glance at the bathroom. His father always got annoyed when the boy spoke to any strangers at the park. But he was safe. Vanya was still inside. He looked over at the man.

You good?

The boy nodded meekly. He knew how he was supposed to engage when onlookers registered concern, a not unusual occurrence.

That your dad?

Yeah.

My dad used to get on me like that. Don’t pay it any mind. He’s only tough on you cause he loves you.

The boy nodded again.

I don’t know how you do it, little man, in this heat. You’re a Trojan, you know that? The man stopped, correcting himself. No not Trojan, you’re… what are the other ones? Spartan, that’s it. You’re a Spartan. Remember that. The man flexed his bicep and punched it twice in quick succession with his other hand, demonstratively.

This time, the boy’s smile was genuine.

When Vanya returned, he wore an odd look on his face, one outside the taxonomy of recognizable Vanya expressions that the boy had assembled. As he walked onto the court, he did so with his phone in his hand, outstretched.

Look. Came the imploration.

The boy looked. On his father’s phone was a Guardian headline: Marat Safin says farewell after defeat in Paris.

He’s twenty-nine, said Vanya, with a shake of his head and a scowl. How can he retire. 

They ran one or two spiders after that, but the boy could tell that Vanya’s mind was elsewhere, and he wasn’t surprised when his father waved him off.

They went to Books-A-Million. The boy went to his usual rack, picked up ‘his’ copy of Open, the Andre Agassi autobiography he had been devouring, and on the pair of armchairs across from the Joe Muggs Cafè, returned to the page where he had left off a week earlier. He had it memorized. 227. Agassi was recounting his ill-fated marriage to Brooke Shields, the boy’s least favorite section of the book so far.

Vanya settled into the armchair across from the boy, the latest copy of Bicycling magazine in hand. Every couple of minutes, the boy would steal a look past the tops of the pages at his father, usually to discern his mood or how much his father had left of his magazine. When he saw his father place the magazine down, the boy closed his book, assuming it was time to leave. No, stay, said his father.

A few minutes later, a brown paper bag descended into the boy’s field of vision. He took it from his father and looked inside. A cookie. The boy looked up at his father with suspicion, his initial thought being that this was a test of some kind. Vanya had a sort of weird half smile on his face, and the boy realized that the cookie was his father’s form of a present.

The cookie was, he noticed as he took it out of the bag, decorated with orange and black icing so as to resemble a jack-o’-lantern. It’s November eleventh, he said to Vanya.

Vanya just frowned, not understanding the boy’s confusion. It’s hot today, Vanya explained, any act resembling tenderness needing to be framed through the lens of bodily utility. You need to replace your sugars.

Vanya returned to his seat, but didn’t pick up his magazine. A minute or two later, he spoke. There was a bakery across from Shiryaevka, Vanya said. After practice, Marat and I would go get pirozhki. Vanya considered his son. There’s a bakery in Fort Lauderdale with good pirozhki, he said. One day I’ll take you.

When his father told stories, the boy never knew if he was supposed to ask questions (and risk sounding dense) or stay silent (and risk seeming uninterested). On this occasion, his mouth full of the cookie, which he had discovered to be just a regular shortbread cookie (and, perhaps unsurprisingly, a stale one at that) with, oddly, a distinctly citrus-flavored icing, the boy elected to nod.

Vanya looked down at his phone. The boy noticed he still had the Guardian article pulled up: Marat Safin says farewell after defeat in Paris. Vanya shook his head. There will never be another like him, he said, in terms of talent. Vanya shook his head again, as if the conclusion had occurred to him anew, then repeated his assertion. There will never be another like him.

Vanya’s gaze wandered, his eyes eventually landing on the cookie, half-eaten in the boy’s lap. The boy glanced down guiltily.

Did you finish the cookie?

Vanya often did this, asking questions to which he already knew the answers, answers usually obvious to anyone with a pair of eyes. I will, said the boy.

Eat. It’s hot today. You need to replace your sugars.