Athlete’s are viewed as adults when they’re kids, and old when they’re still young. Think about the first time you were older than your favorite pros and how weird that was. It was almost hard to process. I remember the feeling. Suddenly these people I had always viewed as adults were younger than me, but I still didn’t really feel like an adult, or even identify as one. Sure, in the United States you’re legally an adult at eighteen but also that’s a completely insane thing to say or think. I’m forty-two and I’m barely an adult and you want me to believe a teenager is also simultaneously an adult? That’s like saying someone is both a criminal and the person who should decide whether or not they’re immune from crimes. Insanity!
There’s also the flip side of it. When they talk about Lebron’s twenty first year in the league, and when you think about how long he’s been a part of your life, and then when you realize he’s only thirty-nine, it’s what is commonly referred to by medical professionals as a mind-fuck. Lebron’s career could legally go to a bar and smash a few beers while it watches him beat the Celtics, that’s how old his career is. Lebron is the oldest player in the NBA, a player who has been at it so long it’s almost impossible to talk about anything he does without putting it into the context of how old he is and how long he’s been doing it. When Lebron barrels down the lane and dunks over some unwitting twenty year-old, it’s as if he’s defying biology, logic, time and reason itself. His age and longevity is almost all we can seem to talk about even though what he does on the court is still amazing for anyone at any age. And he’s still three years younger than me.
The way Athlete’s age, and our perception of them as they age, was sitting on the top of my mind like one of the wisps of hair sitting atop Nadal’s head as he went toe-to-toe with the best young tennis player in the world in the Netflix challenge. Nadal was only thirty-seven, also victim to the Lebron version of time-dysmorphia, a player we’d been watching since he won the French Open in 2005 at the age of nineteen and because he’d been a part of our lives for so long, seemed older than he actually was. But there was also the fact that he looked older. He’d lost a step, sure, but it wasn’t the way he played that made him look older. He was still bending forehands improbably into the corner and ripping serves down the outside of the line. It was his hair, the simplest visual representation of the passing of time we all share. Whether its thinning or greying, our hair is one of the key markers of age, universal across cultures, sexes, generations. And just like when Agassi returned with a shorn head for his own comeback, no longer in possession of his signature feathered Heavy Metal coif, Nadal looked more like some elder statesman making his own miraculous comeback than the baseline-blasting thirty-something he actually is.
As I watched the match unfold I was not only impressed by just how good Rafa still is, how capable he might be of pushing towards the late rounds of any major, and I was also stuck on a simple question darting back and forth through my head like Nadal’s cross-court forehands. Was Nadal not only aware that being a pro for so long, and losing a little of his previously glorious locks, made him look older, but was he embracing it? Like, did he want to look older? He could have thrown a Rafa branded cap on for the match instead of right after it, so why make the conscious choice to show off your battle with time? Was it as a meta-comment on the vacuousness of our appearance-driven culture? Where every moment is commented on, memed, hot-taked, even written about by idiots on substack. Or was he trying to look older for the drama?
The storyline of the Netflix Slam was a battle between a prodigy and his idol, but it was just as much a story about the future of tennis and what might soon be its past. It was a story about time. Maybe Rafa wanted to look a little older to raise the stakes. To make his first set victory over Alcaraz even more unexpected. To make their epic tiebreak even more epic. Perhaps in this dramatic rendition of tennis performed on a platform known for dramatic renditions of things, Nadal wanted to draw their generational gap into sharper relief. Maybe he was bird-dogging us all, making us and even Alcaraz think he didn’t have a chance. Or maybe he just likes wearing a headband for good luck and that’s way more important to him than something as superficial as age.
Whatever the reason, or lack of reason, I came away from the Netflix Slam with the feeling that the future of live sports isn’t simply streaming them through Netflix, but finding as many ways as possible to add to the drama of them. Storytelling has always been a part of what makes sports great, but perhaps we are headed towards a future where the story around sports supersedes the competition itself. Listening to The Ringer in the background as I write this, perhaps we are already there. I guess just like the slow process of age itself, only time will tell.
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