The end of a career and the beginning of…
James Blake leaves a U.S. Open match for the last time.
Matthew Stockman / Getty Images
I currently become dangerously emotional when thinking about a press conference given by a tennis player. Half of the reason for this is coincidence. The other half is because the last week in the life of the tennis player, the just-retired 33-year-old James Blake, captures the entire difficulty of existing as an adult human, and I don't think you even need to know anything about tennis to see where I'm coming from.
First, the coincidental part of it. I like James Blake because of something that you might find unsympathetic: He and I both went to Harvard. Let me try to make it slightly less unsympathetic: I first heard of James Blake because the year I started Harvard, as a 17-year-old from Michigan, was the year he left Harvard to turn pro. This was still when I thought of Harvard as a magic dream space where all the weird kids who actually liked books and math and extracurricular activities went after getting through high school. I heard Matt Damon had gone to Harvard, and I thought that was awesome. I heard about this guy James Blake who was a great tennis player but also apparently liked books and math and learning enough to go to Harvard, and I thought this was awesome as well.
The point is that James Blake reminds me of a hopeful time in life. He was a quasi-cousin — a mascot for overachievers — someone whose progress we all checked in on from time to time. A larger-than-life figure even to Harvard dummies who like to make a big deal out of how hard they are to impress.
Blake in 1999.
Damian Strohmeyer / Sports Illustrated / Getty
We weren't the only ones following him — he was a young and talented American player in what is still a down era for United States tennis, so he had a lot of hopeful fans. But he could be frustrating. Blake was always a player capable of beating the best in the world on any given day. He would win smaller tournaments and pull off an occasional impressive upset and was generally discussed as someone with the potential to be a major star, ranked as high as No. 4 in the world at one point. Yet he never had a signature triumph. He never got further than the quarterfinals of a major tournament. He often lost in five sets in the most stressful ways possible, most famously to Andre Agassi in the 2005 U.S. Open quarters. Blake led that match two sets to zero and ended up going down in a fifth-set tiebreaker, which itself was a tragically close 8-6 kick in the stomach.
His career just never seemed to click into place the way the instructions that came with the package said it was supposed to. And it did really seem like Blake was supposed to have an epic career, given his story. He was born in Yonkers, outside New York City, and as a kid played at — and heard Arthur Ashe speak to — a Harlem junior tennis program that his parents worked with. That's an auspicious start for a black American tennis player (his father Thomas was African-American and his mother British). Then there was the Harvard thing, which tends to raise the stakes of any given pro athlete's career. In 2004, in the midst of Blake's career, he hurt his neck badly diving for a ball. And developed a debilitating case of the disease shingles. And lost his father to cancer. Three huge blows in the span of a few months. In 2005 there was the painful loss to Agassi. The mythic origins, in combination with that terrible mid-career stretch, made it seem predestined that he'd eventually sometime come out on top. It felt so obvious as to be a matter of physics. James Blake was gravitationally bound to win a U.S. Open title. But despite putting together the best streak of his career in 2006, he never threatened to win a major. Just when it seemed like everything was coming together, something would come apart. You may know the feeling.