Swiss gun and Williams roses take us back to Paradise City
Nostalgia has reigned at the Australian Open as the greats have turned back time.
Melbourne has been transformed into the world’s great retropolis, a city where ageing men and women find a way to wander back through history and come out blinking in the golden sunshine of their sporting youths.
And we are helpless before the revitalised glory of Roger, Rafa, Serena and Venus, their surnames tossed away with this return to childhood.
What else can we do but stand and cheer, complicit in this trick of cheating mortality. We look along the row of spectators at Rod Laver and Margaret Court, we remember all our yesterdays as if they were today and a vast chamomile lawn stretches out towards the horizon. Bliss.
Don’t tell me it’s all poppycock. Allow us just one more sepia day of basking in our own nostalgia. Allow us to look forward to tonight’s final between Roger and Rafa, just as we look back in time, back to the wonderful Australian final of 2009 when Federer wept with frustration at Nadal’s rising superiority.
Nadal said the other day, ‘‘I love the sport more than anything. If you don’t want to watch this match you don’t love the sport’’. We love the sport, Rafa. How could it be otherwise when the Williams sisters have turned the women’s final into a flashback to 2003, when there were no sliding roofs to defy the gods and no Hawkeye to teach humanity its own non-mechanised frailty?
Did you see Venus dancing and twirling and hugging herself after her semifinal victory over Coco Vandeweghe? The past had beaten the present in three tough sets. Old Venus had taught the young American pug new tricks.
And was that the loudest cheer ever for a double fault when poor Stan Wawrinka, who is nobody’s idea of a return to youth, capitulated on his own serve in the final set on Thursday night or was it Friday morning?
Oh, nostalgia, where have you been hiding all these years? Did you know that the term was first coined by Johannes Hofer, a 17th century Swiss medical student? He wanted to describe the anxieties of the Swiss mercenaries who longed for home until they literally became sick. Hofer described nostalgia, from the Greek for homecoming and ache, as ‘‘a continuous vibration of animal spirits through those fibres of the middle brain in which the impressed traces of the Fatherland still cling’’.
Was that how it was for Federer and Wawrinka, two latter day Swiss mercenaries yearning for the mountains of home? At one point it was even believed that the ‘disease’ of nostalgia was uniquely Swiss. Some even called it mal du Suisse.
Times change. These days the fatherland is wherever Roger transports his travelling family. But the nostalgia still clings. One of Roger’s daughters admitted that she was looking forward to returning to the mountains of home. Daddy losing was an early return to the joys of heimat.
Maybe nostalgia is now the modern drug of choice. When we found out that this longing for the past wasn’t a disease after all, then we just couldn’t get enough of the thing. Next Sunday in Nelson you can see the Mockers on their reunion tour, still trying to convince us 30 years later that it is forever Tuesday morning. Or if you can’t get enough of this bitter sweet ache then the Hollies will be here still breathing the air, and Guns n Roses are taking us home to Paradise City where the grass is green and the girls are pretty and Springsteen is remembering the glory days when his mate could still throw a fastball.
But Venus and Serena, the oldest women to play in a Grand Slam final, can still serve a fastball. Last night the dynamic duo were harking back to their youths and we loved them for it. This was the here and now, this was the past come to life.
And Federer, at the age of 35 and 5 months, and Rafa, 30 years young, with his thinning hair, is still to come, two retrosexuals heroically duking it out across the bourne of Mel, from which no traveller is supposed to return.
But for all he has achieved in the sport, Roger is not the oldest man to make a grand Slam final. That man is Ken Rosewall, who made the finals of Wimbledon and the US Open in 1974 at the astonishing age of 39. Rosewall never did win his Wimbledon. 20 years earlier he had played Jaroslav Drobny on the lawns of SW19 and nostalgia had its day. Rosewall would win the trophy many times, everyone said, as they rooted for Drobny, Olympic silver medallist at ice hockey and Czech exile, playing under the Egyptian flag, looking for a country he could call home.
Drobny, like Kyrgios, could sometimes snap, aghast at himself, and apparently stop trying. But kids would still shout out, ‘‘here comes a Drobny’’ as they tried to emulate his blistering first serve. And there he is, 16 years after his first appearance at Wimbledon, in his trademark dark glasses, putting Rosewall to the sword as London stood and cheered.
Were they remembering the time when Drobny first played in 1939, that sunshine summer before the dark horrors of the Second World War? Or is age a bomb from which we all need equal shelter?
However it is, those wonderful Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, look to me to be as fresh out of Compton as they ever were. And Roger is still moving as if time and space will never weary him, as if he can treat those two imposters just the same, as if...