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Here I am, it’s a balmy Thursday night, I’m just trying to fix myself some dinner (prawn curry, if you were wondering) – but my palms are weirdly sweaty and there’s a lump that refuses to stop growing in my throat.
God damn it, Lleyton.
Ferrer’s serving, he’s up 4-3 in the second – it’s the four billionth deuce.
An uncanny sense of deja vu has just me, I’ve been here before, I know how the story goes.
Lleyton has his back so far against the wall he’s virtually become a part of it, but oh look – there he goes again, digging in his heels with dogged determination, refusing to go away quietly.
More:
» Bye, Lleyton. Thanks for the validation
» The end of the road for Lleyton Hewitt
» Hewitt bows out as one of Australia’s best ever
» Thanks for the memories, Lleyton
Few sights in sport are as remarkable as a Lleyton Hewitt comeback.
To watch someone so utterly desperate, so psychotically focussed and so completely oblivious to how far he is from victory is utterly enthralling.
A player with no game-changing weapons, fighting for each point as though his very existence depends on it.
The only person in a stadium of thousands who honestly still thinks he can win the match.
In his brilliant tribute to Roger Federer, David Foster Wallace described watching Roger Federer as a “religious experience” – an almost supernatural exhibition of talent.
A Hewitt match though, is nothing like this – it’s an intensely human experience.
It’s visceral instead of ethereal, a triumph of will, not skill.
Chasing down that ball deep in the far corner is beneath a player of Federer’s talents, for Lleyton though, it’s all he has.
Ah. Bummer. Ferrer won the game – that was huge.
I’ve kind of emotionally detached myself from Hewitt over the past few years – he’s perpetually injured and his matches seem more like cameos than a serious run at a title.
But this last game has brought it all rushing back to me.
The late nights with Mum (Hewitt matches were the only exception to the 8pm bedtime rule), both of us gnawing our fingernails into oblivion as we go through the obligatory emotional torment of a Lleyton Hewitt epic.
“YESSSSSSS LAY-TON!!”
She’d scream, exploding out of her seat with a fist so firmly pumped I thought her knuckles would burst out of her skin.
In fact, one of my most vivid memories from my childhood is as a nine-year-old watching Lleyton (he was on a first-name basis in the Lee household), defeat Federer in the 2003 Davis Cup semis.
He was thoroughly outplayed in the first two sets and I was just about ready to go play Super Smash Bros on the P64 emulator my mate Jono had lent me on his floppy disc.
But there was no way Mum was leaving her seat, she knew he was far from done.
So I stayed, and like clockwork, he clawed his way back against the eminently more gifted Swiss – took the third in a tiebreaker, the fourth, 7-5, and stormed home six games to one in the decider.
It would be seven years before he’d beat Federer again.
Ferrer just broke Hewitt early in the third. Also, who is this jerk linesman calling foot-faults? C’mon bro.
The curry’s turned out pretty nicely (recipe’s here, but use about half as much fish sauce, otherwise it’s too salty), but it’s looking like curtains for the great man, and those pesky “feelings” are rearing their heads again.
I think it’s because Lleyton was my first ever sporting idol.
I worshipped him.
I’d copy that obnoxious ‘C’mon’ gesture, wear my hat backwards despite the fact my forehead was far too big to pull off a look like that and defend him to the death.
People forget that for most of Hewitt’s career he was given the cold shoulder by many in the Australian sporting public. Tall Poppy Syndrome, after all, is one of our most enduring cultural traits.
He was a “d***head”, as Jono’s dad described him in the car home from school one day, and really only got back in the public’s good graces since the turn of the decade.
But for me, as a scrawny, undersized half-Chinese kid obsessed with sport, Lleyton was everything.
He was living proof that sport’s most revered positions weren’t solely reserved for the most athletic or gifted.
Looking back, the fact that Hewitt won two grand-slams (one of those against Pete Sampras, no less) is at once entirely baffling and yet completely understandable.
Aaaannddd Lleyton’s just broken back
Of course he did. I should’ve known better.
That’s the thing about Lleyton, there’s a beautiful predictability about his matches.
He will never miss an overhead smash, he will always get to that drop-shot, the forehand top-spin lob will land 30cm from the baseline and skip away out of reach, and every cutaway to his mum will show her wringing her hands in sheer terror.
And time after time you will think he’s done for, but he will, at some point, even if it’s just for a second, make you feel silly for doing so.
Anyone who watches a lot of tennis gets an instinctive sense of when the momentum of a match has irreversibly shifted, a fateful point or vital game that sets the wheels of victory on their inevitable course.
But those rules don’t apply to Lleyton. 878 matches and here I am, feeling stupid and a little guilty for the umpteenth time.
Ferrer wins 6-2, 6-4, 6-4
Ah there’s that familiar feeling, the immutable, torturous hope that even at two sets and two match points down against the 8th best player on the planet, he might yet still find a way to prevail.
I’ve always loved Lleyton, I guess I just didn’t really realise how important he was to me until I realised he’d never be back again.
I think there really is something special, something completely unique about watching Lleyton – and even though I’m genuinely optimistic about the future of Australian tennis, I can’t escape the reality that it just really kind of sucks we’ll never have that again.
No more late nights with Mum watching his Lazarus-like resurrections, screaming at the TV before quickly shutting up so the neighbours don’t complain.
Bruce has just ruined everything with a Home and Away pun because of course he did.
Lleyton’s eyes are starting to well up and that lump in my throat is getting bigger as well.
I think with Hewitt, you live and die with him more than any other player. He’s so unguarded, and so immensely average that you empathise in a way that’s truly rare in modern, professional sports.
After all these years it’s the same old Lleyton, so relentlessly defiant that even his defeats feel like a Gallipoli-esque moral victory.
And hey look at that, my nails are half a centimetre shorter. Watching at home, even at the denoument of his unlikely career – it was the same exhilarating, wonderfully nerve-wracking experience I’ve had a hundred times before.
Thankyou Lleyton, for tormenting us one last time.
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