Running for Your Life: When the Impossible Becomes Possible

On 9/11/11, a Sunday, M and I, en route to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, are stopped by a German-speaking couple who ask for the closest subway. Eastern Parkway, we tell them, straight ahead. We are going in that direction, too, but somewhat slower, in deep conversation. They thank us and hurry along the sidewalk.

September 11 is always a bit hard for me, but this one, ten years after, despite the onslaught of media remembrances, has snuck up on me. The garden is our preferred public sanctuary, where we like to walk and talk about our feelings, and on 9/11/11, with no sign to indicate why, it is open free for non-members. One of the first groups we see in the garden are the Germans who stop and give us a wide smile. Hmm, it looks like they are going to spending time in the garden instead of the subway. We see them a couple of times later, each time exchanging smiles, until it is time for me to go to work where I edit stories, manage graphics and write headlines for a living.
At Eastern Parkway subway station there’s a police surveillance station, and rather than wait to be called over, I place my shoulder bag on the inspection table.

The cop behind the table looks to his colleague and says, “Did you want to see this one?”

“No,” she says, shaking her head.

“Yer okay,” he says, pushing my bag toward me.

Sitting in the subway car on 9/11/11, I’m feeling weak, pit in the stomach. I don’t normally feel this way, and if I were to allow fear to grow, to be nourished, then the pit would bloom into something that could consume me like fire. How close we are to fire. How everyday terror is in countless manmade things. The subway itself, the lights we turn on, the computers, what is not ingrained in the DNA of the human soul, or the pit, the primitive, the pre-fire, the Chauvet caves, where there may have been fire, but it had not entered the culture beyond its simplest forms, what soldiers on the battlefield, the front-line ones, face with uncommon courage. In touch with the pagan, the animalistic. How we are all infused with that powerful, inexorable will to live.

The subway lights go out, only for a blink of the eye. And the calm, silence intensifies. You can cut it with a knife.

*

Djokovic did not just lose service. He was humiliated in its loss. Even watching at home on an old TV, the sound, the energy of anticipation from the thousands watching at Arthur Ashe Stadium, US Open, the day before the ten-year anniversary of 9/11, is palpable. Federer the Favorite, he of magazine covers, Hamptons homeboy, a Swiss who in ways is more all-American than an American, has dramatically, conclusively broken the service, and the manner in which it was done, seemingly the spirit of his worthy opponent, the No. 1 ranked tennis player in the world, Novak Djokovic (Joke-o-vich). With the score 5-3 Federer in the fifth and deciding set, Federer having won the first two, and Djokovic the next two, and until Djokovic’s shuddering collapse in the fifth set, the eighth serving game, the pair compete flawlessly, three hours and thirty minutes later, like Greek gods, it seems all too automatic now. In the ninth game Djokovic is steeled to play better and he does. But Federer sees blood, and since the match began has never served better. With a sour face and darting glances to the frenzied pro-Federer crowd, Djokovic goes down 40-15. Poised, sitting at the edge of their seats, they are near-bursting, awaiting the inevitable winning point.

Then it happens. It feels less athletics than magic, the tonic that one drinks that has the mysterious power of altering even the most certain outcome. Perfect location, 108 miles per hour first serve, and Djokovic not only gets to it but cross-courts it just inside the line, an ungettable angle, leaving the fab Federer flat-footed. The shocked crowd falls silent, and then, Djokovic, smiling like a cat who has just swallowed a mouse, still down a matchpoint at 30-40, takes several steps toward the stadium crowd at his end at the court, lifting his arms as if to say, “So cheer, already. You have seen wondrous, unbelievable tennis. Cheer!” And the New York crowd takes him up on cue; first in a smattering of applause in Djokovic's corner of the stadium and soon across the stands, the loudest cheer the Serb has ever heard at the crown jewel of the Grand Slam circuit.

Djokovic’s next point is of the more superior-ordinary category, and the crowd, as so seldom happens in sporting events of any size, at any level, is stunned silent in its neutrality, cheering not for Federer for after that magic cross-court it is he who is slightly bowed, the finest instrument jangled off-key by the Djokovic magic because at that moment all is changed. The unthinkable is thinkable, the impossible possible. Jokeovich, the Joker, to Federer’s Batman has used a trick, psyche of psychics, because the return that he made at 3-5, 5-40 was not one in a million but one in infinity. Never likely to be seen again. Although there will be other shots that will amaze and change the course of what you think is possible, not just in tennis but in all parts of your life and life itself is well worth it just to imagine that you will be a part of it again.

So what happened in the game? Djokovic breaks Federer’s serve and now he is serving 4-5. Federer will win more points but no more games. Batman will go down to the Joker, 7-5, in a tennis match (9-10-11) that will go down as the most philosophically profound event in the sports’ modern history.

Postscript: On Monday (Sept. 12), 24-year-old Djokovic handily beat an injured Rafa Nadal to win his first US Open.

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