THE SPORTS METAPHOR

It's me! It's me! It's me!

Sports as metaphor for life so often demonstrates the most tired and trite abandonment of the imagination. But every once in a blue moon, the obvious becomes the extraordinary.

This evening, we were priveleged to watch one of those moments on tape delay from The Australian Open, the first of the annual four Grand Slams of professional tennis.

Serena Williams, one of the best of the best, has been barely herself in recent years. After an amazing run, in which she and her older sister, Venus, dominated women's tennis, playing each other, as their father, Richard, had predicted, in one final after another, Serena has been plagued with injury upon injury. Here she was, an unseeded player, being dominated by the Russian, Nadia Petrova, who took the first set, 6-1.

In the second set, Williams ran off the first three games handily. Then, Petrova, a streaky and moody performer at best, charged back with 5 straight games herself, creating what looked to all like the end of the road for Ms. Williams.

Then came the moment.

One could almost see Serena turn away and ask herself the question, "Who am I? Am I not the girl from California with 6, SIX, Grand Slam titles, not to mention the Serena Slam of all 4 grand slams in one successive 12-month period?" "I mean, who are you, girl?"

And you could almost see the answer above the scoreboard at Rod Laver Arena:

"It's me! It's me! It's me!"

Serena went on to win the match 1-6, 7-5, 6-3. She had effectively raised her performance and destroyed the opponent's confidence by an act of sheer will and focus.

I mention all this because it is truly the second time I have witnessed this extraordinary phenomenon. An athlete, clearly on the losing slope of some terrible psychic slide, draws mysteriously and magically from the hidden resources of the internal well, and - presto-change-o - The game is turned.

The first time I witnessed this was Boris Becker, doing exactly the same thing in Rome at the Italian Open some 8 years ago against a barely ranked local hero named Gaudenzi. Boris, sucked it up - on red clay, his least favorite surface - blew the poor felow out 7-1 in the first set tie-breaker and went on to demolish him 6-0 in the second for the match.

Sports are a much-overworked poem for real life. But every so often...