Meeting Juan Martin Del Potro
On recently having the fortunate experience of bumping into a tennis idol of mine.
Meeting Juan Martin Del Potro
Last week I had the pleasure of spending an evening in the presence of Argentine tennis player and US Open champion, Juan Martin Del Potro. He happened to be at the same bar I was at because we were both ‘working press’ at an ATP next-gen event in London. I work for a golf magazine, but the umbrella company also has a tennis magazine and apparently they were unusually short-staffed and needed someone to cover this event. The guy I was covering had apparently spontaneously flown to Iceland for a choral singing retreat, on account of an uninterrupted bout of nervousness.
After I finished typing up my notes for the various games I’d seen that day, I decided to go to a nearby bar to unwind for a bit before getting the tube home. Watching tennis all day obviously isn’t the most taxing job in the world, but you’d be surprised how much it takes out of you - I could see why the usual tennis guy had needed to take a break. It’s a weirdly draining job. I wasn’t used to scrutinising tennis matches and players so closely and over the course of the day I had increasingly felt more and more worn down. I had found it hard not to vicariously absorb the highs and lows of the tennis players - the heartbreak, the relief, the ecstasy, the self-loathing. After six hours of investing my energy so heavily with these people, their on-court vulnerabilities had begun to feel like my own.
The bar was about 70% full and I found a table buried away near the back of the building and started rolling a cigarette. It was a relief just to sit down, have a gin and tonic and not think about anything substantial for a while. I was dimly aware of an ambient buzz about the place but didn’t realise for quite some time that it was because the tennis player Juan Martin Del Potro was in the building.
He was hunched over at the bar staring at a drink with olives in. Occasionally he would look round because someone in the middle distance had shouted his name. The night started for me when, out of what seemed like nowhere, he looked straight in my direction, looked me up and down for a couple of seconds and beckoned me over with his finger. I looked around to see if this had been aimed at someone else. Somehow knowing she was there, he ever so slightly tilted his neck and whispered something to the waitress standing behind him. The waitress’ face looked like a picture of concentration as he carefully directed her gaze to where I was sitting, my arm resting uneasily against a clammy wooden table.
She snaked her away proficiently through the crowd and was quickly standing before me. She had a perfume on that I recognised and just matter-of-factly told me that Juan-Martin wanted to see me at the bar. I muttered a ‘what?’ underneath my breath but she was already on her way back to the bar so she didn’t hear me. I sat there kind of dumbstruck for a while. Del Potro had now done a full 180 degree swivel on his bar stool and he was looking at me imploringly. His arm movements bordered on the impatient. Remarkably, I’d really overestimated both the distance between us as well as the volume of the background music and I realised that I could hear his voice, I could actually hear him quite clearly. He was going ‘Com Here,’ ‘Hames, Com Here’.
The fact that he knew my name was enough to kick me into action a bit and I slowly began meandering quite suspiciously to his stool. His brief episode of impatience was pacified immediately by my starting my walk towards him. He didn’t seem annoyed that I had taken so long - he was just glad that I’d given over. ‘What took you so long’, he says as I reach out to shake his outstretched hand. He looked resplendent in his dark suit. I told him that I was nervous - I tended to act up a bit around celebrities. He said he’d seen my face and name on one of those press cards you see sometimes laid out on tables in hotels. Apparently he’d recognised me in the bar and interpreted it as a ‘sign’ that he should reach out to me.
‘It is Hames, right?’, he asked, a little bit uncertainly. I told him that it was and he nodded happily to himself. He asked me if I wanted a drink and I told him I’d have a gin and tonic. He laughed and turned to the waitress again - ‘two beers please’. The waitress nodded confidently but then all of a sudden looked nonplussed as she motioned to open the fridge. She called out asking what specific beers we’d like but Del Potro had turned his back already and was talking to me.
“I can’t be seen drinking gin and tonic with a man at a bar”, he said, grinning. “People will think I’m gay”. The waitress came over and asked if Peroni was OK and Del Potro said, whilst looking at me, ‘Peroni es perfecto’ very languidly and they both laughed as she cracked open the bottles. She slid one of the beers down to me and then slapped Del Potro gently but disapprovingly on the shoulder - “next time, if he wants a gin and tonic, just let him have a gin and tonic.” Del Potro then looked at me and asked me again if I wanted a gin and tonic. His tone suggested that I didn’t and that he was right in going for the beer for me.
Because I was so tired, I felt a little bit more open than usual to the more insecure memories presiding over my subconscious. A montage of my previous experiences interacting with celebrities appeared unrequested in my mind’s eye. A sweaty palmed conversation on the Jubilee Line with a woman I’d recognised as a Goldenballs contestant. A botched selfie with the leader of the Green Party. Another botched selfie with Helena Bonham Carter outside a cafe in Hampstead.
As I was sitting there thinking up something interesting to say, a man and his girlfriend sidled up to the bar - asking straight away whether it would be ‘ok to grab a selfie’. Juan Martin obliged and smiled emptily in the direction of the iPhone camera. After they disappeared back into the bar, back where I’d been, Juan Martin sank what was remaining of his Peroni and called out to the guy now buzzing about behind the bar for another beer. Whilst he was waiting for his next beer, his lack of having anything immediately to drink or do meant he once again became aware of my presence.
‘Hames, tell me, why did you take so long to come over, I just wanted to talk”. I reiterated that I couldn’t believe it was me he was beckoning and that since the world had become inescapably, truly inescapably digital I’d developed a bit of a nervous disposition.
“Nervous disposition?” he repeated back to me, in his languorous Argentine accent.
“A lack of faith in the moment, really”, I said, mournfully.
“A lack of faith in the moment”, he repeated, putting an emphasis on the headline words in the sentence.
“You sound like my…”, he pointed to his head and twirled his fingers round, “sports therapist...she always told me, Juan, relaaaaaaaax into the moment, relaaaaaaaaaaax into the moment”. He really did elongate ‘relax’ just like that, in an ambiguously comical way. I couldn’t discern whether he was referring positively or disparagingly to his sports therapist.
His beer then came and he went about pouring it into an empty pint glass in front of him. Mid-pour, he turns to me and blatantly referring to the beer he was pouring, goes “this, this is what makes me relax”. I think he sensed that I wasn’t really vibing with that particular sentiment and he added, “stress is inevitable, (he said that word quite deliberately as if it was one of the first times he’d used it), but stress is fine, Hames, because we have alcohol and we have cigarettes and Hames…”, he paused and looked me bang in the eye, “we have women.”
“Like your sports therapist”, I added, for no real reason other than to see what he would say. He shook his head like he’d lived through a thousand lifetimes with this woman.
“No, Hames...she’s crazy, trust me”.
“Did you not get on?”, I asked, just prodding him a bit.
“We got on… but it could never work out between us, she wanted more than I was prepared to give”.
“What do you mean?”
“Hey, Hames, I can trust you, you’re not recording this are you Hames?” he said, randomly, smirking. I told him he could trust me. He took a couple swigs of his Peroni before planting it on the beermat in a way that suggested he was about to really launch into something. I was happy because he seemed quite animated, quite alive, and so did I.
“You know the year I won?”
“Won the US Open?”
“Si”. I said that I didn’t know, but guessed 2009 and it was. I must have known.
“That year, for...two months before the tournament...she lived with me, she ate with me, she worked with me, she slept with me…”. Juan Martin clocked my expression, “not like that”, he smiled, “but she slept next door to me…”. He took a few more sips of his beer and looked around the bar to make sure no-one was eavesdropping.
“She slept next door...and for two months she’d wait ‘til I was fast asleep, you know, ‘dead-to-the-world’, is how you say it, and she would wake me up and say ‘Juan, you’ve won, you’ve won, you are the champion of the US Open’, or something like that, you know. I didn’t know why she did this but every night it...shocked me, it even frightened me. Sometimes I would have a dream that she’d woken me up and said this - but it wasn’t real, because I wasn’t frightened. But it worked, Hames, because as I lived my life, all I could think about were those words and her appearing over me whilst I was sleeping, you’ve won, you’ve won, you’ve won the US Open’.
“Sounds intense”, I remember saying, quite algorithmically. He wasn’t listening to me, though, he seemed transfixed by his own anecdote.
“So I tried not to win, because I was so scared of it, I associated” - he seemed unsure about this word but kept going, “I associated winning the US open with being woken up when I really wanted to be dreaming...so the tournament came and because I didn’t want to win, I played with, as the commentators say Hames, ‘total freedom’... watch my games back and you’ll see...you’ll see; I barely missed a ball all tournament and in the end that crazy lady was right, I did win”.
As he was talking I was surveying the bar. Everything, from the ambient post 9-5 debriefs to the never-ending procession of sullen late-20s bearded men walking purposefully from one bit of the building to the other, felt so morbid and prosaic in comparison to Juan Martin, who seemed to be operating right at the edge of himself, for some reason. Any tension I had in my chest had disappeared and I felt serene, sat there as I was, trying to make sense of whatever Juan Martin Del Potro was trying to tell me about his sports therapist, the steadiness of his almost-perfect English melodically overpowering the rest of the gentrified soundscape around me. I tuned back in and he was now speaking in a slightly less assured tone.
“The second round...”, (I think he was now talking about the next big tournament he’d played after the US), “after the match, a shit match...I found her and I said, ‘why don’t you wake me up anymore?’...and she told me, ‘Juan, I try to wake you up but you sleep too soundly, I can’t - I’ve tried everything...ice cold water, sirens, clapping my hands, stomping my feet on the floor, shaking you like crazy but you just sleep, Juan, you just sleep and sleep and sleep and sleep and --”
As he was saying this the waitress came back from her cigarette break and was taking orders in our close vicinity. Juan didn’t pay her any attention and carried on with his story.
“So I keep on playing, but I had no fear...so I had no freedom and eventually she says to me, ‘Juan, I need other clients, I need to go elsewhere, I need to help someone else’…and since then, I don’t win ever again…”. He paused and looked at me and smiled warmly and took another sip of his beer.
“Arriet...please, another beer for me and Hames”, he said to the waitress, who seemed happy to be serving Juan Martin again.
Turning back to me, Juan Martin Del Potro went, “and now, I can’t find her on Facebook, I can’t find her on Linkedin, I can’t find her on nothing, Hames, she has disappeared from me, it’s like she never existed, it’s like she never woke me up all those times”.
“Do you wish you had won more, then?”, I asked - the words tumbling out of my mouth limply. Stupid question, especially after such a strange anecdote. Why was I trying to drag him back down to earth? to journalist land?
“No...no because...”, and at this juncture he suddenly brought the waitress, Harriet, back into the fold, “because some of us are meant to sleep, right, ‘Arriet”, he looked at me winkingly, “some of us only wake up when we have to”. Harriet brushed off this non-sequitur with a ‘whatever you say, Juan-Martin…’ before swiping away our empty glasses from where they were placed in front of us. She looked at me for a split-second, almost as if she was trying to discern what kind of person had led Del Potro down this fanciful track, before returning to the bar and taking some more orders. I had no idea what was going on, really - I felt tremendously far away from myself, as if Del Potro had flown me away to a faraway land or spiked my drink with some 2CB.
“The ball bounces, you hit it...the ball bounces...you hit it...the ball bounces...you hit it...the ball bounces, you hit it...but Hames…”, he paused once again, making use of his favourite storytelling device, “tirando de la rama, hacemos caer todas las uvas al suelo”. And with that, he got up, nodded in the direction of Harriet, shook my hand and walked, not quickly but not slowly, in the direction of the exit. Harriet and I watched him go and then looked at each other, before bursting into laughter. What a stranger.