Serena Williams, 44 years old, 2 children, wanted to experience the thrill of returning to the Wimbledon court again and who knows if she was up to it: it is difficult to escape the thrill of being at the center of the world forever. Many samples do not stand up to the grey, even golden greyness of the aftermath. They come, they come, sometimes they return. And, when it happens, it is almost never a good deal: you risk exhibiting a faded and colorless version of what you once were.
It also happened to Serena, a comeback from defeat that she didn’t have the strength to explain afterwards in the burning glass of the press conference. More than the predictable defeat, because, as Roberto Vecchioni wrote in a beautiful song, time does not fall in love twice with the same man, or even with the same woman, the explanation that Serena gave for her return is interesting: the boredom of a time that was too empty, “I had nothing better to do, I was tired of sitting at home”.
The golden pension for top tennis players arrives later and later (Novak Djokovic; Wawrinka, Federer themselves and Nadal prove it), but longevity, always relative in sport, does not solve the problem of the big question that grips champions just outside the spotlight and the field: “who are they?”. The field has answered that question for years and years, often very prematurely, suddenly it stops asking and one’s place in the world has to be invented, often without having prepared a plan Bin these cases also because there is no economic need to do so. But it’s never just a problem of earning a living, it’s of recognizing yourself in the mirror.
It’s a big theme that professional sport often removes: too many have no other world than the lines of the pitch. When they close behind them, what remains is the luxury of a great empty time, without worries of sustenance, which however no way can be found to fill effectively. Yet it is a luxury that many would like, while they struggle in daily lives trying to make ends meet.
Experts teach that managing empty time is something you learn from childhood. And who knows, maybe the fact that Serena Williams was a child who certainly didn’t have time to experience boredom says something about her present: at 11 she already appeared with her sister on the covers of specialized tennis magazines, with her coach father saying: “Remember these girls, you’ll see them again on top of the world.” For years, for the prophecy to come true (it happened when they were both on the professional circuit at 14), their time was saturated with tennis.
Exceptions of course, but they increasingly resemble, in everything except the budget, the young children of this society of ours which reacts with terror to the boredom of its children, a horror vacui who does everything possible to fill their empty time and boredom from the outside. Yet experts from Donald Winnicott to Maria Montessori have always suggested the opposite: «The passage that moves us from the void of boredom to the sense of “fullness” deriving from cultivating a passion», Alberto Pellai wrote in one of his posts on the topic, «is not automatic. It happens within a path that makes us feel lost. “You suffer” boredom: that’s what they say. In that suffering there is the root of passion. I turn on after being turned off. I only put light on if I feel lost in the dark. Boredom has enormous generative power. But it forces us to tolerate the frustration of going through it. Today, boredom is often covered up by overstimulation. Are you bored? Press a button and the world outside lights up in an instant: sounds, pixels, moving stimulation, excitement always at hand. This is why many kids don’t know how to overcome boredom. As soon as it appears they cover it, hide it, suffocate it. And she is consumed in the absence of passion.” Often forever.
Serena Williams had a passion: it was that field that today no longer recognizes her and asks her to make way for the young players. And who knows if it was really a passion of hers or if she just followed the path that her father was marking out for her.
