Tennis weather is here, which means it’s time to update my Tennis Minneapolis profile for the upcoming season. Since Nick “The Mouth” Kyrgios is using his mouth better than anyone I’ve heard, I had to update my favorite player to Camila Giorgi. She wasn’t listed in the drop-down menu, and I was forced to select my favorite all-time player, Andre Agassi. But that’s like saying MC Hammer is my favorite artist because he was the first to make me love music. Agassi’s autobiography, Open, did make me fall back in love with the game, but it was my discovery of Giorgi that made me love MY game.
I discovered Camila Giorgi when I first started staying up all night to watch the Australian Open live back in 2020. I was laid off and collecting unemployment. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I was lost and needed time to find myself. I just so happened to find myself in Camila Giorgi.
I was between matches I wanted to watch and went searching for something to fill the time. At that point I had decided I’m more a fan of women’s tennis than men’s because points tend to last longer. There are fewer aces and points won as a result of overwhelming serves. Also, they wear skirts.
I came across a Round of 32 singles match between Angelique Kerber, who was ranked 17th in the world at the time, and someone named Camila Giorgi, who I figured had be Italian. I selected the broadcast, saw the Italian flag next to Giorgi’s name, and immediately began rooting for my fellow Italian underdog, sight unseen. Then I saw her.
The first thing anyone notices when they see Giorgi is her beauty. That’s what my friends noticed when I made her the lock screen on my phone, but I was no exception. “Is she hotter than Maria Sharapova?” I thought. Then she hit the ball. “DAAAAAAMN!” I exclaimed. Yep, officially hotter than Sharapova already. But then she did it again…and again..and again. Flat and deep with pace. Flat and deep with more pace. Flat and deep past Kerber in the corner for a winner. “Where’ve you been all my life, Camila?” I asked aloud.
I was slightly aroused and seriously perplexed. How was she generating all this power? She’s a thin, fit five-foot-six but hits like Serena! But the more I watched, the more I admired her approach. She goes all out, all the time, repeating the same shots in an attempt to perfect them. There’s no compromise, regardless of results or opponent. She plays with a stubborn confidence I’d seen in every Italian I knew. She’s perpetually playing with fire as if she’s too hot to be burned, because she is. In a matter of minutes, I went from not knowing Camila Giorgi existed to knowing the pro player with whom I most identified. I was in love.
This love is brought to you by yoga. Surely bad things happen to those who don’t silence notifications during yoga class. Someone received a dozen texts during class today and never bothered to silence notifications. I started hoping the messages conveyed progressively worse news. Eventually I figured the universe would sort them out. After class, more messages were received, and I had an opportunity to say something. I didn’t. At that point, I pitied them, and it didn’t seem to bother our cheery, pregnant instructor. I thought it was disrespectful to her. Then I realized I might have had a religious breakthrough. I accepted my suffering and the suffering of others and had sympathy and showed compassion for my fellow man. My goal is to reach a meditative state where the noise can’t be heard.
People always ask, “Who do you model your game after?” I used to say Agassi, but I really just dressed like him. You don’t model your game after anyone. Your game is dictated by what you can and can’t do. My natural shot is a flat, fast passer. I drive it low and deep like Giorgi, so I regularly play with fire like her. I hit the net tape and send balls long because pace is how I gain an advantage in points. I want to limit the time my opponent has to setup up a return. I want my serve return to land at their feet, and I want to hit the ball past them and make them feel helpless as often as possible.
“She’s got no shape on this second serve,” I kept hearing from the commentators. Neither do I. I’ve always struggled putting topspin on the ball. I don’t know if it’s because I broke my right wrist in the first home game of my freshman year, but my second serve is flat and has more pace than most first serves I see from opponents. I hit more aces on second serves than anyone ought to, which makes me wonder why I hit a second serve at all. If the margin for error is going to be razor thin anyway, why not dial in that first serve the best I can? The same goes for ground strokes. If I’m going to clip the net tape or drive it long on occasion, I might as well hit the hell out of everything instead of sacrificing the strength of my game to limit errors. But the errors have a bigger impact on my game than they do Giorgi’s because of her mental toughness.
This mental toughness is brought to you by Tall Tales IPA. I needed some lubrication for the vocabulary vomit to flow, so I strolled down to Utepils Brewing to finish this blog that has haunted me for weeks. Tall Tales has never failed to open the floodgates and has a terrific impact on my tone. It makes me not hate writing. I wonder if it would work in tennis matches. I’ve smoked and eaten weed to address my mental fragility, but tennis ain’t skiing. There’s nothing leisurely about playing competitive tennis. Hard to be a gentleman out there. But maybe after two Tall Tales I can be my best self on the court and keep to the code of conduct at the risk of cramping up a bit. Cramps are a problem. This one time at a tournament in Miami I couldn’t get out of the second set of my fourth match of the day without my right calf cramping on every shot. I had to retire. I did enjoy a drag show, screwdrivers, and a cigar from the patio of my condo on South Beach the night before, though. I also had a broken wrist that would require surgery, but I took a set from everyone I played.
The thing I admire most about Giorgi is her mental toughness. She hardly ever shows emotion on the court. She has the look of a woman who’s seen some shit, and I suppose she has. In 2011, her sister was killed in a car accident at 23 years old. Family is likely everything to Giorgi. She wears nothing but her mother’s clothing line on or around the court. Her father has always been her coach despite having never played the game prior to coaching her. He’s a med school dropout turned trainer, and she stuck with him after he was caught smoking at an event and being removed by security for threatening a chair umpire at another. I can actually relate to that, too. My dad was ejected from a baseball game for yelling at my coach for replacing me at second base. I had made a couple of errors on an infield that was basically gravel. My replacement made three errors in one inning, but I was mortified by my father making a scene. It made me want to quit the game. I’ve never told anyone that. I’ve been protective of my own father at the potential detriment to myself.
There are stories I could publish at Go Gonzo Journal but haven’t because of what people might think of my father. This is where Camila and I no longer see eye to eye. She should find a new coach, and I should share those stories. It would be good for both of us.
Tennis is very much the family business for the Giorgis, and Camila treats it like a job, which is probably why she’d rather work with her father than someone who would make it feel even more like work. That’s probably why Nick Kyrgios doesn’t have a coach. If he did he’d never want to play again, but he hardly practices when he does play. Giorgi practices hard and plays harder despite not being a passionate follower of the sport. That’s something her and Kyrgios have in common. Giorgi’s passion is fashion, which is why her intensity on the court is so surprising.
When I started this blog I wanted to celebrate Giorgi’s commitment to the code of conduct. I was in awe of her on-court intensity and mental toughness. I set out in search of an instance of racket abuse, and it didn’t take long to find one. At the 2021 Montreal Finale versus fourth-ranked Karolina Pliskova, Giorgi whipped and skipped her racket from the baseline to the net after a mis-hit when she led 2-1, 30-30. She changed rackets and won the game to serve up a break. She would go on to win the match and her first WTA1000 championship. She held back some tears on the court, but the first question she faced in the off-court press conference was about the lack of emotion she showed after winning her first WTA title.
Camila takes after her mother, who is very shy. She doesn’t attend Camila’s events because she doesn’t like to be photographed. But Camila doesn’t share much of herself on the court, in the press, or on social media. She’s very guarded, which is why when I heard a family doctor alleged she had requested a forged COVID-19 vaccination form, I wasn’t surprised. Camila denies she ever asked, but she’s given me no reason to believe that. She basically said “I’m not in trouble; she’s in trouble.” Both things can be true. She could have asked a doctor being investigated for giving people placebos in place of vaccinations to falsify her vaccination records. Just because the doctor’s in trouble doesn’t mean Camila wouldn’t be if she played the 2023 Australian Open without a COVID-19 vaccination. They didn’t let Novak Djokivic into the country, if you recall. Camila did also say she got her vaccination and booster in different countries, and maybe that’s true. It doesn’t threaten my love of her any less, though.
It turns out my love for Camila Giorgi was really just lust, which is typically the case in all my relationships – with humans, sports, drugs, you name it. I fall in love with anything new and exciting, and USUALLY, nothing can convince me I’m wrong for falling for those new, exciting people or things. I must be making progress, though, because I got sick of watching Camila Giorgi matches, and it didn’t take long.
The hardest-hitting women’s singles match ever might very well be the 2018 Wimbledon quarterfinal between Camila and Serena. Both players were pulverizing the ball on ground strokes. I’ve never seen a women’s singles match played with so much pace. Serena hit the tournament’s fastest serve at 122 mph, but Giorgi had a higher average serve speed for the tournament because she seldom hits a true second serve. She basically fires too firsts and deals with more double faults. Giorgi puts more pressure on herself than any player in the sport and seems to handle it better than any other player in the sport. But why put unnecessary pressure on yourself when a drop shot will do? There wasn’t a drop shot played in the match.
They call Camila “The Giant Killer” because when she executes her powerful passing shots, she can beat almost anyone, like she beat the higher-ranked Pliskova in Montreal. But she didn’t beat Serena. Perhaps a better coach would have her killing bigger giants by employing a drop shot every once in a while. Despite all the research I did for this blog, I never saw Giorgi play a single drop shot. Not one. With her powerful serve and ground strokes backing her opponents off the baseline, a drop shot would absolutely steal the souls of her opponents. It’s probably the best weapon I have in my arsenal BECAUSE there’s so much pace in my game. Yet I’ve never seen this professional play one, which is insane.
What’s even more insane is rendering the results meaningless, which explains Giorgi’s mental toughness. If you’re so stubborn that you’re going to play the same shots repeatedly regardless of results, you’ve rendered the results meaningless. The results can’t hurt you when you don’t care about them. That’s not impressive. That’s just silly. I’m a rec league player and realize that. Adjustments must be made. The game is supposed to be hard, and it’s hard because everyone plays it differently. But no one plays the game like Camila, and for good reason. If you can make it through roughly 400 professional singles matches without showing a shred of emotion, I’m not convinced you’re playing tennis the right way. I guess I need to find a new favorite player. Coco Gauff is the easy answer. She’s already the best doubles player on the planet at 20. Yeah, that sounds good. But when Camila’s on-court, I’ll still be watching, which tends to be one or two matches in major tournaments. That’s a small commitment to make for someone doing something no one else in the sport would dare do, whether their reasons are good or not. Dare to be different, Camila Giorgi. I choose Truth.
