RUSSIAN GQ ARTICLE November 2005

[Annie]

RUSSIAN GQ NOVEMBER 2005 ISSUE ARTICLE ABOUT MARAT


Well before I start the article I would like to say a few words. Marat is on the cover of GQ, the photoshoot is exactly the same as in US GQ September issue so I will not scan them. And a couple of words about the author. Vassiliy Utkin is a famous sports commentator in Russia; he has his own programme on TV called “The football club”. Yes, you got it right, he is a football commentator, so don’t expect a mega tennis-related article. This piece is about Vassiliy’s (tennis amateur and outsider) thoughts about Marat. Enjoy guys!!!!


Tartar Ego
by Vassiliy Utkin

A lot is written about Marat Safin as a person and not a tennis player, not a lot is known however. GQ decided that Vassiliy Utkin’s thoughts can contribute.

On the whole there’s nothing much to talk about here. Especially if you decide to talk using all sorts of big beautiful words. It’s enough to say the name and the surname for your fantasy to start its admiring work. No matter what character you will imagine, it will be a very lively figure. You will want to feel him or talk to him, without any addressing…just talk.

I am talking about Marat Safin. In general it’s a sports quality. Considering that nowadays we are practically unlimited in watching tennis (not really 24 hours a day but trust me there nothing more serious going on in the tennis world than what we get shown on TV) tennis players and especially tennis female players seem to become our good friends. Because let’s take for example the profession of a sniper, why is it so interesting? (Sorry for such an abrupt jump, I mean real snipers here, the people who shoot and kill). It’s interesting because in the process you manage to study your object. He is absolutely himself there: he might blow his nose or he may make a face which is only typical for him. A tennis match participant is also under constant sight. Whether he is temperamental or really in himself – a match lasts long enough for us to get an impression of the person on court. It won’t necessarily be the right one but it will just be enough for our imagination to start wondering admiringly. Here he is suffering, and look now he is happy, now he is really concentrated (that’s because he is serving and this is a very serious moment)…he lost, or he won. Two to five hours have passed. Sometimes more. You are already compassionate with him, he is already your friend no matter what happens to him.

And in this mythological court space, which is not limited with the lines but more with a magical slang (half-court, return cross, smash, tie-break), all roles are assigned at any single point in time. There is always a Genius; he is always surrounded by a retinue of his favourite opponents (sometimes he even loses to them). Every season one Honest Workman strikes to the top; this is also a special character – seems there’s nothing special about a guy, no extraordinary talent, no trademark, but the stars have moved around in a way that this guy has an incredible season and hey! he’s in the top 10! The list of characters can be added by minor parts: here is a never changing Playboy, who had spoilt half of the WTA Tour, there is always a Weirdo…

And then there is always someone who is outside these characteristics and always stands out as being himself. Today on the ATP Tour this man is Marat Safin. Really and truly we don’t know that much about him. It’s been about two years (a minimum of two years, I couldn’t be bothered to stay counting that far behind) since he hasn’t been giving large interviews to Russian sports periodicals. And it’s not like he tries to make it a point that he won’t give any but it’s like he never really has enough time and I think everyone stopped asking nowadays already. Somewhere between the tournaments there lies his private life, which really impresses with minor characteristics of its intensity. For example, during the last Australian Open Marat suddenly appeared with a bunch of necklaces. It’s a fact that he wore them for “good luck” and that they worked. But where the hell did they come from? Girlfriend’s present? Someone advised some magician who can take away the “black eye” (all sportsmen are superstitious)? He’ll never tell you about it because noone will ever ask. So you sit there and think: Marat is really not the type of guy who will give that much attention to presents from a girlfriend. It’s probably the magician. There are probably a real lot of them in Australia.

[Annie]

continued

It definitely wasn’t his Mum. Marat’s Mum-Rausa Islanova is a practical and tough woman. If she believed in the power of necklaces, there definitely won’t be a tough lip line and a shrewd look from underneath the eyebrows. It’s a common known fact that Marat is from a tennis family: his Mum was one of the best players if her times and currently she is an excellent coach. It’s also a well-known fact that she decided not to train Marat herself. Obviously this was for practical purposes – in Spain where Marat was sent by his parents, the conditions were times and times better than in Moscow. But most probably in addition to that Mum perfectly well understood that training such a talented dude (they say Marat’s talent was very obvious from an early age) and being his Mum are two totally different things. Sounds like Don Corleone and not Mum if you look at it closely: never mix business and family.

Actually Mum, who regularly talks to press, regularly warns them: “I will talk about Dinara, Marat’s sister. Do not ask me about Marat”. And she really never says a word about him. Once we had dinner with Marat and Dina’s parents, Dinara was there, too. I was lucky enough to go to Wimbledon two years ago, and you know the relationships and atmosphere there are like in a village: everyone is really friendly and goes to see each other: experienced people don’t stay at hotels, they rent private houses. Marat left that Wimbledon withdrawing just a day before it had started. That was a despairingly unsuccessful season, which started with an injury and kept “limping” forwards with such a depressing irreversibility that it actually gave room for amazingly strong rumours about a mythic failed doping test, and everyone was saying that is exactly why Marat missed tournaments: not to get caught. I, being a total tennis outsider but a very nosy one indeed, was really curious whether that was true or not. But this is a type of a question you can ask Anna Vladimirovna Dmitrieva, who is the centre of our commentator’s gang at breakfast (a very famous female tennis player in the past and now the best tennis commentator known in this country). But I obviously couldn’t ask Rausa Islanova about this.

The atmosphere at dinner was very relaxed. Dinara was teaching me how to use a camera in my mobile and there was a chat about life in general going on at the table. This conversation included a few little details: Marat was mentioned of course but in a very motherly sort of way, with excessive knowledge of his everyday life. At that point in time Marat was busy decorating his Moscow apartment. Until that moment he hadn’t actually lived in Russia for long but then he decided it was time. Details of home decorating made a grand impression on me. You know, there are details, which are kind of really impersonated. For example, one of my friends was going through a divorce and was living through a long-lasting goodbye conversation with her with a stony face, and then suddenly it all ended up with him smashing a computer into a TV screen. Man, I can really picture that right now. If I was a writer I would have included this episode into my novel, or I would include it in a script if I were a moviemaker.

But let’s get back to Marat. The detailed that stroked the deepest parts of my soul was the following: in a huge apartment there was supposed to be a separate home cinema room and at the entrance to that room Marat decided to put…a vending machine. It’s an automatic monster that looks like a wardrobe and supplies you with little things like Snickers or pistachios.

Imagine – a huge apartment intended for a young restless life. A huge gang of young people comes to visit…blah blah blah let’s watch a movie. Ooops!!! Anyone has 10 roubles? 10 roubles? Anyone? Give me ten roubles, please I want some nuts!!! That’s life, I tell ya…

We can obviously only fantasise about this – Marat doesn’t let anyone into his life. So they have a deal with Mum, too – she doesn’t say anything to anyone. Why? Because Safin is not some kind of prince who does “clap” and everything comes his way. He learned to close in, and what’s sticking outside are some bits and pieces, which are definitely a sign of the fact that life behind that “iron curtain” is young, restless and fun.

Take a look into his box at Australian Open. Not during the last tournament, a bit earlier. This is a past but there was a really fun gang of blondes in there mixed with Marat’s friends. A group of people came to the other side of the world… Now Marat will finish the match and join them. And all he does is win, smashes his opponent with his flat shots time after time after time. He knows how to knock them dead. He has enough strength for everything. That’s his lifestyle. Well to be exact it WAS his lifestyle then. Now some things are the same, some are different. It can’t be fully understood. Time will come and something else will show up from behind that curtain that will let us find out what’s going on there now.

He somehow managed to set everything up really well. In our minds a sportsman obviously makes his whole life dependent on his biggest goal: a match, a victory, some weights bar. But it doesn’t necessarily have to take full control over you. Sport shouldn’t stop you from living: even though it takes up a huge space in your life, but it is nevertheless a part of this life.

And now we see Marat smiling and we understand that this is a smile of a happy man, who is stuck in a weird but HIS OWN world. We see him serious: much more often he is serious. We see him thrashing Federer, who plays the role of a Genius these days. Noone can thrash Federer on court apart from Marat. It also happened in Australia that seems to be all over this text like there’s no other country in the world; it happened in a semifinal. And then in the deciding final match an Australian peasant Hewitt with his peasant manners and emotions tried to act like he is really putting up a fight against Marat…how silly was that?

We see Marat strong. Strength is a determining quality of his character. Noone has such a reserve of strength as he does. There is an internal contradiction when you try to compare him to an epic hero. Marat is a tartar and epic heros usually fought against tartars. A textbook however has nothing to do with our story. Safin is powerful and it’s really difficult to fight a feeling (or more rightly, you don’t have to fight it) that if he really wants to – he will beat anyone.

Marat is very easy to love because you cannot envy him. Everything he has, he has a right to own. A lion’s right of the strongest.