JOHN MCENROE: A MASTER OF TENNIS, THEN, NOW AND BEYOND DEATH

Text and Photos: José Manuel Serrano Esparza

It all began for me when I watched on TV the final of the US Open 1979 in which you defeated Vitas Gerulaitis 7-5, 6-3 and 6-3. It was simply incredible to observe the class, accuracy and superlative skill of your fairly wide range of strokes, together with your out of this world service and volleys which science won´t ever be able to explain.

Definitely, you were different, unique, a kind of magician of the racket on court. There will always be a before and after you in the history of tennis and your pitched battles, specially against Björn Borg, Jimmy Connors and Ivan Lendl, confer you an honour place in the shrine of top level tennis.

Then, once again through TV, the absolutely unforgettable 1980 Wimbledon Final against the Swede Björn Borg (one of the best players of all time, with 6 Roland Garros and 5 Wimbledons won through his career), unanimously considered the best match of this sport in history. Five sets hardly disputed by the two best players on earth, including the historical twenty minutes tie-break of the fourth set that you won 18-16 after saving five match balls for Borg, constantly aiming at the lines and attacking before the Ice Man finally prevailed in the fifth, winning the game 1-6, 7-5, 6-3, 6-7, 8-6.

Next year, exactly the same: that incredible July 4th 1981 I was watching you and your magic on TV, also against Björn Borg in your second chance to win Wimbledon. It was a kind of enchantment, a spell, the enthrallment par excellence of all the conceivable enthrallments, a sort of uncomparable rite impossible to explain through words. You could do anything with the racket in your hand. We had been some weeks waiting for this moment and now your time had arrived. There was fidgets in the air, tremendous excitement, we all were anxious to realize your tremendous talent, your absolutely unpredictable plays, your bursts of anger, your wonderful touch of ball and class, your intuition and grasp of every aspect of this sport, your catalogue of boundless resources and your matchless imprint on the mythical central court of the All England Tennis Club.

And it happened. We knew that you wouldn´t thwart our pleasure, the joy of peeping through your display of the most unbelievable and wondrous tennis ever seen on a court yesterday, today and tomorrow, the impossible things you made with your Dunlop Maxply racket and no other player will ever do again.

And it happened. You had been struggling for some hours against Björn Borg, the number one till this day, the tennis player with physical capacity exceeding a lot of Olympic top-notch athletes, sporting 34 pulsations per minute through the whole span of his contests and the best player in the world from behind the baseline with his powerful topspin drive and famous two hands backhand.

The strife was harsh, sometimes brutal, a full-fledged attrition battle in many a respect. This was not for money. It was infinitely more important than that. It was between you and him, between him and you, for becoming the number one in the world. Both of you knew it and had previously accepted it.

And it happened. You were winning 4-6, 7-6, 7-6 and 5-4 and you had a match point to win your first Wimbledon Championship.

Everybody was aware that something great was going to come about. There wasn´t any doubt in this regard, but it was impossible to predict what the Mozart of tennis would do and how the genius would attack. Because even the grass of the court knew that your final onslaught was very near.
And it happened.

Borg failed his first serve. Then, the camera focused on you in the background. Your face was an unutterable mergence of irrepressible emotions, remembrances of all your previous life and experiences, full-blast desire for victory, fear to fail at this decisive moment and unavoidable nervousness, etc.
And it happened. Even now, precisely in the most decisive crunch time of your life, there was margin for one of your genial tennis feats, in this case the most significant one in your career.

Borg put his second serve into effect and you attacked him with a parallel drive on the right of the Swedish player, who ran to reach the ball. He tried the parallel passing-shot but you guessed the direction of the shot and approached to the net to volley. It was a very easy mid height crossed volley for you. There were a lot of meters of court on the left of Björn Borg to put the ball and only approximately a meter on the right of him at the moment of impact. The match was yours and any other player on earth would have made this simple crossed volley to win. But you were and will always be different, the high priest of tennis turned into top-notch art.
And it happened.

You feigned the crossed volley. Borg ran desperately on his left, persuaded that you would send the ball there. And everybody on earth thought that way.
And just a split second before striking the ball, you, the Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart of Tennis, decided to twist your wrist and volley parallel, putting the ball on the right of Borg, exactly on the point of juncture between the baseline and the lateral one. Borg saw it and didn´t run. He had understood. Now you were the new Number 1 of the World Tennis and he went to the net to shake your hand with sincere sportsmanship.

The crowd on the stands became cheerful and burst into applauses, recognizing your extraordinary talent and at home we all were stuck to our seats feeling unutterable emotions.

27 years have elapsed. It seems that it happened yesterday. We all are much older. That´s the ruthless truth, but I go on thinking that never was and will be anything comparable to you grabbing a tennis racket.

27 years later, I have been lucky, very lucky and I´ve had the chance to have you near, very near, playing tennis, the thing for which you were born.

And I have been able to watch live your out of this world class, your masterpiece service, your fantastic volley from every imaginable angle, the way in which you look at the ball then and now knowing that it is yours, that it belongs to you, the way in which you attack the ball always trying to win the point by yourself and not looking for your rival error, your wondrous velvety backspin backhand, your accurate topspin forehand, your tremendous topspin backhand without letting the ball rise, your impossible to emulate drop-shots both through your volley and in mid play, your return shots in which you take advantage of your opponent strength and push the ball with the exact power to cross the net some centimetres over it and make your rival near the net to volley from below, your quarrels with the umpires, your bursts of happiness greeting the attendants when you make a marvellous point, your cleverness and cunning constantly striving to guess the trajectory of the shots by the player on the other side of court and so on.

I´m just one of the hundreds of millions of admirers that you had, still have and will undoubtedly have on earth after your death and I have done my best to pay you homage.

But let me tell you a thing, John. Now things are different. You don´t need necessarily win to win. Yes, I know, you have always wanted to win: since your childhood, when you were on top of the ATP and now in the veterans circuit, about to be fifty.

Therefore, we all know that now and in future you will always fight to the limit of your stamina. All right.

But with respect, you must know that from now on, every time you lose a point or not being able to reach a ball, you will win. I have watched the reaction of spectators almost thirty years after your halcyon days when you were Number 1 in the World. People haven´t forgotten you and won´t ever forget you. You can be sure.

Now, as then, and tomorrow, you love this game. That´s why you go on playing in the Veterans Circuit. We all realize it and do thank you very much indeed for your strenuous effort and the privilege to grant us being able to watch you play tennis and live such unforgettable and out of this world moments. Once more, 28 years after that Wimbledon Final against Borg on that Saturday July 4th 1981, your biggest day, I´ve been utterly under the spell of your tennis and have felt the same things.

We´d only ask you one thing, Maestro: Please, don´t ever stop play tennis!

Thank you, John, for the Memories

Main Titles Won by John McEnroe

- Wimbledon 1981, 1982, 1983
- US Open 1979, 1980, 1981, 1983, 1984
- Number 1 of the ATP four in a row years, between 1981 and 1984
- Masters New York 1978, 1983 and 1984.
- Davis Cup Winner in 1979, 1981, 1982 and 1992
- World Championship Tennis WCT Dallas in 1979,1981, 1983, 1984,1989.
- Five times champion of doubles in Wimbledon in 1979, 1981, 1983, 1984 and 1992.
- Four times champion of doubles in US Open 1979, 1981, 1983, 1989.

Copyright Text and Photos José Manuel Serrano Esparza

PHOTOMUSEUM OF ZARAUTZ: 15 YEARS FOSTERING PHOTOGRAPHY

Text and Photos: Javier Izquierdo Vidal
Published in Film und Foto Magazine Number 4
March 2008

© Javier Izquierdo

Zarautz can be visited because of three reasons: so as to take quiet sunbathings, to dip into the sea or in order to ride on raving waves, aiming at paying homage to oneself with wise and tasty gastronomic recipes, always based on top-notch products, and for the last fifteen years also to relish photography inside an uncommon place devoted to the duty of displaying and spread the techniques and attainments of the art of imagining through optics, mechanics, chemistry and even by means of electronics from the recent years on, without overlooking the relative who enables the fact that from the retinian persistence processed in different parts of the brain, we manage to see images in endless movement.

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

You can´t miss it. Anybody asked, will point out accurately enough how to reach the Photomuseum of Zarautz.
This is possible thanks to the brainstorms of two crazy men (both of them have whispered me with this exact expression) who decided it that way.

Leopoldo Zugaza´s head is a crossroads of contrasts. It can change from deep black when he is wearing a txapela with dash to the almost broken white of an enviable mane when not. Inside this imposing framework, varying between high and low keys, is the grey area which has been working full-blast since the day he thought up the first draft of this Museum of Photography.

Ramón Serras, the other mad human being of the binomial, holds the gray matter with an abundant and well groomed snowy beard, hiding an always available smile, shored up by two scrutinizing and frisky with curiosity eyes. You can realize something hinting that he has looked a great deal through them and that among other things they make up a tool he uses to photograph.

In 1993, Leopoldo Zugaza and Ramón Serras made up their minds to found a museum focused on photography.

Ramón had got some cameras and gadgets which he had been gathering throughout his life and Leopoldo has always been a cultural philanthropist and activist featuring great expertise in a number of subjects.

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

It dawned on them that there was a building of which only the ground floor was used as a school to learn euskera. They spoke with the institutions, requesting to be granted a flat to develop the initiative and within sixteen days they worked out their ´ sketch of a photography museum ´ .

In the last floor of the building now occupied by offices and the library where we talked, the Photomuseum was born, and from the very premiere day it turned out to be small for them.
They found that all the doors of the other flats could be opened with the key they had been given and with the exception of a door where the implements of the boys´ drumming were kept, everything was empty.

After further negotiations, they set about the fulfilment of the museum from the roof downwards, filling the whole building.
Some years later, it was utterly reshaped until becoming into the current cute cultural and photographic epicentre, the only genuine photographic museum in the south of the Pyrenees.

´ Acquiring, preserving, researching, communicating and exhibiting for study and delectation; it all being linked to photography … ´ is the definition of museum seized by Leopoldo Zugaza as a list of purposes to be implemented at the Photomuseum. Moreover, he dresses this concept with his theory of landmarks: ´You get on a bit and another boundary stone is set, some more steps and you place another one a little further´, ´ you push forward what you can, letting the way open in order that others continue to stroll´.

© Javier Izquierdo

He learnt this from José Miguel Barandiarán, while he was digging up in Indusi. The anthropologist delimited with ropes the areas on which he had worked and left some stretches of land without marking them off so that other ones could go on the labor with up-to-date techniques´. ´ One shouldn´t spoil and close the way to the next ones; it must be preserved for others be able to carry out the task. You have arrived up to where you´ve managed and then you leave your place to those who will look forward to continuing. There must be a clear goal and it should be daily chased after, maybe without reaching the optimal achievement, but you are to advance´.

Leopoldo Zugaza deems the perseverance necessary though not always enough: ´ What could I do about what I would want to do, doesn´t depend only on the person´s wish but on the available means, which sometimes are non existent and make the ambition drowsy´. This is said by somebody who since he was fifteen years old noticed that his way was to enhance culture in its broader sense. He has produced cinema, has written and edited a comprenhensive literature catalogue as well as selling books. He´s also developed studies on Basque language, been a photography curator and belonged to the board of trustees of the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts, and besides, he is contriving a number of ideas for a Museum of Music. He knows what he´s speaking about on quoting the lack of means and its significance as a catalyst of desire. On being asked what more he has still to do, he answers that his ambitions are boundless.

© Javier Izquierdo

Although the Photomuseum is located in Zarautz, it was in Durango, during eighties, where the whole project began to be hatched.

As an alma mater, Leopoldo Zugaza arranged photography biennials with a lot of exhibitions, talks and all kind of activities.
The scheme of a photography school didn´t work well and then was retrieved shaping what presently is the Photomuseum.
It´s a lively and didactic place, adapted to the permanent array of technical gear and a wide range of pictures encompassing most of the history of photography.

On the other hand, the ground floor steadfastly changes its exhibitions, with an average of twelve per year and frequent screenings and lectures are given.

On this 15th Anniversary, there will be a different event at least every Friday. The outstanding library and a well stocked assortment of newspapers, both of them available for the visitors, complete the offer.

They´re making a start with a project to collect data and catalogue a systematics of the Basque photography being useful to undertake future analyses.
Recently, they have managed to get a gorgeous trove: an extensive assortment of XIX century portraits, difficult to gather piece by piece.

Ramón Serras reveals enthralment speaking about it. After being acquired by the Kutxa Savings Bank and the Guipuzcoa Deputation, both bodies have entrusted the Photomuseum of Zarautz with the management and cataloguing of this wonderful gathering of photographic jewels; portraits by Nadar and Carjat among others, nudes which had to be watched with great secrecy and now show us their naiveté, 50 images of Sarah Bernard made by different authors, a fisionotrazo made with the fixture bearing the same name, an authentic rarity previous to the photograph taken by Niepce on a balcony in Paris, both fragile and rotund small jewels, some 3,000 images and almost 300 technical appliances and devices belonging to the light of dawn of photography. A display of it will be exposed till March. A good present for a museum celebrating his first 15 years.

© Javier Izquierdo

In compliance with the customary museum standards in regard to photographic topics, the Photomuseum of Zarautz joins together in an eclectic way the two general currents followed by the rest of photographic museums in Europe. On the one hand, we´d have the trend based on the technical gadgets in the purest style of the Mussée Suisse de l ´Appareil Photographique de Vevey; and on the other hand we´d have the working dynamics in this respect of the Mussée de l´Elysée in Lausanne, devoted to the attainments imprinted on the very photographic images. Here, the dual proposal is synchronized, on being the central axle related with the tools enabling photography, which are flanked by the two usual drifts in which you can divide image yielding through a number of devices, photography as a document and the most artistic and experimental side of it.

Once inside the Photomuseum of Zarautz, any visitor is able to carry out a chronological trip or wander venturing into the marvels he finds at every step in the cozy and well thought over spaces of the four floors of the building, always with the steady choice of applying for help from the members of Leopoldo and Ramón´s team, or even from any of the two crazy for photography men who will perform the role of guides in the twinkling of an eye.

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

From then on, the pleasure of visiting this cultural shrine multiplies, since those people teaching the attendants the wonders of elaborating photographic images by means of technological appliances are full-fledged professionals boasting a lot of years of experience and very deep knowledge, lovers of the photographic deeds which they will enjoy to the full extent of it enlightening the audience on manifold aspects bound to the History of Photography generally speaking or regarding any of the devices, images and so forth kept by the Photomuseum within its walls.
Among other collateral effects of the visit, the own camera of each one will be grasped with a different respect every time.

© Javier Izquierdo

Both Leopoldo Zugaza and Ramón Serras are straightforward on raising the new purely electronical way of taking pictures on a digital base, stating that there isn´t much difference compared to Eastman Kodak proposition from the beginnings of XX century sporting the slogan: You just press the shutter and we´ll do the rest´. Silver halides, chromogenic films and pixels are truly first cousins setting up a family in agreement which shouldn´t struggle among one another but coexist in good harmony. A new way of making photographs doesn´t deny the fitness of the previous ones as a current fact, albeit establishing differences which must be delved into.

They´re aware of the fantastic traits of digitisation for the different motifs settled down as leit motiv of the tegumentary aims of the museum.

Notwithstanding, for the time being there isn´t a properly said black and white digital photography, but it is a colour capture subsequently deprived of it and the gray gradations which silver halides are able to offer haven´t been achieved till now. This poses at least a need for improving in this respect.

Ramón Serras, a creator of images and a pundit on all kind of photographic fixtures of various epochs (who besides has published a comprehensive range of books on photography) acknowledges that he keeps on working hard though at a slower pace, having been ´ Reading Room ´ his last exhibition.

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

The fairly beautiful beach of Zarautz, very near the Photomuseum, becomes a leisure focal point where the sun and sea bathings and the delight of reading under those circumstances jumble together. Guileless and very affectionate images dipping the spectator who occasionally has practised the healthy vice of having a good time with books alongside the waves phonetics into a déjà vu.

Throughout a lot of years, Ramón Serras has made a number of photographs of it all, manually made positives by himself with remarkable painstaking, with a great deal of silver and tons of loving care. Nevertheless, this isn´t a hindrance at all for him appearing enraptured with one of his last acquisitions, the Olympus SP-550 UZ digital camera, a highly powerful photographic tool boasting his 20x zoom lens and turned into a magnificent instrument, he says, to capture the riders on the waves far from the shore. We´ll have to give heed to a man who for the whole of his long career has dealt with nearly every aspect of photography, from the most documentary to the intrinsically experimental and definitely artistic.

© Javier Izquierdo

´ Man must be given instruments for the development of his knowledge, in order that he can manage to gain access to the cultural events´, since nobody is alien to culture, ´ each one has got his own´ . "Every language has areas featuring more or less wealth. For instance, Eskimos say ice at least in fourteen different ways".

As far as he is concerned, one of the greatest satisfactions experienced by Leopoldo Zugaza is to verify that the triviality of photography brings about an opposite effect. Taking pictures as an amusement from the discernment on images created by oneself may lead to an understanding of the photographic means which sooner or later will put into effect the appreciation of photography as an undoubtedly artistic fact. Realizing that ´if a photograph can be made out from another one, as for the authorship of it, it means that there hasn´t been a mere technical performance, but something deeper; that the look of the photographer grants that artistic nature to the images he begets´.

One of the basic working principles of this protean cultural activist is ´ if you can take the letter in your hand a stamp won´t be needed ….. so money is saved and more works can be purchased´ which he unfurled when he belonged to the Board of Trustees of the Bilbao Museum of Fine Arts. He feels happy and proud because of the fact that Miguel Zugaza, former director of the quoted museum and present headmaster of the Prado Museum suffers from infatuation regarding the Photomuseum of Zarautz, nowadays one of the best in Europe and boasting an authentic international height, deeming that it is something really great and that everything generated by his father and his partner Ramón together with things to come has been utterly worth, for both of them go on toiling day by day and have new projects in mind.

© Javier Izquierdo

© Javier Izquierdo

From these pages we stick to that perspective. Certainly, the Photomuseum of Zarautz is in our standpoint a very beautiful and interesting place of absolutely recommended visit for any lover of photography and this cultural sancta sanctorum will be more and more held in esteem as time goes by.

© Javier Izquierdo

Photographs made with a Nikon FM3 camera with Nikkor 28 mm series E lens + Vivitar 283 external flash and black & white film Kodak T-Max 400 rated at iso 400 and Nikon FM camera, interchanging Nikkor 35 mm f/2 Ai-S lens with Nikkor AF 85 mm f/1.8 and Kodak T-Max 400 pushed to iso 800.