Roger, Rafa and the flying carpet show

It was approaching dusk at the ATP 250 tournament in Doha, Qatar, and play was literally suspended. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were playing tennis 20 feet in the air. The two legends had climbed onto a court hewn of Persian wool a few minutes earlier, and as suspension cables cranked the rug to its full height, Federer and Nadal gingerly tapped a tennis ball to each other. The area behind the baseline was thin air, so they both camped closer to the net than usual. It was the tournament’s dream vision: tennis’s sculpted, wavy haired Aladdins, where many genies had supplied them with their own flying carpet. All I had been supplied with was an easy metaphor for how the elites appeared to the rest of us all of the time.