Bill Simons
Now that a 3,000-year-old epic has morphed into a 172-minute Hollywood blockbuster, The Odyssey is everywhere. It’s hard to escape the fuss.
The internet is buzzing about the casting. Scholars are arguing over whether Homer even existed. Suddenly everybody’s an expert on a 12,000-line poem most of us barely made it through in high school.
But amid all the Odyssey mania, there hasn’t been a peep about tennis.
Here’s my take.
•••••
For centuries, readers have thought Homer’s Odyssey was about a man trying to get home. But hold on. It’s really about the inner journey that unfolds along the way.
Odysseus leaves Troy believing he is a warrior. He returns to Ithaca as something rarer: a man tempered by storms, humbled by loss, strengthened by suffering, and enlarged by experience. His greatest journey wasn’t across the wine-dark sea. It was inward.
And, sure enough, tennis understands this.
Yes, the sport most values shiny trophies and lofty rankings. Record books preserve the scores. Bulging bank accounts have their delights.
But any student of this game knows there’s another story unfolding beneath the surface.
The greatest connection between tennis and The Odyssey is that neither is fundamentally about winning. Ultimately, both ask the same question: what does the journey make of us?
Every great tennis career is an odyssey.
Every odyssey begins with hope. Fourteen-year-old Venus Williams stepped onto the court for her astonishing pro debut in Oakland. Fifteen-year-old Coco Gauff stunned Venus at Wimbledon.
But hope is only the beginning. Storms soon arise. The real story lies in what follows.
Once gifted youngsters leave home, carrying little more than a racket and a dream, they encounter rivals and mentors, triumphs and injuries, pride and doubt, loss and reinvention. Innocence vanishes.
There are monsters to confront – not Cyclops or sea gods, but fear, ego, expectation, loneliness, and the most alluring of all sirens: the seductive belief that winning will bring peace.
Eventually, every champion learns the lesson Homer understood. The destination matters – but the journey is where transformation happens.
Madison Keys offers one of tennis’s most beautiful modern odysseys.
She long carried the burden of expectation. With her thunderbolt groundstrokes, she seemed destined to win majors. Yet her greatest obstacle wasn’t across the net. It was her problematic relationship with herself. She couldn’t connect her brain and body. Under pressure, she panicked and suffered soul-shaking losses.
She sensed she needed to stop measuring her worth by her results. For years she worked on herself until she no longer needed a Grand Slam title. Only then did the pressure lift. Tennis became joyful again. Soon she won the Australian Open.
It wasn’t simply a championship. It was the triumph of self-discovery and letting go. She’d come home to herself.
Andre Agassi’s voyage was even more improbable. Driven by an obsessive father, he grew up resenting the very game that brought him fame. Beneath the long hair, denim shorts and neon colors lived a restless man-child – not searching for another title, but for himself.
Through painful honesty, the wisdom of his sideman Gil Reyes, the love of Steffi Graf, therapy and his instinct to help others, Agassi discovered that tennis could free him rather than imprison him.
His greatest victory wasn’t the Career Grand Slam, winning Steffi’s hand, entering the Hall of Fame, or creating schools that transformed thousands of lives.
It was finding peace within himself.
Novak Djokovic’s odyssey followed a different map. His monsters were war, rejection, controversy, and the unrelenting burden of time and history.
Reared amid bomb shelters and sanctions, he entered a tennis world ruled by Roger and Rafa. Rarely did he enjoy the crowd’s affection. Again and again he chose the more difficult road – not simply to win more matches, but to seek the self-mastery he craved.
Yes, he has more records than an old-fashioned music store. But what’s really astounding is his willingness to keep searching.
Nutrition. Mindfulness. Meditation. Breathing. Who am I? What am I becoming?
Few champions have explored the inner landscape with such determination and curiosity. His search echoes Odysseus’ – forever moving, forever learning, forever asking what’s beyond the horizon.
Of course, some ships sink before the horizon. Some travelers never return. Hearts are broken. Not every odyssey reaches the destination we imagined.
No. 1 Tracy Austin was bound for glory – until injuries and a car accident changed everything. Monica Seles was destined to be the best player ever – until she was derailed by a blade. Jennifer Capriati, a kind of poster child for burnout, was punched by inner demons.
Arthur Ashe’s quixotic journey was shaped by adversity and infused with nobility.
He confronted obstacles Homer could have understood – racism, political expectations, heart surgery, a botched transfusion, AIDS and confounding ill fortune.
What made Ashe extraordinary – why poems are written, statues built and stadiums named for him – wasn’t simply what he endured. It was the grace with which he endured it.
Roger Federer might seem the least Odyssean of all. Where Odysseus wrestled with the elements, Roger floated above them, turning tennis into an effortless adventure.
Yet Roger’s own journey required patience, emotional growth, reinvention and the humility to discover new forms of excellence, as age dimmed his gifts.
His odyssey became one not of survival, but of refinement.
Perhaps the greatest misunderstanding about The Odyssey is that it celebrates arrival. It doesn’t. It celebrates transformation. Odysseus reaches Ithaca because he has become worthy of Ithaca.
Trophies eventually gather dust, rankings fade, Centre Court grows quiet. What remains are the invisible things: courage learned through defeat, patience earned through pain, perspective gained through disappointment, identity no longer chained to victory.
Of course, tennis first barks, “Can you win?” But ultimately, it demands, “Who are you becoming?” That may be the oldest question in Western literature. It also may be the deepest question in our sport.
And that’s why Homer still belongs on a tennis court. Not because he understood ancient Greece, but because he understood the long, beautiful journey of becoming fully human.
