Pim-Pim som religiös upplevelse

Johan: Författaren, filosofen och tennisspelaren Pim-Pim Johansson har ju som vi alla vet tagit en självklar plats i den europeiska litteraturens kanon med sitt kompendium ”Om bollar inte fanns skulle jag uppfinna en". Vad gäller hans konstnärsskap på tennisbanan följer här ett utdrag ur min kommande bok om Pim-Pim som spelare:

Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Pim-Pim Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swede play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K.

The Moments are more intense if you’ve played enough tennis to understand the impossibility of what you just saw him do. We’ve all got our examples. Here is one. It’s the first round of the Besancon Challenger, Pim-Pim serving to Benoit Paire early in the second set. There’s a medium-long exchange of groundstrokes, one with the distinctive butterfly shape of today’s power-baseline game, Pim-Pim and Paire yanking each other from side to side, each trying to set up the baseline winner...until suddenly Paire hits a hard heavy cross-court backhand that pulls Pim-Pim way out wide to his ad (=left) side, and Pim-Pim gets to it but slices the stretch backhand short, a couple feet past the service line, which of course is the sort of thing Paire dines out on, and as Pim-Pim’s scrambling to reverse and get back to center, Paire’s moving in to take the short ball on the rise, and he smacks it hard right back into the same ad corner, trying to wrong-foot Pim-Pim, which in fact he does — Pim-Pim’s still near the corner but running toward the centerline, and the ball’s heading to a point behind him now, where he just was, and there’s no time to turn his body around, and Paire’s following the shot in to the net at an angle from the backhand side...and what Pim-Pim now does is somehow instantly reverse thrust and sort of skip backward three or four steps, impossibly fast, to hit a forehand out of his backhand corner, all his weight moving backward, and the forehand is a topspin screamer down the line past Paire at net, who lunges for it but the ball’s past him, and it flies straight down the sideline and lands exactly in the deuce corner of Paire’s side, a winner — Pim-Pim’s still dancing backward as it lands. And there’s that familiar little second of shocked silence from the Besancon crowd before it erupts, and Janne Gunnarsson with his color man’s headset on TV says (mostly to himself, it sounds like), “How do you hit a winner from that position?” And he’s right: given Paire’s position and world-class quickness, Pim-Pim had to send that ball down a two-inch pipe of space in order to pass him, which he did, moving backwards, with no setup time and none of his weight behind the shot. It was impossible. It was like something out of “The Matrix.” I don’t know what-all sounds were involved, but my spouse says she hurried in and there was popcorn all over the couch and I was down on one knee and my eyeballs looked like novelty-shop eyeballs.