May 11, 2010
“What do you have against business?” one of his players asked him.
“Where do I start?” replied Coach Duvenhage, MBA ’83.
I pressed him further. Big business has gotten a bad rap, to be sure, but it can achieve great things.
“Business is a means to an end, and should be treated as such,” Duvenhage said. “When money-making becomes the goal, as it has in our culture, lives are wasted.”
Ian Duvenhage is a native speaker of Afrikaans transplanted from the rural town of Kuruman, South Africa. He came to America in 1976 after being recruited by the University of Miami to play tennis and earned his bachelor’s degree in finance in 1980.
Thirty years later Coach Duvenhage is as serious about tennis as ever. He has coached at the University of Miami, the University of Florida, on the ATP tour, and, since 2005, at Vanderbilt. Nashville has become his home, although slowly. Long friendships were left in Florida, and new ones have come piecemeal.
Duvenhage lives in a large, woodsy house off Franklin Road. The front room, perhaps built to be an office, serves as his painting studio. Portraits and still lifes cover the walls and dogs trample under feet. Spring light slants across his canvas and reflects off the tarp covered floor.
“Van Gogh was my first real interest,” he says, and it is obvious. Flowers and fruits, pastoral scenes, and a portrait of his parents lean against each other. The paintings’ bold colors are noticed before their subjects.
Duvenhage is an oddball among the athletic crowd for his artistic interests. The arts, he says, are the highest human activity, and to get lost in them is the best we can do. On the table are collections of Schiele and Beckmann and a book by Harold Bloom.
“Why expressionism?” I ask.
He was led to it, he says, by whatever forces do the leading. Something in his nature, or something in his childhood, shaped his adult passion. “I identify with these wildly emotional, manic painters because I know what it’s like to be deserted.”
The emphases in expressive art are color and distortion, he tells me. Feeling is the goal more than articulation. The intellectual truth is skipped for the emotional truth.
“Painting is one medium among many, so why not literature, or music, or something else?”
Chance, maybe, or inexperience. He tells a story that reveals his special relation to painting. One year on a recruiting trip to the junior national championships in Kalamazoo, Mich., he went for a run on a rain delay. He passed the museum and quit his jog to wander in. Standing there in tennis shorts, he was shook by an O’Keefe painting so hard that he broke down crying.
On the court Duvenhage is a relentless parabolist. Lessons are buried in stories from the South African bush, his days in Coral Gables, and his travels around the world. He tells me of an encounter with Roger Federer in a locker room in Paris.
“Roger didn’t seem to care too much about tennis. He said he loved the game, and he wants to keep playing for years, and I believed him. But he isn’t distraught when he loses. He has a mature self-concept — his worth isn’t tied up with his results. And his unconcern about his results improves his results.”
I wondered what, with that attitude, keeps Federer going. “The beauty of the game, the feel of the ball,” answers Duvenhage. Federer is as close to an artist as tennis has seen.
“In every activity the goal is to get out of your own way,” Duvenhage said. Painting happens through Van Gogh the way tennis happens through Federer. The conduit for art is an old trope, but perhaps strengthened by its persistence. “I have seen Federer play in such a way that it becomes art. It is no longer tennis.”
That message is one Duvenhage hopes to communicate to his team. Art over business, meaning over money, fulfillment over the constant struggle for praise. He interprets his coaching role as greater than knowledge of the game, which can be found in books. He strives to be an eye opener, an enabler of dreams. College tennis and beyond, he urges his players to find the fulfillment he has found.
After 11 years of painting Duvenhage calls himself a beginner and dreams of one day being competent. Humility comes from study of the masters. If anything is to be learned in their own art, the men’s tennis team will take the same attitude toward Federer.
Evan Dufaux was a four-year letterwinner for Vanderbilt’s men’s tennis team from 2005-08.