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After 48 hours of token resistance I bought the November-December issue of Tennis with Marat Safin on the cover. My excuse: It’s probably the last Marat tennis cover ever. Nothing in his demeanor, his statements (“I need to get out of my brain and start from a new page”) or his history suggests that he will come back from retirement. Plus I can have the cover framed for our daughter Saffy.

Verdict: I’ve been gypped, starting with the cover. He’s beautiful, yes, but he’s always beautiful, even more so when he’s berserk. (Then again I’ve been babbling about Safin for years but my non-tennis fan friends only noticed him because of this cover. Hmm.) There’s a sealed flap bisecting Marat’s face—ooh, there must be a second cover when you lift the overlay. . .Nope. Same cover. Why the overlay then? For a half-page ad. Urgh. Unless the point is to illustrate how symmetrical his face is.

The cover story by Tom Perrotta (not the author of Election and Little Children) is entertaining, but it doesn’t say anything we fans don’t already know. It repeats tales of his tantrums, his quotables, and gossip from Russian player Dmitri Tursunov (e.g. Marat came down from climbing in the Himalayas after ten days because there’s no way he would go a month without sex).

My favorite piece on Marat is still the GQ profile from 2005. You can’t profile him without mentioning Dostoevski. Marat is always described as an underachiever, but as he pointed out in an interview, Roger Federer should have 20 slams by now so who’s an underachiever? (I still think wearing The One Ring on a chain did not help him stay calm.)

The two best matches of Marat’s career: the 2000 US Open final demolition of Pete Sampras, and his amazing 2005 Australian Open semifinal victory over Federer, 5-7, 6-4, 5-7, 7-6 (6), 9-7. At the 2007 US Open a reporter asked: “When you won here in 2000, Sampras said you would be number one in the world for as long as you want. Do you think you can still go to the top?” Marat said, “See, even the geniuses make the mistakes. He was wrong.”