Good evening, TWibe! It's already November - how on earth did that happen? Raise your hand if you're not looking forward to the dreadful winter weather. *raises hand* Aussiemarg and others in warm climates, gloating isn't allowed!
As you all know, I was in Washington, D.C. last weekend to see my sister give a recital (she's a pianist) and visit some relatives. I had a wonderful time, though I missed hanging out here in the Deuce Club. How was everyone's Halloween? Did any of you dress up? If so, I'd love to see your costume! If you're willing to share your look with the group, please send photos to my Tennis.come-mail and I'll include 'em in next week's DC.
So how about them Yankees, eh? For those living under a rock, the New York Yankees are the World Series champions for the 27th time, clinching the title in Game 6 on Wednesday night over the Philadelphia Phillies. Phillies fans - commiserations, especially to Sam! - will likely cringe at the following sentiment, but in many ways, it seemed like a Yankee victory was destined. (I won't detail the reasons here, lest the many Yankee detractors tar and feather me(!), but I'm happy to do so in the Comments if requested.) I'm over the moon, being a staunch supporter of the champs, but I'm also lamenting the end of the baseball season. The postseason, in particular. What will I watch now?! And how unfortunate that the tennis season is drawing to a close, too.
Speaking of which, I wanted to devote today's DC to the end of the WTA season. Sure, we have yet to see who wins in Bali ... and the Fed Cup final looms ... but as the season-ending championships have just passed, I thought this was an appropriate time to bid adieu to 2009. (Note that I'll do the same for the men when that time comes. Still about another month to go!)
You'll recall that I did this last year - combined the WTA and ATP awards, though - and it was a big hit. (Click here to see the post.) I wasn't about to mess with a winning formula, so below you'll see that I've reprised last year's awards. But as I'm also a fan of surprises, I've added a couple of new categories. You're more than welcome to come up with some of your own, too!
Take a look at all of the awards and tell us who deserves to win what (and why, if possible). Consider both singles and doubles, and if you're stumped by a category, feel free to skip it - there's no such thing as an incomplete entry!
WTA Awards:
Most Valuable Player
Most Improved Player
Breakout Player
Most Disappointing Player
Best Rivalry
Match of the Year
Most Inspiring or Shocking or Funny Moment (take your pick!)
And introducing the new, more "fun" ones:
Best/Worst Dressed (on or off the court)
Miss Congeniality
Most WTF? Performance
I'll reveal my awardees next week (though like last year, I've given away my pick for Most Inspiring Moment in the above photo - couldn't resist!). Have a great weekend, TWibe!
Good evening, TWibe! I'm auto-posting this as I'm headed to Washington, D.C. for the weekend; my concert pianist sister is performing there, where we also have family, so I couldn't resist making the trip. I wasn't around last Friday either because of that illness (I'm all recovered, thank goodness), so it's starting to look like I've deserted y'all! I promise I haven't, and my schedule should be back to normal next week. Of course, I can't continue without mentioning baseball. Again. But I'm allowed - it's World Series time! Who do we see taking the championship, the Yankees or the Phillies? I'm rooting for the Yankees, of course, but this Phillies team is playing extremely well. After watching the NLCS, I was less than convinced that the Yanks would run away with the series as so many predicted, and these first two games have proven me right. I haven't forgotten about tennis, though. How could I with the best of the WTA duking it out in the season-ending championships in Doha this week? (Incidentally, I'm a little confused as to why the ladies' season is coming to a close so much earlier than the men's.) You had the chance to comment on the SEC last week in Bobby Chintapalli's superb tournament preview, but I'm wondering if any of you have had a change of heart now that the event's underway. Who were you expecting to win originally and who's your pick now? And what - or who - has been the biggest surprise?
It's hard for me to make a prediction, having not watched any of the tournament (that pesky job getting in the way again). Still, it's tough to bet against Serena at a major event ... so I won't.
But since the Deuce Club is our off-topic spot, maybe we should spend more time discussing the fashion from the draw ceremony instead of the tennis! Check out the headline photo: Who gets the award for best dressed? Best hair? Best overall look? I think I have to go with Elena for all of the above. She pulls off glamour so effortlessly - and flawlessly. Speaking of getting dressed up, Halloween has arrived! What are y'all doing to celebrate? Since I'll be in D.C., I'll miss out on all of the festivities - not that I mind terribly. Halloween is one of those holidays I could do without, for reasons I detailed in last year's Halloween DC. But I still enjoy seeing all of the costumes, particularly the creative/fun ones. An ex-coworker of mine and her buddy are dressing up as Wayne and Garth from Wayne's World. Now that's my kind of costume! I got to thinking more about the costume thing, and naturally, tennis popped into my head. I considered asking y'all what tennis player you'd want to be for Halloween ... but then I reasoned that such a costume would be difficult to pull off, since players don't often wear outfits that distinguish them from one another (Aravane Rezai, Bethanie Mattek-Sands, and Dominik Hrbaty are among the exceptions). So unless you resemble a player as is or don't mind dressing as a nondescript one, this probably isn't the best costume idea.
So my thoughts then turned to tennis players themselves dressing up for Halloween. The images had me in stitches - remember how silly they looked even wearing a Santa hat? - and I figured it'd be fun for us to assign costumes to players. Who should dress up as what? Most people view Halloween as the opportunity to exhibit qualities that are markedly different from their own (scandalous, powerful, dangerous, etc.) or to show off a side of themselves that they usually keep under wraps. So keep that in mind and consider costume choices that seem the most diametrically opposed to players' characters/appearances.
Below is a list of popular Halloween costumes. After each one, indicate which player you'd like to see wearing it. And by all means, feel free to move away from the list and come up with some costumes of your own!
Vampire (are folks still Twilight-crazed?)
Pirate
Devil
Angel
Ninja
Priest
Witch
Cowardly Lion (snuck that in there as I figured you guys would have fun with that)
Little Red Riding Hood
Cleopatra
Lady Gaga (I have a feeling it'll be all the rage this year)
Evening, TWibe. So guess what: I'm sick. Again. You'll recall that I'd battled bronchitis a few weeks back but was finally starting to feel healthy once more ... then last weekend, I was walloped by a horrible case of the flu. And I thought the bronchitis was bad! High fever, chills, nausea, coughing - the works. I pray it's a long time before I see another illness like this again. I'm finally feeling like my old self again, but since I was down and out all week, I enlisted one of our TWibe regulars to pinch-hit for me as your Deuce Club host. (Obviously, I threw the baseball reference in there - and there's another one! - because the American League Championship Series is at the forefront of my thoughts. Who do we think will join the Phillies in the World Series? Feel free to use this space to discuss, as we have been all month long.)
Where were we? Ah yes, our guest host: The lovely jewell was generous enough to offer her services this week, and she's put together a fantastic DC for y'all. Thanks, jewell - don't know what we'd do without you!
Well, it’s nearly the end of the tennis season (not to mention a long wedding season for me), and I’m already feeling in a bit of a holiday mood, planning places to go away to in the dull time after Christmas. I wish it would hurry up and get here in some ways, although there’s a fair bit to enjoy between now and then. So perhaps I shouldn’t wish the time away too much.
It’s always fun planning holidays, before the realities of needing to limit travel time, face one’s phobia of flying, save money, etc. kick in. When you only have a week, do you go somewhere new, or do you go somewhere tried and tested where you know you’ll enjoy yourself? If you don’t like flying (and I don’t), it takes an awfully long time to get anywhere from this silly little island, and do I want to spend two days out of a week’s holiday sitting on a ferry or in a car driving to the Channel Tunnel? Hmm ... probably not!
I think my dream holiday would be more like retirement – a long wander through Europe (paying particular attention to the eastern end), Central Asia and into Russia, then a trip across to America for a few years drifting about the north and Canada. I’d want to poke my nose in to all the small and out-of-the-way places and avoid some of the bigger, more well-known cities. If anyone has any tips for this mythical future trip, please share!
And if we’re talking real dreams, I wouldn’t mind a time machine so I could spend a week in some of the best places in history – Tudor and Regency London, perhaps, Byzantium under Justinian and Theodora, then again when the empire was in decline, Reformation Geneva, classical Athens. I’d probably choose Regency London, if I had to only choose one; it just sounds like a city of the most enormous fun.
Anyway, in the interests of brightening up the long autumn drag, I’m curious to know about yourdream holidays. If money or even time were no object, where would you go and why?
(Oh ... and where did I choose to go in real life? Wales. I think I must have a thing for wind and rain.)
Well, this pretty much seals the deal - it's officially Kolya time. I'll say this for Nikolay Davydenko, he's the consumate professional in terms of taking advantage of his opportunities. I think he's played less (and been injured more) in recent times than at the beginning of his career, but he's established himself over the years as the ultimate worker bee in men's tennis.
Davydenko doesn't complain (as far as I know) about the number of tournaments he plays; if anything, he'd probably gripe that there aren't enough of them. He doesn't seem as disgruntled as some of his peers by the touring way of life. His attitude seems to be, just tell me where to show up and play, and make sure you spell the name right on the check. This is Kolya's 19th tournament; six more than Roger Federer has played. He'll probably end up playing 21 or 22 - and the Davis Cup was a washout this year, so he couldn't add those weeks to his toll either.
Over the years, we've seen a number of other players who fall squarely into this Can't Get Enough tradition. Most of you are too young to remember the New Zealander, Onny Parun (he played early in the pro era). I think Onny figured he had to travel so far from home to play tennis that there was no point in going back once he hit the road. Then there was Tomas Smid, or Smidley, as many called him. He was a more recent vintage, and being Czech made his life somewhat easier, travel-wise. But he was a road warrior, too. He played every place that would have him, never uttered a compaint, and almost always played doubles, too. And it wasn't so long ago that wing-ding Jelena Jankovic seemed bent on shattering the mark for most frequent flier miles accumulated in a single year by a WTA pro.
Many others also play an insanely loaded schedule, but the good players who do so are a breed apart. People always snicker at these workhorses, and suggest that they're merely avaricious, but I don't really buy that. I think there's a certain dispostion to which this kind of grinding comes naturally; these players are workaholics, not just greedy pros feathering their nests for the future. And while Jankovic is an exception, these tireless spear carriers trend toward being a little grim. Maybe they're depressed, like that guy who stays at the office until 8 pm every night, and has black bags under his eyes. The last thing he would think to do, in terms of a meaningful change of life, is work less.
Here's something I found pretty amazing, though. Given that Kolya is ranked no. 8 in the world and this is his 20th tournament, he's earned "only" $1.3 million in prize-money this year. I'd happily swap bank accounts with him, and so would many of you, I presume. But that's not really the point. In relative terms, Kolya's prize-money is surprisingly low. I don't even dare to look at what a golfer with a comparable resume - Davydenko is certainly a high-value name and a staple in late stages of important tournaments- pulls down.
And even if Kolya is chasing the money, what's the big deal? I thought that's why we ended up with Open tennis in the first place, because tennis players wanted to be paid for what they did best, and it was usually the only thing they wanted to do. A player can love the game and the life and like the money too, right?
But Kolya is up against it today, even though his slap-shot style and quickness are great assets on the surfaces of the fall tour. He's facing a - dare I say it? - resurgent Rafael Nadal, who can out-muscle him, outsteady him, and neutralize Kolya's quick-strike instincts with speed and punishing counter-punching. It might do wonders for Nadal to win his first tournament since he returned from his long break (he was dealing with knee tendinitis), and it will be interesting to see if adding another Masters 1000 to his collection, with the Tennis Masters Cup looming on the horizon, will propel him back into the no. 1 conversation. We still have a pretty long way to go this year in a number of ways, weeks being the least of them.
Happy Sunday, everyone. I'm on the road most of the day but back with you on Monday.
-- Looks like Pete set this to autopost this morning, but Typepad mischievously switched his AM to a PM. Andrew
Another Friday, another Deuce Club! What does the TWibe have planned for the weekend? You can bet I'll be watching plenty of baseball once again. Who are y'all rooting for in the league championship series? What are your predictions? For those of you who haven't been following, yesterday saw the first game of the NLCS, with the Philles besting the Dodgers in an offensive shoot-out, and by the time this goes up, Game 2 will be well underway. As for the ALCS between the Yankees and the Angels, Game 1 starts tonight at 7:30 TW time; feel free to use this space to discuss the action, as we did last week. (That was fun!)
I've neglected to mention our TW Facebook group for the past couple of weeks, so here's a reminder to join, if you haven't already. Just search for "TennisWorld > Real World," click on "Request to Join Group," and respond to the message I send you about your moniker. Then you're in! And for existing members, stop by and check out the most recent photos and discussion topics ... I'd love to get things moving there again.
All week, we've seen article after article, blog post after blog post, Tweet after Tweet about scheduling issues on the men's tour. Don't worry - I won't ask you to regurgitate your opinion (though maybe some of you will want to do that anyway). But it gave me an idea: We keep yakking about tennis players' schedules, but what about our own? James Martin argued that players have it much easier than those of us in the real world, saying "[they have] a maximum tournament requirement of 25 weeks ... [d]on’t know about you, but I’d fancy a work schedule like that." Let's put his opinion to the test right here, shall we?
Tell us about your work schedule. And don't feel restricted to just giving us a year perspective - you can talk about your daily or weekly schedule, too. Are you a teacher who gets summers off? Do you take a trip to a certain spot at the same time every year? Does your job require you to work on weekends? Or maybe you don't really have a set work schedule at all because you're a student, between jobs, a stay-at-home parent, a freelancer ... something of that sort.
I'll fill you in on mine to give you some ideas, if you need them. My day-to-day schedule is fairly typical: I work Monday through Friday, from 8:30 to 5. Okay, so it's more like 6 or 6:30, alas. I'm one of those. Sometimes you'll even find me working at home, late in the evening, but I try to limit these occasions since I really believe in maintaining an appropriate work-life balance. But not everyone feels the need to strike such a balance; the concept is muddied for those whose life is defined by their work - tennis players are a good example. Maybe you fall into this category, too.
My schedule for the year is pretty standard, as well. I'm not entitled to any special vacation periods, though I'm fortunate to have loads of PTO (paid time off). One guess as to how I use up those days! Yep, I treat trips to tennis tournaments as my vacations; I can't remember the last time I took a "real" vacay, but you won't hear me complaining about this alternative. Loads of live tennis, sun, and fraternizing with TWibers ... not too shabby. Aside from holidays, these tennis trips are the only events that break up my work year. (It's funny - I wish I had more opportunities to use tennis as a break, while players want more opportunities to take a break from tennis!)
Not terribly interesting, huh. But I'm guessing some of you have less conventional work schedules; whether you do or don't, I'd love to hear about it! So, once again, give us an idea of what your daily, weekly, and/or yearly work schedule looks like. Consider things like how many hours per day and weeks per year you work and when, if ever, you're able to get away or take time off. Also, channel your inner Rafa or Roddick and let us know what gripes you have about the schedule and what you'd do to change it, if you had the power.
Try not to depress yourselves - that's not allowed in the DC! - and have a fantastic weekend, everyone!
As sure as night follows day, complaints about the unending tennis year follow the beginning of the fall ATP swing through Asia and Europe. I've already spent good parts of the past two days writing about the issue, both at ESPN and here at the Tennis.com home page. Novak Djokovic also weighed in on the issue; does anyone doubt that his reasonableness on the issue has a little something to do with the fact that he's a tournament promoter as well as a player?
Has there ever been an issue that has generated more, and more predictable, discontent among tennis players and some fans than the brutal length of the tennis year? I don't think anyone doubts that if you blew the whole thing up and started over, the players would enjoy a long break ending at Christmas. But you can't blow the whole thing up, even if you wanted to. What you have here is an overabundance of legitimate stakeholders (which isn't the worst problem to have by any means), none of whom wants to surrender what he or she's built, in many cases after years of struggle and hard work.
Wayne Bryan, the coach/activist dad of doubles team Mike and Bob Bryan, sent me an interesting email on this subject yesterday. Let me quote him:
"It should all shut down at a minimum at the end of October. Tournaments could be doubled up. We don't have to eliminate tournaments - just double or triple-up on some weeks. And a super simple way to knock off one week is to get rid of that extra off week between Bercy and the London Masters Cup. No reason for it, and it just makes the players train one more week. They all want it over and done with.
It would be good for the fans to get a break too! Who would want to watch football or baseball or basketball all year?! There is a natural cycle to things and you need a winter to have an exciting and fresh new spring. Same with tennis"
This is an interesting compromise, especially in an era that has produced multiple stars and a terrific depth chart of former Grand Slam winners and no. 1s. The field at each of the tournaments, particularly the triple-up ones, would certainly be diluted. But that can be adjusted in the ranking-points distribution scheme. The biggest problem you'd have would be the inevitable decline in the prestige of certain events - two of the nine elite Masters 1000 events are played in the fall, and they rely heavily (as does the ATP tournament and rankings structure) on quality-of-field.
Wayne touches on an interesting big-picture issue here as well. Why restrict the number of events that can take place in any given week? This philosophy is driven by the legitimate desire to ensure that the ATP stages highly competitive tournaments, but a good part of the think is also driven by a form of protectionism that may help individual tournaments but hurt the game at large. This raises interesting issues that cut right to the heart of market and regulation theories similar to the ones being punted around in Washington D.C. during this recession. How much intervention or outright control of markets do we need without choking off the sources of revenue and growth, or crippling otherwise functional and efficient markets?
By nature, I'm drawn to free-market notions - that may have something to do with having had to operate in just such a market (as a journalist and author) for good portions of my life. I know that competition makes everyone work harder and broadly improves the "product" - isn't the tale of the last 10 years in tennis a testament to that? The ATP should re-examine it's current template, which may represent the worst of both worlds: the calendar is overloaded, yet it's exclusionary and contains protectionist mechanisms that inhibit the growth of the game.
Everyone in tennis is proud of the astonishing globalization that has occurred in the past few decades; this truly is a world game. But this a pretty big world. Maybe it can host five, seven, even nine tournaments every week (of course, it does this, if you count Challenger and Futures tournaments). Once upon a time, the men and women who built the tours were concerned with depth of field; they were loath to present a diluted product. But a glance at any main tour qualifying draw, and even at the Challenger draws, easily lays to rest any fear that the competition is not up to snuff. When guys like Jesse Witten or Turkey Marsel Ilhan go two, three rounds at a Grand Slam tournament before rejoining the Challenger circuit, you don't have a depth problem.
Furthermore, while having mandatory events makes some sense, why not let the rankings points on offer be the greatest inducement to players - pure and simple. Ah, but then some male version of Dinara Safina might replace a Roger Federer or Rafael Nadal as no. 1!
So what? It's a computer ranking; a print-out washed away and distintegrated within months or even weeks by the tide of reality. Serena and Venus Williams have shown us that there comes a point where such considerations as computer ratings cease matter, or even be persuasive. Over the past few months, we dealt with an awkward situation vis a vis the rankings. But did the brouhaha over Dinara Safina's no. 1 ranking really hurt tennis?
My view is that it helped keep tennis in the headlines, and that - as always - the truth came out in the wash. The obsession with creating a perfect system, individual desires and needs be damned, is dehumanizing. The Williams sisters have been reprising a secular version of that great movie Chariots of Fire, by refusing to live in fear of the monolithic WTA computer, much like Eric Liddell refused to compete in track (for religious reasons) on Sunday. Everyone has his or her priorities and more power to them. The way I see it, everybody won in that recent WTA rankings controversy - including (and perhaps most of all) Safina.
Despite some rough spots, the current ATP template works pretty well. There's no pressing need to monkey with it. The concept nosedives after the US Open, though, so that's where the focus ought to be for the ATP. Perhaps we could essentially de-centralize the fall. Arlen Kantarian, formerly the CEO of Pro Tennis for the USTA, was on the right track when he toyed with the idea of trying to create a calendar featuring regional tours, enabling tennis to have, say, fall tournaments simultaneously in Asia, North America and Europe. I don't think ATP pros want to stow their rackets for two months starting at the end of October; what they want is a break from the demands of high-level competition, and the stress of travel.
To that end, I disagree with my colleague James Martin, who thinks that a winding down of high-value events in the fall might open a pandora's box of exhibitions. Such events have always been a significant part of tennis; in fact, some of the most storied of tennis happenings have been exos, whether you're talking about the Billie Jean King vs. Bobby Riggs match, the Pepsi Grand Slam tournaments where Bjorn Borg first got a handle on Jimmy Connors, or even the recent Roger Federer vs. Pete Sampras shoot-outs. Special events, including those staged for charity, can be low-load affairs that enable players to stay sharp during down time from the tour, they grow the game, help keep tennis on the sports pages, and provide earning opportunities.
Unless the knee injury he suffered in Shanghai is more severe than we know, Andy Roddick will have no trouble hopping on a plane (or, in this case, a subway), to help James Blake run his upcoming exhibition in New York on Dec. 1. I'm not so sure Roddick would have been so eager to help if Blake had scheduled that charity event for, say, Tangiers.
If I were Adam Helfant, the first thing I would do is sit down with the top players and say, okay, what are your most important concerns and beefs. Is it having to compete for ranking points in November, having to travel from Europe to China to fulfill a Masters 1000 obligation, or a lack or training time because of all the playing time. How do you see your ideal schedule, committment-wise and travel-wise? What is the ideal life you can envision, given the realities of what you do for a living?
The answers to such questions would provide the best jumping-off point for any tweaking of the system.
Mornin'. I'm jumping in here early because after the three-day weekend, things are apt to be pretty hectic at the office. I do plan to have a more substantial post later in the day (subject: James Blake), but meanwhile this will be the place for you to discuss today's matches, follow Master Ace's scheduling alerts to see who's playing where, and when, and generally gab about anything that interests you, including tennis - at a time of year when that's a real ask for all but the most dedicated of fans.
I spent the past three days in Boston and on Cape Cod with my family and friends. The weather was gorgeous and we had a chance to catch up with old friends. Luke had a great time; there must have been 15 kids, all of them about the same age, around for the weekend.
Looking toward China, I see Novak Djokovic picked up the win in Beijing. It came at just the right time, let's see if he can build on it and finish the year strong again. Do we detect a pattern developing here?
It's nice to be home, but I did a lot of driving so I'm going to auto-post this, take a peek to see if the New York Jets are going to pull it out over the Miami Dolphins, and I'll be back with y'all at about the time you read this. Enjoy today's tennis!
It's unseasonably cold in Calgary: a string of sub zero degree Celsius days, and a light dust of snow. Time for the things we've been saving for Autumn: some bottles of Aussie Shiraz, the track suit for our own tennis matches, and the last tournaments before the exhausted ATP and WTA elite gather for their year end championships.
This year, the ATP has moved its YEC to London, compensating Shanghai with a bright shiny ATP Masters 1000 tournament.It will be strange, for me at least, to see the year end ATP tournament in its new location, although the tournament was literally held within a stone's throw of my house in Houston for two years. A colleague persuaded me to play hooky from work to watch Federer-Gaudio, RR 2004: because of rain, we saw the warm-up and six points. This was before TW, of course. I suppose you can say my loss will be (ultimately) Rosangel's gain.
It was a busy night in the far east, with Djokovic and Tsonga winning ATP titles in Beijing and Tokyo respectively. For the WTA, Svetlana Kuznetsova enjoyed a straight sets win in Beijing over Agnieszka Radwanska.
Djokovic's post final experience sounds like it was something to see. According to commenter malimeda:
The Beijing trophy presentation was hilarious: a slightly hysterical but beautiful lady MC bluntly told Nole he's "very handsome and loved by Chinese girls" and wanted to know whether he's pleased with the fact. And Nole answered with a long sentence in Chinese!
After both players answered a few questions (Marin being informed he's "very tall"), the silly MC insisted that Nole should perform his imitations. He awkwardly declined, she insisted again, he proposed a random spectator to some down and imitate him, she kept on insisting, and finally he conceded to honour Rafa, an absent champ, with his trademark trophy biting.
With thanks to the indefatigable Master Ace, the draw for Shanghai is here. Enjoy the tennis!
Hey there, TWibe! Are we getting used to waking up at the break of dawn (or staying up 'til then) to catch the action in Asia? Yeah, me neither. Still, the past couple of weeks have seen some fun (well, fun for some, wonky for others) matches and results, worth sacrificing sleep over.
As much as I'm enjoying the tennis, though, baseball has replaced it as my favorite sport - for the month of October, anyway. That's right, the postseason has arrived ... and I'm pumped! I've been looking forward to the postseason for months now, as I do every year; I won't miss a single postseason game, and I'll wish for extra innings in each, just to prolong the end of the day's coverage. I suppose it's tantamount to my experience watching Grand Slams, especially the US Open. During the night sessions, you'll usually find me rooting for one player in one set and his/her opponent in the next, just so the match'll go the distance! (My sleep schedule takes its fair share of hits, doesn't it?)
I know I'm not the only one around here who's gone baseball-crazy (I see those Tweets and Facebook statuses, guys!), so I invite you to share your division series thoughts and predictions. I dare not mention that I'm rooting for the Yankees, right? Crap, I just did ...
Postseason baseball is also meaningful in that it signals the arrival of fall. I dread saying goodbye to the warmth of summer, but the beauty of the fall season almost makes up for it. This is no more apparent than in today's photo; that's Pete's adorable son Luke at the farm, set against a glorious autumnal backdrop. It almost looks unreal, doesn't it? That's quite a shot, Pete - thanks for sharing!
Now on to today's off-topic topic ...
Remember the YouTube series we started back in July? I thought that more than enough time had passed since our last YouTube-related post, so here's your third installment!
We kicked off our series with a YouTube music festival (click here to relive it), then we followed that up with a post on tennis videos (check that one out here). I thought this post, then, could be a mix of the two. Pete actually came up with the idea during the music festival. Here's what he said: Found Los Lobos doing "La Bamba" live, knew I would: http://tinyurl.com/knlj7f. For some reason, I've always thought of this as the soundtrack to Rafa. Some other time, we'll have to pick songs that define players. I think what you come up with will tell you how you feel about the player in question.
Songs that define players ... let's do it!
In need of some inspiration? Start off by checking out some of those "Un jour à Roland" videos (I know many of you have already seen 'em, but they're worth a second - or third or fourth! - look). A little background: At Roland Garros a couple of years ago, a French program ran segments of various players singing karoake; not only are the clips hilarious, but the songs are actually perfect examples of player "soundtracks." (Note that Pete's pick for Rafa, "La Bamba," was his chosen karaoke song! What is it about the song that's so "Rafa," you think?) Here are the top 10 performances: http://tinyurl.com/yf47u9e.
Want more examples? Here are a few of mine, off the top of my head:
Whenever I hear Common's "Universal Mind Control," I think of Serena (because they're dating - but perhaps some of her opponents would agree with the "mind control" part). I always associate Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" with Andy Murray after seeing him enthusiastically sing along to it during a changeover. Christina Aguilera's "Fighter" seems like it could work for Maria. Maybe "Sex on Fire" by Kings of Leon for Marat? (I just opened up a can o' worms, didn't I.)
Now it's your turn. Choose a song that best fits a player, sort of like his/her "theme song." How does it define him/her? If that's too difficult, feel free to go in a different direction, like I did with my Serena and Andy picks. You can select a song that reminds you of a player ... a song of a player's favorite artist (come on, you know you've looked it up!) ... a song by an artist who looks like a player ... anything!
And please try to follow these guidelines:
This is part of our YouTube series, so duh!, make sure to post your song selections as YouTube videos. TinyURL is appreciated but not necessary.
Include a brief description of the clip, so we'll know what we're clicking on, and don't forget to explain why you chose it (how is it related to the player in question?).
It may seem improbable that a player finds a silver lining in a tennis match that he lost after leading 40-15 on serve at 5-all in the third, and that’s doubly true if the winner went on to make the third round of the US Open. But good things have happened to Ryan Harrison, the 17-year old from Bradenton, Fla., since he let that US Open qualifying match against Turkey’s Marsel Ilhan slip through his fingers.
In recent weeks, Harrison has been on fire, and he’s won a few comparably tight matches in the process. He was in the final of the USA Futures event at Costa Mesa, and he won the Futures tournament at Laguna Niguel. Presently, he’s in the quarterfinals of a tournament at the next level up, the Sacramento Challenger. He was a wild card entry, but he’s already beaten the no. 8 seed, Grega Zemlja. Only two players since 1990 have won ATP-level matches at a so young an age: Richard Gasquet and Rafael Nadal.
“I used that loss (to Ilhan) as an excitement,” Harrison told me. “Although I lost that one, I thought, ‘Wow, I could have done a few things better, yet the guy who beat me went all the way to the third round of the Open.’ It gave me a little confidence that’s paying off now.”
The experience also taught Harrison a valuable lesson: when you have an opponent backed into a corner, make him earn every point. Harrison remembers that at 40-15, he “stressed a little bit” and tried to end the game by attacking the net behind his second serve. Ilhan stepped around the delivery and hit a cold winner. Next, Harrison pulled the plug on a developing rally with an ill-advised drop shot, and from deuce it was all downhill for Harrison.
“In that situation the guy is nervous. You have make him earn the point,” Harrison said. “He might make a mistake, or start pushing, so you really have to stay calm and construct the points. I guess I was just trying to get out of the game, instead trying to break him down. If I had constructed either of those last two points, I might have broken him down and maybe it would have been me, not him, in the third round of the Open.”
It’s a good thing any time you hear a 17-year old with an atomic serve talk about constructing points on the court instead of blistering the paint off it. Harrison’s took a bit step toward maturity as a player that day, and his current form should elevate his ranking to inside the top 400. That’s still a long way from his destination, the ATP main tour, but he’s still technically a junior. Plus, he lost a good portion of last year, and the early part of this year, because of a stress fracture in his back.
Harrison, whose father Pat is a teaching pro at the Nick Bollettieri IMG Tennis Academy (the family moved there last November), made the risky decision to turn pro long before his junior eligibility expired, even though his best 18-and-under result in a Grand Slam was a semifinal at the Australian Open of 2007.
“My aspiration all along was to turn pro, and when I came back from my back injury in April the time seemed right. I didn’t even have to think about it very long,” he said. “This is what I’ve wanted to do all along.”
Harrison, whose gifted younger brother is also at the Bollettieri Academy, was born in Shreveport, La., although the family later moved to New Braunfels, Tx., so the boys could train at John Newcombe's tennis ranch. In elementary school, Ryan missed so much school when he was eleven because of tennis that at one point the teachers refused to allow him to make up work. They just started giving him zeros.
“My parents were always going in to apologize, because I was always off playing events, and really enjoying it,” Harrison recalled. “Finally, my parents asked how I felt about being home schooled, to take off some of that school pressure. That was okay with me. My mom Susan was a teacher when my parents got married anyway. She insisted I study and she stayed on me about my grades all along.”
Harrison is a poised, thoughtful, articulate young man with an impressive vocabulary and a realistic grasp of the trade-offs he’s made – not exactly what you might expect of a kid who fundamentally insisted on running off to join the circus. He seems years more mature than many of his contemporaries.
“I don’t really think I’m missing out on what they call a ‘normal’ life. Most kids my age have never been out of their home towns, while I played all the Grand Slam qualis this year, and have already been to and a lot of the major cities in the world. This is the life I always wanted to have.”
Harrison also had a chance to sing before a banquet hall full of people not long ago, although that wasn’t really part of his grand blueprint for life. It happened during the US vs. Croatia Davis Cup tie a few months ago, when he (along with Devin Britton) joined the squad as practice players. The US Davis Cup squad has a rich hazing tradition, and the veterans on the team (James Blake, Mardy Fish, Bob and Mike Bryan, and Andy Roddick – the latter via SMS text) gave the newbies a choice: one had to sing at the traditional teams banquet, the other had to make the speech customarily given by the team captain.
“If you know Devin, he wasn’t about to get up and sing. So he shotgunned the speech right away,” Harrison said. “So I got stuck with the singing. They wanted me to do this Journey song, Don’t Stop Believing. Bob Bryan had an iPhone, and he pulled up the lyrics in the men’s room at the banquet hall. I studied the words for about ten minutes, but of course once I got up there I forgot almost all of them. I was awful. Just terrible. But I guess I got a little respect out of just going up there and doing it.”
Harrison doesn’t lack for friends. He’s good buddies with a number of promising American players, including Britton and Chase Buchanan. They talk, text, and compete in a fantasy football league of their own. They’re also aware of the hue and cry about the apparent demise of American tennis. No American male has won a Grand Slam title in six years – the longest dry spell for the US in the history of the game.
“We hear what people say,” Harrison said. “At least in my case, when I hear that we’re not dedicated, that we’ve become soft, stuff like that – it only motivates me. And I know Devin feels that way, too, because we’ve talked about it. We’re trying to give everything in order to get American tennis going again.”
With American tennis to save, the career as a recording artist can wait.
As you all know, I was in Washington, D.C. last weekend to see my sister give a recital (she's a pianist) and visit some relatives. I had a wonderful time, though I missed hanging out here in the Deuce Club. How was everyone's Halloween? Did any of you dress up? If so, I'd love to see your costume! If you're willing to share your look with the group, please send photos to my Tennis.com e-mail and I'll include 'em in next week's DC.
Take a look at all of the awards and tell us who deserves to win what (and why, if possible). Consider both singles and doubles, and if you're stumped by a category, feel free to skip it - there's no such thing as an incomplete entry!
