Peter Bodo's TennisWorld

The Unintended 3

Well, we might as well call this Part 3 of an agreeable and illuminating discussion that began with my post, The Parisian Slide, and continued through Clay: The New Grass? Some comments that went up right around closing time, from Ryan, Todd and in Charge, and others made me realize that our discussion of the nature of clay-court tennis really wasn't finished.

So let's pick up where we left off, after I voice this caveat:

Some people react to an analysis/criticism of the clay-court game a little more defensively than is necessary, because it strikes them as a slight of their favorite surface, or favorite player. I just hope everybody remembers that the discussion takes a place on a pretty high plane. Guys who win or even go deep at Roland Garros and get to quarters or semis on grass or hard courts are great players, period. But there are great players and. . . great players. Sure, we can focus on what everyone does best and call it good. It's not like I enjoy focusing on the negative. What I like to focus on is the distinctions and differences, and finding an answer to why some men or women win eight majors, and others win just two. A guy who wins two majors is a great player, but not as great a one as a guy who wins eight. It's why they play the game.

In the course of helping Pete Sampras write his forthcoming autobiography, A Champion's Mind, we talked a lot about Roland Garros. I think some of that material will be fresh and interesting to all of you, so I'm not giving it away here. What I'll say, though, is that at the end of the discussion and analysis, Pete kind of smiled, shrugged, and said, "We can talk about it until we're blue in the face, but the bottom line is that maybe I just wasn't good enough on clay to win the French Open."

The mark seems especially poignant today, in the wake of Rafael Nadal's win over Roger Federer in the Monte Carlo final. Maybe Roger Federer just isn't good enough to beat Rafael Nadal on clay, although we'll add: unless Nadal is off his game. Steve Tignor and I were talking about that just this morning. The Mighty Fed's fans might have a hard time conceding that this might be true, but it seems to me that the hunt for the magic bullet has been pretty futile, and it's beginning to sound repetitious. But check out some of the remarks made yesterday by Michael Stich on the Federer-Nadal rivalry (I quoted them at my ESPN blog today).

One of the reasons that Nadal can dominate Federer on clay, and one of the most powerful rebuttals to Stich, is that Nadal is a great mover. Hence, he's able to offset some of the versatility, ball control, and rhythm-breaking strategies that Federer needs to employ against him. Which brings us to what Ryan wrote in a late-afternoon post on Saturday:

Pete--who are these poor movers that benefit from clay? 

Andy Roddick? Lindsay Davenport? You could certainly make the case for Monica Seles or Mary Pierce, but I'm struggling to think of any others...

I think excluding Coria from "your" argument is kinda disingenuous. If this guy isn't the prototype for players who get labeled CCS, who is?

Also, I'd say that people like Costa, Berasategui, etc, your typical CCS, are great movers, but on hard courts they move (and play) in the wrong framework (loopy shots way behind baseline), negating their great movement. Who are the CCS that don't have great movement?

I'm going to open this up talking about three former players some of you may not even have heard of: the Australian former pro, John Alexander, my good friend, the smooth Hungarian player, Balazs Taroczy, and Juan Balcells.

Alexander, an Aussie, was heralded as the "next" John Newcombe because he was tall, strong, and played the "big game" (serve and volley) at a time when it was still the dominant and most productive style. Big "JA" never survived the fourth round at Wimbledon, but he won two of his career seven titles at Louisville and North Conway, on clay. The reason? Alexander was powerful but slow; the clay gave him a little more time to set up his shots and therefore play more aggressively. On days when his unforced error count was low, his wingspan and power were important, productive assests. But they could never make him a better mover; that's one thing that doesn't change, even when you're in the zone.

Taroczy was one of the least able movers on the tour during his heyday, yet he won 13 titles, all of them on clay (or certainly the vast majority; the records are somewhat murky). He won Hilversum six times, a unique achievement in and of itself and, yes, there apparently was something in the water. He also upset Jimmy Connors on clay at Indianapolis (when it was the US Clay Court Championships, and everybody played it).

By any stretch, Balazs was a "clay-court expert" ("specialist" if you insist), and it was because he had rock-solid groundstrokes, including a gorgeous, clean, one-handed  backhand (either sliced or driven). He was a force at Roland Garros, losing to Bjorn Borg in back-to-back years, including once in the quarters. But at the US Open and Wimbledon, he reached the fourth round exactly once. He just didn't move well enough to keep up with the pace on faster courts. We used to laugh and joke about it.

Balcells was a Spanish player who won one career title: Bucharest (on clay). I mention him partly  because he was one of the most interesting players I've ever seen. Despite his heritage, Juan was a "pure" serve-and-volley player with great hands and touch, but clay remained his best surface. So here was a guy who ought to have enjoyed the best of both worlds, a grounding in clay, an inclination and strokes suitable for rushing the net. But if memory serves, he didn't move well enough, and his best hard court results were similar to his best efforts on clay.

Okay. I'll be the first to admit that there are mold-breaking players and oddities in career results (six Hilversum titles?). Also, any Top 50 pro can catch fire for a week or two and win on. . .anything. But Alexander and Taroczy are good examples of the way the slowness of red clay can benefit less athletic players. I'm going to go to another comment now before I get into greater specifics, this one from Todd and in Charge.

So you can win on clay without being a great mover. You can win on clay without being a great server. You can win on clay without being a great returner. And you can win on clay even against "superior" players.

Pete, tell us what you really think!

Actually, if you connect the dots you can easily see exactly what I think, and I think it taps into what I've written above. And here I'll borrow and twist a phrase from former US President Bill Clinton and First Laddie in waiting: It's the groundstrokes, stupid!

Let's pause and look at the National Football League. Can a team win its division, or even the Super Bowl, without a great quarterback, a great running back, or great quartet of receivers? Of course it can; a team can win big with a defense capable of shutting down all opponents' offensive weapons (or something as simple as a muddy [clay-like?] field, as comment poster Robin aptly noted). And consistent, steady ground strokes are tennis's equivalent of a great defense.

This begs the question: does a player needs to be a great mover to have a great ground game? I don't think so. Most top pros are "fast" enough to get to the majority of the forehands and backhands hit by an opponent; in fact, many players with great ground strokes can hide their relatively poor movement because they can control points - just think of Monica Seles - with their groundstrokes. This is the hole card of the clay-court expert.

Of course, a lot of CCEs are great movers - Coria is a fine example. And nobody said that just because a guy has trouble adapting his game to faster courts, it automatically means he's a poor mover (Alberto Berasategui is a good example of a guy who moved well but had other, insurmountable liabilities). Loopy strokes, playing from too defensive a posture, from too far back from the court, things like that also can keep a lethal clay-court player who moves well  - a Sergi Bruguera - out of the mix on other surfaces most of the time. But the combination of reliable groundstrokes and the fitness to run east-west all day will produce plenty of wins on clay - and pose more problems for opponents on clay than on any other surface.

The first and still greatest example of a player who won almost exclusively by defense, by playing great east-west tennis and, as an NFL analyst might say, "great tackling", was Guillermo Vilas. He put up his first big win on grass, beating Ilie Nastase in the 1974 Masters final, and while he won two Australian Open titles on grass, he did it at a time when  many top players didn't play; he is first win, in 1978, was over John Marks (0 career titles), and he defended successfully against John Sadri (2 career titles). But under the tutelage of his Svengali-like coach,  Ion Tiriac, Vilas decided to become the quintessential clay-court grinder. It simply suited his athletic balance sheet to do so, because he was more of a bull than a deer, and saddled with a weak serve despite being lefty. He won one Roland Garros title (1977) title and was runner-up on three other occasions.

Vilas consciously "made" himself into a clay-courter, in a way that it's impossible to imagine a clay-courter making himself into a dominant fast court player (Bjorn Borg was both, partly because of his movement, which is also why he was Vilas's nemesis). This suggests that on clay, Vilas was able to compensate for  the shortcomings that prevented him from winning more fast-court events with his fitness and groundstrokes. But the key thing here is that Vilas didn't just end up doing "well" on clay -  we aren't talking about a Costa or even a Coria here - he became a Hall-of-Famer and the Open-era's third best player on clay. And more power to him for picking his battles and overcoming some formidable natural obstacles.

Tomas Muster is another good case study. To his credit, Muster never gave up on hard court events, although he has the distinction of being a former No. 1 who did not win a single match at Wimbledon - not in his career (he only entered the event four times). Muster had the heart of a lion; he rebounded from a seemingly career-ending knee injury (a courtesy car backed into him) to dominate on clay and ultimately earn the no. 1 ranking. He won a couple of hard court titles (including Miami and Dubai), but he stands alongside Vilas as a master of the east-west game. Both of them invited opponents to get into rallies, and played in such a way that they were inevitable.

Neither Vilas nor Muster could be called a great mover, and you can throw two-time Roland Garros champion Jim Courier into that company as well. Courier wasn't really about east-west tennis, his approach rested on a determination to get into position to dictate with his explosive forehand, from inside the court, which he did with outstanding success. Courier moved better than it might have appeared, and that was made clear by his two triumphs on Australian hard courts.

The bottom line is that these are three former no. 1s (Vilas was, arguably, no. 1 in 1977, but that was before the official computer rankings went on-line. I voted for him in a major poll that year and heard about it from Borg fans). They're undisputed clay-court titans. But only Courier equaled his French Open results on another surface. And that means that the skills that worked so well on clay either didn't travel well, or some other factor kicked in, to block the grander ambitions of Muster and Vilas. Their mastery of the east-west game is a tribute to specific gifts, but their inability to export a more deadly version of the game to other surfaces is a comment on relatively poor movement, manifested as a lack of quickness, weakness in the transition from defense to offense, bad footwork going north to south, or all of the above.

The clay court honor roll is inscribed with plenty of players who were great movers, but some of the biggest names were not. I can't help but think that means something.

 

Clay: the New Grass?

Mornin'. I have a post up at ESPN on today's crazy "dream quarterfinals" - I used the adjective because I can't recall another occasion on which the top two players in the world were embroiled in quarterfinals against guys who are 2-0 against them in most recent meetings - especially when the alpha dog is said to be slumping, while beta-hound could be forgiven for suffering from CCFS, or Chronic Clay Fatigue Syndrome,the clinical term for the been-there, done-that ennui Rafael Nadal is entitled to feel after having  accomplished so much, year after year, on the red dirt of the Europe.

Those dream quarterfinals are over now. Roger Federer overcame a 5-7 first set loss to eliminate David Nalbandian, and David Ferrer got scared when he was in a position to split sets with Rafael Nadal and suddenly decided to stop poking the big dog with his Prince stick.

To me, this looked like Federer's most important if not necessarily his best match of the year. In addition to having lost to Nalbandian the last two times out, Federer's been fending off charges that he's slumping, and continuing his convalescence from mononucleosis (some fans of The Mighty Fed will fall back on the "still recovering from mono" defense when Federer happens to lose a match during the 2011 season).

Nalbandian, probably still giddy from his heroic Davis Cup efforts, was a potentially lethal rival, and for TMF to have come back so persuasively after losing a close first set suggests that we might be back to business as usual: Federer on track to meet Nadal in a final (name your place and surface), with Novak Djokovic insisting on playing the third wheel.

Nadal is, simply, a clay-court  puzzle with no solution. The combination of his style, athletic gifts, and sheer grit makes him more than just the best clay-court player of the era - it casts him as the yardstick against which all clay-court wizards must be measured. In my ESPN post, I wrote:

This highlights one of the more interesting features of clay-court tennis: On no other surface do you have quite as many compelling matches, due to the leveling influence of the slow red dirt. The tour has a prominent number of clay-court experts whose consistency trumps what weaknesses they have thanks to the extra time the courts provide for drawing a bead on a shot.

I continued thinking about that claim, and what it might mean, long after I filed that column last night. It's worth vetting, too, because it raises more questions than it answers, and leads to developing a deeper appreciation for the game of tennis in all its glorious variety. I think to fully benefit from this, we need to de-romanticize clay for some, and de-demonize it for others. To do that properly, we should look at the clay-court game in the long perspective.

Although tennis was thought to have been invented in France, as an offshoot of court tennis, and then exported to England (how's that for "long perspective"?), there's no doubt that the British were the Johnny Appleseeds of the game (a service they performed for a host of other games as well - you all know the famous line about the British being much better at inventing and popularizing games than actually playing them). They also had a great climate for using grass, or turf, as a surface, and I sometimes wonder if sporting precedents didn't almost demand that tennis be played on turf. If you wanted to try tennis, why not do it on the same lawn where you played croquet? Almost all worthy sports, including horse racing, took place on grass. Remember, in those simpler, pre-synchronized  swimming and snowboard half-pipe days, the sporting menu was smaller and not yet broken down into niche cultures.

The mentality might have been the same in Europe as well; there's a lot of grass there, too, right?  But the climate and traditions were different - as were the games you played at home. You played bocce, and most of its cousin sports, on dirt, right? The priorities were different, and so were the options. I'm not really up on where the world's great stores of terre battu and clay lie, but I'm pretty sure that if the British wanted to play tennis on clay instead of grass, they had more than ample opportunity to do so. It just didn't make much sense to go that way, for reasons unrelated to why we as fans prefer one surface or another.

The French and Italians did not go with clay because they were afraid that big servers and ruthless volleyers would destroy the appeal of game, or the spectator's viewing pleasure, or because they had more television air-time to fill and thus wanted longer matches. Clay just made sense. After all, what do you need to play tennis, surface-wise? It isn't Frisbee, which can be played on fairly rugged terrain because the disk, unlike a tennis ball, doesn't ever touch the ground. The one thing tennis requires is a (literally) level playing field. Clay just happened to be a workable material that was superior to most other naturally occurring forms of ever-abundant dirt, while still being relatively easy to obtain. And when some genius came up with the idea of a loose top-dressing, clay morphed from a merely practical, bare-bones surface into an ingenious one.

You can just hear the proverbial first-man-to-play-on-clay declare: It's kind of weird at first, with all that slipping and sliding, but once you get used to it, its fun! Of course, that same sporty gent, visiting England the following year and having been invited to a game of tennis on grass, probably exclaimed: Zut alors! This stuff sure is different, I'd better learn to run up to the net!

Thus was born the great tradition of surface-driven tennis or the original and still most valid justification for using that mindless expression, Different strokes for different folks. . .

Back then, though, equipment and even the degree of importance most people assigned to sport (it was rarely seen as an activity that you became good at just for its own sake) tended to suppress the potential differences in the way the game might or should be played on different surfaces. Nobody was cracking 140 MPH aces with a lollipop-shaped wooden racket and bakery twine for sting. But as tennis evolved and became a more serious undertaking, ultimately, even a profession, the difference between surfaces, and the styles bred on those surfaces, became increasingly important.

But the International Tennis Federation was a British body, and partly for that reason The All-England Club and New York's West Side Tennis Club were way ahead of the curve when it came to promoting the game as a spectacle. Thus, grass became the most important surface in tennis. It's significant that the French Open was a "closed" to non-French players until the relatively late date of 1925, and the tournament stood in grave danger of losing its prestige as a Grand Slam event, if not the actual designation, until Philippe Chatrier embarked on what has been a wildly successful rehabilitation of the event in the mid-1970s. However you feel about it, historically and factually, the French Open was both provincial and exotic until Chatrier brilliantly converted its greatest drawback (it was the only major not played on grass) into an enormous and bewitching asset (it's the only major played on clay, the surface of choice in many parts of the world).

The divide between the surfaces began to grow smaller with the demise of grass-court tournaments, and reached critical mass when the U.S. Open abandoned grass in favor of hard courts. The Australian Open soon followed suit, and only Wimbledon's brilliant ability to retain its prestige saved that event from either oblivion - or a surface change (the effort is multi-pronged, but based on walking a tightrope between retaining its privileged place as the official shrine of tennis and keeping up with changing times - something at which few institutions are nearly as good as the All-England Club).

But at the same time, radical advances in equipment and the generation-by-generation improvement in the game and players helped sustain appreciable differences in the way the game was played by surface. The growing success of the European clay circuit also ensured that clay would not become irrelevant, even as slow hard courts threatened to make clay redundant. Instead, those hard courts seemed to highlight the beauty and novelty of tennis on clay. In a way, clay has become what grass was before the Open era - a common surface but no longer a particularly practical surface, with distinct playing properties and appealing aesthetics in a world suddenly choc-a-bloc with utilitarian, boring hard courts.

This is pretty much were we are today, but with one other noteworthy difference. Given the technologies available today, both to racket manufacturers and court-builders, maybe even because of them, clay-court tennis is like auto racing with mandated governors (devices that keep a car from going over a pre-set speed). The up-side is that you have more players in the mix, because raw horsepower, and the ability of the support personal to squeeze it out, is de-emphasized. The down-side is that the playing field is not really leveled - it's just tilted to accommodate more people.

Keep in mind that this is an act of will (maybe desire is a better word), not, as was the case in the beginning, a practical choice or unconscious part of some evolutionary process. We have the wherewithal to have a truly level playing field on which all skills - including naked power -  are more equally rewarded, and all shortcomings more equally punished.  In fact, we may have it at the U.S. Open, and TMF's recent dominance there supports this idea. Has there ever been a more versatile, multi-talented, weakness-free, weapon-toting pro out there? That he, as well as his buddy, Pete Sampras, haven't won the French makes a pretty good case for the argument that there's more wrong with clay than there is with Federer or Sampras.

That's okay, though, this isn't a complaint. For all the grief it brings tennis, you have to love the way the game has clung to certain traditions and convictions, the chief of which is that using different surfaces is an asset rather than a detriment to the game, and not for purely economical reasons I'll admit I erred in this when the Boston Red Sox decide to reverse the grass-dirt geometry at Fenway Park for a change of pace, or the some NBA team goes with peach baskets and a nice, hard, dirt court.

Meanwhile, I'm going to settle back and enjoy tennis on clay, the new grass.

The Parisian Slide

Okay, I promise you that in my last post, I did not throw out that line about success on clay having more to do with "personal style" than technique, or training. I'll also be the first to admit that I was hardly surprised when some of our most astute and faithful posters rose to the bait with as much vim as the brown trout here in the northeast are now rising to newly hatched mayflies. So I'm going to zero in on that subject, and some of the issues raised by my able critics and friends.

Todd and in Charge cut to the chase, as is his habit, with this comment:

I want to pick up on this intriguing comment from Pete:

"The bottom-line is that doing well on clay, even the red clay of Europe, has less to do with training and experience than with style."

Hold on -- how does this jibe with Pete's oft-touted position that at the end of the day tennis is principally a mental game -- that the differences in technique and stroke formation etc. at the top level are small, and that what separates consistent winners from losers are grit, determination, and smart mental play?

Well, Todd's question is a bit tangential, but my feeling is that even more than reinforcing my point about the priority of style, it undermines the conventional wisdom that there is some "secret" or bio-mechanical basis for playing well on clay (although certain techniques, like the ability to slide, certainly help determine proficiency on clay). Give me a mentally tough player with attributes conducive to success on clay (most importantly, the confidence, willingness and ability to suspend the impulse to the quick resolution of any given point), and I'll show you a clay-court champion.

In fact, I'll give you the name of one (although there are more) such clay court champion: perennial Roland Garros contender and two-time champion, Jim Courier.

As a product of the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy (BTW, there are plenty of Har-Tru clay courts there), he played the quintessential hard court, Bollettieri-era game - a game I've periodically described as the New World Style. The trademarks are playing from inside the court (taking the ball on the rise, if you prefer), and eschewing the conventional attack on the net in favor of gaining court position to dictate with the forehand. You can always tell the New World Style because it ignores the measured approach shot once employed by the old world serve-and-volley or even all-court player in favor of the outright winning placement or, at second-best, a placement so penetrating that even if it's returned, the next ball can easily be put away.

I think the distinction Todd's comment begs to have made is between "style" and "technique". They are two different things. Style grows out of the application of technique, and is more - or less - friendly to the different surfaces. For example, Pete Sampras's "style", which grew out of the way he chose to use his biggest weapon (the serve) simply never was friendly to clay. Andre Agassi's style, which grew out of the way he used his big forehand and wonderfully economical groundstrokes, was friendly to clay.

And one other note on the mental front: in 1998, Sampras beat clay-court expert Ramon Delgado in the quarterfinals of Atlanta, a tournament played on green Har-Tru clay. About two months later, Sampras and Delgado met again in the second round of Roland Garros. Sampras looked like a fish flopping around on the dusty clay the whole way as he lost in straight sets. The difference between green and red clay, and the difference between playing in Atlanta and Paris, certainly played some role in the dramatic reversal.

My own feeling, though, is that the key factors were the uncertainty, frustration, and confusion Sampras by that time had started to feel on red clay - and specifically at Roland Garros. That lack of comfort and confidence, especially when combined with style-based liabilities, were simply more critical issues than whether or not Pete could slide, or squeeze enough service speed out of his arm. To this day, Sampras can't figure out why he never figured out clay.

Next, Embug weighed in:

I think training on red clay is important. Most Americans slide after hitting the ball, when European players who "grew up on clay" slide to the shot, which provides the split-second timing necessary for balance and recovery. With newer strings and racquet technology players can turn a clay-court encounter into a hard-court slug fest; however, the delicate touch shots and intrinsic timing when on clay still leaves Americans in the dust no matter how diligently they try to force a different dynamic.

I see her point, but in all honesty, how many matches are decided by "delicate touch shots", and I don't really see how sliding into a ball calls on more "intrinsic timing" than hitting one on the run - if anything,  I would say it calls for less, simply because a player sliding to a shot is relatively still. This suggests an important and counter-intuitive point:  for all the long rallies and the stamina required to win on clay, the champions on faster surfaces may bring superior athletic qualities to the game for two related reasons: the game is faster, which always makes it harder, and more balls have to be hit while on the run.

Why is Rafael Nadal so much better on fast courts than was his fellow red-clay icon, Guillermo Vilas?  Because Nasdal is twice the athlete. And note that as good as Vilas was on clay, record-wise, he only won at Roland Garros once and never came within shouting distance of a Wimbledon final. Sold clay-court technique, which is based on repetition and stroke consistency simply isn't at the apex of the champion's pyramid.

This, from Slice 'n Dice, responding to Embug:

Kudos for saying it perfectly. It's all about the feet on the clay. Movement, balance, and sliding are crucial to being able to compete on it, and as you pointed out, the best clay court players slide "to" strike the ball, as opposed to sliding "after" striking the ball.

Slice knows his stuff, and if we limit the discussion to technque and bio-mechanics, I agree with him up to a point - the point where I read the most irritating word in the clay-court lexicon: sliding. I've had it up to here with sliding. I hate the very idea of sliding any more, because it's such an overrated aspect of the clay-court game. Sliding is useful, but at some point it becomes the equivalent of fishtailing out of turn three (for you legions of NASCAR fans out there. . .). It becomes counter-productive - an extraneous, show-offy, silly flourish.

Richard Gasquet ought to be a big slider. Emilio Sanchez was a big slider. The dude would go sailing halfway across the red clay of the Court Centrale like freakin' Kristi Yamaguchi, chest all puffed out, chin thrust forward, looking for all the world like the figurehead on the prow of the lead ship in the Spanish armada. But does it ever occur to anyone intoxicated by the Parisian (as opposed to the Cuban) Slide that the technique is a stop-start action that inherently takes too much of the one thing that is usually in already short supply for a tennis player in a tough match - time?

Everyone who plays for a reasonable stretch of time on clay ends up sliding; it's a natural reaction, not the tennis eqivalent of a triple-toe-loop (or whatever the hail it is), which is why it's so easily abused and turned into a parlor trick. If you divided clay-court players into sliders and non-sliders (meaning those who seem to rely on the technique as an intrinsic part of their clay-court physical vocabulary, rather than something they do as the situation demands), I'll take the non-sliders any day.

I think the best non-slider on the tour today is Rafael Nadal (let's all watch him closely next time to see just how much sliding he really does; maybe I'll change my mind). Almost all the successful American players (on clay) were non-sliders, including Jimmy Connors. Ivan Lendl, Mr. All Business, wasn't a big slider, either.

Skip 1515 weighed in with this comment:

The issue of movement on red clay is surely one that affects the American men, but to my mind the real issue is what Robin's called shot tolerance: the ability to withstand the pressure (boredom?) of multiple 20 ball rallies. Someone like Roddick can play well enough for 4 matches that this doesn't become an issue, but faced with 7 matches against players who live on a diet of patience pills eventually catches up with you if you aren't equally committed to running a marathon every point.

I agree with Skip here, and a hat tip to Robin for that wonderful term, "shot tolerance."  This is style, along with a healthy dose of mental toughness, really come into play. The most successful gringo clay-court players always had shot tolerance no matter how what surface they played on. They had the tools, as well as the mentality, to avoid being unnerved or discouraged by the doomsday stroking machines who enjoy their moment in the sun during the clay-court season.

In fact, I'd say that the major issue for creative players who aspire to win Roland Garros (first and foremost, Roger Federer) is having the confidence, patience, and will to survive long enough to challenge the very best players on clay. One thing that really is different in the clay game is that, to borrow an analogy from boxing, you not only have to fight the feature bout, you're more likely to have to fight all the guys on the undercard, too. Clay-court tennis is a great leveler, on which every potential  weakness will be probed.

This brings us right up hard against an irony:  putting too much emphasis on technique devalues the great distinction and most profound value of the clay-court game, because it suggests that having the magic bullet, technique-wise, is the key to winning on clay. If Bjorn Borg won Roland Garros almost in his sleep, almost every year he played, was it because he had superior clay-court technique? And if so, did he also have the technical magic bullet for winning on grass, which has such different demands? And if so, how could one player have both, and if he did, can there be such a radical difference between them? What was Borg, the greatest clay-court player of the Open era, or the greatest grass-court player of the Open era?

Bjorn Borg is the ultimate proof that technique is the most wildly overrated aspect of success in tennis.

Fleaman wrote:

Sliding or not, I still think it would be worth for someone like Roddick to actually play the entire Euro clay court season. Running around and playing tennis on clay is not that hard and definitely not impossible to learn, so by the time RG rolls around a top-10 hard court player with 4-5 weeks of Euro clay under his belt/shoes should be able to win a few rounds, maybe even get into the second week. Since there aren't any points to defend but many to gain, especially Roddick could benefit from this strategy as those points might get him to number 5 or even 4 in the world,which would come in real handy when trying to avoid the Federer quarter of the draw at Wimbledon and the USO later in the season. . .

I find this comment simple but germane. I was there when Roddick first played Roland Garros (2001). He hammered serve-and-volley expert Scott Draper in straight sets, toughed out a high-quality five-set win over former French Open champion Michael Chang, and he was giving as good as he got against Lleyton Hewitt when he had to retire with a foot injury (they were at 2-2 in the third set, after having split the first two). Watching Roddick that day, I thought he could do well on clay.

Wait! What about that backhand? What about the movement?

The answers are interrelated: players who aren't quite as athletic as some of their peers do well on clay (hence all those "clay-court experts") because clay gives them a little more of that precious commodity, time - time to draw a bead, which is critical to being able to dictate with the forehand. Roddick at the time had boundless energy, a zeal for competition even on red clay, and a powerful enough serve to employ his nuclear forehand almost at will. A lot may have changed since then, but Roddick's serve and forehand have not.

I'll leave the last word to Rolo Tomasssi:

Of course there are differences between playing on hard courts and clay courts, but are they as vast as the discrepancy between American success elsewhere and on clay? Of course, tennis being tennis, the fact is that if our players believe they can't win on clay, then the truth of the matter is that they won't, so perhaps it's a moot point, but I do wonder....

hear, hear! And here we are, back at the starting point of a discussion that is less about American players than about what it really takes to perform well on clay.

In his final comment on my last post, Todd wrote:

My contention is the following: that in today's modern game, you are better served learning the fundamentals on red clay -- preferably in Spain or maybe South America, where you can then adjust your game and play acceptably on all surfaces. Americans learning on practice courts here in the States, even at places like Bradenton, wind up for the most part with Tommy Haas-like results on most surfaces, hard courts being their strength, red dirt being a major deficit, Wimby being somewhat neutral.

It's a valid point - if you agree with the premise. But then, how come the rankings aren't dominated by Spanish or South American players, or those who trained there? I think it's because even if you develop your game on clay,  personal style eventually trumps all. That's why Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker became attacking players, despite having been raised on clay, and that's why Roger Federer plays so differently from Rafael Nadal, despite also spending his formative years on similar red dirt.

Feat of Clay

In my most recent ESPN post I wrote about the official start of the clay-court season, and in what amounts to an aside I rued the fact that the U.S. doesn't have a single player who could be called a contender during what amounts to a two month stretch of tennis. In fact, James Blake's loss to Marcel Granoller-Pujol a few days ago in Houston is almost emblematic of the frustration - and futility - most North American players experience on clay. To wit: Blake looked like he might cruise to the title, but blew a 3-0 in the third lead and subsequently faded away.

And just think: if Wayne Odesnik had converted either of the two match-points he held in his semifinal against G-P, we would have had the unthinkable - an all-American final on clay! Okay, so it was on the clay of Houston, rather than the red dirt of, oh, Hamburg. It still would have been a rare moment - so much so that I just had to check to see when we last had a final between two U.S. players on clay. The answer: The very same Houston tournament, in 2003, when Andre Agassi tagged Andy Roddick for the title.

Now here's the scary part: the last time two Norteamericanos contested a clay court final outside the U.S. (the clay-court titles here are not high on the radar of the non-U.S. players, because they don't offer anything like the money or ranking points of the more prestigious European events) was the 1991 Roland Garros final between Jim Courier and Andre Agassi.

We won't venture down the "why can't we play on clay?" path again. The bottom-line is that doing well on clay, even the red clay of Europe, has less to do with training and experience than with style. There was nothing wrong with Jim Courier, Andre Agassi, Michael Chang or even Todd Martin's game on clay. Three of those men, you'll remember, won Roland Garros (Martin is the odd-man out), and Courier is one  of the few Open-era players to successfully defend a French Open title.

I got together with the ATP's invaluable Greg Sharko earlier today to try to figure out just how poorly U.S. male players have performed on clay since 1980, and came up with these ugly stats:

- That Agassi-Courier French Open final is the only European or South American clay-court final contested by Yanks in the 28-year period, perhaps longer.

- In 1982, four Americans won clay court tournaments: Jimmy Arias (Tokyo), Vitas Gerulaitis (Florence), Gene Mayer (Munich) and Van Winitsky (Hilton Head). Note that only one of those titles was earned on American soil.

- Michael Chang won just one clay-court title outside the U.S., the aforementioned French Open of 1989.

- Andre Agassi leads all players in the era under consideration,with seven clay-court career titles.

- Name the American player who is tied with Jim Courier, who has five career clay-court titles (answer will be the first Comment, below).

- Pete Sampras won three career titles on clay: Atlanta, Rome (Italian Open) and Kitzbuhel.

- The last American to win a clay-court title on European soil was Andy Roddick (St. Polten, 2003).

- Jim Courier is among the handful of players who managed to win Rome and Roland Garros back-to-back. He did it in 1992, and successfully defended at Rome in 1993.

So there it is, U.S. fans - read it and weep!

Rosangel's Reality Show

[Ed note: TW's own Rosangel has once again taken it upon herself to produce a statistically-based ranking/seeding that empirically demonstrates that the ATP rankings and Roland Garros seedings are not necessarily an accurate reflection of the performance realities. In fact, you could argue that they are grossly inaccurate and unfair, reflecting an inordinate prejudice in favor of top players as opposed to players who have proven themselves game combatants on clay. Rosangel has produced a clay-court ranking table (below) and you can compare her "real world" rankings/seedings to those Roland Garros has installed. Here is her email, giving you all the background you'll need to interpret her case and compare her stats to those of the ATP and Roland Garros. Great work, 'Angel! - PB]

Rosia writes the Tribe:

One of Wimbledon's more loveable eccentricities is its mysterious "Seeding Committee". Until a few years ago, Wimbledon used to have only 16 seeds, and the seedings were determined through some mysterious alchemy that attempted to combine factors like recent form, previous performance during The Fortnight, and the general qualities of a Champion - especially a champion's performance on grass.

This approach was one of the reasons some highly-ranked players, including Alex Corretja, Gustavo Kuerten, and Albert Costa, boycotted Wimbledon in a fit of pique one year. They felt it was unfair for Wimbledon to depart from the ATP Tour rankings, which had been embraced by almost all the other tournaments as the official seeding list. They reasoned that if you had earned, say, the No. 3 ranking, you should be automatically seeded No. 3, no matter what the surface.   

A few years ago, the Lords of Wimbledon were forced to compromise - they and the other Slams would have 32 seeds, drawn directly from the current world rankings, but Wimbledon alone insisted on its right to unilaterally depart from the rankings when it came time to determining the exact order in which those 32 would be seeded.

They felt the trade-off between a more accurate seeding and the threat of subjectivity (or denying the players something they had earned, as Corretja and company put it) was not just worth making, but had to be made. Wimbledon still clings to this position.

The other three majors, by contrast, have agreed to use the ranking list as the seeding order. It's hard to complain about the Australian or U.S Open capitulating on that issue. But Roland Garros is a different story. In blindly following the rankings, it produces an unrealistic seeding.

So to facilitate discussion of the men's Roland Garros draw, I've revived and updated the clay-court rankings I first compiled a month ago; they are now accurate as of the final at Hamburg. To interpret this table properly, the most significant column is the last one - it is the one that shows in most dramatic contrast the disparity between the real-world prowess of the players according to my numbers, versus where they sit in the ATP rankings - and thus in the RG seedings (the official RG website linked here doesn't even bother posting a seeding list - the link just jumps you to the ATP rankings, which doesn't even take into account the players who are not playing in Paris, but would be highly seeded if they were (Tommy Haas). How lazy is that?

Well, at least the draw has the seedings embedded. . .

Note that my chart contains 10 players who arent seeded at Roland Garros (that is, ranked lower than No. 37), but perhaps ought to be (the cut-off for RG seeds is No. 37 because five players ranked above Almagro can't or won't play the event). The most vivid example of the disparity is my clay-court No. 5, Filippo Volandri. I would argue that he ought to be seeded No. 5 in Paris, yet he barely made the seeding at RG with his "official" ranking of No. 34.

Important point: The points totals include only the ATP ranking  points earned on events played on clay on the full ATP tour; Challenger events are excluded. Also, I looked through the top 100 players - and then some - to make sure I didn't overlook players whose chief surface is clay, but whose overall rankings might be off the radar.   Where two players had the same total number of points, I broke the tie by doing the same as the ATP - I gave the higher ranking to the guy with most total points from Slams and Masters Series events (on clay only, of course!).

There are six current top 20 players who don't even make my "real world" Top 32 on clay: Andy Roddick, James Blake, Marcos Baghdatis, Andy Murray, Tommy Haas and Mario Ancic. The last three aren't playing this year, so the tournament dodged a bullet there. Of the players ranked 21-37, from which the remainder of the official RG seeds are drawn (the lowest seed is No. 37 Nicolas Almagro), eight make my Top 32, and nine don't (Jurgen Melzer at least made 33 on my list, with the same number of points as #32 Julien Benneteau). The other ten players who make my Top 32 are ranked anywhere between 38 and 82 (Luis Horna).

In other words, my clay-court rankings give the No. 82 player in the world the No. 27 seeding, while the official seedings bestow that honor on No. 30 Melzer, who didn't make my Top 32. That's quite a difference.

My conclusion: whatever weird and Wilanderous alchemical formula it might choose to adopt for transmuting performance into seedings, Roland Garros badly needs a Seeding Committee - just like Wimbledon. It may seem unfair to have something less than an empirical seeding (which mine is not, BTW), and you could argue that seeding should be based on year-round, proven performance. That can be defended conceptually, but in the real-world? It sure doesn't convince me.

Oh, it can be argued that some of the claycourters are high on my rankings list because of the number of clay events they play, but at some point this argument becomes circular; and it's still true that clay seedings ought to be based on real-world clay performance. At a clay-court event, it seems a lot wiser to reward players who play often and do well on clay than those who barely play on clay but rack up points on the more ubiquitous hard courts.

I've learned,  while calculating these rankings, that one significant contributor to the skewing process is the the fact that only 30% of all ATP points are awarded/gained on clay. Filippo Volandri is fifth in the world on clay at the moment for a reason. Why should it be such a surprise that he could take out a below-par Roger Federer in front of a home crowd in Rome? On the other hand, does anyone really think he'll be in the Roland Garros quarterfinals?

It doesn't really matter. My numbers say that he is presently the fifth-best in the world on clay. Wouldn't that justify seeding him No. 5 at Roland Garros? Isn't it a striking vote of "no-confidence" to ignore his recent results?

And lastly, why the hail isn't Rafa seeded No. 1 - especially when you keep in mind that there is no significant, real-world difference between being No. 1 or 2.

--- Rosangel

The Titans of Clay

Howdy, everyone. One of the joys of this job is the email I get, and a great one came in yesterday from long-time Brasilian reader, Fernando Nogueira. He wrote to alert me to a tennis blog, where veteran Brasilian sportswriter Jose Nilton Dalcim (editorial director of Tennis Brasil) decided to rank the best clay-court players of the Open era. Like Fernando, I found the list as solid as it is compelling, so I'm reproducing it here, with my own comments after each entry. Hat tip to Fernando for translating the text:

10 greatest clay-court players of the Open era:

1. Bjorn Borg: the best, beyond question. 6 Roland Garros trophies, 4 of them in a row, without dropping a set in 2 of them. He is a phenomena - one of the greatest in the game who also enjoyed amazing popularity. He was also was a 3-time winner in Monte Carlo and 2-timer in Rome.

That about nails it: Did we mention that he also completed a Roland Garros/Wimbledon double three years running (1978-80) and only played the French eight times (his two losses were to the same man, Adriano Panatta; once in the quarters, once in the fourth-round in his first appearance at age 16?

2. Ivan Lendl: one of the first pros to gather a work team and focus on fitness, a 3-time winner in France and 2-time in Rome, Hamburg and Monte Carlo.

More on him to come later this week,  but the ranking once again underscores how under-appreciated Lendl was in his own time - and even today.

3. Gustavo Kuerten: one of the few to win in every important clay court tournament,  he has 3 RG and 4 clay Master Series. Very joyful and good-spirited, he proved it to be possible to play aggressively in the slow court, and brought back the drop shot.

You know, I never thought of ranking these guys this way, and doing so puts Kuerten in proper perspective. He went from first-round loser (1996) to winning Roland Garros the very next year.

4. Rafael Nadal: even before turning 21, he is already the clay-court superstar, with 2 RG titles and 5 clay Master Series. Longest winning streak ever, symbol of youth and force in modern tennis. Has yet to reach the Number One position.

I'll drink to that!

5. Mats Wilander: Borg’s worthy heir. Has 3 RG titles, 1 in Rome and 2 in Monte Carlo. Was the youngest champion in France in its time.

I know it's hard for fans of The Mighty Fed, given the Big Wilanders controversy, but you've got to love Mats. No question about it. Punched above his weight all his career and nobody ever had a cooler - and more operational - head on a tennis court.

6. Guillermo Vilas: Has the longest (46) winning streak in one year, as well as the greatest number of titles (16), all in 1977. Has 5 important titles in clay, including a lone victory in France.

I guess some would be surprised by how low Vilas is ranked, but not me. The guy had a huge appetite for work, wrung every drop of talent out of his thick, powerful frame, and doesn't need to apologize to anyone, for anything!

7. Thomas Muster: Won once in France and has 6 clay Master Series.

They called him "The Animal", quite accurately, but he lacked that extra bit of explosiveness (which is different from power), speed and imagination to rank higher.

8. Sergi Bruguera: Won RG 2-times and has 2 Master Series title.

The record speaks for itself, but to me Sergi epitomized anti-tennis. He may have been the most one-dimensional RG champ in Open-era history. He set up shop way behind the baseline and just lobbed topspin groundies all day, running down everything thrown his way. Gotta respect him but you don't have to flove him.

9. Jim Courier: 2-times champion in Paris, he is the most successful American in clay court territory.

The fact that Jim is on this list highlights the extent to which his prowess on clay as never been fully appreciated by his countrymen in the U.S. Hat tip to Jim, who showed that doing well on clay is a matter of personal style and priority, not early training.

10. Juan Carlos Ferrero: a pure breed of the Spanish school, has a Roland Garros win, a runner-up finish there, and 4 Masters Series titles.

If you asked anyone, oh, three years ago, they would have said he's another Kuerten. Nothing is certain, is it? I think you could put him above Bruguera, neck-and-neck with Courier.

Okay, take it away!