MELBOURNE—“Just a few points here or there.” We know the phrase well; that’s all there is, sometimes, between winning and losing. But rarely has a big-time tennis match turned so quickly and decisively on a point or two as Victoria Azarenka’s 6-3, 6-0 win in the Australian Open final over Maria Sharapova did tonight.
I don’t mean to say that that was all that separated them; this was an even bigger blowout than the last two major women’s finals, at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, and that’s saying something. What I mean is that it only took a loose error or two from Sharapova, in the third game, to spin the match 180 degrees and transform an extremely nervy Azarenka into an extremely imposing one—as well as the new, Slam-full No. 1 player in the world.
Azarenka was making her Grand Slam final debut, and she came out looking like a rookie. Sharapova won the coin toss and let her serve first; it looked like a canny move when Azarenka double-faulted at 30-all and was broken. When Sharapova tore through her in the second game, and Azarenka stopped running and let a winner go past her at game point, nightmare visions of other debut Slam finalists—Dinara Safina, for Aussie fans—began to dance in our heads. After 10 points, Azarenka had made six unforced errors. After double faulting for 0-30 in the third game, she looked certain to go down two breaks.
Sharapova made an error. Azarenka hit a good serve. Sharapova made another error. Then Azarenka, with her first really confident swing of the night, took a high forehand and threaded it up the line for a winner, and her first hold. She fist-pumped and practically leaped to the sidelines. You could see even then, without knowing what would eventually happen—i.e., that she would lose just one more game—that Vika had shaken loose.
“I was super nervous,” admitted Azarenka, who said she had been ready to get out there hours earlier. “The first games were kind of a disaster.”
Then this self-described ex-head case went back to the mantra that has served her so well recently: “I just got back in the moment."
Of course, even if it hadn’t happened then, it was probably going to happen for Azarenka eventually. It was her night, her tournament, and her year so far.
“She did everything better than I did today,” a subdued Sharapova said afterward. “She was the one who was taking the first ball and hitting it deep. I was always the one running around like a rabbit.”
Asked whether she had noticed Azarenka’s nerves at the start, Sharapova said that sooner or later, her opponent was going to get rolling. “I had a lot of matches in my career where I had terrible starts,” she said. “Sometimes those just don’t really matter until you see what happens in the end. From my side, I think the switch went off.”
Azarenka went from finding her feet to soaring above her opponent a few games later. She did, as Sharapova said, everything well—tactically, technically, emotionally, and with variety. At 3-3, 30-30, she surprised Sharapova with a strong serve into her body; then she lofted a soft topspin lob winner to hold. In the next game, in some of the last points of the evening that could be termed crucial, Azarenka was even better.
Sharapova served at 3-4 and the game see-sawed to a third deuce. On that point, Azarenka took a second serve, drilled it deep and up the middle—a sure-fire play for her the whole tournament—and knocked off a swing volley. On break point, she again dictated from the baseline, but this time she went the finesse route and ended it by cutting under a backhand drop shot at the last second. Sharapova had no chance.
She wouldn’t have another. If the first set was about Azarenka rising to the moment, the second was about Sharapova trying to join her there, and failing. She tried to wrest control of the rallies, and often she worked herself into a winning position. But there was an error waiting around every corner.
“There was no way I was going to win the match if I was going to let her dictate,” Sharapova said. "But yeah, I think maybe I overdid it.”
In what seemed like no time at all—the seagulls had barely had time to gather to see their fellow shriekers—it was 5-0 and the 22-year-old Azarenka was stepping to the line to serve for her first Grand Slam. There was one more hiccup, an errant service toss that betrayed a hint of nerves, but otherwise she closed it out like she’d been doing it all her life. At deuce, Sharapova cracked a low, deep return at Azarenka’s formerly more erratic stroke, her forehand. There was nothing erratic about this response: Vika bent down like a hockey goalie and reflexed the ball down the line. She left Sharapova running like a rabbit one more time.
It had to be a disappointing loss for the 24-year-old Maria, who has slaved to find her old form and reach the Top 5 again. In the last year, she’s threatened at three separate majors but come up just short at all of them. What must be particularly galling is that she’s lost two to Slam-final neophytes—her experience has, essentially, counted for nothing. At the same time, there can’t be any second thoughts or regrets about this one. Sharapova was, as she said, thoroughly beaten. So thoroughly that she appeared shell-shocked in the moments after match point.
Sharapova walked off after the handshake and sat down on her sideline bench. She composed herself there, and didn’t move. The house lights began to dim as Azarenka bounced around, talking to whoever was in sight. Sharapova remained immobile, staring straight ahead. When the lights had gone down all the way, all you could see from across the arena was her bright green visor, still on her head. It didn’t move an inch.
Afterward, Azarenka, more effusive with the press than normal, credited her coach of two years, Sam Sumyk, for his patient work with her.
“Sam, I feel like he was not pushing me,” she said, “but guiding me toward that winning attitude. He helped me to find my way, not pushing his way. It’s important to have that education, that you have to learn to do it yourself, because in the end of the day you’re the one who’s holding the racquet.”
This win, over this opponent, brings Azarenka full circle. The rise that culminated with her first major title, and her ascendancy to No. 1, began last April with another pummeling of Sharapova, in the final in Key Biscayne. She built on that win, with a trip to the Wimbledon semifinals, with a valiant performance in defeat against Serena Williams at the U.S. Open, with a hard-fought loss to Petra Kvitova in the final of the WTA Tour championships. The whole time she seemed to be growing—calmer, more confident, sharper in her technique and tactics. She was the one holding the racquet out there, and this formerly volatile young player was taking responsibility for that fact. She wasn't, for one thing, breaking them anymore.
Azarenka was still learning in Melbourne. Last week, she said she had to make herself angry again to finish a match: she had gotten too calm out there. I speculated at the time that maintaining the balance between anger and ease on court would be precarious. Today, it sounded like she did just that.
When she was asked after the match what she had been feeling, Azarenka expressed what for her is a winning state of mind.
“I looked like I was in the zone,” she said. “But I was boiling inside.”
MELBOURNE—A lot of cool things happened to 15-year-old Taylor Townsend on her trip to Australia this month. She got a few toy kangaroo souvenirs for her family, as well as a couple of koala bear trophies. She watched Roger and Rafa go toe to toe—“I was in shock,” Townsend said of their rallies. She played inside Rod Laver Arena, made a Hawk-Eye challenge, and, for good measure, completed a rare sweep of the girls’ singles and doubles events. But all of that may have paled in comparison with her biggest find at Melbourne Park: four official Australian Open towels, sitting in the sun, unattended.
You must realize that these aren’t any old towels. The pros take them by the thousands each year. Rafael Nadal said today that he has 10 of them himself. So you can understand Townsend’s excitement when she stumbled upon her treasure. “I was surprised I saw four towels,” she said, flashing her braces in a wide grin. “Like two towels on one seat, two towels on the other. I was like, ‘Whoa, I’m gonna snag these.
“That’s exactly what I did.”
It’s been a banner Aussie Open for Townsend in many ways. Seeded 14th and competing in just her second junior Grand Slam, she became the youngest winner of a junior singles title here since her friend Donald Young did it at the same age six years ago. The two prodigies share more than just that piece of trivia. Both are left-handed, both are African-American, both hail from Chicago, and both have trained with Young’s parents, Donald, Sr., and Alona, in Atlanta. That’s where Townsend says she learned the attacking game and accomplished net play that may set her apart from her peers in the future. “Ever since I was young,” the apparently not-that-young-anymore Townsend says, “when I started playing tennis, we always did volleys. Mr. Young and Ms. Young, they always taught me just to move forward.”
Townsend says with a matter of fact smile that she has “pretty good hands.” Those hands were in evidence in her three-set win over Yulia Putintseva of Russia in today's girls’ final, a histrionical affair that ended with the loser smashing her racquet over and over and the winner falling to a scorched rubberized court before overflowing with that she called “tears of joy.” Townsend, who switched last year to the Prince EXO3 Tour and began using the company's Beast XP brand of spin-producing polyester strings, won the match with powerful forehands and two-handed backhands, some well-timed, precociously savvy net play, and a heavy, cutting lefty serve. Its motion, perhaps not surprisingly, bears more than a passing resemblance to Young’s.
“She has a great feel for the game,” says USTA director of player development Patrick McEnroe. Townsend left Atlanta last year to train at the USTA’s center in Boca Raton, Fla. “She has that easy power you love to see, and more variety than most of the girls. I think it’s a game that should translate well at the pro level.”
McEnroe also likes the fact that she’s working with what he calls a “tight-knit group of girls at Boca.” It includes 17-year-old Grace Min, last year’s U.S. Open junior champion, and 16-year-old Madison Keys. “I think it’s when you get those groups together that you see success at the higher level.” For U.S. tennis fans waiting for their next women’s champion, these are signs for cautious optimism.
“We practice together,” Townsend says of her days at Boca with Keys and Min. “We push each other.”
What’s next for Townsend? She seems ready for more, right away. A reporter asked her today if she was ready to “slow yourself down and not push success too fast?”
The outgoing Townsend didn’t hesitate with her answer. “No,” she said, “I mean, I’m just gonna keep doing what we’ve been doing. I’m playing a pro tournament in about a week. It’s a great opportunity, It’s a 100,000 [dollar tournament, in Midland, Texas], so I’m just gonna go there and do my thing.”
The fun stuff, the koalas and the kangaroos, is over fast, and the pro grind beckons. “You want a balance,” McEnroe says of how Townsend should proceed from here. “A mix of competition—play the big junior events and ease into women’s events, try to get into the Top 100 this year. The big thing is that she keeps playing her game."
Townsend is currently ranked No. 426, so there’s not shortage of work to be done in 2012. After this Aussie Open, though, when she’s back sweating with her friends on the hot courts in Boca, she’ll know what she’s playing for and what a big title feels like. And she’ll have a few nice towels to keep herself dry.
MELBOURNE—Talk about an epic. Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray started their match around 7:45 P.M. Friday night; I filed my post on it this morning at 4:25 A.M. I wondered if I was just a slow writer, until I saw a Tweet from the Herald-Tribune’s Chris Clarey. He was finishing up himself and preparing to meet the dawn as he walked back to his hotel. This may or may not be the Happy Slam, but it’s definitely a no sleep Slam.
It shouldn’t go as late on Saturday, when the women play their final, though you never know in a tournament without final-set tiebreakers. Who do you think will win? It’s a good match-up, storywise—young player coming into her own vs. a former champ who has labored hard to find her old form. I’m going to take Azarenka, even though it’s her Slam-final debut. She’s held impressively steady so far.
Before I get to the tennis sections of the local papers, there were two other sports stories in today's weekend Australian that, for whatever reason, I found moving. One was about the Indian cricket batsman Sachin Tendulkar, a legendary figure from what I can tell, who failed to get his 100th 100 in a test match against Australia yesterday. There’s a photo of a joyous Aussie team celebrating around the wounded figure of Tendulkar, with this quote from Australian bowler Nathan Lyon below: “It’s been a privilege to get him out.”
On the next page, The Australian brings us a column all the way from the London Times, by our old friend Simon Barnes. The Great Ponytail laments the words of British government official Jeremy Hunt, who recently referred to this summer’s Olympic Games as a “great business opportunity.” This sets the sentimental Barnes off to find 50 reasons, mostly sporting moments from the last 50 years, why his country still has a soul and can’t be reduced to a brand. What sounds like a baby boom nostalgia trip—No. 46 is, “The Beatles: still the best, forever the best”—ends up being, as I said, moving in its sincerity and peculiarity. Barnes’ No. 4 British sporting moment is, “Virginia Wade winning the women’s singles at Wimbledon in Silver Jubilee year (1977) to a soundtrack by the Sex Pistols: a glorious British contradiction.” Sports as part of the texture of life—well done.
How About "No. 1-less Slammers"? Elsewhere in The Australian, Patrick Smith mounts an intriguing, counterintuitive defense for Caroline Wozniacki. He wonders why we need the No. 1 player to have won a Slam, when we don’t automatically make each Slam winner the No. 1 player in the world for that week. It’s apples and oranges, to Smith. To have any meaning, the ranking can’t just be the measure of any one, or even four, tournaments, but performance over a significant period of time.
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About that Decline . . . From the Fickle Media department: On Thursday he was on the way back up; Friday he was all but out of the game; now, on Saturday, Roger Federer has “more Slams in his sights.”
Or, at the Age puts it, “Unperturbed by Rafael Nadal’s apparent mental hold over him, a defiant Federer has vowed to return for many more cracks at the Australian Open.”
The paper quotes Federer’s line about Nadal playing “a bit better against me than against other players.”
Nadal was informed of Federer’s assessment in his own press conference. He agreed that he has “played some good matches” against his rival, but what was important was that he was “ready to play” those particular matches.
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Locker Room Talk The Bryan Brothers, on the eve of potentially breaking the men’s doubles Grand Slam record, return to the Age with a behind the scenes column on some of the top singles guys.
Rafa: “His personality has really blossomed over the years,” the Bros write. “He used to be pretty shy, but now it kind of feels like he’s a leader on the tour. He’s a bit more relaxed and voicing his opinions. You don’t see any of that in the locker room, though. He’s probably the most intense guy in there. He usually has his headphones on; he’s got his routine down.”
Janko Tipsarevic: “He’s one of the good guys. He’s really smart, down to earth, and just a cool guy. He has a really good perspective.”
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Rafa Answers the Questions Nadal has been taking a couple of fan queries each day for the past two weeks in the Age. There must have been a backlog, though, because he goes all out with seven Q and A's today. Two of them are worth repeating
Miri asks: How many Australian Open towels do you have now? [The players reportedly steal something like 10,000 of them here each year]
Rafa: “I haven’t counted them, and I give them away to my team. But around 10? Don’t tell the tournament though."
Juliette asks: "Hi Rafa, do you have a favorite poem or poet? I remember when you read part of a famous poem at Wimbledon . . . "
Rafa: "They made me read that poem that you find at the entrance of Centre Court [Rudyard Kipling’s “If–“]. It was nice, although tough for me to understand the words.”
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Federer, Nadal . . . and Colaci? That’s Dylan Colaci, a 14-year-old who ball-boyed the Nadal-Federer semifinal here. He's the YouTube story of the millisecond, for the catch shown below. Colaci has been interviewed by all of the papers here, but to be honest, I'm not totally sure what the fuss is all about:
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Braveheart, At Last I half-expected Andy Murray, despite his fifth set comeback last night, to be raked over the coals in Brit tab-land anyway. This time, apparently, it was different. He wasn’t the loser or the choker or the too passive mama’s boy. The Daily Mail sums up the general reaction with this headline:
“DAZZLING IN DEFEAT, MURRAY HITS NEW HEIGHTS AS HE LOSES CLASSIC DUEL WITH DJOKOVIC Even in the hour of a shattering defeat, his body broken by nearly five hours of relentless combat, Andy Murray could console himself with one thought: He is finally looking and acting like a Grand Slam champion in waiting.”
I wouldn’t go that far, even though the evening was a step forward for him. But it’s nice to see respect for hard work.
Just don’t make it a habit, tabloids. This column wouldn’t be the same if you started keeping things in perspective.
MELBOURNE—For a good three hours, the semifinal between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray here was, to put it bluntly, a mess. Both players were fighting themselves as much as the guy across the net. Djokovic was battling his body, his nose, his allergies, his nerves. He was trying, with intermittent success, to settle down and let the athleticism flow like it had last year. It took him until the fourth set to shed all of his burdens and start looking like the best player in the world again.
As for Murray, he was fighting against his instincts toward safety and counter-punching, while trying his best to implement the more aggressive game plan that new coach Ivan Lendl wanted him to use. It made for a match that neither guy seemed prepared to step up and grab. After one point near the end of the fourth set, Djokovic walked away staggering in pain, while on the other side of the net, Murray was virtually on his knees screaming in anger. Lendl, perhaps channeling Mr. T's Clubber Lang character from Rocky III, gave Murray this pre-match nugget of wisdom: “It’s going to be painful,” he told his player. I guess the guy really does know what he's talking about.
One stat sums up the evening: There were 18 breaks of serve on 50 total break points. This was not an orderly contest. Still, Murray-Djokovic finally did cohere, and its fifth set offered a completely unforeseen turnaround that threatened to turn the match into a classic. The two wounded warriors—Djokovic said that “both of them went through a physical crisis” during the match—came together in the end to make the long, strange night worthwhile.
Let me start with Murray, who lost the match, 6-3, 3-6, 6-7 (4), 6-1, 7-5. We can debate how he approached the match tactically—47 winners and 86 unforced errors at least show that he went down swinging this time—but two particular moments are worth focusing on. One is an example of his characteristic flaw, while the other offers hope for change someday.
The first, and worst, of them came after Murray grabbed the lead for the first time. He ripped his way through the third-set tiebreaker—an ace at 3-3 and a roaring forehand winner three points later put a stamp on it. Now he was up two sets to one; how would he handle having nothing but the finish line in front of him? We didn't have to wait long for the answer. Serving in the first game of the fourth set, Murray suffered a quintessential brain cramp. Rather than finishing a sitter off with an overhead, he hesitated and plunked a swing volley over the baseline. A couple of wild unforced errors later and he was broken. A couple of games after that, he was tanking. Murray may have learned this maneuver from Lendl, who was famous for throwing sets and even matches early in his career. But he hasn’t mastered it yet. One thing you don’t want to do when you tank is let yourself be broken in the last game of the set. But Murray kept letting the balls go by even then, and Djokovic got to start the fifth serving. It proved to be pivotal.
“I guess maybe it was normal there was a letdown in the fourth set,” said Murray, who was thoughtful and positive in his press conference after what had to be a devastating defeat. “That was something I would have liked to have done better, though. I would like to have to played a better fourth set, get off to a better start.”
Murray was tired, but he was also a different player once he had the lead, a less intense and purposeful player—he didn’t know what to do with it.
The news wasn’t all bad for Andy. Something did change in the fifth set. He went down 2-5, then held. Until that point, he had had trouble recovering from his listlessness of the previous set. But as he set up to return serve, he began to fire himself up in a more genuine way than I’d seen from him. Murray was, for once, giving off sincere positive energy. Guess what happened? He played four brilliant points on Djokovic’s serve and won them all. Rod Laver Arena erupted. Hopefully Murray will remember that moment. He appeared, for one game—he hit four excellent returns and two blatant forehand winners—to have cracked the code to his potential.
As for Murray’s opponent, can we start calling Novak Djokovic the Benjamin Button of tennis? He starts matches as if he’s just finished playing five hard sets. He breathes deeply on the first changeover. He shuffles off court in the middle of the second set and sits down in an open-mouthed daze, as if he might not be able to answer the bell. Come the three-hour mark, though, the man suddenly has some spring in his step—he’s rounding into shape. After four hours, he’s sliding and grunting at full stretch, flipping up a perfect defensive lob, and then tearing toward the net to smack a forehand winner to break serve. He might as well be starting the match right then and there.
Djokovic’s old maladies have returned in Melbourne this week; he says he’s struggling with allergies. But there’s always been a mental component to these episodes as well. By the third-set tiebreaker tonight, Djokovic was laughing with his coach at his missed shots and joking around with the ball kids, with no signs of distress. It’s as if he has to work out his nerves, get to a point where he has nothing left to lose—such as being down two sets to one to Murray—and then he can let it rip, which is when he’s at his most dangerous.
Or, as Murray put it afterward, “He runs very, very well when he’s breathing heavily.” Murray said that it was something that he and Lendl “spoke about before the match.”
Djokovic ran very very well indeed in the fourth and fifth sets. He was back to his old defensive tricks, skidding across the baseline and breaking Murray at 3-2 with the defensive lob-forehand winner combination I mentioned above.
The match, after all that time, all of those rallies, all of the crises, came down to two consecutive shots. They were enough to describe the difference between these two players so far in their careers.
Murray followed up his break for 4-5 in the fifth with a strong hold. His momentum carried over to the next game, when he went up 15-40—two break points to serve for the final. Djokovic saved the first. On the second, the two players left exhaustion behind and fired 29 shots back and forth. Finally, pushed into a corner, Djokovic pulled the trigger and put a forehand on the line for a winner. It was this match’s version of the Shot. The shuffling, slicing, hurting Djokovic of three hours earlier was forgotten. The champ from 2011 had finally appeared.
Murray wasn’t finished. He earned another break point. The two began to rally, but rather than go big, as he had for much of the night, Murray stayed safe. Too safe: He sent a backhand lamely into the net. His chance had passed, and his decision to tank the last game of the fourth set came back to haunt him. Serving second, he was broken in the next game for the match.
Ten minutes later, a sweaty Murray was philosophical and even long-winded in the interview room. He said he was happy with his performance compared to his embarrassing loss to Djokovic in the final last year, and that he’s crossing his fingers he doesn’t suffer the same bottoming out, in confidence and motivation, that he has the last two springs. But Murray was honest enough to admit that he doesn’t know how he’s going to feel in a few days or weeks.
Meanwhile, No. 1 Djokovic moves on to meet No. 2 Rafael Nadal. Watching their wins these last two nights, it seemed that either match could have gone the other way. Djokovic could have missed that line-pasting forehand at break point. Nadal could have sent that desperation lob, hit when he was facing his own break in the final game against Federer, a few inches longer.
At the same time, though, this marks their third straight major final matchup, and one of them has appeared in the last seven Slam finals. It could have gone the other way for the world's two best players this time, but it was never likely.
MELBOURNE—“Tennis players are always talking about the zone, getting into the zone,” Mike Bryan told me last week at the Australian Open. “I feel like I’m starting to know what it feels like.”
Tomorrow night, Mike, with his twin brother Bob, will try to break Mark Woodforde and Todd Woodbridge’s men’s record 11 Grand Slam titles. The Bryans are 33 and still going strong. They’re coming off what Mike calls “their best summer ever"; in 2011 they won the Wimbledon and Australian Open titles, recorded their 700th career win together, and finished the season No. 1.
Playing championship tennis into your 30s, and beyond, is not uncommon in doubles. In fact, you might say the Bros are about to enter their primes. The player ranked just below them, at No. 3 in the world, is Daniel Nestor. He'll be 40 in September.
Still, Mike says he’s in a good mental space these days. He credits some of that to brain-training sessions that he’s been undergoing at the offices of a company called Neurotopia in California. Neurotopia, according to one of its founders, James Seay, was begun, “as a medical group providing therapy for chronic symptoms associated with conditions like migraines, concussions, ADHD and ADD.”
Patients’ brain waves were mapped, to see where there were irregularities. Did he or she have trouble focusing, or recovering from stress, or processing information quickly? Treatments were developed to help re-balance brain waves—essentially, to train it like any other muscle.
The following year, Neurotopia began working with athletes in extreme sports, who needed their focus and reaction time to remain sharp over a long period of time. From there, the company has begun to help athletes from virtually all mainstream professional sports, from Nascar to major league baseball to golf to surfing to tennis and more.
“The brain,” Seay says, “like anything else, thinks it’s perfect. We try to fix problems that are there. In the case of athletes, we try to help improve the areas where they need to be strong.”
“It’s pretty wild,” says Mike Bryan, who has done close to 20 mental-training sessions with Neurotopia, and who hopes to begin doing them remotely on the road soon.
The company’s technology certainly has a futuristic feel. It works like this: Sensors are placed on your head, which reads your brainwaves as you take a simple test where you’re asked to recognize visual stimuli and push buttons when you see them. From the results, a “profile” of your brain and personality is created. You’re rated in various mental categories, including Stress Recovery, Focus, and Reaction Time.
I went through Neurotopia’s testing process this winter and received a psychological profile. It showed that I’m able to concentrate for long periods, but that I have trouble recovering from stress—both of these diagnoses sounded about right. They’re also common among tennis players, though the pros also tend to rate very highly when it comes to reaction time.
With your mental profile in hand, therapy sessions begin. Sensors are attached to your head again, and you’re placed in front of a screen with what looks like a car chase video game on it. Except that there are no controls in front of you, no wheels or sticks or buttons. When I started my session, all Seay told me to do was, “concentrate.” I wasn’t sure what that meant, but I looked at the car and it began to move. It kept moving. It picked up speed and made turns and went over bridges and crashed into the car in front of it (which it wasn't supposed to do; it's a sign that you're trying too hard). I wasn’t doing anything, or thinking of anything in particular, and I began to wonder whether I really was moving the car. But when someone in the room with me spoke, and I answered, the car screeched to a halt.
The idea is that moving the car will train you, unconsciously, to concentrate harder when you need to concentrate—i.e., during a tennis match—and to relax at other times—i.e., when you want to sleep. The car I was moving was at the easiest level. As sessions continue, it gets more difficult to move it, and your ability to concentrate fully and get into the right frame of mind for the task at hand is enhanced.
“By training certain waves to work harder at certain times,” Seay says, “we can change what your mind considers a normal reaction.”
“I’ve got the car moving pretty well,” Mike says of his improvement over the course of his sessions. “I used to overdo it, and it would crash, but now I’ve got it going pretty smoothly.
“I’ve felt a difference on court,” he continues. “I feel like I can hold my focus longer, and I feel like I can turn it on when I need it. I wanted my body to be relaxed while my mind was working, and that's how I feel. I can get into an optimal brain state out there, and I can control my reactions when I miss a shot a little more. Hey, we had our best summer last year, and I’m sleeping better, too.”
Hard to believe? Brain training for athletes, according to Seay and others involved, is in its early stages, and no one knows where it will lead or what it will reveal. One doctor told me that the field is promising, but we need more information to see if it can be useful. Mike’s brother, Bob, for one, has resisted, despite his brother’s recommendation.
“Bob’s skeptical of just about everything,” Mike says. “He doesn’t believe in stretching.”
Skepticism is the healthy reaction, perhaps, but for any tennis player, the possibilities are enticing. Imagine being able to get over your nerves or your tendency to choke or lose focus, the same way you can increase your muscle strength or make yourself more flexible?
“I wanted to be more like Federer, you know,” Mike says, laughing. He hopes to join the Swiss Maestro as a Grand Slam record holder this weekend.
