18 posts categorized "January 2009"
 One of the pleasures of watching a great tennis player through the years is that we will see him or her pushed to all kinds of emotional extremes. Every close match has a different atmosphere and a different set of circumstances, which is enough to bring out a shot, a look, or a reaction from a star that you hadn’t quite seen before.
This is especially true of a player as expressive and natural as Rafael Nadal. He has been involved in dozens of classic contests, dozens of knock-down, drag-out fights that have used up every ounce of emotion—his, his opponent’s, and that of anyone watching. He almost always, after seeming to be on the verge of disaster, pulls them out. Think Rome 2006 against Federer, Wimbledon 2008 against Federer, the semifinals of the Olympics against Djokovic—each called on different tactics and reserves from him, but he survived them all.
You can add another one-of-a-kind epic to that list today. Nadal beat his countryman Fernando Verdasco in five hours and five sets in the semifinals of the Australian Open to set up another go-round with Federer. This match didn’t take place in the venerable environs of Centre Court, but the quality and drama were comparable to the Wimbledon final, in a sweaty, hard-working, upbeat Australian kind of way. Maybe it’s the sleeves, but Nadal for once looked smaller than his opponent, a more compact version of himself. Verdasco, being a lefty, resembles him, but he’s a little bigger and hits a little bigger. From a physical standpoint, Nadal seemed to be playing uphill.
He was doing it extremely well. Verdasco hit more winners, many of them awe-inspiring, but Nadal’s shot-making and overall command, especially through the fifth set, were remarkable. Game after game, he just missed breaking Verdasco’s serve, then got right back to business to hold easily. His serve itself was as effective as it’s ever been in putting a stop to an opponent’s momentum.
Beyond that, there was lots, lots more, a feast of improbable shots from both guys, but I'll just detail a few of Nadal's that stick in my mind. There were the violently sidespinning forehand winners into the corners; the gets from 10 feet wide of the sidelines; the spin around twice, block the ball blindly back, then thread a crosscourt pass winner; the reflex overhead spike winner; the charge the net for the first time in an hour when you’re down 15-30 at 4-4 in the fifth idea (it worked); the intelligently unrisky running backhand pass at Verdasco’s feet to set up a winner on the next ball (every textbook recommends that; how many people do it?); the 0-30 down at 4-4 no problem I’m going to gather myself and win the next seven points concept; and finally the please double-fault please double-fault, yes he double-faulted finish yes.
As Nadal kept losing break points through the fifth, I began to put a scenario together: Verdasco is a noted double-faulter. Nadal is serving first, so Verdasco will have to hold with the match on the line. And Nadal is getting tight when he’s reaching break point. It came together pretty much as I imagined it. I’m willing to bet Verdasco wins that last point if he gets his serve in. But it’s not as if Nadal hadn’t worked for his good fortune in the end. Both guys deserved a lucky break, but he was the one who got it. Call it a new survival technique from a guy with about a dozen of them.
So we saw shots we’d never seen from Nadal before. I also spotted a new expression from him late in the match. I remember it coming at 4-3 in the fifth; a friend remembers it at triple match point. Either way, it was a trance-like bug-eyed look filled with exhaustion and maximum adrenalin at once (it's close to the photo above, but not quite). It was the face of a great tennis player on the ledge again. Leave it to Rafael Nadal to show us how far the sport can push a man.
•••
Will he have anything left for the final? While it’s plainly unfair to have one men’s semifinal a full day after the other—TV ratings only excuse so much tinkering with the fairness of the competition—Nadal will have the usual amount of rest between matches. The forces seem to be favoring Federer. He’s playing and moving well, he’s 3-0 in finals in Melbourne, he’s going to want to get No. 14 out of the way now if at all humanly possible, and he has a winning record against Nadal on hard courts (it’s just 3-2, but that’s better than the 6-12 overall between them). Plus, I picked Federer at the beginning of the tournament, which I'm sure has given him confidence in Oz. (“If Steve Tignor thinks I can win…”)
And yet. Federer has rarely been the same player against Nadal that he is against the rest of the world—that air of serene confidence is knocked out of him. Plus, Federer’s fabulous form in the last two rounds came against an overwhelmed Del Potro and his personal whipping boy, Andy Roddick. It’s no coincidence that I heard Pat McEnroe refer to Federer as a “genius” for the first time in a long time in the semis. Part of it was because Federer was playing a guy who, with his mediocre approach shots and volleys, is tailor-made not just to lose to him, but to make him look spectacular in the process. That’s not how it works for Federer against Nadal. And the courts apparently play more slowly at night, which is when this final will be held.
I can see Federer moving forward, pushing Nadal around, and slowly grabbing a hold of the match, maybe after winning a first-set tiebreaker. I can also see Nadal coming out with guns blazing—behind his sleeves—and nothing to lose and dominating the rallies because he wants to make them as short as possible. I can see a dozen other variations on these themes. A lot may depend on Federer’s willingness to come forward even if Nadal blows a couple balls past him or he stones a volley early. That’s something Verdasco had success with, but which he didn’t do relentlessly.
Most of all, I can see a match that tennis needs. It’s not just a continuation of the defining rivalry of this time, but an extension of it to a new surface and a new arena. One thing we know about the Aussie Open is that its bouncy, medium-pace courts often allow two opponents to feel comfortable and maximize their games at the same time. This has been the site of some of the finest matches of the last decade. We deserve one from these two guys.
Anyway: Nadal in four.
 There’s a problem, right at the start, with trying to write about John Updike. After you finish your first sentence, you might find yourself looking at it and mentally comparing it to the types of sentences you remember from books written by Updike himself. This is not a good way to boost your confidence as you begin. It’s a good way to make yourself consider another line of work.
For such a canonical author, Updike, who died this week at 76, inspired severely mixed reactions. The common criticisms of him—he was self-absorbed , chauvinistic, and prolific to a fault, he was old and white and male, he was about style not substance—were not wholly unjustified, I suppose, though he was a more varied writer, in form and subject matter, than his critics gave him credit for. More than one person has said, after seeing a dozen or so of his books on the shelves in my apartment, “I just can’t read him.” I had the opposite reaction: For a long time, I couldn’t not read him. I was addicted to his sentences, his paragraphs, his stories, his novels.
A decade ago I went on an Updike binge, reading 17 of his books in the course of about 12 months. (I don’t know why that highly exact number sticks with me, but it does.) I liked him partly because he was from the outskirts of Reading, a Pennsylvania town that’s similar in size and make-up to the one where I grew up. The story of his move from that tiny outpost to the New Yorker without any family connections was inspiring. But I liked him mostly because of his sentences, and because by the time I was halfway through one of his books, I would begin to look at the world in a busier, more detailed way. I still have this experience after a long exposure to his writing, and it’s still just as exhilarating. The last time it happened was during the 2006 French Open, when I took along his new novel at the time, Villages. It really wasn’t all that new; it was the latest in a long line of his books that were rough fictional chronicles of his life, from PA farm boy to swinging New England suburbanite to uncomfortably settled grandpa. I knew the tale well—one of those 17 books I read way back when had been his autobiography, Self Consciousness; another had been a book about one man's obsession with him, the great U & I by Nicholson Baker. But during the tournament, rather than seeing new sights in Paris, I sought out one favorite café and read Updike. In a way, it was a great method for visiting the city—I saw it in a whole new light just from the way my brain was working.
In the mid-90s, I had a job as a proofreader on the midnight shift at an investment bank. Don’t ask how I ended up there; each night at 3 A.M. I found myself praying that someday I would be allowed to work during the day at a job. Any job. Digging ditches, I didn’t care. The only upside to the graveyard shift was that I had time to read. On that job, I went through the four Rabbit books—each from the Brooklyn library, each in the tremendous original Knopf hardback editions with the double-lined jacket design—faster than anything I’ve read before or since. They were lifesavers.
That summer I read Couples, his 1968 stream-of-consciousness soap opera, in a small pink paperback edition at the Jersey shore. Apropos of its era, this is Updike unhinged. His observations are almost psychedelic. Here’s one that takes place on a tennis court, where ex-lovers are playing doubles: “Georgene contemplated him coldly. Beyond her green eyes and high-bridged nose, wire mesh of the tennis court; beyond the slope of summer grass whitening where wind touched it. Waves. Lattices. Combine and recombine. Dissolution. She whispered, ‘It must have been purely chemical.’”
Flowery? Yes—it’s not economical. Too much Joyce in there? Updike loved the old white guys. Martin Amis was right about Couples when he said it was a “shimmering false peak,” a brilliant overreach. But it cast a spell over me at the shore; who else could make the wealthy suburbs of the early 60s seem sinister?
Updike’s best stuff is tougher, but just as lyrical, from the Hemingway-like early stories to the vicious, semi-autobiographical marriage-and-divorce stories about a couple named the Maples. Here’s the opening line to Rabbit is Rich: “Running out of gas, Rabbit Angstrom thinks as he stands behind the summer-dusty windows of the Springer Motors display room watching the traffic go by on Route 111, traffic somehow thin and scared compared to what it used to be. The ----ing world is running out of gas.” Love that: traffic that’s “thin and scared.” Updike is thought of as bourgeois and comfortable, but if you want a piece of art that dances around with an unmentionable taboo, you won’t do any better than his Maples story “Sublimating.”
Naturally he was a better sportswriter than anyone else when he bothered with it. I remember being a little disappointed when I first read “Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu,” his story about Ted Williams’ final game at Fenway. But I skimmed it again this week and found two immortal lines that come back to back. The first is about how Williams never came out for a curtain call, and he didn’t on this final day, even after hitting a home run. Updike understood why: “Gods don’t answer letters,” he wrote. Then he began the next paragraph with a sentence just as perfect: “Every true story has an anti-climax.”
Updike’s own death seemed a terrible anti-climax. He had smoked from childhood into, I believe, his 40s, with a peak of three packs a day in college. I wondered how he’d beaten lung cancer, but it caught up to him decades later. It was still too early; he was going strong. Who will write those sentences now?
I gave it a shot once. During those long proofreading nights, I was also scribbling down, by hand, music reviews for a small indie-rock magazine. In the grip of Updike—and a little bit of Saul Bellow—I worked for many hours on a short review of a show by two ultra-obscure bands called the Mountain Goats and Papas Fritas. There had been a total of about 15 people at the show, but I wanted this to be the best-written review in the history of rock. After all that labor, I finally got down, almost by accident, a short sentence describing one of the lead singers that I thought was somehow worthy of a serious novel. But that was the only sentence; the rest of them were typical rock-critic stuff. Updike, my fellow Pennsylvanian but so much more, had written 50 million sentences like that over the years. I’d managed one.
I sent the review in and got an email back from the editor, Katherine, a fellow lit lover. She singled out that one sentence and said it reminded her of John Updike's style. I'll never get a better compliment.
 Like the upcoming Super Bowl between the Pittsburgh Steelers and the Arizona—huh?—Cardinals, there’s been a slight flukiness to this year’s Aussie Open. On the men’s side, we still have Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, but this was supposed to be the year of Andy Murray and the dominance of the Big Four. Did anyone believe Fernando Verdasco, who has never done anything of note at a major, or Andy Roddick, who was notable at the start of the event mainly for going so unnoticed, would still be hanging around in the semifinals? As for the women, Williams, Safina, and Dementieva aren’t surprises, but Vera Zvonareva’s presence throws it all out of whack somehow. The Russian women just seemed so 2004.
These small surprises should be welcomed. They keep us believing that nothing is set in stone in sports, and we wouldn’t watch in the first place if that weren’t true. The only downside is that they make any attempts at pre-tournament predictions—the hard labor of every sportswriter—laughably futile.
So, with those last two words in mind, I’ll take a crack at picking the winners of the four semifinals that we’ll see over the next two days in Melbourne.
Dinara Safina vs. Vera Zvonareva
Safina leads their career head-to-head 5-4, but Zvonareva has won their last three meetings, all of which took place last year, on hard courts, and ended in straight sets. Along with Williams, Safina has been playing the escape artist at this year’s Open, coming back from match point down against Alize Cornet and winning 6-4 in the third set over Jelena Dokic. She’s been erratic but stubborn, while Zvonareva has looked better with every match. In fact, she’s looked the best of any woman in the tournament, hauling off on blatant full-swing winners from both sides. It’s always a mistake to think that someone’s fabulous form one day will continue the next, but after her run at the 2008 year-end championships, Vera seems to be for real this time.
Winner: Zvonareva
Roger Federer vs. Andy Roddick
I said before his last match that Roddick might be the game’s purest defender right now. That doesn’t mean he’s the best at it—it just means that he does it the most. He outlasted Djokovic by hitting big serves, not making errors, running balls down, and not wilting in the heat. He can’t rely on outlasting Federer, especially if the roof is closed tonight. I’d say a defensive Roddick has no shot in this one, but then again he’s tried the throw-everything-plus-the-kitchen-sink at Federer many times, and it hasn’t worked—when the Swiss struggles, it's usually not because he's getting overpowered. Roddick won the last time they played, in March 2008, but I can’t remember for the life of me how he did it. Even if Andy does remember, Federer is a lots sharper now than he was last spring.
Winner: Federer
Serena Williams vs. Elena Dementieva
Interesting—I had no idea that Dementieva had won their last three meetings, including one at last year’s Olympics, which ended with two 6-1 sets in a row. Serena likes to say that every match is on her racquet, and she’s usually right. But Dementieva will have a major say in this one. If she keeps up her recent form of relentless baseline bombardment and doesn’t let it get close enough for her serve to start wandering, she should win. But Serena has a habit of looking bad in earlier rounds only to escape and find her best form later. She also has a habit of winning semis and finals at majors.
Winner: Williams
Rafael Nadal vs. Fernando Verdasco
In theory, Verdasco should have beaten his countryman and fellow lefty somewhere along the way. He's got too much raw game not to have found it one time. But he’s 0-6 against Nadal, with only one of those matches, at Queen’s in 2007, going the distance. The last time they played, at the French Open in 2008, Nadal locked him early and eventually won 1, 0, and 2. Verdasco has been impressive, from his newfound determination under pressure—in the past, he would have folded in a heartbeat when Tsonga showed signs of life in the third set yesterday—to his patient, Agassi-like way of yo-yoing his opponents back and forth along the baseline. But Nadal has been even better.
Winner: Nadal
Enjoy them, both for the big names and the surprising names we’re going to see. For once, I’m thankful I can watch these Slam semis in my not-too-scorching apartment.
 For residents of the Northeast, it was a long, blustery, bitterly cold weekend—that is, if you consider 25-degree temperatures bitter, which I most certainly do. For tennis fans, however, the last few days have been a lot warmer.
Watching many hours live through the night and many hours on DVR through the day, I began to think this Aussie Open might be better seen at home than in person. If I’d been in the press room, I may not have walked out to see the grandly tumultuous fifth set between Fernando Gonzalez and Richard Gasquet on Friday, which ended with Gonzo’s Chilean fans trying to burn down Melbourne Park—I don’t want to think about what they would have done if he’d lost. I felt like a fan again: In part that’s because I was rooting hard for Gasquet, a terminal lost cause; but it’s also because the Aussie Open always appeals to the unjaded tennis lover in me. Here are a few other thoughts from a very eventful three days.
—It was hard to watch Gasquet lose to Gonzalez. As you may know, Gonzo has never been my favorite player. His serve and backhand aren’t pretty, and even his forehand winners seem vicious rather than exhilarating. Plus, even in defeat I gained a measure of respect for Gasquet. After blowing the third-set tiebreaker, he didn’t completely fold up his tent. I’m going to go out on a limb and say that lasting so long into the fifth will, paradoxically, help his confidence in his ability to fight in the future. It was also fun to see the French fans get feisty for once. A classic match, one of the most entertaining I’ve seen in a long time, Gonzo-Gasquet offered a positive view of the nationalistic fan fervor that the Aussie Open inspires. It’s too bad it came so early in the first Slam of the year. We’ll be hard-pressed to remember it by season’s end.
—Jelena Jankovic was beaten by a red-hot player in Marion Bartoli, but it was clear that JJ's flaws will continue to haunt her matter how fit she is. In practices at Bollettieri’s this winter, she was working on recovering well for her opponent’s return of serve. A good idea, but if you want to win a Slam on the women’s side these days, there doesn’t seem to be a substitute for a better-than-decent serve. Jankovic’s is merely decent.
—If anything, 15 fewer pounds on Andy Roddick’s frame has helped his defense. He tracks down balls more easily behind the baseline, but what incentive does he have now to come forward? He may be the purest defender in men’s tennis at the moment. I have to think that isn’t Larry Stefanki’s ultimate goal for him.
—For two sets against Roger Federer, Tomas Berdych reminded me of why I had once, long ago, enjoyed watching him. His power may be the most effortless around. At one point, I thought, wrongly, that it might be the future of the sport. It was nice to see that future again, even if didn’t last long. Too bad the sun got in his eyes. But that doesn’t mean Berdych is hopeless; it’s been said for years that he needed a new coach, and now he’s got one.
—McWilliams wine and “male enhancement” products—this is the advertising that tennis generates. McWilliams says its wines are “surprisingly affordable”—are they surprised that no one pays more for them?
—This was the first time I’d gotten a good look at Victoria Azarenka, and she was impressive. The sharp, heavy-spinning serve, the clean contact on the backhand, the wiry athleticism, the attention to the fundamentals—the WTA has a potential new star on it hands. The tour just has to find a way to keep her from sounding like a peacock when she hits the ball.
—Remember what I was saying about the not-quite-perfect footwork of Amer Delic? I saw it crop up again on both sides of the net in the Monfils-Simon match. Each of them gets to the ball in time, but not a millisecond sooner. This makes them stereotypically smooth and stylish Frenchman, but you wonder if they would be even better if they weren’t so smooth. They might benefit from watching how Azarenka sets up for a ball.
As for Monfils, I knew I couldn't trust the guy—his injury was in his mind?
—Once upon a time, I thought that Fernando Verdasco had a stronger upside than Rafael Nadal. I’ve always liked the forehand technique and his balance as he sets up for it. It’s just that it was no fun to watch him set up so well and then hit the ball 5 feet out. Now his forehand is starting to look a little like Nadal’s when he goes inside-out and curls the ball into the corner.
—What did we learn from Andy Murray’s defeat? He looked curiously loose and passive through long periods of it, as if he couldn’t settle on a tactic. Like Jankovic, no matter what Murray does to shore up his serve and strength, the fact that he isn’t a first-strike player will always leave him vulnerable to a guy who is taking the first strike, and making it.
—Seems like old times on the men’s side, right? Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic are back in the saddle, and Nadal is suddenly leading the way, as the world No. 1 should. He isn't hitting his backhand better, but he’s hiding it well, which these courts allow him to do. If he continues to make his serve a point-ending weapon, the sky’s the limit.
—We’ve got a couple more possible corkers tonight. First there’s Marion Bartoli vs. Vera Zvonareva: The Frenchwoman is sui generis, and the Russian a one-woman emotional roller-coaster. We might just see one of them playing for the title in a few days. The night session is headlined by Roger Federer vs. Juan Martin del Potro—the Argentine may be the most impressive man in the draw so far other than Nadal. He played without doubt or fear in beating his fellow young gun Marin Cilic.
Winding up the day session is Roddick-Djokovic, a rematch of their raucous, vengeful, hilarious tussle at the U.S. Open. Remember that night? How can anyone forget Djokovic laying down the ultimate insult by saying that Andy “wasn’t nice”? Oh, it is going to be on.
 It’s always instructive to see a guy who spends most of his time at the Challenger level suddenly facing off with a Top 10 player. We get so used to seeing the big guns doing battle against each other that we, or at least I, can begin to take their skills for granted. “Djokovic’s forehand is too busy these days,” or “Del Potro struggles with low balls,” or “Roddick’s forehand doesn’t penetrate”—in an absolute sense, these statements are true, but when you take in the totality of professional tennis, the flaws of the guys in the Top 20 begin to seem highly relative. It’s not that they don’t matter—they’re the difference between champions and also-rans—but because the best players do so many things superlatively, the very few things that they haven’t completely mastered tend to stand out. For instance, it isn’t exactly a newsflash when a Top 5 player happens to be a ridiculously good mover. To get some perspective, you might go watch a first-round match at a Futures event somewhere in Arkansas. That’s where you’ll see a few guys who struggle with low balls.
Last night Amer Delic, a 26-year-old stalwart of the Challengers who is currently ranked No. 127, appeared in Rod Laver Arena to face 21-year-old world No. 3 Novak Djokovic. Delic more than held his own, showed off some effortless power on both his serve and forehand, was a paragon of sportsmanship, and even had set points to take the match to a fifth. But what I noticed as much as his virtues were his vices, because they’re different, and more fundamental, than the ones you usually see on center courts at Slams.
By fundamental, I mean they involved his footwork. It wasn’t terrible, clunky, or lazy; it just wasn’t perfect. When he ran around his forehand, he got there in time to hit it, rather than before he needed to hit it, à la Rafael Nadal or the Williams sisters or Djokovic or most of the players we see on a regular basis. When Delic was forced to move quickly to his left for his backhand, he made it over there competently, but he often didn’t get there in time to take the one extra adjustment that would have gotten him fully ready to swing. When Delic had a set point in the fourth, a Djokovic forehand clipped the tape and bounced lower than expected. Delic was still moving up to the ball when he had to reach down and hit it. He ran through it and didn’t set his feet; the result was a wild forehand wide.
Pete Bodo and I had been talking recently about how we thought Djokovic’s game had gotten a little wild and hitchy, where it used to be so compact and efficient. But seeing him on the other side of the net from Delic made me forget that conversation immediately—Djokovic takes the extra step on his backhand (two-handers like his require you to get into even better position), he gets set up early on his forehand, he almost never runs through the ball. After a close match like this, the most common reason given for the result is that it came down to confidence. I would add that it also came down to the years of military-like discipline that Djokovic must have endured to develop the one-extra-step footwork that serves him so well today.
The first time I encountered that discipline was as a kid watching Jennifer Capriati practice at the U.S. Open. She did a series of quick-reaction drills that forced her to hit, take a few steps forward, and hit again, until she reached the net. When I say “a few steps forward,” I really mean about 200 of them in total, because that’s about how many she took after you counted up all the tiny, squeaky, lightning-fast adjustment steps before each swing. Funny to think she has a reputation for being undisciplined now. But how often do we think about the amount of work that even the most talented players need to do to reach the top of the sport in the first place?
After the Delic-Djokovic match last night, I found my eyes following the pros’ feet. When you focus on one player’s movement exclusively, the sport in its current fast-paced form can begin to look like a spastic modern dance routine. Perhaps surprisingly, there's also a world of difference in the way each player gets around the court.
—Rafael Nadal, of course, moves with an aggressive sense of purpose. We know him as a baseline grinder, but his uncle has always said that his nature is much more forward-minded. You can see that come out when Nadal moves for a short ball. Where some baseliners have trouble moving forward, he relishes the chance. He makes a beeline to get the ball at its highest point and usually succeeds.
—Jelena Jankovic moves as naturally—it’s second nature—as anyone. After hitting, she drops right into position in the middle of the court, without ever looking to move forward. It’s a paradox: She flows back there, but that natural flow is a product of a million and a half drills in the hot sun at the Bollettieri academy.
—Caroline Wozniacki, the very young Pole-Dane, is more precise and robotic in her footwork than Jankovic. Hit, scramble back up to the hash mark; hit, scramble back up to the has mark; Hit, scramble back . . .
—Watching Ana Ivanovic move, her recent slump began to make more sense. Of the top players, she takes the longest strides—not what you’re taught—and uses the most leg movement to get from one place to another. She tries to combat this by bouncing her feet before she serves and moving around before she returns—hence the infamous squeaky feet. Ivanovic relies on shotmaking to win, which kind of reminds me of NBA teams that rely on outside shooting. They always have hot and cold streaks.
—Marcos Baghdatis also has a reputation for being undisciplined, but you wouldn’t have known it from watching his feet stay low-to-the-ground as he hustled against Mardy Fish. His movement was smooth where Fish’s was choppy—another example, perhaps, of our early exposure to baseball and football (we’re fabulous servers) and Europeans' early exposure to soccer.
—When we say Roger Federer is “in full flight,” the phrase really does fit, except that he’s always in full flight. He spends more time in the air as he moves across the court than just about anyone else—you wonder whether his heels ever touch the ground—and he's catlike when he backpedals. Like Jankovic, he makes militaristic discipline look artistic.
As obvious as it may sound, it all starts with footwork for Federer. In the third set against Safin, the Russian, after getting flattened in the first two sets, began to gain some traction. You might say he started to play better, but you might also have watched the number of steps Federer was taking on his side. Having cruised early, he was a little less balletic for a couple games during the third.
Some day the Swiss really will “lose a step,” as they say. It will be a pity when it happens: For Federer to lose a step from his footwork would be like John McEnroe never hitting another touch volley or Pete Sampras forgetting his service motion. Federer might continue to win, but something fundamental to the sport—a small element worth watching in its own right—will have been lost.
—
 Brad Gilbert bothers people. He always has. In particular, he bothers people who are better than he is at tennis. This is a man who, over the course of a dozen years of outsmarting and outlasting more talented players on tour, brought John McEnroe to the brink of retirement—“When I start losing to the likes of Brad Gilbert,” Johnny Mac said, “it’s time to get out of this game”—made Boris Becker blow a gasket on the U.S. Open’s Grandstand court, and inspired Pete Sampras to drop an f-bomb in a national magazine. When the story’s writer mentioned Gilbert, who was then the coach of Sampras’ rival, Andre Agassi, Pistol Pete responded without hesitation:
“F--- Brad!” he said.
Even when a top player is employing him, the man finds a way under his skin. Now that I think about it, maybe the young, immature Andy Murray had a very good reason for screaming at his coach when he was losing. Maybe it wasn’t just his immaturity. Maybe it was because his coach was Brad Gilbert.
Does Brad, or as he’s known around the game, “BG”—if there has ever been a man who was born to be called by his initials, it’s Brad Gilbert—bother you, too? I know more than a few people who would nod vigorously at this question. They can’t stand his commentary for ESPN and mute him as often as possible. They sometimes wish that a device could be invented that would mute his voice alone.
I can think of many types of people who would obviously be turned off by Brad. Lovers of polished broadcaster's pipes like Dick Enberg’s must cringe when they hear Gilbert’s flat, scratchy tone and hyper delivery. Lovers of restrained British-style tennis commentary must roll their eyes when Brad finds four different ways to describe a single winning forehand, one of which is, “That’s a . . . that’s a . . . that’s a ‘how do you do’ shot!” Lovers of stylish clothing must wonder how he could be allowed on TV in a yellow blazer. Lovers of the English language must hang their heads when they hear Brad say, more than once, “He lost in those tournaments to Federer and Nadal, respectfully,” instead of “respectively.” If there’s one type of listener that must surely love Brad Gilbert, it’s the aficionado of the malapropism.
But Brad Gilbert doesn’t bother me. While Darren Cahill produces as many insights in roughly half as many words, I’ve come to like Brad’s rough edges. I like his imperviousness to irony—he attracts the lion’s share of jokes and taunts from his colleagues, but they seem to bounce right off his big skull. I like the way he brings the gung-ho style of a team sports guy, complete with jock jargon and a nerdy love of stats, into the more rarefied world of tennis.
Yes, Brad has an opinion on everything and a prescription for everything. At TENNIS Magazine, he does a monthly column called, “Brad’s 3 Reasons Why...” in which he lists all the changes he would make in the game—suffice it to say that, if he ever got to rule the game, very few things would be left un-changed. And we know he can go around the bend with his prognostications. Gilbert once predicted that Federer would win 20 majors and Nadal wouldn’t win the French Open in 2008 (he won it without losing a set). After the Wimbledon final last year, he turned around and said that Federer wouldn’t catch Sampras’s 14-major mark, but that Nadal would. Are you surprised that he’s now driving the Murray bandwagon? Gilbert told me in a recent phone conversation that he wouldn’t be surprised if the Scot was No. 1 in four months. (I’m not even sure that’s possible, but it sounded good.)
In other words, Brad is excitable. What’s important is that he’s excitable in a good cause. Did he look ridiculous at Wimbledon when he stood up and gave Nadal a round of applause in the ESPN studio after the final? Yes. Was it also touching and appropriate? Absolutely. Is it illogical to say Murray will be No. 1 almost immediately, even before he has won a Slam? Of course. But later in my conversation with Gilbert, he also said this about Murray: “What sets him apart is that’s he’s such a good volleyer for someone so young. The other guys who were good volleyers when they were young were Edberg, Sampras, and Federer. All those guys spent a lot of time at No. 1.” Pretty interesting, right? I never would have thought of that.
Brad, unlike ESPN’s other announcers, makes tennis sound like a big-time sport; he makes a match sound like must-see TV; he gets me intrigued about up-and-coming players I haven’t seen yet. He obviously knows how to analyze the game, and he sees its details from a coach’s perspective. If you think that power-baseline tennis doesn’t involve tactics, adjustments, and shot-by-shot decisions on the part of the players, you need to listen to Gilbert—when he describes a rally, what looks like a slugfest begins to sound a little closer to an athletic chess match. Beyond the nuts and bolts, Gilbert falls in love with certain guys’ games and communicates a winning enthusiasm about what they do. Nadal is a particular favorite; Gilbert spent much of Wednesday night pointing out the excellence of Nadal’s footwork. I’d always realized on a general level that Nadal moved well, but seeing how he hard he worked to get around and hit a forehand even off a fast-moving slice from his opponent was eye-opening.
So far in Oz, Brad has told us that Mike Agassi called him to tell him that Marin Cilic will be in the Top 5 this year, that Andre Agassi strung his racquets more loosely at night in Melbourne, that Nadal strings his sticks at 42 pounds, that Djokovic has developed a hitch in his forehand swing (we'll see if that turns out to be true), and that the Aussie teen Samuel Groth has a “monster serve that you have to see.” Somehow this information sounded important, even shocking, to me when I heard Gilbert say it—I was certainly psyched to check out Groth. Maybe it’s because I know this info is coming from BG, a guy who has become one of the Zeligs of the game, a true insider and a big part of its recent history.
We know Gilbert kicked Agassi’s butt into gear during the rain delay at the 1999 French Open. We know he coached Andy Roddick to his only Slam title, a win that seems like a borderline miracle now. But do you know who pointed Steffi Graf out to a newly single Agassi as someone he should date? And do you know who ended up with the racquet that Nadal used to win the greatest match of all time, the 2008 Wimbledon final? That’s right, it’s the one and only BG. When I heard that story, I wondered how Brad got Rafa to give that stick to him. Of course, there was only one answer: Every once in a while, it pays to bother people so much.
 On Sunday night I trudged home, head down, defeated, after watching the Philadelphia Eagles once again reveal their fatal flaw: the inability to win when it counts. For some reason, though, I feel like Reid, McNabb and company are explosive enough to get hot at the right moment and go all the way some day—unfortunately, I thought that day might have been about to come.
It was time to turn the sports page once again, which made flipping on ESPN2 when I got home that night all the more enjoyable. There once again were the blazingly blue courts of Melbourne Park. They didn’t just look warm this time, they sounded warm. By now, the trademark echo in Rod Laver Arena—most noticeable when a line call is hollered out—triggers sensations of vicarious summer.
I spent a good part of the next two days wallowing in that virtual sunshine. One thing you can say about ESPN’s coverage is that it lasts awhile. Each day feels like a small tournament of its own, which is pretty much the way a Grand Slam feels in person. From my perch in the living room, here are a few notes after two days of surveying Oz.
1. Juan Martin del Potro: I came into this year a little wary of the big man’s immediate future. But the first shot I saw him hit was a brilliant, inside-out, two-handed backhand return for a winner. I’ve never heard anyone mention his anticipation on the return, but he seems like a natural.
2. ESPN
Early downsides: They have a few too many people over there. After you’ve heard from Pam, then Brad, then Patrick, then Darren, then Mary, then Mary Joe, it can begin to feel like the commentators are in the foreground and the players somewhere off in the distance, doing their thing. The network also works too hard to make U.S. viewers feel at home. Did we need Andy Roddick’s thoughts on the Super Bowl, and a live interview with Lance Armstrong (who?)? Tennis fans in the U.S. are internationalists at heart; we follow the sport, not the Americans who play it.
Early upsides: While I once wanted tennis and only tennis, Fowler’s interviews with Roddick—he looks better 15 pounds lighter—and Ana Ivanovic—who else speaks quickly enough to work a quote from Nietszche into her analysis of her current game, all in three seconds flat?—have been worthwhile and even charming. And unlike the Tennis Channel’s bare-bones operation, ESPN’s full-court, all-court coverage does justice to the grandness of this Slam.
The channel continues to follow Americans to the ends of the earth, sending Shriver and a lone camera to peek in on the likes of Robert Kendrick on Day One. But it follows players from other nations there as well. I actually found myself wishing I could see the Fish-Groth first-rounder, rather than the record-breaking marathon between Lopez and Muller—it was the longest match in Australian Open history—that the network tracked so diligently. It was newsworthy, but still, it was Lopez and Muller, neither of whom was at their spryest after 5 hours in the blistering heat.
Note: Cliff Drysdale and Mary Carillo, both in their 30th year in the commentating business, sound something like an old couple when they’re forced into in the booth together. Yesterday Carillo said she “hated to agree” with anything Cliff said.
3. Jelena Jankovic
I like the green dress and the heavier topspin she was getting on her forehand. But speaking of green, did JJ look a little, well, pukey, at one point in the second set of her first-round match? No matter how fit you are, nerves and 100-degree heat are a lethal combination.
This match exemplified a problem I have with more than a few early-round WTA contests at majors. Jankovic was shaky for a few games, but her opponent, the little-known Yvonna Meusburger of Austria, couldn’t take advantage of it. If an ATP seed had stumbled like that, he would have at least been punished with the loss of a set. There’s nothing, short of making the women’s draws 64 players rather 128, that can be done about this, but the massive gaps in ability levels make the women’s first week seem more like an exhibition—what’s Venus wearing? are Jelena's arms bigger?—than a competition.
4. Bernard Tomic
The 16-year-old Aussie was impressively skilled and calm in winning his first match at a major, over Potito Starace in four tough sets. Tomic is a rail-thin finesse player, which is not exactly what you want in a prospect. But he’s tall, he has a weapon—his smooth two-handed backhand caught Starace off guard with its pace—he changes speeds well, and he has good hands. He even stood stock still as he hit a forehand winner in the deciding tiebreaker. It may have looked like he’d given up on the shot, but I’ve seen him hit balls like that before, where he doesn’t move at all. Could this be the start of a new, game-changing technique?
5. Chris Fowler
Did he study to be a lawyer? He's personable and a good interviewer, but he has a habit of not letting a statement, no matter how benign or polite, pass without challenge. Darren Cahill made an innocuous and friendly comment about how Tommy Haas still thought he could win a major. It was made more in generosity than anything else, but Fowler jumped on it, asking Cahill if that were really possible considering that Haas is 30 years old and ranked No. 79 in the world. Cahill answered that Haas had been injured and was better than his ranking, but Fowler kept at it, saying he would never get seeded with his ranking that low. Cahill did the smart thing and dropped the subject.
6. Shahar Peer and Tamira Paszek
These sure shots from years gone appeared out of nowhere as first-round losers on outer courts. The tour churns them up, and then churns them out. Who will we see in this position in two years? Bernard Tomic?
7. Sam Querrey
He has to be counted as the U.S.’ biggest disappointment thus far, falling in three feeble sets to Philipp Kohlschreiber. I was struck by the same thing that Brad Gilbert was struck by—even when Querrey hit a forcing shot, he did it from so far behind the baseline that he was never in position to capitalize on the next ball. Beyond that, what is Querrey, at 6-foot-6, doing playing the same game as the 5-foot-10 German?
8. David Nalbandian
The grouchy Gaucho may just turn into a curmudgeonly entertainer in his later years. The crowd in Melbourne loved his multiple racquet smashings during the second set of his win over Marc Gicquel.
9. Roger Federer
He went into full-flight mode too early against the tricky Andreas Seppi. Federer broke out to a 4-1 lead, then started getting playful, hitting overheads from the baseline, squash shots from his ankles, and a glorious turnaround topspin forehand pass off a Seppi lob. Then he had to go back to serious work in the second and third sets. It looked like a drag. Watching him slog dutifully through, I began to wonder if the real reason champions lose their grip on the top is not because they lose a step—after all, everyone is losing them at the same rate—but because the motivation and hunger of youth are impossible to sustain.
Also, was their something a little wonky about Federer’s backhand, especially early on?
 10. Venus’ dress
Didn’t I say that yellow is the new black? Venus looks good, as always, and I also liked Serena’s dress, but it’s better from afar; I’m told that’s because the cut is right for her. Sounds good to me.
11. Christina McHale
She was just doing her job, but it felt a little cruel when Shriver got a hold of this 16-year-old American right after she had cramped badly and lost 9-7 in the third. When McHale said, through tears, that you have to fight through everything, I found myself asking a very basic question: Why? What does it prove about someone if they “fight through everything” anyway?
Whatever the answer, I enjoyed McHale’s game. She’s not big or powerful, but she’s rangy and athletic. I’d never heard her name before.
12. The Crawl
ESPN insists on running its news crawl at the bottom of its Aussie Open broadcasts. This may make sense when there is actual news to report, but do we need to be kept abreast of the “notable MLB players to avoid arbitration” during this off-season, or that Mark McGwire’s former coach says he is a “man of integrity”?
***
That’s it from the Oz notebook. I’ll be back in a couple days with more. Enjoy the virtual warmth while you can.
PS: One question before I go: I didn’t get a chance to see Rafael Nadal lay the hurt on Christophe Rochus. I’m told Nadal is tweaking his forehand—any noticeable difference so far?
 The last few years on the ATP tour have not been good to dark horses. Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal have collected 14 of the last 15 Grand Slams, an unprecedented two-man run of dominance in the Open era, and probably any era. Even during that time, though, it was at least possible to imagine someone—a Fernando Gonzalez here, a Marat Safin there—coming from deep in the nether regions of the draw to steal one away while Rog and Rafa had their backs turned. This time, as hard as I stare at the Aussie Open men’s brackets, and as wild as I let my imagination run—could, um, David Nalbandian win it all?—I just can’t picture anyone other than one of the prohibitive favorites in Melbourne hoisting the trophy in Rod Laver Arena two weeks from now.
That’s because Federer and Nadal have more backup than ever. Last year the Big 2 became the Big 3 when Novak Djokovic won Down Under; this year Andy Murray has joined the ruling class. In fact, Murray has done more than that. To the ire and disbelief of Federer, he has played so well of late that’s he’s become the bookies’ pre-tournament pick to win it all. What’s surprising is that no one who follows the game is remotely surprised by this: over at ESPN.com, five of their six tennis writers picked Murray to win it all. The sixth, Matt Wilansky, picked Nadal, though he said he based his choice on the “logic” that Nadal is still the No. 1 player in the world. In other words, it doesn’t sound like he has his heart in his prediction. As for Federer, no one thinks the 13-time Slam winner and three-time Aussie champ has what it takes.
Is Murray a lock? Is picking Federer or Nadal to win a major now a subversive, just-for-the-hell-of-it, third-party protest choice? Is there someone, anyone, out there who can upset the Big 4’s apple cart? Or is it even a Big 4 anymore? Djokovic, after finishing 2008 on a high note at the Masters Cup, has struggled in his preparation for Melbourne, a fact that only helps Murray’s chances.
These and other questions will be answered soon enough—as they say, that’s why the play the matches. For now, all we have are the draws, our maps to the near future. Let’s take a closer look at how they might play out. Whatever happens, it’s nice to see fans fired up for tennis again—I can’t remember this much anticipation for an Aussie Open before. See what a little time away can do for us?
First Quarter
It’s still odd to see “Nadal, Rafael, ESP” in the No. 1 position in a Grand Slam draw. But, lest we forget, he has earned the right to be there. His relationship to the Aussie Open is a mysterious one. From the start of his career, when he twice lost close duels to Lleyton Hewitt in Melbourne, we’ve always said that he should do well on the slow and lively courts there. While he has steadily improved his results over the years, reaching the semifinals last year, Nadal has never seemed in top form at this point in the season. The last two years he was blown away by Fernando Gonzalez and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, respectively. The courts may be suited to Nadal, but they seem even more suited to other players’ games. If his lack of a title in Oz has shown us anything, it’s that Nadal is a momentum player who is at his best when he’s got a few wins under his belt, not when he’s starting from scratch. Plus, this time he’s coming back from knee tendinitis that kept him out of the Masters Cup and Davis Cup final last November.
Still, “should do well” remains attached to his name in Melbourne Park. This year Nadal will start with the benign Christophe Rochus, and may get one of two terminal underachievers in the third round, Dmitry Tursunov or Tommy Haas—Nadal has never lost a set to either. Then there could be trouble: Gonzalez, Lleyton Hewitt, Richard Gasquet, Gilles Simon, and Gael Monfils are lurking in the rest of his quarter.
Simon is No. 6 in the world and beat Nadal in Madrid last fall. But he’s never been out of the third round at a major, thus making him a highly unreliable pick at this one. While Gonzalez drummed Nadal out of the tournament two years ago, he’s 0-3 against him since and hasn’t won a set. It’s Monfils who could be the most dangerous. He beat Nadal in Doha last week and is one of the few guys outside the Top 4 with the electric athleticism to go all the way. From the sounds of it, he’s been more serious in his preparation than ever—no more acupuncturist, lots of time on the courts. The Frenchman is never a safe bet, but he is a fun one.
First-round match to watch: Gonzalez vs. Hewitt
Semifinalist: Gael Monfils
Second Quarter
Murray has been slotted into Nadal’s half (or is that the other way around?). It’s a good section for him, a good medium-pace court for him, even a good format for him—like we’ve always said about Federer and Nadal at the majors, someone is going to have play their best for three sets to beat him (you know you’ve made it when we start to say that about you). Murray also seems too grounded in the day to day of training right now to think too far ahead. The pressure will be there, but he has the bedrock of self-confidence to fight it off, just as Djokovic did here in 2008.
The next highest seed in the quarter is Tsonga, and after that James Blake. Murray starts with the ancient Andrei Pavel, would get Jurgan Melzer in the third round, and either Radek Stepanek or Fernando Verdasco after that. I think he’ll face Tsonga in the quarters. The Frenchman outhit Murray here in the first round last year, but the Scot’s improved serve will keep that from happening in ’09. He’s always been good at winning difficult points; now he can win the easy ones as well.
Player to watch: Ernests Gulbis. He’s on Tsonga’s side and could conceivably reach the quarters.
Semifinalist: Andy Murray
Third Quarter
Once, not so long ago, our first question when the draw came out was, Which half did Djokovic land in? Not so much anymore. The defending champion, for the record, is in Federer’s half, and in the same quarter as Andy Roddick and David Nalbandian (and Mardy Fish, in case you were wondering). Djoko seems safe to start, though his potential second-round opponent, Jeremy Chardy is an improving shot-maker, and he could face Jarkko Nieminen, who just beat him in Syndey, in the third round. But the two highest seeds in his half of the section are Mathieu and Soderling, hardly what you would call dangerous floaters.
Up top, Roddick might face a tricky third round, either against Philipp Kohlschreiber, who beat him in Oz last year, or his Davis Cup teammate Sam Querrey, who is off to a strong start this month. After that, there’s Nalbandian, who also seems to be in better-than-average form, and who likes these courts—he was two games from the final in 2006. If Roddick is going to make any kind of move, maybe for the rest of his career, it will likely happen in the next six months. He’s got a brand new coach in Larry Stefanki, and historically he gets an early boost when he starts working with someone new.
Player to watch: Marcos Baghdatis. The 2006 finalist is floating in the middle of this section. He’s been hurt, but he’s among family Down Under.
Semifinalist: David Nalbandian
Fourth Quarter
Does Roger Federer suddenly seem old? That’s the feeling I get every time I hear someone say that he’s 27. In every other reality, that is not old—I’m not sure I even had a job by the time I was 27—but in the men’s game right now, with its parade of 20- to 22-year-old sluggers, it sounds positively ancient. I’ve even heard Federer called the “sentimental favorite” in Melbourne. I think it’s a little early to start giving him the Andre Agassi treatment; the guy did win the last major to be contested, like, four months ago.
Still, a glance at his draw won’t make His Eminence feel any younger. Juan-Martin del Potro, 20, is the second-highest seed, and Marin Cilic, also 20, is the fourth. But Federer might get to start against two of his old buddies, Carlos Moya in the second round, and Marat Safin in the third. After that, he could find himself in a tricky duel with his doubles partner, Stan Wawrinka. For all that, though, I still would bet on Federer against anyone here. He hasn’t been on fire this season so far, losing a pair of 6-2 sets to Murray in Doha, but he also says the pressure is off him. That pressure, the “monster” of expectations,” weighed on him in Melbourne last year.
But it won’t be Federer’s frame of mind that determines his fate—he’s seen it all and felt it all on a tennis court by now, and may be beyond trying to prove he’s the best in the world every week. His fate will be determine by something simpler: How consistent he is with his forehand over the two weeks.
Semifinalist: Roger Federer
Semifinals: Murray d. Monfils; Federer d. Nalbandian
Final: Murray vs. Federer would give us intriguing questions on both sides of the net. Can Murray slay the teacher, the father, the master, when it counts? He’s in the same position Djokovic was last year. Both reached their first major finals at the U.S. Open and were taught a straight-set lesson by Federer. Djokovic learned from it and came back to beat him in Melbourne. Will Murray be calmer this time around and not let Federer get out of the gates so quickly? Will keep him from taking over the center of the court so thoroughly?
For Federer, the question may be one of how well he manages his desire to put the kid in his place. Revenge has been sporadic for Federer over his career; certain players can get in his head, and he doesn’t play to send messages to opponents. He didn’t get revenge against Guillermo Cañas in Key Biscayne in 2007; he has occasionally gotten it against Nadal (in part because he’s mostly faced him on clay, but still, the guy bothers Federer); and he didn’t get it against Murray in Doha. On the other hand, he did turn the tables on Djokovic at the U.S. Open.
As far as their games, Murray has had success taking control of points on Federer’s serve; using his own serve well on crucial points; and of generally not giving Federer much to work with from the ground. Plus, Murray is the only guy in the world who can match Federer in terms of quickness, creativity, and net skill.
If this is the final, the pressure will be felt equally—Murray is going for Slam No. 1; Federer for a record-tying No. 14—the motivation levels will be similar, and the playing styles will be as complete as humanly possible. Do you want change, or do you want experience? The world seems to favor change; I may be out of touch, but I don’t think 27 sounds all that old.
Champion: Roger Federer
 Melbourne has been almost as hostile to outsiders on the women’s side in recent years. The last five winners Down Under have been named Henin, S. Williams, Mauresmo, S. Williams, and Sharapova, all of whom have spent time at No. 1. You might think this year it would be different, with two of the four, Henin and Sharapova, not in the draw. But Slam winners on the WTA side are always an exclusive society, and while the faces at the top are slightly rearranged this time around—a different Serb is coming in with momentum; a new Russian has thrown her hat in the ring in the last 10 months— they’re also notable for being pretty familiar to us. The most intriguing player who is going for her first Slam title, Jelena Jankovic, is 23 years old, a veteran by any standard in professional tennis.
Because of oddities in the rankings, mostly involving the Williams sisters, one recent phenomenon of the draws at women’s majors has been that of the overloaded half. You might see five legit contenders up top and Svetlana Kuznetsova and someone else on the bottom. This time there’s more balance, though the bottom half is strong, with No. 6 seed Venus Williams, winner of the tour championships last November, slotted to meet Elena Dementieva in the quarters, with the winner to possibly face Serena Williams in the semifinals. Not that the big names on the other side—Jankovic, Ivanovic, Safina—are all that shabby. But whomever comes out of that side will only have to beat one Williams sister for the title. That never hurts.
First Quarter
Jankovic, No. 1 since the fall, will be the top seed at a Slam for the first time. Whether she embraces the moment or wilts in the spotlight—not likely, would you say?—she’s been rewarded with a soft quarter. The next highest seeds are Vera Zvonareva and Nadia Petrova. Zvonareva came on strong at the end of 2008, reaching the final of the season-ender, and Petrova seems to think she can find her old form this year; either of them would make for quality opponents for the Jankovic in the fourth round. And JJ has said she’s been feeling some ill effects of her fitness work with Pat Etcheberry, the same Etcheberry who overtrained Henin and sidelined her a few years ago. But I don’t think this drama queen can complain about the lot she’s drawn to start in Melbourne.
Semifinalist: Jelena Jankovic
Second Quarter
The third and fifth seeds, Safina and Ivanovic, are the headliners here. Each was on fire last spring, when they played each other in the final of the French Open. But Ivanovic cooled off and Safina seemed to hit a ceiling named Williams later in the year. Now the Serb comes in with her coaching situation up in the air, and Safina is no longer the hottest Russian around, that honor belonging to Elena Dementieva so far in 2009.
Could anyone knock these two off track? There are some mild road bumps out there—Alize Cornet, 2008 semifinalist Daniela Hantuchova, the still-skilled Anna Chakvetadze. Most dangerous is 18-year-old Caroline Wozniacki, who has been knocking on the big-upset door for a year or so now. She may be ready to take one of these two down—she’s on Ivanovic’s side—but probably not both.
Semifinalist: Dinara Safina
Third Quarter
Here we have what might be the match of the tournament, and even the decider of the champion, in a potential quarterfinal between Venus and Dementieva. As we’ve said, Venus finished 2008 playing some of the best sustained tennis of her career in Doha, and seems poised for a possible renaissance in ’09. Dementieva won the biggest tournament of her life at the Olympics last season and has already won two tournaments this month, the last of which included a victory over Safina.
I don’t see anyone who will come between them along the way. If they do play, Venus will bring a 7-2 career record in, which includes wins at Wimbledon and the tour championships in 2008.
Semifinalist: Venus Williams
Fourth Quarter
So this is where we find Kuzzie. I thought she had dropped out with an injury, but she remains in the draw for the moment. She’s slotted to face Serena in the quarters, though there are a couple of darkhorses on Kuznetsova’s side, Agnieszka Radwanska and Jheng Zie. Serena’s toughest competition might come from either the 13th seed and still-improving Victoria Azarenka, or an aging but always talented Amelie Mauresmo, who played Serena tight for a set at Wimbledon last year. But Williams has won this tournament three times, and while she’s been hurt (that’s a given by now), she comes in having won the last major and reached the final of the one before that.
Semifinalist: Serena Williams
Semifinals: V. Williams d. S Williams; Jankovic d. Safina
Final: Jankovic vs. Venus would be a final to savor, a combination of first-class athleticism, scrambling, and diva behavior—unlike those nice guys on the men’s side, these two will take no prisoners, especially now that Jankovic has already lost a Slam final and won’t be satisfied just making it to another. They are also extremely evenly matched: Jankovic holds a 5-4 career edge, but their last seven matches have gone to three sets. Each is a counterpuncher at heart, each is tough to finish off, and each can track down just about anything—hence their long, close matches. While I think this is Jankovic’s year to win a Slam, I can’t bet against one of the Williamses in a major final. No one plays the big ones like they do.
Champion: Venus Williams
 I've been wanting to write a travel post about my recent New Year's trip to Texas. This is my last chance, really, with the Aussie Open looming. So here's one last pre-tournament respite from tennis, for anyone interested. My men's preview is on the home page; feel free to comment on it on the previous CE post (not on this one). I'll be back with a look at the women's draw tomorrow.
For years, I’d had two very different impressions of Austin, Texas. The earliest came from the long-running live music show Austin City Limits, which I can first remember seeing in the early 1980s. Along with the cheesy video program Night Flight on USA, it was an early televised window into music for me. The only evidence of Austin itself was an image of the colossal Texas state capital, which periodically floated behind the set like a bombastic but oddly beautiful cloud of authority. My second and much weirder impression of the city came from the movie Slacker, director Richard Linklater’s small classic from the early 90s, where a semi-deranged group of 20-somethings make aimlessness into an art form in Austin. They’re happy, though a little defensive, to eat, sleep, watch live music, wander the streets, and discuss Kennedy-assassination theories.
I finally made the trip to the well-loved scruffy city myself over the New Year’s break, with my girlfriend Julie. We started in Austin, then drove to San Antonio—five days total in the famous and dusty Hill Country of Texas. The weather was cooperative: It was sunny and in the 70s, a nice but not-too-shocking change from the 30-degree rain pelting the streets of New York. More than that, the warm air in Austin felt gentle, a feeling I’d only associated with the best days in Northern California. It didn’t seem fair: How can a Northeasterner keep a bad mood going in that kind of weather?
Still, I began this trip with a semi-infuriating mistake. On our second day there, I scrolled through some online music listings for Austin and discovered that folk-country-leftwing-redneck singer Todd Snider had played the night before at the legendary little dance joint Gruene Hall, south of the city. Never mind that as a resident of New York City I probably could have seen Snider a hundred times and had never taken the opportunity, even though I own half a dozen of his records and occasionally recite his day-seizing anthem “Enjoy Yourself” (“Enjoy yourself/It’s later than you think”). The point was to hear Snider in Texas. By now, virtually any show that I go to in my hometown seems like it’s part of the daily routine—fun, but normal rather than thought-provoking. To see that show in a new place, that’s cool, that’s romantic, that’s daring, whatever you want to call it—it’s exciting.
There’s comfort in routine. Why else, despite being surrounded by hundreds of world-class restaurants in New York, would I regularly skip them all in favor of the just-slightly-above-average Tex Mex place down the street, where I can talk to one bartender about college football and another about rock and roll (as you may be able to tell, I’m not a foodie)? There’s comfort in routine, but nothing to make you sit up a little straighter and open your eyes a little wider, the way you do when you’re someplace new. It’s a chore breaking out of habits—is there a more powerful force in the universe?—but it must be done if you don’t want your brain to atrophy. As Snider puts it in “Enjoy Yourself,”
You’re gonna take that ocean trip
No matter come what may.
You got your reservations
But you just can't get away.
Next year, for sure, you’ll see the world,
You’ll really get around;
But how far can you travel
When you’re six feet underground?
Of course, there’s a downside to breaking your routine. When I take a day off from work, my mind is vulnerable to all the shameful demons from my past and all the fears of the future. Normally, these are kept at bay by the daily goals and obligations of work. A full week day without a definite purpose? That can be a scary thought, and there have been many afternoons when I’ve contemplated giving up and just going into the office, even though I’ve taken it as a vacation day.
A full-fledged vacation should take care of that; in theory, you have things to do. But no, even in Texas, with the gentle air and clear skies, I could find myself in the middle of the afternoon wondering what my purpose on this planet was: Why had I chosen to come to a place that housed a bar called the Chuggin’ Monkey? What was San Antonio’s Riverwalk but a theme park with margaritas and souvenir T-shirts instead of rollercoasters? Why, when I visited the Texas State House and the Alamo, did I feel like a school kid on a field trip?
Actually, I’ve come to like the field trip stuff as an adult. The State House is as grand as advertised. It’s larger than the Capitol in D.C.—this is Texas, not just the piddly United States of America, after all—and you can see its pink walls floating in the distance from pretty much anywhere in the city, just as it did on Austin City Limits. From that description, you might think it’s an oppressive symbol of a government that can find you wherever you are (it was once the house of Dubya), but I thought of it more as a quaint and kind of funny monument to Texas bravado. Except, perhaps, for the prominent statue on its front lawn commemorating the state’s participation in the Confederacy.
It doesn’t take long for a city to widen in my mind during a trip—you begin in one place and think that’s the whole town, until you drive a few blocks away and experience a completely different vibe. In Austin we started in the old downtown section, at the Driskill, a grande dame hotel where the bathroom towels feature a giant monogrammed D at their center. It’s founder was a man named Jesse Driskill, which has to be one of the great names I’ve ever heard. Driving there from the airport, we saw a bumper sticker that read, “I’d rather be drunk,” and another that read, "This ain't my first rodeo." Julie spotted a guy in a cowboy hat.
“He’s wearing one of the hats!” We stared.
We quickly found that the soul of Austin is on the other side of the river, in the thrift shops, hipster hotels, and former-car-shops-turned-outdoor-bars on South Congress St.—the Slacker side of town, where cowboy hats are rare. The same was true in San Antonio. Once we escaped the River Walk, there was a suitably grungy arts district, a fabulous and streamer-filled all-night Mexican diner, an even more fabulous pancake house in a godforsaken strip mall, and some of the best barbeque we’d ever had in a restaurant that doubled as a gas station.
Here’s some more of the Hill Country highlight reel:
—Waterloo Records seems to be music central in Austin. I walked in and immediately recognized a favorite scent from my youth—the musty mix of long-resting cardboard and vinyl that fills record stores from Burlington to Berkeley. I began the familiar motion of flipping records back with my index finger, something I don’t get to do to often anymore in NYC. But I didn’t see much of interest, and I briefly thought I had lost the old passion for these relics. Then I passed the New Arrivals section and thought, Of course, that’s the only section that will ever have anything decent in it. I figured Austin for a town full of record-collector scum (it’s no insult; that’s what we call ourselves). I was right, in those racks were tossed-away gems like Hüsker Dü’s Flip Your Wig; Bud Powell’s Bouncing with Bud; Duke Ellington’s Far East Suite; even the soundtrack to the 1964 Olympics in Tokyo. I needed to hear the “music to swim laps to.” I had the old collector’s urge back, so much so that I found myself hoping that the clerk at the cash register would give me a sign that he approved of my purchases, the way the clerks always did back in State College, Pa. No such luck this time. I got over it.
—Across the street from Waterloo is Book People, a two-story establishment that functions not just as a store, but as a locus and neighborhood for anyone interested in books in the area, like Elliott Bay in Seattle, Powell’s in Portland, and the Tattered Cover in Denver—some of my favorite places anywhere. I loved Book People as well and felt like I could happily spend a day there. Which was odd, when I thought about it longer. I live across the street in Brooklyn from a small independent bookstore that everyone who visits inevitably calls “cute.” It is cute, and quaint, and clean, and friendly, and I buy books there all the time. But it also strikes me as one of the dreariest places on earth; the thought of spending an entire day in there is enough to make me want to cry. Now I realize why: I pass it every day on my way to and from work. If I passed Book People going to work, I would probably find it just as horrible after about three weeks.
—Austin is all about barbeque, we were told. We tried to go to a couple of the better-known joints downtown, only to find them closed by 10:30—this was when we knew we weren’t in New York City anymore. So we tried the south side of town, stopping at the Green Mesquite, which looked like any other diner, with five or six glass-topped tables and beat-up booths. But this is a diner that just happened to have ridiculous smoked chicken (“ridiculous” is the extent of my abilities as a food critic). The waiter sported a long scraggly beard and wore sneakers and a trucker’s hat. When we asked which was better, the brisket or the pork ribs, he nodded and immediately said in a no-nonsense voice, “Oh, the brisket.”
—The Hill Country between Austin and San Antonio is full of beautifully dusty brown vistas and live oaks. It also seems to be a hotbed of roadside gentleman’s clubs. Best name: “The Wild Boar: A Gentleman’s Paradise.”
—San Antonio looked, to these untrained eyes, to be a uniquely smooth mix of American and Mexican culture. We were there for 48 hours, but the fusion seemed as complete as any place I’ve been in the States. There was celebration of the Alamo, just down the street from a brightly decorated Mexican diner that served superb enchiladas anytime day or night.
 —I got tickets to the NBA game between my Sixers and the Spurs. It was a great game that the Spurs won on a lucky final play. At halftime, a local store put on a promotion that consisted of donuts being dropped onto spectators from the roof of the arena.
—Did I say I wasn’t a foodie? I may have to rethink that after trekking out to the suburbs of San Antonio, to a faceless strip mall, to eat breakfast at the Magnolia Pancake House. There’s something about the pancakes, something I can’t put my finger. Let’s just say they’re kind of ridiculous. The 20-minute wait was worth it. Plus, it gave me a chance to see a well-groomed man about my age quietly sitting in the waiting area and reading Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time. I was dumbfounded. That’s one of those I-swear-I’ll-read-it-before-I-die-novels, which I seriously doubt I will ever read. I own one of its 12 volumes, but have never cracked it. Who says Texans aren’t intellectuals?
—The final stop on the chowhound tour was a complete accident. I had to stop to go to the bathroom, so I got off at a random exit north of San Antonio. We tried to stop at a Holiday Inn, but couldn’t park close enough, so I drove down to a gas station that seemed to be called Rudy’s. It turned out that Rudy’s was the restaurant—its dining room consisting of picnic tables and a gigantic ice bucket filled with beer bottles—behind the gas station. It advertised itself as the “Worst BBQ in the World.” It was anything but. We were still full on pancakes, but we couldn’t resist some smoked chicken to go.
 —Food is one reason to go to Texas. The other, of course, is music. The first show we saw was a decent blues band at the Saxon Pub in Austin. The singer was gutsy and the band had the room dancing, but it wasn’t anything you can’t find in NYC. For the first few days, I had better luck in the car, where the local country music station suddenly seemed to make total sense. There’s a punchy red-state poetry to the stuff that sounded just right down there, and made a lot of the stuff on my IPod seem stiff and uptight. Like the tribute to the pickup truck; apparently no woman can resist a man who drives one—the singer claimed he’d met “all his wives” in “traffic jams.” Or Tom T. Hall’s four secrets to life: “Faster horses, younger women, older whiskey, and more money.” Even Willie sounded better when he came on the radio, especially when he sang his own philosophical poetry: “Yesterday’s dead, tomorrow’s blind/I live one day at a time.”
When we lost the signal on San Antonio’s country station, I put in a mix CD. The first song was Sebadoh’s “Healthy Sick,” an old indie classic. Hearing it through the Hill Country was a perplexing and exhilarating experience, one that reminded me of how I once heard and treasured the indie rock of the 80s when I lived in the middle of Pennsylvania. When you’re young and in an out-of-the-way place, and you like thorny, whispered, lo-fi, underground music, and you read about it in magazines that are mailed from big cities far away, and you can only hear it on fuzzy college stations that don’t come in for more than a few miles, and you can only find it in basement record stores in college towns that you drove two hours to get to because you can't bear another trip to the Listening Booth or the Sam Goody at the mall, you keep this music close, like a secret truth. I could feel that secret truth again in Texas, just like I’d felt it 20 years ago in Pennsylvania.
Still, I didn’t come to Texas just to hear Sebadoh in a different context. Our last stop on our last day was Gruene Hall, the joint where we hadn’t seen Todd Snider five days before. Gruene is a quaint tourist town south of Austin. Its biggest draw is its century-old, wooden, how-has-this-place-not-burned-down dance hall, where country acts large and small have cut their teeth, afternoons and evenings, for decades.
 The tourists didn’t hang around in Gruene Hall long, which at 2:00 on a Sunday afternoon was filled with cigarette smoke, bottles of Lone Star, old-timers in boots and hats, long-haired women having a good time, and the sound of acoustic guitars. The McKay Brothers, three weathered dudes with guitars and a mandolin, were playing some suitably gnarled and witty folk-country at the other end of the barroom. Out back was a huge dance hall filled with picnic tables. I kept thinking of the places where Clint Eastwood did his bare-knuckle fighting in Every Which Way But Loose.
We sat down, ordered the local brew, Shiner Bock—it tasted good, crisp, and cold there, but I can’t vouch for it anywhere else—and watched for an hour. The McKays were great, and they clearly felt at home. They sang, “In Texas, you don’t lose your girlfriend/You just lose your turn.” The old-timers laughed hard.
We got up and turned to go. Walking out, I caught the eye of two different people. Both times we looked at each other, nodded, and smiled, a straightforward, friendly gesture I’m not used to in New York. I was a tourist, but for the moment I was at home. It felt good.
Just a quick note to everyone who is currently scanning the Aussie Open draws that my breakdown of the men's is up on the TENNIS.com home page. Check it out and feel free to comment about it here. I'll be back with the women's picks later today.
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