TENNIS.com - Blogs - Concrete Elbow by Steve Tignor

Sometime in the late 1970s, sports fans in this country got fed up with their commentators. This might not seem like a particularly unique event—I’m ready to hit the mute button after about 15 minutes in front of any game—but it helped inspire the NFL and its TV partners to try one of their less-successful experiments. In December 1980, NBC broadcast a meaningless regular-season game between the Jets and the Dolphins without announcers. I can remember watching a few minutes of it and wishing that someone, anyone, would start talking. There was no rhythm or flow—no significance—to the actions of the anonymous helmeted men pushing each other around on the field. The commentators, while hardly beloved, were back the next week. I’ve periodically had tennis fans ask me, “Why do we even need announcers for matches?” I’ve always answered by referencing that football game and asserting from that evidence that talking heads are necessary—a necessary evil at times—for all sports. But in the last two days I’ve come to think that tennis may be an exception to that rule.

On Monday and Tuesday I tuned into Key Biscayne on TennisTV.com at work. The website has been carrying men’s and women’s matches from the two main show courts at Crandon Park (right now my account allows me access only to the ATP's). Some of these matches are being called in the normal way, by two guys in a booth; others, to my initial surprise, have no announcers at all.

Like I said, I regularly mute tennis broadcasts in favor of a soundtrack from my IPod. The upside of this is that it keeps me from having to hear anyone talk over the play; like TENNIS Magazine’s editor, James Martin, who wrote an anti-blather polemic on our website last year, I’m strictly less-is-more when it comes to commentating. The downside is that I don’t get to hear the ball hitting the racquet, or any of the other ancillary sounds that are part of attending a tennis match. The announcer-less matches on TennisTV let me hear those sounds—the pop of an ace, the frustration in a player’s voice after he misses, the sound of a single, lonely set of hands clapping after a routine error early in a match; the quiet milling around that goes on during changeovers—better than I can when I’m watching on television and there’s someone chattering over them. The experience of seeing a tennis match live has been returned. You don’t feel like you’re there, exactly; you feel more like an invisible spy (or butterfly, if you wish) inside the arena.

Today we got to witness Tsonga-Simon and Roddick-Monfils in fabulously surreal silence. What’s strange is that the rest of the broadcast’s production remains intact. The view, as it does on TV, shifts between the camera at the top of the stadium, which shows us the points, and those at court level, which give us the close-ups of the players. Without voices to accompany these shots, the camera becomes a silent and omniscient spectator. It shows you what’s happening from every angle without telling you anything about it. The interpretation is yours.

The first thing I noticed is that the players seemed less like stars and more like players, or even regular guys, to me—maybe it’s the fact that I didn’t hear their names nearly as often. Whatever the reason, without hearing about their histories or records or reputations, I tended to judge them by what I saw of them in front of me. Roddick lost some of his strutting veneer; he just seemed like a guy trying to take care of business out there. Ditto Tsonga. Monfils’ physique and absurd length struck me more forcefully than usual. You're being fed less information about each person, which paradoxically gives you more perspective on them.

Even better, you don’t have to listen to any advice for, or criticism of, the players. No frustrated cries of “why doesn’t he follow that to the net” or boilerplate about “getting more first serves in.” In between the two silent matches, I watched a little of Murray-Troicki, which had announcers. After Murray raced out to a 3-0 lead, one of them said, with mournful disapproval, that this “was just an awful start” for Troicki. I watched Troicki get ready to hit his next serve. I would have said from looking at him that he was behind, but that he was still trying his best and trying to figure this match out, like anyone else, and that there was no cause for despair. On the whole, I felt more negative, more worried, when I watched with announcers. The sport, and the spectating, felt more like work. During the silent matches, I found my own way of thinking about what I was seeing, and that relaxed me.

Beyond that, it was clear to me now that harping on tactics, which all commentators do, is unrealistic. If you’ve ever played a tennis match, you know that many, many points involve no strategy whatsoever. They involve reactions, improvisations, muscle memory, and luck, all things that can easily be observed without having to be explicated. On Saturday, Justin Gimelstob pointed out how much of the power Juan Monaco gets into his backhand came from his left hand, and how that gave him more natural crosscourt angle on the shot. I thought I would miss this kind of technical talk, that it made me more aware of individual players’ little strengths and weaknesses. I didn’t miss it at all. As with the strategy chatter, this stuff now seemed like a distraction from the wider aesthetic enjoyment of a tennis match that I get on my own. Watching live, with no one else in your head, is the best way to appreciate the simple, face to face format of the sport, as well as the many varieties of athleticism and personality that are showcased within it—what else do we need?

I'm not prepared to say that I want to see the Wimbledon final in silence just yet. Some things deserve to be hyped and babbled about (though I wouldn't mind having the option of tuning out certain Grand Slam announcers selectively). And who knows, we might get lonely being on our own during tennis matches. But at the end of the Tsonga-Simon match today, as they approached each other for their handshake, I noticed for the first time in my life how the camera went out toward them. The lens—or the guy carrying it—moved forward along a straight line and at a smooth pace that still managed to convey urgency. The bright white of the net cord, which was on the camera's right, made the perfect frame for the shot. (And the handshake is urgent. The camera must capture it or, as every true tennis fan knows, a match will feel incomplete emotionally.) After three sets in the sun, the two Frenchmen ambled up, smiling, and shook hands with the playful, sheepish respect that comes from being old friends who must also be adversaries. I didn’t need anyone to tell me what to think about that.

Does a yellowish tint coat your TV screen during the Fox Sports broadcasts from Key Biscayne, as if the tournament were being played behind a haze of South Florida humidity? For some inexplicable reason, I like it. The lack of a crystal-clear picture makes me feel as if the tournament is for tennis addicts only. It doesn’t have to work too hard to be thrilling, because we’re the only ones watching in the first place. The heat on the players may be high, but the pressure on the sport is low.

I needed to detox a little from tennis after my Indian Wells overdose, but I got in enough DVR time over the weekend, and TennisTV time today, to relate a few first impressions from Miami.

—Andy Murray betrayed a sluggish irritation during the first set of his opening match against Juan Monaco. The Argentine did begin impressively, controlling the points with heavier ground strokes than Murray could muster, particularly with his versatile backhand. But there were two troubles with Murray: (1) His old coach-berating side resurfaced at inopportune moments late in the first set. This was the first time I’ve seen him let his negativity affect his play this year. (2) He was either content to stick with the passive, rope-a-dope game that worked so well for him on the ultra-slow courts in Indian Wells, or he’s just so comfortable taking no risks right now that he can't get into the habit of forcing the action. Either way, it’s a risky way to play a strong and consistent baseliner. Even on the clay courts he'll see over the coming months, Murray will need to be able to take control of points and hit through the court.

—This morning the editor of TENNIS Magazine, James Martin, told me that watching Marat Safin this weekend made him hate tennis. I can see his point; the man is looking more miserable than ever out there—that’s saying something—and that only makes his job seem like inhumane drudgery. In his loss to Gael Monfils in the Knucklehead Bowl, Safin cracked a racquet in the decisive third-set tiebreaker. But having already been warned, he had to play with it or risk losing a point. His return of serve flew out.

—I watch a lot of tennis with the sound muted—the jazz soundtrack of the weekend was The Sermon, by Jimmy Smith—but I did catch some of Justin Gimelstob's commentary. I’ve always thought he was an insightful analyst who knows the game and the players. He also worked with technique guru Robert Lansdorp, which has to help with the finer points. Gimelstob also offered some ATP information I didn’t know—the South American guys want some clay-court events to be switched to hard—and was honest in assessing the embarrassing competitive habits of David Nalbandian. My only trouble is that Gimelstob puts himself and his analysis front and center in the telecast—he's still proving himself, I guess—which can make it hard to relax and sink into the match itself.

—In the best and most-often-replayed point of the Indian Wells final, Rafael Nadal jumped back for a lob from Andy Murray on his backhand side and sliced a high volley crosscourt that Murray scrambled to track down. The Murray get was spectacular, but the Nadal volley had an even higher degree of difficulty. On Monday, against Frederico Gil, Nadal, after struggling for much of the first set, broke serve at 5-5 with another high backhand volley. On this one, he reached back and spiked the ball with stunning force. Gil, who had hit a decent floating lob, was caught off guard and ended up stumbling after the ball.

I once considered Roger Federer’s high backhand volley and backhand overhead the best in the game. Maybe, more than forehands, backhands, or serves, it’s these status shots that make one worthy of being No. 1. Think of them as the top player’s exclamation points, the fancy hood ornaments that let ther world know their status as the sport's luxury vehicles.

—In my last post on the WTA, I lamented the fact that a tour with so many distinct and engaging personalities could produce so few distinct playing styles on the court. It goes against everything we’ve been taught about the expressiveness of tennis.

The current WTA paradigm (I’ve been out of college long enough to be allowed to use that word) mandates flat forehands, pummeled two-handed backhands, and an air of absolute seriousness and shrieking dedication to the destruction of your opponent—plus face-concealing visors, can't forget those. This weekend we caught a glimpse of a rare exception to this universal approach, in the form of 19-year-old Alexa Glatch and her casually athletic SoCal game and demeanor. Unfortunately, the surf-and-skateboard girl—at times, she looked like she was ready to lope off the court and onto the beach—didn’t have a prayer of withstanding the paradigm’s originator, Serena Williams.

Glatch, once a sure-shot young pro (and the pretend loser to Maria Sharapova in her famous “I Feel Pretty” commercial) who broke her wrist and arm in a moped accident, made some tentative steps forward in Indian Wells and Key Biscayne. She’s always had size—she’s over 6-foot-1 and has a Lindsay Davenport-esque aspect to her gait (they also share a coach in Robert Van’t Hof)—and she hits a heavy ball, but I was surprised by the flexibility of Glatch’s technique and the mellow stylishness of her strokes. She can generate big topspin effortlessly, snap off an inside-out forehand like a dude (or a Justine Henin), come over her backhand with two hands or take one hand off and shift easily to a slice. And she has an easy, natural, momentum-building service motion. She’s a jock, not just a product of a zillion balls pounded out at a tennis factory (though I’m sure she’s hit her share).

Glatch's game is more than just utilitarian; it has personality, and it was a breath of fresh air to watch. That’s not going to change any paradigms, but at least it lets us know there’s still life outside it.

For the moment, I'm unable to embed You Tube videos. To watch the two clips from the 1999 women's final in Indian Wells that I talk about below, go here, and then here

I mentioned in my Key Biscayne preview that Serena Williams owns that tournament. But it wasn't the place where she first signaled her imminent ascent to the top of the sport. That came, ironically, in the 1999 final in Indian Wells, a tournament that the Williamses would only enter two more times. As the decade-old clips above prove—can it be that long ago?—a 17-year-old Serena put the world on notice with a fierce three-set win over all-time great Steffi Graf.

The beads have gone and her muscles aren’t quite as cut as they are here—how could they be?—but Serena’s game hasn’t changed much, has it? I don’t remember this match; its quality, at least in the two late-match videos I’ve linked to above (you can find a lot more of it on You Tube), is lower than it was in Graf’s win over Venus at Wimbledon that year. Even a decade later, though, you can feel the heat and tension as these two ultra-competitors slash at each other.

—The first sound you hear in the second clip is Serena’s grunt. It’s appropriate. While Monica Seles had grunted as loudly 10 years before this, it was the Williamses who made it a permanent part of the sport.

—Cliff Drysdale says that Graf hasn’t won a Slam since the 1996 U.S. Open. No wonder she was so happy when she beat Martina Hingis in Paris two months after this match. I hadn’t realized the drought had lasted that long.

—The Williamses were well-established by 1999—Venus had reached a major final, at Flushing Meadows, as early as ’97—but I can remember the shock among tennis fans that they could take down Steffi Graf—the Steffi Graf, holder of 21 major titles at that point.

—Pam Shriver asks Mary Joe Fernandez (she’s been around that long as well?) who the crowd is rooting for. Shriver then says that in most countries the audience would strongly support their own player, but in Indian Wells the fans may be on Graf’s side. She thinks this is because the tennis audience always warms to its champions late in their careers. And she’s right. But I wonder if there is some ambivalence toward the Williams sisters that has never completely disappeared. Or is it an early sign of distaste from the people of Indian Wells, who would rain boos down on Serena and her sister two years later?

It will be interesting, as Venus and Serena become the grand old veterans of the women’s game, whether they also become its sentimental favorites. A lot may depend on whether they ever stop dominating, or whether they quit while they’re on top.

—Was Serena better at 17? I’m sort of thinking she was. She was slightly more consistent, or at least less prone to wild frame shots. And she wasn’t as incredulous and annoyed at herself after her misses. She was Slamless, hungry, and focused on getting what she wanted. None of it was old hat yet. Maybe her forehand is a more reliable weapon now? Aside from that, she had it all from the beginning.

—You can see Serena, when a ball lands in the middle of the court, running around her forehand to hit backhands. It was her attacking shot at that point, and a serious upgrade from Graf’s slice. Like the return, the Williamses, after Seles and Capriati, helped usher in the age of power from both wings. There was no reason for a young girl to try out a one-hander once she’d seen Venus and Serena do this kind of damage with both hands. Graf's inside-out forehand had met its match. Will the Williamses ever meet theirs? If so, what could it possibly be?

—Not only could Serena beat Graf, she could do it while standing inside the baseline to receive her serve. Besides the grunt, one major new element that the sisters brought to the sport was the ability to dictate off the return. Serena shows how offensive she could be with that shot in the final game. This ability and mindset has spread around the women’s tour and made holding serve that much more difficult, especially with matches on the line. This is often chalked up to a lack of nerve, and serve, from the women today, but you have to factor in their improved returns as well.

—What’s remarkable in the last couple of games is how Serena takes Graf out of her game. She stands at the baseline, owns the center of the court, and doesn’t let a 21-time Slam winner hit her shots. Even at 17, the match is on her racquet. And while she gets a little tight at times, there’s no sense that she has any fear about finishing off a legend of the sport. You might even say that Graf was afraid to beat Serena—the American came back from 4-2 down in the third to win. We should have known, whatever her dad might have said, that she’d be around for a while.

When you go to a tournament, you stroll to whichever court you like and watch any player who strikes your fancy, from a few feet away. When the match is over, if you have a media credential, you can talk to that player. Then you can go hang out by the pool at your hotel.

I know my tennis viewing has been spoiled by this access and immediacy, but I’m about to find out just how much when I go back to my TV this weekend. I’ve heard some dire reports about the coverage from Indian Wells, though the schedule from Key Biscayne looks promising, with a lot of daily live listings.

Still, TENNIS.com has the tournament covered. Pete Bodo is heading for Key Biscayne on Monday, and I’ll write here as often as possible. For now, check out my men’s and women’s previews and come back here to make your own predictions. I've gone out on a few limbs on the ATP side.

Believe it or not, you might want to consider Marcos Baghdatis a little more seriously. He rolled over Ernests Gulbis 6-2, 6-2 yesterday. It would be nice to think that Baghdatis' game and personality—equally appealing— could become relevant again, wouldn’t it?

There’s a moment when you know you’re back in New York. It doesn’t come when you see the Empire State Building or the Verrazano-Narrows from the air. It isn’t when you realize, to your surprise and sadness, that you still miss the World Trade Center and will never consider the city complete without it.

It happens when you get into a yellow cab and the driver, after finding out where you’re going and making his way to the highway entrance, barrels off with a rush so sudden and stunning you feel like something’s just pushed you in the back and sent you flying forward. There’s fast driving, and then there’s the fury of a New York City cabbie who has a living to make and a lot of road to cover. As much as crime has dropped over the years here, it’s still a concrete jungle.

A jarring welcome, to be sure, but the upside is that once you’re on the highway, you know right away there’s no going back to the sunnier and perhaps happier place you just left. Before I forget my last 10 days in such a place, let me tie up a few loose ends about the tournament in Indian Wells.

“Did you think [Andy Roddick] was better today compared to when you played him two years ago in the semis?”

Q. Do you think you can have real friendships on the tennis tour? Do you find that some of them are also fake? 

SAFINA: There is no friendship, you know. As I always say, we're colleagues. Of course we talk to each other, but for sure you cannot say to the girl how you feel, you know, that something is bothering you. Maybe today you woke up on the wrong foot.  I don't know, maybe somebody maybe a phone call. I mean, I had in Australia before the match and they told me my grandfather died. To whom can I go and cry except my team? My brother I can go, but if I tell to one of the players, what's she going to go and talk to the opponent, you know, she's feeling bad. Her grandfather just died.  So these things are tough, you know. But like this you always can call on the phone, call and to say like and to cry on your calls.

—On the first night, a party was held for the press at which the new BNP trophy was unveiled. I ate a mini-burger, had a beer, ate a roll of sushi, had a glass of wine, and finished with a chocolate cupcake and a coke. It was official: I was back on the road.

Roger Federer, after being asked to talk about his tears after the Aussie Open final

Federer: What I don't like is that people think they know why it happened. It's very simple: You go out five hours and try everything you can and you spend three weeks in one city. You love tennis, and you get emotional because the fans are into it and you feel like you're so close, and all of a sudden you realize yet you're so far again. So this is what brought out the tears, I guess. Then seeing again the old scenario of Rod Laver there, just Australian fans are so respectful and so knowledgeable of the game, that kind of created that kind of emotion. It had nothing to do with, Oh, my god, I'm never going to win this tournament again.

—The place; The bar at the Indian Wells Hyatt. I’m waiting for a friend and reading a book from the mid-70s by the aforementioned John Updike. A couple is eating—and drinking—next to me. The man in the couple is wearing a shirt with a large, neon-colored Benihana logo on the back. A repeat of the Roger Federer-Fernando Verdasco quarterfinal is playing on TV.

What I read: For all the taming clichés of tourism and frequentation that a gross and frivolous empire can impose, but a few quick steps from the beaten path, into the solitude beneath a red rock, serve to convince us that this grandeur is heedless; its breath is a dragon’s, its innumerable eyes are blind.

What I hear: “Honey, honey, no, no, look here. I have something to tell you, baby, and I don’t want you to take it the wrong way. When we’re playing mixed doubles sometimes, and I see John at the net, I have to say, honey, he looks like a rock star up there, he’s so skinny and he has those sunglasses. You know you don’t have anything to worry about, honey, nothing at all, I just wanted you to know that sometimes I think about . . . OHH! This is my song, baby!”—Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer” comes over the speakers—This. Is. My. Song. Baby, let’s dance, come on, dance with me.” She gets up and starts to wiggle. I look back down.

Frankie, sitting proper across from me at the little formica table, which was snow white and ice-slick and within it a pink blur that was her face reflected, leaned forward an inch and pronounced distinctly, in that garden of a voice whose far corner was shadowed by magnolia, words of an alarming vehemence. “I don’t want to rebuild, I want to destroy.”

“Look at that! Look at that! Look at that! Did you see that, baby?” Federer has hit a crosscourt backhand winner. “That’s just like you do it, that’s just like you do it, you know you look just like Roger Federer when you swing.”

Benihana puts down his oversize margarita. “Federer, jesus, man! Even if he loses a point, he’s always ahead. Look at him, he’s doing the calculations in his head right now, he’s doing the math. He’s like a Swiss banker, man, he’s got everything in order, just right, the cards are always lined up.”

They had the same milky human kindness, the same preposterous view of the church as an adjunct of religious studies and social service, the same infuriating politics, a warmed-over McGovernism of smug lamenting: never did they think to themselves, however heavily their heads nodded, as two luxurious blooms on a stalk fibrous with capital and cops.

—Halfway through the tournament, Kamakshi asked me if anyone missed Nikolay Davydenko, who had pulled out before it began. I was shocked to realize he wasn’t there. I never heard anyone else mention his name during the event. We may not like to hear about tennis needing “personality,” but it really does matter for our enjoyment of the sport.

—I wrote when I went out to Cali that I wanted to listen to some jazz CDs in the car, but it ended up being a rock and roll kind of week. I hadn’t realized how much I missed driving and listening to something with a beat. It’s in the blood. Heading out of Palm Springs I came to the entrance onto interstate 10. Turning left would take me to L.A. and the airport, turning right deeper into the desert, where I could drive in peace on a brilliantly sunny day. Oh, how I wished I could turn right.

The room was Mediterranean and the meaning was two-fold—"Indefinitely," Old 97s

No, I don’t have no money, but I’ve always got plenty of time—“Lazy Days,” the Byrds

Won’t you come away with me, and begin something we can understand?—Pernice Brothers

Let’s get high while the radio’s on/Just relax and sing a song/Drive your car up on the lawn—“Good Guys and Bad Guys,” Camper van Beethoven

The highway is your girlfriend as you go by quick/Suburban trees, suburban speed/And it smells like heaven—“Roadrunner,” Modern Lovers

The anti-hipster stance in the words of these last two songs made special sense as I drove in the dusk past the strip malls that line the roads just outside Indian Wells. Most writers and observers in this country detest the strip mall. Maybe they’ve never spent 10 straight summer evenings hanging their legs off the hood of a car in a parking lot between a Kmart and a movie multiplex, or celebrated finishing the SATs with a trip to the Pizza Hut. To me, a strip mall is like a showboating wide receiver in the NFL—they may be detestable in the abstract, but when they’re yours, you love them, the same way an Upper East Sider loves Park Avenue. Cruising past shopping centers in late-afternoon light in the Cali desert, with rock formations jutting up alongside parking lots, you know they can be as beautiful as the hippest neighborhoods from Berkeley to Brooklyn.

—The sportswriter Jerry Magee has been covering tennis for 50-odd years in San Diego. Last week he was given a lifetime achievement award at Indian Wells, where he’s an institution in the pressroom. He has the booming, folksy voice of a country singer, and his nightly calls to his wife, Grace, are famous. He can be often be heard lamenting the decline of the newspaper and the rise of the “enemy,” the Internet.

Magee was presented with a watch on center court before one of the evening sessions, and the assembled press cheered from our balcony. Just when it seemed like Magee would be asked to make a speech, he walked off the court as quickly as he could.

As the night went on, fellow reporters continued to congratulate Jerry, until you could hear him getting a little sick of the whole thing. His response to each compliment was slowly reduced to a grunt. Everyone loved it, of course: Reporters by definition hate the phony—one of the great things about the job is that we’re paid to be skeptical.

He walked to the door. “Don’t forget to wind that watch, Jerry,” someone else shouted.

“Yeah, right,” he growled without looking back. The door shut behind him with a bang. He was gone.

Because I doubt you’ll read this, Jerry, let me congratulate you one more time. At a time when journalists are watching our positions disappear even as we hear about how much better the blogosphere can do our jobs, it’s good to know that the legend of the gruff sportswriter lives on.

The last 10 days in Indian Wells were a riot of tennis, with players, fans, press, tournament workers, and myriads of other humans crisscrossing all over the grounds. Floating above them the entire time, and landing safely with the trophy between his teeth at the end, was one man.

In my own little corner of this world, the back rows of the pressroom, Rafael Nadal was a figure of fascination. I heard reporters who don't normally cover tennis say how "charming" and "hilarious" and "nice" and "amazing" he was. As a player, yes, but even more so as a person.

They're right, of course, but they're getting in a little late, don't you think? After making easy, 6-1, 6-2, work of the No. 4 player in the world today, Nadal stands at an unprecedented career peak. He's won the first Slam and Masters event of the season and dominated a Davis Cup tie for Spain. The season, as Nadal said today, is long, and at this time last year Novak Djokovic found himself in much the same position. But for now the only way I can think of to wrap up this tournament properly is to record the best of what I saw of its central character, Rafael Nadal.

—I had lunch at 1:30 or so on Sunday. The cafeteria was mostly empty. Facing away from me, toward a wall, a few feet from a TV, was Nadal. He was at a table with a hitting partner and looked smaller in his sweatshirt and vintage blue-and-yellow Nike sneakers. He was watching golf; he and his friend were analyzing how one of the golfers should hit the ball. Nadal put his hand up and moved it toward the right, indicating that it should be a slice. When the shot landed with a thunk in the sand trap, Nadal went "Ooof." He was scheduled to play the final in an hour.

—It was match point for Nadal against Andy Roddick in the second-set tiebreaker of their semifinal. Roddick duffed a strange return that popped up diagonally and landed in an awkward position for Nadal, a few inches from the net on his backhand side. Nadal wanted to drill it but couldn't get there in time. You could see him adjust as he ran. When he got there, he pushed the ball lightly and at an extreme crosscourt angle. This forced Roddick well wide of the court on his pass. He got to it, gave it a rip, but couldn't bring it back into the court. Anyone who says modern tennis, or modern men's tennis, is the domain of thoughtless power needs to see that shot and the improvisatory poise that made it happen.

—At his press conference after his quarterfinal win over Juan-Martin del Potro, Nadal shows up with two chocolate chip cookies and starts to eat them as he talks.

Q. I was wondering if you have things like that quite a bit? I always think athletes have a very regimented diet and don't indulge.  

"My opinion, you can eat everything. Well, before the match maybe don't have five cookies or one steak, but my opinion, you can eat everything in the right time. If I eat right now, 20 cookies, maybe I gonna have indigestion tonight. If I eat two, three cookies, maybe it's OK.

Maybe not for the stomach, no, but for the head it's better. (Laughter.) In the end, the important thing is to be mentally okay.

—Nadal is down a match point and for all intents and purposes out of it in the fourth round against David Nalbandian. He hits a ball with maximum force that lands on the line for a winner.

When he pulls out the second set in a tiebreaker, I can only wonder if any other great players in history have had so many emotional, dramatic, unlikely, and memorable moments as Nadal. Already this year he's been involved in two classics—Verdasco in Melbourne and Nalbandian here—and topped them both by putting his arm around Roger Federer.

—Nadal walks into his press conference after the final with his cellphone in his hand and a distracted look on his face. He looks like he's walking toward a van that’s going to take him to the airport, not to answer questions from a room full of reporters. He sits down and says, lightly, "Hel-lo."

—It's 2-2 in the second set of the men's final. The wind has kicked up and is swirling. Nadal and Andy Murray each move inside the baseline and chip balls at each other that bend and curl in the breeze. It looks like they're playing paddleball with magnetized racquets. Nadal takes a ball from Murray and slices it back low and slow and down the middle. He follows it forward. The ball curves away from Murray, who can't get his forehand up and over the net. Nadal breaks and doesn't lose another game. Ditto my comment above about his shot on match point against Roddick—improvisatory poise at its best.

—To do this, Nadal uses a Babolat Aerodrive (or something like that), a racquet that nobody else anywhere uses. It reminds me of his cookie comment—you can eat everything, you can use anything, it doesn't matter, what matters is you.

—Late in the second set in the final, Murray runs down a lob and flicks a forehand over his head. Nadal lets it go and watches it drop two feet inside the line. When his reaction—he jumps a little, closes his eyes, raises his head, and opens his mouth to say something like, "Oh no!"—is replayed on the big screen, the audience erupts with laughter.

—Nadal practices his forehand over the first weekend of the tournament. He's working on snapping up on it with less backswing and more flick. In his next match, he seems to have it mastered, and it does look a little different and more abbreviated than I remember it. While Federer sticks with what works and maintains a deep belief in his innate ability, Nadal is about the process. He's a tinkerer who doesn't believe he was born to be the best; he concentrates on how he can improve himself enough to get there. He's there, but he's still tinkering.

—After his semifinal, Nadal is asked whether he feels like he has learned to win matches even when he's not playing his best. He says that that's something he's always had success doing.

After the final, he's asked why he thinks he handled the wind better than Murray. Nadal says that he thinks he "accepted" the conditions better than Murray, who fought them.

These two answers, about finding ways to win and accepting the conditions around him, point to what I think is, beyond his speed and spin and power, a major reason for Nadal's success. Unlike most tennis players, even the best tennis players, he doesn't play with anger or regret or frustration, the three emotions that doom most of us.

After losing the fourth set of the Wimbledon final last year, Nadal said that he sat down on the changeover and accepted that he had played horribly when he was ahead in the tiebreaker, but that otherwise he was "doing very well." If Nadal is a control freak or a perfectionist, he doesn't allow it to get the best of him. John McEnroe couldn't emotionally deal with his errors, Djokovic lets his frustration affect his play, and even Federer gets down in the mouth if things aren't going as he expects. Nadal accepts, when he walks onto a court, that he will not always be at his best. As a guy who is constantly trying to improve, he begins with the premise that he can never be perfect, and that he should not always win. Federer and Pete Sampras, by contrast, begin every match believing that no one can beat them if they go out and do what they're supposed to do.

On the one hand, Nadal's is an intelligent approach because it allows him to take pressure off himself and put his mistakes behind him—why regret what was inevitable in the first place? On the other hand, when you try to imagine actually putting this into practice in the heat of battle, you realize that it is an almost impossibly difficult psychological stance to achieve for any length of time. How does one banish these primal reactions?

Forget the biceps and the legs and the forehands and the overheads. Nadal's most important strength is the one that's the hardest for all of us to achieve. He has the strength to be honest with himself.

When I woke up this morning in Indian Wells, the wind was threatening to decapitate the palm trees on the other side of the road from my hotel. Driving to the tournament site, I could see it kicking up screens of dust that soared higher than the nearby hills.

An hour later, as the women's finalists walked onto the stadium court, the Serbian fans in the top rows were holding onto their flags for dear life. Ana Ivanovic and Vera Zvonareva did the same with their skirts and their visors. Unfortunately, they were powerless to do much with the tennis ball once it left their racquets.

The breeze blew their service tosses halfway to the net, and their ground strokes from the center of the court all the way to the alleys. It blew a plastic racquet wrapper from the court surface up and out of the arena in seconds. It took shots that must have felt good coming off the racquet and made them very bad—a few times Ivanovic's face went from happy to surprised to woeful as the ball sailed through the air—and took soft, mediocre shots and made them brilliant. It was hard to adjust because the wind wasn't blowing in any discernible direction. It was blowing everywhere.

In the end, the conditions reduced the final of the BNP Paribas Open, which had upped its women's prize money and fielded its strongest draw this year, to a test of resourcefulness rather than pure tennis skill. Zvonareva passed this test by planting herself in the middle of the baseline, facing the net, and getting the ball back any way she could.

"I was trying to put as many balls as I can in the court," was pretty much the extent of Zvonareva's explanation of her tactics afterward. That's as complicated as it can get on a day like this.

The book on playing in the wind is to take more little steps than usual to keep yourself ready for any last second gusts, send the ball down the middle of the court, and don't be afraid to hit it hard so it doesn't have as much time to get blown god knows where. Ivanovic stuck to this script, and she stuck to the attacking script she had written for herself all tournament. She couldn't pull it off. On point after point, she hit a forcing approach only to botch it in the end. Zvonareva was allowed the luxury of waiting and playing it safe. She made a specialty of a shot that on most days even a rank amateur would be ashamed to use: the slice forehand. A couple times it floated upward, crawled over the net, then hung unsteadily in the air, eventually bamboozling Ivanovic into another error. If little steps are the key to playing in the wind, that wasn't going to help the Serb; she's a long-legged strider all the way.

"I tried to get through the middle," Ivanovic said afterward. "but it was very hard to control the ball."

Ivanovic said, naturally, that she was "trilled" to reach the final again here, and she did show signs of the old sharpness, especially in her semifinal win over Pavlyuchenkova. Ivanovic says she's feeling more confident, and that her goal is to win a major, but I'm not convinced she's ready. Her confidence waxed and waned all week. And when it went south, as it did against Flavia Pennetta, she couldn't find the court with anything, and looked extremely anxious trying. Can she go seven matches without a clunker?

Ivanovic, as you might expect, was bubblier than the winner in her press conference. She said she had gotten all of her "emotions" out and composed herself before she faced us. As for Zvonareva, you would never know she was, not too long ago, a self-wounding basket case on court, prone to tear-filled mid-match meltdowns. She's all-business now, and it shows in her results: A final at the WTA championshps in 2008, a semi in Melbourne, and a Premier win in Indian Wells. Again, though, you wouldn't have known she'd just won the biggest title of her career. After 10 minutes of routine answers and little reaction from Zvonareva, she was finally asked, "What's it feel like to suddenly be $700,000 richer?"

Zvonareva didn't blink or crack a smile. "I don't know," she said, "I don't really think about it." What bothers me is that I believe her. She's done a great job of calming down and moving her game up a level. Will it take a little more of the old overt passion for her to take the next step and go toe to toe with the Williams sisters?

The winner aside, the WTA at Indian Wells was notable for it's abundance of personality in the press room, but a parallel lack of personality or individualism in the playing styles displayed on court. Yes, there was expressiveness—Ivanovic's innocent determination was balanced against Zvonareva's hunched resourcefulness today. And you can find those contrasts in every match. At the same time, the four WTA semifinalists—and almost everyone else in the draw, for that matter—pounded the ball from the baseline, wielded two-handed backhands, and approached the net only when they were blown there accidentally (the three missing stars, Venus, Serena, and Maria, fit all those categories as well).

Has the women's game been over-democratized? The dominant style of WTA play is an outgrowth of what's been taught at the Bollettieri Academy for 30 years. There's a military toughness and precision to it—Nick was an army paratropper, after all—that's undeniably effective: No one can fight the power anymore. But tennis, and women's tennis, has always been a sport of highly unique individuals. It has produced stars as varied and indelible as Steffi Graf, Evonne Goolagong, and Martina Navratilova, each of whom played, sounded, and acted nothing like the others. When you go into the military, you get stronger, harder, and fiercer. But you also have your personality erased. After talking with Cetkovska, Ivanovic, Pavlyuchenkova, Jankovic and others this week, I know there's a lot of life and a lot of unique individuals on this tour. I wish they didn't all express themselves the same way when they stepped on the court.

There's a breeze swirling around the center court as the first semifinal begins at Indian Wells, but it isn’t bothering Roger Federer. He whips two quick forehand winners and finishes his first service game with an ace.

Federer and his opponent, Andy Murray, switch sides. In his own first service game, Murray takes a high forehand and, rather than trying to hit a winner or even a penetrating shot, lofts the ball a little higher than normal and places it a few inches closer to the baseline than the service line. He holds as well.

This is a match between artistic tennis players with very different approaches to their craft. The first two games provide microcosms of both. Federer's athletic shot-making and will to aggressively create has been the state of the art in the game for five years, the final word in tennis style. Murray, his equal as an athlete, is cerebral, restrained, tricky, and reactive by comparison.

Cerebral, restrained, tricky, yes, but is he really all that reactive? "There's more than way of dictating points," Murray says afterward. "It's not just going for big, booming serves and huge forehands. If you change the pace with the ball a lot, you know, and mix it up—I'm playing the match the way I want it to go. If I started trading ground strokes with someone like Federer, I think he likes that."

Through the first three games, Murray shows no desire or need to leave his perch behind the baseline. It's up to Federer to figure out how to break through those defenses. Federer tries to trade backhand slices with him briefly, to junk with the junker, but he's not consistent enough. When Federer does move forward, Murray, scuttling across the back of the court and eating up yards with his long strides, is inevitably there to make him play another volley or another overhead. Eventually, Federer misses those as well. Murray wins the first set 6-3.

The Scot is asked later whether he was the fastest kid at his school. "In a straight line, no," Murray says. There's laughter in the press room, but he isn't making a joke. Murray doesn't crack a smile through the entire interview, despite the fact that he's just beaten Roger Federer for the fourth straight time. "Since I played tennis, that was one of the things that I've always done very well, is have good anticipation. Over 100 meters I'm OK, not great."

Murray is anxious and edgy at the start of the second set. He shows his first negative emotions as he's broken in the first game, and a few minutes later lets out an almost girlish scream after flicking a forehand wide—"AhhnnndeeeEEE!"

"Roger, wake up!" someone yells from the highly pro-Federer crowd. This is as partisan as an audience gets at Indian Wells. The memory of Federer crying in Melbourne lingers. There's sympathy for the old king, a three-time champion here. The 22-year-old Murray has yet to inspire that kind of loyalty.

Federer sees his chance and begins to take it. The wind has died and the afternoon is at its hottest. From here until the beginning of the third set, Federer and Murray face off with their best, diametrically opposed, games.

What they produce is tense, stop-and-start tennis. Murray tries to disrupt and tie Federer in knots by hitting low and slow, taking pace off the ball, and changing trajectories with each shot. Federer tries to break free and get clean looks at forehands. Each shows off their peculiar genius. Murray twice waits an extra millisecond with his two-handed backhand and fools Federer by going down the line. Federer responds by snapping off two crosscourt forehand return winners, backpedals balletically and hops into another forehand winner, and hits an absurdly fine overhead from his own baseline into the opposite baseline corner and past Murray. He finishes the set with a backhand half-volley pickup from the baseline for another winner.

Federer's is the more high-flying and crowd-pleasing genius. But as Murray says, it isn't the only way to control a match. And it isn't the only one that can produce signature improvisatory moments. Returning at 2-1, Murray hits a short lob. As Federer sets up to drill it, Murray begins to run forward. He times it perfectly and blocks the reply past Federer on a short hop. He breaks and doesn't lose another game.

It's Federer's backhand that has held the key to this match. He missed it early, but had more success running around it in the second set. In the third, it collapses completely. "I think I played well in the second," Federer says in his press conference. Rather than wait the customary half an hour or so to come into the interview room, he has walked straight there from the court. He leans forward more than usual and answers tersely. "I forced the issue a bit more and then played a shocking third set."

There are three factors to consider about Federer's "shocking" third set. The first is the surface. It's always slow here, but according to some coaches and trainers, it's playing more slowly than ever. The winners today, Murray and Nadal, both have plenty of time to scramble and set up for passing shots. It's no accident that both of these guys have two-handed backhands; it's difficult even for Federer with his one-hander to generate the pace necessary to get the ball to jump through the court. The second factor is Federer at this stage of his career. Today he summoned his best tennis, his full-flight tennis, for a brief spell. But he couldn't sustain it against a young and hungry opponent. Will we see him at his best only in streaks from now on?

The third, and by far the most important element, is that younger opponent. Murray, like Nadal, is a hard guy for Federer to beat. The Scot, with his speed, anticipation, and very high shot tolerance, doesn't need to walk the same high wire as Federer. His genius is to reduce the game, to bring down to court level, to make the spectacular useless.

"He knows he doesn't need to play close to the lines," Federer says of Murray afterward, "because he knows he can cover the court really well. I think that calms him down mentally. I think that's why he's playing so well."

Murray spends much of the third set hitting dull slices and wobbly loops, only to come up with something 10 times better—a hook forehand crosscourt, a belted backhand down the line—once Federer gets to the net. It's rope-a-dope—or rope-a-Goat—tennis. Muhammad Ali named the tactic 35 years ago. Like him, Murray, a boxing aficionado, knows that it's an offensive tactic disguised as defense. And from the beginning of his press conference today, he wants everyone to know that he won this match, Federer didn't lose it.

"As long as I'm playing the match on my terms," Murray says when asked if he's surprised by Federer's collapse, "and I'm getting the ball in the position that I want to get it in and making him play difficult shots, then [I'm not surprised]."

Murray finishes by suggesting something I've never heard suggested in a press conference by another player: That Federer didn’t play a smart match.

"He was running around a lot," he said, "and playing very sort of low-percentage shots. When you're doing that, you're going to make mistakes."

There is no awe for Roger Federer in those words, none of the usual caveats about how, no matter what happened today, he's still "the greatest player in history." There's nothing but a shrug from Murray that told us, It was all in the plan, why are you surprised?

As Murray says, there's more than one way to dictate a point. There's more than one way win a fight. There's more than one way for a tennis artist to paint a match.

It's time for the men to get down to it in Indian Wells. I've got a preview of today's potentially outstanding semifinals on the TENNIS.com home page. (The lead paragraph is posted below.) Check out the rest over there and tell me what you think back here. And enjoy.

The BNP Paribas Open—can we come up with a something a little catchier to call this tournament? The "Buh-Nip," anyone?—has flipped what we think of as the traditional script at dual-gender events. It once went like this: The men, with their greater depth, produced the compelling matches in the early rounds, while the women, with their dominant stars, came on strong at the end. This dynamic has been transformed on the men's side in the era of Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer, who have staged a compelling final or three. In Indian Wells, though, we've seen the women, who are without the winners of the last three Grand Slams, shift further toward parity. They may soon be verging on anarchy.

The sports fans of Southern California, beholden to the fortunes and misfortunes of their freeways, are famously late-arriving. But yesterday at the BNP Paribas Open they were on time and accounted for at 7:30 sharp, the evening session's stated start time. Baseball legend Reggie Jackson used to say he made the big money because he put the "fannies in the seats." Roger Federer puts the fannies in the seats.

I was in one of those seats, having moved down to a lower tier from the press balcony in the sky. Up there, I couldn't even tell you exactly what color Federer's shoes were. That just wasn't going to do. (I still can't describe them—off white? silver?) Plus, I had high hopes for his quarterfinal with Fernando Verdasco.

The match traveled all the way to the brink of excitement—two set points for Mr. Sauce in the second—only to be turned back to the routine at the last second. It's funny how differently we can perceive the quality of the same set of events: From my view in the stadium, I would have graded the match at B; in their pressers, Federer and Verdasco each said that the level of play had been poor; but watching a few games on a TV at my hotel later, it looked like fantastic, fast-paced tennis. The two people watching near me were certainly impressed. They were almost falling off their chairs at some of the rallies. "Look at Federer," a woman exulted, "he knows everything!" I thought I'd already heard all the compliments I would ever hear about the man, but that one was new.

I began the match thinking I would catalog the similarities and differences between Verdasco and his countryman and fellow lefty Rafael Nadal. The list started early and built rapidly. "Doesn't get as many returns in play." "Shots don't have as much action." "Doesn't use the slice." "Goes for winners from behind the baseline." "Gives away a point when he's down 40-0."

By the time I found myself writing "misses overheads" and "doesn't grunt," I knew the exercise was futile. As Federer said when I asked him to compare Rafa and Mr. Sauce in the press conference afterward, "They're two different people."

That is undeniable. But as players, Nadal and Verdasco begin with enough fundamental similarities—they're Spanish lefties with beefy builds, strong legs, and two-handed backhands who hit with topspin from the baseline—that a tightly circumscribed comparison can shed some light on what makes one of them a Hall-of-Famer and what has made the other a streaky head case for most of his career. I’ll limit it to three areas that might not be as obvious as "doesn’t grunt."

—On court presence: There's one thing you can say for a person who annoys you—he has a presence. He doesn't just fade into the woodwork. Rafael Nadal has annoyed a lot of opponents and pundits over the years with the amount of time he takes between points. (I think he's improved a little in this regard recently.) But it allows him to do something important: He controls time during the match. He controls the clock. That's a psychological head start. It forces your opponent to immediately react to you, and ultimately, because there's nothing the player can do, to conform to you.

To make the comparison personal, I have a squash opponent who does the same thing. He takes extra seconds before he serves bouncing the damn ball and looking over at me (the pace of play in squash is about five times faster than tennis—there's really no time allowed between points at all). I have no idea what he's thinking, but I know he was coached at an excellent academy as a kid and undoubtedly enrolled in a class called "Mind Games." It worked. As hard as I try to avoid it, I tighten up during that time, with anger, with nerves, with a severe and unproductive desire to win the point as quickly as possible so I can take over the serve. Once I do, I play faster than normal just to try to swing the pendulum of the match's rhythm back to the center. What's made me angry is not the waiting; it's only a few seconds. It's the fact that my opponent has controlled my time.

Unlike Rafa, who slows even more after losing an important point, Verdasco doesn't control anything. He puts his head down, walks to the line, and throws up his toss. Tennis players, especially baseliners, are "rhythm players"—no one really likes to think all that much out there. Verdasco obliges Federer, while Nadal doesn't give him an easy return rhythm. He owns his time.

—Serving system: Federer noted that Verdasco was taking pace off his first serve. The Spaniard flirted with double-digit m.p.h.'s for much of this tournament. He did that in his match against Kohlschreiber because the German was taking advantage of his second serve, and Verdasco might have feared the same thing from Federer.

The trouble was, unlike Nadal, Verdasco wasn't precise in his placement. Often, the ball ended up in Federer's wheelhouse, kicking into his forehand at chest level and allowing him to move up to the baseline to hit it.

Nadal began his career with what he and his uncle Toni called the weakest serve of any pro. He has made it more powerful over the years, but more important, like a blind man developing sharper hearing, Nadal has worked around his limitations to develop a phenomenal serving accuracy.

Most players have three targets: wide, up the T, and, every once in a while, at the body. Nadal has at least five. He has the wide one to Federer's backhand, but he also has the really wide one, the one that lands on the line or within an inch of it (it's not a fluke when he puts it that close). Nadal can go up the T, but he's just as likely to hit hard right at an opponent's forehand hip (again, it's not a fluke that he can put it right there, and not two inches to the left, which would make the ball a sitter).

Nadal sets up serving patterns so he can break them and surprise his opponent at a crucial time. Against Federer, this means going to the backhand 50 straight times, then at the forehand at deuce late in a set. (At Wimbledon last year, he completely scrambled his usual pattern against Federer, scrapping the everything-to-the-backhand system that had worked so well a month earlier at the French Open.) Against Djokovic, Nadal will go mildly up the T a few times or out wide, then suddenly drill a serve 10 m.p.h. faster tight to his forehand side. If Nadal is simply serving slices to the same spot during a particular match, it's not because that's all he has in his arsenal. It's because he thinks that's the best way to serve on that day.

Marat Safin talked about Nadal being "in Federer's head." Even if you don't believe in the term, or that Federer is psyched out by Nadal—I believe it is applicable in this case—it's true that Nadal gets in all of his opponent's heads—i.e., he forces them to think and guess—with his tricky serving patterns. Verdasco serves to the left, serves to the right, varies the spin here and there. He has no overarching system, and he can't put the ball an inch from the line when he needs to. Nadal can.

—Return philosophy: Last night, Verdasco tried to drill outright winners off Federer first serves. He tried this in part because he can hit them. Nadal, as great as he is, doesn't have that type of forehand. He can't flatten it out from back there; or, I should say, he doesn't flatten it out, because he knows it's pointless. The same thing applies on the backhand side. Verdasco, like his new mentor Andre Agassi, tries to take over points with his two-handed return. Nadal doesn't, for a good reason: His two-hander doesn't penetrate the court as naturally as Verdasco's does. As he has with the serve, Rafa, like Andy Warhol—have those two been mentioned in a sentence before?—has made a virtue of his limitations.

On strong first serves, Nadal will hack a slice backhand. No matter that it floats, that the stroke is ugly, that it lands short. The point is that it's in the court, and it gives him a chance to use his wheels to track down the next ball. Nadal will also neutralize a forceful first serve by looping back a high forehand into the deep corner. The opponent is forced to start the point over. Verdasco tries to play offense with his returns. The results can be jaw-dropping, but they usually aren't. Nadal has a goalie's mentality. He can send a message and rip a return, but most of the time he camps out back behind the baseline, gets as low as he can, and defends. Every ounce of energy is pointed at getting the serve back in the court and working from there. Nadal's most common return is the backhand punched back high and down the middle; it kind of wobbles in the air. It's not stylish, but it does its job.

Rafa, stringy hair always flying, is willing to get ugly to win. When has anyone ever said that about the fabulously coiffed Mr. Sauce?