Do you call this tournament Roland Garros? That’s what its directors would have you say. I’ve never been sure why. As far as I know, it was originally the facility that was named for the World War I French aviator, not the event itself. It’s always seemed a little weird to me that you can play or attend someone—maybe far off in the future people will say, “Steve Tignor is the toughest tournament in the world to win.”
I like “French Open” myself. It’s easier to understand, and it's grander. I’d even say it’s one of the sport’s most tersely evocative phrases. To an American, it sounds much more exotic than our plain old asphalty U.S. Open. Plus, the idea of French tennis is right there in the name. Anyone who has ever loved the sport—and the various ways it can be played—has almost certainly loved to watch at least one player from France. The sport seems less like a competition to many of them than it does a possibility.
For evidence, click above to see the seemingly impossible, as well as the completely counterintuitive, done on a routine basis by the most eccentric of all French tennis eccentrics, Fabrice Santoro, who just made his final appearance at Roland Garros (“Fabrice Santoro” would make a fine name for a tournament someday, don’t you think?). I’m not going to break down all of the points gathered there. I’ll just say that Santoro was a student and enthusiast of the game as much as he was a player, and his mischievously infectious love for tennis—for its possibilities as a performance—is what I’ll miss most when he hangs up the wand for good this summer. My favorite memory of the Magician didn't come during a point. On a side court a few years at Flushing Meadows, the 34-year-old Santoro was visibly tired in mid-game. He finished one point near his water bottle on the sideline, so he took the opportunity to pick it up and have a sip. He kept his eye on the chair umpire a few feet above him as he drank—it was clearly a time violation. But that's just what Santoro loved about it. He scanned the audience and gave us a conspiratorial grin as he drank, looking for all the world like a little kid not getting his hand caught in the cookie jar.
Fabrice memories aside—they can wait until another Friday, I suppose—we have more urgent business to attend to, namely what’s happening over this long holiday weekend at Roland Garros. The middle weekend at the French and U.S. Opens always seem like the dog days of the tournament to me, long hours when the two weeks begin to find their shape and personality, when players who looked promising to start begin to drop by the inevitable wayside, when the chaff separate from the wheat—or is that the wheat from the chaff? Anyway, here’s a quick breakdown of the match-ups to watch.
Nadal vs. Soderling
Rafa doesn’t like Robin, and he went out of his way to show the world that by wiping the clay with him 1 and 0 a few weeks ago. This one might be interesting for the personal animosity. And Soderling might threaten for a set. An aside: Has Nadal looked abnormally subdued so far? Is he enjoying it as much as usual? I got the feeling he wasn’t having much fun the two times I saw him play in Madrid, even when he was winning.
Davydenko vs. Verdasco
Two solid players in good form. Which one wants to get to Nadal in the quarters? The Russian has won four of their five encounters, but they haven’t played since 2006. I’m thinking Verdasco, who hasn’t dropped a set, has the edge. This is one I want someone to broadcast.
Murray vs. Cilic
The Scot has been living a little dangerously so far, coming back to steal sets from both Starace and Tipsarevic. He doesn’t look confident so much as unwilling to lose, but some of the old mopey anger has resurfaced. Murray is 2-0 agains Cilic, who has played surprisingly stellar clay ball this week. It will be a nice test of where each of these guys is at the moment.
Federer vs. Mathieu
The Frenchman knows how to mount a serious, if ultimately futile, challenge to a top player at Roland Garros. He took Andre Agassi to five sets and made Nadal work as hard as anyone ever has in Paris in their 2006 four-setter. Not unlike Federer’s last opponent, Acasuso, Mathieu hits a heavy, penetrating ball from the baseline. Federer will have to work for this one. That which does not destroy him may only make him stronger. And Mathieu will not destroy him; he’ll give it away in the end.
Monfils vs. Melzer
Monfils says he’s good for an hour and a half out there. Maybe a time limit will be the thing that finally focuses his mind.
Safina vs. Rezai
Rezai is a high-strung and highly erratic Frenchwoman, who will make this entertaining for the home folks. But Safina has the look, the gravitas, as they say, of a Grand Slam champion right now.
Ivanovic vs. Suarez Navarro/Azarenka
The latter two have split sets and will play the third on Saturday. Either will make a testy opponent for the defending champion. Ana has played her best tennis of the year this week, but I still don’t quite trust her. I want to trust her, but I’m not there yet. A win here would help.
Sharapova vs. Li
La Shriek has returned to find that she has inspired an even louder generation, led by Azarenka and Michelle Larcher de Brito. But the original has given the tournament its best story so far by defeating Petrova and, just when you thought the run was over, coming back to win in three today. Don’t say the woman ever does anything half-way. As a tennis match, this should be an intruiging battle of the backhands.
Cirstea vs. Wozniacki
Woz is the one making all the right moves these days, and looking like a player who can find a way to win, rather than lose. But the Romanian, born two months earlier than the Pole-Dane, is a talent. She moved up quickly, then, as these things happen, she hit a plateau and had trouble dealing with it. But Cirstea may be climbing again. She beat Cornet and will now play the girl she calls her “best friend.” Still, Wozniacki seems like she has the steadier head at the moment.
Serena Williams vs. Martinez Sanchez
I don’t know much about her opponent, but I do know that Serena has a way of making an ordeal of any match, no matter how innocuous it looks on the surface.
Enjoy it. For those of you Stateside, the matches continue on the Tennis Channel, over at NBC, and at ESPN360. If you work in tennis broadcasting and can’t get a gig in Paris this week, you need a new career.
I’ll leave you with a new musical recommendation, in case you really can’t deal with Carillo or Gimel or Navrat the Rat or Leifor my new favorite commentator, Ian Eagle. I'd to give you something appropriately French to listen, but the record that's worked for me the last two days has been Rock and Roll with the Modern Lovers. Of course, this Jonathan Richman classic is way out of print and not available on ITunes. So let me quote from its best song, "Roller Coaster by the Sea," the gentlest but most affirming summer anthem of all. It's just right for the 1st of June and those trips to the beach we'll be making soon. They're so close I can almost reach out my Manhattan window and touch them.
I went on the roller coaster last night when I was feeling bad
Down by the sea and I was feeling sad
But we went down, and around, and it knocked me out of my head
Hey roller coaster by the sea, thank you for helping me
Yes, you knocked me out of my head
And thank you, Fabrice. You may not have won them all, but your style rarely failed to knock me out of my head.
My guess is that you like tennis. That's good, because you need to this week. With two
channels firing away 12 hours a day, I’m starting to feel surrounded by it
myself, like the sport is watching me. I get up in the morning and see Andy
Murray struggle in HD. I go to work and hear Maria Sharapova shriek from the
computer in the next office. I come home in the evening and catch all the
various names and personalities—the Tsongas, the Wozniackis, the Roddicks, the
Serenas, the Kendricks, the Safins, the Monfilses, the no-names and the never-weres—that I missed over the course of the day. I’m going to start hearing Barry MacKay’s voice in my
sleep soon—“Oh, that's a bad miss,” he’ll say, and I’ll try not to be rude and ask him what constitutes a
good miss.
But having to go to work during all of this dirtball means that
my exposure to the first four days of the French has been sporadic, hit and
miss. I’ve had time to observe, but not to formulate. With that in mind, I’ll
begin with that staple of the homebound tennis reporter, or at least this
homebound tennis reporter, the Notebook.
—Johnny Mac and an expanded roster of commentators have helped the Tennis Channel gain on ESPN as far as quality and production
value—at times I forget which channel I’m watching. The TC did the smart thing
and split up the mismatched booth team of Bill Macatee and Martina Navratilova, which nearly sunk their Aussie Open coverage. I like Ian Eagle and Corina Morariu,
Navratilova knows the nitty-gritty of the sport as well as anyone, and McEnroe
is a calmly authoritative presence—the best thing about him is that he doesn’t try
too hard.
—The same can’t be said for Justin Gimelstob, who is always
proving himself. But while that means he talks too much for my
taste—pretty much every U.S. commentator talks too much for my taste—and his
overzealousness can result in an unfortunate or wonky choice of words—“tender
vittles”; “accelerate through the hitting zone”—Gimel has insight into the
sport and its current players. He’s particularly good with second-tier guys,
who he knows from his own days on tour, and he understands the sport as
it’s actually played today, not as he wishes it were played. Watching Spanish player Pablo Andujar rip forehands past Robby Ginepri in the first round, Gimel commented that “you
have to be able to finish points on clay.” Counterintuitive, perhaps, but exactly right.
—The tradition continues: A racquet company that doesn’t
sign the game’s most marketable player signs a similar looking player to
basically impersonate said star. Alona Bondarenko sprawls on the ground looking
like Anna someone in a KSwiss ad; Barbara Schett’s blonde hair is styled not
unlike Maria what’s-her-name in a Wilson ad; and now, in another Wilson
commercial currently making the rounds on the Tennis Channel, an unnamed Feliciano Lopez has his hair styled not unlike a certain other, higher-ranked
Spanish tennis star who plays with Babolat.
—Why are the ball kids so infinitely better at the Slams
than they are at Masters events? I can see that there would be a step up for a Slam,
but the difference is ridiculous. It’s fun just to watch the kids do their jobs
at the French, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open.
—Mary Joe Fernandez: better hair. Mary Carillo: is she growing younger before our eyes?
—Do you know any tennis players? Nervous types, wouldn’t you
say? You want to know why? Because even when you’re well ahead in the score,
every lost point feels like the beginning of a drastic and disastrous change in
momentum. John McEnroe says this was one reason he was always on edge: He
always suspected, when he missed any shot, that it would come back to haunt
him.
Most of the time, these fears are unwarranted. When a player
has a significant lead, he or she usually wins. Comebacks make the news,
but they’re relatively rare. The problem is, occasionally a player’s worst
fears are realized, which only makes the rest of us more nervous in the future—we realize we were right to worry all along.
In her first-round match against Caroline Wozniacki, Vera
Dushevina was up a set and a break, and she had another break point to put the
match virtually out of reach. But she shanked a makeable forehand return wide.
No big deal, she may have tried to tell herself, but it was. Woz held and,
given second life, turned everything around and won in three sets.
In his second-round match today, Potito Starace and Andy
Murray were tied at a set apiece, and Starace was up 5-1 in the third, with a
set point on Murray’s serve that would have put him in the proverbial driver’s
seat. Like Dushevina, he shanked a makeable return long. Like Dushevina, he may
have tried to tell himself that everything was going to be OK, that it didn’t
matter, that he was too far ahead to blow it, that Murray was in full mope mode
and ready to move on to the fourth. As a tennis player, Starace should have
known better. He lost the set.
—I know as a sportswriter I’m supposed to be outraged most of the time and have all kinds of suggestions for how to do things better. I
usually don’t have them. But how about this: We start using final-set
tiebreakers at all the Slams, except in the final rounds. I maintain that the
compressed format of the tiebreaker is more exciting than waiting for someone
to break serve—or, in the case of some women’s matches, hold serve. After five
sets of a men’s match, do we need all that much more tennis?
—Should Dinara Safina have eased up on, or even given a game
to, Anne Keovathong in the first round? No. I wanted to see the Brit get
one—I’ve been double-bageled in tournaments and in team matches and it's
flat-out humiliating. But the sole purpose of everything you do on a tennis court
is to win a match. If Safina loses a game, she's putting that at risk. You
often hear a losing college football team complain that the winners “ran up the score” on them, as if a blow-out breaks some kind of unspoken code of
non-humiliation. This argument is bogus and designed to deflect attention from the team's own incompetence. It’s the loser’s job to get better, not the
winner’s job to get worse.
—Early in his loss to Josselin Ouanna today,
Marat Safin appeared to be on the verge of self-parody, something I've been preparing to see for years. He gave his antics a crooked smile, as if to say, “Look at me, playing
the fool again.” Then, perhaps spurred by the supercilious French crowd, Safin got serious, made a stirring and completely unforeseen
comeback, and still lost 10-8 in third. This one seemed more tragic than ever,
because he obviously wanted it. Marat even pumped his fist a few times near the
end. But each time he'd show some a sign of hope, he’d proceed to lose the next three
points. That’ll teach him to be positive.
—Now, in the era of 32 seeds, is when we begin to get the quality matches: Safina-Pavlyuchenkova, Nadal-Hewitt, Azarenka-Suarez Navarro, Almagro-Verdasco,
and one I’m hoping to see, Mathieu versus the aforementioned point-finishing
Andujar. Plus, a very good second-rounder between Tsonga and Monaco.
A question: Has the 32-seed system, which spares top players
from facing anyone all that dangerous until the third round, contributed to the
general lack of upsets in the men’s game. All the big names get a chance
to settle in. Another question: Is this a Good Thing?
—Favorite album to listen to this week when tennis commentary gets to be too much: The River, By Bruce Springsteen. An eclectic Reagan-era monster that fits today's hard times, it's not as despairing as Nebraska—it's more realistic, and a lot more fun. I still love the cheesy summer anthem, "Sherry Darling," where Bruce can't get to the beach because he has to drive his girlfriend's loudmouthed, big-footed mother to the unemployment agency. I still love the way he sings, "Now the rooms are all empty down at Frankie's Joint/And the highway she's deserted clear down to breaker's point" in "Independence Day." (I once went to see Bruce and he couldn't remember those lines.)
Another year, another hotly debated, highly anticipated
French Open men’s tournament. And in the end, another foregone conclusion,
right? It’s remarkable how much anticipation remains for these two weeks despite the fact that since 2005 they've been controlled, more tightly each year, by one
player. Did we look forward this way to Wimbledon during the
often-stultifying reign of Pete Sampras? Yeah, I guess we did. The remote but
dumbfounding possibility of seeing the king deposed, like the possibility of
buying a winning lottery ticket, keeps us coming back for more against our
better judgment.
This year, the possibility that Rafael Nadal will not win
the French Open feels just about as remote as it has the last few springs, which is to say, distant. But
it feels a little more plausible than it did a week ago, before Roger
Federer proved that the Spaniard can be beaten on clay. Granted, it took a
four-hour match the day before and an altitude he didn’t like, but the point
is, it happened. There are 127 players lined up below Nadal on the French Open
drawsheet who will try to make it happen again. Who has a chance?
First Quarter
In his presser today, Nadal sounded happy to get back down
closer to sea level, where, according to him, the ball doesn’t fly off the
strings so haphazardly. Separating Paris and Madrid so distinctly in his mind
is probably a good strategy; it will allow him to think of his loss on Sunday as an aberration rather than a harbinger. And instead of rattling him, I think it will make him come out with a fighter’s, rather than a
defender’s, mindset. He has a little bit to prove again, which isn’t a bad thing.
Who or what stands out in Nadal’s section of the draw?
Actually, kind of a lot, now that I look at it. There’s a
Hewitt-Karlovic opener that could provide him with his third-round
opponent—neither is a gimme, though neither is as dangerous as he used to
be. After that, there’s fellow clay dog Ferrer, who pushed him hard for a set
in Barcelona; Davydenko, another dirtballer who has troubled Nadal on the
surface and has reached the French semis; Wawrinka, a solid Top 20 kind of guy;
Almagro, a flashy but perpetually disillusioning fellow Spaniard who was
drubbed here by Nadal in 2008; and Verdasco, a, um, flashy but perpetually
disillusioning Spaniard who was drubbed here by Nadal in 2008.
This could be a slog for Rafa, but would he want it any
other way?
First-round match to watch: Gulbis vs. Querrey
Semifinalist: Nadal
Second Quarter
With that many strong players migrating to the top of the draw,
Andy Murray has been left with, on paper at least, fairly easy pickings. Lopez,
Stepanek, Cilic, Gonzalez, Safin, Hanescu (?), and Simon are the
other seeds here. Of those, Gonzo is most likely to succeed. This is a
positive for Murray, who has shown his lack of total acclimation to clay
since Monte Carlo, at which point I thought he might be the biggest threat to
Nadal in Paris. Now, just a couple weeks later, his passive game seems to leave him vulnerable to heavy
hitters, like Monaco and del Potro, his recent conquerors, who can hit through
the court more easily than he can. Murray will face one of those guys, sorta, in the first round when he plays Juan Ignacio Chela.
Wildcard to watch while you can: The last pre-Nadal French
champ, Gaston Gaudio
Semifinalist: Gonzalez
Third Quarter
It seems like old times, doesn’t it, wondering which side of
the draw Novak Djokovic will fall on? It makes a certain cosmic sense that he
and Federer get each other—Djoko and Nadal must be sick of each other’s faces
at the moment. The Serb is in high form again and would make a fine sleeper
pick to win it all. He believes in his fitness, he’s found that precious and precarious balance of
control and aggression, and he realizes that he’s a cut above the pack, a fact that
seemed to escape him for a few months there.
Which members of that pack will be chasing him? First
there’s del Potro, who I would consider a threat except that he’s never taken a
set from Djokovic, or even reached a tiebreaker—the Serb seems to relish facing
him. Other than that, we’ve got Tsonga, a home fave who has never won a match
at Roland Garros; ex-champ J.C. Ferrero; the savage forehand of Igor Andreev,
and, buried far from Djokovic, Monaco, who opens against Marcos Baghdatis.
Player to watch for the last time in Paris: Fabrice Santoro,
who opens with C. Rochus
Player to watch for the first time in Paris: Bernard Tomic,
who opens with Kohlschreiber
Semifinalist: Djokovic
Fourth Quarter
There are some names to consider in Roger Federer’s quarter—Berdych,
Blake, Monfils, Roddick—but are there any threats to the three-time finalist?
The only one who sticks out as of now is Berdych, who was up two sets to love against Fed in Australia. So he is a possibility, but they wouldn’t play each other
until the fourth round, plenty of time for Federer to find his footing on
Chatrier, a court he has had to learn to tolerate over the years.
Federer seems more relaxed in Madrid than he has all year. The racquet-bashing was out of his system for the moment, and I think
he feels like he has a shot at the whole thing after not just beating
Nadal on clay, but doing it on his terms, and doing it without playing his
absolute best. The bottom line? Federer doesn’t lose before the semis, of any Slam.
Semifinalist: Federer
Semifinals: Nadal d. Gonzalez; Djokovic d. Federer
If Federer and Djokovic face each other, it will be a battle
of two players who come in with a lot of confidence, and a lot of
confidence that they can beat the other guy. Djokovic must feel like he’s
figured out a rope-a-dope method of coaxing Fed to self-destruct, while Federer
must feel like he’s in good enough form to put their last two matches behind him and
exact revenge on a cocky whippersnapper who has always bugged him. But I think
the stronger self-belief, as well as the more natural clay-court game, belongs to
the Serb.
Final: Nadal d. Djokovic in straights
***
It took a little while for a central storyline to develop in
women’s tennis this year, but it has finally happened, just in time for the
Grand Slam season. Through the early part of 2009, there were wins, there were
losses, there were a few surprises, a few meltdowns, a few tears, a few
absences, a few winners, a few errors, a few shrieks. But the WTA was missing
two key ingredients needed for a full-fledged narrative: a conflict, and a
compelling new career arc.
Leave it to Serena Williams to put both of those things in
motion. As you undoubtedly heard, last month in Rome she stated that she was
the “real No. 1,” not Dinara Safina, who had recently ascended to the top
ranking for the first time. It was hard to argue with Serena: The most memorable
of the aforementioned meltdowns had been provided by Safina in the final of the
Australian Open, as she was being given a thorough and at times even casual
thrashing by Serena herself. But if losing so badly to the American didn’t stir
the competitive fires in the Russian, it seems that her words have. Safina beat
Venus Williams on her way to winning in Rome and followed that up with a title
at the Premier level event in Madrid last week.
Which means that the French Open, where Safina was runner-up
a year ago, will begin as a referendum on her, and on her status as the No. 1
player in the world. If all goes well, this storyline will continue for two
long weeks and culminate with a showdown between Safina and Serena to decide
who is the real-est No. 1. But two weeks
is a long time in women’s tennis. Let’s see how likely it is that our wish
comes true.
First Quarter
Before we can begin to speculate about final rounds, of
course, we need to consider the first week’s activities. The possible negatives
for Safina are: Did she peak a little too early? Will she react badly to the
pressure that will come as she tries to win her first Slam and prove once and
for all that she’s deserving of her ranking?
The draw hasn’t made it easy; if Safina goes all the way,
she’ll have earned it. She begins against Britain’s Anne Keovathong, who has
reached the semis this week in Warsaw. More ominously, in this quarter are the
defending champion, Ana Ivanovic, who beat Safina in last year’s final, the
talented clay-courter Carla Suarez Navarro; the hard-hitting Jie Zheng; the
young and also hard-hitting Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova; and this season’s
breakout player, Victoria Azarenka. But while I wouldn’t call Safina a natural
clay-court player by any stretch—she’s too tall and gangly to be a
ground-hugging dirt devil, a la Justine Henin—she has already proven beyond
doubt that she feels at home on the surface. Couple that with her recently
added motivation and seeming burst of confidence, and I think she’ll survive
this difficult test.
Semifinalist: Safina
Second Quarter
This section is headlined by last year’s finalists at the
WTA Championships, Venus William and Vera Zvonareva, neither of whom have had a
high a profile during the clay season—the Russian for good reason, since she
turned an ankle in Charleston and hasn’t played since. Also, neither of these
two has gone deep at Roland Garros recently: Williams lost in the third round
each of the last two years while Zvonareva went down in the fourth in 2008 and
has only reached the quarters once, back in ’03.
Which means that there’s an opportunity here for someone to
sneak through to the semifinals. Who can seize it? Lisicki? She’s strong but
not seasoned. Petrova? She was ill in her defeat to Schnyder in Madrid last
week, but has been to the semis in Paris before. Mauresmo? She just had a
decent run in Madrid, and it would be a nice story if she finally made good in
front of the home crowd. But it would require reversing the forces of history.
Wait, I just spotted one more name hidden deep within these
brackets: Maria Sharapova. She begins against a French wild card, then might
hit Petrova in the third round. All in all, not a bad place for her to be…
Semifinalist: Venus Williams
Third Quarter
Elena Dementieva is No. 4 in the world? That might seem hard
to believe until you look at her week-to-week record this year. She’s been
steady if not spectacular, and that steadiness has continued on clay. The same
cannot be said for the second seed in this section, Jelena Jankovic, who began
the year at No. 1 but comes to Roland Garros all the way down at No. 5—exactly
the nosedive I predicted JJ would not make in 2009. While she showed a few
signs of life early in the European swing, Jankovic has hit a mediocre plateau
since, losing to Penetta, Kuznetsova, and Schnyder in the quarters of the last
three events.
Trying to threaten Dementieva and Jankovic will be
Frenchwoman Alize Cornet, who seems to like the home-court pressure, but who
remains underpowered; Caroline Wozniacki, a breakout performer of 2009 who
reached the final in Madrid; another Frenchwoman, the always unpredictable
Marion Bartoli, owner of a 5-8 career record at Roland Garros; the perhaps
dangerous up-and-comer Urszulu Radwanska, little sister of Agneiszka; and the
eternally present Daniela Hantuchova. I’m going to take a risk and go with one
of the new faces.
Semifinalist: Wozniacki
Fourth Quarter
There are many reasons to doubt Serena Williams’ chances of
winning her second French Open. She retired in Madrid with a leg injury. She’s
been complaining about over-scheduling. She hasn’t gone past the quarters here
since 2003. The problem for the humble forecaster is finding the woman who is
going to beat her, or, failing that, finding the player who will take advantage
of a loss by her to reach the semifinals.
The women with the best chances of doing the latter are
Svetlana Kuznetsova, former finalist here and winner recently in Stuttgart over
Safina; Patty Schnyder, who made the semis in Madrid and, like Hantuchova, is
always hanging around; and Agnieszka Radwanska, who upset Ivanovic in Rome a
couple of weeks ago. I’ll take Kuzzie, who has been better than she has been
worse lately, which is about all you can hope for from her.
Semifinalist: Kuznetsova
Semifinals: Safina d. V. Williams; Kuznetsova d. Wozniacki
If the draw does work out this way, which I’m
absolutely certain it will, Safinamay face her biggest test against Williams, who she recently beat in
Rome in three sets, but whom she had never taken a set from in the past. Here
the Russian would have to do it on the major stage. I’m going to say she’s
ready.
Rarely are tennis matches, or sporting events of any kind,
so closely tied up with world political events as they were over the course of
the 1989 French Open. The tournament occurred just as Beijing’s Tiananmen Square
protests were winding to their horrifying conclusion. One of the billions watching all of it unfold was Michael Chang. He and his mother were
“glued to the TV in Paris,” he told me recently. “It made winning a tennis match seem
like peanuts.” The moment inspired Chang, he said, “to try to put a few smiles
on Chinese faces around the world.” It inspired him so much that the
17-year-old overcame two of the game’s all-time greats, Ivan Lendl and Stefan
Edberg, in fifth sets on his way to winning the only Grand Slam of his career.
But it wasn’t just the victory that people remember, it was
the way Chang won. More than any other player in history, he did whatever it
took. For the June issue of TENNIS Magazine, I wrote an article about his 1989
Roland Garros run, with special attention to his anarchic fourth-round win over Lendl (who at first told me he "couldn't remember" anything about the match, then proceeded to give me a detailed list of everything that had gone wrong that day). The
title of the piece, which you can find here on TENNIS.com, is “The June 5th
Incident.” It’s a reference to the term the Chinese government would use to
describe what had happened at Tiananmen: They called it, in good, bland, Orwellian tradition, “The June 4th
Incident.” The next day, that incident would be given its most lasting image,
when a lone civilian, forever to be called “The Unknown Rebel,” faced down a
line of four government tanks and brought them to a halt. That same day, Chang
took the court against Lendl In Paris. Below are clips from both of those two interrelated events, each epochal in its own way.
While Chang took inspiration from what was going on in his
parents’ ancestral homeland, another 17-year-old was taking her inspiration
from Chang during Roland Garros that year. Arantxa Sanchez (not yet Vicario),
wearing the same ugly-but-now-iconic striped Reebok shirt as the American,
pulled off what may have been an even more improbable upset when she came back
to beat world No. 1 Steffi Graf 7-5 in the third set to win her own first
major. At this point, Graf was coming off her Golden Slam of 1988, she’d
already won the Australian Open in ’89, and she would go on to win Wimbledon
and the U.S. Open again. But on this day the domineering German met her match in stubborn grit in the
form of Sanchez. Above are the final three games of their final.
You can find pretty much the entire match on YouTube if you so desire.
—First, let me apologize for the commentary of NBC’s Joanne
Russell. Amateurish at best. On the one hand I’m glad Bud Collins—“Fräulein
Forehand!” “Barcelona Bumblebee!” “eyeball to eyeball!” “net cord!” Shut
up!—had gone down to the court by this point. On the other hand, it meant more
Russell.
—Sanchez’s shots were very makeshift at this point. Little
backswing or snap through contact. I was never a fan of hers when she
played—always rooted for Graf, except when she played Sabatini in major
finals—but I knew even then that Sanchez was one of the most intelligent
competitors I'd ever see. She was intelligent because, like a good pool player,
she never forced herself to hit a difficult shot. She kept the ball far from
any line and well over the net. But she wasn’t a pusher; like Andy Murray,
she could control a point from a seemingly defensive and reactive position.
—Graf at her peak here, but as always she struggled with the
topspin backhand. Amazing how Sanchez had her on the run.
—Graf takes a bathroom break just before Sanchez serves for
the match. I guess gamesmanship is eternal, though apparently Graf had food
poisoning earlier in the tournament. So, 20 years later, I’ll let it slide.
—It seems from this clip that Graf served for the match. How many
people would have believed that a 17-year-old relative unknown would break her in that spot? If Sanchez hadn’t come back, Steffi would have won double calendar-year Slams. Talk about unbreakable records;
that would go right up there with Johnny van der Meer’s two straight no-hitters.
—Ah, the famous ball-holder on Arantxa's back. Looks like you could wind up her and watch her run all day.
—Watch the Sanchez moves around when she sets up to return
serve. She looks like she has light feet, like Andre Agassi always did.
—Sanchez must have been frustrating to play because of her
counter-punching ability. Go hard into her forehand and you better make it a
clean winner, or it’s coming back fast and deep.
—1989, like 1968, was a year when revolution was in the air,
from Berlin to Moscow to Prague to Bucharest all the way to Beijing. In ’68, it reached the streets of Paris; in ’89, it reached its tennis courts,
where a new generation of champions was born.
***
I'm back tomorrow to preview this year’s French. All this talk
of ’89 has me wishing for some fresh-faced kids to come from out of nowhere and upend the men’s
and women’s draws. If they’re out there, I can’t see them yet.
It appeared to be an afternoon like every other in Madrid
last week. The sky was a steel blue that nearly matched the silver walls of the
Magic Box. The Spanish sun was as encompassing as ever, but the air was cut
with a swaying cross-breeze. The well-dressed and well-heeled sell-out crowd in
Santana stadium stood with their hands in their pockets and chattered excitedly while
“Oye Como Va” played over the loudspeakers. It seemed like they’d come to a
garden party and found out that a tennis match was going to be played as
well—the very best tennis match, of course. A cheer went up when the smiling
face of Roger Federer, who was waiting for his name to be announced, popped onto the big screen at the corner of the arena. He also seemed to be happy, with
the sky, with the sun, with the afternoon, with life. By the time he’d reached
the service line, the cheers had coalesced into a rousing ovation, one that
only got louder when his opponent, Rafael Nadal, strode out. With his head
down and two weighty bags around his shoulders, the home-country boy was as
grimly serious as Federer was light on his feet.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan as I scanned
the arena, until my eyes got back down to the court. There they landed upon
something astonishing and perhaps unprecedented: Nadal, still all business, had
come out for the coin toss before his opponent. He bounced and stared blankly
into the distance as usual, but it was Federer who did the last second futzing
and fiddling on the sidelines. My first thought was that this was a
masterstroke by Nadal. He would throw off his opponent’s expectations and take control of the tempo of the proceedings all at once. When he did his
customary three-step dash back to the baseline to the start the warm-up, it seemed
that all questions about his post-semifinal energy levels had been forgotten.
That impression lasted through the early part of the first
set. Nadal finished his opening service game with a winner and held a break
point in the next game. There, on a second serve, he shanked a forehand just
over the baseline. If Nadal has a weakness, it’s the forehand return of a
second serve on break point. He gets nervous—remember the one he dumped in the
net at break point late in the third set of last year’s Wimbledon final? Like that
one, his miss here, while seemingly innocent at the time, had longer-lasting
reverberations. In Madrid it allowed Federer, who looked shaky to start—he
almost whiffed on his first backhand of the match—to settle in.
There’s always heightened tension in finals, and this
typically helps Nadal, who slows down play and lets that tension build in his
opponent’s mind. This time it seemed to get the better of him. Maybe it was the
home-country crowd. Maybe it was the long string of matches on clay this
spring. Maybe it was the impending trip to Paris and all that that means. Maybe it was defending his
No. 1 ranking. Maybe it was the contrast to the adrenaline-injected atmosphere of
the previous day. Maybe it was trying to beat Federer one more time. Some
combination of those things weighed on Nadal during this warm Sunday afternoon.
No, he didn’t run, slide, or hit with his customary vigor—there were probably a
dozen shots that he silently got back into play that he would normally have
battered into the corner with a grunt. But from where I was sitting, the bigger
obstacle for Nadal was the pressure of the moment. He’s had no trouble handling
his No. 1 status so far, but it is a different kind of pressure, one that you
must live with every week, from the first round on Tuesday to the final on
Sunday. It’s one that Federer must have enjoyed not feeling on this day. No
wonder he was smiling.
That said, I didn’t feel like Federer played a great match.
Rather, he played the right one, and he executed it just well enough to win. It
didn’t involve attacking on every shot—can we retire that as a tactical
suggestion? The one time Federer chipped and charged, he
put the ball in the perfect spot, right in the middle of the baseline, where
Nadal had to create an angle on his pass. And that’s just what he did, flicking
a forehand past Federer with ease.
Instead, the key for Federer was that he gave Nadal no
rhythm. He served flat up the middle. Then he used a medium-pace kick wide
in the ad court that sent Nadal scrambling. Then he slid a slice wide in the
deuce court, waited for the weak, one-handed reply from Nadal, and knocked off
a forehand into the open court. Then he served at the Spaniard’s backhand
hip—when he did that on set point in the first set, Nadal’s return clanged off
his frame and straight up in the air. As Pete Sampras did against Andre Agassi,
Federer must consider his serve, by itself, to be a counterweight to the rest of
Nadal’s game. He must use it with maximum effectiveness to stand a chance against him on clay.
When the rallies started, Federer quickly used the drop shot, snuck into the
net, or went big with his forehand—anything to keep Nadal from making it a more physical contest. At 0-30 on Nadal’s serve late in the first set, Federer took
the first forehand he got, went for an inside-out winner from behind the
baseline, and missed wide. This may have seemed ill advised on the surface, but it had the longer-term effect of not letting Nadal feel like he was safe at any stage in a
rally. Federer was going to play the points on his terms, even if it meant
missing (he went on to break in that game). Nadal is a rhythm player, a worker;
as he showed against Djokovic, he can hit his way out of a bad day. Federer
didn’t let him see enough shots to do that. It was only deep in the second set
that Nadal began to grunt when he hit the ball. The grunt is part of his
rhythm, evidence of his effort. Federer hadn't given him an opportunity to work
himself up to it.
There are elements of a match that you can control, but they never account entirely for the result. Nadal had another break chance in the
first set, after Federer had badly missed two forehands. On the break point, Federer moved in for another forehand and sent it dangerously close to the baseline.
Nadal missed the subsequent pass and stared at the line; the approach had just clipped it. It was
the same shot that Federer missed repeatedly in the Australian Open final. This
time it went in. Later in the same set, Federer set up his own break point by
hitting another forehand that spun wildly and landed smack on the sideline,
again to Nadal’s exasperation. Sometimes a player or a
team is due. Federer was due in Madrid.
Does this result change the dynamic for the French Open? Yes. Does
it mean Federer has a better chance of beating Nadal there? Not by itself. Still, Federer's fans should be heartened by the way he played the most important, and
heart-stopping, point of the match, the type of point he has been losing to Nadal for
most of his career. Serving for the match at 5-4 in the second, Federer met the
inevitable strong resistance from Nadal, who suddenly couldn’t miss a return
after hitting them perfunctorily all afternoon. Federer went down 15-40, and
the two played what must have been the longest point of the afternoon. Each hit
the netcord once, and each flirted with the baseline. It appeared that Nadal
had the better of the rally, but Federer fended him off with a patchwork of
slices and high topspins shots, anything to stay alive and maintain the break.
Eventually it was Nadal who went for it all on a backhand down the line and
missed. Federer has played Nadal close at Wimbledon and in Melbourne, but he’s
lost virtually all of the most crucial points. He survived this one. He should try not to forget it.
Three years ago, I wrote a piece called “The Duel” about the
budding Nadal-Federer rivalry for TENNIS Magazine. I finished it by saying,
“Federer and Nadal are too ambitious and talented [boring word, but I was young
then] to settle for half the tennis universe. That will be the real key to
making their rivalry a great one: Each wants what the other has.”
In 2008,
Nadal got what Federer had at Wimbledon. He went after it, as he always does,
with bare-shouldered gusto. This year, Federer, in his own quieter way, has
made it clear that he wants what Nadal has at Roland Garros just as badly.
Rather than let his recent losses on clay make him despair, Federer has retained
his deep self-belief and remained as ambitious as he was three years ago. Think
of it as the upside to his famous stubbornness. We’ll see if he's stubborn enough to win the
French Open—I’m still picking Nadal. But if it’s too early to say whether Madrid
signaled a renaissance for Federer, it’s clear that, just as the season is approaching lift-off, something even better for the sport has
been given a fresh and glinting edge: The Duel.
Did you know that Cokes taste better in Madrid? I'm not talking about the Richard Gasquet kind of coke, but the U.S. symbol of all things corporate and peppy. Maybe it’s
the vintage “Coca-Cola” label spelled out in cursive on the can. Maybe it’s
because the recipe still calls for real sugar. Maybe Americans can only
appreciate Americana when they find it somewhere else. Whatever the reason, a
Coke sign caught my eye while I was walking past a small café next to the
city’s elegant Retiro Park this past Saturday. Thirsty and leg-weary, I peaked inside and saw a
very small room with a very large television. On it was a familiar sight: A yellow-sleeved
Rafael Nadal and a blue-shoed Novak Djokovic slugging it out on red clay.
My girlfriend Julie and I ducked our heads in, ordered Cokes
like Midwestern teenagers, and pulled up chairs. It was the third set, and it
was clear that these two guys were in the midst of one of their customary
side-to-side, up-and-back, corner-to-corner wars of shot-making attrition. It
was also clear that Nadal was having an off day—his backhand was labored, his
shots landed at the service line—but that he was caught up in the moment and
wasn’t going to cave in.
Behind us sat three fellow tourists from the U.S., a mother
with her teenage son and daughter. The boy was rooting for Djokovic, the girl
for Nadal—why did this not surprise me? The five of us had the place to
ourselves for a moment. I was just about to say that I’d yet to see any place
in Madrid—bar, restaurant, shop, you name it—that was this quiet, that wasn’t
vibrating with festive humanity. Before I could get the words out, the noise of
laughter and chatter had suddenly filled the room, and a dozen or so young men
and women were streaming through the door.
Spanish or not, anyone who has ever been to a wedding would
recognize this crew. A marriage ceremony had just ended in a church around the corner,
and these friends had escaped for a beer and a cig. The men stood
a little awkwardly in dark suits and ties; the women sat down between them on
stools, taking the opportunity to get off their feet. Everyone smoked and
smiled and drank, and there was relief in the way they swayed a little as they faced
each other in a semicircle.
They also watched Nadal, their countryman. In the time they
stood in the café, his semi with Djokovic went from being just another
entertaining slugfest—the third these guys have put on over the course of this
clay season—to an all-time classic. Along with his Australian Open semifinal
win over Fernando Verdasco, it’s the second one-for-the-books that Nadal has
been involved in during 2009 alone. If he isn’t the best player in history, he
may at least go down as the guy who played its best matches.
As the third set wound into its fourth hour and toward an inevitable tiebreaker, the wedding-goers’ conversation was repeatedly punctured
by an “Ah!” or an “Oh!” or a “Si!” or a “Vamos!” or any number of other strange
and involuntary blurtings that sports fans everywhere recognize as the sounds
of impassioned disbelief. After each one, the group would stop talking and turn their heads
toward the TV screen.
There they saw a heavyweight fight on dirt. Through dint of
effort, Nadal had shrugged off his earlier constricted form and was swinging
freely. If anything, Djokovic was even freer; he wasn’t stroking the ball, he
was clubbing it, but his viciousness retained an elegance. The wedding party
may have had a reception to attend, but there was no way they could leave now.
I have no notes from the match; I hadn’t even intended to
watch it. But what could a few scribblings tell me about this one,
anyway? What I remember thinking was that, more than usual, Nadal won it by
doing anything he could. When he teared up at match point against Verdasco, Nadal went as far emotionally as you can
go while a match is still going on. This time he
went as far as you can go from a shot perspective—Nadal threw them all at Djokovic, and each improvisation
led to something new and more confident as the match got tighter. The sliding backhand
desperation moonball? That morphed into a ripped backhand crosscourt later. The short, overly spin-y forehand that he had going early? That became a heavy shot that he
used to bludgeon and wear down Djokovic’s backhand. Finally, down match point in the tiebreaker, Nadal took a forehand at shoulder level from behind the baseline and hit a winner
into the corner. After four hours, he'd peaked
The wedding-goers eventually stopped talking and just stared
at the screen. Blue shoes or yellow sleeves, both guys—Djokovic exasperated but valiant, Nadal willing himself to believe the day could end with a victory and having come too far not to make it happen—commanded our attention. I mentioned a couple weeks ago that Nadal always allows himself to celebrate a win,
no matter how early it is in a tournament. His celebration of this one, which
he had manufactured for the home fans on an off day, could be set in
stone—Nadal landed prone on the court, hands at full stretch above his head,
his body as rigid as a statue. It was a just a semifinal, but by ignoring the
future and treating it like a momentous occasion, one worth fighting for, one
worth finding different ways to win, Nadal didn’t just give himself
a chance to revel. He and Djokovic gave tennis fans, as well as a few wedding-goers making an escape, one
more day to remember—as you can tell from this post, watching it was an indelible experience for me. No town likes a party more than Madrid, whatever the occasion, so it's fitting that in this city we saw a tennis match become more than just a thrill or a rush or a battle or a fight or even a spectacle. Nadal-Djokovic was a celebration of everything we call competition.
We'd heard a lot about Madrid's Caja Magica—the Magic Box—over
the course of the last year. Its futuristic interlocking-roof design was going
to provide a new architectural vision for tennis. It was going to be a key to
the city's 2016 Olympic bid. It was going to become the site of tennis' mythical
Fifth Grand Slam.
A tourist from the U.S., particularly one who'd just read an
intriguing article about the facility and its famed French architect in
the New York Times, might have expected that the road to this magical place
would be brightly paved, that you'd see its impressive structure gleaming in
the distance. This tourist would have been wrong, as I was Wednesday when I
walked out of the metro stop in Madrid's San Fermin neighborhood. The 25 or so
tennis fans who got out with me—you could recognize them us the sweaters over our shoulders—craned their necks in all directions, searching for a sign.
Finally we found it, a tiny, triangular, orange scrap of metal harmlessly attached to a lamppost. It
read "Caja Magica," and pointed us down a nondescript side street
filled with California Spanish-style adobe bungalows. I thought about other
streets I'd walked down to get to tournaments. I decided that, based on this
early promotional evidence, Madrid had a long
way to go before it was going to threaten the French Open as the world's
biggest clay event. At the Roland Garros metro stop, you aren't just pointed to
the courts; you stroll through part of the station on a bed of la terre battue.
There's nothing Magical, or even playful, about the design
of this tennis facility. Wide, flat, rectangular, and moderately imposing, its sits at
the far edge of San Fermin, looking more like a 1970s airport terminal than an
athletic complex. The high gray walls that surround it, which appear at first
to be straight out of the Brutalist handbook of office-building architecture,
are revealed at closer glance to be tightly woven metal screens. This links the
indoor and outdoor areas of the site, but it doesn't reduce the chilliness of
its atmosphere. Walking around the grounds, you're cut off from the three main
arenas, which are encased in concrete. You can't hear balls being struck,
players grunting, out calls being made, or fans cheering. You have no idea what's
happening or even who might be playing.
That said, once inside there's a lot to like about the main
stadium, which is named after 1960s Spanish Grand Slammer Manual Santana, who was
on hand Wednesday to check out this decade's Spanish Slammer, Rafael Nadal. The
size and seating capacity—12,000—is ideal, and a $50 ticket will get you
hundreds, if not thousands, if not tens of thousands, of feet closer to the
court than an $80 ticket will get you in Ashe Stadium at the U.S. Open. The red
plastic seats are comfortable and not jammed too close to each other. Most are
shaded from the strong Spanish sun as well—a bonus. Even when the retractable
roof is open, it's hard to know whether to call this an outdoor or an indoor arena, as the metallic-colored permanent roof juts far out over the court on
all sides. (The closest comparison I can make is to the old Cowboy Stadium in
Dallas, which was half enclosed at its top.) The light
that does seep onto Santana stadium's clay is made all the more intense because
the space surrounding it is left in the shade.
As a spectator with tickets, rather than an entitled press
guy with a badge, I didn't have access to the second stadium (named after Arantxa
Sanchez Vicario). Of course this only made me want to get in there more to see James
Blake, a guy I normally wouldn't make a special trip to watch if I was covering
a tournament. But I did have access to the third stadium, a compact and
colorless space sealed off from the grounds at large. Like Santana,
the sun shines brightly through the square hole in the roof here, but the walls are a bland pale gray that might remind an American of a high-school gymnasium, an effect that
was only heightened by the thudding echo of the ball coming off the players'
strings. As in the big arena, the modernistic Box concept is extended to the four
sets of bleachers in Stadium 3, which are set at hard right angles rather than curved toward
the playing field. You're very close to the players here, which is a blessing
and a curse. I was close enough Wednesday to see just how little effort
Svetlana Kuznetsova was giving at the end of her loss to Alona Bondarenko.
Away from the metallic indoor caverns, on the other side of a low
greenish-colored moat, are the side courts. They appear for now to have been an
afterthought (construction around the grounds was still going on right up until
play started). There are two rows of them, and the only way to access them is to
walk down a fairly narrow wooden pathway that cuts through the middle. This
area is easily congested—on Wednesday a group of schoolkids brought pedestrian traffic
there to a complete halt for five minutes.
The courts themselves, both inside and out, were bumpy
and slippery, and the grounds crew looked like they could use a few lessons in organization and precision from the guys at Roland Garros. During his warm-up on an outer court, Jeremy Chardy
dug up such a big chunk in the surface that the crew had to immediately run out
with a shovel full of clay to patch it up. There were missed spots when
the courts were swept and overhosing between sets—Nadal seemed to be
watching the crew in semi-disbelief as they went about their business after the
first set of his match with Jurgen Melzer.
These glitches will most likely be fixed in the years ahead.
But what won't change is the way the ball jumps off the players' racquets in
Madrid's 2,000-foot altitude. This is particularly true on the outside courts, which
are open to the wind. Chipped returns floated long, and players slowed down and
shortened their swings on ground strokes. They also spent a lot of time far behind the baseline; linespeople were repeatedly forced to jam their bodies up
against the back fence to avoid getting a racquet upside the head. The tournament should
consider extending the playing surfaces next year, if possible; otherwise someone, player
or official, is going to get hurt.
They might also consider some landscaping. Out on the side
courts, the parched land and wide blue sky reminded me of Indian Wells, only
without the scenic mountains in the distance for perspective. The closest Madrid
gets is a scrubby, dry little hill that rises meekly a few hundred feet away—can't Ion Tiriac buy a better view? Still, walking out of the side court area you could see that jasmine and grapevines had been planted along the fences, and that with a year's worth of growing and gardening the place would,
as many of the players said this week, "have potential." For now the
tournament's environment, inside and outside, remains raw and under-cultivated.
None of which kept me from experiencing the unique pleasure
that tennis fans can get when they travel across the Atlantic to watch a
tournament. There's a sense, when you sit in a stadium in Paris or Madrid or
London, that you're a spy, that you aren't supposed to be there, that you've
been transported to an alternate tennis universe. Or make that an alternate
sports and celebrity universe. One of the mystifying experiences for an
American visitor is seeing the face of a man on a Jumbotron and hearing
the crowd build to a roar as the camera lingers on him. You know it must be a
soccer star, the European equivalent of Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods perhaps. Though all you
really know is that he means a lot to a lot of people, but exactly why remains
a mystery. This is a happy novelty for the U.S. fan: We get to analyze and enjoy the match and the crowd and the
atmosphere with fresh eyes, as if we're seeing a tennis tournament for the first time.
The atmosphere in Madrid on Wednesday reached its peak at exactly 4:10 P.M. That's when Rafael Nadal took the court to a packed house, half of
which had walked down as far as they could to take photos of him. These fans
were fortunate to see the home-country hero make his debut here: Nadal had
requested to play in the afternoon so he could watch a Spanish soccer match
that evening. The crowd was good and wound-up by the time the match started, and they
let it out between points with endless, pointless cries of "Ra-FA!"
Nadal started slowly, hit more balls than normal over the baseline, shook his head at
the semi-organized grounds crew, and eventually found his return groove on Melzer's
lefty kick serve. He won anti-climactically, 6-3, 6-1, but watching him gather
the energy of 12,000 Spaniards and send it back to them witha forehand belted through the thin air and past his opponent, you could feel for the first time a certain something in
the Madrid afternoon. What was it? After three days of players slipping, sliding, pulling out and complaining, the Caja had finally found its Magica. The Box had a little Magic in it after all.
In traveling from Rome to Madrid, we’ve gone from the peeling to the gleaming, from the historic to the high-tech, from the solemn-sounding Foro Italico to the postmodern-sounding Magic Box. And what did we find when we got there? Marat Safin with his hands in the air and his racquet bouncing on the clay in front of him.
The center court in Madrid looks great from what I’ve seen over the last hour on TV, though my first thought was that the light and atmosphere reminded me of the light and atmosphere in the similarly high-tech main stadium in Hamburg, the tournament that was booted off the schedule this year to make room for this one—the new has been replaced by the even-more-new. Otherwise, it sounds like it’s been a shaky start in Madrid, with Spaniards Nadal and Robredo noting the site’s deficiencies: few practice courts, buildings still under construction, cramped locker rooms, a silly blue clay court, and an owner, Ion Tiriac, with delusions of world domination. Are these legitimate beefs, or the gripes of touchy pros who have had their routine disturbed for the week? We’ll find out in the days and years ahead. What’s interesting so far is that Nadal, who is dead set against Tiriac’s idea of Madrid becoming a “Fifth Slam,” is turning out to be just as much of a traditionalist as his predecessor at No. 1, Roger Federer. Why would either of them want the sport to do anything differently? It might mess with their mojo.
The biggest change is that Madrid is a dual-gender event, which, according to most of the sport’s observers, is the best way for each tour to maximize its appeal. That means we have two draws to break down: Both of them feature virtually every player of importance in limited, 56-person draws—it felt a little early in the week to see Safin play Tsonga today. But both of them will have their own very different storylines playing out.
The Men
First Quarter It may sound illogical, but the men’s event is now less about who can beat Nadal than whether he can keep winning all the way through to another French Open. That would mean five straight tournament titles, more than he’s ever pulled off in one spring. While that kind of sustained dominance may seem unlikely, what’s even more unlikely is that he’ll lose a match on clay in the foreseeable future. We’ll see if Nadal’s early irritation with the facility and the surface has any affect on his attitude.
Nadal’s quarter is loaded with fellow Spaniards—Ferrer, Verdasco, Ferrero, Montanes, Granollers, Lopez, and Almagro. Plus, there’s Argentina’s Juan Monaco, who nearly reached the semis in Rome two weeks ago. Of those, Verdasco and Ferrer have the best chance of making some inroads against Nadal. I might say the same thing for Almagro, except that I haven’t seen him once during this clay season, which isn’t a good sign. First-round match to watch: Almagro vs. Kohlschreiber—nice backhands. Semifinalist: Nadal
Second Quarter This time Novak Djokovic, after losing to Nadal in the Monte Carlo and Rome finals, has the honor of appearing in the same half as the top seed. He’s slotted to play the winner of Tsonga and Simon in the quarters. Before that, he doesn’t have a lot to worry about—Sam Querrey has already knocked out 15th seed Radek Stepanek. I’m curious to see whether either Tsonga or Simon will make some kind of move heading into Roland Garros. There’s an opportunity here for each of them. Semifinalist: Djokovic
Third Quarter After a couple weeks of rest and practice, Andy Murray picks up his clay campaign again. He’s opposite his old friend Juan-Martin del Potro in this section; he’s near Tommy Robredo; and he begins with the perhaps tricky Simone Bolelli, an Italian who knows his way around a clay court. Will Murray’s momentum be slowed by his early loss in Rome? I don’t think so—he has the big picture in mind and seems to have learned not to sweat the day-to-day and point-to-point as much as he once did. On del Potro’s side is Stan Wawrinka, who could easily reach the quarters or beyond. Dark horse: Tomas Berdych. He won his first event of 2009 last week, and he might face del Potro in the second round. Semifinalist: Murray
Fourth Quarter Roger Federer may not have it easy to start. He could get Igor Andreev, who had him on the ropes at the U.S. Open last year, in his opener, and then perhaps James Blake, who made an unexpected surge last week in reaching the Estoril final. On the other side are Roddick, Haas, Gulbis, and Davydenko. Why do I like Roddick’s chances, despite the fact that he’s coming off his honeymoon? He’ll already have nothing to lose on clay; now he’ll have even less than nothing. And despite most evidence to the contrary, he isn’t that bad on this stuff. Semifinalist: Roddick
Semifinals: Nadal d. Djokovic; Murray d. Roddick Final: Nadal d. Murray
The Women First Quarter After a spell of the routine and the random, there were suddenly a few sparks of drama floating around the WTA tour as this tournament got underway. They began when Serena Williams proclaimed herself, rather than the top-ranked Dinara Safina, the “real No. 1.” Safina countered by beating Serena’s sister on her way to a title in Rome. I was about to say that now we just need to cement the moment with a showdown between the two new rivals in Madrid, except, naturally, Serena retired in the first round.
Safina begins with a potentially tough first-rounder in Na Li. In the quarterfinals she might need to repeat her win in the Rome final over Svetlana Kuznetsova. Is Safina just another part-time No. 1, like Jankovic and Ivanovic, or is she ready to make it part of her identity? Last week it seemed to be the latter. We’ll learn more soon. Semifinalist: Safina
Second Quarter Jelena Jankovic has bottomed out and is slowly finding her way back to the surface. It hasn’t been a straight line upward, but she’s certainly in better spirits than she was in the U.S. in March. Hantuchova, Dulko, Petrova, Wozniak, Bartoli: Jankovic doesn’t have any insurmountable obstacles on her way to the semis. Let’s see if JJ is ready to take advantage of the opening and put herself back in the running for Roland Garros. Semifinalist: Jankovic
Third Quarter The new face of 2009, Victoria Azarenka, has kept up the good work through the spring, and there’s no obvious reason to think it won’t continue in Madrid—which, in WTA terms, means she’ll probably crash and burn in the first round. She’s scheduled to face Elena Dementieva in the quarters. Semifinalist: Azarenka
Fourth Quarter Serena and Venus were somehow been thrown into the same quarter—this is the problem with not caring about where you’re ranked, and, therefore, seeded. While Serena is out, Venus had a solid run to the semis in Rome. Semifinalist: V. Williams
Semifinals: Azarenka d V. Williams; Safina d. Jankovic Final: Safina d. Azarenka
I’ll be in Madrid this week, and at the tournament for a day or two. I will let you know how it is, and whether the tournament is running a little more smoothly from the fan’s perspective. Enjoy it back here. FYI: If you want to see the women, you’ll have to leave the Tennis Channel, which only carries the ATP feed, and hit TennisTV.com.
This week’s You Tube post comes with a personal agenda.
Yesterday was my birthday—let’s just say that rather than pushing 40, 40 has
finally pushed back—and I wanted to find a clip taken from that day, May 7,
1969. The closest I could get was the above video from the French Open
final between Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, played in early June of the same year.
Not that I’m complaining—it’s hard to find two players from any era that are more
enjoyable to watch roam a tennis court.
I was asked yesterday if I “felt different.” I spent some
time thinking about it this morning and decided that, if anything, I feel more
like I always have. Forty is just what it claims to be: 20 times 2. I could be
two 20-year-olds stacked on top of each other: The same desires, fears, mystifications,
and occasional moments of happy abandon I felt at that age have only doubled in
the time since.
The highlight of the day was my first dinner at the famed
Gramercy Tavern in Manhattan. Finishing up the main course, thinking how the
food was so good it almost seemed silly, some bittersweet words from Bob Dylan
came to mind: “It frightens me, the awful truth, of how sweet life can be.”
Leave it to Dylan to put his finger on what really hurts: It isn’t the
knowledge that life is so bad, it’s the knowledge that it can be so good, if
only you could make it that way.
Anyway, how about some Rocket vs. Muscles?
—Let me start with a pointless but to me interesting aside: Steffi Graf was born one week
after this match.
—These guys both strode around with sloped shoulders between points—so much for the usefulness of intimidating body language. In Laver’s
case, he looks relaxed and unhurried. In Rosewall’s, he looks beaten down.
Which is not surprising considering that he is down two sets and a break when
the clip begins. The other thing I immediately notice is the plainness of their
all-white clothes. That’s not a tennis tradition that I miss.
—Laver’s service trademark is the quick step forward with
his back foot. He begins the wind-up languidly, then kicks into gear with
his left foot. He seems to hit an accelerator mid-serve, and that ability to
shift into a higher gear mid-way through a point is characteristic of his game. I’m surprised by Rosewall’s lack of upward extension on his serve.
He seems content to get it in deep, but without much force.
—Laver serving and volleying on clay. A nice half-volley; he
has no trouble keeping his body moving forward through it. You can see his
great feel for the ball in this shot, and in the compact way he snaps off his
forehand ground stroke with little backswing. If Nadal does it with
biceps, Laver did it with that tree-trunk forearm.
—Love the Laver backspin. The slice deep in the court is the most
aristocratic of strokes. But he could come over the ball as well. Like Federer, Laver
seems to be in a constant transition game, always ready and able to turn a
point on its head, even on clay.
—No sitting down on the changeovers. You can see why every
round at men’s tournaments was once 3 out of 5 sets. They took so much
less time between points and games in the pre-TV era.
—It’s instructive to watch the game’s legends in real time,
rather than through highlights of their best moments. Not only do you learn
from their methods, but you realize that they were human, and no more perfect
than today’s players. Laver is cruising until he serves for the match; then,
out of nowhere, he’s broken. Rosewall then takes the serve and proceeds to play
a horrible game of his own to give the title to Laver. The Rosewall backhand is
one of the consensus greatest strokes in the sport’s history, but he could also
dump it in the middle of the net with an ugly swing on a big point, as he does
in the final game of this match. More than that, Rosewall is visibly negative in this
clip. He threatens to bang a ball out of the stadium, Safin-style, after one
error. For some reason, seeing this from a vaunted Aussie legend makes me feel good. Even he could let his emotions get the best of him.
—Laver was an athlete to his core. You can see it in the way
he backpedals for an overhead, as if he’s relishing every step as well as the
chance to jump back and smash the ball inside out. The Rocket was a down to
earth guy who played percentage net-rushing tennis, but you also get the
feeling he loved to do the spectacular. At the start of his career, he had to
learn to rein that tendency in.
—Rosewall had beaten Laver in the final at Roland Garros the year before, in the first open Grand Slam. In '69, Laver turned the tables and went on to win the Grand Slam. Rafael Nadal
may leave this year’s French Open with the same opportunity. That fact is the
same, but you can see that almost everything else about the sport has changed
radically, from the clothes to the strokes to the championship celebrations. If
tennis on YouTube shows us anything, it’s that a lot can happen in 40 years.
Included in my ongoing birthday celebration will be a trip
to Madrid next week. I’m going for vacation, but I’ll be at the tournament for
at least one day. I'll do a draw breakdown this weekend and be back later with a report from inside the confines
of tennis' newest, most futuristic, and best-named three-retractable-roof facility, the Magic Box.
In keeping with recent tradition, the women have kept a low
profile so far this spring. While the rest of the world comes out to play
tennis at this time of year, the WTA’s most famous players makes themselves
scarce. Last month they ceded the final of the once-prestigious Charleston event to two
upstarts, Sabine Lisicki and Caroline Wozniacki. And they’re threatening to do
the same this week in Rome, where Serena Williams and Ana Ivanovic have already
bit the Foro Italico dust. The highest-profile moment on the women’s tour in
the past few weeks came when Serena claimed in Rome that she, rather than the top-ranked
Dinara Safina, is the “real No. 1.” Then she lost in the opening round.
The WTA doesn’t go out of its way to show off its product,
either. While the men were playing in Roman sunshine last week, the women began
their preparations for Roland Garros in a dark echo chamber in Stuttgart
floored with muddy-looking clay. It’s too bad the atmosphere wasn’t brighter,
or at least a little more TV friendly, because this time two Top Tenners,
Safina and her fellow Russian Svetlana Kuznetsova, faced off in the final.
They did not play a memorable match, but by the end I’d
begun to think of it as at least a representative one. Like the women’s game as a whole at the moment,
the Stuttgart final felt incomplete. You had Safina on
one end, jutting her jaw forward with slit-eyed severity before she returned
serve, and reinforcing each winning shot with a determined fist pump. On the
other side, there was Kuznetsova, mysteriously placid as always, walking
blankly from one point to the next.
From this description you might think that Safina would have
ended up pulling out a gritty victory. She is, despite Williams’ protests, the
No. 1 player in the world. But you would be wrong. From the start it was the
No. 9 Kuznetsova who was the superior player. She slid more smoothly on the
clay. She held her ground at the baseline. She hit her backhand early and as
cleanly as I’ve ever seen it. And despite her usual slap-shot forehands that
land 5 feet wide and her total inability to construct a point with anything
remotely resembling patience—I’ve said before that she’s almost cursed by her
athletic versatility—she held up through two sets to win her first title since 2007. Before Sunday, she had lost a ridiculous 10 of her last 11 finals.
Safina served well to start but still struggled to keep up
with her flaky countrywoman. She hit her forehand late and couldn’t generate power with anywhere near the same ease. Worse, she was forced
to camp out well behind the baseline; otherwise, she wouldn’t have had time to
make it all the way through her long strokes. Safina is No. 1 in large part due to her perseverance, and it was on
display even in defeat in Stuttgart. Still, I began to wonder how
she had so much success on clay last year. She seemed too ungainly
to move well enough on the surface.
I’m happy for Kuznetsova, and I hope she can take this win
and run with it, though what are the chances, really? I’d like to see her use all that athleticism for good rather
than for weird. Even more, I’d love to see her put together a few points that don't involve her going for broke as soon as possible—or as soon as impossible.
But from wider vantage point, I came away from the Stuttgart final thinking
that this was the women’s game today: The smooth talent and explosiveness was on
one side, the grit and perseverance on the other. Can anyone give us both right
now? Yes, there are the Williams sisters, but we know their ability to put
everything together physically and mentally wanes during the routine weeks before waxing again at the majors. In other words, you can’t rely on
them to carry the tour. Below them you have the slumping but steadfast
Jankovic, the jittery Ivanovic, the ever-so-slowly, semi-rising Zvonareva,
the fierce but still raw Azarenka, and the previously mentioned up-and-comers
Wozniacki and Lisicki. For the upper echelon of a professional sport, does that
list feel incomplete to you?
The logical next question: Are you starting to miss Maria
Sharapova? I have to say I'm starting to miss her
cold-blooded royal bearing, the strutting persona that she brought to the court with
the express purpose of forcing her opponents to react to it. Whether or not we
want to hear her, I’d say tennis fans could use the sight of her on court rather than in a photo shoot.
She may not be in the running to be a real No. 1 anytime soon, but she would have
made that echo chamber in Stuttgart a little brighter last week.
On another WTA note, check out this column by Tom Tebbutt on
his blog. He says it’s time for the WTA coaching rule/gimmick to come to a
merciful end. Unlike Tom, I think on-court coaching should be allowed, but he’s
right that it’s in current form, where coaches are miked, the tour is pretty
transparently caving into TV demands.
