Andre's Real Legacy	08/31/2009 - 8:56 PM

It wouldn’t be the U.S. Open without a gala opening-night ceremony to celebrate how devoid of greed and bursting with diversity the sport is, how it’s played by shiny happy children from every park and street around the country. This year it was a tribute to “athletes who give back,” the most prominent of which was Andre Agassi, who has devoted much of his non-playing time over the years to building a school for underprivileged kids in Las Vegas.

These ceremonies are also designed to broadcast the continuing health of U.S. tennis, the promotion of which is the USTA’s stated mission. Whatever you may have heard to the contrary, the health of the sport here isn’t all that bad at the moment, as America’s across the board success at Wimbledon demonstrated. Beyond our homegrown players, this country can take at least half-credit for the success of Maria Sharapova, Jelena Jankovic, Tommy Haas, and Dmitry Tursunov, among many others.

Still, the question dogs the organization, and people like me who work in the sport: What’s wrong with American tennis? I hear it from players at my local club and relatives looking for a conversation starter, any conversation starter, with me. I have a few answers—we’re not as hungry as the Eastern Europeans; we play too many other sports; we don’t learn footwork playing soccer; we’re too fat. But really, none of these hold up when you think about the sheer number of people in this country and the sheer amount of money available for it compared, say, to a place like Serbia. And really, are the Swiss hungrier than we are?

And while we had a good Wimbledon, and while Serena Williams will likely remain the most dominant woman player for as long as wants to, there’s legitimate fear for the future in this country. Where’s the next Serena? Where’s the next Agassi? While it’s his post-career legacy that was on display tonight, Andre also served as living proof that not very long ago U.S. tennis was dominant on the men’s side as well, and that it still benefits from old-fashioned immigrant desire to carve out an identity in an adopted country. Agassi's father, Mike, was an Olympic boxer for Iran, and he transferred all of his vicarious drive for success to his kids. Andre, as we saw tonight, is the shiny product of that drive, a remarkably polished man in his late-30s who looked completely at home in a suit on a huge stage speaking at length about his by all accounts very successful foundation. You wouldn’t have known Agassi had ever been a tennis player, except for the little hop step he did, in his dress shoes, right after he blew kisses to the crowd, the same way he always had after a win.

Agassi was equally poised, and even inspiring, in his press conference afterward. Asked about his evolution from peroxide punk to tennis’ resident life coach, he began with a joke: “not only did I drop out of 9th grade, but 8th grade was the best three years of my life.” Then he pulled a 180 and made the room go quiet when he said that he wasn’t done yet, that we’d need to talk to him in the future about where he was, that he would “continually ask the most of myself.” I have to say, I found myself vowing to do the same thing as I walked out of the presser.

But Agassi or no Agassi on court, the first few days at the Open are still the best chance all year to see the current state of U.S. tennis—like the other Slams, the tournament gives the lion’s share of its wild cards to natives, most of whom will be gone by end of the first week. So, thinking of the Agassi legacy, both on-court and off, I spent the day catching up with four Americans.

First up on Court 7 this morning is Donald Young. He’s facing No. 14 seed Tommy Robredo, who looks more imposing and more explosive from this close-up vantage point. The place is packed, but the pressure in the air is less intense than it once was for Young, when he first made the jump from the juniors to the pros four or five years ago. He hasn’t changed much since then. He’s still a little undersized, even though he’s listed as 6-feet tall, he still doesn’t get much extension or weight transfer on his serve, and his strokes still aren’t as heavy or penetrating as someone like Robredo’s. But he’s as quick as anyone around, and he’s learned to use that quickness not just to defend side to side, but also to transition all the way to the net off of virtually any forehand.

All of which should be enough to earn Young a better ranking than his current 185. His biggest problem is the simplest: an inability to win. He routinely goes up 30-0 in games only to lose them; he follows up an excellent serve by missing a forehand by an inch; he drills a stunning backhand volley directly at Robredo, who pokes it away for a winner; and down 3-4, with Robredo serving, he briefly goes up 0-30 only to have the chair umpire overrule a call in his favor. Instead of it being 0-30 and having a half-chance to break, Young starts over at 15-15. Robredo serves two aces and a service winner to hold. This, in the end, is what separates Robredo from Young: The Spaniard gets free points on his serve; the American doesn’t. Though I also get the feeling, like I always do watching DY, that he’s just a little unlucky.

What advice might Andre Agassi give to this snakebit kid? He might tell him, like so many others have, to get outside coaching rather than sticking with his parents. Andre’s father recognized that early, when he sent his son across the country and gave him a new equally driven second father, Nick Bollettieri.

Next up in the parade of Yanks is Devin Britton, an 18-year-old wild card and NCAA champion from Mississippi who’s laboring inside a breezy Ashe Stadium against none other than Roger Federer. Watching the 6-foot-3 Britton bend low to reach for a backhand, I wish that he and Young could be fused into one player: He’s got the height and a strong serve, and he seems as relaxed as Young does edgy; what he doesn’t have is DY’s speed or ball-striking ability.

Britton has been advertised as a serve and volleyer, but he doesn’t do much of it against Federer, whose forehand, Britton says later, “scares him.” He also says that he hits a few balls toward that side intentionally because he loves to watch Federer hit it (“it’s pretty”), and that after he broke the top seed’s serve in the second set, he experienced the “best 10 seconds of my life.” They ended when he lost the next 12 points.

So what might Andre say to inspire Britton, who is currently ranked No. 1375, but who did reach the semis of junior Wimbledon this year? He might tell him to have the courage and arrogance to stick with what you do best—if that's serve and volley, then serve and volley—no matter who's on the other side of the net. He might also agree that Federer is a beautiful player to watch.

Out on Court 4, an American is winning. California’s Robert Kendrick, 29, is rolling, in fact, up two sets and a break over Martin Vassallo Arguello of Argentina, who is putting up only token resistance. Kendrick, blond, narrow-eyed, and 6-foot-3, looks like he should be playing in cream slacks circa 1950. But it’s 2009, so he’s got a backward baseball cap on instead. However he looks, he’s playing consummate Big American tennis. He’s moving his serve around the box. He’s sticking volleys from below net level. He’s pinning Vassallo Arguello back with his forehand. He’s even taking first serves and knocking off backhand return winners. Kendrick can get negative, and he can overcook simple shots at the wrong moments—like Young, he doesn’t win as much as you think he should when you watch him hit the ball. But for today, at least, he looks like the modern, updated, less-well-dressed version of California legends like Jack Kramer and Ellsworth Vines. Long live classic American tennis. How long will it last? He’s got a half-American next, Tommy Haas.

There’s one more American on the side courts, a teenager from Brooklyn via Ukraine named Gail Brodsky. Here’s immigrant desire—her father came to New York with nothing, delivered pizzas, and taught Gail tennis—in the flesh. Brodsky, yellow-haired and tan, looks and acts more Russian than she does American, until her flat New York accent comes out when an overrule goes against her: “Wha?” she asks the chair umpire. But her intensity is pure Eastern Europe—she screams at the sky, slaps her thigh, fist-pumps vehemently after each winner, and levels the ball with a flat two-handed backhand every chance she gets. She also, alas, loses in straight sets to 20th seed Anabel Medina Garrigues. Brodsky has the intensity, but looks like she lacks the weapons. Unlike, say, Serena or Maria Sharapova, when she levels a ball with everything she has, it doesn’t fly past her opponent all that often.

What does any of this prove? For one, the U.S. is too diverse to pigeonhole one problem with its young players. Young is an African-American with immense talent; Britton is a jocky but gawky Southerner; Kendrick plays vintage California tennis without quite enough polish or consistency; and Brodsky is a few inches short of the American dream. Which takes me back to Andre. For all of his classy sparkle tonight, he came up tough and foul-mouthed, a mulleted punk. He may disavow everything about his original self—he said today that “he’s not terribly thrilled with the decisions he made as a kid or my understanding of anything”—but his vulgar and arrogant side was what originally made him a great tennis player. Agassi was pushed by his father, the way so many other kids are. But then so were his siblings; only Andre had the raw talent and physical skills to make use of his dad’s thwarted, overweening desire. 

Like Agassi said tonight, there are 300 million people in this country; there’s no excuse for us not to have our share of top tennis players at all times. Then again, his unique life journey only proves the real truth about raising tennis players, a truth proven again by both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal: Every champion is an aberration. U.S. tennis fans should have known it all along—there’s only one Andre Agassi.

Opener	08/31/2009 - 11:18 AM

An event like the U.S. Open, which gathers together so many people—256 main-draw players, plus 256 more qualifiers, surrounded by 800,000 or so spectators over the course of the tournament—gives off an endless number of emotional vibrations during its two weeks. We all remember the final one, the trophy-kissing moment of triumph; the moral there is one of achievement and perseverance and, more than anything else, unlikelihood. Why Roger Federer? Why Serena Williams? Why not me? Don’t tell me you’ve never asked yourself one of those questions.

But that’s just the exclamation point, the final destination for all of the other passions that will rise off the the grounds at the National Tennis Center. And they've already begun. I was on the grounds again on Saturday and watched the conclusion of the qualifying rounds. This is, as they say, the moment of truth (and money): The 32 winners make it into the U.S. Open and, at the minimum, take home a first-round loser’s check, which in past years has been close to $11,000. Each of these matches can feel like a private little Open final of its own.

I caught two of them, both involving highly touted junior prodigies—one current, Laura Robson of Great Britain, and one past, Donald Young of Atlanta. Each of these players has won junior Wimbledon and garnered infinitely more press than the average denizen of the qualies, a fact that only motivates the unknowns they face that much more.

In Robson’s case, that unknown was the hulking Eva Hrdinova, who was up a set when rain came on Friday. Robson came back firing on Saturday and led 4-0 in the third set; she had one foot in the main draw. At which point, of course, tennis being what it is, her opponent relaxed and stopped missing entirely, while Robson came unglued completely. Serving for the match, she double-faulted three times; two of the second serves nearly hit the baseline. Hrdinova caught her at the finish line, winning in a third-set tiebreaker (thank God the Open plays them), 7-4. By the end, Robson was beyond tears. She sat on the sideline with a look of pure, simple pain etched into her face.

I walked away hanging my head and wondered, for the millionth time, why anyone would choose to play tennis—at all. I wasn’t made any happier when I saw that Young was in his own battle to qualify on the next court. I visited Donald and his family in Atlanta for a feature five years ago, when he was the No. 1 junior in the world at age 16. I hadn’t loved the way he trained, but I had loved the feel he had on his strokes. It’s been tough to watch his many ups and downs, his racquet-throwing outbursts, his reduction to a cautionary tale about “taking too many wild cards.” That alone isn't why he failed to become the next John McEnroe—the next Johnny Mac needs to be big—but you did get the feeling that Young was never sure if really belonged with the big boys, or whether he had been awarded his place there because of his junior status alone.

But I was happy to see that DY’s blindingly sweet and blindingly erratic strokes—he almost has too much racquet-head speed for his own good—were still intact on Saturday. Whatever his problems, few guys at any level can whip a forehand winner into the corner as rapidly and decisively as he does. Not surprisingly, his opponent wasn’t pleased to be losing to Donald Young. This time the prodigy finished the job in straight sets, and he was about as excited to do it as Roger Federer had been to win the whole thing last year. Young plays Tommy Robredo in the first round, perhaps a winnable match if he can get it over quickly and doesn’t let the veteran wear him down. As fellow tennis writer Andrew Friedman said to me afterward, maybe having to earn his way in will help DY feel like he really belongs in the U.S. Open this time.

Such a genteel, sharp-angled, white-lined, well-organized sport: It needs to be to hold all these emotions inside it. I’ll be out on the grounds looking today, seeing a million more.

***

In case you missed them, you can find my men's preview here, and women's preview here. Here's the TV schedule in the U.S.

And, if there's no tennis to watch or play or read about, and you're interested in my writing on a completely different New York City subject, check this post out.

The New Baby Federer	08/28/2009 - 4:15 PM

From past experience, it had always been my considered opinion that the U.S. Open qualies were overrated. After attending them for many years in the early part of the decade, my memories boiled down to two: (a) stifling humidity coupled with a wide, blinding sun that fell just low enough in the sky to smack you in the face; and (b) Eric Taino. Not all that surprisingly, I had begun scheduling my week at the beach to coincide with the qualifying tournament. This year I mistimed my vacation.

I’m not unhappy that I did, because yesterday I had my eyes reopened to the charms of this event. Which is a surprise, because the day didn’t start all that well. While it’s widely known that the qualies are free, what’s less-often reported is that it costs $18 if you need to park to see them. Throw that together with a bone-dry $10 chicken sandwich for lunch and that same dreaded sun smacking me in my face, and I was feeling ripped off by noon.

But that marked the end of the bad news, because walking the grounds and watching the matches was an infinitely more relaxing experience than it will be next week when the main draws begin. Not only are there are fewer fellow fans to contend with during the qualifiers—the bleachers were absolutely empty for two matches involving fairly well known women players—but we were allowed to come and go as we pleased without having to wait for changeovers (I’ve always believed that the players would get used to this if it were the norm). I still hesitated before walking into a match; I couldn’t quite believe that I could actually go in there and sit down and watch tennis any time I wanted.

As for the quality of play itself, a regular opponent of mine, John, who I traveled up to Flushing with yesterday, put it well. “You watch these guys and you see they can do some of the same things the top guys can do, but just not as often.” The shots are there, but the ability to hit those shots all the time isn’t. In other words, these guys are mortals.

John’s other immediate observation was, “There aren’t any Americans.” And it’s true, every year the names get harder for us Yanks to get our tongues around. A single example should suffice: One of the first matches I happened upon Thursday was Croatia’s Roko Karanusic versus Russia’s Izak Van der Merwe. In the three or four years since I’d last been to the qualies, the balance of power at the lower levels of the sport has shifted even farther in the direction of Eastern Europe.

A prominent exception to this rule could be found on Court 11. That’s where Great Britain’s teen up-and-comer, Laura Robson, whose name sounded almost too Anglo to be real, was playing Hungary’s Aniko Kapros, whose 15 minutes of fame came seven years ago: At the French Open in 2002, she had upset Justine Henin. Kapros pushed her serve in, but after losing the first set, she had Robson flummoxed the same way Henin had been flummoxed back in Paris. While Robson was under no pressure at all, she still couldn’t find the court with even the simplest backhand; she could barely keep the ball within the doubles alleys as she went down 0-4 in the second set. What seemed even stranger to me was the complete lack of fanfare for Robson. At Wimbledon this summer she’d been the center of an entire country’s attention, her photos plastered across the front pages of every newspaper. Yesterday she could have been playing anonymously in a public park. There might have been 20 people watching.

As I learned at Wimbledon, Robson is a thoughtful and quick-witted kid. The trouble is, I’ve never thought those traits were essential, or even desirable, in an athlete—can she block out all the unnecessary thoughts that come to you during a tennis match? Yesterday she showed that her mental depth off the court may just translate into mental strength on it. Robson came back from 0-4 down to win the second set, and the match, 7-5. In the final game, after she'd missed a shot that would have put her up 0-40 and given her three match points, Robson stopped herself and slapped her thigh. You could see that she was focusing and gathering herself—she was smart enough to stay calm, to know that anger would be counterproductive when she still had a lead. Then, after she won, this young national heroine, who was trailed to New York by half a dozen British reporters, walked off the court and slapped five with the only three people in the bleachers, all of whom had come with her.

***

There was one match that drew a main-draw-style crowd yesterday, though I couldn’t decide why. It was either to get a glimpse of highly touted 18-year-old Bulgarian Grigor Dimitrov, or, more likely I finally decided, to watch the guy who was, for whatever it’s worth, the top seed in the qualies, Brazil’s Thomas Bellucci. Either way, the bleachers were packed and the tennis was first rate. Bellucci is a rail-thin lefty who belts the ball from both sides—he plays a very meat and potatoes power baseline game, and he ended up winning fairly routinely, 6-4, 6-3. More interesting, though, was the loser, Dimitrov.

I’d only seen him in action once, on TV, in a three-set loss to Rafael Nadal in Rotterdam this winter. That time Dimitrov vaguely reminded me of a young and wiry Novak Djokovic. Seeing him in person, it’s clear that his allegiances among top players lie elsewhere. From his coach (Peter Lundgren), to his demeanor in the warm-up (loose-limbed), to his service motion (casually efficient), to his one-handed backhand (high take-back for slice; long extension with the elbow for topspin), the kid is a flat-out Roger Federer clone. I’ve been wondering when this person would appear; six years of Federer dominance has to have had its influence over a few impressionable teenagers, and Dimitrov is the perfect age for it—he was all of 12 when the Swiss won his first Wimbledon, in 2003.

Since then, Dimitrov has spent time training in Paris and working with Lundgren—there was a strong sense of déjà vu seeing his barrel chest and sunglasses on the sidelines yesterday. Like a young Federer, the Bulgarian’s style may take time to develop. He loves the spectacular and the pretty: the desperate running pass, the jumping inside-out forehand down the line from behind the baseline, the delicate slice. But he may have to fall out of love with his own style if he wants to succeed in a big way. Dimitrov was bullied by the prosaic but effective Bellucci for most of the afternoon. Watching from a far corner of the court late in the match—I’d gone there to get away from that lowering sun—my friend Tom Perrotta and I could just catch sight of Dimitrov’s forearm as he swung, elegantly, at a wide slice backhand. We both said something like, “Wow, even his arm looks like Fed’s.” Then we both watched as the ball floated three feet wide.

As if we needed any more proof: It’s tough to play like Roger Federer.

***

I'll be out on the grounds again this weekend and back here for opening day on Monday. I've got a highly controversial men's preview and an equally provocative women's preview up on the TENNIS.com homepage. Feel free to make your own predictions here. 

A Port in a Storm	08/26/2009 - 6:28 PM

I'm proud to say that the following story of mine, about tennis' transition to the Open era in 1968, which ran in the May 2008 issue of Tennis Magazine, won 1st prize in this year's U.S. Tennis Writer's Association awards, which will be handed out at the Open. Here it is, in case you need a little of the sport before you get a lot.

We’ve all seen the highlight reel. Blue-helmeted cops crack protesters’ skulls at the Democratic Convention in Chicago. Martin Luther King’s entourage stands over their slain leader on a Memphis hotel balcony. Another group surrounds a dying Robert Kennedy on the floor of a Los Angeles hotel kitchen. Tommie Smith and John Carlos raise black-gloved fists on the medal stand at the Mexico City Olympics. Students hurl stones outside the Sorbonne in Paris and stage a coup at Columbia in New York. Hippies twirl through an acid haze in California. Soviet tanks roll into Prague. Inner cities burn, Vietnam burns, the president quits, and by year’s end the first photo ever taken of our big, blue, turbulent planet is plastered across front pages everywhere.

That’s right, we’re back in 1968, the year when everything happened. The shadow those 12 months cast is so wide that the French have a nickname for the people who took part in them. It’s said that one “68er” (le soixante-huitard), no matter his or her country of origin, can instantly recognize another. But while there was upheaval everywhere, one image you don’t see from that year is a tennis court.

The sports figures who resonate from ’68 represented the revolutions in politics and style that were unfolding side-by-side. Muhammad Ali, who had been stripped of his heavyweight title the previous year for refusing to serve in Vietnam, was portrayed on the cover of the April issue of Esquire as a martyr pierced with arrows. A few months later, a long-haired Joe Namath led the upstart New York Jets toward Super Bowl III, which they would win two weeks into 1969. Over the ensuing decades, Ali and Namath would remain powerful symbols of the era.

By contrast, the winners of the French Open and Wimbledon in ’68 were Ken Rosewall and Rod Laver, nobody’s idea of countercultural heroes. Aging Aussie pros who had conquered the game’s biggest amateur-era stages after years of banishment, they looked like clean-shaven anachronisms rather than the road-hardened rebels they were. The same went for the winner of the U.S. Open, Arthur Ashe. Tennis’ anti-Ali was a lieutenant in that most despised of ’60s institutions, the U.S. Army.

Seen from the distance of 40 years and free from the more extreme fads of the time—Ashe would become a social and political figure every bit as significant as Ali—it’s clear that the genteel pastime of tennis was an important, if unsung, part of the revolutionary fabric of ’68. Rebellions raged against all institutions that year, from the Pentagon to the Kremlin, but they had one common target: Whatever happened to be the Establishment in any given place. Nowhere was that more true than in tennis. In the spring of ’68 the sport’s long-ruling amateur establishment, the International Lawn Tennis Federation—it controlled the Grand Slams, Davis Cup, and Fed Cup, and issued player rankings—would, after decades of resistance, open its gates to professionals and begin paying players to compete. The move couldn’t have come in a more appropriate year. In fact, it couldn’t have come on a more appropriate day.

***

On March 30, 1968, the 106 members of the ILTF (now the ITF) gathered for a special session at the venerable Automobile Club in Paris’ Place de la Concorde. They were there to discuss the possibility of open tennis, and the location could hardly have been more symbolic. It was at the Place de la Concorde in 1789 that France’s Third Estate, the people’s representative body, had taken its own Oath of the Tennis Court. Locked out of its halls, members had met on a court-tennis court and pledged to stay together until the country had a constitution. The French Revolution was born.

The revolt that the ILTF set in motion 179 years later could hardly compare for drama—heads did not literally roll. But the unanimous vote on March 30 to allow professionals to play in a select number of ILTF tournaments was the most important change in tennis’ nine-decade history. Forty years later, we can trace the beginning of the Open era and the commercialized modern game to that day.

The process had begun with a call to action the previous winter from an unlikely place. As chairman of the All England Club, the longtime headquarters of amateur tennis, Herman David was hardly a flag-burning radical. But by 1968, he had been working for nearly 10 years to bring the pros to Wimbledon. He had proposed the change to Britain’s Lawn Tennis Association in 1959, and five years later had tried to get the LTA to unilaterally declare the tournament open. He’d been shot down both times.

By the end of 1967 David was ready to go nuclear. He would open British tennis at all costs, including withdrawal from the ILTF if necessary. What had driven him to the brink? It was, at least in part, that most universally subversive of forces, television. In the summer of ’67, the BBC had chosen its annual Wimbledon broadcast to be the first program of any sort shown in color. The experiment was a hit. A month later, the BBC sponsored the World Professional Lawn Tennis Championship, an invitational featuring eight pros that was played on Centre Court and again shown in color. A sold-out crowd watched Rod Laver beat Ken Rosewall in the final. One hundred years after the founding of the All England Club, the pros finally had a foot in its door. In December, David denounced amateur tennis as a “living lie,” and Britain’s LTA voted to make its events open to all players.

With those words ringing in their ears, the members of the ILTF gathered in Paris to craft the compromise that began the Open era. The organization, which functioned as a United Nations of tennis, needed to placate a variety of national federations. The British were ready to dissolve all distinctions between amateurs, who couldn’t accept prize money, and professionals, who happily did. But the Eastern bloc federations wanted to maintain control of their players and thus opposed professionalism. A complicated solution was brokered that divided the players into four designations—amateurs; teaching professionals; “registered players,” who could accept prize money but still obeyed their national federations; and “contract professionals,” who were associated with independent promoters like Lamar Hunt, who had begun his professional WCT Tour the previous year.

Confusion reigned, and it would be five years before the players took full control from the ILTF and dissolved all distinctions between pro and amateur. But the dam had been breached. The age of “shamateurism,” in which top amateurs were paid under the table, was over. After years of barnstorming through tiny gymnasiums in the pro-tour wilderness, the world’s best players were welcomed back. The revolution in Paris had only been a first step, but as Bob Kelleher, then-president of the United States Lawn Tennis Association and a strong proponent of open tennis, said, “You have to creep before you can crawl.”

***

While the announcement of tennis’ brave new era made headlines, it could hardly compare to the story that would break the next day. On March 31, President Lyndon Johnson shocked a national television audience by announcing that he wouldn’t run for another term in the fall.

Like tennis’ amateur era, Johnson’s doom had been sealed by the rising influence of television. 1968 marked the first year that events in Vietnam were widely broadcast by satellite on the nightly news. No longer able to control the flow of information about the war, the U.S. government could only watch as the Vietcong staged a surprise attack on January 30 that came to be known as the Tet Offensive. The maneuver was largely a military failure from the Vietcong’s perspective, but it was a public-relations disaster. What America saw on TV were U.S. soldiers being killed at its embassy in Saigon. Popular opinion would turn permanently against the war.

By the end of February, CBS news anchor Walter Cronkite, the mouthpiece of Middle America, would make a rare on-air editorial comment, voicing his opinion that Vietnam was lost. It was the straw that broke Johnson’s back. “If I’ve lost Cronkite, I’ve lost the war,” the president reportedly said.

The end of amateur tennis and the demise of the Johnson administration on consecutive days may seem like an accident of history. But the same anti-establishment forces, which had come to a head in 1968, brought each of them down.

Tennis had been resolutely amateur since its origins on the lawns of England in the 1870s. In its earliest incarnation it had been played at the nation’s public schools, where the sons of the upper class were educated in how to be “gentlemen.” A spirit of fair play, the love of friendly competition for its own sake, and a devotion to a well-rounded life were at the core of the gentlemanly—or amateur—ethos, which informed all walks of English life.

In the U.S., that ethos was imported by East Coast prep schools and Ivy League colleges and became a ruling principle of the cricket and tennis clubs built by the WASP elite. Over the decades, it proved to be a durable philosophy and spread far beyond England and the Ivy League. By the 1940s, Australian tennis coach Harry Hopman was instilling it in his young players, who would include Rod Laver, Ken Rosewall, John Newcombe, and Roy Emerson. Together they would dominate the last two decades of the amateur era. While they weren't all members of the upper class, the Aussie greats are recalled today as the epitome of sporting gentlemen—the last of a tennis breed. But one by one, even they left the amateur game for the pro tours. The code of the gentleman had given way to the law of the market.

Aristocratic rule proved equally durable in the U.S. government, starting with the turn of the century administration of Teddy Roosevelt, who built a tennis court at the White House, and peaking with the administration of his cousin Franklin 30 years later. Even as the ’60s brought challenges to all forms of traditional authority, President Johnson continued to rely on the establishment’s finest products to guide his foreign policy. These were “the best and the brightest” in journalist David Halberstam’s famously ironic formulation, men like Robert McNamara, McGeorge Bundy, Dean Rusk, and William Westmoreland. Despite their best intentions and impeccable résumés, they led Johnson straight into the quagmire of Vietnam.

The announcements by the ILTF and Johnson on March 30 and 31 opened two sets of Pandora’s boxes. Tennis’ would take years to empty, as it spent the next decade remaking itself into a mainstream professional sport. The effect of Johnson’s de facto resignation was immediate. Suddenly the most powerful position of authority in the world essentially stood vacant. The result was a months-long, worldwide frenzy of rebellion. On April 4, Martin Luther King was shot and killed. Inner cities across the country erupted in riots. On April 23, students at Columbia University in New York seized administration buildings and held them for a week, causing the school to be shut down. The standoff ended with a violent police raid. On May 2, student protests in Paris ended in violent clashes with police in which hundreds of people were wounded. This was the beginning of France’s now fabled “May ’68.” Workers joined the students and called nationwide strikes. A mass shutdown of the country lasted through the month and eventually led to a referendum on the rule of President Charles de Gaulle.

Riots and strikes aside, May ’68 is remembered fondly by those who were there as a brief window of liberation, when people of all backgrounds stopped to engage each other. It was in this setting that open tennis made its Grand Slam debut at Roland Garros.

Compared to other events of that spring, the Open era had gotten off to a slow and sleepy start. The first tournament in history to welcome amateurs and professionals had been played at the end of April in the drizzly English resort town of Bournemouth. While old pro Pancho Gonzalez took an early tumble, the cream wasted no time in rising to the top: Laver and Rosewall reached the final.

After that off-Broadway rehearsal, the pros took their act to the big stage at Roland Garros. What they found at the first French Open were standing-room-only crowds of Parisians looking for refuge from the battles on their streets. “Roland Garros was a port in a storm,” wrote Rex Bellamy of the London Times. “In a strife-torn city, the soaring center court blazed with color. People even perched on scoreboards. . . . The first major open was played in the environment nightmares are made of. But the tennis was often like a dream.” In the insurgent spirit of the moment, tennis’ old rebels, Laver and Rosewall, lived up to their legend and made the final, which Rosewall won. The professional game had arrived.

While tennis fans in Paris got a break from the realities of 1968, the rest of the world continued to implode. During the tournament, Robert Kennedy had been shot and killed in Los Angeles. He had been running for the Democratic nomination for president, and his death sent the party on a despairing path toward its convention in Chicago in August. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, Czechoslovakia was heading toward a confrontation with its communist patrons in Moscow. Czech party leader Alexander Dubcek had helped create Prague Spring, a brief period of liberation similar to Paris’ in May, by loosening state control over the citizenry—“socialism with a human face,” he called it.

As the American and European summers careened toward those twin disasters, tennis found a pleasant space between them, on the lawns of the All England Club. The two weeks of the first open Wimbledon were the sport’s grand reunion party. Gonzalez returned for the first time since 1949; Rosewall for the first time since ’57. In the end, Laver reclaimed his throne, easily winning the title after five years in exile. To former player and author Gordon Forbes, being at the event was akin to watching a film burst into color, “rife with images, crammed with humor and pathos.”

***

One month later, it was clear that there was nowhere left for the 68ers to run, as the hammer of authority came down on both sides of the Atlantic. On August 21, the Soviet Union brought a swift and brutal end to the reforms of Prague Spring when it invaded Czechoslovakia, killing 72 people, and arrested Dubcek. Five days later, the Democratic Convention began in Chicago, with the events in Prague still echoing. After days of confrontation, demonstrators, chanting “the whole world is watching,” were beaten in the streets, on live television, by the Chicago police. Watching the footage, Cronkite said that America had become a “police state.”

It was at this moment that the first U.S. Open was getting started halfway across the country, at Forest Hills. Unlike the French Open and Wimbledon, this was a topsy-turvy event, with 13 pros ousted by amateurs. Laver was knocked out by Cliff Drysdale in the quarterfinals, paving the way for a final between Tom Okker and Ashe, who was still an amateur.

Before a packed and ecstatic audience, Ashe won a five-set thriller. His victory was both a breakthrough and a last hurrah for the amateur era. Just a few years after the height of the civil-rights movement and a few months after Martin Luther King’s assassination had sparked urban riots, Ashe, a black man from the south, had become the first African-American to win the men’s event at a Grand Slam.

The next month, two other black athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, would make a different kind of statement at the world’s biggest amateur event, the summer Olympics in Mexico City. Taking the medal stand after winning the gold and bronze medals in the 200-meter run, they raised gloved fists and bowed their heads in a black power salute as “The Star-Spangled Banner” was played. Ashe, who had been schooled in tennis’ gentlemanly ethos by his father and his childhood coach, Dr. Walter Johnson, made no political gestures at Forest Hills. His win alone spoke volumes. A black man who had been molded by the ancient customs of an exclusive WASP sport had reached its summit, just as those customs were being left behind. As the Open era unfolded, tennis’ new international popularity would make him an icon of integrity and calm intelligence. It was a rise that could be traced to Forest Hills in 1968. Just as the other uprisings of that year had reached their ugly nadir, Ashe’s dignified excellence helped make tennis’ year of revolution a historic success.

A Shiny Car Doesn't Mean Much	08/26/2009 - 6:00 PM

Before we go over to tennis 24/7 and kiss the summer goodbye, here’s a quick recount of a little time I spent at the beach last week.

The word—vacation—doesn’t do justice to its meaning in the end. What’s intended as nothing more than brief break from reality ends up, as the years go by, becoming a defining element of our lives, the time when we look back and feel that we were most ourselves. It’s hardly an accident that such a high percentage of photos in family albums come not from our working life, but from our vacationing life.

This was brought home to me most potently at a cousin’s funeral a few years ago. His older sister eulogized him by describing the ritual that he performed every year when he traveled to Cape Cod, where their family had gone each summer when he was a kid. At precisely the same spot on the highway in Massachusetts that leads to the Cape, he would pop in the same beaten old Cat Stevens cassette and croon along joyfully to the same song (which one it was escapes me), as if all his cares were in the rearview mirror. From there, he would choreograph every part of their approach to their beach house—he had to drive a certain way, stop at a certain place, listen to a certain song, arrive at a certain time. I doubt he was alone in this: For many people, returning to a place where we were most carefree as kids is a powerful, and maybe even melancholy, experience.

As I I’ve written here, my family went to the Jersey Shore every summer when I was younger. It’s easier for me, living in New York now, to head straight east and avoid all forms of tri-state traffic. So before the Open commences each year, I spend a week in August at the very end of Long Island, in the town of Montauk. My idea of a vacation is to sit on a beach and read—nothing more, or less, than that is necessary. But that’s a deceptively basic description of the trip. The simple act of entering an environment that’s both strange and familiar calls up all kinds of new sensations and inspires all kinds of new observations. With that old line, ‘what I learned on my summer vacation,’ in mind, here are four of them.

1. Roads: Like my cousin, each time I go to Montauk, I recognize a moment when the everyday world, three hours behind me and stuck in the city’s steaming concrete, finally recedes for good. It happens when I turn off the main route through eastern Long Island and onto the single-lane Old Montauk Highway. It’s not even a full turn, just a slight bearing to the right, but here is where the salt-water smells come through the passenger seat window; sand dunes, topped by high grass, rise and fall and rise again on the right; the ancient, ungraded road, like a road through a Caribbean island, ascends and descends so quickly that for a split-second I feel like my car could be flipped all the way over on its back. Anywhere else and this might cause me to be carsick; here it’s a gentle thrill ride.

2. Cars: They tend to be invisible in New York. They’re everywhere, so you end up not noticing them. Plus, that’s part pf the point—you don’t want your car to attract any kind of attention in the city. The opposite is true everywhere else in America, and the opposite is true in Montauk. The first day I’m there I cross paths with a classic while I’m walking to the beach, a light-brown 1976 Cadillac convertible. Now I remember why big cars were once called boats: The Caddy, seemingly as wide as it is long, appears to rock back and forth down the road. Both driver and passenger rest their elbows on top of the doors next to them. All around Montauk are similarly bright and happy relics: a light-blue convertible Beetle, a maroon Mustang, a lean and unadorned Ford Falcon, a curvy yellow Stingray. After all the sullen and status-heavy black and silver SUVs, Beemers, and Hummers that dominate the roads throughout the Hamptons, these stylish little vehicles are like holidays for the eyes, living memories of a more open, democratic, confident time in this country.

3. Front Yards: I stay at a beachside bed and breakfast each year, a small place with a view of the ocean. I walk into its compact front yard on the first night and, for the first time since I'd been there the year before, I see a significant number of stars in the night sky. Watching them blink, I'm overcome by nostalgia, not for anything in particular, but for that sense of wonder you have as a kid. Jonathan Richman got this feeling, which is one of relief, exactly right: “It’s so good to see the sky clear up this way/There’s the stars, we haven’t lost them.” Next I notice their sonic equivalent, the crickets in the hedges, which are another nostalgic trigger—when I moved to New York, I had trouble getting to sleep without them. Now they seem to chirp in rhythm with the blinking stars—night’s timekeepers. Finally, I notice the thing that’s closest to me: the telephone poles and wires that roll like small waves down the highway in both directions. Of all these new and unfamiliar sights, these are the strangest: these poles and wires surround you; they almost threaten to strangle you, and yet they’re all but invisible, the original element of a man-made landscape. In the morning, I read the paper on the front porch and see them again through early day mist. The birds that perch on the wires are dimensionless in this mist, which allows for no depth perception. They look as if they’re made out of construction paper.

4. Books: I tend to over plan my book selection for a vacation. The process start in my head weeks in advance. On this trip I brought four novels, eight old New Yorkers, a stack of unread New York Times stories dating back three months, and, for good measure, a book of classical poetry I thought I would pick up before I went to sleep. As usual with poetry, classical or otherwise, I watched TV instead. But I did make it through virtually everything else. Sitting back in my beach chair and holding a New Yorker up to block the sun on a scaldingly hot afternoon, I tried to imagine a world without paper. As convenient as it might have been to have all of these various printed products in one Kindle, I liked switching from one to the other. A book isn’t merely words; it’s a thing as well, as crafted and individual as any other product—a Trollope book should look and feel and even smell different from one by Evelyn Waugh. Then again, maybe all my planning was useless, anyway. The guy in the room below mine, a New York City lawyer, picked up a biography of Bob Hope from the messy stack of paperbacks in the inn's kitchen when he got there. He never stopped reading it, as far as I could tell, and finished it by the end of the week.

5. Music: My cousin put on Cat Stevens; on this trip, I put on Soft Machine. How have I missed those guys all this time? It never ceases to amaze me how much timelessly good music was produced from about 1967 to 1972, the years in which this British psych-jazz-rock outfit was pushing their ideas outward—forget Pink Floyd, these guys were much more accomplished and thoughtful. Their bubbling landscapes make for an appropriately ethereal night-driving soundtrack along a beach road.

During the day, I went back to an old favorite, the Drive-By Truckers, a Southern-indie band whose lead singer, Patterson Hood, would be the Bruce Springsteen of his day if anyone cared about rock and roll anymore. Perhaps his finest song is called “The Sands of Iwo Jima.” In a scratchy falsetto, he tells the story of his uncle, George A., a World War II vet. Hood describes how his uncle enlisted after Pearl Harbor because he “believed in God and country/things was just that way.” As a boy, the singer watches an old war movie with his uncle and asks him if that’s the way it was in real life. George A. says he “never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima.” The song finishes by describing George A. today, still living on his farm. The singer sums up his attitude to life with these final lines:

        He never drove a new car though he could easily afford it

He’d just buy one for the family and take whatever no one wanted

He said a shiny car didn’t mean much after all the things he’d seen

I listened to this song driving out of Montauk. I passed the hipster beach, the locals-only bar, the miniature golf course, and all the big status cars on the Old Montauk Highway. Where Ocean City, NJ, is a vast upper-middle-income morass as far the eye can see, with very few class differentiators, Montauk and the Hamptons are woven together out of layers of discreet classes, all of them, in their own way, snobbish and smug. It’s a beautiful place, and you can find your niche away from humanity much more easily than you can on the Jersey Shore, but I wonder sometimes how you would even begin to afford a house there or drive one of those shiny cars. Thank you to Patterson Hood for helping me keep it in perspective:

    He said a shiny car didn’t mean much after all the things he’d seen

***

I'll be heading to the qualifiers tomorrow at the Open, and will be back later with a preview of the draws.

Taking the Pole Positions	08/24/2009 - 2:30 PM

Let’s back up and start with a tentative big-picture question:

Is the roadmap working?

In past summers, the word most frequently heard during the women’s summer season was one of the more depressing in tennis: “withdrawal.” Injuries and pullouts devastated the North American hard-court season and made the WTA look like a poor cousin to its male counterpart, the ATP, in the U.S. Open Series. This summer, while we may not have been given a blockbuster final or a Serena-Safina showdown for No. 1, we have at least seen the world's best women play tennis. The roadmap was designed to work in two ways: By lightening players’ workloads and narrowing the focus of fans by emphasizing a few significant events. We’ll have to wait until the end of the year to see how the first part of that equation has worked—will everyone still be ready to go in November?—but for the moment the WTA seems to have succeeded in defining more clearly which events should matter to players and spectators. The last two of those events, Cincinnati and Toronto, neither of which were mandatory tournaments, still featured draws that could fairly be called “loaded.”

The upshot in Canada was, as I said, not a classic final by any measure. But it did involve two very recognizable names, Maria Sharapova and Elena Dementieva, a vast improvement, from a marquee-maker's perspective, over 2009 runner-up Dominika Cibulkova. And while the 6-4, 6-3 score might tell you that Dementieva’s win wasn’t all that that close, it was nevertheless a deceptively absorbing match, especially for those of us who like our tennis hard earned rather than effortless.

Unusually, the more absorbing play came from the loser’s end. Sharapova, unseeded and thus forced to play one more match than her opponent, had trudged through a long week. By the time the first game was over on Sunday and she had double-faulted three times to be broken at love, she appeared to be a wounded warrior. She glanced irritably at her coach, she rotated her injured shoulder and grimaced, she fought against the wind that whipped across the court all afternoon. But while it wasn’t reflected in the score, she very nearly won.

Whatever the result, Sharapova was the player on top of the baseline dictating play. She was the one trying drop shots and fighting to find her range in the breeze without caving in and playing safe—an unthinkable idea for her. At the end of the first set, Sharapova’s coach, Michael Joyce, told her to stop trying to hit forcing shots when she was backed up; her arm was too tired for that, and she should just put some “air” under her shots and wait for a shorter ball. This was logical, sensitive advice, but Sharapova wasn’t having any of it: She curled her lip and said, outraged, “You mean push it?” She made it sound like an act of treasonable cowardice. Joyce finally managed to motivate her with a neat little turn of reverse psychology. “What do you want to do out here? You want to just get of here, or do you want to fight?” As he turned to walk away, he finished with, “You do whatever you want.”

Sharapova fought, of course. She forced Dementieva to work for 2 hours and through many multiple deuce games to finally beat her for just the third time in their 11 meetings. But while Sharapova made it much more interesting by throwing the kitchen sink at her opponent—she even tried rushing the net behind her returns late in the second set—her serve remains an issue. Just when you thought she had banished the double fault, it crept back in at crucial moments. More important for the long term is the fact that Sharapova has always been lifted above the mass of women players by her ability to hold serve—she was one of the few who could routinely go through two sets against a quality opponent without being broken. That’s not true at the moment, and no amount of fighting spirit or kitchen-sink tactical variety is going to make up for that.

As for Dementieva, she has made a quiet case to be a co-favorite, along with Serena Williams, at the U.S. Open–I don’t think you can put the world No. 1, Safina, up there with them at the moment. Dementieva beat Serena in the semis in Toronto, and she’s playing a game right now that reminds me, in its smooth practicality, of Andy Murray’s—they’re both experts at making their opponents uncomfortable. On Sunday she was content to hunch over, send the ball back safely near the middle of the court, and track down Sharapova’s riskier shots. But what looked like a simple strategy had its intelligent wrinkles. She directed floating backhand slices at Sharapova’s forehand, forcing her to generate her own pace while hitting with extra topspin, two things she doesn’t like to do. And when she did go on defense, Dementieva did it, like Murray, in a highly organized way. She recovered quickly, with no wasted motion, toward the center, and she put her stab returns in difficult spots for Sharapova to handle.

Like Maria, though, so much comes down to the serve with Elena. Through most of yesterday’s match, she was able to get it where she wanted. But when it came time to serve out the match, she reverted to, as Cliff Drysdale put it, “the old sidewinder,” her famously shaky low-toss slice second serve. But it was enough. When Dementieva finally won, she dropped to her knees, not something you see very often after a 6-4, 6-3 victory. As I said, this was a tough win rather than a beautiful one, and she earned that celebration. Has she also earned the pole position at the Open? Is she really ready, after all these years, to win her first major? You can look at it a couple of ways. The last two times this tournament was held in Toronto, it was won by the eventual U.S. Open champion. In 2005, that was Kim Clijsters, who made her own Slam breakthrough in Flushing. In 2007, it was Justine Henin. We know Dementieva is no Justine Henin, but if Clijsters can win one, I have to think the Russian can too.

***

Speaking of U.S. Open front-runners, there’s little question after Sunday who that is on the men’s side. Roger Federer, perhaps in search of some new motivation after the year he’s already had, found it in the forms of Murray and Novak Djokovic in Cincinnati. He hadn’t beaten either of them this year, even during his runs to the French Open and Wimbledon titles. But he put any questions about his ability to hang with the younger crowd to rest by taking care of both of them in straight sets to hoist his 16^th Masters Series shield.

What did Federer do differently against Djokovic this time? I thought he, like Dementieva, did a good job of forcing his opponent to hit the shots he didn’t want to hit. In beating Nadal the night before, Djokovic had feasted on high-topspin balls to his backhand side—he has a high stroke zone with that shot. Federer, logically enough, made sure he didn’t see too many balls there; he used his backhand slice to force Djokovic to bend and hit up. All he could do was put those shots in the middle of the court, where Federer had a chance to run around them and knock off forehands. The one time that Federer did give him all topspin to his backhand, on the first point at 4-4 in the second set, Djokovic opened up the court and eventually hit a backhand winner down the line. Federer went back to the slice thereafter and won the set.

Just as with Sharapova, Dementieva, and the rest of the world, it’s Federer’s serve that will make the difference. He says this shot is working better than it did early in the season, when he said his back was ailing him and he was losing regularly to Murray and Djokovic. This may be the case, even though it strikes me as a classic chicken-and-egg situation—does feeling better help you win, or do you feel better because you’re winning? Whatever the case was then, Federer’s serve helped him yesterday. Down 4-5, 30-40, set point for Djokovic, the world No. 1 came up with three excellent first serves to hold.

Slice backhands, solid serving, quiet motivation—we’ve seen all that from Federer. But he also showed off a shiny new weapon that I’m going to call the Haas Shot. Serving at 4-5 in the second, 15-30, with Djokovic and the Cincy crowd primed for a third, Federer saw his opponent’s down-the-middle return, backpedaled two steps, and fired off an inside-out forehand winner. It was the exact shot he hit to turn the tables when his back was pressed to the wall against Tommy Haas in Paris. Not merely a winner, but an authoritative, any-more-questions kind of winner, it silenced the crowd, evened the score in the game, and stopped Djokovic’s momentum in its tracks. 

Some players use these tune-ups tournaments to get in shape. Others use them to get match tough. Is Federer now using them to hone his unstoppable, game-changing, only-hit-it-when-you-absolutely-need-it Haas Shot? I think we have our favorite for the U.S. Open.

Toronto (Pre)View: Free for All	08/19/2009 - 8:17 PM

When is it officially too late to write a tournament preview? I don’t think a law has ever been passed on that issue, but two days after the main draw begins must, at the very least, be close to the borderline. Cut me some slack, if you will; I’m actually on vacation at the moment, getting a prickly sunburn, and I brought the wrong charger for my computer. If any of my predictions for Cincy turn out to be wrong, I’m blaming the fact that I had to make them while racing the battery monitor on my screen as it (very rapidly) ran down. But now I’ve got the charger here at the beach, and it’s time to look at what’s going on in Toronto. You would think that coming in after the second round would give me a leg up on picks, but this tournament already looks like it’s beyond predictability. Rather than a harbinger of potential results at the U.S. Open, it’s an old-fashioned free for all at this point—Venus, Svetlana, Victoria, and Dinara are all out, and Maria won today despite 17 double faults. Who’s next? Who will use the opening to build some confidence and grab a few points? Let’s take a look.

First Quarter

Top seed Safina, a finalist on Sunday, has already succumbed to second-week syndrome in losing to the fabulously named Aravane Rezai, but Kim Clijsters hasn’t slowed her roll at all—she upset Azarenka today. Jelena Jankovic has done the same in fending off Schnyder in two close sets. I don’t see Rezai being consistent enough to make the semis, which means this section should come down to Jankovic vs. Clijsters. I think JJ, who is used to going out there day after day and week after week, will be a little better prepared to keep rolling.

Semifinalist: Jankovic

Second Quarter

The big name here, Venus Williams, is also gone, having lost to the less famous of the Bondarenkos, Katernya. K.B. will get Radwanska next, with the winner will play the winner of Zvonareva vs. Sharapova. The latter match should be a good one, and a good gauge on the progress of both players as they continue to recover from injuries. Maria is 5-3 against Vera, though they haven’t played since 2008. Vera looked a little more efficient today. For both of them, this could be chance to put themselves in the conversation in New York.

Semifinalist: Zvonareva

Third Quarter

Kuznetsova is out, but that’s too surprising; she lost to the surging Sam Stosur. The Aussie will play Razzano next, and then, most likely, Elena Dementieva. Whatever Stosur has done this year, Dementieva, the fourth seed, remains the class of this quarter, especially on hard courts. She’ll have to suffer a meltdown not to make it out.

Semifinalist: Dementieva

Fourth Quarter

If any section can be said to be “loaded” right now, it’s this one: Serena, Ivanovic, Zheng, Wozniacki, and the dangerous qualifier Lucie Safarova are here. As shaky as Serena always seems to be at this time of year—even more than Roger Federer at this point, her form at the tune-up events and her form at the Slams themselves don’t even remotely resemble each other—I don’t see her taking a fall to Woz or Ana or anyone else in her vicinity.

Semifinalist: S. Williams

Semifinals: Dementieva d. Williams; Jankovic d. Zvonareva

Final: Dementieva d. Jankovic

***

I may be back on Friday, depending on the weather out here on Long Island. Otherwise, I’ll see you Monday and next week for the U.S. Open qualies. Cincy is on ESPN starting tomorrow; the network picks up Toronto on Friday. My only question regarding the coverage so far is: Shouldn’t Chris Fowler have been a lawyer rather than a broadcaster? He’s a pro at his job, but I’d hate to try to get the last word in on him.

In the meantime, check out TENNIS’ Twitter feeds here, including one from Concrete Elbow.

Cincy Preview: Big Four Strike Back?	08/17/2009 - 12:03 PM

Feels like old times, doesn't it? Old times as in January 2009, that is, a point in the season when many of us asked whether Andy Murray and Jelena Jankovic were on the verge of winning their first majors. Murray came to the Australian Open playing the best tennis in the world, while Jankovic had finished 2008 the same way. Neither of them has made the leap yet, of course, though at least Murray has avoided taking the swan dive into baffling mediocrity that has defined Jankovic’s season.

Last week they both showed they’re threats again for the season’s other hard-court Slam, the U.S. Open. Jankovic surprised everyone by winning in Cincy, while Murray, in an iron-willed and iron-bodied display, went into lockdown mode in Montreal. He simply wouldn’t let the bigger-hitting Juan Martin del Potro finish him off in the final. Still, it was another positive week for the Argentine, who took the next in his many methodical steps upward by reaching his first Masters final. More important, he showed an uncanny ability to raise his game at the right moments. Few players, even among the pros, become looser and braver as a match gets tighter; Serena Williams is one, de Potro seems to be another. He only made one mistake: Taking an injury timeout before Murray served at 5-6 in the second set. That gave the Scot a target—namely, what he saw as de Potro’s gamesmanship—and a renewed motivation just when he needed it. In the past, coming into certain majors, we’ve talked about how difficult it’s going to be to beat Federer or Nadal over the course of three out of five sets. Now we can say the same about Murray at the Open. He’ll be a very tough out.

Before we get there, though, the men and women each have one more significant event to contest. They switch locations this week—the men are down in Cincy, the women up in Canada. Let’s see what awaits them when they get there.

Cincinnati

First Quarter

How significant was Roger Federer’s loss from 5-1 up in the third last week to Jo-Wilfried Tsonga? On the one hand, his losses at Masters over the last two years haven’t foreshadowed poor performances at Slams. On the other hand, if you’re Federer’s opponent and you’re down, you now know that anything is possible—I even made a comeback from 1-5 down myself the next day, with Tsonga in mind the whole time. On the third hand—for lack of a better term—Federer will do whatever it takes to avoid another collapse like that in the near future.

The big name in his quarter is Andy Roddick, who has had his own troubles finishing matches lately. There’s also Robin Soderling and Marin Cilic, two guys who could, theoretically, pound their way into the quarters. There are also home-country tests for both Federer and Roddick, in the forms of Sam Querrey and Stan Wawrinka. But I don’t have strong feeling about anyone in this section—which means it’s probably best to go with Roger Federer. He’s survived in the Cincy heat while all his rivals have collapsed before.

Semifinalist: Federer

Second Quarter

Just what Murray and del Potro wanted to see, their names in the same section of the draw. DP has to be, as Brad Gilbert would say, gassed after the last two weeks, but Murray has already shown he knows how to handle a double bill in extreme heat—he reached the final in Indian Wells and then came back to win in Miami. He’s a last man standing kind of guy these days, and he doesn’t have a lot to fear here. Safin, Verdasco, Almagro, Sela: none of those guys seem ready to take advantage of a weakened Scotsman.

Semifinalist: Murray

Third Quarter

If Montreal showed us anything, it’s that the Big 4 is on the verge of becoming the Big 7. Roddick’s resurgence, del Potro’s ascent, and Nikolay Davydenko’s post-Wimbledon hot streak have created even more of a traffic jam at the top of the rankings. Throw in Murray’s new No. 2 ranking and you start to wonder: Where does that leave Novak Djokovic? He’s won almost 50 matches this year, but after his straight-set loss to Roddick in Canada he’s looking like the odd man out as he gets ready to return to one of his spiritual homes—Broadway.

It leaves Djokovic, perhaps, with more to prove than the rest of the field, and that’s when he plays his best. In Cincy, he’ll have to prove it against, perhaps, Haas, Robredo, and then Davydenko. The Serb doesn’t like the heat, but he doesn’t like being ignored, either.

Semifinalist:  Djokovic

Fourth Quarter

Rafael Nadal is in a similar boat as Djokovic. He’s just been demoted to No. 3 in the world for the first time since 2005, and he’s just lost his second straight match to the game’s latest star of the future, del Potro. But unlike del Potro, Rafa does thrive in heat, and now he has a few matches under his belt. His draw looks OK—Monfils, Tsonga, Berdych, Gonzo, Karlovic are all here. But we may see a hungrier and more ambitious Rafa now. No. 3, that can’t sound right to him—it may be a wake up call.

Semifinalist: Nadal

Semifinals: Murray de. Federer; Djokovic d. Nadal

Final: Djokovic d. Murray

I’ll be back later with a preview of the women in Toronto.

A Game With Which We Are Familiar	08/14/2009 - 5:46 PM

Do the pros play the same game that you and I do? Let me start my answer to that question by comparing tennis to another sport with which I have some experience. When I watch top men's squash players—yes, they have a pro tour—compete, I have to admit that I have no idea what they’re doing. That is, I have no idea what their tactics are. Each of them is fast enough to get to every shot that their opponent can possibly hit, from anywhere on the court; no matter how well one guy sets up a rally, it very rarely leads directly to him winning the point. I don’t know what kind of strategy you would employ in this situation, when point construction is almost without value, when cause doesn’t lead to effect. From what I’ve been told, squash pros just keep grinding, hitting the best shots they can, and hoping for two things: errors, and a loss of stamina, from their opponents.

By contrast, tennis pros do play a game with which I am familiar. For the most part, points are constructed and ultimately won the same way they are at my rec level—in both cases, a strong serve wide will open up the court for a forehand up the line, which will be rewarded with a winner. Of course, the meaning of “strong” in this case is relative, and an “open court” at the pro level closes down a lot more quickly than it does at mine. But there’s still a cause and an effect that I can recognize.

The next question is: If the pros do play the same game we do, what can we learn by watching them? It may be, as we discussed here last week, far-fetched to ask garden-variety hackers to whip their racquets all the way across their bodies on their forehands the way Roger Federer does. It’s like our 12th-grade English teacher used to say when we read ee cummings and asked why he got to ignore all the boring rules of punctuation that we had to follow: "Because he learned them first, and then learned to write so well that he didn’t need them anymore—unlike you." The same is true for the pros when it comes to the basic rules of tactics and technique that we all know so well. Does Federer need to get his “full weight” into his forehand? Does Novak Djokovic avoid going down the line because it’s the “high part of the net” and therefore too risky? Is there really such a phenomenon as "getting one more ball over the net?" 

This week I’ve played tennis three times and spent much of my time at the office watching matches from Cincy and Montreal out of the corner of my eye on my computer. How many of the game’s tried and true strategic guidelines apply in both places? I'll start with three of them today.

“The serve is 80 percent of the game”

This is an axiom that an old junior coach of mine successfully drove into our heads. I was never convinced about its validity until I did text commentary last summer for NBC’s Olympics website during the medal matches in Beijing. I’d never watched a match where I had to have something to say about every point. It opened my eyes to just how many of those points at the pro level are won and lost because of the serve. As an example, look at the game today played by Murray (who was serving), and Davydenko at 4-4 in the second set. Murray hit an ace and two service winners; on the only point where he had to hit a second serve, Davydenko won it with an outright winner on the return. That was the only point Murray lost on his way to holding. In this case, the serve really was 90 percent of the game, and that's not an aberration—whether it's ace, a service winner, or a weak second serve, a vast number of points are won or lost directly because of the quality of one shot, the serve.

Aces are fewer and farther between at my level, and I can return virtually any serve hit to me by my regular opponents. It’s clear that this shot is not as crucial as it is in the pros, at least when high-intermediate rec players are fairly evenly matched—ground-stroke consistency, particularly on the backhand side, is what decides most matches. One winter, however, I played in a league where my opponents' levels varied wildly. When I played someone who wasn’t as good as I was, I came on to the court with two very simple strategic goals: Don’t double fault and don’t miss any returns. It never failed.

“Aim three feet inside the line on your approaches”

Igor Andreev would have done well to remember this advice in his second-set tiebreaker against Andy Roddick. Given an open court on a crucial point, he took a huge cut—can he do anything less?—and drilled a forehand right at the sideline. It missed by an inch and the breaker was essentially lost.

On the other hand, we have the example of Juan Carlos Ferrero, a man who lives strictly by the 3-foot rule, directing even his easiest putaways safely inside the court. We saw what happened to him when he did that yesterday against Murray, who ran rings around him in a 6-1, 6-3 win. The moral: You can play too safely.

I found the same thing to be true in my own matches this week. Up 15-40 and looking at a second serve, I decided to chip my return into the middle of the court because I thought my opponent might overhit—he’d let out a scream of frustration on the previous point. But no, he merely hit the ball hard, for a winner, and he did the same on the next point to make it deuce. With two break opportunities in hand, I should have taken a chance on the first one. At other times recently, I’ve used an extra-conservative approach shot, thinking of the old tennis mantra, “make them pass you"—Ken Rosewall used to say that simply getting to the net would win him a majority of points. More times than not, my opponents casually flipped a ball past me. Again, the moral: You can play too safely.

For the most part, though, my ability to hit penetrating shots close to the lines on a consistent basis depends on my nerves. I know the balance between safety and aggression by instinct, but I often have trouble finding it at crucial stages, on 30-all points or in tiebreakers. This is when, through no conscious choice of my own, my slice starts to float rather than bite, and I begin to loop my forehands rather than drive them. Often playing it safe, or “playing the percentages,” isn’t a matter of tactics, but the best reaction we can muster to a precarious situation. It’s better than overhitting, but you can’t count on it to work. That's frustrating, but it's what makes tennis something more than just a war of attrition.

“Recover to the center of the court”

The center hash mark on the baseline is where we stand to warm up, and where we theoretically are supposed to head after we hit a ball back. But most pros play the court as if it’s tilted. Andy Murray, who is as good at recovering as anyone, tends to position himself one step to the left or right of the hash mark. From there, he can anticipate the crosscourt while daring his opponent to take the riskier option down the line—he’s fast enough to cover it anyway. Pete Sampras did the same thing because he loved to hit his running forehand and very rarely failed to do damage with it. 

As with playing a safe approach shot, sometimes this play works and sometimes it doesn’t: Against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga today, Federer hit a short crosscourt return. Rather than move to the center, he simply waited on the left-hand side of the court and gave Tsonga the down the line opening, which was the tougher shot. Tsonga missed it long. A few points later, a similar situation arose. Federer repeated his tactic, and Tsonga took the bait and went down the line again. This time he hit it for a winner.

I’ve come to like tilting the court more as I’ve gotten older. I can protect my weaker backhand, and tantalize opponents, à la Federer today, with an open court up the line. But where Tsonga may make 50 percent of those high-risk shots, my opponents spray many more—the combined number of balls they send wide, into the net, or long far outnumber the ones they send past me for winners. Of course, if I added them up, the same probably goes for me when I hit down the line. But I keep trying them because when I do hit a winner, it feels so good that I remember it far longer than I remember all the times I’ve dumped the ball into the net. But so what? If all I'm going to remember is the feeling of hitting a winner, why shouldn’t I try for another one?

Dumb shots and short memories: They go hand in hand for pros and hackers alike.

•••

We'll continue this discussion another day. Enjoy the weekend, whether you’re playing or watching—we’re running out of evening light here in the northeast, so I'm cramming in what I can. 

I’ll be back Monday, before I head out to the beach for the last time. It should be an intriguing couple of days, especially up in Montreal.

The Harry Potter Kids Return	08/12/2009 - 5:36 PM

The New York Times is nothing if not a hotbed of dubious trend stories—how else would a daily newspaper (or a blog, for that matter) fill all that space if reporters weren’t allowed to transform a few scraps of anecdotal evidence into sweeping cultural theories? A few weeks ago, the ground zero for many of these articles, the Sunday Styles section, embedded a writer deep within the harsh green confines of Vermont’s Middlebury College. The hook: Find out why half the students were running up and down the quad and beating on a soccer ball with brooms, attending Britney Spears concerts, and trying to organize a Saved by the Bell reunion. The reason, it turned out, was this: “Generation Y: They’re 20-something and Already Nostalgic.” The broom game is a version of Quidditch, from the Harry Potter series, the first of which came out in 1997. According to the Times it’s a symptom of the yearning that college students now feel for those lost days of innocence—known as the late 1990s to you and me—before 9/11 and Iraq made forced them to “grow up too fast” and stop breaking things at Limp Bizkit shows

If there are any tennis fans among these kids, they might also have tacked up a dog-eared copy of a Time magazine cover from early in the decade that featured the Williams sisters next to this headline: "Taunts! Tantrums! Talent! Why the women, led by Venus and Serena Williams, are pushing the men off center court.” This moment would mark the high point of the WTA’s golden era, before so many early retirements would rob the tour of stars. A closer look at the issue also shows that the sport would soon be knocked far from the front pages of any paper or magazine: The date in the top left corner is September 3, 2001. 

But like those black-robed dweebs at Middlebury, women’s tennis just can’t shake the late 90s. The second half of the decade saw the rise of both of the Williams sisters, Martina Hingis, Justine Henin, Amelie Mauresmo, and Kim Clijsters, who, as a 16-year-old in 1999, would make her debut at both Wimbledon and the U.S. Open and reach the fourth and third rounds, respectively. In the decade since, thousands of hopefuls have come and gone and a dozen or so have seemed to be on the verge of long-term stardom—or at least a permanent place in the Top 5—but only one woman has achieved it: Maria Sharapova. You might say that the reason that Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova reached the French Open final this year is that Clijsters and Henin, who are only a couple of years older than they are, were voluntarily on the sidelines.

Now, as you know, Clijsters is back on the field of play. And just like the Williams sisters over the last two years, she's already flying the banner of the WTA’s millennial generation proudly. Is it a shock that this week she came out in her first tournament in two years and won her first two matches, over perennial Top 20 players Marion Bartoli and Patty Schnyder, in straight sets? I don’t think so—the surprise may be that it isn’t a surprise at all.

It certainly wouldn’t be to Rick Macci, who coached Jennifer Capriati and the Williamses. When I talked to him recently about the current women’s tour, he went back to the case of Capriati. “When Jennifer came back,” he said of the American’s rise from triple digits in the rankings back in, yes, the late 90s, “I knew it wouldn’t take her long to be in the Top 10, because she could always do one thing, she could always hit the ball through the court. If you can do that, you have a chance.” One reason Martina Hingis’ own comeback wasn’t as successful was that the sport had passed her by in her absence—she could never dictate with pace, and the finesse that won her five Slams is no longer enough.

Clijsters can bang the ball, and while she’ll almost certainly have lost a step—I haven’t seen either of her matches in Cincy—she’ll also almost certainly still be a superior athlete to the majority of her opponents. She plays the same hard-hitting baseline game that's the WTA standard today, but she can generate more topspin for safety than many of the younger women, and she’s a natural on defense—Clijsters’ signature shot doesn’t involve a shriek, but a squeak. That’s what her shoes do as they scrape the hard courts as she retrieves a ball with one her famous splits. Compared to Clijsters’ style, which was never what you call elegant in the first place, the women’s game this decade has grown steadily more pragmatic and rudimentary. Sharapova, Safina, Kuznetsova, Dementieva, and others rely more on hitting first-strike missiles and less on running them down—they play preemptively at all times, betting that their winners will outweigh their errors in the end. The trend will only continue as players like Azarenka and Lisicki take their places near the top.

Speaking of Gen Y nostalgia, there was a similar, if slightly less dramatic turn of events, among the men in Montreal today. That’s where 29-year-old Juan Carlos Ferroro, another Harry Potter kid—he turned pro in ’98—continued his modest but impressive late-career renaissance by beating Gael Monfils to reach the third round. In this case it’s Ferrero’s game, once the start of the art in controlled power from the baseline, that looked rudimentary. While Monfils, like more than a few of his colleagues, roamed far behind the baseline and played a passively aggressive style, the Spaniard won by knocking his comparatively simple strokes flat and straight and not too close to the lines. Dated, yes, but a winning method in any age. We’ll see how well it works against another baseline-roaming whippersnapper in the next round, Andy Murray.

We’ll also get a good look at Clijsters versus the current generation tomorrow, when she faces Kuznetsova. At 24, the Russian is just two years younger than the Belgian, and she can be seen as her less-polished little sister. Both come from world-class athletic stock—Kuzzie’s family are cyclists; Kim’s dad was a soccer player and mom a gymnast—both are forceful movers and hitters, and both can create plenty of topspin. Kuzzie has won two Slams to Kim’s one, but few would say she’s the finer player—she owns just nine career titles to Clijsters’ 34. 

But Kuznetsova is fighting a trend, no matter how dubious. You know who performed on opening night in Cincy, don't you? That's right, it was that old boy bander and original Gen Y husband Nick Lachey. Hey, those late-90s are tough to beat. We'll see if it's true again tomorrow.