Book Club: The Authoritative Pang	09/30/2009 - 4:23 PM

The Book Club is flying solo this week. That’s because charter (and only other) member Kamakshi Tandon is kind of busy with something called law school. Nevertheless, it seemed like the right time to take stock of the small but influential collected tennis works of author and essayist David Foster Wallace, who died a year ago this month.

The bulk of the tennis-writing career of David Foster Wallace, the observations that made him famous as a chronicler of the sport, took place over the course of just one month, from early August to the Labor Day weekend of 1995. In that time he attended tournaments in Montreal and Flushing Meadows and came back with two articles: “The String Theory” for Esquire, and “Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open” for Tennis Magazine.

To say these were tennis articles like any other is like kind of like saying a whale is just another fish in the sea. Wallace brought a new, hyper-detailed, all-seeing eye and let-it-rip attitude to the analysis of the sport. Part of this was his writing skill and the importance of the game to his life, but part of it was also his outsider’s viewpoint. Despite having grown up on a tennis court, Wallace had never attended a pro tournament before he went to Montreal that year; and when he got to the Open, he couldn’t hide his sense of awe at the sheer size of the thing. A regular tennis journalist could never have written from that perspective, and Wallace would have been hard-pressed to duplicate it himself. Maybe that’s why these would be his last comments of significance on the sport for more than 10 years.

“The String Theory” is at its core a profile of Michael Joyce, a “journeyman” pro at the time and the current coach of Maria Sharapova. The bland magazine headline doesn’t give you much sense of the article’s wide-ranging concerns, which must be why Wallace, in his first essay collection, gave it a slightly more comprehensive title: “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff About Choice, Freedom, Limitation, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness.” That still doesn’t cover everything discussed, but whatever its name, the piece ranks among the very best ever written about the sport.

The concept is basic: Wallace travels to the 1995 Rogers Cup, hangs out with Joyce, and writes about everything he sees and hears and thinks. It’s not a small amount of stuff: In his book of essays, the story runs for 42 pages and includes 64 “footnotes,” which range from brief tangents to some of the most thoughtful analysis in the piece. His tone is markedly different from what it was four years earlier in “Tennis, Trig, and Tornadoes.” Here Wallace scraps the difficult verbal density of that story and takes on a regular-guy persona as he strolls the grounds. He uses his massive footnotes as conversational asides—NY Times writer A.O. Scott called Wallace’s writing “the voice inside your head," because it was always speeding forward recklessly even as it was second-guessing itself. Nowhere is that more true than in “String Theory” and “Democracy and Commerce.” The articles were written the same year that Infinite Jest was published; his immersion in tennis almost seems to come as a relief, and his writing is better for it. I’ll stick to the Joyce piece here, because the two are similar and this is the more successful of them, but both are must-reads. No other writing has done justice to the teeming, vulgar grandeur of a professional tennis event, while at the same time giving the average reader an idea of the effort it takes to play in one. Below are some of the best lines and riffs.

—It begins, “When Michael Joyce of Los Angeles serves, when he tosses the ball and his face rises to track it, it looks like he’s smiling . . .” Some writers might be happy to end this sentence here, with that nicely turned last phrase. Not Wallace. After a comma, he continues by immediately diving into his trademark geeky detail: “. . . but he’s not really smiling—his face’s circumoral muscles are straining with the rest of his body to reach the ball at the top of the toss’s rise.”

—Joyce’s first-round match in the qualies: Stade Jarry’s Stadium Court facility can hold slightly over 10,000 soulds. Right now, for Michael Joyce’s qualifying match, there are 93 people in the crowd, 91 of whom appear to friends and relatives of [Joyce’s Canadian opponent] Dan Brakus.

The acoustics in the near-empty Stadium are amazing—you can hear every breath, every sneaker’s squeak, the authoritative pang of the ball against very tight strings.

—Footnote 6, about the girlfriends of marginal pros: Most of the girlfriends have something indefinable about them that suggests extremely wealthy parents whom the girls are trying to piss off by hooking up with an obscure professional tennis player.

—The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin.

—Footnote 26, on the Wilson T2000: Jimmy Connors’ game was all the stranger because the racquet he generated all his firepower from the baseline with was a Wilson T2000, a weird steel thing that’s one of the single shittiest tennis racquets ever made and is regarded by most serious players as useful only for home defense or prying large rocks out of your backyard or something.

I mentioned that Wallace likes to assign a villain in his stories. In this one and in the piece about the U.S. Open, that villain is Andre Agassi. Wallace detested him, seemingly on aesthetic grounds, though I’m not exactly sure why. Wallace will also detest Mark Philippoussis, who he describes as “malevolent and cyborgian” at the 1995 U.S. Open, and Rafael Nadal for similar reasons. None of these guys measured up to his idea of what a beautiful tennis player should look like, or how he should play. But Wallace takes it a step farther and makes the vilification personal, as if they represent a despicable worldview and approach to life.

—Footnote 21: Sampras is surprisingly childlike and cute on the court, in contrast to Agassi, who’s about as cute as a Port Authority whore.

—Footnote 31: Watch Agassi closely sometime—for so small a man and so great a player, he’s amazingly devoid of finesse, with movements that look more like a Heavy Metal musicians than an athlete’s.

Like I said yesterday, this feels like something from a screenplay rather than a description of reality, and reminds me of the “nonfiction” of Tom Wolfe. Reading his stories about Chuck Yeager, the pilot, and Junior Johnson, the stock-car racer, you begin to wonder at some point whether they’re the same person—Wolfe bends their personalities to fit his idea of a hero. Wallace seemed to need to see tennis as a metaphor for good and evil, right and wrong, cool and uncool. I find this suprising coming from someone who actually played tennis, though maybe I shouldn’t. Wallace was a self-proclaimed grinder, and he tends to glorify the players—Sampras, Federer—who don’t play that way.

—Footnote 49, on Mark Knowles: “From a distance he’s an impressive looking guy, though up close he has a kind of squished, buggy face and the slightly bulging eyes of a player who, I can tell, is spring-loaded for a tantrum.”

—Footnote 61, on Thomas Enqvist: “Enqvist, by the way, looks eerily like a young Richard Chamberlain, with his narrow, rodentially patrician quality. The best thing about Enqvist is his girlfriend, who wears glasses and when she applauds a good point sort of hops up and down in her seat with a refreshing uncoolness.”

—After speculating that Joyce might be a virgin, he concludes with these words about him: “Michael Joyce will remain a figure of enduring and paradoxical fascination for me. The restrictions on his life have been, in my opinion, grotesque. But the radical compression of his attention and self has allowed him to become a transcendent practitioner of an art—something few of us get to be. It’s allowed him to visit and test part of his psyche that most of us do not even know for sure we have, to manifest in concrete form virtues like courage, persistence in the face of pain, performance under wilting scrutiny and pressure. Michael Joyce, in other words, is a complete man. But he wants more . . . At 22, it’s already too late for anything else; he’s invested too much, is in too deep. He will say he’s happy and mean it. Wish him well.”

Whatever else Wallace did as a writer, his penetration into what it takes and means to be a struggling professional tennis player was a lasting contribution to the sportswriting craft. It remains, and will likely always remain, the last word on the subject. Am I jealous? I thought I might be when I started to reread it. By the end, I was just grateful.

*** 

Tomorrow we conclude with DFW’s most famous tennis article, in which God appears in a Nike headband.

Book Club: Tornado of Words	09/29/2009 - 2:03 PM

The Book Club is flying solo this week. That’s because charter (and only other) member Kamakshi Tandon is kind of busy with something called law school. Nevertheless, it seemed like the right time to take stock of the small but influential collected tennis works of author and essayist David Foster Wallace, who died a year ago this month.

From what I can tell, “Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornadoes,” published in Harper’s in 1991 and written in 1990 when David Foster Wallace was 28 years old, was the first article by the author to heavily feature the sport. He would begin Infinite Jest around the same time, and there are similarities in the characters and writing style. I came upon "TTT" a few years later, when he had re-titled it “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley” for his book of essays, A Supposedly Fun Thing. Wallace, or maybe his editor, had a flair for titles, and his is certainly more poetic than the original. But as someone who has to come up with magazine headlines on a regular basis, I can’t fault the Harper’s people too much. Theirs got the point across.

I can remember being extremely impressed by “TTT” when I first read it, maybe a little more so than I am today, though I certainly still enjoy it. The writing style, in its flat, rolling, affectless density, seemed perfect for the postmodern moment of the early 90s. And the treatment of tennis as something important in this intelligent guy's life was an epiphany—"Hey, maybe tennis really is cool." Wallace, in linking the three elements of the title, recreates summers on the Illinois junior circuit that were easily recognizable to me—like him, I was a respectable sectional player who never reached the national level—while also giving the sport a metaphorical meaning.

Re-reading the piece last week, I was struck more than anything by the complexity of the verbiage; I'm not used to the dense postmodern approach anymore. Wallace was still a new voice at that point, and filled with the idea of pushing literature forward; after a decade of Raymond Carver/Richard Ford minmalism, Pynchon and pyrotechnics were back in. While “TTT” isn’t overly difficult to read—Wallace always had a natural way with words below the wonkiness—his tennis writing would get better as he got more accessible, more plainly human. Here is how “TTT” begins:

When I left my boxed township of Illinois farmland to attend my dad’s alma mater in the lurid jutting Berskhires of western Massachusetts, I all of a sudden developed a jones for mathematics. I’m starting to see why this is so. College math evokes and catharts a Midwesterner’s sickness for home. I’d grown up inside vectors, lines and lines athwart lines, grids—and, on the scale of horizons, broad curving lines of geographic force, the weird topographical drain swirl of a whole lot of ice-ironed land that sits and spins atop plates.

That’s quite a start, and a lot of things at once: It’s an exciting performance; it’s a shade too cute (the colloguial “I all of a sudden developed” right after the imagistic “lurid jutting Berskshires”); it’s hard to understand; and it sounds like a math geek’s impersonation of John Updike, a writer who Wallace read faithfully but would famously rip in a review a few years later.

The headlong, complex style continues, and when it veers away from tennis it can be hard to follow. Here’s Wallace describing his tiny hometown of Philo, Ill.:

Philo is a cockeyed grid: nine north-south streets against six northeast-southwest, fifty-one gorgeous slanted-cruciform corners (the east and west intersection-angles’ tangents could be evaluated integrally in terms of their secants!) around a three intersection central town common with a tank whose nozzle pointed northwest at Urbana, plus a frozen native son, felled on the Salerno beachhead, whose bronze hand pointed true north. In the evening, the sun galvanized his left profile and cast his arm’s accusing shadow out to the right, bent at the angle of a stick in a pond. At college it suddenly occurred to me during a quiz that the differential between the direction of the statue’s hand pointed and the arc of its shadow’s rotation was first-order.

The tennis parts come as a relief from this type of convoluted physical/mathematical description, and they’re strikingly accessible and even down to earth by comparison. Wallace looks back at how the sport, with its swooping movements inside the hard right angles of the lines, mirrored the wind that blew at gale force for most of the year through the grid of central Illinois. The most entertaining parts for people who play will be his description of his own game. Wallace might have best been described as a “proud pusher”:

The best-planned, best-hit ball often just blew out of bounds, was the basic unlyrical problem. It drove some kids near-mad with the caprice and unfairness of it all, and on real windy days these kids, usually with talent out the bazoo, would have their first apoplectic racket-throwing tantrum in about the match’s third game and lapse into a kind of sullen coma by the end of the first set, now bitterly expecting to get screwed over by the wind, net, tape, sun. I, who was affectionately known as Slug because I was such a lazy turd in practice, located my biggest tennis asset in a weird robotic detachment from whatever unfairnesses of wind and weather I couldn’t plan for. I couldn’t begin to tell you how many tournament matches I won between the ages of 12 and 15 against bigger, faster, more coordinated opponents simply by hitting balls unimaginatively down the middle of the court in schizophrenic gales.

But to say I did not use verve or imagination was untrue. Acceptance is its own verve, and it takes imagination for a player to like wind, and I liked wind; or rather I at least felt like the wind had a right to be there.

This is a very fine and perhaps excessively detailed exploration of the pusher’s psyche: “Acceptance is its own verve” are words every tennis player should live by, if they can.

There are a couple of semi-annoying tics to this piece, ones that crop up again in DFW’s writing: the cute, colloquial “on real windy days”—this from a self-described hardcore grammarian—in the paragraph quoted above is one. And his implication, elsewhere in the piece, that as a professor’s son he was of a different class from the “dentist’s kids” and “Joe Perfecthairs” at the “country club.” We’ll see in the future that Wallace had a habit of branding at least one person a villain in his non-fiction stories, as if he were writing a screenplay, and that this creative writing prof at idyllic Pomona College in California liked to see himself as a kind of intellectual working stiff.

What matters more, though, is that Wallace had found an original and important way of writing about tennis. No one else has combined a nitty gritty knowledge of how the game is played with such an entertaining voice in getting it across—his omnivorous language in these 15 or so pages ranges from “secants” to “screwed over.” In the process, no one else made tennis seem so integral to a thinking person’s life. As he became a more accessible and less writerly writer, I could easily have seen a collection of junior tennis tales from DFW, or even a screenplay from him that would have become the sport’s version of Caddyshack (still waiting for that, by the way). But he went with Infinite Jest instead; probably the right choice (though, who knows, Caddyshack may be the more enduring piece of art).

The story ends, as it should, with Wallace and his partner trying to drill during a real live tornado. I’ll let him tell it in his own inimitable way—here the flat affectless style he’s used throughout begins to rise to the lyrical:

This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like the lift of the world’s biggest mitt, the nets suddenly up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking a ball out of my hand to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball . . . I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once touching the ground over 50-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and Antitoi [his opponent] and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for a I swear it must have been 50 feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down, Antitoi detached a retina and hard to wear those funky Jabbar retina-goggles for the rest of the summer, and the fence had two body-shaped indentations like in cartoons where a guy’s face makes a cast in the skillet that hit him . . . 

Antitoi’s tennis continued to improve after that, but mine didn’t.

Wish I’d written that.

*** 

DFW goes pro tomorrow. Please keep all comments relevant to the Book Club posts, thanks.

Book Club: Considering DFW	09/28/2009 - 6:12 PM

My reactions to David Foster Wallace and his writing come in conflicting forms. First there’s the man himself. After hearing about his suicide last September, I wrote that I was stunned to learn about his psychological problems, which had been going on for decades. I’d read most if not all of his essays over the previous 15 years, and I didn’t have a clue that anything serious was wrong with him. In fact, his first collection, A Supposedly Funny Thing I’ll Never Do Again, had helped me through a two-week bout with pneumonia in 1997, and his second, Consider the Lobster, was one of the secret highlights of a weeklong trip to Rome 10 years later. You can’t really go to that city, come back, and tell people that one of your favorite things about it was the book you read. But it was.

I was stunned all over again this past spring when the sad story of Wallace’s struggle with depression was laid out in the New Yorker. I felt some kinship with him. Like me, he had been a junior tennis player as a kid and had attended a small East Coast college, in his case Amherst. But there was obviously a lot of distance between us. My few failed forays into his 1,100 page novel Infinite Jest were enough to make me realize that Wallace’s mind went in all kind of directions that mine didn’t. I can remember reading his story in Esquire about tennis journeyman Michael Joyce in 1996 and thinking, That’s what tennis writing should be all about. It was an inspiration.

Then I became a tennis writer myself. You might have thought that, as someone who had read his stuff for years, I would have rejoiced at the sight of a cover story by Wallace in the New York Times sports magazine about Roger Federer. But when it appeared one Sunday in 2006, I didn’t rejoice; I groaned. For good reason: When I went to play squash that same afternoon, my opponent’s first words—I could hear them coming before they left his mouth—were, “Did you read the article by David Foster Wallace on Federer in the Times?”

“No, not yet," I answered in a dull monotone, "but I saw it.”

“It’s amazing, the best sports article I’ve read in a long time.”

We were warming up as he said this. He hit the ball softly toward me off the front wall. I slammed it back into the wall just a little harder than normal, thinking as I did so, “Really, the best sports article you’ve read in a long time. Better than anything I’ve ever written, even though I write about tennis for a ------ living?” Who was David Foster Wallace to parachute in and show me how to do my job? Why did it take the imprimatur of the New York Times to make people to consider a piece of writing worth talking about? Of course, I also knew the Federer piece was going to be top-notch and highly entertaining, which it was, even if I’ve come to see it as problematic (more on that later this week).

Now I'm crushed that there won't be more pieces from Wallace on the sport—tennis will be lesser without him, and how many writers can you say that about? He was not only a gifted and inspiring stylist, but he had the advantage of seeing the professional sport with an unjaded outsider’s eye, and the rec sport with an enthusiastic insider’s eye. As it is, we have the entire Wallace tennis oeuvre before us. Aside from sections of Infinite Jest, it consists, as far as I know, of five articles, four of which you can read on the web:

Tennis, Trigonometry, and Tornadoes, from Harper’s in 1991

The String Theory, a profile of Michael Joyce, from Esquire in 1996 (I can’t get to some of the footnotes, which is a real problem since, like all DFW articles, they contain a lot of the article's most memorable observations, including one that I quote below)

Democracy and Commerce at the U.S. Open, from Tennis Magazine in 1996

Roger Federer as Religious Experience, from the NY Times in 2006

And from 1995, “How Tracy Austin Broke My Heart,” a scathing review of her autobiography that I couldn’t find on the Internet, but which is collected in Consider the Lobster.

I’ve re-read Trig and the Joyce piece so far, and I’ll talk about those in the next post. I’m trying to place Wallace in the tennis-writing pantheon: What did he bring to the sport that no other writer has? Were there flaws in his seemingly flawless technique? If there were, they were overwhelmed by the scintillating freedom of his prose, which, except for Trig, was never as dense and difficult as his fiction. Even more important, though, was his conviction that tennis mattered, which may have been his ultimate contribution. Wallace articulated what so much of us know and love about the sport but could never dream of putting into sentences like his. Here’s an example to get us started:

Wallace describes Michael Joyce’s own love for tennis, which he was forced to play by his father:

The marvelous part is the way Joyce’s face looks when he talks about what tennis means to him. He loves it; you can see this in his face when he talks about it. . . . When he speaks of tennis and his career his eyes get round and pupils dilate and the look in them is one of love. The love is not the love one feels for a job or a lover or any loci of intensity that most of us choose to say we love. It’s the sort of love you see in the eyes of really old people who’ve been happily married for an incredibly long time, or in religious people who've devoted their lives to religious stuff: it’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it. Whether there’s “choice” involved is, at a certain point, of no interest . . . since it’s the very surrender of choice and self that informs the love in the first place.”

There we have the best description I’ve read of a pro’s relationship to the game: "It’s the sort of love whose measure is what it has cost, what one’s given up for it."

Not bad for a footnote to a magazine article.

More DFW tomorrow.

UTennis: Man vs. Cannon	09/25/2009 - 12:29 PM

It’s been a little light, news-wise, since the U.S. Open ended, which is not necessarily a bad thing if you’re me. I’ve had time to do some writing and editing for our magazines, TENNIS and Smash. Still, along with you, I have had two moments to savor: The return of Justine Henin and the continued, uncanny ability of Davis Cup to inspire epic performances.

Last weekend, in the semifinal between the Czech Republic and Croatia, we were given one of the more memorable/remarkable/downright bizarre matches in the sport’s history. Radek Stepanek beat Ivo Karlovic 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 7-6 (6), 6-7 (2), 16-14. The contest lasted 5 hours and 59 minutes, and its 82 games were the second-most since the tiebreaker was instituted. The first four sets went to tiebreakers, three of which were won by just two points; the fourth set, which Karlovic won 7-2 in a breaker, must have felt like a blowout.

All of which pales a little compared to what Karlovic did in defeat. His 78 aces—on clay—would seem likely to join the ranks of other unbreakable sports records, like Joe DiMaggio’s hitting streak, Johnny van der Meer’s consecutive no-hitters, Steffi Graf’s Golden Slam, Roger Federer’s 22 straight Grand Slam semifinals. And has any record, other than perhaps Bob Beamon’s long jump at the 1968 Olympics, ever been improved so dramatically in one day? Karlovic, naturally, held the previous mark for most aces, with 55. That briefly seemed in danger during this year's Wimbledon final when Federer reached the 50 mark in the fifth set. But 78? The sport might have to go to best-four-out-of-seven sets before that's challenged.

Naturally, someone—Magnificat83, to be exact—has posted a video on YouTube of all 78 of Karlovic’s aces. (Plus, at the end, the sad result of them, Stepanek’s service winner at match point.) Even then, the clip lasts eight minutes! Is watching a very tall man hit aces worth eight minutes of your life? Sure it is.

—If I had to point to one specific and crucial advantage that Karlovic gets from being 6-foot-10, it’s that he can hit flat serves wide, without taking any pace off or adding any spin, and send them blitzing past his opponent. Sometimes I try to imagine doing that when I’m serving. The idea seems absurd.

—Dr. Ace looks like an NBA player throwing a ball down at a 6-foot hoop. When he’s in rhythm, the service box must appear to be an ocean to him.

—Credit Stepanek for never blinking or showing any frustration whatsoever during this blizzard of aces. You can’t survive against Karlovic without that mindset.

—78 aces is more than three sets' worth of points

—By about the five-minute mark, I start to get tired watching Karlovic. I wonder whether hitting this many aces wears out the server while keeping the returner fresh? Stepanek played three sets of tennis without having to exert any energy at all.

—Consider that this mark was achieved in a year when Roger Federer broke the men’s Grand Slam singles record, and a year after what many people, including myself, believe was the greatest match ever played. I think about a line Gordon Forbes, a player from the amateur circuit of the 1950s, wrote when he came to watch the Masters Cup sometime during the 1990s. He said that the level of play had become so good it seemed like everyone was aiming for perfection with every shot. Needless to say, this was a totally different attitude toward the game than anyone had before.

Having caught a few classic Slam finals from the ’70s and ’80s recently on the Tennis Channel, I can see what Forbes meant. Those matches were excellent in their way, but a few points are enough to make you appreciate just how proficient today’s players are. On one level, 78 aces, in a losing effort, is an anomalous achievement by an abnormal guy. But at another level it’s a stunning benchmark of skill, accuracy, and consistency on the serve.

—What’s just as remarkable is that Karlovic lost this match. In baseball, a lot is made of the fact that the distance from home plate to first base, 90 feet, has never had to be lengthened, even as players have gotten faster. On an average ground ball, a clean throw from the shortstop still gets the runner by half a step. The same can be said for the serve in tennis. It’s been feared for decades that it would overtake the rest of the sport, but the guys who have relied almost entirely on their serves to get them through—Ivanisevic, Roddick, etc.—still come up just short when pitted against guys with all-around games. There have been calls to go to one serve instead of two, but it’s never been necessary. Stepanek still absorbed three sets worth of aces and won. The sad thing for Karlovic is that tennis is better off with him as a loser. At times, when I see how glum he can look on a court, I think he knows this.

—When Stepanek finally does win, he celebrates with deep emotion; he’s too exhausted to do the worm. Yes, it would be nice if guys like Roger Federer played Davis Cup, but I like the fact that it gives second-tier players, the Stepaneks and Karlovics and Verdascos and Lopezes of the world, a chance to have a moment to rejoice as if they’ve just won their sixth Wimbledon or their first French Open. It’s an opportunity for glory for these hard-working, week-to-week pros, and an opportunity for fans to see them at their most emotional. With Davis Cup, the riches get spread around.

—There’s one accidentally poignant comment below this clip: “Tennis also needs freaks like that.” Karlovic is an aberration as a tennis player, but his “freakishness” has rarely come across so painfully as it does here, when he walks off the court a loser after six hours and 78 aces. He takes it as impassively and stoically as always. It's as if he realizes that he's a guy not destined for glory, even in DC. Instead, he's destined to be just good enough to put himself permanently in the record books even while suffering the most heartbreaking loss of his career. But that’s Davis Cup, and that’s tennis. 

Have a good weekend.

Justine, the Sequel	09/23/2009 - 1:59 PM

Say this also for Justine Henin: She’s as dramatic as she is private. We don’t know why she retired in the first place, we don’t know anything about her long personal journey, other that it was wrapped up in about 15 months, and we don’t know why she decided to take the full-time plunge again so quickly. A year ago she couldn’t stand the tour for even one more day; now she’s talking about playing in the 2012 Olympics.

The most obvious reason, from an outsider’s perspective, for Henin’s return is that she turned on the TV the other day, saw Kim Clijsters holding the U.S. Open trophy over her head, and knew what she had to do (i.e. grab it out of her hands). Henin admitted that her countrywoman’s comeback did motivate her. But she hinted that the initial spark came when she watched Roger Federer complete his career Grand Slam at the French Open. It makes sense: Henin loves Paris, as we know; she would have loved the “beautiful emotions” (that's how I imagine her describing it) of a drama-filled moment like that; she’s been compared to Federer for years; and she’s missing just one piece from her own career Slam, a Wimbledon crown.

Is it annoying that Henin and Clijsters both used the word “retirement” instead, of, say, “sabbatical”? It certainly would have been more accurate. But when they called it quits, they probably couldn’t see themselves playing tennis again in the foreseeable future—it requires everything you have, and at times it must leave you with nothing left to give. When Clijsters retired to get married and have children at such a young age, a Belgian woman I talked to at the time told me she wasn’t surprised. It’s what you do there, she said. (I offer this only as an observation, not as ironclad evidence of anything.) And one thing we know about Henin is that half-measures aren’t her style. As she showed when she retired against Amelie Mauresmo in the Australian Open final a few years ago, she’s an all or nothing kind of player, and person.

There aren’t many precedents for extended sabbaticals from tennis, and the WTA’s rules don’t make room for them. Maybe they’ll become a trend. As I wrote in an ESPN post on the subject yesterday, we’ve spent the last year or two hearing about how Venus and Serena Williams had done it the right way all along, that their “outside interests” helped them stay interested in the game, that all the other women were robots bound to short circuit. Now Clijsters has come back, beaten both Venus and Serena, and won the U.S. Open. If Henin does the same thing next year, should we change our tune and say that the Belgian system—go hard, burn out, retire, come back—is the right way? No, the real reason the Williamses were successful has nothing to do with their design skills or cameo appearances. They succeeded because, from skipping the juniors to not worrying about their rankings as pros, they conducted their careers exactly how they saw fit, regardless of other people’s opinions in the sport. If Clijsters and Henin remain at the top of the game during their second careers, we can only credit them for doing the same thing. There is no “right” way of being a tennis champion. Every one of them is, to some extent, an anomaly, a freak.

What matters is that tennis has two of those champions back—the WTA may even be the hot tour going into 2010. It’s only right that this era of women's tennis, one that will be remembered first and foremost for the Williamses, Justine Henin, Maria Sharapova, and now Kim Clijsters, gets to run its full course. While Henin likely won’t be able to match Clijsters’ immediate level of success, she was a reliable champion during her career, one who won at least one major per season from 2003 to ’07, and one who competes well on all surfaces.

But whatever her results, one thing that’s virtually guaranteed is that Henin will be a pleasure to watch. The swooping backhand, the lethal forehand, the dervish-like mobility, the look of frozen fear in her eyes, and her ability, on most occasions, to overcome that fear: There’s no way she could keep all that retired for long.

Playing Ball: The Nets are Down	09/21/2009 - 5:54 PM

I used to be a year-round addict myself. Each spring I made the delicate transition well known to anyone who lives where the weather gets cold. I left my indoor club, where the conditions were controlled and the ball made a satisfying thud when it hit the strings, and returned to the outdoor public courts in my neighborhood. “The nets are up”: It was a wonderfully concise phrase—no more words were needed—usually heard out of a car window or from the church pew behind you or at the movie theater or in the parking lot at the mall. It sounded like a cause for celebration, and it was, except for the small fact that I knew I was going to play much worse for at least a week. The thin spring air, the iffy, chilly wind, and the pale sunlight in my face wreaked havoc on all my shots, particularly my serve. The worst part was the sound, or lack thereof: Without the echoing thud that the indoor club provided, my first serve seemed to lose 20 m.p.h.

The m.p.h.’s came back over the summer, as the air got thicker, the sun grew stronger, and I became accustomed to the crisp ping that a serve makes outdoors. By September I didn’t want to go back inside. The transition only made me think of the long winter ahead, so I stayed outdoors as long as I could. I can remember having trouble calling lines because there were so many leaves on the court. The wind returned in the fall, and the sunlight grew paler every day, but I liked playing tennis then. The cold air required a sweater, but it also inspired me to try to keep the points short.

That's all changed for me. Now my tennis is condensed into a recognizable season that lasts from early May to early October. In colder months I switch to squash, a game I picked up 10 years ago because of the difficulty I had finding an affordable way to play tennis in New York. Squash is cheaper than indoor tennis in the city—pretty much anything is—and, as I’ve written here before, I’m hooked on it. My tennis season is made even shorter by the lack of lights at my club; there are only two months when I can play for a significant amount of time after work before it gets dark. Those days are long gone now.

My playing season feels the way I imagine summer itself feels in England, or somewhere similarly northern and sun-starved. For most of the year, it hibernates; from December to March, I can’t picture what it would be like to be outdoors without a heavy winter coat, let alone running around on a tennis court in shorts and a T-shirt—the idea seems like pure fantasy. Then, against all odds, the air gets warm enough to begin doing just that. My tennis life blooms again out of nowhere, rises to a brief, sunset-filled peak from late June to the middle of August, only to close down in chilly darkness just as quickly. The endpoint is never exactly the same, but this past weekend was a significant marker. Despite sunny skies and 75-degree temperatures in New York, I opted to play on the little boxy white squash court at my gym instead. Maybe it was the post-U.S. Open crash, a time when the mind, or at least my mind, has taken in as much tennis as it can handle for the moment. Or maybe it was because the date was Sept. 20, the official final weekend of summer. I’ll play tennis a few more times, but I’m already reminiscing about the brief season just past, wrapping it up in my mind.

What will I remember from 2009? The sky above my club, for one: In New York, we only see the sky as a long thin rectangular strip between the buildings—some colossally high, others three or four stories—that tower over the street we’re walking down. Half of my tennis club is ringed by four-story apartment buildings, but the other half is much more open. There are subway tracks, and just beyond them a neighborhood filled with detached, two-story, century-old houses. You can see the same houses in pictures of the club from the 1920s, along with Model Ts in the parking lot and long trousers on the courts. Compared to the view from a typical New York street, the sky here is a spectacular vista. You can see what’s hidden from you most of the time: cloud formations, the path of the sun as it sets, and airplanes, one after another with almost no break, heading into La Guardia.

Another memorable vista is the first view of the club, which is in an unusually urban setting for tennis, from the subway. After work I would take the train from Manhattan, my racquet bag bouncing off people as I found a place to stand. The slow, grinding cars lumbered over the Manhattan bridge, where you can see all of downtown to the Statue of Liberty, and then back underground, through the heart of the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, and outdoors again. As I got off and walked toward the station exit there, hurrying to make sure I got a court, I could see the trees along the tracks ahead where the club sits. That sparking green in the middle of the decaying city always feels like a secret. This is the best essence of a club.

I’ll remember this season’s early promise, much of which would go unfulfilled, as every season’s early promise tends to do. I started by winning a few doubles matches in June with a new partner. We liked the new combination, we traded high-fives after overheads, and we talked about getting a regular, once-a-week game going. It fizzled in about three weeks. Between long office hours, vacations, injuries, and other random events, it’s hard to get four working guys together one time over the course of an entire summer, let alone once a week. This is even more difficult in New York, where most people work into the evening, and where getting around in general is a hassle—I can’t imagine there’s another place where plans are canceled as often as they here. By August, we’d given up.

Speaking of August, I’ll remember the middle of that month, a point when there was just enough light to squeeze in an hour of tennis after work. By the end of each session, the lights in the apartments surrounding the club would come on and you could see into each cozy living room as you played. One night a woman came to her window holding her baby. When I looked up, she waved the baby’s hand at me. On other nights, a young girl would pull a chair onto her fire escape directly above one of the courts and watch while she did her homework.

I’ll also remember, with regret, my two-handed backhand. I always do. As a kid, this was my best shot. I play tennis left-handed, but I bat and play golf right-handed. Like Jim Courier, my two-handed swing is a little like a batter’s in baseball. I was strong enough to hit it well as soon as I picked up a racquet; my forehand, by contrast, began as my weak side, and I labored over it for years. The upshot is that my forehand, so carefully constructed, rarely breaks down when I’m nervous, while my backhand, which I never gave a thought to, goes haywire at all the wrong times.

My temporary solution to this painful and mysterious dilemma has been to learn a one-handed slice. I say temporary because every summer I start by vowing to bring back my two-hander full time. Then I find myself in the middle of a match and immediately reverting to the slice. While the shot has been a nice addition—few things feel as good as buzzing a slice backhand down the line for a surprise winner—and has brought me closer to the old wood-racquet spirit of the game, it is also very attackable. Playing me is pretty simple: Hit to my backhand. If you want to mix it up, hit high to my backhand.

This year I managed to crack a two-hander worthy of my junior days. It came, naturally, at the end of a blowout set, when I had nothing to lose. I saw a high-bouncing short ball, took it on the rise, and before I could think about it I’d connected perfectly for a crosscourt winner. It was a bittersweet moment: The shot itself felt like a brief trip to tennis heaven, or at least to the mythical Zone; I hadn’t even swung hard to get maximum velocity. But it almost felt too good, too easy, too natural. It made me think of my two-handed backhand less as a simple shot than as a lost part of myself, a missing limb. You know how the pros signature shots’ are so recognizable they almost seem to take on lives of their own? That’s how I felt about my backhand. I tried to revive it again all summer, but it never came back to life.

But I won’t get morbid about my backhand, really I won’t. It was a good season. I ran a lot, slid a lot, hit a lot of good serves, and reached a level that I'd like to think isn't too far below where I was 20 years ago, when I was on the court every day. You really can get better at certain parts of the game, even running. I track more balls down than I once did, simply because I believe I can; it’s a lesson learned from squash, where you’re expected to get to every single shot. And being back inside the closed confines of a squash court yesterday, I was reminded of how open a tennis court is, how much a part of the world it is, and how liberating it feels to rejoin that world each spring.

One moment from the summer sticks with me the most. It was early August and my friend Jimmy and I had finished playing, sweeping the clay, and doing the lines just as it was getting dark. We sat on the clubhouse steps, not saying much. I was thinking how incredible it was that it was already this dark this early in the year. Could I really see the end of the season on the horizon, just as August was beginning? Jimmy must have been thinking the same thing. He looked up and around and said, “We don’t get enough of these summer nights.” 

Right now, feeling a cooler breeze each morning on the way to work, I know he was right. But I can’t quite mourn it, because I feel lucky to have the memories I’ve preserved here. To be able to flash back on a few months of buzzing slice backhands, 9:00 P.M. sunlight, waving babies, rapid-fire doubles points, sliding gets, roaring subway trains, and a few perfectly struck balls here and there, to see the summer as something luminous and temporary, feels fortunate. The tennis season isn't long for me anymore, at least according to the calendar, but it lasts all year in my mind.

The Name, the Game	09/18/2009 - 3:01 PM

Recently I wrote a post about the dozens of immortal names that tennis had given to the world. I came up with a quick list of them off the top of my head; right in the middle of it, like the keystone of the whole operation, was “Jack Kramer.”

It’s hard to think of two words that seem more appropriate to what they’re describing. The old-fashioned nickname, the easy syllables, and the clicking ks at the center conjure the image of a plucky, upstanding Greatest Generation type, a humble American hero in a World War II movie. When you see pictures of the lanky, crew-cut-sporting Kramer slicing under a forehand in his white clothes, you know the name fit like a glove. Or the way the handle of a Jack Kramer Autograph fit in the hands of millions of players from the 1950s to the 1980s.

Kramer, who died last week at age 88, was indeed a member of U.S. tennis' greatest generation. With fellow Californians Ellsworth Vines, Bobby Riggs, Don Budge, and Pancho Gonzalez, he helped democratize the sport at its top levels in the 1930s and 40s. They were the first group to start on public courts out West and conquer the clubby amateur game back East. But they couldn’t live on gentlemen’s wages, so Kramer, dedicated to the stunning idea that a tennis player should be paid for his skill, led them back out of those ivy walls and into the wilderness of the early pro tours. The pro game would finally break through the club walls in 1968, but that revolution sparked a second one, one in which Kramer was cast as part of the sexist establishment. In 1970, Billie Jean King, another product of those California public courts, led a boycott of Kramer’s tournament, the Pacific Southwest Open in Los Angeles, because it had offered the men’s champion $12,000 and the women’s $1,500. While Kramer maintained that he was a convenient scapegoat, the WTA was off and running. They were generational adversaries at the time, but Kramer and King can now be seen as part of the same democratizing tradition that had helped make pro tennis a global success.

The clip at the bottom of this post probably represents the most I’ve seen of Kramer's game in one place. He could obviously get around a court with aplomb and stroke a mean forehand volley. When I was a kid, he had seemed more curmudgeon than revolutionary and always had a bad word to say about my favorite player, Bjorn Borg. More recently, I’ve spent some time flipping through the copy of his biography, The Game, that we have in the Tennis Magazine offices. Co-authored with Frank DeFord in 1979, it’s written in a very conversational style, with maximum honesty. Kramer didn’t do false modesty, but he didn’t skimp on the self-criticism, either. Someday I’ll take it home and read it from cover to cover, but for now I’ll just throw out some lines as I flip through it again. Maybe you’ll get a little sense of the man who, as the title of this book happily points out, was synonymous with American tennis for 30 years. He might even have something to say to us as players and fans today.

On the professional vs. the amateur game: “Things are not so pure in tennis today. But at least the players have a voice and a piece of the action. In the shamateur [he almost always substitutes this term for amateur] days, we were only athletic gigolos, and the system was immoral and evil. I mean to be harsh. Tennis has changed so much in the last decade that it will not be long before the shamateur days are looked on fondly, all quaint nostalgia. I don’t want the truth forgotten. The overall system was rotten."

On his dad: "What is good about me is a gift from my father, and what is bad is my own doing. It is a great comfort in life to grow up secure in the knowledge that your father is the finest man in the world. Learning to play tennis was easy after my father got through teaching me ethics, integrity, and fairness."

On being called for a foot-fault as a teenager: “The moment I started to show any kind of big head Dad would call me ‘Cocky’ and stick me right back in my place. One time when I was just starting to win, I began to think I was a big shot, and I carried on a running argument with an umpire. When he called me for a foot-fault, I blew my stack altogether and threw my racket over the fence. I looked up and saw my father approaching the umpire’s chair. I felt like a million dollars: My old man was going to show this guy that his boy couldn’t be pushed around. Yes, sir! After a few seconds of conferring with Dad, the referee suddenly stood up, waved his arms, and announced that the match was over, the win going to my opponent by default. My father had called it off. Our discussion was very brief. “Cocky,” he said, “if you ever do that again, you’ll never go back on a tennis court as long as you live in my house.”

On being 60 years old: “I don’t want to sound like an invalid. I’m not. I was skinny as hell as a kid. I never had to worry about my weight, and I always ate all the wrong things. Now I’m a few pounds overweight because I can’t move around as well, but I still eat all the wrong things.”

On his style: “All things considered, I’ve always been a conservative person in most things, while I have always been listed as a revolutionary in tennis.”

On his financial philosophy: "I know I'm still affected by having grown up [during the 1930s]. I know it is foolish, and I know it must have something to do with my Depression insecurity, but I carry a great deal of cash on me. I always have a couple thousand bucks in my pockets."

On the second serve: “The most important percentage shot in tennis is the scond serve. A big cannonball is wonderful, but it can’t carry you. A second serve can make or break you. A kid like John Newcombe became a champion only because he could a great second serve.”

On the GOAT, and why improved equipment doesn't automatically produce better players: “Don Budge is still the best player I ever saw, and Ellsworth Vines is second. Day in and day out, Budge played at the highest level. What am I supposed to do, say that Connors is better than Budge even though he loses, just because Colin Dibley serves a ball faster than Tilden?”

On Laver: “I’m well aware that he’s the only man ever to win two Grand Slams, and he was unbeatable for a year or two in the late 60s. But he and Pancho Gonzalez came close enough together  for me to make a careful comparison of the two, and I’m positive Gonzalez would have beaten Laver regularly.”

On a failed Open era: “The terrible thing is that professional tennis should have taken over in the 1930s. There was genuine agitation for an open game, but the motion failed by a hair. The only thing lacking with the pros [of that time] is that they didn’t have some dumb sonuvabitch like me around who could put an organized tour together.”

On the women’s tour: “I have been tagged an ogre by the girls, and that is going to stick.”

On the Battle of the Sexes: “As for Riggs, Billie Jean beat him fair and square. A lot of men, especially around our age, were so stunned when he lost that they figured he must have tanked. Budge is convinced of that. But what motive would he have for that? Bobby Riggs, the greatest ham in the world, gets his greatest audience—and purposely looks bad? There’s no way.”

On the women’s GOAT: “The best female player I’ve ever seen is Helen Wills Moody. She would have run today’s women players into the ground.”

On the 1973 Wimbledon boycott: “We gathered in the face of the most biased press coverage. We were accused of everything except the one thing that counted, standing up for the rights of all players.”

On Nastase: “He’s a fascinating kid. People are always amazed when they hear me point out that he is not that bad a kid off the court. Dumb, yes.”

On the future: “The democratization of tennis has come a long way in a short time. . . . The next 50 years are really going to be something. I’ll buy tickets to get in."

Have a good weekend.

Reading the Readers: Babbling On	09/17/2009 - 7:00 PM

It’s nice to get responses, even when you don’t have time to get through them all. Still, I saw enough today to get the gist. Let me respond to a few comments and add a couple thoughts to the Serena situation before we “move on.”

—From Weekend Warrior: “Didn’t you have a post the day after Serena’s tirade saying that the linesperson should not have inserted herself into that semis match? It seems to have conveniently disappeared.”

Wasn’t me. That’s the linesperson’s job, as long as she’s sure of what she's doing. If it was a mistake, it wasn’t because it came at an inconvenient time for one of the players.

I’ll also take this opportunity to add something I neglected to put in my first post on the subject. The common line, as laid down by John McEnroe, has been “you can’t make that call at that point in the match.” McEnroe shifts the decision and the blame to the official and away from the player. But players have responsibilities, too, the most basic of which is learning to serve without foot-faulting. The real rule of thumb that should be followed in this situation is:

You can't allow yourself to be called for a foot-fault at that point in a match.

As for the triviality of the rule, if you’ve ever played a serve-and-volleyer who foot faults, you know it makes a difference in how quickly that person gets to the net. Should only serve-and-volleyers be called for them?

—From a: “Why no mention of r-fed using the f-word? Why only hang Serena?"

I didn’t hear Federer curse (he said s---, right?) at the time, because I was in the stadium—you really do see more on TV in a lot of ways. He was fined, and it would have been acceptable for him to be warned on the court. And if he’d raised his racquet and shouted the same words that Serena used at a line judge, I’d hope he would have been defaulted immediately. There are words, and then there’s the way you use them.

—From Richie: “It seemed like an overly long Open.”

You’re right, it really did seem to go on longer than usual this year. In the end, I thought it was a great one. I sat in Federer’s presser after his loss and it dawned on me what a ridiculously dramatic Slam season the guy has had. Cries after a five-set loss to Nadal in Oz; wins the French for the first time to complete career Slam; wins a 16-14 fifth set over Roddick for 15^th major; and finishes with another five-set loss to del Potro in New York. How much emotion can you pack into a year on the job?

—From Red: “Hey Steve, what grade would give yourself for your predictions this tournament?”

An F. This was the worst tournament I can remember.

But really, are people bothered if I get a prediction wrong? I usually hate it more when someone else is right. I do them for fun and as a way to preview the event; the point is to make them interesting or even a little outrageous, as much as it is to be correct. It’s a sportswriter’s axiom that you’re not allowed to always go “chalk.” I did nearly go with DP before this one, but opted for Murray. So what?

—From siggy, a few posts ago: “Steve, what did you study in college, and where, if you don’t mind me asking, did you matriculate?”

I was an English major at Swarthmore College, near Philadelphia. But I learned as much from reading old issues of Rolling Stone and out-of-print Pauline Kael books in the school library as I did from anything in my classes.

—From abbey: "My favorite was about del Potro's player box as the repeated hugs captured my attention, too. The way you wrote about, actually made me tear up."

I have to take a moment to say thank you for that. I wouldn't want to write anything about tennis if I didn't think I could make people feel an emotional connection to it.

—From Penny: “Steve Tignor has no idea what he’s talking about. Babbling fool.”

That’s a good name for a blog: babblingfool.com

***

Will be back soon with a Jack Kramer tribute. Thanks for the comments.

"Much Better"	09/15/2009 - 6:50 PM

Juan Martin del Potro

What will I remember from this most logical and inevitable—though still stunning—Grand Slam breakthrough?

—Del Potro lumbering slowly behind the baseline as he set up to serve, and finishing by blowing on the heel of his right hand. It was a ritual that exuded self-assurance, and seemed to help him gather more of it with each point.

—Del Potro enlarging the court and ranging backward behind the baseline to track down a forehand in the corner and unleashing a flat line drive past his opponent. There were two remarkable aspects to this shot: It had absolutely no arc, and when it hit the DecoTurf, it didn’t so much bounce as skid, like something coming off ice.

—The Argentine, from the third set on, forcing Federer back with his heavier, thuddier shots. The world’s best was suddenly just hanging on for dear life, surviving with his squash shot. From my perspective in the 10th row off the baseline, it seemed like, if del Potro believed in himself, that it was only a matter of time before he would overwhelm Federer. For the day, at least, the sport had been handed over to a new, taller, rangier, more physical, and powerful generation.

—Del Potro’s player box. For anyone who’s seen all he ever needs to see of Anna Wintour’s straw helmet, Gavin Rossdale’s ever-ascending forehead, and his wife, what’s her name, this kid from small-town Argentina couldn’t have been a bigger breath of fresh air. He had his manager, his coach, Davin, and his trainer, Orazi (when I see the similar-looking Davin and Orazi next to del Potro at tournaments, my brain always goes, “Hi, my name’s Larry, this is my brother, Darrell, and this is my other brother, Darrell.”) Behind them were two rows of very empty, and very desirable, seats. When DP clambered up there afterward, all they could do was hug each other over and over; they didn’t have anyone else. The vibe wasn’t “us against the world,” though, the way it is with Maria Sharapova’s player box; DP doesn’t do confrontation. It was just “us.” 

—Dick Enberg opening the trophy presentation by asking del Potro how he felt, considering that the Argentine had claimed that the previous day, when he'd crushed Rafael Nadal, had been the best of his life. DP answered without missing a beat, and with maximum brevity: He said he felt "much better." 

—The sight of del Potro in the press room afterward. One of my favorite rituals at the Slams is the champion bringing the trophy with him up to the dais. I wasn’t shocked by DP’s win yesterday until I saw him behind the same silver cup that Rod Laver raised at Forest Hills when he completed the Grand Slam in 1969. Del Potro hunched low and, as always answered questions slowly and thickly. Finally, an Italian reporter had had enough. He asked, with mock exasperation:

“You always talk so quietly with this soft voice. Do you ever shout in your life, in your private life? Do you ever get angry?”

Del Potro, slowly and thickly, barely looking up: “Yeah, of course.”

—Finally, yesterday on the way into the National Tennis Center, as I passed through security and bag check and traipsed across the grounds to the stultifying press room one last time, I told myself how happy I was not to have to go anywhere near the place for the next 12 months. But as I walked out in the opposite direction after the final, behind a couple in matching blue and white Argentine soccer shirts who had their arms draped around each other, I’d changed my mind. There was a buzz around the grounds and in the air that I was going to miss; I wanted to see more tennis. A few minutes later, I got on the train back into Manhattan. The woman sitting next to me, who was coming from somewhere else, said, “Did you see del Potro?”

“Yes, I saw him.”

“I liked to watch him when he won,” she said, and put her hands over her face to imitate his emotional reaction after the final point. She had hit it: That was why I wanted to see more tennis, to see that emotion and relief that only a player who has won his first major can conjure. It doesn’t happen all that often nowadays, which only made the last moments of yesterday’s final that much more exhilarating. Thanks for sharing it with us, DP. A+

Kim Clijsters

I wonder if she even feels like she’s playing her best yet. Give Clijsters credit: She saw an opening at the top, and she filled it. And she appeared to me to be hitting with more aggression—intelligent aggression—than ever, while the only difference in her movement was that she didn’t do quite as many splits as she did in the old days (that’s a good thing, by the way). While I’m surprised she beat both Williams sisters and went all the way so soon, I knew she would bounce back with no trouble. As with Jennifer Capriati in her comeback at the start of the decade, if you can hit big and through the court on the women’s tour, you always have a chance. Kim can do that, and she can move with a gymnast’s sure-footedness—she seemed to enjoy scaling the wall to get to her husband after the final as much as anything she did on court. More important, she put a smile back on the face of women’s tennis a day after Serena had scowled her way out of the tournament. The trophy ceremony was a love fest and a big welcome back for a favorite of everyone involved in the sport. Her daughter danced, Mary Jo gave her a hug, and the guy crying next to her husband was John Dolan, a WTA pr guy who has had more than his fill of pro egos, but who couldn’t help but become a friend of Kim’s. Would she have beaten Serena anyway? It’s not a lock, given Williams’ history of returns from the dead. But Clijsters deserved the win anyway. You should get something for not dropping an f-bomb at a line judge, shouldn’t you? A+

Caroline Wozniacki

She wasn’t the edgiest runner-up in history—the bloodthirsty sporting rivalry between the Danes and the Belgians just doesn’t register in the Big Apple—or the most famous. A few minutes before the final, I was walking in the hallway under Ashe next to a blonde with two racquets who was wearing a nondescript gray sweatshirt. I didn’t realize it was Wozniacki until I got back to my desk in the pressroom. And I’ve spoken to her before.

I feared a nervous meltdown in the final, but she didn’t show much, if any, fear. Wozniacki is refreshing all around: She doesn’t shriek or look up to her box all that often. She uses her brain, makes adjustments during rallies, and plays purposeful defense. She solved the riddle of Oudin by employing the moonball, and used it again to good effect in the final—let’s just hope the dark days of Andrea Jaeger are not upon us once again. Wozniacki is a natural at the game who also knows how to move forward, even if her volley is an adventure. She made Clijsters, a superior ball-striker, work for everything she got. A

Roger Federer

What does the greatest do after he’s the greatest? Pete Sampras went into a deep slump, rallied for one more major, and retired. He was 32, though, while Federer’s tennis afterlife is beginning at 28. Yesterday he was dwarfed by his younger opponent, and as the match progressed he had to work harder than del Potro to get on the offensive. But while he was outplayed by DP for long stretches, and on his heels much of the time, you might still say that Federer let this one slip away. He went to DP’s forehand a lot, even after the big guy found a monstrous groove with it. And serving for a two-set lead at 5-4 in the second, Federer opted for a drop shot on a key point that he ended up losing. It’s the shot that won him their French Open semi, but maybe he fell a little too in love with it here. Will Federer become overly besotted with his maestro image now that all the heavy lifting is done? His finest moment of the tournament was a between-the-legs shot. Don’t panic yet, though. Even Federer, who was two points from the title, termed this loss “acceptable.” After the year he's had, both professionally and personally, he better say that. A

Melanie Oudin

The only image that could match del Potro’s victory plunge was the celebration Oudin patented after her three upsets: staggering forward, hands-in the-air, eyes bugged out, she was the slightly berserk face of teen triumph, American-style. Don't try to resist. A

Mary Carillo

Right from the start, she was tough but dead-on in her assessment of the Serena situation, blaming the player, not the official, and calling for a suspension. A

Rafael Nadal

Making his second straight Open semi was an accomplishment. Enduring another, very different injury immediately after the knee problem was troubling. Getting run out of town by del Potro was embarrassing, and a possibly a reputation-diminisher in the locker room. But he’s been here before—remember Tsonga in Melbourne?—and returned stronger than ever. The down moments in his career just seem to make him hungrier. If that's possible. B+

Jimmy Connors

Who would have thought we’d wish that Jimmy Connors would loosen up a little? At least undo the top button on your shirt, before you strangle yourself. And stop asking Martina what she thinks—she's gonna tell you anyway. What you said, when you said it, was pretty strong. B

John McEnroe

Mac, Mac, and more Mac. Mac on your TV, Mac in your ear in the stadium, Mac’s eternally-not-quite-balding (how much Rogaine can one man use?) head hovering over the National Tennis Center. He didn’t waste any time making ESPN his territory. I think Brad Gilbert is in witness protection—who was that man in black doing a mixed doubles match on Court 12?—and Darren Cahill didn’t get a whole lot of love either.

But Mac is good. He’s still enthusiastic, and his insights aren't overworked—he never tries to claim that there’s more going on strategically out there than there really is. But his argument that “you just can’t call a foot fault” in the Serena situation was flawed (more on why below). He remains a player chauvinist to a fault. B

Novak Djokovic

What happened to the days when the Serb and his wacky family fought Federer tooth and nail? Now he’s been mesmerized and softly intimidated like the rest of the tour. In their semi, he stuck his butt out for Federer to hit, he prayed to the lord for help, he never acted like he could win the match, and he wrapped it up, as always, with a nice big hug. Smiling is great, but that’s not what most of us want out of a tennis match. C+

Dinara Safina

I’d have more sympathy for her last-minute move to Armstrong if she’d showed a little more in the match she lost there. As it was, Kvitova appeared to me to be every bit as good as the No. 1 player in the world. Reaching that spot may have been the worst thing that ever happened to Dinara. C

Andy Murray

Has he become too methodical in his preparation, to the point where he’s ironed out his creativity? For a player of such vaunted variety, he had no options once he got behind Marin Cilic. There’s no substitute for power and aggression, as del Potro, who just left the Scot and his many Masters titles in the dust, has proven again. C-

Serena Williams

A foot fault is different from a line call for at least one major reason: No matter how much control a player has over his or her feet, they can’t know for sure whether the call was right or wrong, because they’re looking at the ball at that moment. Could Serena have been that confident she didn’t foot fault at the moment she went berserk? She had been called for three others during the tournament, so it couldn’t have been a shock. Rather, she was protesting the idea of the call, of someone having the gall to whistle her for it on a second serve at 5-6 in the second set of the semifinals of the U.S. Open.

There are defenders, most prominently McEnroe, of the idea that “you just don’t make that call at that stage.” The concept comes from basketball, where referees typically try not to decide a game with a foul call. But refereeing in basketball is relatively subjective to begin with; there’s some kind of illegal contact on hundreds of plays during a game. In the final seconds, it’s just a matter of the refs raising their threshold a little for what constitutes a foul. Can we ask this of tennis officials? When should we tell them not to do their jobs and call foot faults? Only on second serves at 5-6 in the second set of the semis of the Open? On match points? In tiebreakers? After the eighth game of a set? No, the simplest answer, as usual, is the best—they should call foot faults when they see them, and players should make sure they don’t commit them. It isn't a trivial rule, either: There obviously needs to be a uniform place where players start points, and the back of the baseline is the easiest spot for it. If you start to allow players to cross the line by half an inch, it will soon become an inch or two inches or three inches, until no one is sure what they can do, or what they can call. 

If there’s a rule of thumb that we should import from another sport, it should come from the NFL. Foot faults, like overruled calls in football, should only be made when they’re indisputable in the eye of the line judge. If there’s doubt, don’t call it. But that criteria should hold true at every stage of the match. If the lineswoman in the Serena semifinal believed without doubt she saw a foot fault, she was right to call it. It’s the player’s job not to cut it that close. And whatever the reason for the call, its obviously the player's job not to threaten anyone.

Serena was angry, at the line judge and at herself. You could see her frustration building during the match. Now, like McEnroe, she’ll have a new, unwelcome addendum to her career bio: A Slam loss because of multiple code violations, because she said—screamed—words that should never be used on a tennis court, brandished her racquet at a line judge, and even went back toward her a second time. As with McEnroe, her temper and her talent are intertwined; as weak as her first apology was, there’s no question that the fierce emotion she showed in her outburst is, when it’s harnessed, part of what has made her an 11-time Slam champion. But that’s what makes her punishment for it all the more necessary, so we can get more of Serena the champion, the Serena who rarely argues calls, in the future. For our purposes today, two f-words—foot-fault—led to more f-words by Serena; they can only be answered in kind here. F

The Logical Result	09/14/2009 - 11:32 AM

It’s been a tough couple of weeks for me as far as predictions go. I started by picking Andy Murray and Elena Dementieva to win their first Slams—probably won’t go down those two roads again anytime soon. Then I stated that Serena was virtually a lock in the semis, and she proceeded to . . . well, you know. And yesterday I speculated that the Rafael Nadal-Juan Martin del Potro match was shaping up to be a classic, one that Nadal would eventually win by dint of his greater experience. Ha! It ended up being a classic, all right, a classic beatdown by del Potro in which the 6-foot-6 Argentine made the No. 2 player in the world look like a glorified junior.

Not that anyone minds—we all know that the only thing sports fans want out of predictions is for the pundit who makes them to be wrong. So I'll go ahead and make one more. We have Roger Federer and del Potro in the final today; if this isn’t a heated rivalry or even a particularly charged encounter—in June, these two ended their five-set semifinal in Paris in the customary way for the men these days, with a big sappy hug—it is a logical and satisfying final between two guys who have had stellar seasons, and who played some of the finest tennis of their lives to win their semis in straight sets.

Del Potro and Federer have each surrendered two sets along the way, though the only note of real trouble for either came in Federer’s quarterfinal, when Robin Soderling found his range and came within one point of extending their match to a fifth set. But by the time Federer was wrapping up his next match, against Novak Djokovic, it was clear sailing and high-flying once again. He punctuated the win with what even he said was the best shot he’s ever hit, a between the legs passing shot winner. If nothing else, this shot—was it hit with topspin?—guarantees that Serena’s tirade won’t be the only highlight we get to see from this tournament in the future..

This is also a logical final because del Potro can measure his (significant) progress in 2009 by his matches with Federer. At the Australian Open, he was slapped with two love sets; on that evidence, he appeared to have a big-match problem. But in his next encounter with Federer at a Slam, in Paris, he went a long way toward shedding that reputation. Looking as self-assured as he ever has for long periods, he led the eventual champion two sets to one. While he lost, he didn't cave ignominiously down the stretch. Now del Potro gets a third chance to measure himself against the best.

At Roland Garros, the Argentine did a good job of attacking with margin; he got on top of rallies and took the right chances. Whether it was destiny, or the Federer Effect, or both (or are they the same thing?), he just couldn’t maintain that precarious balance for five sets. The clay courts required too many perfect shots. Both of these guys are better on hard courts; they each win by attacking and creating openings, rather than with consistency, and they each have an uncanny knack of coming up with winning serves in desperate moments. Del Potro has some advantages: His shots are flatter and get through the court more quickly, and he can use his two-handed backhand to attack with his return (though he typically chooses to hang back and direct the ball to a corner with that shot). Of course, Federer brings his own assets: He’s a better volleyer and more instinctive in his transition game, he’s a superior defender (though I’ve been impressed with how much del Potro has improved in that department since last year’s Open, when his footwork was much choppier), and he can create the angles that you need to get a big guy like DP on the move. Like most matches these days, only more so, this one will go to the guy who can hit the first forcing shot in a rally most often. If anything, this is more important for del Potro, who will have a tougher time getting back onto level terms once he’s behind in a rally.

It will also go to the guy who plays with more confidence at the end of each set. In the semis, del Potro cruised while Federer won when he needed to win. There's no question about Federer's motivation; he's appeared just as hungry and slightly anxious (a good sign) as ever these two weeks. And I don’t think there’s any question that DP is ready to make the final step; he’s surprised us so often with his orderly improvement that we really can’t be surprised by anything he does anymore. But Grand Slam finals have an atmosphere of their own, unlike any other match—time seems to slow down. The Open is a big, tense stage, and it tends to intimidate at least person in each men’s final. When was the last one that went five sets? Agassi-Martin 10 years ago? There must be something special, and scary, about playing in Ashe and knowing that, as they say, “the whole world is watching”—the stadium is so big, it probably does feel like time has stopped and all possible eyes are on you. Del Potro has never felt that before, so we don’t know how he’ll react. What we do know is that Federer, the five-time defending champion, doesn’t mind it at all.

Champion: Roger Federer