UTennis: Andre in '97	10/30/2009 - 1:58 PM

As we’ve been reminded this week, 1997 was not a good year for Andre Agassi. This isn’t normally the case when someone gets married, as Agassi did to Brooke Shields that April. But looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been a relationship built on a rock-solid foundation. Or much of any foundation at all: Agassi started doing crystal meth before the wedding, and when he filed for divorce exactly two years later, he cited an incompatibility in “tastes, natures, views, likes, and dislikes.” I’m not clear on the details of Nevada law, but something tells me you don’t need to list quite that many reasons to go splitsville in Las Vegas.

Andre found no refuge on the tennis court. He lost seven first-round matches, one of which came, in straight sets, at the hands of Justin Gimelstob (not that Justin wasn’t a good tennis player or anything; just sayin’), through the spring and summer. This was a also period in which Agassi now says he was taking the drug. Still, he started to show signs of life in August, just before the U.S. Open, when he reached the quarters in Indianapolis. At Flushing, Agassi made his debut inside brand-new Arthur Ashe Stadium at night against Steve Campbell. Above are five or so minutes from that match.

—These are the latter stages of the 4^th set. Agassi won the first two 6-1, 6-1, and dropped the third.

—Besides the drugs, the losses, and the marriage woes, this was not a strong era for Agassi fashion-wise, either. As much as we’ve mocked the spandex, the mullet, and the acid-wash of the 1980s over the years, at least it was memorable and in some perverse way original. Agassi’s black-shoed, goateed, grunge era look here makes me think of Johnny Rotten after he went back to being John Lydon. The former Sex Pistols leader could never match the bold and flashy outrageousness of his earliest years. What does a punk do when he has to grow up? Did Lydon ever try crystal meth?

—I’d say Agassi is sweating more than normal here, but that could be a combination of the shirt color and me looking for signs of drugs. From what I’ve learned this week, crystal meth is mainly pseuodephrine, iodine, and red phosphorus. It causes, as Agassi, said, a euphoric energy rush. Unfortunately, it also destroys a lot of people’s lives (I guess Agassi’s version of this was the loss to Gimel?). There’s no way I can imagine playing on the stuff or using it as a performance enhancer.

—Agassi is visibly testier here than he will be in the future. Look at the anger after a missed first serve. He’ll eventually lose in the fourth-round to Pat Rafter in four very good sets. My main memory of that match was how hyped-up Agassi was. He was over-hyped, in fact, and it was one reason he lost.

—Could this tournament have been where he tested positive? There are more tests done at Slams, and he was there for more than a week.

—Agassi’s serve is much weaker than it would become. Very little back bend or kick. He can still belt a forehand, though, as he shows on one point, but he had yet to develop the grinding consistency that he would use to wear people down once he devoted himself to getting fit. And stopped, uh, using crystal meth.

—He had also yet to develop his trademark post-victory kiss-blowing gesture. You can see that Agassi was an edgier and less lovable figure in those days. We usually think of his transformation as going from 1980s darkness—mullet, spandex, underachieving, cursing, image is everything—straight into the golden late-career light of multiple Slams, beloved elder status, ultra-fitness, fatherhood, and charity. But 1997 was a grim waystation between those two stops. There was still a negativity about his on-court persona at this point.

—This turned a lot of people off. For fans of the serene and classy Pete Sampras, Agassi will always be defined by his punk image and the nasty, blue-collar edge he inherited from his father. I went the other way; I liked Agassi’s raw humanity. He was surface rather than depth at the start, a constant seeker—remember the early Bible-reading Andre?—and a sucker for fads. He always talked about his desire to be “carried away” by something, anything. What is his crazed devotion to fitness but the flip side of his drug use? As Martin Amis said, we liked Andre because he always took it too far. Like I said yesterday, there’s something extremely American about this, and extremely American, for better and worse, about Agassi.

I don’t like knowing that he lied to cover it up. I don’t like that he played on when he should have been suspended. And I want to know who the heck “Slim” is. Those two first two things, rather than the drug use itself, will likely bother me in the future. There have been stronger reactions: Navratilova and Nadal have each said, in different words, that Agassi has damaged the sport. Nadal also wonders why he had to come out with it at all. Agassi does have a lot of books he needs to sell—his pre-recession advance was something like $4 million—though he still didn’t need to throw this fact in. I have no idea why he did it. All I can do is echo Amis: Agassi's fans loved him because he gave us so much. He's doing it again. He's still going too far.

The Week in Questions	10/29/2009 - 2:45 PM

Your reaction to the opening days of Doha may have depended on whether the camera was focused on the court, or whether it was panning the stands. Sparse and muffled crowds at important tournaments, particularly the early rounds of important tournaments, has been a theme of fall tennis for many years. But I don’t want to belabor that fact in Doha, because the drama of the matches so far this week hasn't been hurt by the lack of energy in the audiences. And this would have been true even if the bleachers had been filled with crickets (though that might have been disturbing to the players). But when Venus and Serena Williams play to a third-set tiebreaker at a season-ending championship in front of a few dozen scattered humans, you know that the event isn’t living up to its potential.

That’s a topic for another week (next week, perhaps). For the moment, I’ll reserve my questions and answers for the matches themselves. If they haven’t been beautiful to watch, they have certainly lived to their dramatic potential.

1. What did we learn from Venus-Serena XXII?

It’s safe to say that never have there been so few witnesses to a match between the Williams sisters. And while it won’t be remembered for the quality of its play—though Venus and Serena rose to the occasion late in the third set—it was a worthy addition to the Williams canon. What I noticed most, and it was something I hadn’t seen in a while, was Serena’s ambivalence. She lost the first set and started the second by belting a couple of balls as hard as she could. It looked like she might be on the verge of cashing it in mentally, which must be a temptation when your sister could use a win to help her chances of defending a title. But fortunately or not for Serena, those belted balls happened to go in. She won that game and recovered her composure from there. But there was still hesitation and unhappiness in Serena’s demeanor.

When we talk about the Williamses’ matches, we usually talk about how hard it must be to have to beat your sister. I'd guess that it’s more complicated, and that those complications lead to wild swings in the quality of the tennis from each woman. You love your sister, you want the best for your sister, but when you get out on the court you also want to beat your sister. Subconsciously, you may even want to beat her more than anyone else in the world, the way siblings often do. Through the third set of yesterday’s match, I felt like I could see Serena negotiating those emotions. She played well and kept her emotions in check all the way to 5-4. But when she served for it, she fell apart and played her worst game of the match. She gave Venus chances and then used her serve to take them back. At the end, she let her relief and happiness out after a crucial backhand winner. Serena had beaten her sister, and her own tangle of conflicting feelings. Best of all, it was over.

2. Is Caroline Wozniacki the future?

She’s young, she’s blonde, she wears Stella McCartney, she just reached her first Grand Slam final and cracked the Top 5, and she may or may not have hooked up with Fernando Verdasco already. What is the ceiling for the so-far unassuming Wozniacki? Is she due for a serious reality check when Justine and Kim come back full time next year?

Watching her slog through two long, winding and surprising matches in Doha—she snuck through in three against Azarenka after losing the first set 6-1, then fought off cramps that had dropped to the court to beat Zvonareva—I’ve been struck by a few things:

Wozniacki’s first serve looks stronger, especially the wide one. Unlike many of her peers, she shows you when she’s enjoying it out there—i.e., she smiles. She’s got great feel on her crosscourt forehand. She’s comfortable settling into a pocket well behind the baseline, but doesn’t move forward or take advantage of winning situations instinctively. She reminds me at times of Martina Hingis, another eastern European transplanted to Western Europe, without the cockiness or the creativity. Like Andy Murray, she gives her opponents room either to hang themselves or to find their games; as we’ve seen so far with Murray, that hasn’t been a recipe for winning majors. More important for fans, though, Wozniacki is a gamer, maybe even to a fault. She played her first match hobbled by a hamstring injury. In her second match, serving for it at 5-4 in the third, she looked finished when leg cramps had her writhing on the court. She got up, served with a tear coming down her face, lost a 31-stroke rally, and still won the game and the match.

Wozniacki will struggle against the more explosive Justine, Kim, Venus, and Serena, but she has the persistence and consistency to beat everyone else on a regular basis—there’s plenty of room for a non-head case in the WTA. She doesn’t have the edge or self-regard of a diva who can bring new fans to the game. But that should only make her more appealing to those of us who watch every day. We know we’ll get her best.

3. Or is Victoria Azarenka the future?

Thinking about the up and downs of Azarenka’s season, the early peaks and later plateaus, the first thing that comes to mind is that the length of the schedule makes it tough for anyone to be good all year—there are just so many different phases, places and surfaces to negotiate. The second thing is that it’s tough for Victoria Azarenka in particular to be good all year. She can open up the court and put a rally in the palm of her hand, but just when you think she’s ready to finish it, the ball may fly haphazardly off her strings for no discernible reason. If you could put Azarenka together with Wozniacki, you’d have the next No. 1. Azarenka can hit through the court, but she doesn’t have the feel of her fellow up and comer. And while she’s fiercer and angrier than Wozniacki, the Dane may be tougher mentally—hanging in there is pretty much what she does for a living.

When the two of them played this week, I mentioned to a colleague that I thought Azarenka was doing a good job of controlling of those fierce emotions, which can get the better of her. Right at that moment, she took a ball and drilled into the stands, incurring a warning for ball abuse. A couple minutes later, she broke her racquet on the court, incurring a point penalty that put her down 5-6 in the third set. On the changeover, she looked at the chair umpire, picked up her racquet, and began slamming it into the court, as if to say, “You want to see racquet abuse, I’ll give you racquet abuse.”

Azarenka should have more upside than Wozniacki; she can make more happen on the court. But sometimes her hands and strings turn to stone—the ball kerrangs off her frame. And while Azarenka’s intensity drives her, it also doubles back and undermines her. Against Wozniacki, she stayed calm and let her mistakes go, until she just couldn’t let them go anymore—the anger is always there. As fans, when Azarenka goes out on court, we know we’ll get her best. The question is whether her best may be too much.

4. Is the No. 1 ranking cursed?

The two women who have spent the most time there in 2009 are Dinara Safina and Jelena Jankovic. Look where they are now. Safina has already staggered out of Doha, injured in part because she wanted to stay No. 1, while Jankovic showed up with less than her best after a long season trying to defend the points that got her to No. 1 in the first place. No wonder the current No. 1, Serena Williams, has never seemed all that interested in staying up there. It doesn’t seem to do good things for you or your game. 

In theory, we shouldn’t have these problems next year. Henin and Clijsters will be back, and Serena will start the season in the top spot. Still, the WTA needs to examine its system and how it weights events. While you can’t control Serena’s results in smaller tournaments—it would be nice if she had won at least one tour event this year—but it’s not like she only plays the majors. Right now, being No. 1 means something on the men’s side, but not on the women’s, at least not anything good. Holding that spot should mean, at the most basic level, that you’ve played the best at the biggest events. It shouldn’t mean that you’ve been the best at supporting the tour. At the very least, it shouldn’t be a cruel joke on its holder.

5. What do you think of Andre now?

Let’s leave Doha for more scandalous places. You know by now that Andre Agassi has admitted doing crystal meth, and that his dad is nuts (the first item is news, the second not so much). These are my reactions to Agassi’s admissions:

—We will likely never hear another player excuse a positive drug test by saying he accidentally drank from someone else’s glass (listening, Mariano Puerta?). If a player says this, I hope no one believes him.

—Guns, crystal meth, mullets. Who says tennis is a country club sport? Agassi’s story is pure red-state America.

—He secretly hated tennis. I wasn't driven into the game by a maniacal parent, but I’ve played just enough to know that hating tennis isn't all that uncommon. By the time I was done with the sport after college, I couldn’t bear even to look at my racquet. I imagine a burger flipper at McDonald's feels the same way about his spatula at the end of the week. 

Now I go to Indian Wells every year and watch the pros practice under the bright desert sun in the morning. What could be a better line of work, an innocent observer might ask. For me, though, when I see them get out there, get the feet moving, get up on their toes, get the racquet back early, try to get the blood and sweat flowing, hit their three or four shots over and over and over (and over), I feel pain. The moral of Andre? This sport can give you a lot, but it's work, often unhappy work, and it can make you do crazy things from time to time.

Who Will Deliver in Doha?	10/26/2009 - 11:27 AM

When tennis players talk about the schedule, they rarely fail to mention that no matter how many tweaks, nips, and tucks are made at the edges, the season always ends around the same time—i.e., too late. It's hard to say that's still true on the women’s side in 2009. Didn’t the year-end Sony Ericsson Championships in Doha, which begin tomorrow, sneak up on you a little? Can the WTA really be wrapping it up before the World Series finishes? The tour’s Roadmap has its tradeoffs—you might say that it lowers expectations for the tour as a whole—but schedule-wise it has put the women a big step ahead of the men, some of whom must keep slogging for another month and a half. If anything is going to get the ATP to shorten things up, it will be this glaring new discrepancy in workload. With the women resting at home, these last six weeks for the men look more brutal than ever.

Those questions are for the future; Doha’s draw is out now. It consists of the familiar pair of four-person round-robin groups, the White and the Maroon, which are made up of the top eight players from 2009—you'll see right off the bat that one of them is weighted more heavily with talent than the other. Either way, the top two performers from each group advance to the semifinals. All eight qualifiers have made the trip, and all of them appear to be healthy, another victory for the WTA. Let’s see what’s going to happen when they face off against each other this week.

White

Dinara Safina

Caroline Wozniacki

Victoria Azarenka

Jelena Jankovic

The first thing that catches your eye here: No Williams sisters. This makes the Whites a free-for-all, and a land of opportunity. None of these players are what you would call red hot; they’ve basically staggered their way into the desert. Jankovic's No. 1 ranking was fumbled away long before she posted good results in Cincinnati and Tokyo. Wozniacki has slumped after her run to the U.S. Open final; she retired with an injury in Luxembourg last week and may be shaken by an investigation over it (she quit when she was up a set and 5-0). Azarenka expended all of her energy by mid-year. And bad has turned to worse for Safina since the Open. This may sound like a depressing litany for a year-end event, but in a perverse way it makes the Whites more intriguing. All of their matches will be crucial and unpredictable.

The first of them takes place Tuesday between Jankovic and Azarenka. JJ has won their last three meetings, the most meaningful of which came this summer in Cincinnati, and Azarenka has reached just one quarterfinal since Wimbledon. As for the other Whites, Wozniacki and Safina have played only one time, on clay this year in Madrid, where the Russian won in straight sets. But a lot has changed in their levels of confidence over the last six months. Wozniacki, despite her feeble fall results, is still a rising commodity. Her fundamental trait, her steadiness, should serve her well as she faces her less reliable opponents.

Semifinalists: Wozniacki, Jankovic

Maroon

Serena Williams

Svetlana Kuznetsova

Elena Dementieva

Venus Williams

The first thing that catches your eye here: Two Williams sisters. With fellow big hitters Dementieva and Kuznetsova, they comprise a fearsomely strong foursome—look for the missiles to be fired, both accurately and inaccurately, on the Maroon side. The upside to this imbalance of power is that the two top finishers here can only meet in the final.

Perhaps the most significant statistic to keep in mind is that the ostensible favorite and top seed, Serena Williams, has never been at her best in the season-ending championship. She’s won it just once, in 2001, and hasn’t qualified for the semis since ’04. Last year, her sister got the better of her and went on to win the whole thing.

Which means that the Maroons should be nearly as chaotic as the Whites. You might think that Dementieva would thrive at a sub-Slam event like this, but her career record in year-enders is a stunning 5-16 (though she did reach the semis last year), and she has had a poor last third of 2009. Still, despite her periodic disasters, Dementieva is capable of beating anyone and has made herself a better player with age. As for her countrywoman, who can predict what Kuznetsova will do next? She also has the raw pace and mobility to hang with anyone—she beat Serena on her way to winning the French Open this year—and she won the Premier event in Beijing a few weeks ago. But Kuzzie is even worse than Dementieva at this time of year. She comes to Doha with a 2-10 career record at this tournament. You get the sense that she feels like the heavy lifting is done and she’s ready for the season to be over.

Who doesn't feel that way? Somebody has to win it each year, right? Last season it was Venus Williams, and she should at least be well rested this time around—she's won only five matches since July and may just be happy that Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, the Russian teen who beat her twice this fall, didn’t make the cut. Venus starts with Dementieva on Tuesday, while Serena goes up against Kuznetsova. Predictions aside, we’ll see four superb, if erratic, athletes go toe-to-toe in one day. Call it one more small win for the WTA.

Semifinalists: S. Williams, Dementieva

Final: Serena Williams d. Elena Dementieva

Marat TV: A Teenager in Paris	10/23/2009 - 3:40 PM

Have you heard that Marat Safin is retiring? His long and mostly painful farewell tour made its way through his home country of Russia this week, where he lost to Evgeny Korolev in the Kremlin Cup. Safin likely has no regrets about packing his bags this year—50 percent of his tournaments have ended in first-round losses in 2009—but by the U.S. Open he was beginning to regret he’d ever mentioned it out loud. “It’s too many questions about what I’m going to do, why I’m retiring and this and that,” he said with a tired but tolerant shrug at Flushing Meadows. If he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself, by August Safin had learned to smile at those questions. At least he looked a little happier than he had in the spring, when he performed the Herculean feat of breaking his racquet in half at the handle during an excruciating defeat to Nicolas Lapentti in Monte Carlo.

Not that it mattered. Whatever Marat’s mood, fans came out to get one last look, and hopefully one last racquet smash, as he passed through their part of the world. I’ll miss watching and listening to him play as well, especially his rifle-shot serve and backhand, but I’ll also miss the unique and heady atmosphere that would inevitably develop at his matches. There was always a giggling anticipation in the air—giddy girls will do that—and it would peak whenever he missed a couple of shots and began to look to the heavens for an answer. Here we go, you could hear the crowd thinking. “This is what they paid for, this is what they want,” Safin might have said to himself, Connors-style, if he’d been more of a showman.

But he wasn’t. Safin had all-world talent, but he was too much of a normal guy, even too much of a gentleman in a perverse way, to exploit all of it. The attention seemed to suffocate him, and he had a love-hate relationship with the sport, which his mom drilled into him when he was a kid. Safin seemed to play less from the joy of competition or performance, and more as an obligation to his athletic gifts.

I can see Safin becoming the Ilie Nastase of this era, the skilled head case whom fans will look back on with fondness and say, “I remember the days when Safin would be out there bashing his racquet. That’s when tennis was great…” Starting today, I’ll get the nostalgia going early with a series of You Tube clips of the man at his best and worst—sometimes they occurred in the very same point. I’ll begin with a look at a match I watched at the French Open in 1998, Safin’s classic five-set quarterfinal with Cedric Pioline.

—I wrote at length about watching this match in a post two years ago (wow, time does fly). It was the first time I’d been to Paris and Roland Garros, and the first time I’d seen Safin play. I was there on a trip with my family. We would eventually visit my mom’s relatives in Germany, but along the way we spent three days in Paris and two at the tournament. We were blown away by the drive through the center of the city, executed in the traditional whirling, zig-zag fashion of a Parisian cabbie. I spent my days looking up in awe at the house where James Joyce wrote, the apartment where Oscar Wilde died, and the house where Gertrude Stein talked (I liked writing); admiring the Marais while trying not to get leveled by a careening Mini; and finding the wall behind the late Serge Gainsbourg’s house, where love notes to him are scrawled—call it the hipster version of Jim Morrison’s grave. We had a great time, and we saw some great matches.

—The videos of this day are broken into six parts. None are perfect encapsulations, the way the You Tube highlight reels are, but each gives you an idea of what was going on. I chose this one in part because the sun was out during this part of the match. I remember it coming in and out that day, and it was chilly enough that its rays made you feel like a new and better afternoon had broken out. Seeing a speck of that sunlight again here brings back the feeling of that day, the ambiance in the stadium, even the particular temperature and warmth and smell of the air.

—I also chose this clip because the first thing you see is a thin, clean-cut, 18-year-old Safin jumping to hit a backhand. If he didn’t invent this shot, he was one of the first I saw use it. But it was his normal, court-bound backhand that was the revelation, as well as the revolution. It allowed him to fend off opponents' inside-out forehands, which Ivan Lendl and Jim Courier had used to dominate through the early part of the 90s. This would help make the men’s game the all-around, four-cornered slugfest it is today. Watching this match live, particularly the pace Safin was generating, you thought the future of tennis was right in front of you. Seeing it 11 years later, it doesn’t appear that these guys are belting the ball with abnormal power, but that’s the way it seemed that day. Safin, who had beaten Andre Agassi and defending champion Gustavo Kuerten at this event, and who came out firing here, looked like he might knock Pioline through the tarp at the back of the court. But the wily old Frenchman adjusted.

—Speaking of Pioline, look at his old-school, long-follow-through, Heninesque, one-handed backhand, which is shown in slow motion just a few minutes after Safin’s new-school jumping two-hander. He was a wonderful player to watch, a mix of the athletic and the balletic. Plus, he usually appeared to be exhausted; or, as the announcer says here, très fatigué. Guess it’s tough to smoke and play tennis. The Parisian crowd, of course, let him know their displeasure through the years, but on this day he had them. I can still hear the chant: “Ced-reek!”—clap-clap-clap—“Ced-reek!” I’d never heard a tennis audience sound so united.

—For a fan who had only attended tournaments in the U.S., the center court at Roland Garros constituted a sort of alternative tennis universe. Clay instead of asphalt; red courts instead of blue or green; an entire stadium unified in its approval and disapproval, and ready to show it at any moment; loopy strokes and long hair; rallies that extended the playing area far beyond the lines. When you’re at Roland Garros, you can’t believe the court you play on at home can possibly be the same length and width as the one you’re looking at below you. It’s like a ruin—the Tennis Court of the Clay Gods.

—The alternate universe extends to the sports stars in the crowd. At one point, everything stopped as two people walked into the French Federation box at the back of the court. The crowd began to stand and clap, and even the players paused and looked. Anna Kournikova had walked in with a strange-looking, gap-toothed guy in a white hat. My parents and I looked at each other and shrugged. It turned out to be Ronaldo, the Brazilian Ronaldo, in Paris for the 1998 World Cup. (Look how young he and Anna are there!) Seeing the reaction of the audience to him, I felt like I was eavesdropping on the conversation of a very large family I didn’t know.

—Safin lost that match to Pioline 6-4 in the fifth, a harbinger of many heartbreaks to come. But I was impressed, of all things, by his maturity. In his own way, he drew the audience toward him, another harbinger of things to come. Late in the afternoon, Safin slammed his racquet to the clay. The crowd came down on him with a frenzy of boos, frightening in its uniformity and intensity. Safin picked up his racquet and immediately put his hands in the air to apologize. The crowd cheered; he’d listened to their scolding and admitted he was wrong. But as he was doing it, there was a rakish half-smile on his face.

We’ll miss that, too.

***

Next episode: Back in Paris six years later, Marat drops trou in the Bullring. And I’m there again.

Have a good weekend.

The Soulful Goof	10/21/2009 - 4:42 PM

The cavernous echo when ball meets string, the single camera angle from somewhere deep in the rafters, the overarching darkness, the elongated court that looks like it’s in the middle of a wind tunnel and seems to play like it’s made of ice: You know you’re a hardened tennis junkie if you’re watching Stockholm online at work this week.

Still, I had my reasons. Or I had one reason, anyway. It was to get a look, even if only from a distance, at a former favorite player of mine who has just resurfaced at the barren and frozen edges of the pro tour. Marcos Baghdatis, former Aussie Open finalist, Wimbledon semifinalist, foil for Andre Agassi at the U.S. Open, and a man who was described in a London tabloid as “looking more like an extra from My Big Fat Greek Wedding than a serious tennis player,” had dropped all the way to No. 151 in July. Years of injuries, dubious training habits, and the rise of a more persistent and ambitious group of young players had forced the Cypriot far from game’s big stages and screens. But after three titles in recent Challenger events, he’s back in the Top 70 (Kind of a meteoric rise just from winning Challengers, right? But never mind, we'll take it). Based on his three-set loss to Rafael Nadal two weeks ago in Beijing, and his straight-set win over No. 3 seed Juan Carlos Ferrero today, Baghdatis' game is edging back into form along with his ranking.

Since this is Baghdatis, we need a “to be sure” caveat about now. And it’s true, he beat no one of note in those Challengers, and Ferrero has lost in the first round of this tournament three straight years. But whichever Baghdatis shows up next—he plays Robert Kendrick, a match you would think he would win—it was nice to see his familiar, unassuming style and spic-and-span ball striking again.

Baghdatis didn’t look much different, at least from the view in the rafters. He’s still doughy, low-to-the-ground, and surprisingly mobile. He still bounces the ball between his legs and flips his hair around between points. He can still absorb pace and send it back with a perfectly timed laser from either side. And he can still hit a killer approach shot, follow it up by stoning an easy overhead into the net, and then kick the ball up and play a little keepy-uppy to the fans' delight. On this day, though, Baghdatis didn’t make many mistakes. He moved up to short balls well and caught them high and early—never a specialty—and by the end of the first set he was hauling off and hitting blatant crosscourt backhand winners on the run.

I like the guy’s personality—is there any tennis fan who just can’t stand Marcos Baghdatis? (yeah, probably, now that I mention it)—but it’s his timing I miss the most. I watched Baghdatis play Novak Djokovic from the first row at the Italian Open two years ago. It was a fairly ugly match that was lost by Baghdatis, who seemed to be in a despairing mood, more than it was won by Djokovic. But from that vantage point, you could fully appreciate, get a feel for, the guy’s aptitude for hitting a tennis ball. By comparison, Djokovic’s strokes, which are viciously elegant in their own right, looked labored—the Serb didn’t connect as purely and compactly with the ball. Baghdatis’ shots had a different sound; there was an easy full power to them, like a well-struck drive in golf.

Of course, Baghdatis lost the match. That was in part because he wasn’t as determined or confident a competitor as Djokovic was in those days, back when the Serb was still talking about becoming No. 1. But it was also because Baghdatis didn’t have the variety of shot of his opponent. I’m not just talking about using slice or taking pace off the ball; I’m talking about basic things like trajectory. Baghdatis does one thing so well—hit low line drives—that he rarely tries to do anything else. That can work against him. If his opponent likes pace, he’s going to get plenty of it from Baghdatis. If his opponent finds a groove, Baghdatis is going to have to outhit him, rather than give him different looks. And when his shots clear the net, especially on his backhand side, they clear it by inches and nothing more.

The top of the men’s game is rich with talent and personality right now. But there’s room for a Baghdatis, a warm and likeable showman, a goof, a guy who isn’t going to make the semis of every Slam, but when he wins, it’s going to be fun watching him do it—a guy who is worth checking out simply to see him make contact with a tennis ball. As Juan Martin del Potro showed at the U.S. Open, the men’s game can use someone else with the skills to surprise one of the Top 4.

As I said, in Rome in 2007 Baghdatis was uncharacteristically despairing, almost Safin-like in his readiness to think the worst of his game. As the match wound down and fans started to head for the exits—in the middle of points, Roman-style—a ball boy tossed a ball to Baghdatis after he’d missed an easy shot. He slammed it, unthinkingly, right back in the kid’s direction, just missing him. The kid ran after it, picked it up, and tossed it again. Baghdatis, whose face had gone from despair to outright sadness, let it go by. Then he walked over and put his hand on the boy’s face and pulled him in for a hug. Plenty of pros have slammed balls around tennis courts, but few have given out hugs to ball kids. Call it one more reason to wish for his return. Baghdatis may be a goof, but he’s a goof with soul.

Nikolay's Challenge	10/19/2009 - 1:00 PM

As we saw in the final, from a skills perspective, the sky is the limit for the Russian. Davydenko put on a display of epic efficiency against Nadal. His basic tactic was to push Rafa wide to his backhand side with sharp-angled forehands. What was surprising was how he set this dynamic up seemingly at will. Davydenko moved inside the court, took the ball on the rise but added extra topspin for margin, and forced Nadal to slice back defensive one-handed backhands until the rest of the court was wide open for a down the line winner. For most of the match, it was a startlingly easy strategy to execute, and I would say that future opponents of Nadal should study a tape of it. At the same time, though, this was Rafa at his most reactive and powerless. I watched these two play live in Rome two years ago, and Nadal was in the same rut—he hit short and loopy and constantly gave Daydenko the initiative. But that match was on clay, and Nadal found his offensive groove just in time to escape with a three-set win. This time he was on a hard court, and there was no escape. Nadal rarely ran around his backhand—when he finally did, in the next to last game, it was a revelation: “Oh, yeah, Rafa really is fast enough to do that. Why didn’t he bother to try it a little earlier?” But it was too late for him to generate any momentum, especially the way Davydenko was knocking off any shot that Nadal left hanging in the middle of the court.

The point of this final wasn’t Nadal, though. He tends to suffer losses like these in the fall, when a little of his competitive edge is rubbed off—remember the way David Nalbandian dismantled him in the Paris final two years ago? Nadal came back and had a pretty decent 2008. No, the point of this match was Davydenko and his partially wasted potential. Last week, to illustrate the difficulty in drawing up a schedule that works for everyone, I drew a contrast between the very top players, the Federers, Nadals, Murrays, and Djokovics, with the next tier, the Robredos and Stepaneks and Tsongas and Simons of the world. The former regularly make the finals of events and are always in contention at majors, so they ration their tournament appearances. The latter make their living by playing week in, week out; they almost never challenge for Slam titles. Davydenko is the reigning king of the second group, but he has the game to join the big boys. The Russian, who has joked that he has to play so much tennis because his wife loves to shop—actually, I doubt he’s completely joking there—enters a tournament every week that he can. If he could enter two tournaments per week, he might try it. He’s been busier than ever over the last six months, in part because he was out with an injury early in the season. Davydenko played three clay-court events after Wimbledon, and he has happily feasted on the injured fields in Kuala Lumpur, Beijing, and Shanghai this fall. Along the way, Davydenko has also sharpened his underrated skill with a dry one-liner. Talking about his chances at the upcoming World Tour Final in London, he said, “Maybe I have more chance [there]. Maybe everybody will retire and I can win London!” Talking about what he loves most about taking home titles, he said, “I don’t care about the publicity, but I love the money.”

Of course, he’s not really joking with that last line. Davydenko obviously loves to win, and it’s refreshing to see a guy support the tour with such zest. His post-title celebrations are always infectiously enthusiastic, and yesterday he ran over to plant a kiss on his tearful wife in the stands (maybe she was imagining herself at a Louis Vuitton store with the $600,000 winner’s check, who knows). But Davydenko plays for money, not glory. This isn’t a sin—I work for money, too (except on the Internet, but whatever, this is where the glory is). The problem is, this slight and wiry man has never conceived of himself as anything so grand as a Grand Slam champion, and thus has never dedicated himself to winning them. For example, rather than rest and practice during the week before the U.S. Open this year, the way most of the Top 10 did, he opted to play his sixth post-Wimbledon event, a third-tier tournament in New Haven worth 250 ranking points. He then had to retire—a regular occurrence with Davydenko—against Robin Soderling in the round of 16 at the Open. No worries, though, there’s always next week for the Russian. He was back in action by the end of the month, at another 250 in Kuala Lumpur, where he won the title.

Davydenko is 28 now. He’s won three Masters titles, reached four Slam semis, and taken down everyone but Federer. He isn’t a moody headcase like Nalbandian, and he hits and moves at least as cleanly as someone like Murray, who has dedicated his life to winning a major. Isn’t 2010 the moment when Davydenko should show a little more confidence in himself, put a little more of himself on the line, by seriously throwing his energy into the majors rather than finding more 250s to scarf up? On the one hand, time is running out on his Grand Slam chances (very few players have won their first at such an advanced tennis age), and his serve will never be the bail-out weapon that Slam-winning regulars like Sampras and Federer own. On the other hand, he has the all around game, the right mix of speed and pace, to go all the way, even if it involves having to beat Federer for the first time in his career (he's an absurd 0-12 against him). Djokovic and del Potro, both of whom have defeated the world No. 1 on their way to winning majors, are not so far out of the Russian's league that he can’t imagine matching their achievements.

It would require a drastic reversal of his mindset and habits. The Top 4 guys contend at the big events not just because they happen to be the most talented players around. They also do it by organizing their schedules around those events, by not playing every week of the year. Yes, they make up for the lost cash in the endorsements they get, endorsements that have famously eluded the Russian. But if Federer or Nadal lose at a Slam, it kills them. The question is, Does Davydenko have the courage to adopt that attitude?

It wouldn’t just be Davydenko and his wife's wardrobe that would benefit. The sport’s fans would as well. While he wins with efficiency—his older brother turned him into a virtual tennis-practicing robot as a kid—it is nevertheless a poetic efficiency. Davydenko may not be outwardly charismatic, unless you like your tennis players to look like villains from American Cold War movies, but anyone who plays the sport can appreciate what he does. Watch the way he springs forward and, with just a couple quick and sure steps, cuts off the angle on his ground strokes. Check out the set-up and balance on his forehand. See him hit with accuracy and power to all four corners of the court. And marvel at the pragmatic flair with which he carves around a backhand volley for a winner. Davydenko is all business, but there's nothing brutal or mindnumbing about watching him go about it.

Like I said, he’s got a dry cool wit, too. Here’s Davydenko’s assessment of his win over Djokovic in the semis in Shanghai: “I was lucky, he was lucky. In the tiebreak, I was more lucky.” Unfortunately, that’s not the way most Grand Slam champions think or talk. I don’t know about you, though, but I’d love to hear him take the mike on the trophy stand in Melbourne or Paris next year and tell the world that he finally won a Grand Slam title because he was “more lucky” than his opponent. I think he'd love to say it as well. It's time for him to try to make it happen. After all, the majors aren't all about glory. They come with a lot of money, too.

UTennis: The Missing Half	10/16/2009 - 2:54 PM

So I get up this morning, after writing at length about the desolation that had permeated the Shanghai Masters this week, and I find a brand new tournament on my TV. The stands are crowded, the spectators are noisy, the shots sound louder and bolder, and the play, between Gilles Simon and Novak Djokovic, is inspired. Who said this part of the season was “pointless overkill”? Were those my words, just yesterday?

While the rest of the game's marquee names have been dropping like flies, Djokovic and Rafael Nadal have begun to find their form in China, five months after they staged their version of Death in the Afternoon in Madrid and opened the door for Roger Federer to step into history. Until last week, neither the Serb nor the Spaniard had won a tournament since. Nadal benefited today from another retirement, by Ivan Ljubicic, but he did turn around what looked like a very unpromising opening to his match. Meanwhile, Djokovic took his own frustration with a first-set loss and used it for motivation, rather than letting it use him. He got mad in the third set against Simon, and then he got better. They played some fabulous points along the way.

The match, with its long and winding rallies, reminded me of the three-setter that took place at the year-end Masters Cup in Shanghai a year ago, between Roger Federer and Andy Murray. Federer was injured and Murray had already qualified for the semifinals, but their competitive juices couldn't be stopped, and the result was a grueling classic. These two guys are the missing pieces to the ATP puzzle this week—imagine if they had joined Rafa and Novak in the semis? But they didn't, so we’ll have to live with a few of the highlights from 2008, which are collected in the five-minute clip above (there’s much more where this came from on YouTube, if you’re so inclined).

—The first thing that strikes me is that Murray is a master of the edges of the game, rather than the core. In one early point here, he controls the rally to a certain degree with his forehand, but he can’t finish Federer with it, and the Swiss eventually works his way back in and wins the point. Murray’s forehand grip and stroke are slightly too flat and conservative for him to consistently hit outright winners with it from the baseline. This is something that the other members of the Top 4, as well as Juan Martin del Potro, can all do on a regular basis. If there’s an essential element to winning Grand Slams today, it’s being able to control and finish with the forehand. Del Potro’s win at the U.S. Open, coupled with Murray’s Slamless 2009, proved that all over again.

—As I said, this forces Murray to make his inroads around the edges of the court and the game. When Federer hits his customary teasing short slice backhand crosscourt, Murray is one of the few players who can not only get there in time to give himself options with the next shot, but who has the hands to drop the ball back while he’s on the run. And his forehand becomes more dangerous when he’s on the move; like Pete Sampras, he relishes turning the tables with that shot. But he isn’t as aggressive with it when he sets up for it in the middle of the court. Murray’s style and persona are that of the counterpuncher, not unlike Lleyton Hewitt, another guy who beat Federer 7-5 in the third in a classic Masters Cup match in Shanghai, back in 2002 (see highlights of that one here). They’re happiest when they’re fighting back.

—This match is a also a cautionary reminder of what the long season can do to its best players. I wrote last year that the best arguments for shortening the schedule were the late-year injuries to Nadal (he missed this event and the Davis Cup final a couple of weeks later) and Federer, who, as the announcer reminds us, received treatment for back pain during this match. But that also forced Federer to keep the points a little shorter, which made them more exciting. Check out the backhand down the line winner Federer knocks off in the third set; that’s not a shot he tries all that often. Still, in the end, it’s bad business to have the two guys who are involved in one of the sport’s all-time rivalries, the two guys who are the tour’s current meal tickets, staggering to the end of the season. The game suffered a major consequence of that in 2009 when Nadal was unable to defend his Wimbledon title because of an overuse injury to his knee.

—We can see clearly the benefits of soccer to the games of today’s Top 4. All of them are European, and all played the game as kids. Nadal’s uncle was a pro, as was Murray’s grandfather. I’d like to see a U.S. player make the fluid footwork transition that Murray does here while tracking down a seemingly ungettable drop shot from Federer. Murray strides across the baseline and in one motion switches gears and starts moving toward the net. (Murray has said he wasn’t the fastest sprinter as a kid, but he was one of the best at switching directions.) To finish this point, he flicks a forehand up the line for a winner. They don’t teach you that on the soccer pitch.

—Andre Agassi was quoted this week saying that he thinks Murray has the talent to win multiple Slams. But he’ll have to solve the power issue to do that. Del Potro’s U.S. Open win can be read as evidence that, all other things being equal, power still rules. You still have to take the biggest titles rather than letting them come to you, and you still have to dominate with the core elements—the serve, the forehand—of the game. What I do like about Murray, at least when it comes to his matches with Federer, is his attitude. He believes he's just as talented, just as athletic, and that he’s got a solid strategy to beat him. Even better, Murray doesn’t always sing the Good King’s praises.

The continuation of their rivalry will have to wait for another week. Maybe we’ll get a Fed-Murray thriller in Paris or London. Maybe we’ll get the Big 5 all decently rested and in good form for the year-end World Tour Final. If so, it will have been worth waiting through the fall season to see.

***

Have a good weekend

Notebook: Making Shanghai Fun	10/15/2009 - 2:11 PM

Like clockwork, it’s all falling apart on the ATP tour right now. Juan Martin Del Potro is getting a head start on his sophomore slump. Andy Murray and Roger Federer are AWOL, and probably happier for it. Andy Roddick, Tommy Haas, Stan Wawrinka, and Gael Monfils went on the DL for the week, some with more reason than others. Marat Safin is going out as a loose cannon (did we really think it would end well?). And, according to Roddick and Rafael Nadal, the schedule still stinks. It might even be worse than ever. We’ll find out if their complaints, which are ringing a little louder than usual, can create a full-fledged tipping point for this age-old question. Meanwhile, the show goes on, as best it can, in Shanghai. Let's see what's been worth seeing there so far this week.

Dead Flower

It’s designed to look like it’s in full bloom when the roof flies off, but the stadium is so wide open that the players appear to be contesting a Masters event on their own private island. Even when the stands are crowded they look empty, the fans reduced to blurry blobs of humanity somewhere on the horizon. But that beats what’s going on in the Grandstand; was there anyone in attendance for Nikolay Davydenko’s first-round win there the other night? I counted 14 people, coaches included, taking in Ivan Ljubicic’s upset of Fernando Verdasco. Unfortunately, the empty seats and life-sucking lack of energy only reinforce the notion that the season should be over by now. What may be more concerning is whether guys like Federer, del Potro, and Roddick, if they’re feeling a little banged up and sick of their jobs after the U.S. Open, will commit to this event in the future. I can only guess that the reason it exists and will continue to exist can be summed up by those pesky little Heineken signs that you see behind the players. If you’re a sponsor, one billion Chinese will never be wrong.

Another Minute, Another Schedule Complaint

I’m starting to think we need the season to be this long; what else would we do at this time of year if we couldn’t complain about it? My colleagues at Tennis.com, James Martin and Peter Bodo, have taken sides on this issue this week. I’ll only add that the troubles don’t just stem from the fact that the players and the tournament directors have conflicting interests. The players themselves have conflicting interests as well; the division is between the very top guys and everyone else. So far in 2009, Federer has entered 12 tournaments and played 63 matches. Tommy Robredo has entered twice as many events—Shanghai is his 24^th—but has played just two more matches than Federer. Robredo has earned $950,000 in prize money for his efforts; Federer has earned more than $6 million for virtually the same amount of time on court. Some guys, those who regularly reach finals and command high fees for exhibitions, can use the rest. Other guys need to play as much as they can because they know their earning years are short.

When players complain about having to show up for mandatory events, they're also complaining about having to show up for tournaments where they're not getting appearance fees. It's not the only reason the top guys are unhappy, but it's hardly a coincidence, either. You can pack the events more tightly together—though that would create other issues regarding proper rest between tournaments—or change their locations, but the tour shouldn’t scrap the mandatory aspect of the Masters Series. It's the ATP’s only long-term success story of the last 20 years. Getting everyone together eight times a year isn’t too much to ask to make it happen.

The China Syndrome

Not being pros or tournament directors, how should a tennis fan approach the fall season? It’s a tricky and changeable question. On the one hand, my ideal would be a schedule that stopped dead in early October with the season-enders and the Davis and Fed Cups. But do I feel that way because I’ve never gone through the fall without tennis? Would I miss it? I can only analyze how I experience these late-year events myself. With the 500-level tournaments, tuning in for the final on Sunday is clearly enough. I was entertained by last week’s Djokovic-Cilic match in Beijing for the hour and a half that it was on. But at the same time it felt like pointless overkill. "It's a weekend," a sports fan might think if he stumbled on it, "so there must be a tennis match somewhere." Football and baseball were on as well, both of which made more sense in October. Tennis has no season; it's always there, like wallpaper.

I’d like to think a Masters would seem a little more essential to me, and I have gotten up early this week to watch taped matches from Shanghai. But while I’m watching, I’ve also been reading and listening to music. I wouldn't sit and stare at a match between, say, Simon and Troicki or Gonzalez and Davydenko, that’s being played in front of a dozen people, without otherwise occupying myself. But as a background to my morning routine, it’s a nice addition—next week I’ll be doing the same thing with the TV off, anyway. And there have been some compelling moments. There was the anguish on Verdasco’s face near the end of his loss to Ljubicic. There was Ljubicic’s reaction to his win: He sat down in his chair and lifted his eyebrows, as if to say, “Wow, OK, this feels pretty good.” There was the spirited battle between Blake and Nadal, and the newfound positive energy of Novak Djokovic. There were the jaw-dropping winners, hit with near-disdain, by Monfils. Were these worth staging the tournament for? Or did the dismal sight of the very same Monfils throwing in the towel after the third game today—I knew immediately that he was going to retire—negate the good stuff?

Taken together, if this is all I’m getting from Shanghai, it's an argument against fall tennis for me. Better to have the time away from the sport and come back craving the new season in January.

Of course, if Nadal and Djokovic come out firing in the final and give us Madrid II here, forget I said anything. 

The Rafa Syndrome

Speaking of Nadal-Blake, two things came to mind watching those athletes gallop all over the court. One, Nadal has a knack for great matches—he's been involved in the two best of 2009. This is because, while he isn't completely defensive or reactive, he lets the other guy play his game. His opponent, as long as he's Top 20 material, generally knows he can get his swings in and maybe find his groove. This is a big part of what makes the Spaniard's style so labor intensive. He often faces the best his opponent has.

The second notable element came in the final game, with Blake serving at 4-5. The American had played superb second and third sets, staying patient, constructing rallies, moving forward at the right time, applying pressure. But here, on a crucial point, he went for a down-the-line kill shot without working Nadal out of position first and missed it wide. On the next point, Nadal got a good look at a second serve and dumped a nervous return into the net. Here in a nutshell were these two guys weaknesses, and here they were cropping up again at just the wrong moments. I thought of John McEnroe’s line about how he chokes in every match he plays; it’s just a matter of how he manages his choking. A few minutes later, Nadal won the match with a down the line forehand winner. He’d managed his choking better than Blake.

Bellucci and Me

On the other side of the mental map, we had Thomaz Bellucci. The Brazilian lost to Fernando Gonzalez in ugly fashion, throwing towels at ball girls and making his racquet head into a Pac Man replica at match point. You could see the volcano readying for eruption two games earlier. The problem was, Bellucci was still on serve in the second set when he started to lose his mind. Each miss made him angrier, and even his winners seemed to disgust him. He was fighting some invisible foe, and it was only a matter of time before he was broken. I would have chastised Bellucci for his mental weakness, and said that this was why he wasn’t Top 20 material. But his irrational reaction to pressure reminded me of someone: Myself, unfortunately.

Keeping Up with the Jones

Speaking of Blake again, he finally has a new coach, Kelly Jones, after 20 years with his buddy Brian Barker. It’s likely too late for major surgery on his game, but I do know that Jones is an iconoclast. We talked once about having him do an article for Tennis Magazine, the basic idea of which was: “Everything You’ve Been Taught is Wrong.” I liked seeing Blake rush the net more against Nadal. Maybe Jones will be the right jolt for his final couple of years on tour.

Big Questions

It's official: Del Potro is so last month. Is Cilic ready to fill his sizable shoes? I ask the question at ESPN.com.

Drinking Game for Glazed-Eyed Tennis Channel Viewers

Drink: Every time Jason Goodall says, “to the good,” “brilliant,” or “full marks.”

Chug: Every time Robbie Koenig yells “world class!”

Do a shot: Every time Koenig says “lady luck.”

If that doesn’t make Shanghai more fun, nothing will.

Surveying Shanghai	10/12/2009 - 12:15 PM

No rest for the weary? On the ATP tour, it’s more like no rest for the winners. Today the four finalists in Tokyo and Beijing, after a sweaty week of success, must clean themselves up and get ready for an even more important event, the Shanghai Masters 1000. Fourteen months after the Olympics, the sport is still trying to seed that famous “tennis boom in China.” Seeing the crowds in Beijing last week, it appears that the boom has yet to be heard at home. The stands were more thickly populated in Tokyo. I know China remains the Holy Grail of all emerging markets—we’ll see what the audiences are like in Shanghai—but I feel like I’d rather watch a Masters event from Japan, where the sport is long established. It’s an old question for tennis: Do you expand and chase dollars in new locales, or do you build the game where it already has a foundation?

That's my week’s worth of Monday morning quarterbacking; I wouldn’t be a tennis fan if I didn’t indulge in a little now and then. Just consider yourself lucky I’m not bringing up the length of the season again; maybe that will be a subject for next week, when the guys limp out of Asia and head back to Europe. For now, though, while you were sleeping, the men were getting started in Shanghai—Ivo Karlovic is already gone; see what you missed! Here’s a look at what the rest of them might do in the week ahead.

First Quarter

The year just keeps getting longer for James Blake. He shows up in Shanghai, many miles from home, and who does he find on the other side of the net? Dr. Ace. Now that Blake has survived the very big man, 6-4 in the third, who does he get next? Rafael Nadal, the top seed and the guy who beat him last week. Nadal had some nice moments in his semifinal run to Beijing, but just like at the U.S. Open, he was run off the court by a younger, taller man—that time it was Juan Martin del Potro, this time it was Marin Cilic (who, by the way, looks like he could be the next giant to make a giant breakthrough). I know Rafa is coming back from multiple injuries, but you couldn’t help but notice that he was far from the same player who won an Olympic gold in the same city last year. That may just be the way it goes for Nadal. He was blown away by Tsonga in Australia in 2008 and came back to win the next two Slams.

Rafa's draw in Shanghai is respectable but not quite scary. Blake, who has beaten him three times, may be his toughest opponent. Otherwise, the names of note here are Robredo, Monfils, Hewitt, Isner, and Verdasco, who is playing for a berth in the last eight at the World Tour Final in London (he’s currently ranked No. 9).

Semifinalist: Nadal

Second Quarter

The giant sleeps here. Del Potro will be hungry (thirsty, too) after an opening-round loss in Tokyo, and his draw to the quarters looks like a pretty smooth ride. On the other side is Tsonga, who played nearly flawless lockdown tennis in trouncing Monfils and Youzhny this past weekend. He’ll be weary, and he could face a test in the person of Robin Soderling. Is Tsonga ready for a repeat performance, or is his Asian success going to catch up with him (he also reached the semis in Bangkok). Is del Potro’s post-Open letdown over? I don’t know ether answer, but I’m guessing it will be fun to find out. If the Argentine and the Frenchman play, it could even be a prelude to a late-round Aussie Open showdown in a few months. Tsonga is fighting to reach the WTF in London (he’s currently No. 7) but del Potro is 3-0 in their head-to-heads.

Semifinalist: Del Potro

Third Quarter

Remember Andy Roddick? You can’t say that name without thinking about his Wimbledon loss, can you? The grassy cloud over his head has gotten darker of late—he lost to Polish unknown Lukasz Kubot last week. It looked for a second like Roddick would get a chance at revenge in Shanghai, but Stan Wawrinka beat Kubot in the first round. That means Roddick gets Wawrinka, which may be better news for the American. He handled the Swiss in straight sets earlier this year, though that was in a Davis Cup tie in the States.

On the other side, Nikolay Davydenko and Fernando Gonzalez are slotted to play each other in the round of 16. It’s a hard section to call. Davydenko is 5-0 against Gonzo, but Roddick has winning records against both. I’ll take Kolya based on recent form, his final-round appearance at the Masters Cup in Shanghai last year, and his bubble status to make it back to the WTF (he’s No. 8).

Semifinalist: Davydenko

Fourth Quarter

How much will Novak Djokovic have left after running hard to fend off a strong challenge from Cilic yesterday? You can add that question to the perennial one with the Serb: What will his motivation level be? He wanted it in Beijing, but Ernests Gulbis, a former junior mate, could provide an unpredictable challenge in his opening round. The Latvian has shown signs of life—i.e. he won two matches in a row—of late. After that, Djokovic might see Tommy Haas, who has beaten him twice in 2009.

Elsewhere in this quarter we have the fast-rising Cilic, he of the del Potro-like slap forehand and the absolutely unflappable demeanor; he was positively Borg-like in his loss to Djokovic on Sunday. He’ll need everything he has to recover in time to play Tomas Berdych in the first round in Shanghai. Up top is Gilles Simon, who won a couple of weeks ago in Bangkok and is another WTF bubbler, and Marat Safin, winner of matches against Pete Sampras and Roger Federer way back when.

Semifinalist: Haas

Semifinals: Davydenko d. Haas; Del Potro d. Nadal

Final: Del Potro d. Davydenko

***

Thanks for the prayers for the Phillies this weekend. They obviously worked. Can you give me one more tonight?

UTennis: The Lux Life	10/09/2009 - 2:42 PM

It’s the solemn duty of every sportswriter to discover—or failing that, to create out of thin air—“turning points” in the history of competitive athletics. This may sound like a laborious task, but we have many tools at our disposal. There is the “changing of the guard.” There is the “end of an era.” There is the “new generation” of "young guns" and "hot shots," or, in the unfortunate case of tennis 10 years ago, “new balls.” Never mind that some of these hot shots and new balls may be only two or three years younger than the last generation; it’s all about finding the new, the different, the improved.

Tennis in particular lends itself to the turning point; the sport’s eras have been easy to designate in recent decades. One player—Sampras, Graf, Federer, Serena—will become the face of the game for a certain period. When that player loses his or her grip on the tour, there may be a brief sorting out process, out of which will rise a new champion for a new era.

There are also obvious broader changes that have transformed the sport and created dividing lines between eras. With each decade, the players have gotten stronger, and so has the equipment. The most dramatic of these transitions happened in the 1980s, when the pros switched from small wooden racquets to larger-headed graphite frames. Watch a clip of the all-wood 1980 Borg-McEnroe Wimbledon final. Then watch a clip of the no-wood 1988 Masters final between Boris Becker and Ivan Lendl. (Were the late-80s and early-90s the most entertaining era in tennis, after all? I smell a topic for investigation during the off-season.) Finally, watch a men’s match from China this weekend. You’ll see that more changed in that first, eight-year interval than in the last 21 years.

But there has been one significant changing of the technological guard during that second span, even if it’s impossible to notice at first glance. It’s in the strings. The crucial moment came at the 1997 French Open, when an unknown 20-year-old Brazilian named Gustavo Kuerten showed up in Paris with polyesther strings made by a Belgian company called Luxilon—previously famous for making bra straps—and won the French Open.

The clip above is from Guga’s semifinal that year against Filip Dewulf. Can we see a “turning point” in the making?

—First we remember the clothes. The bright blue and yellow, like a burst of Technicolor in the middle of a black-and-white film. Also, his ensemble was more original and easier on the eye than Andre Agassi’s ill-begotten forays into loudness earlier in the decade.

—Next we remember the Guga grunt, which would be extended into a long sigh in future years.

—Then we see the face and the long hair, still straight to his shoulders at this point, like he’d just wandered off the beach looking to hitch a ride back to his parents' place. The Parisian crowd embraced Kuerten, and he embraced them back. His free-spirited nature boy style must have appealed to their artistic sense.

—Then there’s the light-on-his-feet movement across the baseline, helped by the most natural of slides. I’d forgotten how open Guga’s stance was on his forehand. Did this contribute to his subsequent hip problems?

—Now we take a second, one second, to acknowledge the guy across the net. Filip Dewulf. Also out of nowhere. But lacking the bold clothes or the stylish game or the je ne sais quoi—it’s hard to recall a funkier serve or forehand.

—OK, back to Guga. There are signs here that he’s doing things that hadn’t been done consistently in the past. Watch the backhand down the line winner from behind the baseline. That had generally been reserved for guys with two-handers. Then watch Kuerten’s forehands and backhands dip as they head for the sidelines. While he doesn’t generate the same kind of heavy spin that Rafael Nadal does today, Guga's strokes are still more reminiscent of 2009 than they are of 1989.

—So is Luxilon the key ingredient? Are we now watching a power polyester game—virtually every pro today uses Lux in some form—as opposed to the finesse-oriented gut game of the 50s, 60s, and 70s? There are conflicting theories on the subject, some of which were addressed in a Time Magazine article in June called, naturally and dully, "The String Theory." (It's available online, but it won't open  for me right now.) There’s no proof that polyester does anything to the ball to increase spin, and one researcher maintains that the pros are still adapting to a more fundamental change, the widening of the racquet face in the early 80s.

Still, when I tried a full set of Luxilon, I did generate more spin, both top and slice (but mainly top). I also generated a sore shoulder, so I switched to Lux in the main strings and a durable synthetic in the crosses, a blend that I’ve used for four years. Of course, the extra spin could also be a product of the “dead” feel that polys are famous for, which induces players to swing harder (and get sore arms).

—Whether or not this is an important moment in the evolution of tennis is up for debate. What isn’t debatable is the bittersweet nature of seeing a young, fresh Kuerten dancing across the clay at Roland Garros. Was he a casualty of the modern power game he helped create? Was he a guy with a body built for an earlier era who accidentally started a new, more physical one? Sportswriters can place Kuerten on a tennis time line like any other champion. We can reduce his backhand and his string choice to evolutionary steps in the sport. But why would we want to do that? 

This clip shows that, for me at least, the blue-shirted beach bum from Brazil will always exist just a little outside of tennis time, free of its conventions. We identify most of the top players—Rafa, Roger, Steffi, Martina—with a single name. But with Kuerten we only needed two syllables. Whomever coined it, the combination of "goo-goo" with "gaga," of the childlike with the exuberant, was a perfect fit. It let you know you one thing right away: You were probably going to like watching this guy play tennis.

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Have a good weekend. Lots of matches coming up on the Tennis Channel. But if you get a spare moment, say a prayer for the Philadelphia Phillies, too. Thanks.