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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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.
