Christmas Story	12/24/2009 - 9:17 AM

If you live in New York, the first sign of the holiday season is not the sight of a titanic, glittering tree or a robot Santa swiveling his hips in front of a department store. It’s something both more mundane and harder to escape: One day in early December you walk out of your apartment and realize that you’re surrounded by even more people; this hardly seems possible in a city that already holds 9 million. Not only that, many of these people are smiling, and many are wearing colors other than black, the mandatory color of Gotham. This also seems hard to believe, but there they are, couples and families and brace-faced teenagers gazing wide-eyed, happy to find themselves in Rockefeller Center, happy to be jostled through Times Square, happy to eat at Sardi’s, happy, even, to ride the subway.

I can understand the appeal; I’ve been there. My sister and my parents and I visited New York from Pennsylvania during the Christmas season a few times when I was a kid. There’s a nice picture of us jammed together, smiling, in front of that titanic, glittering tree in Rockefeller Center. Even now, as a full-time, longtime New Yorker, I enjoy the bright, bustling spirit that descends on the concrete jungle during the holiday season. In the evenings, walls and bushes and lampposts that are normally dark and nondescript are outlined in sparkling red and green and white. Around the boroughs, chatty gangs of people pack themselves five deep at bars and escape the cold by hustling for the dim warmth and soothing noise of a restaurant. This past Tuesday, at a dim, warm, noisy, brasserie-style restaurant in Brooklyn, I had to hang my winter coat on top of five others on a tiny peg behind my chair. At any other time of year, I would grumble to myself about the masses of humanity in New York, about what a hassle it can be here just to get a seat at a restaurant on a Tuesday night. Why, three days before Christmas, did it feel so comforting to be caught up in that same humanity?

Why? Answering that would require figuring out what the meaning of Christmas is to us relatively godless, relatively liberal types in this country. I’m probably not the best person to ask; I’ve still never fully understood the idea that “Jesus died for our sins,” except that it helped give us a great Patti Smith line: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins, but not mine.” (Not that I really understand that line, either.) The Christmas most us know now is about communing with friends and family, remembering the people we love. It’s the time of year when we collectively decide, for one month, that life is pretty good—bright, sparkling, colorful, festive—after all.

What if you can’t buy into that message, if you can’t find that spirit, if your life doesn’t happen to be perfect when December rolls around? That’s when the season can feel oppressive; like it or not, this oppression is also a major, mirror-image theme of the holidays. Maybe that’s why, when I think about Christmases past, my mind is often steered past ornaments and office parties and egg nog, back toward an image of myself in New York in December 1991, when I came to the city by myself to find an apartment for the first time. It's an image that was scary while it was happening, but which I look back on with a sort of head-shaking pride, the way you can when you know how things turn out. It's the kind of pride that says nothing more than, Wow, that was me.

I had finished college the previous spring and was coming to Manhattan to do an internship at Rolling Stone magazine. I’d sent at least 50 resumes out and received exactly one reply, but it made sense in a way—during my freshman year in college, I’d discovered a set of red bound-leather volumes deep in the library that contained every issue of Rolling Stone. I went through them all in about a month. I may not have known Coleridge as well as I should have, but I knew Rolling Stone.

I also knew music, and for the trip to New York I had brought a mix tape—yes, a cassette—of various favorites songs of the moment. The one that stood out as I traipsed up and down Manhattan through a bone-rattling wind, looking at a series of comically miniscule living spaces, was Darlene Love’s “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Recorded in 1963 with Phil Spector’s booming wall of sound, the song has become a kind of national anthem of the holidays over the years. Love sings it every year on the David Letterman show before Christmas. Back in ’91, I’d known it was considered a classic, and I loved Spector’s famous Xmas album. The copy I own features the Great Weirdo himself awkwardly hunched in a Santa suit. But my favorite image is on the back cover. There, at Spector’s feet, is a teddy bear wearing headphones and sunglasses and reading the Bible—I can’t think of anything that better sums up the pop heart of Christmas in America.

I had four or five apartments to see on that frigid day in '91, and I would have to take one of them; my internship started in January. On my first call, after finding my way to the Upper West Side and trudging up five flights of stairs, I was shown a 10-by-10-foot space where I was allegedly supposed to live. Not only was it tiny, but it was squeezed in between the kitchen and the bathroom, with no doors to close the space off. The woman renting it smirked when she showed it to me. Even she couldn’t pretend the arrangement would be anything but horrifying.

The other places I saw, in the Village, in Chelsea, on the Upper East Side, were only marginally better. No one seemed enthused about having to bring in a roommate, to say the least. But there was a recession on at that time and people needed the extra cash, even if it meant having a stranger curled up outside the bathroom in the morning. Christmas spirit seemed scarce in the Big Apple.

But I had a little of it in my Walkman in the form of Darlene Love’s masterpiece. I may not have known it then, but it’s easy to see now why this song strikes such a chord: Underneath that magical-sounding Spector-esque mass of bells and strings and horns and God knows what else, the song is about the desperation that lies on the dark side of Christmas. It’s the flip side of that groovy teddy bear on the cover.

Each verse sounds to me like a short, unfinished letter from a woman to her ex-boyfriend. After a drama-setting bass intro, the first one begins:

The snow’s comin’ down

I’m watching it fall

Lots of people around

Baby, please come home

It’s as if she’s set out to describe what’s going on around her, but after three lines she just cuts it short and says the only thing she really wants to say: Baby please come home. The second verse/letter goes the same way:

The church bells in town

They’re ringing a song

What a happy sound

Baby please come home

The boyfriend is never named, and we don’t know why he isn’t home. All the singer knows is that he was here last year, and now he isn’t, and it’s Christmas.

***

That night at around 7:00 I came to the last apartment on my list. The space was almost as cramped and odd as the others: The apartment consisted of a ground floor and a balcony above it with a separate bathroom that fit no more than one person at a time. Next to this balcony was an opening three feet high where you were supposed to put your bed. It would be like sleeping in a vault. But the women who was renting it was nice, it would only be for two months, and, well, I had no choice. So I forked over 700 bucks and said I would be back in a week.

Afterward, I blasted the other songs on my Walkman as I walked past the Christmas lights of Manhattan toward Grand Central station and my train back out of town—the Pixies, the Velvet Underground, this new band Nirvana, and as a kind of inside joke, Cat Stevens’ “Father and Son.” That song never failed to make me crack up. My freshman year in college, a friend in my dorm had come back to his room and found the door locked. Inside he could hear his roommate, singing along, loudly and earnestly, to Stevens' song, in which a father gives his son advice like, “Find a girl, settle down, if you want, you can marry.” When my friend imitated his roommate singing those lines in a booming voice, it put three or four of us on the floor in hysterics.

The song and the memory didn’t seem so funny this time, on my own in Manhattan. I would have to say goodbye to the everything-is-a-joke irony that had sustained my friends and I in high school and college. I’d miss it, but I only knew a couple of random people in New York, and I was starting from the ground up, working at a job that paid no money at all. The world had gotten serious on me.

 ***

The best moments in soul songs come when the singer does something he or she doesn’t have to do. Often it’s subtle to the point of being barely noticeable, like Smokey Robinson slowing down and half whispering the “baby” in the last chorus of “Ooh, Baby, Baby.” Darlene Love gives us one of those moments near the end of “Christmas.” After an instrumental break, she roars back in for the final verse just a hair early, and she ups the emotion with a quick flutter of her voice. The song ends with an energizing rush that's almost triumphant. It' sad, the boyfriend is still far away, but you can't get enough.

If there was a way

I’d hold back this tear

But it’s Christmas day

Baby please come home

I listened to this song as I approached Grand Central. I’d never seen the station before, so, despite the cripplingly cold wind, I took a moment to cross the street and get a wider view. I remember bright white lights illuminating the imposing structure, which took up an entire block. There’s a wreath in the photo of Grand Central above, but in my memory of that night there are no Christmas lights, no red, no green, nothing but the white stone of the train terminal. You can go anywhere from Grand Central, its tracks fan out across the country. But one feature of the building itself is that, the way it’s situated on its block, it’s hard to see how to get around it. And that's pretty much how I felt at the moment. I was 22, I was leaving my life in Pennsylvania behind. I didn’t know what New York would be like, but I knew one thing about my future: There was no getting around it. It was Christmas, and, as hard as it was to believe at the time, I'd come home.

***

That's it for me for the year. Tell me a Xmas story if you like; otherwise, I hope you have a good holiday and I'll see you in 2010.

Going to the Ledge	12/23/2009 - 12:46 PM

Each year at the U.S. Open, we’re told that the tournament hasn’t really begun until we get a five-set match that goes deep into the night. For tennis fans in American time zones, the Australian Open doesn’t feel like the Australian Open until we wake up one morning before work, sip our coffee, flip idly through a few channels, and find a tennis match that’s being played live in Melbourne. You may have set your DVR to tape it at 3:00 A.M., but it’s too late to go back to the start now.

You're compelled to keep watching because, whether it’s Safin vs. Federer, Roddick vs. El Aynaoui, or Baghdatis vs. Hewitt, the first thing you hear is the buzz of disbelief inside Rod Laver Arena about what’s happening down on the court—you may not know the score yet, but the moment sounds historic. That’s how it sounded again this past January when I woke up and discovered Rafael Nadal and Fernando Verdasco deep in the fourth set, and the fourth hour, of their semifinal in Melbourne. There was a lot of scampering, spinning, and sneaker-squeaking going on, but the first shot I remember seeing was a forehand by Verdasco that was positively hammered, straight and flat, past Nadal. It wasn’t even close to the sideline, yet Rafa was nowhere near it. The shot gave Verdasco six set points to take it to a fifth and had fans in the arena on their feet. It only got better from there. It was hard to imagine that this match would be topped over the next 12 months; despite two other very strong contenders, it wasn't. 

—We get snippets of the reactions of the Aussie announcers in these clips. The first word we hear, appropriately enough, is “sensational.” As the match progresses and the shots keep coming, the announcers go from saying words to just making sounds, like “Oh!” and “Ah!” and “OHHHH!!!”

—This is the third match in my Top 10 from the Australian Open. We see again that the court inspires hard-hitting even as it allows the other guy to run down those hard-hit shots. And we see again that the break before the tournament allowed a guy like Verdasco, who had spent the off-season training with Gil Reyes in Las Vegas, a chance to improve his game before the weekly grind began to take its toll. Which, eventually, it did. Will there be another surprise like Verdasco in Melbourne in 2010? Who might it be?

—Some facts: At 5 hours and 14 minutes, it was the longest match in Aussie Open history. The first set alone took 75 minutes. Verdasco hit 95 winners overall. The final score was 6-7 (4-7), 6-4, 7-6 (7-2), 6-7 (1-7), 6-4.

—Writing about the Aussie Open final a few days ago, I mentioned that Nadal, when he’s feeling upbeat about his game, is very good at being tactically one-dimensional. In other words, he’s very good at finding the right moment not to be one-dimensional. He finds that moment early in the first-set tiebreaker, when he sneaks in behind a deep ground stroke and slides a forehand drop volley an inch over the net. Verdasco isn’t expecting it, and is nowhere near it.

—This match opened up as it went along, as both guys got comfortable enough to improvise. Was it something about the fact that they’re both left-handed? I’m also left-handed, and while I hate playing fellow lefties with strong serves, it can be an intriguing novelty to get into rallies with them. Instead of belting every ball crosscourt, to a right-hander’s backhand, you find yourself backing up to your right and looping the ball inside-out with your forehand from there, trying to get it into your opponent’s backhand. You can see in this match that Nadal and Verdasco are both trying to make this dynamic work for them. Whoever is hitting the forehand to the other player’s backhand will control most of the points. It makes for a kind of reverse chess match from the one we usually see in baseline tennis, and it contributed to the uniquely creative rallies we saw from Nadal and Verdasco. Who says you need a contrast in styles to produce classic tennis?

—No rally was more creative or improvisatory than the one that gave Nadal a set point (or was it a break point?) in the third. All of the slices and sidespins, as well as Nadal’s killer final hook shot from way outside the court, made the point feel almost playful.

—Then, in the fourth set, there’s another shift. You can hear it on Verdasco’s strings. He’s gone beyond playful and improvisatory and just started clubbing his shots, yet he’s lost none of his accuracy. With that nice, high, true bounce, the ball must have looked like a basketball coming into him. As for Nadal, whether he was rolling over it, around it, or under it, his spin gave him so much control that the ball looked like it was on a string after he hit it. It seemed, on this day, that he had finally made his slice into a weapon. By season's end, he wasn’t hitting it half as well.

—At 4-5, 30-40 in the fifth set, after five hours, Nadal and Verdasco had each won 192 points. Then Verdasco, who seemed to have left his old, unreliable self behind for good, reverted to form and double-faulted. Nadal finished the match flat on his back, while Verdasco was bent double on the other side of the net.

—I’ve said in my round-ups of 2009 that this was the year of the tear, of the Emotional Generation baring its soul. Most of those emotions came out on the trophy stand, but in this match, Nadal's eyes went glassy with tears before the final point, something I can’t remember ever seeing before from a male player. The picture of that moment, above, is a fitting testament to the 2009 season. 

If going to the ledge so often, both mentally and physically, shaves a couple years off of Rafael Nadal's career, so be it. Because of him, and because of his performances in matches like this, we've gotten to see just how far the sport can push a man.

Noble Efforts	12/22/2009 - 5:49 PM

“This sport can be so cruel,” Sue Barker said to Andy Roddick to start her post-match interview with him on Centre Court. Roddick was having none of that sappy nonsense, of course. In the days afterward, however, I realized that she had a point. Everyone I talked to about the match would shake their head and mention just one shot out of the hundreds—thousands?—that were hit that day: Roddick’s botched backhand volley at 6-5 in the second-set tiebreaker. You play the best match of your life and not only do you lose, but nobody even remembers a single shot that you hit in the court. That’s cruel.

This is the Wimbledon men’s final we’re talking about, of course, the third straight five-set epic to take place on the last day of the fortnight. Roger Federer was the common denominator in all three. He won two of them, and on this day set the record for the most men’s Grand Slam titles. He assured his tennis immortality, and by all rights should have wrapped up the title of Athlete of the Decade—if we’d known there was such a title at the time. At the start of Wimbledon in 2003, Federer had never reached the semifinal of a major, let alone won one; a scant six years later, not much more than half a decade later, he’d won 15. That’s not good; that’s just goofy.

—This match looks so sunny and crisp after the storms and darkness and drama of the final the year before. It’s certainly well played, and these highlights point up how many different types of shots were on display—deft half-volleys, perfect passes, awesome serving, a casually parabolic overhead from the baseline. But for the most part the action happens inside the sidelines; Federer vs. Nadal was more rip-roaring, and took the players farther afield.

—The first point we see is enough to let us know that Rodick was playing the match of his life. He extends through his backhand smoothly, hits a heavy and penetrating ball, and catches Federer a little out of position, something he hasn't achieved all that often in the past. It wins him the set. Later we see Roddick do the same to Federer from his forehand side, from way out of position. He was matching, even outplaying, Federer during the rallies.

—But that’s been the Federer formula at Wimbledon: Hit aces, hold serve, and win tiebreakers. It won him the title in 2007 and almost brought him back in ’08, but it never worked quite as well as it did this year. Federer hit 50 aces, won the second-set tiebreaker 8-6, the third-set tiebreaker 7-5, and held 15 straight times to win the final set.

—My cruel friends were right about one thing: The most important shot was Roddick’s backhand volley at 6-5 in the breaker. He said later that he thought Federer’s high pass was going long, so he hesitated. But two other things went wrong with this shot. His approach landed only a foot or so behind the service line, which gave Federer some time for his pass. And Roddick hit his volley with a weird grip. His volley grips have never been ideal, and he chops down on the forehand side. This is the product, in part, of having a two-handed backhand and a semi-Western grip on the forehand side. The more conservative volley grips never feel natural. I feel Roddick’s pain. I grew up with a two-handed backhand and could never learn a proper backhand volley grip. In college, in a dual match against our biggest rivals, our team was tied at 4-4 in matches. In the deciding match, my doubles partner and I were up 5-4 in the third set, with me serving. We reached match point, I served and came to the net—and sent a makeable backhand volley long. We eventually lost. Afterward, my coach’s only words about the shot were, “You had the wrong grip.”

When people talked about Roddick’s miss afterward, they typically said something like, “All he had to do was get it in the court.” That’s not true; Federer would have tracked down a lollipop volley. More than that, though, just because the pros make those types of high volleys look easy doesn’t mean they’re as easy as they look.

—The second most important shot took place three points earlier, with Roddick up 6-2 in the breaker. He had four set points, and he was serving; this was the time to close the door, since Federer would have the next two serves. But Federer got him on the run and forced Roddick to go for a forehand winner up the line from a bad position. Roddick hit it well but Federer came up with a neat crosscourt flick to keep himself alive in the tiebreaker. That ability to hang around and give his opponent a chance to self-destruct is classic Federer, but I wonder if Roddick would have gone for something less risky if the score had been closer in the breaker. He tried to end it with one swing, and it didn’t work.

—I’d forgotten that Roddick had a break point (two break points?) at 8-8 in the fifth. Federer served his way out of it, naturally, and knocked off a perfect swing volley at 30-40. Talk about a shot that’s not as easy as it looks. I’ve never hit a swing volley in the court in my life; Federer makes it look like he could do it while juggling two bowling pins with his other hand.

—Federer said later that in the fifth set he imagined the two of them playing forever, with long beards hanging down below their faces—now you don’t need to feel so bad about the crazy, useless thoughts that pass through your own head during a match. But Roddick lost his way in the 30^th game. His coach, Larry Stefanki, said that the shadows on the court, which were made worse by the new roof, bothered Roddick in that game. You can see that the last ball is on him before he’s ready. The better explanation is this: Somebody had to lose.

—Federer was the winner, and we can only marvel at his seemingly superhuman consistency. It’s come at the expense of Roddick on many occasions, but this time those superhuman qualities, that surreal 15-major record, the tennis nobility watching from the Royal Box, all of it served to make Roddick seem more human, more sympathetic, more dignified, more worthy. Who was the nobler figure at the end, the Duke of Whatever, or the American guy shaking his hand while wearing his baseball hat backwards?

When you watch sports, do you love the winner, or do you love the person? At this year’s Wimbledon final, you didn’t have to choose. Roddick was right: There's nothing cruel about that.

Death in the Afternoon	12/22/2009 - 7:18 AM

There’s an ominous look to the red clay as this highlight reel begins. The bright midday sun in Madrid has baked it back to its elemental state; the court appears to be as dry and dusty as a desert, as hostile as the surface of Mars. It’s a place where you might go out to play a friendly tennis match and not come back alive. Just ask Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic.

Their semifinal at the Madrid Masters was the third time they clashed during the clay season. The first two encounters, in the finals in Monte Carlo and Rome, had been stylishly dramatic affairs. But this one took the Spaniard and the Serb as far into their reserves—physical, psychological, spiritual, vocal—as either of them has ever gone. Neither player would be the same afterward. The winner, Nadal, would lose for the first time in six matches to Roger Federer the next day, suffer an upset at the hands of Robin Soderling at the French Open two weeks later, withdraw from Wimbledon, fail to win another tournament, and end the ATP season on an all-time low note in London. A visibly drained Djokovic would also be upset at the French, and would go without a title until making a surge at the tail end of the year. While they were in free fall, Federer, who hadn’t beaten Nadal or Djokovic in 2009 before this event, won in Paris and at Wimbledon without facing either of them. It may have been only the third-best match of 2009, but the Massacre in Madrid was the season’s most pivotal. If you want to get an idea of what it did to the guys who played it, check out this 15-second clip of Djokovic from his press conference afterward.

I was on vacation in Madrid during this tournament, and the strong sunlight at the start of the match is enough to bring back very vivid memories of the trip and the city—I don’t think you can have a memory of Madrid that isn’t vivid. The sun in that elevated, land-locked metropolis seems to hang right in the middle of the sky all day. It wasn’t just warm in spring; the sun felt closer, a part of your daily existence. Under it I ate stingingly fresh shellfish—how does it get all the way to Madrid in that state?—at a beloved hole in the wall called Ribeiro de Mino. Everyone orders one entrée, an intricately and perilously structured mound of prawns, crabs, barnacles and other gnarled sea creatures; it’s an artwork. Speaking of which, I also stood in awe at the Goyas and Velazquezes in the Prado and Picasso’s Guernica across the street at the Sofia. Wandered the regal and immaculately festive grounds of the city’s central park, the Retiro. Found a cool Spanish-language poster for the movie Blow Up and an almost-as-cool set of mustard-colored New Balances. And, on the day of this semifinal, strolled through the streets of the upscale Salamanca neighborhood, until I noticed Djokovic’s blue shoes dancing around on a TV set inside a café.

Earlier in the week I’d been out to the tournament site, the Magic Box, for a day, and I’d planned to go again for the final—this seemed like the right balance of sight-seeing and tennis-watching. But how many times do you poke your head into a café and see Nadal and Djokovic on the flat screen? I had to stop and see how this installment of their rivalry, which has produced so much jaw-dropping tennis in the last three years, was playing out. This is what I wrote when I posted about the match in May:

In the back of the café are three fellow tourists from the U.S., a mother with her teenage son and daughter. The boy was rooting for Djokovic, the girl for Nadal. We had the place to ourselves for a moment. I was thinking that I’d yet to find any spot in Madrid—bar, restaurant, shop, you name it—that was this quiet, that wasn’t vibrating with humanity. Before I could finish the thought, the noise of laughter and chatter had filled the room, and a dozen or so young men and women were streaming through the door.

Spanish or not, anyone who has ever been to a wedding would recognize this group. A marriage ceremony had just ended in a church around the corner, and this set of friends has escaped for beers and cigarettes. The men stood a little awkwardly in dark suits and ties; the women sat down around them on stools, taking the opportunity to get off their feet. Everyone smoked and smiled and drank, and there was relief in the way they swayed as they faced each other in a semicircle. The pressure of the formal occasion was off.

They also watched Nadal, their countryman. In the time they were in the café, his semi with Djokovic went from being one more entertaining slugfest into a classic. As the third set wound into its fourth hour and toward an inevitable tiebreaker, their conversation was repeatedly punctured by an “Ah!” or a “Si!” or a “Vamos!” or any number of involuntary blurtings that sports fans everywhere recognize as the sounds of impassioned disbelief. After each one, the whole group stopped talking and turned their heads to the screen.

There they saw a heavyweight fight on dirt. Through dint of effort, Nadal had shrugged off his earlier constricted form and was swinging freely. If anything, Djokovic was even freer; he wasn’t stroking the ball, he was clubbing it, but his viciousness retained an elegance. The wedding party may have had a reception to attend, but there was no way they could leave now.

***

Looking at that heavyweight fight again seven months later, this is what I can add:

—Tennis Channel commentator Jason Goodall says late in the match, “I’m running out of superlatives.” But the only one we hear, over and over, is “Brilliant!” Until Robbie Koenig chimes in with an equally appropriate “Ridiculous!”

—How many times has Djokovic started out on fire against Nadal only to find that he can’t quite maintain that level long enough? He goes up 3-0 here, and seems to be making especially good use of his wide serve in the deuce court. His ability to take a Nadal forehand and send it down the line with his backhand will always make him a tough match-up for Rafa, no matter what the surface.

—Late in the first you can see Nadal find his feet. He starts to build enough confidence to hit down the line with abandon. He’s not always confident enough to do that.

—It’s a shame Nadal doesn’t make it to the net more. He may have the best overhead in the game. Not only does he rarely miss it, he rarely fails to spike it with authority for a clean winner. And if a lob is high and deep, he’s adept at taking a little off it and slicing the smash into a corner where his opponent can’t reach it.

—Grunting in men’s matches is less conspicuous than it is women’s matches. You wouldn’t expect anything else in this one.

—One negative note: As compelling as the rallies were, this match was played at a very slow pace. It took four hours, but as Federer said, “those guys take their time.” Long breaks between points don’t usually bother me when I’m in the stadium. But when I’m watching on TV, without a DVR, it can sap my viewing energy.

—By the third set, Nadal is the one on top of the baseline and Djokovic is doing the running. With each game, Nadal’s headband moves a little farther up his forehead while his forehands get slugged with a little more reckless abandon. Like the clay below these guys' feet, the match in its later stages feels like tennis at it most elemental.

—The third-set tiebreaker speaks for itself. The match reached its peak and reached its end at the same time. So did 2009 for both of these guys.

***

I’ll finish the same way I finished in May:

The wedding-goers eventually stopped talking and just stared at the screen. Blue shoes or yellow sleeves, both guys—Djokovic exasperated but valiant right to the last point, Nadal willing himself to believe the day could end with a victory and having come too far not to make it happen—commanded our attention. Nadal’s celebration of this win, which he had manufactured for the home fans on an off day, could be set in stone and placed in front of the Magic Box. He landed prone on his back, hands at full stretch above his head, his body rigid as a statue. No town likes a party more than Madrid, whatever the occasion, so it’s fitting that in this city we saw a tennis match that was more than just a thrill or a battle or a spectacle. Nadal-Djokovic was a celebration of everything we call competition.

Serving It Fresh	12/21/2009 - 2:28 PM

Looking forward to the Aussie Open? If you haven’t reached that point yet this off-season, the match highlighted above might just get you there. The titanic and tiring third-rounder between Richard Gasquet and Fernando Gonzalez was played so long ago that I had to double-check the date to make sure it really did happen in 2009. It did, and if anything the clip above makes it look even more sensational than it was the first time around—these two guys did everything short of levitate out there. You know it was a very strong year for tennis when this was only its fourth-best match.

—Roddick-El Aynaoui, Safin-Federer, Serena-Sharapova, Safin-Agassi, Verdasco-Nadal, Baghdatis-Nalbandian: what is it about the Aussie Open that allows it to churn out so many paragons of high-quality tennis? First, there’s the medium-pace hard surface, which lets any type of player play his game—Gonzo and Gasquet can set up and hit their bombs, but also track the other guy’s down. At the same time, the court is fast enough to inspire them to hit big and try to end points at the net. 

The second thing the Aussie has going for it is that the players are as fresh as they’re going to get all season. Imagine the level of tennis if they had three months off! Or would that be too much time away? From the standpoint of this tournament, maybe the length of the off-season is ideal: There’s enough time for the guys to heal and practice, but not enough so that they get rusty.

—Some facts about this match: It was the first time these two guys had played each other. It lasted 4 hours, 9 minutes. Gonzo hit 85 winners and committed 51 errors; Gasquet’s ratio was a similarly impressive 80 to 58. Gonzo’s feet bled. Gasquet had a hole drilled in his toenail. At the end, a flare went off over the court.

—You rarely hear a crowd sound so into it right from the start. The Chilean fans, famous for their fervor, were matched this time by the French fans. Both groups are in full roar during the first game.

—Gasquet is into it from the start as well. We all know about his ability to find the zone, but I’d never seen him begin a match in that state—the crowd must have amped him up. When he hits an overhead winner from behind the baseline, it feels like this going to become a circus match.

You know Gasquet is hot when he’s hitting his down the line backhand and running crosscourt forehand for blatant winners. I’ve never seen anyone make it look so effortless. When he’s in this mood, it’s almost as if the ball and racquet take on a life of their own, and he can’t hit anything but perfect shots. Afterward, Gonzalez said Gasquet played like a “superhero” through the first two sets.

—Watching it the first time, I was hoping this might be a breakthrough for Gasquet. Even after he lost the fourth set, he kept fighting, which is not what I expected. He plays pinpoint serve and volley on a couple of crucial points late in the fifth, tattoos an outrageous forehand winner from the baseline to save one match point, and even tries his own backwards-shuffling, arms-pumping celebration dance (is that how he danced with Pamela in Miami, do you think?). Alas, it still wasn’t enough, and his season quickly went south. I watched Gasquet lose badly a month later to Fernando Verdasco in Indian Wells. Then he met the aforementioned Pamela and that was it for 2009.

—Gonzalez, on the other hand, makes everything look effort-ful. But give him credit for this one. He kept swinging with gusto and racing after everything even when he was down two sets. He saved a huge point on his serve at 7-7 in the fifth by guessing right and reflexing a volley for a winner. And after 82 winners over four hours, he still comes up with three more in the 22^nd game of the fifth set, including a backhand bomb on match point. The guy was relentless. What did he get for his trouble? A chance to face Rafael Nadal in the next round, where he lose in straights. It doesn’t take long for these guys to start feeling not-so-fresh again.

Now are you ready for the Aussie Open?

Bringing Out the Heavy Artillery	12/19/2009 - 8:27 AM

More than anything else, it’s momentum that makes tennis so nerve-wracking to play. Or, I should say, it’s the fear of momentum. No matter how far ahead you are, every time you lose a point something in the back of your head wonders whether it might end up being the spark your opponent needed to turn everything around. It’s brutal: You can’t relax for a second.

For anyone who knows that feeling, watching the 2009 U.S. Open men's final—No. 5 on my most-memorable list for the year—was like seeing your worst nightmare come to life. Here we have Roger Federer, a 15-time Grand Slam champion with a perfect record against his opponent, Juan Martin del Potro, who is making his major-final debut. Federer plays some of the best and most dominating tennis of his career through the first set and a half. He serves for a two-set lead and a seemingly insurmountable edge. But he doesn’t put away a short ball in that game, del Potro comes up with two brilliant passes, and a couple hours later Federer is shaking hands a loser, his five-year win streak at the Open a thing of the past. Let's take a look at the brutal details. (The clip above covers the first half of the match. For the rest, click here. I wasn't able to embed it on this page.)

—Federer is a fast starter in U.S. Open finals. In the six he’s played, he’s won the first set all six times, including a bagel over Lleyton Hewitt in 2004. Something about the quick surface and the heightened late-Sunday atmosphere inside Ashe Stadium must agree with him. He jumped out as quickly as ever against del Potro, going up 3-0 and making a stunning crosscourt forehand pass after running all the way across the baseline in the process. The first del Potro highlight in this clip doesn’t come until 1-2 in the second set, when he’s already down a break.

—To start, Federer seemed to be trying to work his inside-out forehand to del Potro’s backhand, and he had it lasered right onto the sideline. He also continued the strategy of bringing del Potro in that had worked so well in the French Open semis. For a set and a half, it looked like this was going to one more lesson from the master.

—A key moment that was lost in the shuffle: Del Potro goes down 1-3 in the second and faces a break point at 30-40. This is essentially a set point for a two-set lead for Federer. But del Potro gets in a strong first serve to Federer’s backhand, follows it with a forehand winner, and grunts in self-approval. He’s more famous for his killer forehand, but del Potro’s ability to step back and get in big first serves when he’s down break point is just as important to his game. After that point, the famous forehand started to flow.

—From there, it’s heavy artillery time. These guys’ shots come so fast and deep, they seem to pick up speed as they go. Jimmy Arias has said that del Potro is one of the few players who hits hard enough to throw the nimble Federer off balance. Watching from the sideline at this match, I would say that del Potro is the first guy I’ve seen who hits hard enough, with enough depth and low-trajectory penetration, to keep Federer from leaning into the court and creating the way he usually does. From a court-level perspective, the physical difference between the two was striking. Del Potro seemed to be wearing Federer down and pushing him backward—almost looming over him from the other side of the net. After the second set, it seemed to me to be only a matter of time before del Potro would win the match; Federer actually made it much closer than I would have anticipated. But he couldn’t hold him off in the fifth. I’ve heard that Federer thought he choked this match in the end, and I’m not going to argue with him. But it looked to me like trying to hold off the del Potro onslaught finally made Federer's own strokes go haywire.

—At the same time, I don’t think Federer gave himself the best tactical chance to win. Rather than continue to go inside-out to del Potro’s backhand, he started going inside-in to the forehand. And del Potro began to read it. In a big way. But even after DP had clearly found his range with his crosscourt forehand slap shot—the ball comes off the court like a puck off ice—Federer didn’t shift his aim toward the backhand. Afterward, Federer maintained that del Potro’s backhand is his more dangerous shot. Was there a hint of the fabled Federer stubbornness in this strategy?

—Have to love the del Potro player box. A coach, a trainer, an agent, and a bunch of empty seats. Why do need anyone else?

—Del Potro held his nerve admirably for a Slam-final rookie. The transcript of Federer’s press conference afterward has him saying that DP kept a “steel racquet” in the clutch. Sitting in the presser, I heard it as “still racquet,” which would make more sense—Federer was saying that del Potro had done a good job of keeping his nerves a bay. Look at the last point. DP hits a bullet forehand down the line that Federer somehow scrapes back over the net and drops into a difficult position short and low. But del Potro is there to dig it out and send another tremendous forehand up the other sideline for the match. He earned it.

—I’ll finish with my finishing words the day after the match:

Walking through Flushing Meadows afterward, there was a buzz in the air that I was going to miss. I couldn’t believe it, but I suddenly wanted to see more tennis. I got on the train back into Manhattan. The woman sitting next to me, who was coming from farther out on Long Island, asked, “Did you see del
Potro?”

“Yes, I saw him.”

“I liked to watch him when he won,” she said, and she put her hands over face, imitating del Potro’s emotional reaction after the final point. She’d hit it: That was why I wanted the Open to keep going. I wanted to see that emotion and relief that only a player who has won his first Grand Slam 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, Juan Martin.

Fortune Favors the Good	12/18/2009 - 2:31 PM

In my last post I stated that 2009 was a good year for tennis matches. Unfortunately, I realize now that I need to revise that assertion: It was a good year for men’s tennis matches. From a competitive standpoint, the women disappointed. Dinara Safina came up lame in both the Aussie and French finals, the Williams sisters gave us a briefly compelling but ultimately unmemorable Wimbledon final, and Caroline Wozniacki couldn’t quite make herself into a threat to Kim Clijsters at the U.S. Open.

That leaves us with just one WTA match that combined the requisite drama and excellence to qualify as a classic: the Wimbledon semifinal between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva, won by Williams 6-7 (4), 7-5, 8-6. Above are a pair of highlight clips that cover much of the second and third sets. I apologize for the irritatingly excitable announcers—NBC pulled all the videos of its broadcast. But there’s no way to ruin this one. The tension builds right to the final point.

—I normally think of Serena as being a fierce competitor rather than an elegant one. Maybe it’s the traditional clothes or the Wimbledon setting, but from the start her strokes and movement seem smoother and more polished. Her extension through her forehand in the first few rallies shown is exemplary. She also seems to be hitting it with more topspin than usual, and with a concerted effort to pin Dementieva deep in the court. You can see that Serena is in a no-nonsense mood.

—Dementieva is counterpunching for the most part. Her game has always seemed to me to be the tennis equivalent of a blind person who has, in order to survive, developed her other senses to their maximum. Dementieva’s blind spot—her serve—has forced her to become just a shade quicker along the baseline, make her strokes a little more compact, and tighten up her reaction time. She’s had to deal with fending off big returns her whole career, which helps her come in prepared for Serena’s rockets. Sometimes Dementieva looks more like a hockey goalie out there than a tennis player.

—Hawkeye was cruel to the Russian in this match. The machine made two calls against her by the barest of margins.

—There are few Hall-of-Famers who are as willing as Serena Williams to do anything to stay in a point the way she is. If she’s pushed to her right, she’s not embarrassed to go to the hack slice forehand and pop it straight up in the air, if that’s what it takes to get the ball over the net.

—Dementieva certainly had her chances. She blew an open-court backhand in the last game of the second set that I believe would have gotten her to a tiebreaker. But the most telling moment for me comes when she goes up a break in the third, 3-1. Immediately, she drills two very makeable forehands into the net. Dementieva likes pace; the more time she has, the nervous she can get, especially in this situation against Serena. Also, does Dementieva not move forward that well? On one point she's unable to take advantage of a weak Williams return because she can’t get there in time.

—Dementieva has match point at 5-4 in the third. Serena hits a mediocre serve and Dementieva hits a solid backhand return. You think it will be a typical rally, but Serena decides to take the initiative right away. She doesn’t do anything spectacular, but she does force Dementieva to come up with a backhand pass. The Russian mistakenly chooses to go crosscourt, where Serena is waiting. Fortune in tennis still favors the brave. And the good.

—This match reaches its peak with Serena serving at 5-6 in the third. There's lots of desperate hitting and desperate emotion: Dementieva is left down for the count after one point, and Serena gets right in her face on another. Most crucial, Serena hits two aces to rescue herself. In the next game, her ground strokes land on the baseline multiple times, including twice on the final point. Not surprisingly, she breaks serve. Fortune favors the brave, the good, and the fortunate.

—For such a tense match, it ends in an odd way. You rarely see a player miss the last ball of a tight contest by going for winner and sending the ball wide. It’s easier to gauge the sideline and find the right margin for error than it is to gauge the baseline or the net—with the match on the line, why aim so close to the sideline? But Dementieva does just that and strokes the last ball wide. It's almost as if part of her has decided that destiny is against her on this day, at this event, against this opponent.

—With Dementieva serving as well as she ever has, there was almost nothing to separate these two players. Every set was close, every game hard fought. Why did Serena win? There’s her serve, of course, and her power, and her speed. But what comes to my mind is the way she reacts to her missed shots, as compared to the way her opponent reacts.

Serena can’t believe she can miss. She can’t believe she can lose. Dementieva, as much as the thought upsets her, can.

Killing Him	12/17/2009 - 12:40 PM

Yesterday at ESPN.com I wrote that 2009 was all about the trophy ceremony. “God, it’s killing me.” “I’m one of the lucky few who gets cheered for.” “My lovely wife, who’s pregnant!” “We were yoking…” Whatever del Potro said in Spanish at the Open. In 2009, the Emotional Generation soared to new heights on the Grand Slam winners’ stands.

Nowhere was this truer than at the Australian Open. The now-immortal tears and words of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will forever overshadow what was, on second look this morning, a sizzling tennis match that might have defined this era, if Federer and Nadal hadn’t already done that the year before at Wimbledon. Only Federer’s final set collapse, which is largely absent from the highlights above, keeps me from rating it higher than No. 7 for the season. It was a good year for trophy ceremonies, but it was a good year for matches as well.

—Federer starts out hot, hitting some outrageous winners reminiscent of his best stuff from Wimbledon 2008. But even in this very early stage, where he is controlling the action, is there a sense that he’s pressing more than he presses against anyone else? As someone wrote about Jimmy Connors when he played Bjorn Borg in one of their Slam finals, Federer’s winners should count for two points each—that’s how big a risk he’s taking with them. But that's also because Nadal is pushing him out of the middle of the court and forcing him to take chances.

—The revelation, though, is Nadal. Is this the same guy who finished the season in such tame and dispirited fashion? Here he's up on the baseline, pushing Federer off the center hash mark, outfoxing and out-varying him with drop shots, on-the-run reflex winners, and short-angle volleys, and playing with that famous determined kick in his walk and snarl on his lip. He’s also changing directions with both strokes much more often than I recall. The biggest difference, though, is that Nadal’s backhand is a weapon. I haven’t seen that full-swing, up on his toes, sharp crosscourt two-hander in months. I seem to remember he tried it when he had a break point in the final game of the Madrid final against Federer and missed it wide. (I remember it because I’ve never felt the air go out of a building the way it did when the ball landed in the alley.) Did he make that shot again in 2009?

—These were still the days when the only question worth asking in tennis seemed to be, “Why doesn’t Federer come in against Nadal?” The answer is right in front of us here: Because Nadal, at his best, can hit a passing shot on a dime, from either wing, from any spot on the court, with frame-shaking topspin. You try to come in against that 50 times in a match.

—These were also the days when Nadal was routinely outplaying and outhitting Federer when it mattered most. Look at the point he constructs on set point at 6-5 in the first set. Nothing defensive about that. Even better, look at the rally he constructs on what would prove to be the most important point of the match, at 5-3 in the third-set tiebreaker. For most of these five sets, he stood at the center of the court and hit his forehand forcefully but safely crosscourt, to a spot just behind the service line and well within the sidelines. The fact that he can tilt the rallies this way and dictate them without much risk has always been the fundamental reason he owns a 13-7 record against Federer. But at 5-3, when he knew that a winning point would put him in position to take a two-set-to-one lead, but that a losing point would still leave him ahead 5-4, he moved his forehand target all the way to the sideline. Nadal hit that spot, made a rare dash to the net, and angled away a backhand volley. The set was his, and the lead was too much for Federer to overcome. For anyone who still thinks Nadal is “one-dimensional,” realize that he’s one-dimensional by choice. When he senses the right moment to do more, the resources are there and the surprise factor is built-in.

—And then it’s all drowned out by the ceremony afterward, which is what the world will remember from this day. We all know what happened, but seeing it again I’ve found my two favorite moments. The first is the earnest ovation that Nadal gives Federer from behind him as Federer is beginning to lose it. Nadal pushed the joy of winning the Australian Open all the way down inside him and became instead a respectful and concerned friend. Do you resent that Federer in a sense stole some of Nadal’s thunder? You shouldn’t: He inadvertently brought out a gracious and gentlemanly side of the Spanish kid that many tennis fans didn’t know existed below the biceps and fist-pumps. Even on the trophy stand, Federer brought out the best in Nadal.

The second moment is the look on Federer’s face when Nadal finally gets him to smile and walk back up to finish his speech. The greatest tennis player of all time looks, at that moment, like a nice, embarrassed kid—a nice, embarrassed kid we’ve all been at one time or another.

No wonder we like these two guys so much.

Cannon Fodder	12/16/2009 - 1:12 PM

In the first two matches on our Best of ’09 list, I’ve prefaced the discussion by saying that from a quality of play perspective, they left something to be desired. I’m not sure you can say that for No. 8: How much better can the quality be when 78 of its points are won with a single perfect shot, and that the guy hitting them comes up second-best?

What you can say is that Radek Stepanek’s 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 7-6 (6), 6-7 (2), 16-14 win over Ivo Karlovic in the semifinals of Davis Cup won’t be forgotten any time soon. Karlovic’s 78 aces, which is 23 more than his previous record, is a mark that’s going to be in the books for a while—unless Dr. Ace himself breaks it, that is. The match's length, 5 hours and 59 minutes, and total games, 82, are just short of being all-time records themselves. And can a contest be any closer? The fourth set, which Karlovic won 7-2 in the breaker, must have felt like a blow out.

The first time I posted about this match I showed an eight-minute You Tube clip of Karlovic’s 78 aces. Now they’ve been whittled to a much crisper and more convenient 2 and a half minutes. The person who put it up, Magnificat3, has also tracked the directions of Ivo’s bombs: 39 went past Stepanek’s forehand, 39 went past his backhand. What Karlovic’s height gives him is the ability to ace his opponents anywhere, including with a flat bomb out wide that lands way up the sideline. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen hit that serve. And his smooth, bare-bones delivery must be next to impossible to read. You can see that on a lot of these serves, Stepanek guesses the wrong way. Watching them go by him one after the next is comical. I start to crack up right around the one-minute mark.

What we don’t see is how Stepanek hung in to beat him; all we get here is the Czech looking helpless, until, on the final point, he wins the whole thing. One clue to his victory is that he seems to take all of Karlovic’s aces in stride. He knows they’re going to happen sooner or later (or always), and it will only hurt him to get upset about it. Whatever he did to keep himself in it—I only saw the final set—Stepanek’s achievement is one of the finest of the year. He survived three sets worth of aces.

The other moment we don’t see is the aftermath. Stepanek was overcome as he slowly moved from one of his teammates to the next and eventually into the Czech section of the audience. Karlovic, as usual, looked utterly alone. This is what I wrote the first time I posted about his defeat:

Karlovic’s freakishness has never come across as painfully as it does here, when he walks off the court a loser after six hours. He takes it as impassively as always. It’s as if he realizes he’s a guy not destined for glory, even in Davis Cup, a place where second-tier players like him are traditionally allowed to shine for a few moments. Instead, he’s destined to be good enough, in a weird enough way, to set a monumental record even while suffering the most heart-breaking loss of his career. Tennis has feared the rise of the big server for decades, but Karlovic proves again that these fears remain unfounded. If this performance showed us anything, it's that tennis still can’t be won with one shot alone. The sad thing for Ivo is that the sport is better off with him as a loser. At times, when I see how glum and lonely he can look on a court, I think he knows this.

Denting the Net	12/15/2009 - 3:41 PM

The ninth most memorable match of 2009 might also qualify as the most unlikely of the year. It involved that rarest of tennis finds, a Spanish server and volleyer, trading forays to the net for five sets against a guy who had recently been on the verge of settling into his second career as a teaching pro. It was so unlikely that, despite the fact that it took place on my favorite court, the Grandstand at the U.S. Open; despite the fact that I suspected that the ex-teaching pro in question, Taylor Dent, might set off a few fireworks around Flushing this year; and despite the fact that I was walking past that court as the match was starting, I was not in the arena to see it. I went home and, kicking myself the whole time, watched it like everyone else on the tube. I could feel the electricity all the way from Queens.

Watching the fifth-set tiebreaker in this second-rounder between Dent and Ivan Navarro, it’s clear that, like the Oudin-Sharapova match from yesterday, this wasn’t a classic for its quality. There are a lot of tight volleys, blown sitters, and ill-advised line-call challenges. But the key word in that sentence is volleys. If this match didn’t prove that serving and volleying can still get you deep into a major—Dent was beaten soundly by a baseline-hugging Andy Murray in the next round—it did remind us that constant net-rushing can still produce uniquely hair-raising tennis. Especially when it’s done by an American, at night, in New York City.

—We begin with an Aussie commentator noting that Dent uses one racquet for serving and another for returning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen this before. The announcer speculates that it’s because he strings one of them a little looser. Whatever the benefit, it’s got to be hard to adjust your swing on ground strokes each game. I guess Dent figures he hits mostly groundies when he’s returning, and mostly volleys when he’s serving.

—It’s hard to believe with this energy and atmosphere, but the stands aren’t full. Some tennis traditionalists might find the crowd, with its zealous partisanship, its random bursts of noise, and its sloppy summer fashion, to be of the Ugly American variety. But I’ll bet you would have liked to have been there, too. Isn’t it a strength of the sport that it can be played in places as varied as Wimbledon, Paris, and Flushing Meadows?

—I don’t think I’d seen Navarro before this. He seems like not just an old-school player, but an old-school doubles specialist. As they used to teach you in dubs, he kicks his first serve in and gives himself time to close on the net. His forehand volley is strange and stiff, but he’s so far up in the court that Dent still has trouble doing much with it.

—Up close, Dent isn’t as big as you might think. He’s also a mellow guy without the sense of entitlement that you normally expect from a professional tennis player. I always wondered if that was part of his trouble. He didn’t need to win to satisfy his ego or his sense of himself.

—Would the sport be better if there was more of this type of tennis? Undoubtedly. For one thing, s & v doesn’t need to be of the same astounding quality as the best baseline tennis to still be entertaining. If it lacks the head-smacking wow factor of a winner drilled from behind the baseline, s & v makes up for it in the relentless, nerve-wracking pressure it creates. Pressure on the returner to keep the ball low. Pressure back on the volleyer to make a lightning-quick reaction and decision at the net. Pressure back again on the returner to make a clean pass, because he’s probably going to get one shot at it. It’s tennis played at a different tempo, both for players and fans. The compression of the points, especially in tiebreakers, especially in fifth-set tiebreakers, gives the sport an antic energy. It also imposes more logic on the proceedings. Rather than rallies that end in errors for no particular reason, there's always a cause and effect with the serve and volley game.

—I love Dent’s overamped reaction at the end. His appreciation of the atmosphere on the Grandstand makes you remember that this tournament is not the norm in the pro game. The Open still lives up to its rowdy reputation. Dent is so psyched up by it that he can’t think of how to end his speech into the chair umpire’s microphone. So he skips the “thank you” and comes up with the only appropriate words for the moment: “Let’s go!”