All You Need to Know	01/29/2010 - 2:26 PM

How would you rate this year’s Australian Open so far? At the risk of sounding perversely obvious, the first thought that comes to mind is that there’s been a lot to watch. That’s true for every Grand Slam, of course, but this one has brought us more than its share of five-set wars of attrition on the men’s side—watching Marin Cilic alone would have taken 10 hours out of your life—and more than its share of drama and surprise on the women’s. Remember Roddick-Gonzo? How about Henin-Dementieva? Tsonga-Almagro, Venus-Li, Serena-Azarenka anyone?

If this year’s Aussie has lacked anything, it’s been a signature instant classic. We’ve been spoiled over the last decade by the tournament’s ability to produce these highlight-reel spectacles. Will we get one from the finals? If we don’t, it won’t be for lack of opportunity. Serena vs. Justine is the match that the sport hoped to see at the beginning of the event. And while Roger Federer vs. Andy Murray doesn’t have quite the name-brand mass appeal that Federer vs. Rafa would have, it’s still the logical endpoint, and a healthy development for the game. If Nadal is going to be increasingly troubled by injuries going forward, Federer is going to need a new foil. And you can't find a better candidate than Murray.

First, there’s been tension between the two guys, more than there is between Federer and Nadal, who have formed a sort of two-man All Time Great Club over the last couple of years. Roger and Rafa have embraced the fact that, after the 2008 Wimbledon final, they’re destined to go down in history together. While Federer is clearly the king—a fact that Nadal never fails to point out—losing to someone 13 times tends to make you respect his game. Federer and Murray don’t dislike each other from what I can tell, but at various times Murray has been irritated by Federer’s “I just need to figure this kid out” attitude toward him, which he stuck to last season even after Murray had beaten him two straight times. Murray may have thought: “If the guy accepts Rafa as a rival, why can’t he at least start to accept me? I’ve got a winning record against him as well.” That’s what makes this match so intriguing. Federer wants to show that he really just did need to figure Murray out, that the king isn’t giving up his throne any time soon; while Murray, the new kid, the little brother, the heir apparent perhaps, wants to take his first step into that All Time Great Club. He can only do that by beating Federer where everyone, including Federer, accepts that it counts, in a major final. And you only get so many chances in your career to play them.

The second reason to appreciate this match-up, as well as Murray’s step forward, is that his game is too good, too interesting, for him not to make that step. The sport has had a versatile and stylish player at the top of the rankings for the better part of six years. I like Juan Martin del Potro as much as anyone, and I can be awed by his brute force, but it would be nice to think that Murray can continue the Federer tradition and contend for majors with a more subtle and artful game. More than del Potro and virtually everyone else on the tour today, Murray has the complete tennis skill set; the problem for him at the majors has been finding a way to put this advantage to use, to put himself in offensive positions and use his hands and touch and variety to finish points rather than just extend them. From Murray’s perspective, that will be the big question tomorrow night. At the World Tour Finals a couple months ago, he played passively against Federer and relied on his ability to run balls down and put his opponent in uncomfortable positions. It worked for a set, but it didn’t work for the next two sets, as Federer, like a man picking a lock, finally found the right combination of aggression and patience. He won the third set going away. Murray is going to have to do more than rely on his legs tomorrow night. He can't give Federer three sets to pick the lock again.

From Federer’s perspective, he must believe that the match will be on his racquet—he said as much about his encounters with Murray the last time they played. He comes in, as usual, in very good form. He blazed out of the gates against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in their semifinal, looking like a man happy and relaxed after surviving a scare, which he had, against Nikolay Davydenko in the previous round. Federer was so good, in such casual control, that it reminded me of his performances from the 2004 Australian Open, a tournament in which he basically toyed with the rest of the world’s best players. I wonder: Federer will be 29 this year, but has he declined in any way from his form of six years ago? Right now, I’d say that the only reason that he hasn’t been quite as dominant in the last two or three years is that Nadal was able to lift, for six-month periods at least, himself up to Federer’s level. Yes, Federer isn’t as dialed in or motivated at the lesser events now, and he no longer goes on 40-match win streaks, but in the specific two-week, seven-match, three-out-of-five set context of a Grand Slam, he’s still in the prime of his career. That’s why, despite Murray’s confidence boost, his younger legs, and his 6-4 record against Federer, I’m going with the guy who’s done this 21 times before.

Whoever wins, its hard to think of a match with so much to appreciate. The simplicity, even off-handedness of Federer’s serve—it really does look like he’s just tossing the ball up and hitting it. The footwork of Murray, the way he recovers after a shot, gets his feet dancing a mile a minute, hops high for a split step, and starts dancing again when he comes down. The way Federer puts his head into his slice backhand. The balanced and uncluttered way Murray takes his two-handed backhand back. Federer’s way of ignoring all the laws of technique as he flies forward to meet a forehand, hits it without bothering to set his feet, and keeps moving to the net as if he’s never swung at all. And that’s just the start with these two guys. This match could be an experience, a tennis immersion.

***

The women’s final won’t be far behind in the appreciation department. We’ll get Serena’s purposeful glower and Henin’s searchingly intense eyes. Serena’s serve, equally as simple and equally as effective as Federer’s. Henin’s backhand, the power of which seems to come from an unknown source somewhere in her skinny torso. Serena’s invincible ball-striking, which allows her to hit winners from positions and balance points that leave you scratching your head. Henin’s way of making every moment look like one of desperation. Serena’s way of doing what the old cliché says a champion must do: raising her game from the ashes just when she needs to. Henin’s originality, which has inspired a cult-like fan following. Serena’s larger-than-life—in a metaphorical sense—persona, which has also inspired cult-like devotion. Maybe we'll even get some old-fashioned name-calling, like we did when these two met at the U.S. Open three years ago. See the name that was called here.

Who will win this battle of the cults, or the originals, of the icons of determination? There are various stats that come into play. Serena leads the head to head 7-6. Henin beat her at three straight majors in 2007. Serena helped send Henin off to her sabbatical by beating her—as they say—down in Key Biscayne in 2008. Serena has been bothered by her legs and has played a lot of tennis, including teaming with her sister to win the doubles title (their 11^th major, by the way). Henin has looked shaky for stretches; she needed three sets to beat Kleybanova and Wickmayer, and has struggled with her serve. But in the semis she was lights-out, Henin 2.0, moving forward at every opportunity and hitting the corners.

One stat and one factor stick out to me as crucial. The first is Henin: Which of the Justines we’ve seen in Melbourne will show up? How will she serve? As impressive as she’s been, I have my doubts that she’s ready to play at her top level consistently, all the way through, the way she did in 2007. The second is Serena’s record in Grand Slam finals. It’s 11-3, with two of those losses coming to her sister and the other coming to a zoned-out Maria Sharapova at Wimbledon in 2004. The three losses she suffered to Henin in 2007 all came in Slam quarterfinals. Serena plays differently—i.e., much better, much bolder—in Slam finals.

With anyone else, you’d say that she rises to the occasion. But thinking of Serena’s final-round performances through the years—against Safina, against Maria, against Hingis, against Davenport, against her sister—I get the feeling that Serena believes that the occasion has risen to her. She doesn’t deserve to be in a Grand Slam final; a Grand Slam final deserves Serena Williams.

Finally, seeing Federer and Serena this week, I’ve been struck by how inexplicable they are. Federer comes from normal, non-pushy, non-professional-athlete parents, from a country without much of a tennis tradition. And when he’s playing well, I often find myself unable to explain why, or exactly what he’s doing to win, other than doing everything right—for me, his smoothness masks his tactics; it makes tennis look too easy to require tactics. As for Serena, she comes from an even unlikelier tennis background, and her 180-degree turnaround against Victoria Azarenka only underscores how strange she is as a player. She couldn’t win a point until she was down 0-4 in the second set; then she couldn’t lose a point. It wasn’t a matter of nerves or lack of effort or even particularly bad form—I have no idea how she did it, but she does that kind of thing all the time. She’s Serena Williams, he’s Roger Federer, that’s all you need to know. And that’s why I’m picking them to win.

Nervous Breakdown	01/27/2010 - 2:36 PM

It seems, to paraphrase NFL coach Denny Green, that no one has ever said what we thought they said. Rodney King never asked America, “Can’t we all just get along?” Humphrey Bogart never demanded, “Play it again, Sam.” Mark Twain never joked, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Andy Warhol didn't predict, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” His original quote was, characteristically, more surreal and sinister: “In the future, someone will become famous every 15 minutes.” 

The best line in tennis—“No one beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row”—is real, though it came about by accident. Vitas didn’t walk into the pressroom after beating Jimmy Connors for the first time with that thought in mind, but as he was answering a question, someone there helped him turn his words into the greatest mock statement of defiance in history. Still, our sport isn’t completely in the clear. What may be its second-most-famous quote is indeed bogus. Boris Becker didn't say, “The fifth set isn’t about tennis. It’s about the heart.” Makes the game sound so soulful, right? What he originally said was, “The fifth set isn’t about tennis. It’s about nerves.”

While that’s a bit of a letdown in the poetry department, it does have the virtue of being true. What Becker left out, and what was proven again over the course of a long day of tennis in Australia yesterday, is that the second set, the third set, the fourth set and sometimes even the first set are also about nerves as much as they are about tennis. When the second week of a Grand Slam rolls around, you might as well dissolve the distinction altogether. Tennis and nerves are one and the same.

John McEnroe has said that after a certain amount of time on tour, he came to expect, and accept, that he would choke in one form or another in virtually every match he played. What mattered was how he dealt with it, how he managed it. In this case, McEnroe was using the broadest definition of choking. He didn’t mean that he regularly rolled his eyes back into his head and morphed into a racquet-swinging zombie when he got a lead, à la Jana Novotna at Wimbledon. That’s what tennis fans usually picture when we think of choking. Instead McEnroe used the word, accurately, I believe, to define any moment when his play was affected by his nerves or his mindset—when anything mental messed with his technique or tactics. Choking takes on many guises over the course of a match, or even a game, and much of it goes unnoticed by spectators. Yesterday's play in Melbourne is as good an example as any.

***

Exhibit A was Victoria Azarenka’s performance against Serena Williams. Despite having been up 6-4, 4-0 and losing, Azarenka shook Williams’ hand with a satisfied smile. The consensus was that she hadn’t gagged away that overwhelming lead; she’d just been the victim of one of Serena’s typical but still utterly bizarre mid-match turnarounds in form. And it’s true, there were no Novotna-zombie moments from Azarenka. There wasn’t even much of a dip in her game from when she was winning every point to when she was losing every point.

Yet there was one mental slip by the Belorussian, just before the ball started rolling in the other direction. Azarenka was up 4-0 in the second set and cruising. Serena said afterward that at that point she was wondering whether she could catch a flight home on Friday. At 4-0, Azarenka missed a couple forehands that she hadn’t missed all day. Then, at 30-30, with a chance to hit her favorite shot, a backhand from on top of the baseline, she tried a drop shot instead. She missed it, lost that game, and would lose the next four in rapid succession.

Until that point, Azarenka had been connecting beautifully on her backhand and belting uncontested winners with it. But that was when she was fighting to get ahead of Serena, before she had to deal with any real expectations of winning, before she could begin to imagine herself in the semifinals, before she knew that she needed to close it out or it would look like a disastrous choke job. The match’s dynamic had changed, and that change is enough to make an athlete do something awful: think. 

Thinking led Azarenka to try a change of pace with a drop shot, rather than sticking with what had gotten her there. She never recovered.

***

Exhibit B is Nikolay Davedenko’s performance against Roger Federer. Davydenko came into this match, as we know, having won the last two times he’d faced Federer. He continued that form by outplaying Federer through the first set and a half. Much like Azarenka, Davydenko ran his opponent and controlled the rallies until he was up 3-1 in the second set. And much like Azarenka, he found himself facing an entirely new dynamic when he earned two break points on Federer’s serve. The specter of having a set and two breaks in hand must have brought visions of a win and a spot in the semifinals into Davydenko's head, or at least into his subconscious—how could it not? What usually accompanies these visions is a whole new set of I-can’t blow-it-now nerves. The onset of these, of course, makes it that much more likely that you are going to blow it.

Davydenko, right on cue, shanked a backhand wide for no reason. Then, even worse, he didn’t get turned for a sitter backhand and dumped it lamely into the net. One way to choke is to get tentative, another is to rush. Davydenko rushed that backhand. It would be an hour before he won another game.

***

Exhibit C is Novak Djokovic’s performance against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. After being forced to retire with heat exhaustion last year, Djokovic purposely went to Australia early to prepare for the conditions. So how did he end up having physical problems against Tsonga anyway?

Djokovic won the third set 6-1 and appeared to be in total control. It was Tsonga who was struggling physically. Just at that moment, Djokovic was caught on camera dry heaving into his towel. A few minutes later he was asking the chair umpire if he could leave the court because, as he immortally put it, “I have to go throw up.” This briefly revived Djokovic in the fourth set, but he didn’t have anything left for the fifth and lost it 6-1.

Djokovic said that he felt slightly ill before the match, and that it grew worse in the third set. Maybe it was something he ate—he said that all he had was pasta— but I wonder if he didn’t prove Becker’s axiom to be true again. Nerves, and trying to control nerves, is tiring and makes you queasy. It’s the sport’s version of an actor’s pre-show jitters; if you don’t feel them, you know something is wrong. Every spring I come back to tennis after a winter’s break. Every spring I walk off after my first match with a forgotten sensation: An upset stomach. And every spring I find that I’ve missed that sickening feeling.

Unfortunately for Djokovic, he seems to have a constitution that succumbs to a combination of heat, nerves, pressure, physical effort over a long period, etc.—in short, all the ingredients of a Grand Slam. It’s the kind of issue that no amount of physical training can prevent. Everyone in the sport is still waiting for a cure.

***

Exhibit D is the entire quarterfinal, from first game to last, between Li Na and Venus Williams. To start, Li was so off that she spent the opening set staring in disbelief as shot after shot sailed over the baseline. In the second set, Williams caught the bug and did something a Williams very rarely does: tightened up with a lead. As Tennis Channel's Corina Morariu pointed out from the sideline, Venus wasn’t just making errors, she was decelerating her strokes and losing pace. She gave away the lead and the tiebreaker.

Then it was Li’s turn again. After playing a solid set and coming back to claim a 5-4 lead, she walked out to serve for the match and couldn’t put the ball anywhere near the court. It was 5-all in about two minutes. This time it was Li who was slowing down her strokes and guiding the ball. The terrible irony is that to overcome choking, you can’t try to hit a soft, safe shot. That will only make the ball go out. The way to play it safe is to swing fast and let topspin do the work. As Andre Agassi says, “Racquet-head speed is your friend.”

It’s a lesson that, against all odds, Li remembered when she served for the match again at 6-5. She began the game by shoveling the ball down the middle and not taking any chances. The tactic earned her the first point and allowed her to loosen up. Even when she lost two subsequent match points, she lost them with full cuts. When she got a third, I waited for the inevitable push/shank and another break of serve. No matter how determined you are, getting your racquet to move through the zone on a career-defining point like this one must be like trying to swing underwater.

There have been times like these in my own matches when I’ve had an open court for a forehand and managed to hit it for a winner. Typically, I’ll look back and think, “How did I do that? How did I keep the racquet steady in my hand?” It has to be pure muscle memory, gained through years of practice; it’s the only counterweight we have against our jumpy, doubtful brains. On her third match point, muscle memory kicked in just in time for Li. Shocking me and maybe herself, she kept her racquet steady long enough to drill a forehand down the line and past a staggering Venus, who appeared to be taken by surprise by the shot as well.

After the match, in her halting English, Li told ESPN how she felt. “I’m so exciting,” is what I thought I heard her say. Will this turn out to be a real quote? Or did I mishear it, like we have so many others? Either way, Li’s last forehand may be the shot I remember most from this tournament. It felt like more than just a winner; it felt like a victory over the natural forces of tennis. The final set for Li was about nerves, of course. But this time it was also about living with them. It can be done. Li had it right even if she said it wrong: That's so exciting.

Stock Truths	01/25/2010 - 3:35 PM

Is commentating on tennis more difficult than it sounds? From the sportswriter's point of view, all a TV announcer is asked to do is watch a match and say what comes to mind. No need to pick and choose and revise thoughts. No need to fit them into sentences that make sense one after the other. No need to come to some kind of conclusion that no one in the world has ever thought before. The writer must craft while the commentator is free to spout.

But there’s a trade-off involved, and it’s one that most of us ink-stained scribblers can live with. If we put in more mental labor to get our jobs done, the announcer is forced to live with having the first thing that comes to his mind travel out to millions of television screens and be heard in millions of living rooms. As a writer who has made a few off-the-cuff podcast pronouncements in recent months, I can say that this is not easy, or, to my mind, particularly satisfying. In the millisecond you’re given to come up with a full-scale analysis of a player or an upcoming match, your mind, after plucking a thought out of mid-air and careening forward from there, will often end up fitting that thought inside a cliché that you’ve heard a thousand times in the past—there’s no chance to rewrite what you said or think more deeply. Even worse, you may be forced to cave in and say something so limp it wasn’t even worth mentioning in the first place. No one would ever be bothered to write “Murray is looking good." But to my frustration, that’s the kind of thing I hear coming out of my mouth.

Like me, when they’re pressed for time, ESPN’s Australian Open commentators fall back on the tried and true, on the stock tennis phrase. If you tuned into any of the network’s marathon broadcasts from Melbourne over the last eight days, you've undoubtedly heard a few. You may have watched so much tennis that you tune it out when Brad Gilbert or Mary Joe Fernandez says that "the serve is going to be key." Or you may cover your ears and start screaming. But just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true. How many of these observations are valid? As someone who watched a lot of tennis this weekend and played a little of it as well, I'll do my best to find out.

***

“He wants to win it right here."

Chris Fowler spoke these words during the final game of the fourth-round match between Andy Roddick and Fernando Gonzalez. His point was that Roddick was trying hard to break Gonzo’s serve rather than saving his energy to finish it on his own serve.

From my perspective as a rec player, this comment is absurdly obvious. Anyone who has ever played a match just wants to get it over with at the first possible moment; no one would ever choose to win it later. Even when you’re far ahead, the specter of your opponent winning a game or two and gaining momentum always looms in a tennis player’s head.

The next day I watched as Nikolay Davydenko went up 5-2 in the fifth set on Fernando Verdasco, then lost three quick points in a row on Verdasco’s serve. Brad Gilbert correctly said that the Russian was saving his energy so he could close it out on his own serve. At the pro level, anyway, Fowler’s remark was not as pointless as I first thought. Few of us weekend warriors are skilled or confident enough to take a game off and still feel secure that we can hold our serves to finish a match. But ATP pros, who hold with far more regularity than we do, can take the calculated risk that their serve will give them the decisive edge, and that they shouldn’t waste their energy trying to do something as difficult as breaking their opponent.

“I’d like to see player X be more aggressive.”

To a commentator, this is the tennis player’s cure-all: If at first you don’t succeed, go on the attack. How many times has a pro been advised to become less aggressive? I think I can count them on one hand.

You can understand why. The No. 1 players in the world on both tours, Roger Federer and Serena Williams, play attacking tennis. And matches at the highest level of the sport are typically won be the more proactive player, the person who can dictate the rallies. Then again, the No. 2 men’s player, Rafael Nadal, is a defensive specialist, as is No. 5 Andy Murray. Caroline Wozniacki reached the final of the U.S. Open on the strength of her consistency and retrieving skills. 

By “attacking,” the commentator also means coming to the net more often, which is nice in theory, as long as the player can hit a volley. Until he improves around the net, though, I’d still say Novak Djokovic, who is trying to get up there more these days, has a better shot of winning from the baseline. As a long-term goal, it’s a valid point. It’s a crime that Andy Murray hasn’t figured out a way to use his talents around the net, and Verdasco will always be held back by the fact that he’s uncomfortable finishing points up there. But over the course of a tournament or even a season, it seems more reasonable to advise a player to focus on executing the game they play best, even if it means hitting moonballs from 20 feet behind the baseline. Change is best when it’s subtle, and when it fits into a player’s established style. Rafael Nadal normally stands 12 feet behind the baseline to return serve; against Ivo Karlovic he varied his position and often stood back half that distance. He won in four and never let Dr. Ace into a tiebreaker.

“It’s going to come down to who wants it more.”

These were the words of Gilbert late in the match between Davydenko and Verdasco. It sounds like a stone-cold cliché on the surface, but there was a context to it. The two players had just traded ugly service breaks, and Gilbert had commented that there was no rhythm to the match. His point was that neither guy was in good form, so it was going to be a battle of will rather than skill.

Fair enough, except for one thing: How do you measure and compare the desire of two players? Yes, there are moments when a player wants a match more than the other guy. This happens most often in appearance-fee-laden events, or late in the season, maybe when one guy has clinched a spot in the year-end championships and the other guy is fighting to get in. But in a fourth-round match at a Slam, between two guys who have never won one before? It’s safe to say they both wanted it enough to give everything they had to win it.

Desire itself isn’t the point. What matters is how it manifests itself—how does a player control it, direct it? Does he use his desire, or does he let it use him and overwhelm him?

“Player X has nothing to lose.”

This was said of James Blake in the run-up to his match with Juan Martin del Potro. And it was true at the start: Blake could swing away against the higher-seeded player and know he wasn't expected to win. But it was only true until Blake grabbed a lead—then he would have something he could lose. Sure enough, he went up two sets to one and ended up losing in five.

In that sense, the player with nothing to lose is really just a player who is hoping to have a lot to lose at some point. If the underdog earns a lead, there's more pressure on him to hold it and close out the upset than there is on a higher-ranked player who's trying to close out a routine win. The phrase "nothing to lose" needs to be retired. There’s always something to lose in a tennis match.

“That double fault was caused by his opponent’s strong return.”

This would seem to be logical, and maybe it does happen like this at the pro level. But in the 30 years I’ve played, I’ve never double-faulted because I was worried that my opponent would blast his return by me. If anything, this knowledge has forced me to sharpen my second serve. Many double-faults are caused not by a server swinging too hard or going for too much, but by a server not swinging hard enough to bring the ball down into the court with topspin. The pros may react differently, but I hit my best second serves when I’m aiming into corners and trying to put a lot of bite on my kick. When I double fault, it’s because I’m nervous about the score, about getting broken; I get tentative and try to guide the ball in.

“I know it’s not his game, but Verdasco can be successful slicing the ball down the middle to Davydenko.”

This was Gilbert, and he was right on about Davydenko’s weakness—the Russian is better when he has an angle to work with and is running side to side. Verdasco seemed to hear BG in the booth, because he began floating soft backhand slices down the middle, the opposite of his usual blast-or-be-blasted style. The tactic succeeded in bothering Davydenko and messing with his rhythm.

But tennis also has a law of unintended consequences, and it held true in the fifth set here. That’s when both Cliff Drysdale (“Lord Drysdale” in his booth partner’s words) and Gilbert both noted that Davydenko had found a winning formula by moving forward. How had the baseliner managed to do this? In part because Verdasco had drawn him forward with those floating slices.

“Almagro looks so much more composed than Tsonga.”

This was the conclusion of both Drysdale and Darren Cahill in the fifth set of the classic spectacle of shot-making between the Spaniard and the Frenchman. Both announcers thought this boded well for Almagro, because he wasn’t as agitated as Tsonga. But I had the opposite feeling. It seemed to me that Almagro, the lower-ranked player and the guy who had trailed throughout the match, wasn’t as desperate to win as his opponent, and that this would hurt him. Like Almagro yesterday, I can play well when I’m relaxed and have no expectations. But if I feel like I must win a match, I may be more erratic and agitated, but I’m also more likely to find a way to beat the other guy—it may not be pretty, but desperation does get the job done. It worked for Tsonga.

“That’s nice to see.”

This was Cahill describing the smiles that Tsonga and Almagro shared as their match wound to its rousing conclusion. Almagro had hit a dipping pass that Tsonga had blindly picked off his shoe-tops and dumped over the net for a perfect—and lucky—drop volley winner. Almagro flashed a “you gotta be kidding me” grin without directly looking at Tsonga. The Frenchman smiled as well, also without looking directly at his opponent. Then both of them turned toward each other. Almagro’s “You gotta be kidding me” grin met Tsonga’s “You’re right, I gotta be kidding you” grin. High-pressure Grand Slam match or not, they almost broke out laughing. It was a moment of the slyest bonhomie.

There was no arguing with the commentator on this one. That was nice to see.

No. 1 of a Kind	01/22/2010 - 3:25 PM

You must have heard the news about women’s tennis in 2010. The Belgians were back. Order would soon be restored. We’d never be forced to cover our eyes while Dinara Safina or Svetlana Kuznetsova melted down in a Grand Slam final again. I even went as far as to write that the WTA would quickly see its rightful ruling class move back into the tennis castle on the hill, the place where they keep all the most glittering trophies.

That all seems so long ago now. Like, yesterday. This morning, chaos reigns once more in the women’s game, after one of those Belgians, Kim Clijsters, was hustled out of the tournament in under an hour by Nadia Petrova, and the other, Justine Henin, was on her way to a similar fate when her opponent, Alisa Kleybanova, conveniently exhausted herself and self-destructed. All of which means that the bottom half of the draw has opened up nicely for . . . Dinara Safina and Svetlana Kuznetsova.

It hasn’t been as easy as we thought for the women of Belgium, but it’s been an even worse week for two stars from Serbia. In 2008, Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic had tennis fans in the United States wondering what that tiny country had that our not-so-tiny country didn’t when it came to raising No. 1 players. Jankovic and Ivanovic both spent time in the top spot that year, but they’ve been in decline ever since, and this Australian Open marked their collective nadir. Each lost in the second round in unsightly fashion. Ivanovic couldn’t control her toss or her nerves; Jankovic looked somewhere between bored and annoyed as she was being overpowered by Alona Bondarenko. Based on their current awful form, you have to wonder if we’ll see either of the Serbs go deep in another major, this year or any year.

As these small-country players come and go, rise and crash, retire and unretire, one big name from a big country soldiers on, defying opponents, critics, line judges, and ITF officials. That would be Serena Williams, of course, who plays a third-round match tonight against a potentially dangerous opponent, Carla Suarez-Navarro, the woman who beat Serena’s sister Venus in Melbourne last year. Serena has had her share of early-round clunkers at majors—in 2009 she won the Aussie Open after surviving serious scares from Kuznetsova and Victoria Azarenka, a woman she may play again this year. But watching Clijsters fall so quickly to Petrova last night, I kept thinking: If Serena came out playing this badly, she’d still have found a way, deep in the second set, to turn things around. At the very least, she wouldn’t have gone down without a fierce effort. 

Afterward, Clijsters said she did everything she could to change the momentum against Petrova, but you wouldn’t have known it from watching the match. Not only did she make no attempt at changing tactics, she didn’t even try to alter the tempo or flow of the match. Not until the final game did she give us a fist-pump. Serena has 11 Slams and Kim has two; the reason was right in front of us. It isn’t because of a difference in talent; it’s because of a difference in will. Serena takes her losses, and by the logic of this tournament, she could take one tonight against Suarez-Navarro. But she’ll rarely do less than everything it takes to win.

On Sunday, all eyes had been turned toward Kim, Justine, and another returning champion, Maria Sharapova. Now, on Friday, it’s once again Serena we look to, and who we have to think will be holding up the trophy at the end. Henin is still in the tournament, and having lived though one scare, she could gather strength as she goes and win it all. So could Kuznetsova, conceivably. But however the tournament concludes, Serena’s mere presence in it has been an intriguing one.

After her legendary U.S. Open tirade, I thought she should have been suspended from the Aussie Open, and I still do. It was an egregious act with no justification, and it called for a meaningful punishment; in other words, something more than a fine. So why, watching Serena’s first-round match in Melbourne, did I completely forget that the tirade had ever happened? I watched her play with my usual admiration for her tenacity and passion, which were obvious even when she was facing an overmatched opponent. It wasn’t until ESPN ran a clip of her doing her thing at Flushing Meadows that I made the connection between that angry Serena Williams, in a dark dress playing at night in New York, and this calmly determined Serena Williams in bright Australian sunshine. It shouldn't have been that hard to connect them. Both Serenas have a rage to compete and win. Most of the time she can channel it constructively; at Flushing she lost control of it.

This is how the mind works—time softens all emotions, including a fan's outrage at the actions of a professional athlete. This week the Tennis Channel and Adidas ran a story about Fernando Verdasco’s training regimen in Las Vegas in which Andre Agassi made a brief appearance. A few months ago I'd believed that Agassi’s reputation might never recover from his admission of crystal meth use. But watching him with Verdasco and Gil Reyes, he seemed like the old Andre to me, a tennis legend revered by all. Ditto for Alex Rodriguez. When he celebrated winning the World Series in October, I had to be reminded by a pundit on TV that he’d ever admitted using steroids. I thought, in disbelief: That was this year?! Will the same be true for Tiger Woods sooner than we think? In the back of our minds—particularly in the back of women’s minds, I suppose—we’ll remember that he’s a sleaze. But the rest of our minds will only be able to see him winning golf tournaments. We may not be able to forgive, but we're very good at forgetting. In the end, they're pretty much the same thing.

Serena's tirade is also part of another sports-fan phenomenon that I’ve never been able to explain: How a player’s behavior can be disgusting in the moment, but then seem rakishly appealing when viewed years later. John McEnroe is the ultimate case in point among tennis players. I was sickened a couple years ago when he bent down and called a line judge a “fat, ugly loser” at a seniors event—those are the words of a bully, not a rebel hero. At the same time, my favorite tennis clip on YouTube is this medley of the greatest blowups of McEnroe's youth—I could watch him argue at Wimbledon in 1980 and 81 forever.

Granted, part of the reason is that calling an umpire an “incompetent fool” is brilliant, while calling someone “a fat, ugly loser” is just cruel—Johnny Mac was like Rimbaud; his best poetry was behind him by the time he was 21. But while there was nothing brilliant or poetic about Serena at the Open last year, her outburst may become part of the lore of the game someday, just like “you cannot be serious!” (It helps that we never hear what she actually says.) Jon Stewart may have kicked off the turnaround when, with Serena on as a guest, he said of the incident, “That was so hot.”

I can see the scene 20 years from now. I’m sitting at home watching a CBS or ESPN highlight reel of memorable U.S. Open moments. When it gets, as it inevitably will, to the Tirade, I’ll remember somewhere in the back of my mind that I was once repelled by what happened. And then I’ll shake my head and smile and think, “Serena Williams, you really were one of a kind.”

The Education of Nikolay Davydenko	01/21/2010 - 11:57 AM

When did athletes stop saying, “I’m going to give 110 percent today”? As anyone over the age of 30 will likely remember, that was the go-to pre-game cliché of the 1970s and 80s, uttered nearly as often as the eternal “We’re going to take it one game at a time.” Maybe somewhere along the line a jock accidentally wandered into an arithmetic class and discovered that, for decades, he and his buddies had been wasting their time trying to do something that was mathematically impossible.

Sports clichés, which are mouthed with a faintly bored and professionally tolerant thousand-yard stare by everyone from NFL linemen to the teen phenoms of the WTA, are dull and exasperating in equal measures. But they have their uses. They rob opponents of bulletin-board motivational material. They keep the athlete from having think too much about what he or she is doing on the court—always a good thing. And, except in the case of giving 110 percent, they’re incontrovertibly true. No matter how good you are, you really only can take it one game at a time.

From my perspective on the other side of the pressroom, the most important function that an eye-glazing cliché performs is this: It doesn’t make news. Reporters were constantly frustrated by the perceived dullness and lack of depth of Pete Sampras. He wasn’t introspective by nature, but in public he also wasn’t introspective by choice. As most athletes eventually learn, being interesting to the press isn’t worth the trouble. It only becomes a distraction. The problem with a memorable quote is just that—people remember it, which means they’re going to ask you about it. Again. And again. And again. That means you’re going to spend energy explaining what you meant the first time.

At 28 years old, after a decade on tour, you might think Nikolay Davydenko would know all of that by now. But this year’s Australian Open has given the unassuming and dryly self-deprecating Russian access to a whole new universe of attention. With two wins over Roger Federer and the tentative favorite status they’ve earned him, people are suddenly listening to him when he speaks. As Davydenko said in his presser after his second-round win, when he was asked what he would tell his children he did for a living after he retired, “It’s interesting. We’ve not talking about tennis. We’re talking about my life. This is my first experience like this in the press.”

Everyone laughed. To reporters, Davydenko’s unpredictable mix of honesty and ironic bravado is disarming and refreshing after all the safe clichés we've had to endure. But underneath the laughter, we smell blood. That was obvious right from the start yesterday, when the second question Davydenko heard was, “Did your opponent look scared?”

This was in reference to a remark he had made after his first-round win. When he was told that Andy Murray and Rafael Nadal had said they thought he could win the tournament, Davydenko answered, in his usual hyper, Yoda-esque English, “Oh, really? Surprising, you know, these guys start to talking about me, because maybe now. Before, if nobody talking, then nobody scare. Now it’s everyone scare. . . . But it’s interesting feeling. Now I feel like I can beat everyone.”

Two questions after that one, Davydenko was asked, “Do you enjoy scaring people?” It was official: “scared” was the word of the tournament, and Davydenko’s quote was going to get around.

It got to Federer, Davydenko’s prospective quarterfinal opponent, a day or two later. Federer seemed to wince a little when he heard it. Rather than being outraged, he acted as if it was a poor choice of words, that top athletes don’t really get “scared” of each other. He’s right, and at some level Federer knows that Davydenko really meant something like, “now the other top players respect me more and know I’m capable of beating them at a Grand Slam.”

Using those words instead would have been safer and smarter. If you were in press-conference school, you’d almost certainly be coached to phrase it that way. But Davydenko, while he’s way too honest and unpretentious to trash talk in the classic sense, is a witty guy who’d rather have fun than play it safe with his words. Let's face it, after all these years away from the limelight, and after the controversy over his potential match-fixing, he's liking the positive attention. Listen to a few of his other answers in his latest presser:

Q: Would you like to write a book? Because you’re a great character.

Write a book? You mean humor book, Tennis book? Action book? . . . No, no no, I would like to go in business, but I don’t want to lose my money also in business.

Q: Why are you talking about money all the time?

Because we are Russian (smiling). Russian always talking about money. And you know all Russian can get only cash, not like you guys, only credit cards also.

Q: Are you a vodka drinker [oh, how the press loves this guy]?

Yes.

Q: Is that where you get your strength?

I don’t drink so much because you see, I’m skinny. Sometimes mix with Red Bull. Get power in night club or disco.

Q: Would you want to have kids so they can see you play?

Yes. No. Yes and no. [My wife] is scared if I start to, with kids, lose tennis and go down, stray.

Davydenko is indeed a wonderful character, and as a tennis writer part of me would hate to see him rein himself in. So far he seems oblivious to how the word “scared” might be playing around the grounds or the locker room. But he may soon get sick of hearing it and having to spend time thinking about it. And while Federer, after two losses to Davydenko, doesn’t need to put anything on his bulletin board to motivate him for their match-up, showing the world again that Darth Federer is scared of no one might seem like a nice fringe benefit of beating that mouthy little Russian for the 13^th time.

I’ve said recently that I didn’t think Davydenko could win a major simply because he doesn’t think of himself as a Grand Slam champion. He doesn’t have the swagger or the all-consuming, I-must-prove-something-to-myself mindset. He doesn’t feel entitled to titles. His image of himself to this point has never depended on winning majors, the way Federer bases his entire year around winning Wimbledon. All of this makes Davydenko a more engaging athlete, but it doesn’t make triumphing at the ultimate level, in Melbourne, any easier.

The day that Davydenko doesn’t use a word like “scared” to describe his opponents, the day he gives us a thousand-yard stare and says that he and his opponents “have a mutual respect for each other,” that he’s just gonna go out and give it 110 percent, you know he’s serious about creating a legacy as a Grand Slam champion rather than just making enough money so he never has to work again. It will be a sad day for the tennis press, but it might be a good day for Davydenko. He’ll have learned his lesson. It should be an easy one for a money-hungry Russian to understand: Being interesting is bad for business.

Tennis for Life	01/19/2010 - 2:19 PM

It used to be, in that prehistoric age before the DVR, that the Australian Open came to us as an unexpected burst of sunshine in the middle of a cold January night. With the rest of the apartment’s lights off and silence reigning all around, the bright green courts at Melbourne Park came out of my square analog TV screen like a fresh blast of summer—it really did make you feel warmer.

That hasn’t been the case for the last few years, but this is the first time I’ve noticed the change. Now the Aussie Open comes to me all the time, its serene blue courts gleaming with more depth and resonance out of a rectangular LCD screen. With hundreds of hours on ESPN2 and Tennis Channel, the tournament forms the background for evenings, late nights, and early mornings. At the end of one day I can eat dinner, finish the paper, make progress on a book, pay a few bills, and do my stretching while I watch. At the start of the next day I keep watching as I drink my coffee, start a new paper, and think about painting the living room (before putting it off for another day or month or year).

I miss the late nights and the green courts, but no fan can argue with the current total immersion formula. In the U.S., tennis is now presented like no other sport on television. When the four majors are happening, it’s with us morning, noon, and night; for the rest of the year, it’s buried way up the channel list and far from the general sports fan’s eye. Depending on your outlook, this is either a vicious or a beneficent circle: The prestige of the majors has drawn ESPN to them; in turn ESPN’s blanket coverage has only increased the Slams' prestige by increasing their visibility 10-fold over the rest of the tour.

Either way, it will add new dimensions—a blue backdrop and a soundtrack of grunts—to a tennis fan’s life for the next two weeks. Let’s take a look at a little of what it brought us over the first two days and nights.

The TV Report

Not much has changed since last year on either Tennis Channel or ESPN2, so I’m not going to spend a lot of time critiquing the U.S. broadcasts. ESPN still spends too much time chattering at the desk rather than showing actual matches, and it sticks with Serena Williams at all costs. She draws viewers here, particularly after her notorious U.S. Open performance, and there’s no arguing with that. For a defense of its methods, see my 2009 interview with an ESPN programming director here.

As for the commentary, I was happy to start the new year with a brand-new sports metaphor from Brad Gilbert: “Hugging the plate." It means, in Brad-speak, standing close to the baseline during rallies. I also realized that I like the way he refers, right from the start of a broadcast, to the players by their nicknames. Hearing Juan Martin del Potro called “Delpo” all the time makes a broadcast seem more enthusiastic, less formal, more fun. So does hearing Brad say, “He’s playing unbelievable.”

Darren Cahill continues to be a knowledgeable voice of reason, but favorably comparing Serena Williams’ 41 straight first-round wins at majors to Roger Federer’s 22 straight semifinal appearances was a stretch.

Pam Shriver is on her way to redeeming her erratic performance at last year’s U.S. Open. She's back in her comfort zone, analyzing tactics and technique rather than trying to be the next Michael Barkann. She was especially good in her assessment of Maria Sharapova’s weak preparation for the Aussie Open, which consisted of just two exhibitions. She was persistent enough to prod even Mary Joe Fernandez into agreeing with her. As we’ve noted here in the past, Fernandez, the wife of IMG agent Tony Godsick, is very rarely critical of IMG client Sharapova.

Yet More About the Greatness of Roger and Rafa

Champions rise to the occasion: We know this. But in their first-round matches in Melbourne, Federer and Nadal showed us that they do it very different ways.

Nadal opened against Australia’s Peter Luczak, who played well enough to put a first-set scare into the Spaniard. Nadal spent most of that set in his passive rallying mode and looked shaky on his backhand side, where he rolled several ugly unforced errors into the alley. Not surprisingly, he played his best tennis when he was down break points. For many of us, there can be a tendency to rush and get negative after we lose a deuce point on our serve. But Nadal always gathers himself in these situations, and usually does something good with his first serve. This was case virtually every time against Luczak.

Still, Luczak eventually broke him and served for the set at 5-3. At 30-30 in that game, Nadal played his most creative point of the match. For the first time, he refused to rally passively; instead, he ran around and hit a forcing forehand on his return, put the next ball deep in the opposite corner, came in behind it, and finished the point with a putaway at the net. From there he broke and won the set in a tiebreaker. It’s a cliché, but Nadal has a winner’s ability to be inspired rather than unnerved by adversity. He uses it to produce his best, most thoughtful tennis, and he does that by getting out of his routine. Once he’s done that, Nadal typically loosens up, as he did in winning the last two sets easily over Luczak.

Adversity sends Federer in the opposite direction. When it’s close, he plays the same game he always plays, only better—he gets to the ball a little earlier; he hits it with the pace and penetration of his prime; he cuts out all mishits and most errors; he tracks down the extra ball; he makes his first serves. When Andreev was up 5-4 in the third and serving, with three sets points, Federer’s backhand slice was suddenly angled just a little more sharply, which forced Andreev to backpedal just a little farther to hit his lethal forehand. He missed it each time. Nadal actively manufactures his confidence; Federer finds his by instinct. One way or another, each of them gets there.

Match Point—For Two?

The Federer-Andreev and Vania King-Dominika Cibulkova matches, which were going on at virtually the same time yesterday, were both examples of the same strange mental phenomenon. That is: When a lower-ranked player serves for a match—or in the men’s case, for a two-set-to-one lead—and the score is 5-4, the player who is behind also stands a very good chance of winning the match (provided, of course, he or she can break serve). It's almost as if it's a sudden-death game for both players. Instead of serving it out, you can feel like you're suddenly playing for your life. 

Cibulkova broke King at 4-5 in the second set, won it in a tiebreaker, and nearly won the third set. Federer broke Andreev at 4-5 in the third and cruised from there. For the player trying to pull the upset, it’s virtually impossible to put that missed opportunity out of your mind. The momentum you had carefully built up for two whole sets can be completely dissipated in a matter of seconds.

The Ivanovic Show

I know a guy who is brave enough—or evil enough—to admit that he finds it more entertaining to see a player like Ana Ivanovic melt down than play well. It’s a sick way of thinking, of course, and suffice it to say that he's not a women's tennis fan. Then again, you can’t turn away from the scene of a car crash either, can you?

For me, seeing Ivanovic play well is entertaining and satisfying, mainly because I’ve been in her shoes. At this point, every victory for her feels like a triumph over the dark forces of doubt that plague all tennis players.

Most Pleasant Surprise

Maria Kirilenko and her newfound chutzpah. This undersized, underpowered Russian has always been a worker and a scrapper. It was nice to see her reap at least one reward for it with her win over Sharapova. But it wasn’t the shocking result many believe it to be; the two know each other well, and Kirilenko already owned a win over her. I should have highlighted it as a first-round match to watch.

With that in mind, let me finish by reminding you of a couple second-round matches to watch in the coming days: Justine Henin vs. Elena Dementieva and Juan Martin del Potro vs. James Blake.

I'll try to have a beer with one, and coffee with the other the next morning. 

Collision Courses	01/15/2010 - 6:10 PM

It would have been difficult to imagine during any of last year’s Grand Slams that the women would be competing, drama-wise and depth-wise, with the men any time soon. But a few weeks and one intense little dynamo from Belgium later, the WTA is the talk of Melbourne and the tennis world. While the men have gotten even deeper at the top, the women have done them one better by getting deeper and more chaotic at the same time. It’s going to start early, with a marquee match-up in round two. What else should we expect when all of the world’s best players collide for the first time more than in two years? The unexpected, perhaps?

First Quarter

OK, there’s no surprise on the top line of the draw. That space has been reclaimed, rightfully, by defending champion Serena Williams. Her path is not a cakewalk. She begins with the younger Radwanska, Urszula. She might play the talented Carla Suarez Navarro, who upset her sister here in 2009, in the third round. She could find herself facing home-country favorite Sam Stosur after that, and the quarterfinal could pit her against Vera Zvonareva, Victoria Azarenka—who defeated Serena in Key Biscayne last year—or the struggling 2008 Aussie runner-up, Ana Ivanovic.

Williams was shaky in Sydney, where she barely scraped past Aravane Rezai before being thrashed by Elena Dementieva in the final. Williams’ left knee was bothering her, and that could make her run in Melbourne a painful and laborious one—but she’s survived her share of those in the past. She said after that final that she was ready to go, and the last time she lost to Dementieva in Sydney, 12 months ago, she had her revenge in Melbourne.

Sleeper: Sabine Lisicki

Semifinals: Serena Williams

Second Quarter

Now the question that has tormented us for so long may finally get an answer: Is Caroline Wozniacki for real? She’s the No. 4 seed in Oz, and she’s been given as wide an opening to the semifinals as she could have asked for. Venus Williams is at the bottom of her section; while Venus could certainly overpower Wozniacki if they met, the American has stumbled early Down Under on numerous occasions, and she has to face a fierce basher in Lucie Safarova straight off.

Otherwise, the stiffest competition might come from, um, well, Agnieszka Radwanska? Shahar Peer? Tamira Paszek? Daniela Hantuchova? What year is it in this section, anyway? 2007? Wozniacki’s steadiness and persistence should serve her well on the medium-pace Plexicushion courts. Or will she have trouble hitting the ball through the court? Consider that a new question to torment us this weekend.

First-round match to read out loud: Caroline Wozniacki vs. Aleksandra Wozniak

Semifinals: Wozniacki

Third Quarter

This is where the chaos starts. The top seed in the quarter is Elena Dementieva, but she might be only the third-most-likely player to make it out. She’ll face Justine Henin in the second round, and if she survives that, most likely Kim Clijsters or Svetlana Kuznetsova in the quarters.

Who will stagger out of this quarter of death? Henin is 9-2 against Dementieva, a record that includes three love sets, and she’s an astounding and humiliating 16-2 against Kuznetsova. Clijsters is 11-3 against Dementieva and 7-1 against Kuznetsova. There’s no clearer evidence than these records that the class of the WTA is back. They were meant to come in and take over a section like this one.

Clijsters is ready to go all the way. Is Justine? Based on her performance in Brisbane, where she utterly outclassed Ana Ivanovic and appeared even faster than ever, you have to believe the answer is yes. But is she ready to get past her countrywoman? The answer again is yes; she was two points from doing it last week. But I’m going to take Kim anyway. She may have nearly let that match slip away, but that was only because she dictated the action so thoroughly in the first place.

Semifinals: Clijsters

Fourth Quarter

We come back down to earth in this section. Dinara Safina—do you remember her?—is the top seed, and Jelena Jankovic is on the other side. The bold-faced name in between them belongs to Maria Sharapova.

I would be more confident of Sharapova’s success if she had played a little more to warm-up for this event. But she limited her preparation to a Hong Kong exhibition. She says she’s back to her old service motion, but that doesn’t mean she’ll be back to her old service mind-set, which was once the steeliest aside from the Williams sisters.

As for Safina and Jankovic, maybe the total deflation of pressure compared to last year will help—Dinara, in particular, seemed to suffer under the spotlight. She reached the final in ’09, but she’s been hurt to start this season. All other things being equal, Sharapova is the better player.

Semifinals: Sharapova

Semis: Clijsters d. Sharapova: Kim won their first four matches, Maria their final three. To win, I think Sharapova will have to raise her game farther above her normal than Clijsters will.

S. Williams d. Wozniacki

Final: Clijsters d. S. Williams

It would be the match we’d love to see, and Serena would be out to avenge her tirade-induced loss to Clijsters at Flushing Meadows. But I think Kim is coming into the event in better form. Can she beat Henin, Sharapova, and Serena in one tournament? She has the game; it will be interesting to see if she has the belief.

Champion: Kim Clijsters

Big Four? Let's Talk about the Big Six	01/15/2010 - 2:10 PM

The first glance at a Grand Slam draw brings to mind a race track: The names, jammed up against each other, look like long lean horses in their blocks, ready to bolt into the empty triangular lines across the page. It’s a moment of pure anticipation and possibility.

The second glance begins to narrow those possibilities just a bit and reveal a few specifics about who’s going to be racing alongside whom. As that happens, the tournament takes its first shape. What does the 2010 men's Australian Open look like right now, before a ball has been struck? My first reaction as the names came into focus was that this was a draw that did not disappoint. All four sections could potentially give us quarterfinals that could pass for Grand Slam finals, evidence that, at the moment, the Big 4 has grown into the Big 6 (or even 7) on the men’s side. It won't get much better than this.

First Quarter

Here’s another point that becomes very clear very quickly: Roger Federer doesn’t have an easy draw. He opens with Igor Andreev, a guy with a vicious forehand who took him to five sets at the U.S. Open two years ago. And to reach the semifinals, he’ll likely have to get by either the tour’s hottest player, Nikolay Davydenko, or the man who played the best tennis of his career at last season’s Australian Open, Fernando Verdasco. Floating in between these guys are names like Hewitt, Baghdatis and Gulbis, each of whom could take home a prize scalp on a given day.

Could this, at long last, be the end of Federer’s Grand Slam semifinal streak, which has reached the preposterous number 22? (He hasn’t been beaten earlier at a major since Gustavo Kuerten sent him out of Roland Garros in the third round in 2004.) I don’t think so. Yes, Davydenko has beaten him two straight times. Yes, Federer has been taking his lumps lately, ever since hitting that between the legs shot against Novak Djokovic at Flushing Meadows. He’s been inconsistent, he’s lost tight matches, at times his shots have lacked pop, and he’s been beaten twice in a row by two players who had never beaten him before, Davydenko and Juan Martin del Potro. But that’s not really anything new: Away from the Slams, Federer has been in relative decline for a couple of years, but he’s found a way to survive the two-week tests. And how much would he love doing what Pete Sampras did to Andre Agassi at the 1995 U.S. Open and turning the tables on Davydenko when it counts. You wonder what Federer’s motivation can be at this point in his career? You’ve found it right there.

First-round match to watch: Ernests Gulbis vs. Juan Monaco

Sleeper: Marcos Baghdatis

Semifinals: Federer

Second Quarter

Novak Djokovic couldn’t have set it up any better if he’d rigged the whole thing himself. The No. 3 seed is slotted to play an injured Robin Soderling in the quarterfinals. In the round of 16, he's slotted to play perennial Slam punching bag Tommy Robredo. The most dangerous player anywhere near him is Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who hasn’t reached the final weekend of a major since doing it in Melbourne two years ago. Still, Jo Willie loves the courts and the atmosphere Down Under, and the fans love him back. A rematch of the 2008 final would make for yet another blockbuster quarter.

But Djokovic looks well positioned. He’s won this tournament before, he was the best player on the tour through most of last fall, and he says he’s learned his lesson about the Australian summer heat since retiring against Andy Roddick last year. This is Nole’s quarter, and maybe his tournament, to lose.

First-round match to watch: Richard Gasquet vs. Mikhail Youzhny

Semifinals: Djokovic

Third Quarter

Fortune is still not smiling on Andy Roddick. The No. 7 seed faces a hard-hitting up-and-comer in Holland’s Thiemo de Bakker in the first round. And across the section from him he can make out the towering presence of No. 4 Juan Martin del Potro in the distance. Closer to Roddick are two other men with guns, Fernando Gonzalez and Sam Querrey.

Del Potro, who has been bothered by a wrist problem, could be challenged by James Blake in the second round, and then either Marin Cilic or Stan Wawrinka, each a dark horse in his own right, in the round of 16. This, with the addition of Roddick in the quarters, will be a serious challenge for del Potro. If he really is hurt, he probably won’t make it out. But he’s still the best player here, and if the tall tank gets rolling, it won’t be stopped.

First-round match to watch: Cilic vs. Fabrice Santoro, who may finally be playing his last major

Semifinals: Del Potro

Fourth Quarter

Just like the top section, the bottom has given us a quarter worth savoring: No. 2 Rafael Nadal vs. No. 5 Andy Murray. There isn’t a whole lot in their way, either. Monfils and, uh, Ferrer on Murray’s side; Stepanek, Karlovic, and the slightly dangerous Isner on Nadal’s.

Both guys come into Melbourne in solid form. Nadal is healthy, and he willed some his old confidence back last week in Doha. A couple wins in Melbourne, where he’s the defending champion, should be enough to make him forget that he couldn’t close the door against Davydenko in the final. Murray arrived in Australia early this year, played some dazzling tennis at the pressure-free Hopman Cup, and should come in as fresh as anyone.

He’ll also come in, unfortunately for him, with a 2-7 record against Nadal. So why do I like Murray in their match-up this time? It will be on hard courts, of course, the only surface where Murray has had any success against the Spaniard. Despite his record, though, Murray has for the most part played with confidence when he’s faced Nadal over the last couple of years. He beat him in the semifinals of the 2008 U.S. Open, and even his most recent loss to him, at Monte Carlo last year, was closer than the straight-set scores would indicate—Nadal was a little scared by it at the time and believed Murray represented the biggest threat to his clay reign. Most important, Murray can hurt Nadal with his two-handed backhand, and he’ll get a chance to dictate a good portion of the rallies. This should allow him to show off more of his skills than he would if he were pinned behind the baseline against a ball-belter. Remember the match these two played Down Under in 2007? No? Let’s hope you’re reminded of it in 2010.

First-round match to watch: Stepanek vs. Karlovic

Semifinals: Murray

Semis: Djokovic d. Federer: I have no ironclad reasoning for picking Djokovic here—going against Federer is always a risk. But I think the Serb’s draw may allow him to conserve his emotions and energy through the first 12 days, to the point where he can come at Federer the way he once did, with guns blazing and family screaming. At the same time, Federer may be coming off a draining match with Davydenko.

Murray d. del Potro: This would be another toss-up. These guys have fought each other tooth and nail before, and while del Potro may be a little hurt, Murray may be trying to recover from a win over Nadal. That would favor the power-hitting del Potro, who, like I said, has the game to win his second straight major. But it would be a lot to expect.

Final: Djokovic d. Murray

Champion: Novak Djokovic

Looking for a Future	01/13/2010 - 3:50 PM

The fourth and final installment in a series on the intriguing storylines of 2010.

As the new season begins, the men’s game appears to be teetering between eras. On one side we have a two-man past and present, in the well-established form of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Despite various ups, downs, injuries and racquet smashes over the years, they remain firmly lodged at the top of the sport. On the other side we have the still-nebulous future and its multiple possibilities. Who will claim it? In which stylistic direction will it veer? What will tennis look like next?

The styles of Federer and Nadal have defined the last five years. Because of them, the sport on the men’s side has been about dictating forehands, shot-bending spin, expanded court coverage, calculated attacks, fellow-feeling among rivals, unprecedented dominance, and Nike bandannas—in short, they've made the power game artful. Compared to the women’s side, the ATP has also been about the continued ability of tennis to create athletic anomalies, freaks of nature and culture, unexplainable individuals who have countered the cookie-cutter version of power tennis brought to us from Eastern Europe via the Bollettieri academy. Ten years after Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters made their debuts, they’re still being hailed as the WTA’s last hope against that cookie-cutter. Over those same 10 years, the men have seen the rise of players as diversely gifted as Andy Murray, Novak Djokovic, Juan-Martin del Potro, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Richard Gasquet, Nikolay Davydenko, Radek Stepanek, and, of course, Rafael Nadal. Why this is, I can’t say: Is there a wider range of athleticism among men? Can men do more with their shots because of their height and size and strength advantage? Are young boys still encouraged to try sports more often than young girls? Are girls boxed into a narrower, more power-oriented and pragmatic set of skills at a younger age by their teachers, who know that a big-time payoff can come earlier for women?

Those are questions for another week, year, lifetime. Today I want to look at four of the male pros I listed above and ask whether any will rise above his peers in 2010 and begin to give shape to tennis’ future. As I wrote last week, I’ll never predict the demise of Federer-Nadal; they’ve bounced back enough times to make it an I’ll-believe-it-when-I-see-it proposition. And while Federer is 28, Nadal will only turn 24 in 2010—the long-term future could easily be his, if his knees allow it. But they will both decline some day. The question is, will one player pick where they leave off, or will there be an extended sorting out process until the next dominant champion shows himself?

Last year at this time all eyes were on Andy Murray as he made his doomed trip Down Under—we knew he was going to win the Australian Open, just knew it. This time we’ve been following, more skeptically, the steps of Nikolay Davydenko. At 28 and a half, he’s not going to define the future of tennis. If the Russian did, it would mark the triumph of the authoritarian approach to tennis over the creative and democratic. He is where he is because his brother locked him inside a court and turned him into a tennis-ball-hitting robot when he was a kid. What's interesting about Davydenko is that, in spite of this, his game is not cookie-cutter. Or, I should say, he’s so springy and precise that he makes the robotic a pleasure to watch.

The more relevant question at this point is whether Davydenko can define the next two weeks. The past is equivocal as a guide. Davydenko has routinely disappointed at the majors; he’s always been about making money over the long haul rather than peaking for the big events, in part because he thought the glory that the Slams represent was out of his reach. At the same time, Davydenko has made his share of Slam semis and quarters, including three of the latter in Melbourne. The bigger problem for him is his mindset. Even after beating Federer and Nadal back to back, he still poor-mouths his chances in three-out-of-five-set matches. It doesn’t sound to me like he’s trying to take any pressure off himself, either; after all these years of second-class status, he really can’t picture himself as a Slam winner. If he does win—and based on his game and his current form, he should be the favorite—Davydenko may be more surprised than any of us. It would be a wonderful moment to see him finally become convinced that he really is that good. But I’m not betting on someone who wouldn’t bet on himself.

***

Going a little ways up the rankings list, we encounter Novak Djokovic, the presumed and self-proclaimed heir apparent circa 2008. For a number of reasons—his emotional volatility, his lack of a killer weapon, his vulnerability to I-woke-up-on-the-wrong-side-of-the-bed-today syndrome—he remains stalled at No. 3. Djokovic, a Serbian who trained in Germany, straddles the creative and the authoritarian styles. He’s a freak of flexibility, and his skill with changing the ball’s direction and using the down-the-line with impunity is something new for the sport—there's a reason he looked like the future circa 2008. (I’ve always wondered: Does Djokovic, and the way he hits his two-hander, somehow look like the product of a woman coach? His first instructor was Jelena Gencic.) But despite his streamlined elegance and versatility, Djokovic seems to lack that one unbeatable go-to shot—the Sampras serve, the Federer and Nadal forehands—that the era-defining players always have. I love the guy for his game and for his bombastic goofiness, and I think the sport would be a wackier place with him as its public face. But he almost seems to be a tennis player trapped in a showman’s body. The emotions he needs to gather and keep at bay to play his best usually leave him spent by the time he nears the finish line at a major.

***

You might say the opposite has been true lately for a third future-of-the-game contender, Andy Murray. After years when his negativity could get the best of him, in 2009 Murray tried to remove the emotional from his game; he concentrated on the physical and the long-term rather than worrying about his results at any one tournament. Murray, tennis’ leading technocrat, won a lot of matches but didn’t rise to any important occasions. And his disappointing late-season performances, at the U.S. Open and the World Tour Finals, left me wondering if he would ever be able to bridge the gap between his talents at the baseline and his talents around the net. (I also began to wonder whether his devotion to muscle building may end up hurting him. Murray's game is based on his speed; are big, sturdy legs faster than lean legs?)

It’s not as if Murray doesn’t know how to hit an approach. His backhand down the line, which may be his best shot, is a natural in this regard. It’s just that he doesn’t have a transition game to go along with it—he doesn’t have a transition mentality. Even more than Djokovic, Murray lacks a killer weapon that would enable him to avoid having to build a transition game based on traditional, well-placed, skidding approach shots. Which is a terrible waste, considering how skilled he is around the net; Murray has all-court DNA in a power-baseline era. But if he could bridge that gap and use all of his gifts, he could shape a tennis future that, even more than Federer has, would blend its modern and classical versions. It's a lot to ask. At this point in the game’s evolution, the lack of an easy way to end points may be too much to overcome—the hole in the bottom of the boat.

***

Ending points is not a problem for our final contender, 21-year-old Juan-Martin del Potro. After everyone else has taken their shot, is the future of tennis going to be a long, lanky, brooding Argentine with a slap shot forehand and a sneaky will? It’s tempting to think so. While Federer has lulled us into believing that power can be blunted with beauty and bamboozled with finesse, the sport has still gotten faster on his watch Federer may not look like he’s bludgeoning the ball, but he has very rarely been overpowered. Watch him versus someone like Andy Roddick (or imagine them playing each other). The speed with which the events of Federer’s strokes take place—the set-up, the backswing, the extension—take significantly less time than Roddick’s or just about anyone else’s. Federer may not have made the game more powerful, but he has helped make it quicker all around.

Now del Potro appears ready to up that speed again, while discarding Federer’s outer layer of elegance. Del Potro has all the modern attributes, and a little more—the reliable two-handed backhand, the I-see-ball-I-crush-ball-as-flat-and-hard-as-possible forehand, the serve that can bail him out on break points, underrated anticipation on returns, and, best of all, a deep-seated stubbornness. I thought it was interesting that his fellow Argentine, Juan Monaco, said last fall that he believed del Potro would become No. 1 because of “his mentality.” He knows something about the guy.

I'm guessing Del Potro will have off days because of moodiness. He has a tank-like, slow-starter quality that may cost him matches, and based on the morose look he brought to the final of the World Tour Finals, it seems that he doesn’t always warm to the fight. But watching del Potro over the last two days at the Open, in which he blasted his way past Federer and Nadal—the two-man present—in back-to-back matches, you could believe that you were seeing something new, a progression. Since the mid-1980s, power has been at the heart of tennis' evolution. Beautiful or not, force has been the only law. Del Potro, more than Murray or Djokovic (or his classmate Marin Cilic) lives by that law.

Del Potro won’t own 2010, and it will be tough for him to crack the Federer-Nadal code—for one thing, he’s still a work in progress on grass. He may even slump as he adjusts to the pressure, the way Sampras did after his first, unexpected major win in 1990. But I will say that in the Open final, del Potro was the first person I’ve seen who backed Federer up, loomed over him, and knocked him at least slightly off-balance in rallies—for once, Federer’s quickest wasn’t quick enough. When someone can do that to the best player of this era on a regular basis, you’ll know the future has arrived.

Restoration Players	01/11/2010 - 4:27 PM

The third in a series on tennis’ most intriguing storylines of 2010

So much for easing ourselves into the new season—the pros have come out swinging as if it’s already June. It’s hard to imagine a year opening more auspiciously. Over the first weekend alone, we were given a stunning comeback in one men’s final, a bizarre concluding tiebreaker in another, and a women’s match that outshone virtually everything that happened on the WTA tour in 2009. Watching the last of those finals, between Kim Clijsters and Justine Henin, I kept asking myself: When did I start having to pay attention to what happens in Brisbane? Why did the first tournament of the year feel like the fifth Grand Slam?

That might be what Clijsters and Henin were thinking as well. Each was likely a little startled to be facing the other quite so soon, especially Kim, who must have been wishing for the good old days of summer 2009, when she had the comeback road all to herself. Unfortunately for her she made it look so easy, like so much fun, that she inspired her countrywoman, greatest rival, and big-match nemesis to hit that road herself.

As they belted each other into the corners for three rollercoaster sets on Sunday, I also started to ask myself: Who were the players we cared about last year, exactly? Jelena Jankovic, Dinara Safina? And why? This isn’t fair, of course; Dinara and JJ are no slouches in the grand scheme of things. But over the course of a couple of hours in Brisbane, Henin and Clijsters had given the WTA back a significant part of its top tier. There were shanked shots, there was rust, there were nerves, and there was one crucial double-fault in the end. But there were no meltdowns or tears or shrieks or frighteningly wayward services tosses, either. More than the men, the women—from Navratilova and Evert, to Graf and Seles, to Hingis and Williams and Henin—have always had a ruling class of players that dominates at will. They win with confidence and competence in most facets of the game. They win with winners rather than losing with errors. The WTA got the final member of this era’s ruling class, in the form of Henin, back last week. That’s why Brisbane felt so much like Melbourne.

There are 40 more weeks and many bigger events to go, of course. What did Clijsters-Henin Round One tell us about what we can expect on the women’s side for the rest of 2010? I had thought before this event that Clijsters might be the real Belgian to watch this season. Her movement and shot-making had always been a match for anyone’s; it was her head that had gotten in the way when she was younger. She’d struggled to muster her best against Venus and Justine in particular at the Slams. I thought that in her second career she might be looser and not as likely to succumb to nerves. Why I ever would have thought that, I have no idea. If the sport’s history has shown us anything, it’s that nerves are eternal; there’s no way to keep them down, no matter what we tell ourselves about “having nothing to lose.” That's because they’re the flip side of what got us the lead in the first place—to win, we have to care about winning, and caring about winning makes us nervous about not winning. Clijsters’ performance against Henin showed us this dynamic all over again. Up 6-3, 4-1, she suddenly reverted to her pre-retirement form. She rushed to try for winners; she rushed to set up to serve; she rushed to get points over and done with. She rushed herself right out of the second set and almost out of the match.

On the other hand, Clijsters should happy that the final was on her racquet the whole way. She played well, she built a huge lead; she got nervous, she lost the lead; she relaxed, she regained the lead. For much of the match, she overpowered Henin’s famous one-handed backhand, and her swing volley was the most spectacular shot of the night. So while the nerves will continue to be a factor, so will Clijsters’ superior athleticism. She’s now beaten both of the Williams sisters and Henin in her comeback, three things she struggled to do in her first career. Kim may end up being the Belgian to watch after all.

I’m guessing Clijsters and Henin will each take home a major this year. Kim’s may come on one of the hard-court Slams, while Justine hasn’t been beaten in Paris for years. I suppose her success there in 2010 may depend on whether she throws everything into Wimbledon. Just as important for women’s tennis fans, the presence of the Belgians will surely inspire Serena Williams to reassert her authority over this era. She’s the woman with 11 majors, after all.

We’ll see where they end up, and who gets the best of the diva wars. What’s worth mentioning and savoring for the moment is the fact that the WTA has its ruling class back, as well as its individuality. Rather than another lasered two-handed backhand, the shots to watch will be Henin’s full-body whip one-hander and Clijsters’ leaping swing volley. Rather than a new, louder, younger grunt, we’ll hear Henin’s little bark of “Allez” and watch Clijsters’ blue eyes get bigger as they survey the court. They’re not as intense as Henin's, but they're very human; when Clijsters focuses them before a serve or a return, they’re hopeful and unsure in equal measures.

Henin and Clijsters, between the two of them, exhibit whole worlds of talent, will, and vulnerability—something for every tennis fan. I have no idea how they both came out of a tiny, relatively non-descript corner of Europe at virtually the same moment, and I don’t care. I’m just happy they came out of it again.