Is it all about execution? Does shot selection mean
anything? Down match point in a third-set tiebreaker to Roger Federer Tuesday night, having squandered numerous opportunities to pull off a potentially
career-changing upset, Tomas Berdych let two forehands fly. One went inside
out, landed a foot or two inside the baseline, and elicited a middling
mid-court reply from Federer. On the next forehand, Berdych leaned in and belted it crosscourt. This ball also landed just inside the baseline, for a winner. A few minutes later, against
all odds and historical precedents, Berdych won the match.
Because of the result, we can say that the big Czech's caution to the
wind approach was the right way to go, the smart, proactive play. After all,
“be aggressive” is the default strategic position recommended to all professional tennis
players, no matter what the circumstances. But if Berdych had missed one of
those two forehands, thereby losing the match and reinforcing his reputation as
one of the game’s foremost head cases and wastes of talent, we would have said that his tactic was reckless, that it was inevitable that he would choke, and that the great
Roger Federer would prevail in this pressure moment.
Obviously, both of these assessments can't be correct. Was it
just dumb luck that Berdych made those forehands and Federer subsequently committed a routine error to end the match? No, that’s not true either—execution is a
function of correctly gauging what you can do at any given moment. And this was a
special moment for Berdych. On the previous point, he had nervously guided a
forehand up the line that the side linesman, after initially signaling that the ball was good, called wide. Berdych challenged and walked to the net. He appeared sure that his shot had landed in. Hawk-Eye indicated that it had been
wide by the narrowest sliver possible. Berdych stared at the court for a long
time before walking back to the baseline. Along the way, he caught his coach’s
eye and the two of them shared a wide smile that began ruefully but ended up
seeming almost giddy. Berdych got down in his return stance with a look of
happiness on his face, all tension gone from his body.
The moment reminded me of the last holes of a Masters golf tournament a few
years ago, when Phil Mickelson, after being wound tight for four days, suddenly began to smile
with relief, right at the moment when he knew he couldn’t win the tournament. A
natural reaction, in some ways, but it also seemed to me to be the definition
of an athlete who's unable to enjoy competition—it didn’t matter whether he’d
won or lost, Mickelson was just happy that it was over. The same was true for Berdych
once Federer reached match point. The Czech, who had been up 4-2 in the third and
who by all rights deserved the victory, could finally relax. By guiding that
forehand wide, he’d already choked. The worst was over.
But in this case Berdych, also a guy who doesn't thrive competitively, had one more chance. What he did right, and intelligently, was to gauge
his frame of mind and choose his shot from there. The ice had broken inside this normally chilly player, and aggression really was the smart way to go. He
was much more likely to execute a risky forehand at that moment than he was when he was ahead.
Berdych's attitude and shot selection at this moment compared favorably with his opponent in two ways. Federer later said that
his timing had been off, but he never made any concessions to that fact during the
match. He continued to hit for the lines, even as he piled up 61
unforced errors—to be fair, you can’t play all that conservatively against Berdych,
who is absolutely lethal when he has time to set up. From an
emotional standpoint, where Berdych enjoyed the moment in the end, Federer
looked, as he had looked earlier against Florent Serra, like he would rather
have been pretty much anywhere else. I’m sure he cared and wanted to win, but
his aura in general was one of irritation, even disdain, at not being able to
do everything he wanted, rather than one of determination to win anyway. This isn't a new look for Federer, but for me last night, it made
watching him a chore—he was the one who couldn't enjoy the competition. It’s also not a new or alarming result for Federer. Hard as it to believe, he
hasn’t reached the final of either Indian Wells or Key Biscayne since 2006. But he’s come back to win plenty of Slams over those years. At the majors, Federer has more time to find his game, and more motivation to do what it takes to survive even when he
can’t.
Normally it’s Berdych, not Federer, who is a chore to watch. A few years ago, he was yet another guy who I saw on a deep side court and
believed was the real thing, a future Slam contender. He had the height, he had
the timing, he had the smoothest power for a big guy since Marat Safin, he even
seemed to have an even-keel demeanor. Like dozens of other sure shots,
Berdych turned out to be a disappointment. His face a stony mask, he played a soulless brand
of tennis; I got the feeling he couldn't put himself on the line emotionally.
Either he had it on a certain day, or he didn’t. “Finding a way to win” was not
a phrase that cropped up alongside Tomas Berdych’s name very often, if ever. On Tuesday night, at least, he found a way to win. He did it by breaking the ice. He did it with a smile.
Greetings from a gloomy east coast of the United States.
It’s been raining, heavily, according to the tournament’s web site, in Key
Biscayne. It’s raining, just as heavily, outside my office window in Manhattan.
With matches just getting started and no finals to review from yesterday,
I’m left with a hodge-podge of items to address. Three items, to be exact, come
to mind.
“Some Jackass”
Yes, these were the words used by Andy Roddick to describe
Wayne Odesnik this weekend. As you know, Odesnik, an American third-fourth-fifth-tier ATP player, pleaded guilty to trying to smuggle eight vials of HGH into
Australia at the beginning of the year. Another player, upon hearing of the case,
wondered what it said about WADA, the sport’s doping overseer, that Odesnik had
never failed a test. The truth is, he couldn’t have failed a test for HGH,
because tennis has yet to test for it. In fact, until a couple of months ago,
no one in any sport had ever tested positive for the muscle-building substance.
Terry Newton, a British rugby player, was the first; he admitted using it and
has been suspended. This has led major league baseball’s commissioner, Bud
Selig, to push the player’s union to allow HGH testing. Along with the Odesnik
case, it may (it should) spur tennis to make that step as well.
ITF spokesman Stuart Miller told me today that “recent
developments”—namely, the Odesnik situation—meant that tennis would have to
“consider broadening” what it tests for. “We test for a wide variety of
substances, and you can’t test for everything every day. It’s constantly
evolving, and we’re always looking to trends in other sports and what we should
be looking for next.”
According to the ITF’s records from 2009, Odesnik
was tested once last year, at the U.S. Open.
The Phantom Injury
I have a running debate with another tennis writer about how much consideration we should give a supposed injury or illness when we
assess a player’s performance in a given match.
My colleague is willing to downgrade the significance of any
match where one player has complained of a physical problem. I go the other way; if
it doesn’t force you to retire, and it doesn’t make you limp or have to
powder-puff your serve in, it’s not worth considering or mentioning. The
latest example of one of these situations happened on Saturday, when Andy
Murray lost for the second straight time while seeming to have an issue with
his foot. But niggling problem or not, it wasn't his foot that drilled that easy pass into the net to lose him the first set against Mardy Fish—he got the ball in plenty of time. Murray hasn’t mentioned any physical issue in his press conferences. He’s focused on what is likely a larger
problem: His lack of mental toughness since the Aussie Open final. He looks
like a deflated player at the moment.
Part of my attitude about this comes from own experience. I never
pushed my body the way a pro athlete does, but I did play tennis virtually
every day for a lot of years. I’ve been injured plenty of times—back, shoulder,
hamstring are three popular places. But I've never finished a match
where an injury was in any way the cause of my defeat. Either I I couldn’t
play at all, or I had to quit midway. When any injury is mentioned, and I've seen a pro run and hit with no visible hindrance, I wonder what exactly it could have done to them. Partisans of Roger Federer claim that he was hindered by a back problem
in his 2009 Aussie Open loss to Rafael Nadal. I didn’t notice it, and even if I had, I don’t
know how what kind of injury is worth bringing up if it allows you to win six matches at a Grand Slam and
take two sets from a guy who has a winning record against you. Ditto for Nadal
at the French Open last year. I didn’t see any visible knee trouble in his loss
to Robin Soderling, and I don’t know how you win three matches at the most
grueling tournament in the world, before going out in four tough sets to the
eventual runner-up, if you’re suffering every time you plant your
foot on the ground. I know Nadal has said his knees contributed to that defeat, and he pulled out of Wimbledon because of them a few weeks later. But I’ve also heard from another source near him that it was his head—which was
troubled by his parents’ separation—and not his body that hurt most. I
know we don’t want to start making personal problems into excuses, because no
match will ever count again. How often does anyone feel their absolute best
both physically and mentally? How often are our heads totally clear?
Don’t take it from me, though. Take it from Federer. Asked
in Indian Wells whether he felt as beat up at 23 as Nadal often appears to be
now, he said, “Sure, sometimes you feel tired. Part of our sport, you know.
You ask: Every guy has something small going on.” If every guy has something
small going on, then that means no injury—no barely detectable injury,
anyway—is worth mentioning over any other. Do we want to, after every match, start scientifically comparing the significance of each player's bruises and strains and boo-boos with his opponent's? It'd be a lot easier to go back to judging a match by its final
score, and its final score alone.
A Daveed Sighting
It was nice to see David Nalbandian again this weekend,
wasn’t it? No, he’s not in perfect shape. Yes, he faded down the stretch
against Nadal. And yes, he’ll never be all he can be, because he likes his
hobbies and his time away from the sport and he’s capable of petulantly chucking any match
to the wind. But did you see the slo-mo replays that Fox Sports showed of his
forehand on Sunday? Effortless balance, eyes glued to the contact point well
after he’s hit the ball, a naturally exaggerated extension afterward:
Nalbandian may be hell to root for, but every shot of his is a pleasure to watch.
If the importance of a tennis match can be measured by the
number of YouTube clips it generates, the men’s final that took place 10 years
ago in Key Biscayne, between Pete Sampras and Gustavo Kuerten, is up there
among the all-time classics. There are at least two pages worth of videos on the
site; I’m guessing you can see every point if you wished. Along the way, you
can also hear Luke Jensen, the color man that day, say “pumped” and “smash and crash” and, I’m going to go out on a limb and assume, “Texas T-bone” an odd dozen
times. Never thought you'd be thankful for Justin Gimelstob? You thought wrong.
Why the nostalgic love for Pete and Guga? It was a superb,
chaotic, and razor-close four-setter that was decided in an overtime
tiebreaker. The crowd in Miami, blending the South with the North American,
produced a soccer-game atmosphere—it was always fun to watch Guga in the
second, smaller stadium at Key Biscayne in those days; the green-and-gold swarmed the place. But what’s most interesting, from an historical perspective,
is that this was one of the last top-level duels between players with
contrasting styles. Pete and Andre had the more famous rivalry, but the most
dramatic tennis came when they were paired with someone else who was their
stylistic opposite. Pete and Guga gave us this one, as well as an even better
match later that year in Lisbon, while Andre and Patrick Rafter traded five-set
wins at the majors.
The clip above covers the
final points of the match.
—I went to see the
movie High Fidelity instead of watching this one, but I did get back in time for the
fourth-set tiebreaker. Which means that what comes to mind
first when I remember it is Kuerten’s reaction at the end. When he sees his final passing shot
tick and tape and go long, he smashes his racquet to the court and then chucks it toward his chair. Despite his
reputation as a mellow surfer type, the anger wasn’t completely
uncharacteristic—a couple months later, he would become seriously
grumpy when Magnus Norman extended him to a fourth set in the French Open
final. But the violence, as far I know, was.
—Sampras: bigger hair than normal. Kuerten: The man had many
looks over the years, but I thought this was a pretty good one.
—Sampras had one his traditional slump-shouldered, tongue out, I’m
almost out of gas moments that day. Was there ever a player who won so many matches in which he
appeared to be barely staving off physical collapse? He had a rare blood
condition, and nerves must have played a part in aggravating it. I can remember
saying “Here we go again,” on more than one occasion when he went into this
mode.
—The shot that enraged Guga was a pass from Sampras that was
called in on the baseline. Seeing it now, it looks like the ball was long.
Alas, there was no Hawk-Eye to prove it either way. Guga reacted in the worst
way possible. He didn’t really argue with chair umpire Steve Ulrich, choosing
instead to assume that the line judge blew it and that he was robbed. Then he belted a ball into the stands, a peak of emotion that 's tough to come down from in time to be calm enough to play the next point. He never did come down from it. You can see Guga continue to gesture in the
direction of that linesman minutes later.
—The all-time greats supposedly never choked, right? Wrong,
as Sampras proves here by double-faulting, feebly, at match point. The
difference is that he was able to put that botch behind him right away. His next
serve was a smart and confident one out wide in the deuce court, which earned
him another chance at the title.
—Luke Jensen is unique, I will say that. Typically you’ll
hear an announcer—say, Brad Gilbert—become energized when a player goes for a
bomb on a big point. I’ve never heard anyone, aside from Jensen here, bellow,
“He went for the kick!” Jensen follows that observation up by saying that
he “can feel it, the big one down the middle.” Sampras spins the ball lightly
into the middle of the net. My favorite Luke-ism occurs a few seconds
later, when he steps back to give the big picture about what’s at stake here:
“This Masters Series final is really heating up. They’re playing for the
crystals, the dollars . . . pride.”
—Classic TV juxtaposition: Sampras telling Pam Oliver (you
know tennis was a big deal when Pam Oliver was working it) about what a great
tournament Guga had just had, while the camera cuts to a shot of Kuerten
pressing a towel into his face in despair.
—Annacone: So calm you wonder if he was even watching the
match. Sampras: Very goofy face in the final slo-mo replay of his celebration.
—What about the tennis that’s we see in this tiebreaker?
Sampras reminds us that he was an athletic volleyer first and foremost, rather
than a crisp technician, à la Stefan Edberg. He’s at his best when he’s
reaching and reacting. If the contrast in
styles leads to anything, it leads to an unpredictability from one point to the next that’s
not as common now.
—I’ve said it before, but Sampras is a guy who I’ve learned
to enjoy watching more in retrospect. What once seemed dull now seems like an intelligent and admirable attempt to remain as even-keel as possible, to keep emotion out of the equation. He was taught as a kid that there the only words that should be spoken on a tennis court are "in," "out," and the score; no wonder he struggled to match Agassi's patter in the Hit for Haiti.
For such a
great and deeply confident player, it’s odd that Sampras' signature piece of body language was to look
straight down at his feet between points. He played an extrovert’s game,
free-flowing and aggressive, but he did it with introvert’s manner. Unlike Kuerten on this day, Sampras never
appeared to look ahead to what might be coming, or behind at what had already happened.
That’s what keeping your head down will do for you.
***
Will we see a final this good in 2010, or did the days of
all-time Masters Series classics—aside from certain afternoons in Madrid—die
with the three-out-of-five-set final? TV coverage starts Saturday on Fox Sports.
Tennis.com’s no-holds-barred coverage of the off-court fashion in Miami has
already begun here. Have a good weekend.
It’s time to reshuffle the deck and do it all again.
The surface is similar, the country is the same, the air is still hot, and few
of the faces have changed. But they have been moved around a little, and that’s
just enough to make Key Biscayne feel fresh.
Perrotta has the brackets covered this time, so I’ll step
back and do some of the global thinking. Or global questioning: What will we be
looking to find out at the Sony Ericsson Open this time around?
Was
the ATP’s parade of upsets in Indian Wells a sign of anything to come?
The BNP Paribas had the feel of a
fall Masters event, where the top players typically lose just enough of their
edge to turn the tournament into a free for all. Of the Top 4—do they still
merit the term Big 4?—seeds, only Rafael Nadal reached the semifinals or
appeared to be close to his best form.
Like I said in my post after the
Indian Wells final, I saw the event as a fluke rather than a harbinger. The
flipside to those early losses is that Federer, Murray, and Djokovic should
come to Key Biscayne rested and hungry for a solid result. And despite Nadal’s
loss in the semifinals, his form was good enough to win the event,
whomever he might have played.
Of the other three, only Murray’s
performance in Indian Wells was worrisome. Federer has been having off days at
Masters events for years and they haven’t carried over to the majors. Djokovic
had played a lot of tennis in the previous couple of weeks, and packing it in
on a bad day isn’t unheard of for him. But Murray, while he may have been
affected by a foot problem during his loss to Robin Soderling, was passive not
just in his game plan, but in his attitude as well. Much like
his loss to Marin Cilic last year, he didn’t try to change anything after the
first set. Worse, it didn’t appear that he could have changed the dynamics of
the rallies even if he had tried. Now Murray may have to find a way around Soderling in
the quarters in Key Biscayne.
Conversely,
with Serena Williams out, is there any discernible hierarchy on the WTA side?
After the co-debacles of Henin and
Clijsters in Indian Wells, the ruling class at this moment may be weaker than ever. For every player on an upswing,
someone else has struggled. Jankovic rises, Azarenka deflates, Wozniacki reaches
a career high, Ivanovic a career low—with her ranking at No. 58, the question
may be whether Ivanovic will soon become a wild card baby, à la Anna Kournikova
during her slow demise. Yanina Wickmayer is going two directions at once. She
had an excellent Aussie Open and is improving over the long term, but she’s taken her
lumps lately.
Are there any Ms. Reliables out
there, anyone we can count on? While Wozniacki didn’t show much in the final in
IW, she does have a game and attitude that seem built for consistent
results. I do think Henin will rebound, but I’m not sure what to make of
Clijsters at the moment. Her draw looks good, but it didn’t look bad in IW
either. Is Venus Williams, who has played very well this year and who will
return in Miami, the WTA savior of the moment? She’s as good a bet as any.
3. Is there anyone who might surprise us?
One player who I didn’t write
about last week, but who I enjoyed watching, was Alisa Kleybanova. She hung tough
at the end in her upset of Clijsters and made Jankovic work very hard to beat
her in the quarters—Kleybanova doesn’t seem to cave mentally. With her
Davenport-esque style, we know she can club the ball, but she ran
surprisingly well in Indian Wells and appeared to have shed a few pounds. All
of which, of course, means that she’ll probably up and lose her opener in Miami.
As for the men, in his press
conference after he’d upset Nadal in the semis, Ivan Ljubicic looked back at
his run to the final and made sure that he mentioned his three-set win over
Juan Monaco—Ljuby called him a “tough customer.” Monaco is more consistent than
he is powerful, which makes a slow hard court a good fit for him.He gave eventual champion Murray a
fight in the second round here last year, and he might get a rusty or distracted
Fernando Gonzalez in the third round this time around.
What
are the early match-ups to watch (or at least to follow on live scores)?
ATP
Mardy Fish’s strong serve might
give Andy Murray a headache in the second round. Ditto for Taylor Dent and
Nadal.
David Nalbandian, a wild card, is
lurking in Nadal’s section; he’s beaten Rafa badly on a couple of occasions.
Andy Roddick could get Igor
Andreev, a player he’s lost to on hard and clay courts in the past, in the
second round.
Marin Cilic vs. Marcos Baghdatis
would be a highlight of the third round.
A Roddick-Ljubicic rematch is
possible in the fourth.
WTA
U.S. Open junior champ Heather
Watson of Great Britain has a wild card and might see Wozniacki in the second
round.
Henin and Dementieva, if
everything goes according to plan, will go at it again in the second round.
What
does the style of tennis played in Key Biscayne and Indian Wells tell us
about the sport right now?
Together, these two
Masters/Premier events—both dual gender, both on U.S. hard courts—form a
collective almost-Slam. Like the other majors, there’s a distinct type of
tennis that's produced on these courts. In general it’s risk-averse. The
biggest mistake Andy Roddick made in the Indian Wells final was trying to serve
and volley on the first point of the tiebreaker. He stoned a volley badly and,
after two first-serve bombs by Ljubicic, he was down 3-0 and the match was teetering on the brink. In this sense, IW/KB presents us with the conservative contemporary
game at its purest. But just as it would be wrong to base your assessment of
the state of the sport on how it’s played on clay or grass, it’s hard to
extrapolate beyond these two events themselves—like I said earlier, in 2009
Murray was the best at IW/KB combined, but he didn’t even reach a Slam final.
We’ve heard a lot about the
downside of slow-court tennis. Is there anything positive to draw from it? First, it
makes players work hard, both on their serve and return games—points aren’t
that easy to finish, even from an attacking position. If it doesn’t necessarily
lead to upsets, it does level the playing field slightly, because most players
are at least comfortable on these types of courts, with styles and physiques
that suit the surface’s demands. If the quality of play isn’t as spectacular as
often as we might like, it’s rarely, at least on the men’s side, dreadful. You’ve
got all the best players, without as many mismatches as you get in a major, and
close to a dozen of them on each tour have a shot at the title. I can't ask for
too much more than that.
A tennis tournament in its dwindling, winnowing latter days
inspires an instant case of nostalgia. A few days ago we saw dozens, even
hundreds of players kicking soccer balls on the pitch and scarfing pasta in the
cafeteria. By the final weekend virtually all of them were gone, moved on,
presumably, to the next event, where they'll do it all again for a few days. For
the vast majority of pros—half of whom are done after round 1—each stop on the
tour consists of a brief flash of hope and community before they’re cut loose and left to their own devices
again. The sport must be one constant hello and goodbye. The process is
starting again as we speak in Key Biscayne.
The same holds true for writers, in a slightly less brutal
way. Colleagues you ate and drank with through the early part of the week vanish
at different stages. By the end you’re yelling at your TV monitor by yourself
as a last-second shot goes up in a college basketball game. By now, of course,
we’ve all left Indian Wells, and the squeaky door in its pressroom is shut
for another year. The blue sky there has been traded for the pure gray of New York.
Before this year’s tournament—which was sleepy and stunning in equal
measures—blurs in with a hundred other
tournaments, I’ll finish in the traditional manner: By putting down everything
I didn’t have the time or the space to put down before.
"You make a good point, no?"
There was a rare occurrence in Rafael Nadal’s final press
conference: A player may have learned something from a journalist.
Q: Don’t you think the last thing that is still missing in
your game is the ability to kill a match?
Nadal hesitated for a thoughtful few seconds before giving in. “Probably, probably. You know, that’s—yeah.”
“Miss”-tery
In the women’s final, I thought I heard chair umpire Lynn
Welch say “Miss Jankovic is challenging the call at the right far baseline . .
.” Do all the umpires refer to the (single) WTA women as “miss”? I can’t recall now, but it sounded as cool as it did antiquated.
Feathered Fans
Indian Wells may have the only center court where birds can
be heard loudly chirping as play goes on. Robin Soderling, not surprisingly, is a favorite of this crowd: They provided a happy soundtrack to his upset of Andy
Murray in the quarterfinals.
Evening Gold
It wasn’t a strong tournament for the women on centre court,
from Caroline Wozniacki’s final-round fold to Kim Clijsters’ head-scratching
tiebreaker meltdown to the Sharapova-Zheng death march. But that wasn’t
necessarily true on the outer courts. That’s where I relaxed for half an hour
or so, under the lights, with nothing to write, while Wozniacki and Zheng threw
everything they had at each other. The temperature was right and the stands
were moderately crowded, with plenty of seats but also plenty of energy. There
was nothing overly dramatic or high stakes about the match; it was just a
chance for people to be awed by the skill of two pros. On any given rally, you
might hear someone say “Oh my God,” after one shot; another person say “Wow” after
the next shot; and a third person clap and say “Amazing” when the point ended.
In a perfect world, we’d watch every match from this vantage point, on this
kind of night.
The Beauty of the Bracket
Nothing represents college basketball like the bracket;
there’s something perfectly cutthroat and unforgiving about it—it’s as
Darwinian as anything we’ve created. I can remember staring at the NCAA
tournament brackets for hours as a kid, eventually taking the newspaper’s copy up to my
room so I could concentrate on them. Tennis also has brackets, of course; is
there any way to feature them more prominently as a tournament begins, to use
them the way the NCAA does?
Favorite Quote
It didn’t come from a player, but from my friend sitting
next to me in the pressroom, Matt Cronin. Multitasker extraordinaire, for the
first few days he’d been posting and Twittering up a storm about every tennis
development available. After sending one text, he sat back a little and said, “I’ll bet
they’re going to look back at me and say, ‘Man, that guy could really tweet.’”
Glimpsing Agnieszka
One benefit of a Williams-less Indian Wells is the
opportunity to see a favored player like Agnieszka Radwanska appear in a
semifinal. Radwanska has shades of Hingis’ touch—she fooled Wozniacki in the
semis with a no-look crosscourt drop shot—but she lacks the consistency; just
as important, she lacks Hingis’ arrogance and ambition. The unassuming quality that’s so
appealing is also part of what keeps her from being seen by more people.
"Put Your Hands in the Air!"
Perhaps the greatest drawback to covering this tournament
was having to hear every single center court match introduced. After the
obligatory yet inexlicable blaring of “Where the Streets Have No Name,” the event’s emcee, whose name
escapes me, would tell the crowd that the two players coming down the tunnel were
“in it to win it,” so we should “make some noise.”
On one very particularly hot afternoon, the aforementioned
emcee warned us to “stay hydrated.” A nice thought, but it was too tempting for
one reporter, who yelled across the press room, "But remember to make some noise while
you’re hydrating!”
We Do Need Our Stinkin’ Badges
The one priceless item for a writer at a sporting event is
his or her credential badge, which stays around our necks like a wedding ring
stays on a ring finger. It’s your ticket to everywhere; if you lose it, you’re
done, pack up, quit your job. One morning I woke up, got dressed, and started
out of my hotel room door without my badge. I felt half-naked without it,
so I hurried back in and put it around my neck. Then I walked down to my hotel’s lobby,
picked up a paper plate, and started scooping eggs onto it. I’d taken the whole
badge thing one step too far: I’d worn it to breakfast.
Has your NCAA bracket officially been busted yet? Whatever the damage, I doubt it was as bloody as what went on in Indian Wells over the last 10 days. It wasn’t just the champions—Jelena Jankovic and Ivan Ljubicic, two players whose long-term trajectories had been pointing downward—who stunned us, either. From the moment I arrived 10 days ago to find out that Justine Henin had lost in her opening round, this was a tournament that overturned expectation and precedent on a daily basis. Among other stunners, Marcos Baghdatis beat Roger Federer for the first time; Kim Clijsters folded with a commanding lead in a third-set tiebreaker; and Ivan Ljubicic ignored his collective 4-12 record against Rafael Nadal and Andy Roddick long enough to beat both for the title.
Even on Sunday morning, if forced to predict the winner of the women’s final, I would have taken Caroline Wozniacki. She hadn’t been scintillating this week, but she had looked intimidatingly competent. While there wasn't much between her and Maria Kirilenko as far as their games went, Wozniacki ruthlessly exploited what difference there was to win 0 and 3 in the third round. Then she ran Nadia Petrova and Jie Zheng into the ground in third sets—love and 1, respectively. And she’d been in total control of her straight-set semifinal with Agnieszka Radwanska.
Then, just when Wozniacki appeared set to make a Premier-level breakthrough, her competence deserted her. It began, from my perspective, in the first game of the final. Jankovic, in the middle of a standard crosscourt rally—the kind that Wozniacki had been playing and grinding through and winning all week—belted a forehand up the line for a winner. The anticipated dynamic had been broken. Wozniacki began to try to hit her ground strokes with more depth. She sent two balls over the baseline. She lost that game, and lost her equilibrium with it.
The most obvious problem was with her forehand. She missed it in every way and on every big point. Returns into the net, rally balls wide, passing shots long, you name it, when she needed a point, Wozniacki’s forehand was there to lose it for her. It appeared to me that her contact point was all over the place, that she never settled on how she wanted use it. Asked about her forehand later, though, she denied it had been a particular problem. “I just think that I was making too many errors,” she said. You can’t argue with that.
On the other hand, this was the best I’d seen Jankovic play in many months. She did a lot more than just shovel the ball back over the net, too. She won points with her serve out wide in the ad court. She reached for a nice poke drop-volley winner. She knocked off a difficult overhead while drifting back close to the baseline. She even fooled Wozniacki with a cleverly deceptive short-angle crosscourt loop forehand behind her.
Where did this shot, and this match, leave Wozniacki? She became No. 2 in the world this week and looked strong for much of it, but she didn’t rise to the moment in the final, and she didn’t seem all that frustrated about that fact afterward. She also lost to a player who, if she wants to continue to be No. 2 for any length of time, she’s going to have to beat. Wozniacki was upbeat in her presser; if she were a couple of years older than her 19, I would say she was too upbeat. Asked how she tried to change the momentum today, she didn’t have much to say. “I wanted to get her moving a bit more,” Wozniacki said. “But it’s the way it went, and it’s OK, you know. I just need to get back on the practice court, and there’s always next week.” That’s the right attitude for now. But it won’t always be.
As for Jankovic, it’s nice to have her back in the winner’s circle. For today, at least, she kept the drama-loving J.J. under wraps and played it calm and straight. She didn’t beat the Williamses or the Belgians on her way to the title, but she was back to playing clean tennis and opening up points with her famous down the line backhand, a shot that I’d seen less of from her over the last year. She got herself to match point by belting one for a winner after a long, moonball-heavy rally. It even sounded good, coming off her racquet with a deep pop. Wozniacki didn’t expect it and the crowd didn’t expect it, either. But that's what this tournament was all about.
***
Who did I predict to win the men’s final, you ask? Can you guess? Come on, I’m sure you can—that's right, Andy Roddick. I thought that Ljubicic would be forced to leave his comfort zone at the baseline more often than the steadier Roddick, and that the errors he would commit doing this would be the difference. I also—big mistake—looked up their head to head and saw that Roddick had a 7-3 edge.
What’s ironic is that Ljubicic won this tournament, whose slow hard courts make it a showcase for defense and solid all-around play, with one very old-school power shot: his serve. Down love-40 early in the first set, he served his way out of the hole, hitting an ace at 30-40. In the first tiebreaker, he took advantage of a botched, inexplicable serve and volley by Roddick on the opening point by following up with a service winner for 2-0. More crucially, at 3-2, he hit a nasty sliding second serve that handcuffed Roddick on his backhand side.
By the start of the second set, Ljubicic’s serving dominance had Roddick shaking his head, then hanging his head, then pointing to the back of the line to indicate the exact spot where he was placing his bombs time and again. Ljubicic used a strong serve to save a break point later in the set and finished that game with an ace, and, as he had against Nadal, he turned it up even more in the breaker. He opened with a service winner and hit two aces to go up 6-2. At that point, though, with his first Masters shield one swing away, Ljubicic suffered a serious brain cramp. He tried a drop shot that he’d later call “stupid.” He threw away another point by hitting his second serve as hard as his first serve and netting it. Then he made the score 5-6 by ill-advisedly stopping a point to make an incorrect challenge—he was hoping more than playing. Ljubicic didn't need to hope: He stepped up at 6-5 and hit a perfect serve to the corner for the title.
This wasn’t an event that was indicative of tour trends. I’ve talked about the continued rise of overall competence at the expense of creative risk-taking, and that's true for both tours. But Indian Wells is an extreme example. What wins here doesn’t win at Roland Garros or Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. In 2009, Andy Murray’s retrieving skills made him the top performer over the course of the Indian Wells/Key Biscayne double, but he didn’t end up reaching any major finals.
Instead, this year's tournament ended with a one-off: An overdue and well-deserved triumph by a respected member of the game’s second-tier. After the final, Ljubicic sat in the press room next to the tournament’s shining abstract trophy and spoke about what winning it meant to him. “Looking at my career, I did feel like I was missing it,” he said. “It gives something special to your career. It's another thing after Davis Cup, Olympic medal, and two Top 10 finishes and now a Masters 1000, so it makes everything look—look better, actually.”
The day before, Ljubicic had proclaimed forthrightly his desire to finally win his first Masters title, after losing in three other finals. “It would mean the world to me,” he said. “When I see my name on the court, to have that little shield [the Masters-winner shield] next to my name, it would be nice.”
Sometimes, with all the money on offer in tennis, you start to wonder if it's the primary motivator for most of the players, or at least for the guys without legitimate shots at winning Slams. It would be understandable if it was, but it's not a fun thought for fans to consider—we want to believe in the glory of our game. When we hear a guy like Ljubicic recount his career achievements—none of them monetary—with so much pride, we can believe in it. We can believe that the players love the game's history as much as we do. Ljubicic's appreciation is a function of his age and his background, of course—he’s 31, and he knows all about not getting everything he wants. But hearing him talk so lovingly about that little shield was the best surprise of all this week.
Ivan Ljubicic’s win over Rafael Nadal on Saturday was a story of twos: Two chapters and two shots. It began as it was supposed to begin, with Nadal tomahawking forehands, tying Ljubicic to a string along the baseline, and breaking him twice for the first set.
If anything, the match got even more predictable through the first five games of the next set. Nadal’s confidence only grew, especially on his forehand. He had the range on every version of this shot that he owns: The high loop, the heavy deep bomb, the over-rotating inside-out flick from inside the service line, the dipping return, and the short-hop winner from the baseline, a shot that Ljubicic shook his head about later. Nadal even held for 3-2 in the second set by hitting a forehand winner from behind the baseline and above his shoulder.
It’s either ironic or entirely appropriate, then, that in the next game it was Nadal’s forehand, specifically his forehand return, that proved to be the tiny chink, the tiny flaw, the miniscule opening that would eventually let Ljubicic stomp through the door. If there’s one moment when Nadal is most vulnerable to nerves, it’s when he has a break point, in a game when he’s either ahead or tied in a set, and he gets a second serve to his forehand. Up two sets, with a break point at 3-3 in the third in the 2008 Wimbledon final, he dumped this shot in the bottom of the net against Federer and almost ended up losing the match. In Madrid last year, again versus Federer, he mishit that same shot long on break point in the second game and was never in the match.
It’s shouldn’t be a difficult stroke. On a second serve in the ad court, the ball is almost guaranteed to jump into the strike zone of a left-hander’s forehand. But on break point, it’s also guaranteed to come in just slowly enough to let you think about the consequences of a miss. This will do funny things to anyone’s swing. The most common reaction is to pull up too quickly on the ball, something I did—I’m a lefty like Nadal—with disconcerting regularity when I played doubles and had to return second serves on break points in the ad court. It’s extremely tough to manufacture your usual swing in this situation.
Today, Nadal went up 0-40 on Ljubicic’s serve at 2-3. Ljubicic, who served lights out all day, hit an unreturnable and an ace to make it 30-40. He missed his first serve and spun in his second with decent depth and kick. Nadal backed up and ran around to hit a forehand, but instead of setting off the kind of deep bomb he’d been hitting routinely in that set, he pulled up just a bit and the ball floated back high and short, right to the service line. Ljubicic took it on the rise with a forehand and won the point. A pattern had been set, one that would spell the difference late in the match: Nadal would outplay Ljubicic from the baseline, hold serve easily, and threaten on his return game, only to have Ljubicic snuff out his chances with his serve. That dynamic also played a big role in the deciding tiebreaker. Nadal, knowing he had to win every rally, tightened up on his ground strokes. Ljubicic, more confident with every point, took advantage and ended the match with a roaring forehand up the line.
“A lot of people today,” Ljubicic said when he walked into the pressroom afterward. The 31-year-old probably hasn’t seen that kind of media attendance since his Top 10 glory days in the middle of the last decade. He didn’t waste his chance, opening with a well-measured soliloquy on his win. And why not? As he said, “It was probably the best I’ve ever played in my career.” Ljubicic said he felt from the beginning that he could hang with Nadal from the baseline, and that it was just a matter of him relaxing a little after he saved those break points at 2-3 in the second.
It was really a matter of doing just what he had to do and no more. “I knew if I kept serving well,” Ljubicic said, “and playing aggressive with my service games I would have a chance to win in the end.” For every time that Nadal punched a ball by him on the baseline, Ljubicic was able to fight one off with a strong backhand and then back it up with a heavy serve. He held off break points and came up with a couple of monster holds late in the third to make it to 6-6. It wasn’t until he got up 4-1 in the breaker that I felt like he really had a chance to win. But Ljubicic had given himself the chance and taken it.
Is this a loss Nadal should be worried about? I’d say no. As Ljubicic said, “He played some incredible points. I felt like, What is this? I mean half-volley winners off the baseline. It was impressive.” Nadal lost because he couldn’t break when he had three chances to essentially put the match away. He lost because, by definition, there’s nothing you can do with an “unreturnable” serve. And he lost because he hit short at the end. None of those reasons are abnormal or alarming. Granted, if you put this together with his loss to Davydenko in Doha in January, when he also had a lead and couldn’t close it out, you could make the case that Rafa isn’t winning the crucial points that he once did. But you could also make the case that, compared to his performances at the end of 2009, his play in Indian Wells as a whole shows that he’s more than halfway back to his best form—not bad for his first tournament since the Aussie Open.
This day was about Ljubicic, though. I wrote earlier this week that he had looked cheerful in his diligence on the practice courts, an unglamorous over-30 veteran who has seen some thin times in recent years. But those thin times have also given Ljubicic patience, which is the quality that most came through in his play today. He has a blunt face for a tennis player; it’s not expressive, but it doesn’t hide anything either. All of which made his reaction when he won today that much more gratifying. The tour’s sober father figure let go with a spasm of spontaneous joy, one that led him all the way to the first row, where he gave his wife a hug—this was a big one for him.
The last few years, when his ranking slipped and he struggled to win matches, let alone titles, Ljubicic’s face, which was never what you'd call expressive, had become a stoical mask, his walk heavy with obligation. A tennis player on the downside of his career must steel himself to take losses he once wouldn’t have tolerated. When this happens, you can begin to wonder how much fun he's is having, or even how much he cares. Today we saw Ljubicic rip off this stony mask. My one complaint about the guy is that he doesn't play with much joy. I had no complaints today.
When we were 16 or 17 years old and armed with new driver’s licenses, my friends and I would drive around our hometown in the evenings listening to music. We used our parents’ cars mostly, a beige Honda, a green 70s-era pseudo-deluxe van, a Chevy Nova. None of them were fast. The cassettes we played were $3.99 bargain-bin jobs, white and easily eaten by an overaggressive tape player. The roads we drove were dark and twisting two-laners that meandered out of the city and cut lazy circles through the woods and tiny sinking villages that grew out of the country nearby.
In those years, before the Internet and cable TV began to tie everyone closer together—or, depending on your viewpoint, before they began to wrap themselves around our necks—there were fewer messages from the world beyond our town and the dull brown hills that encircled it. With no college culture to speak of in the area, we ate what the networks and record companies fed us. Musical independence at my high school meant choosing Megadeth over Metallica.
The stuff my friends and I listened to was a loud, mind-expanding message from the outside—on a starless night, it could sound like it was coming from the universe. It was jarring, in a glorious way, to roll the window down on a humid Pennsylvania summer evening, hear the crickets and see the stars and fireflies in the distance and the deer way back in the trees, and fill the air with the ice-cold Manhattan majesty of Television’s “Marquee Moon.”
We started with the Stones and the Beatles, moved to Motown and soul, and progressed, with difficulty, to the punk and indie rock we’d read about but couldn’t find at the Wee Three records at the county mall. The last two genres, made by kids not much older than us, felt like a secret language, a code we could speak that the headbangers couldn’t understand—punk vs. metal seemed like life vs. death in those days; maybe it still does. One step at a time, the sounds and words deepened what we believed was possible intellectually, emotionally, artistically. Along with the musty fiction section at the public library, these cassettes were our culture. Fragments of phrases that poked through that din remain riveted in my brain:
Broadway, looked so medieval It seemed to flap, like little pages
***
Standing on the corner, suitcase in my hand Jack is in his corset, Jane is in her vest Me, I’m in a rock and roll band
***
I hear you talking when I’m on the street Your mouth don’t move, but I can hear you speak.
***
Hanging out, down the street Same old thing we did last week Not a thing to do But talk to you
Steal your car, and bring it down Pick me up, we’ll drive around Wish we had A joint so bad
The first three of those songs above were urban fantasies, exotic and gritty. The last, about having nothing better to do than drive around and talk to the same couple of people, is small town poetry. You may know it, unfortunately, as the theme to a sitcom, but it was originally a song by Big Star, written and sung by Alex Chilton.
Chilton, a Memphis native and most famously the singer of the oldie-radio staple “The Letter,” died of a heart attack this week at 59. It’s not surprising that he didn’t reach a grand old age; Chilton relished living out the irresponsible life, the mythic life of the traveling musician that he’d learned growing up in Memphis and living for years in New Orleans. I saw him play an outdoor summer show at the World Trade Center—it really was right up against one of the towers—a dozen years ago. His on-stage manner was loving towards the old soul cover songs he played, but skeptical about the artificial spectacle of performing. A cigarette dangled from his lip throughout.
After Big Star folded in the mid-1970s, Chilton had a shambling, erratic underground career. There was a 50 percent chance he’d blow off any show or sabotage it midway, but this was part of his fascination, and made him a cult hero. His last 20 years were also marked by moments of shining, sarcastic brilliance. His 1980 album Like Flies on Sherbert, with its William Eggleston cover, is a masterpiece of broken-down rockabilly. Like Chilton, it’s ornery but full of love for obscure rock and soul, and it contains one of my favorite lines in any song, from “My Rival”:
My rival I’m gonna stab him on arrival
But Big Star will be his legacy. It’s what we listened as teenagers and in college, and what I listen to today. Talk about a secret language—Big Star was Top 40 radio from another, much more perfect planet. Paul Westerbeg summed up its magical, mysterious appeal in a song called, naturally, “Alex Chilton”:
Children by the million, wait for Alex Chilton when he comes round They say, “I’m in love, what’s that song? I’m in love, with that song.”
To my friends and I, Chilton felt like one of us—tongue-tied, obsessed with rock and roll—as we drove in circles.
Sitting in the back of a car Music so loud, can’t tell a thing Thinking bout what to say Can’t find the lines —"Back of a Car"
Won’t you tell your dad, ‘get off my back’? Tell him what we said about ‘Paint It Black’ Rock and roll is here to stay Come inside, it’s OK —"Thirteen"
***
Now I live in the middle of that once-exotic urban zone that I heard about on my tape player. And I don’t own a car. This makes the days or weeks when I do get to drive a time to savor, and a time to listen to as much as music as I can when I’m behind the wheel. Cars and rock and roll—it's called being an American.
Just like in the Pennsylvania backwoods two decades ago, the words and music I’ve listened to this week in Indian Wells have lodged themselves in my head and formed a soundtrack, an emotional background to the tournament. These are a few fragments that have popped out of the din and are rolling around in my subconscious. They surface randomly, as I’m walking or eating or writing or watching tennis, then submerge themselves again. What they do for, or to, me, I don’t know. But life would be much much dryer without them.
DC Comics and chocolate milkshake Some things will always be great DC Comics and chocolate milkshake Even though I’m 28 —“DC Comics,” Art Brut
***
Tonight the sky is empty But that is nothing new —“That’s When I Reach for My Revolver,” Mission of Burma
***
Gives you something you can do with your hands Makes you look cool and feel like a man —“Me and Your Cigarettes,” Miranda Lambert
***
Getting older makes it harder to remember We are our only saviors —“Constructive Summer,” Hold Steady
***
I like it when My hair is poofy I like it when You slip me roofie —“Who’s Got the Crack,” Moldy Peaches
***
You’ve got to give a little Take a little And let your poor heart break a little That’s the story of That’s the glory of love —“The Glory of Love,” Five Keys
***
We’re feeling good . . . From the pills we took —“Talent Show,” Paul Westerberg
***
You get under my skin I don’t find it irritating —“Another Girl, Another Planet,” The Only Ones
***
I hope when I die That they bury me someplace nice Away from the noise Away from the ice Away from the things that have haunted me for all of my life
—"Hobo," Patterson Hood
***
I’ll be sad in heaven If you won’t follow me there
—"Can’t Hardly Wait," The Replacements
***
Go steady with me. I know it turns you off When I get talking like a teen
—"On Directing," Tegan and Sara
***
Last night I was standing in the driveway, calling your name Last night it was late, I could hear your father. Sometimes I just want to change the world all around
—"Change the World," Vulgar Boatmen
***
Don’t the sun look angry through the trees Don’t the trees look like crucified thieves
—"Desperadoes Under the Eaves," Warren Zevon
***
“Which one’s the birthday boy?” she said, “I ain’t got all night. What’d your mama name you? You can call me what you like.”
—"Birthday Boy," Drive by Truckers
I’ve heard these snippets and songs as I’ve driven, by myself, between my hotel and the tournament site. I imagined finishing this post by comparing my youthful listening, which I did in darkened circles, with a crew of friends, and my adult listening, which I've done alone, straight through the palm trees and luminous little road lights of California. He who travels fastest travels alone.
But last night, I had a good mix CD going and it wasn’t all that late when I pulled into the hotel driveway. A song I loved, “Things Go Wrong” by Dumptruck, an old indie anthem, was on. I drove through the lot, turned around, and didn’t stop until I was back on the highway. I was driving in circles again.
***
Ten years after high school, I met a friend at a rock club in Manhattan. Coming around the corner toward the club, I caught a glimpse of myself in a big restaurant window. My hair was too long, too bushy. It was unkempt in a way that can never be cool in New York, where people know how to do unkempt right. I looked down and shook my head—“Jesus, will you ever get my hair right? Will you ever know what you're doing, be responsible, competent, with anything?” My friend, waiting ahead, was watching.
“What’s wrong?” he said, laughing.
“My hair, I need to get it cut,” I stammered. “Looks terrible.”
“No, it’s cool," he said, giving my hair a second glance. "It looks like Chilton.”
It was the right word to say. I looked down and smiled, “Yeah,” I thought, “Chilton.”
RIP Alex. Irresponsibility will never be the same without you.
In 2004, I walked out to a distant side court at Roland Garros to watch Robin Soderling, a heavy-hitting 19-year-old from Sweden, play his opening-round match against the aging Hyung-Taik Lee of Korea. What I remember most from that afternoon was sitting in the first row, at the far end of the court, and looking up to see a towering—if a little awkward—figure taking Bolo-style cuts at his forehand and hitting them for one blatant winner after another. It looked like Lee might be pushed through the back fence by the end of the match. His medium-pace, mid-court shots were cannon fodder, batting practice. Soderling won the first set 6-0 and the second 6-3. I left feeling sure that I’d be seeing a lot more of the big kid very soon, maybe even at that tournament.
I didn’t see Soderling play another point that week, because he lost the last three sets to Lee. And despite various predictions of mine, about how he was going to be a “snake in the grass” at Wimbledon, a “side-court must-see” at the U.S. Open, a “dirt devil” at the French, I didn’t see a whole lot of Soderling over the next four years. His spiky hair popped up during the indoor season and dropped back out of sight soon after. It seemed that his early power had masked flawed technique, lack of speed, and a testy demeanor, all of which kept him from playing well for any length of time—it was the awkward, rather than the towering, part of his game that had turned out to be crucial. In 2008, my friend Jon Levey went to Roland Garros, watched Soderling rip the cover off the ball for a while, and wrote on this blog that he thought that the Swede might be the guy, on the right day, who could end Rafael Nadal’s run there. As far as I remember, I didn’t agree. I’d waited too long to start believing in Soderling.
Today Soderling, now 25 years old, beat Andy Murray to reach his first Masters Series semifinal. The stiff movement and less-than-elegant stroke-making were still in evidence, but that’s where the resemblances to Sod 2004 end. What I noticed more than anything was that while Soderling may be a basher at heart, he’s not a dumb player. His game now has flexibility, texture, multiple gears. He jumped to an early lead by pummeling 138 m.p.h. serves and knocking Murray off-balance with his pace from the baseline, but when he didn’t have an opening, he didn’t try to create one. If Murray sent a ball deep, Soderling was patient enough to flip it back and wait for something better. If he dropped a 135-m.p.h. bomb serve down the T in the deuce court to start a game, he’d come back to that side the next time and slide a 115-miler out to Murray’s forehand. Both were effective, and the combination had Murray muttering.
“I was pretty sure before the match that it was almost impossible to outpower Andy,” Soderling said afterward. “He’s moving really well and he puts everything back. I started to play not as aggressive, and I was waiting a little bit for my opportunities, and it worked pretty well.”
Soderling also worked himself into better position in the rallies. He typically hit a few balls crosscourt to Murray’s backhand, waited for him to go to the slice, and then moved around it to take over the point with his forehand. The way these points transpired, there wasn’t much Murray could do. He didn’t dictate at all, and while the slow surface should theoretically have helped him, all it did was make the ball sit up for Soderling. Murray, who appeared to be hindered by a problem with his right ankle (he denied any physical problems in his presser), was trapped. Even when he started to make inroads, Soderling had the answer. Murray went up 0-40 on Sod’s serve in the middle of the second set; Sod hit five straight first serves, including an ace on game point, to get out of it.
Asked what the biggest reason was for his rapid improvement was, Soderling said, “I changed how I think a little bit. You know, a couple years ago I was very focused on playing well all the time. And now what matters to me is to win matches. Doesn’t matter if I play well and win matches or play bad and win matches, you still have to win.”
Soderling has transformed himself from an erratic and seemingly mindless ball basher into a quietly confident problem solver. Just when he appeared ready to blow it at the end of the second set—serving at 5-6, he went down 0-30—he righted himself. He didn’t linger on his chances to win a few games earlier, and he didn’t beat himself up about it. “My only chance was to stay calm,” he said.
The question now is this: Is Soderling likeable enough to root for? From what I can tell, he’s become a kind of pawn in the Federer-Nadal fan rivalry. Federer fans love him for beating Nadal at Roland Garros and praising Federer so effusively after losing to him in the final. Rafa fans detest him for . . . beating Nadal at Roland Garros and praising Federer so effusively after losing to him in the final. I’ve gotten the impression, from observations and colleagues' stories, that he's not a pleasant guy—there's no question he keeps to himself—and I’ve never warmed up to him as a player. But you wouldn’t have known any of that from his press conference today. Soderling flashed a happy and slightly shy smile at us on his way in, and he answered all of our questions thoughtfully, in a high, soft, earnest voice. He said, in his hesitant English, that he’d needed to learn to win matches “week out and week in.”
The men’s tour has a new challenger. It also may have someone new to like.
There’s a dirty secret in sports that all of its fans know but will only occasionally admit: It can be boring. It can even—and this is hard for a sportswriter to admit—be meaningless. I’m not talking about tennis in particular. Think about the NBA, where meaninglessness is so pervasive that it’s been given a catchy nickname: "garbage time," that moment, which often comes as early as the third quarter, when the game’s conclusion is foregone but the ball must still be dribbled and the 24-second clock obeyed. As for baseball, its premier chronicler, Roger Angell, has written some of his finest essays on how that sport’s extremely intermittent excitement—i.e., its long passages of mind-numbing dullness—mimics the extremely intermittent excitement of life. I’ve read hundreds, maybe thousands of pages of Angell’s baseball writing, and the moment I remember best is when he describes spending the better part of a game watching a spider spin a web near him in the press room. Baseball, in his mind, is more enjoyable because it doesn’t rivet your attention. It gives you time to see, do, think about other things as you watch it, to come in and out of it.
Is this also true for tennis? In baseball, the pitcher may step off the rubber, throw to first, and shake off his catcher five times before actually throwing the ball home. When he does, the batter, provided he hasn’t stepped out of the box by then, is as likely to foul the ball off as he is to put it into play and allow the game to progress. Compared to this, tennis is nonstop action. The players may tweak their strings and futz with the towel before they serve, but every swing of the racquet counts, and a small but important outcome is determined with every point. Have you ever flipped from a tennis match straight to a baseball game? The mind reels as it tries to adjust to the sudden change of life’s pace. It’s the mental equivalent of running underwater.
Still, tennis fans know that their sport can be dull as well. Sometimes that’s frustrating, especially if I know another, better match is going on elsewhere. Sometimes it makes me question the wisdom of spending large chunks of my life watching two people I don’t know play a game. The mark of the diehard fan, however, is the ability, like Angell, to find some pleasure in the dullness—to, every now and then, prefer the dullness, the lack of momentousness.
Along these lines, some of my favorite tennis-watching memories have come during that dark time known as the indoor fall season. With the pressure of the Grand Slams over, it allowed my dad and I, when I was young, to get a laugh at the decadent spectacle of Michael Stich or Brad Gilbert raking in millions and taking home absurdly overdesigned trophies. Ditto for the lucre-filled indoor WTC matches of old. We loved the horrible, depressing, echoing thud that the ball made in an empty arena when a player bounced it before serving.
Indian Wells has been pretty quiet itself over the couple of days, with a surprising number of seats, whole swaths of seats in fact, going empty. Yesterday the main arena was half full at best all day, and not too far from deserted by the late afternoon, when Sam Stosur and Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez stepped onto the court for the third and final match of the day session. This was the match I was planning to write about, so with the sun finally beginning to retreat toward the horizon, I headed for a set of press seats that are closer to the court than the media room itself.
I was the only reporter there, naturally. I was also the only person in that section. I took the opportunity to indulge in one of the great pleasures of the spectating life. I lifted my legs up, put my feet on the armrests of the seats in front of me, and spread my arms out, onto the backs of the seats next to me. There’s a feeling of freedom at the bottom of this kind of unfurling. You’re at your ease, taking up as much space as you like, crossing and uncrossing your legs whenever you please.
As the players warmed up, I contemplated the between-match music that has been played this week at Indian Wells. It’s been pretty much bottomlessly horrible. Yes, U2’s cold and sanitary “Where the Streets Have No Name” is bad. But it’s a soulful masterwork compared to another song that was recently snuck into the rotation: “P.Y.T.,” Michael Jackson at his worst, in my opinion. My only explanation is that these are the songs that were, in a focus group, proven to make adults 40 to 60 years old want to buy T-shirts. But as these thoughts pass out of my head, a song I like, a song I’m happy to hear, begins to blare through the stadium: “The Heat of the Moment,” by Asia. This, by any aesthetic measure, is also an awful song. But it has a bombastic energy, and it jogs a particular memory of eating lunch in junior high with a friend named Richard when I was 13. It’s not a pleasant memory, exactly—junior high, as every American knows, is another term for hell—but it’s an extremely vivid and volatile one, the same way being 13 years old was. Where is Richard is now? Where are the friends and morons we knew in junior high and high school? From this spot, leaning back in an empty set of bleachers on a Thursday afternoon in Indian Wells, Calif., watching the sun go down, idly enjoying the heavy warmth that's still in the air, analyzing a professional tennis match, I feel like we were all shot out of a cannon and sent hurtling toward some unforeseen landing point on the other side of the earth. I can’t complain about landing here.
I’m going to write about this match, so I’m paying attention by default. Purely from an entertainment perspective, Stosur vs. Martinez Sanchez briefly hangs on the razor-thin ledge between interest and dullness, ultimately landing on the interesting side. That’s due mainly to the fact that (a) the second set is close, (b) the two players have significantly different styles. While this isn’t essential to create watchable tennis—Nadal and Berdych burned up both baselines last night—it’s a big help on a quiet afternoon like this one. There’s a sense of opposition, of individuality, of getting to see tactics rather than just execution.
The time and space between points are filled with stray ambient sounds that blow lazily around the stadium. A burst of “Aussie, Aussie, Aussie!” up in the top rows. A random, unanswered whistle. A plastic cup falling over. Claps, even after ugly errors. The chair umpire’s clipped, sonorous, authoritative, “Time.” A wild and surprising bellow from the cheap seats—“Let’s go Maria Jose!”—that elicits a few giggles from people I can’t locate. The customs of a sporting event must be kept, even if the rooting interest is tepid.
On a changeover a little later, the “fan cam” is announced. This device, totalitarian in nature, finds your face in the crowd and puts it, whether you like it or not, on a screen for everyone to see. I keep my head down and pray it doesn’t find me. But this doesn't stop me from planning exactly how I would wave if I were spotted.
The sun edges closer to oblivion beyond the bleachers to the east. Shadows creep closer to me, until they’re one seat away. Finally the light is gone, and it’s a relief. With the sense of a fresh start in the air, I focus more closely on the match. Tennis is well suited, maybe better suited that baseball, to passive, aimless, daydreaming contemplation, to the easy pleasure of low stakes. The grunt, the serve, the rush to the net, the look of frustration after a miss, the nod to the ball boy, the score called after each point, the “out” call puncturing the silence for a second and then letting the silence return: There’s a rhythm to this type of tennis match that’s just compelling enough to organize your thoughts, but not so gripping that you can't mix the action on court with the stream of consciousness in your head.
My own thoughts pass from Martinez Sanchez’s serve down to my Nikes in front of me—why didn’t I get a second pair of them in London last year when I had the chance? I realize, for the first time, that they’re the same model—Navy blue with a yellow swoosh—that my childhood writing idol, the rock critic Lester Bangs, wore in a book photo from the early 1980s. His were new then, mine are vintage now. In that photo, he was rummaging through a stack of records in his boxy, jumbled New York apartment, which, as I think about it a little more, is not unlike my own boxy, record-filled New York apartment today. Maybe we aren’t shot out of cannons and hurtled toward a destiny we can’t predict. Maybe our lives' trajectories are much more narrowly circumscribed than we realize, in a way that's designed to make us happy. Here I am, watching and writing about one childhood obsession of mine, tennis, and apparently living out the life of another, right down to his sneakers. I don't think I'd want to doing anything else. Did it take this placid tennis match, and the time I had to myself watching it, to get me to understand this?
Martinez Sanchez and Stosur are coming back out after a changeover. I sit forward and start to scribble in my notebook. Whatever happens down there, it’s already been a fascinating afternoon.
