That’s “thoughts” in Italian, not pennies. While custom has it that they're of equal value, thoughts are still, more than our offices or our cities or our houses, where
we have to live.
They're also where we watch a tennis tournament. Whether we're at an event or seeing it on TV, we experience it mostly as the focal point for a chain of our own loosely related thoughts.
If I’m at a tournament in a foreign city, especially one where I don’t speak the
language, these thoughts tend to stretch into a wide mental canvas. I don’t view the event; I walk around
inside it. When I watch a tournament on TV or on my computer at work, the way
I have this week, it comes to me as a signal surrounded by all the other noise
of my normal life. It gets dropped into the mix.
Before it blows away into distant memory, the way all tournaments do no matter how gripping or luminous they seem at the moment, let me try to reconstruct some of my 2010 Rome experience, in 10
pensieri.
Wait . . . Verdasco?
It began to germinate in the back of my head on Sunday in the
Barcelona final, and as hard as I tried to kill it off, it continued to grow
through the week: Is Fernando Verdasco turning into—am I allowed to say this?—a
winner? I mean, like a guy who knows how to win. He got better last year, but only now does he seem to have
learned to manufacture victories when he’s not at his best, or when he could easily
pack it in after having played virtually every day for three weeks. In the
third set against Soderling in Barcelona, he didn't take any of the many opportunities
that the Sod gave him to gag away his single-break lead. A
couple of times in Rome, I’ve thought that he looked ready to call it a
tournament, but he didn't. Let’s hope Verdasco doesn’t take another humiliating beating at the hands of
Nadal in the final, and wonder why he bothered getting there in the first
place.
Roy Emerson, Meet Your Great Grandfather Ralph Waldo
What would the Emmos have had to say to each other? For some
reason, Ralph Waldo (love that name, right?) in my mind as I watch Gulbis-Volandri.
He’s gotten there, I think, because the trees outside my window
remind me of the description of the area in New England where he lived, which I
read in an English-class textbook in 10th grade. How the hell does
that happen? But I can't recall the quote of his that had been a favorite
of my 16-year-old self. That year, I had been exhilarated to
discover through reading books that life was dark and difficult and
lonely—really, I can still remember how exciting that revelation had been. Emerson's quote had something to do with slime, I think . . . (I didn’t get any
further, so I looked it up later: “Each man sees over his
own experience a certain slime of error, whilst that of other men looks fair
and ideal.” Wow, that is exhilarating to me now, but I'm a little worried for my 16-year-old self that he liked it so much back then. Maybe I just liked saying "slime.")
Not All Clay is Created Equal
I’d never noticed it before this week, but the players don't slide as much on Roman clay as they do in Monte Carlo and
Paris. This looks harder dirt, drier, thinner, quicker, more packed down. But still
slippery.
Honorary American
I’ve tried to put my finger on what separates Ernests
Gulbis, as a personality, from other Eastern Europeans for me. He’s
Latvian, I know, but now I think I realize the difference: He acts and talks
and walks, in my mind, like an American—an American college kid. He’s loose,
he’s rich, he’s sarcastic, he’s trying to grow up and do things the right way,
but it’s not easy pounding the laziness out of him. He admits that the demands of
the sport can be a drag. Sidenote: I like his coach, Hernan Gumy’s, demeanor in
the box. I don’t know how he stayed so calm during the Federer and Volandri
matches.
Message from the Moon
The Euro clay Masters tournaments give you that rare chance to get up and immediately flick on a tennis match with your coffee, instead of hearing about a murder in the Bronx.
One day this week, while I was making the coffee, I caught a glimpse of the moon out my back window. At night it appears to be paper thin, and it glows. In the
day, though, it loses its glow and reveals itself to be a big white stone in the air. On that morning, it looked like it had been caught without its makeup.
What is the moon’s message? Would it be different if there were two of them? There aren’t, there’s just one: The moon, like a tennis player, like anyone else, has to go it alone, too.
When in Rome
When in Rome, if you’re a couple in the stands at a tennis
match, you wrap your arms and legs around each other, you sit in each other’s
laps, you slouch in your dark clothes, you look, on the whole, somewhat better
than the fans at a Philadelphia Eagles game. Does any sport, from its players to its fans to its playing surfaces to the motions its athletes’ make, look better than
tennis? Can there be more color on display at a sporting event than there is at a European clay Masters? Even Djokovic’s Tacchini shirt,
with its biker tattoo logo, looked good in its stinging yellow version this
morning. Over the course of a week, with HD flat screens and live streams at
work, the blazing color from Rome seeps into my life, and enrich its, even from
thousands of miles away.
Flawed Gods
Two weeks ago I wrote that the center court in Monte Carlo
put me in mind of a Greek theater by the sea. Or maybe it was just Novak Djokovic, and not the
court, because I thought the same thing watching him on Friday against
Verdasco. In one sense, now that the Greek gods are all gone, the pros, when they
walk on the court by themselves, get to take their places. They walk in front of
us, but they also walk above us; we single out tennis players, literally. But we also watch, and wait, to see these Gods reveal their
flaws to us. One of them always does. Today, as I saw Djokovic’s brow
beading sweat in the first game—it wasn’t exercise sweat; it was ill sweat—I
wondered if he might have some kind of Sampras-like blood condition. It happens
to him too regularly to just be nerves, doesn’t it? Later, though, I felt like his
fatal flaw is that he is a conflicted competitor. Djokovic can get stronger and
surer as a point goes on, or a game goes on, but just when you think he’s all
there, he serves up a hasty, panicky drop shot just to get the point over and relieve the tension. Is
there something Nastase-like about his jangly nerves? Verdasco looked like a
rock of calmness by comparison.
Good Band Name Alert
While watching Nadal and Wawrinka in the corner of my
computer screen at work, I received an email ding. Despite oceans of spam over the
years, I still like the sound of the ding—it beats the dead thump you
get hit with when you have no mail. That sound hurts just a tiny bit, doesn't it?
What’s worse is when I see that there are four new
messages, and all of them turn out to be spam. On Friday, however, I received one
that's remembering: “Come to Northern California’s Tarantula
Festival next month!” Tarantula festival? Do other people get invited to these
things?
She Was Good at What?
On the shelf below the flat-screen in the living room is a
big book of poems by Sylvia Plath. My eye flicks down to it every time I watch
anything. It has a nice cover, and I remember from high school that the poems
are very good. I remember that they were pretty scary, too—“blood-soaked” is how
another writer described them. I like that the book is there, a deadly vision of
life wrapped up in a somber and stylish package, reminding me that there's depth below every surface, even below the TV screen. But I just can’t open it and dive
in. What happens instead is that I read
her name on the spine and begin to sing a song, called “Sylvia Plath,” by Peter
Laughner. It begins with this comically somber opening line: “Sylvia
Plath/Was never too good at math.” Everyone thinks I'm making it up, but you can hear Laughner sing it here.
Finding the Next Next Level
Rafael Nadal looked good in Monte Carlo last week, calm and
confident. Today against Stan Wawrinka, who came out firing from the start, he appeared to ascend
another step closer to his 2008 form. It’s one thing to go for your shots, and
make your shots, when you’re trailing. It’s another to go for bigger shots, and still
make them, when you’re down break point. That’s how Nadal overcame and
eventually ground down Wawrinka. That’s what he did when he was at his best.
That’s what No. 1 players have to do, and which Nadal hasn't done for months. You know Rafa has it going when Uncle Toni,
world-famous hard-a$$, is out of his seat and nodding.
We’ll see if he's out of his seat again this weekend. Enjoy it; enjoy Stuttgart. See you Monday.
Watching Roger Federer play the final two games against
Ernests Gulbis yesterday in Rome reminded me of my favorite opening line from
an album review. Greil Marcus wrote it in Rolling Stone in 1970, about Bob
Dylan’s abominable Self-Portrait.
“What is this s**t?”
After his mind-bending mid-60s peaks, Highway 61 Revisited and
Blonde on Blonde, which threw all the old rules out the window, and his smaller, mellower, autumnal end-of-decade gems, John
Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline, which showed what could still be done when you brought the old rules back, the long, weird, and deliberately
irritating Self-Portrait was the first clear signal of decline, of exhaustion,
of capitulation from Dylan. Is that what we saw yesterday from Federer? Was his
loss to Gulbis his Self-Portrait? And by that somewhat dubious whimsical logic,
will his 2010 Australian Open the equivalent of Nashville Skyline, a long walk
into the sunset that was so smooth it deceived everyone into thinking he could
pull it off forever?
I’ll start by saying that we’ve been here before, or close
to here before. I wrote a post after Federer’s almost-as-ugly loss to Gilles
Simon in Toronto in the summer of 2008 about how the world would be a different place if Federer never found his forehand again. He found it pretty quickly, in time to win
the next Grand Slam, the U.S. Open.
The next thing I’ll say is that the end of this match
was worse than Simon. When he was broken at 5-5, after Gulbis had, in Federer’s
words, “donated” the previous game to him, it was as if Federer intentionally found different ways to get his forehand to land outside the lines.
Over the last two games, the only shots I can remember him making were a few
desperate stabs that barely crawled over the net. Federer had the match
handed back to him, but he declined to take it. During changeovers in the third
set he hunched under his umbrella like a chastened, fuming schoolkid, and
tossed his empty water bottles behind him with exasperated disgust.
It was hard to read Federer’s mindset at those moments, and
it’s hard to figure out why he’s performed so poorly at the Masters events this
year, particularly at this Masters event. Like I wrote at the start of 2010, his season would be intriguing primarily because he was in a position
that few, if any, players had ever reached. He was starting his tennis
afterlife; Federer had reached every individual goal imaginable, but he still
had years left on his career. Forget the inevitable physical decline, the
question for the moment was: What would this do to his motivation? There really
wasn’t anyone he could go to for advice.
But back to the physical for the moment. Decline, as we know, is inevitable. In fact, outside of the majors, it’s been happening to Federer
for a couple of years now. His last dominant season when Rafael Nadal was
healthy came in 2007. In tennis, I’ve always thought that age manifests iself not in loss of speed or power but in consistency, in the ability to do the same
thing over and over with precision—ask Lleyton Hewitt or Pete Sampras. And
there’s plenty of evidence for Federer’s lack of consistency in 2010, both from
shot to shot and tournament to tournament. If the Gulbis case was extreme, it
also wasn’t totally surprising from a shot-making standpoint. Federer is going to have
bad days, he’s going to have very days, he’s going to lose.
What’s harder to gauge, of course, is the mental aspect, which
brings us back to motivation. In his last three post-loss press conferences,
Federer seems to have moved from bitterness to a bewildered acceptance of his
newfound propensity for chucking away close matches. He was unhappy and even a little defiant in Indian Wells,
but as you can see from the clip below, he was calmer in Rome, at least when he was answering these particular questions. He said he never
felt saved, he couldn’t find his serve, he knows he’s got work to do (did he pick
up “hard yards” from Brad Gilbert, by any chance? please give it back to him, Rog), he’s looking forward to the
next tournament (he’s “curious” about what’s going to happen), it’s easier to
take because he’s won so much, and that losing wakes you up to some of the
things you're doing wrong. The only strange element to the video is the
noise that Federer makes as he walks into the press room, in answer to the fans’ cries. I
don’t know what he says, but there's a cranky old man aspect to it.
So, what does all this, the rancid forehands and the fairly
low-key post-match assessment, tell us about Federer now and in immediate
future? I’d venture to say that he's in an odd psychological position when he’s
not playing a major, not playing for history. On the surface of his brain, he wants
to win and hates to lose as much as ever. But motivation and will and desire
are only semi-conscious attributes—you can’t fool your own mind into wanting
something more than it really does. What was disturbing in the second set was how quickly Federer faded away after Gulbis asserted himself early. What was
disturbing in the third was how he didn’t capitalize on his extra chance at
5-5, seemingly because at some level he didn’t think it was his day to win.
That’s where the extra, unconscious motivation may have been missing: Federer
couldn’t manufacture a win purely out of his will and his experience. I’m sure,
at that point, that even Gulbis believed that Federer would make him
pay for his double faults and choked forehands. Maybe, after the losses in Indian
Wells and Key Biscayne, Federer has become fatalistic about the Masters, maybe
he’s starting to assume he won’t find his best game. Afterward, he even uttered
a word that has never been associated with him: “I may have
to get through some ugly matches.” Hopefully he’ll take that prediction to
heart, but it can’t be a pleasant thought for the man who has always been aware of, and proud of, his “beautiful technique.”
There are plenty of mitigating factors to the loss. Gulbis
is a good player; he can beat anyone (Federer made an interesting comment in his
presser, about how much pace Gulbis can get on his second serve). This was also Federer’s
first match on clay, his weakest surface. He lost early in Rome last year and
went on to win the French Open. But if his present form continues, it will only get harder for him to summon his best on command at the majors. Or maybe it
won’t—maybe that extra level of motivation will always be there for the big ones.
The bottom line, as it always is with Federer these days, is that we won’t know
the meaning of Rome until we see what happens in Paris. With him, no Masters result can be looked at separately from the ensuing Slam result.
Can the fate of Bob Dylan shed any light on Federer’s
future? Self-Portrait was indeed a sign of decline, of artistic exhaustion
and capitulation. And that exhaustion lasted for a few years. Then Dylan made Blood on the
Tracks, which redefined what a rocker could do in his 30s—of course, it was also about break-ups and anger and regrets, but let's not worry about that right now. The point is, nobody asked “What
is this s**t?”
New arenas mess me up. They throw my viewing game off. Two weeks ago I waxed on about how
reassuring it is to return to the old European clay of Monte Carlo every
spring, to see its center court in the same spot where we left it, still
suspended between sky and sea, the bleachers as small and low-slung as
they’ve always been, the light blanketing everything the same way it always has. Coming to Rome, I’d heard that a brand-new stadium awaited
us, but, this being the Eternal City and all, I pictured a new venue that would
look pretty much exactly the same as the old. The Foro Italico means
fascist-kitsch statues, a marble amphitheater, and lots of low, golden, late-afternoon light, right?
It turns out that time doesn’t stand still in Rome,
either. The new center court has retained the amphitheatre concept, but that low sunlight has been blocked by an upper section of bleachers, and the whole place has been filled with implacable steel-gray seats that have a way of looking conspicuously empty. The stadium might be spectacular in person, and I’ll get
used to it eventually on TV. Somehow, though, empty seats look better when they’ve
been around for a while. You know, at least, that they’ve been filled many times before.
And they will be again, once the top guys begin to christen
the new court over the next couple of days. Let’s take a look at what might
happen when they get there.
First Quarter
Roger Federer will make his first appearance since Key
Biscayne a month ago, and he’ll do it as the top seed, even though he insists he’s not the
man to beat during this clay season. From his statements here, and back in the
U.S. earlier in the spring, Federer seems to be savoring the fact, new to him, that he has nothing to prove at Roland Garros, and that no one can ask him when he's going to win the French. Whether this will help his game by loosening
him up, or hurt him by taking away an extra motivational edge remains to be
seen. I’d vote for the former, but we might not see the fruits of his new state of mind until the French Open itself. You know that's where one of his eyes is already.
What we do know is that Federer won’t get a chance to ease
himself back into competition. In his opener he'll play Ernests Gulbis,
who took him to three close sets early in the year in Doha, and who looked pretty
sharp on Monday in trouncing Marcos Baghdatis. Assuming Federer finds his clay
legs in time for that one, he might face Marin Cilic, or Ivan Ljubicic, or
Nicolas Almagro, or—why not?—Feliciano Lopez in the quarters. None of them are
lay-ups, but barring disastrous form, you have to like Federer in all of them.
Semifinals: Federer
Second Quarter
Is it payback—i.e., clayback—time for Rafael Nadal? Not only is he
scheduled to play Federer, who won their last meeting on clay, in Madrid in
2009, in a semifinal for the first time in five years, he’s also scheduled to
face his other tormentor on dirt last season, Robin Soderling, in the quarters.
Soderling has solidified his standing on hard and clay courts in 2010, and is coming
off a runner-up appearance in Barcelona. Will that inspire him, or tire him? He
may have to get past Tomas Berdych or Stan Wawrinka to reach the quarters. Last
year in Rome, Nadal beat Soderling 1 and 0, but he’s won just one set against the Swede in the two matches they’ve played since. Weary or not, belting the ball erratically
or not, Soderling will be the one guy who won’t be intimidated when he faces
Nadal on clay. I will say this as far as a prediction: I'm going to want to see them play.
Semifinalist: Nadal
Third Quarter
If Rome’s draw were a see-saw, the left side, with Federer
and Nadal at either end, would be on the ground and the right side flying high
in the air. The highest seed in the third quarter is Andy Murray, who has spent
the last couple of months trying to find the bottom of his game; he looked utterly lost two weeks ago
in Monte Carlo. His second-rounder against Seppi will give us an idea of whether Murray has farther to fall. On the other side is Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, a
guy who can lose as brilliantly and spectacularly as any player in history. Is he destined to
someday do something at a Masters event on clay? I think so, but I’m not going
to predict it. A safer bet for the semis may be dogged David Ferrer. At the
same time, all bets could be off: This morning Juan Carlos Ferrero, the 12th
seed, was blown off the court by a qualifier from Colombia named Santiago Giraldo. Kid’s got
a helluva backhand. We’ll see if it works like that again.
Semifinalist: Ferrer
Fourth Quarter
Novak Djokovic and Fernando Verdasco bracket this bracket.
On paper, you have to like Verdasco, who tuned Djoko in Monte Carlo 2 and 2 and followed that up by winning the biggest tournament of his career on Sunday in
Barcelona. Of course, that also means that Mr Sauce hasn’t had a decent rest in more
than two weeks. But his draw seems kind. The scariest names near him
are Hewitt and Youzhny, and they play each other in the first round.
As for Djokovic, you can also see his chances from opposing
viewpoints. After shedding the inhibiting influences of Todd Martin, Djokovic
began to hit his way toward his old form in Monte Carlo. And then he woke up on
the wrong side of the bed before his semifinal. Which
Djokovic will show up is anyone’s guess. On the plus side, he’s reached the
final in Rome the last two years, winning it in 2008 and playing Nadal close in
’09. The third round might be thest. Djokovic could get John Isner, who
pushed him to five sets on clay in Davis Cup last month, and who won his
first-round today, or Thomaz Bellucci, the Brazilian left-hander who’s due to
make good on his potential sooner or later (though so far the answer has been later). Note: If form holds into the quarters, Djokovic had beaten Verdasco the five previous times they'd played before the Monte Carlo meltdown.
I can only recollect it in my imagination now, but there it remains a favorite sign of spring to me. In the old main stadium at
the Italian Open, the black-haired girls who worked as ushers—by American
standards, I use that word extremely loosely—liked to dance together to the
music that was played on the loudspeaker during changeovers. As fans streamed
in and out around them, well after the chair umpire had called time, the girls
faced each other, clapping their hands and lifting their white sneakers up and
down to whatever awful Euro-pop was pumping through the arena.
For the sake of the fans in Rome, I hope they’re doing it
again next week when the Italian christens a new stadium. For my own sake many
many miles away, I’m hoping that another spring tradition at the Foro
Italico continues: The epic men’s final. We were given two of them in the middle of
the decade, between Rafael Nadal and Guillermo Coria in 2005, and Nadal and
Roger Federer in 2006. Nadal won them both in fifth-set tiebreakers. “Epic” is
a lot to ask of a two-of-three-set match, but I’d settle for another final as
entertaining as last year’s, between Nadal and Novak Djokovic.
Today I’ll memorialize the narrow old main stadium, with its
too-small court, too steep bleachers, lack of luxury boxes, sub-par lighting
system, awful Euro-pop, fabulous dancing ushers, and propensity for staging great tennis
matches. Click above for highlights from the last two sets of the best of them, the 2006 final between
Nadal and Federer. Isn’t it time this tradition was started up again?
—This is the match where clay-court Masters tennis went
mainstream. Borg-McEnroe, Sampras-Agassi, those rivalries were played out on
hard courts and grass. Now the world was tuned to Rome like it never had been
before. Since then, the clay season, even in the U.S., has become the heart of
the tennis year, when tensions run highest.
—I like this Federer look, all-white. Do you miss
Nadal’s sleevelessness? I can’t say I do, though it did go with his game.
—Four years can seem like an eternity, can’t it? It’s
obvious that Nadal has gotten better since this match. His service motion was
different then; reliable, but the way he brought the racquet up directly behind
his head must have limited the racquet-head speed he could get. His backhand seems
more rudimentary here as well, and, while it may be due to the fact that he’s playing an attacking
opponent like Federer, he’s not as creative from the baseline. He was more
of a classic dirtballer back then.
—In those days, the biggest question in tennis, the one asked
ad nauseum every spring, was what Federer could do differently to beat Nadal. The consensus
was that he wasn’t coming in enough, he wasn’t taking it to Nadal when he got a
mid-court ball. Judging from this clip, even judging from the first point
alone, I don’t see what else he could have done. Federer was all over the
court, he was drilling forehands into Nadal’s forehand and winning points with that risky tactic. He was dictating much of the play and didn’t seem to hesitate to
come forward. But he was playing a guy who could extricate himself from a
perilous position better than just about anyone in history.
—In those days, Nadal’s game was thought to be pretty
one-dimensional—grunt, belt heavy topspin, fist-pump. We were just beginning to
realize that the label didn’t fit. Here he shows how good is at the cat and
mouse game at net. Even when he loses those games, he makes the right
play. On one point here, Federer brings Nadal forward with a tremendous drop
shot. Rather than go for the winner crosscourt, which would have left the court
open on his side, he does what you’re taught to do, he keeps the ball in front
of him up the line. It’s just that Federer is there with the crosscourt pass. One
reason Nadal must be able to live with his defeats is that they rarely come
because he’s beaten himself.
—I don’t remember seeing Federer hit so many blatant down the
line winners with his forehand. He must have been wondering: How many perfect
shots do I need to hit to win a match? That’s the curse and the beauty of the
five-set format. This was the match that convinced the ATP to reduce the
Masters finals to best of three, because both Federer and Nadal pulled out of
the next one, which started the following day in Hamburg. It was a
good change in the long run, I think, but I do miss the possibility of seeing
matches like this.
—There’s a chess-match quality to these rallies: Who can
avoid giving the other guy a look at a forehand? Each is forced either to
squeeze the ball into the small window that his opponent has left open for a
backhand, or, if they are going to risk it and go to the forehand, they have to make it perfect. The points seem to scrunch up, scrunch up, scrunch up, until
one of them flings it wide open and they’re both suddenly flying all over the
court.
—Love the dueling fist-pumps. Each of them gives a stern look
across the net as they do it. To me, the 2008 Wimbledon final still reigns
supreme, for operatic drama and shot-making brilliance, but
there’s more of an no holds barred, in your face display here from both guys
that’s very cool.
—We miss Federer’s two match points here. But I think we do
get an early glimpse of Nadal’s girlfriend in the stands, under a mass of black
hair.
—At this stage of their rivalry, when Nadal was chasing him
and before he had beaten him in the ’06 Wimbledon final, there was an extra
tension in Federer’s demeanor that didn’t exist against other players. At this
point, he must have been wondering if the kid was going to take everything
over. But he made his stand at Wimbledon.
—Nadal had come back from 0-3 down in the fifth set against
Coria the year before. Here he comes back from 2-4 down in the fifth set, and
2-4 down in the fifth-set tiebreaker. Did either of these guys show a single
sign of weariness over four hours? Look at the final point of the match: They
play it with total abandon, covering every inch of the court.
—Then, when it’s over, after all that time and all that running, Federer, who had
lost despite holding two match points, walks over to the chair umpire and shakes
his hand politely, without any outward anger of angst. A nice moment I’d
never noticed before.
We keep wanting more from this rivalry, but every so often
we should look back and remind ourselves how much we've already been given.
***
Have a good weekend. I’ll be back to preview this year’s
Rome draw on Monday. Stick with me, I’m on a winning streak.
Yesterday, between discussions of 16 vs. 6, 13 to 7,
those two strange beasts, Fedal and the Goat, and who had the better career, John
McEnroe or Ivan Lendl (it was Lendl by a hair, by the way), there were a couple comments that
got me thinking.
From bmars250:
Well this is interesting the way steve is now talking about
Rafa ending up being the leading all-time masters champ. The reason for this is
simmple. Rafa is better than anyone on clay and given the number of masters on
clay well it’s kind of obvious and a bit unfair. Imagine if there was an equal
number of masters on grass as well, cld you then imagine how many masters fed
would have got by nw???????
Well, ys I cld begin to imagine!!!!!!!! Federer would have a lot more, and,
if there were as many as three grass Masters a year, Nadal would likely have a couple
more by now as well. There’s no doubt that the lack of grass events skews this
comparison, but there’s no room for them at the time when they would logically be played, right before
Wimbledon. A grass circuit in the fall would be fun, but I don’t see it on anyone's radar. At the same time, I don’t think the Masters set-up is “unfair” to
Federer in particular. Six of its nine events are held on hard courts, a
surface on which he once had a 50-something-match win streak. The Masters Cup
is also on hard courts, and Federer has reaped the benefits with four titles to
Nadal’s goose egg.
Elsewhere in the comments—I can’t find it now—someone
mentioned that they thought that hard courts were a “neutral” surface, and thus
the one that should be weighed most heavily when we look at a player’s
accomplishments. Hard courts may have occupied a neutral position between grass
and clay in the days when the balls skidded around the grounds at Wimbledon,
but now that the style of play is basically the same everywhere, privileging
hard courts doesn’t make sense. Nadal wins on grass, Federer wins on clay,
they both win on hard courts. Look at the semifinalists at last year’s French
Open—Soderling, Gonzalez, del Potro, and Federer. What unites them isn’t their specialization on clay, but that they’re four of the biggest hitters on tour. Tennis is
played on various surfaces, and at this point in its evolution none of them is more of less important or central to the sport than any other. When you assess
a player’s Masters titles—specifically, Nadal’s—there’s no reason to add the
caveat that he's won most of them on clay, especially since he beat Federer in
many of those clay finals. Everyone, except the Americans, of course, can play
on dirt now. Nadal has won 16 Masters titles, 11 of them on clay; Federer has
won 16, 11 of them on hard courts. They’ve each won 16, period.
From geellis:
I think the biggest point
favoring the superior importance of the slams is not one of their empirical
attributes (i.e., how many sets, number of hours on court, days of rest in
between, seeding, etc.) but their intangible component, namely, how the players
treat them. Put differently, I mean the emphasis or "pressure" that
the players put on themselves to win at the Majors. That said, other than a
couple of serious standouts (Fed, Serena, and now perhaps Nole and Murray) I'm
not sure players today "try" any less to win a match at the Masters
events than they do at the Majors. That said, I cannot disagree that the
players consider the Majors to be a bigger deal than the Masters events.
In some senses, however, I would
argue that this makes the Masters more not less difficult to win. And why?
Because most players play their best tennis when there's less pressure not
more. Thus commentators are so fond of saying player x can "swing
freely" or player x is "playing with house money" etc. Why has
Lleyton not won AO or Emelie not won RG? Because they were not good enough? Of
course not. Because they could not handle the pressure (more on their cases
later) and, therefore, could not produce their best tennis. Now I understand
that some people will say it's exactly this quality of nerves that makes the
Majors more difficult. I'd say, the factor of nerves is one that doesn't fall
so neatly in the favor of the the Majors as more difficult. Or, rather, not a
factor we should consider so highly. This is true because nervousness is not
simply a result of a player's own predisposition, but rather also a result of
the conditions around the player. Therefore, it's simply not fair to compare
the pressure on Hewitt, Mauresmo, or now Murray at their respective Majors to
the pressure on Rafa or the Fed.
As we said yesterday, the majors are the most important
events because we’ve collectively agreed that they are. It’s a convention, but
it's one that must become very very real in a player’s mind as he sets up to serve to win
Wimbledon—it has to feel different from setting up to serve for Monte Carlo or
Cincinnati, simply because of the lifetime-guaranteed prestige that goes with winning on Centre Court.
Along the way, I’ve also believed, subconsiously, that the majors
were the “truest test” of a player. But are they? They’re 3-out-of-5 sets,
which does force a player to win more sets and games and points against his
opponent and to be fit enough to potentially play for many hours. But does that
mean 2-out-3 sets is a less true test? It’s the format for the vast majority of
professional matches, and no one believes that the vast majority of matches aren’t
a true test of skill, do they? How could most pro matches not fully count on some level? Each player knows the format and plays accordingly. If
longer matches mean truer tests, why not create a Super Grand Slam that’s best
four-out-of-seven? Or why not abolish the tiebreaker?
No, two-out-of-three is a
slightly different test, but it’s just as true. It’s less about stamina,
patience, mental fortitude over the long haul, and more about precision under pressure, about the
ability to produce now. There are fewer games, sets, and tiebreakers, which
makes each one that is played just a little more nerve-wracking. Roger Federer,
the master of the 3-of-5, has talked about how that format helps him relax, but
how many times has he needed to come back from two sets down during one of his
16 Slam-title runs? I can only remember one, against Tommy Haas at Roland
Garros last year. Like most champions, he’s excelled in both set-ups.
Empirically, you can make a case for the superior
difficulty of winning a Slam or a Masters event. A Slam requires two weeks of
concentration and fitness; a Masters often requires a 24-hour turnaround
between matches, and a hot player can put you on the ropes in a matter of
games. A Slam forces you to beat seven opponents, but likely won’t set you up
with as tough a first- or second-round assignment as a Masters. What separates
them is what we began with: the historical weight that all of us put on the
majors, which lands squarely on the shoulders of the players. Slams are more
pressurized, for all 128 entrants, because they’re about history—the world is
watching, and it may only remember what you did at the big ones.
But I’m not sure about the significance of geellis’s point
about the special difficulties of home-country pressure. Yes, this makes it tougher for
Murray, Mauresmo, and Hewitt at their Slams. But does that mean that Virginia
Wade’s win at Wimbledon in 1977 or Yannick Noah’s at the French in 1983 were
greater achievements than, say, Nadal’s at Wimbledon in 2008 or Federer’s at
Roland Garros in 2009? From my perspective, the pressure on the last two—on
Nadal to win Wimbledon after losing a five-set final the year before, on
Federer to take advantage of his best opportunity in Paris—is hard to top. I’m
willing to just say that tryng to close out a Slam will put the weight of the
world on you. And that’s a lot for anyone to carry, whatever
country you’re from.
Are we ready to believe in Sam Stosur? I did once, very briefly, years ago, when I first saw her play somewhere in her native Australia. She had a game that might have been described as half-Heninesque. She had the inside-out forehand and the aggressive, jocky, all-court style, but she didn’t whirl around that court quite like the Belgian. And while Stosur’s backhand was strong, it was a workmanlike two-hander, one that would never make it into tennis’ Hall of Great Shots alongside Justine’s Olympian one-hander. Still, Stosur appeared to have Top 10 athleticism, her kick serve had the virtue of simplicity, and she was more capable of dictating a point from the middle of the court with her forehand than most of her opponents.
For years, it seemed that those gifts would be wasted. Stosur bounced around the rankings—No. 65 to 46 to 29 to 47 to 52—but never landed anywhere near the Top 10. The relatively few times she popped up on my radar screen, I could see that the shots and the talent were still intact, but she seemed to have no idea how to use them or to modify them for the moment. Like, say, Ernests Gulbis or Svetlana Kuznetsova on a bad day, Stosur could hit the ball as hard and as well as anyone, but her game lacked texture and adaptability. Like Kim Clijsters, if she got tight and things didn’t go well, she could rush herself into a trip to the showers.
But you don’t need to adapt when you can just hit a blatant winner off any ball you like. That’s what Stosur did for two very quick sets against Vera Zvonareva on Sunday in Charleston. The Aussie, who, even as she improved in 2009, had a habit of folding in finals, won her second and most prestigious title at the Family Circle Cup. At 26, she’s in the Top 10 for the first time, with a 17-5 record on the year. More impressive is the way she won this title. While Stosur hasn’t lost to Zvonareva since 2004, she made the sometime Top Tenner look like a barely coordinated amateur. Along the way, she inspired Vera to commit one of her most YouTube-worthy meltdowns—after double-faulting at 0-3 in the second, she broke her racquet, chucked it into the sideline sofa, and then, after it landed on the court, gave it a kick for good measure. It was the highlight of her afternoon.
Otherwise, it was all Stosur. Every time I looked away for a second—at a newspaper, out the window, at the floor—I looked back up to see her sending another viciously angled winner past a staggering Zvonareva, who had trouble even getting within five feet of some of these balls. Stosur’s uncluttered service motion and the powerful kick it produces is a thing of athletic beauty, one of the finest shots on the women’s tour. She can backpedal and hit her forehand for winners equally well to either corner. And she was using her slide-and-slice backhand when appropriate yesterday—that’s the texture and adaptability I was talking about. Better than all these, though, was Stosur’s return. She took it early, used a truncated backswing, hit it crisply, but never went for an outright winner with it.
So, back to my original question. Are you ready to believe in Sam Stosur? Can she rise higher than No. 10? Can she avoid the dismal early losses that have plagued her at the majors (before 2009, she was a collective 17-22 in the Slams)? Is she a match for the even more physically gifted Williams sisters, Henin, and Clijsters? Can she overpower someone as steady as Wozniacki, who will make her hit an extra ball to finish a rally? For the moment, as we head to Roland Garros, I'll say yes. Stosur made the semis in Paris last year, and she has the point-ending power for clay. Maybe now she’s learned to use all of her gifts. I hope so. Normally a blowout final is dull stuff, but not this one. After the Henin-Clijsters trainwreck in Key Biscayne, it was satisfying to see a player grab a match from the first game and win it decisively, with outstanding play from start to finish.
***
The same could very nearly be said for the men’s final that had been played earlier in the day, in Monte Carlo. Rafael Nadal grabbed his match with Fernando Verdasco from the start, winning the first six points and ending the second game with a vintage crosscourt backhand pass from off his shoe tops and outside the doubles alley. It's probably a shot that only a right-handed left-hander could hit. In other words, it's probably a shot that only Nadal could hit.
That’s the shot we’ll remember from his 2010 Monte Carlo win, his sixth in a row. What was most memorable the rest of the time was how routine this title was and how self-assured Nadal was winning it. He didn’t drop a set and, as he has in years past, the anxieties that seemed to plague him through the early part of the year all blew away in the red Monaco dust. There wasn’t a moment all week where Nadal seemed in any kind of doubt about who the tournament’s winner would be. There was more confidence in every part of his game. He had no issues going up the line with his forehand or taking an aggressive cut at his crosscourt topspin backhand, two shots that he gets cautious with when he’s not confident. What I noticed most, though, was how seldom he was forced to hit his slice backhand, which is a shot that can float on him. On hard courts, when he’s pushed back, he’ll resort to this stroke. On clay, with a little more time and his ability to slide, he seems to have no trouble taking the extra step needed to get in position to drive the ball. Nadal has mastered the surface, the subtleties of footwork and court positioning needed to get around on it efficiently, to the point where he appears to believe he can hit any shot from any spot, and that he’s never out of a rally. Must be a nice feeling. A confidence-boosting feeling.
Nadal didn’t beat Federer or Djokovic or Murray or del Potro or Davydenko or Soderling or a bunch of other very good players. It doesn’t matter—do you really believe that he can’t beat those guys on clay? What matters is that he’s found his best form, and that, after the “accidents” in Indian Wells and Key Biscayne, he knows that it’s still good enough to put him on the winner’s stand. But let’s set aside what this means for his future for the moment. The win was Nadal’s 16th Masters title, tying him with Federer and putting him one behind the record-holder, Andre Agassi. It’s extremely unlikely that Nadal will challenge Federer’s Slam record, but he’ll probably retire as the all-time Masters winner, a record indicative of consistent excellence and persistence. His record in Monte Carlo itself is even better; at 23, Nadal has already won six straight titles there. What will he end up with, 10? Whatever it is, it won’t be surpassed any time soon.
I talked recently with Nadal’s former Davis Cup captain, Emilio Sanchez, for an article for Tennis Magazine. He said that he hoped Nadal would find success again soon, because “he’s so emotional, and he suffers so much when he’s not winning.” You could see the truth in those words after match point yesterday, when Nadal fell straight to the ground as if he’d been shot, and ended up crying into his towel on the sideline. You might say that a guy who has won a tournament the previous five years should act like he’s been there before. I say the opposite. Would you rather that Federer, when he won his fifth straight U.S. Open in 2008 after having a tough season, had just flashed a smile of satisfaction, shaken Andy Murray’s hand, and sat down, instead of rolling on the court in berserk joy the way he did? Which would have been the more memorable reaction? Which would have revealed more of the man? Which would have moved us more? The same goes for Nadal’s tears in Monte Carlo. They came after a year of ups and downs for him, of physical and emotional disappointment and pain, and they showed that it isn’t just the majors that need to matter. After every match he wins, wherever it is, Nadal takes the time to celebrate as if the experience is brand new. It’s one reason why he continues to win, and why he can stay motivated at Monte Carlo. Keep acting like you’ve never been there before, Rafa. It's why tennis players keep playing, and it's why tennis watchers keep watching. We want to feel that way, too.
Why do we watch tennis matches? It’s a minor, niggling little question, I know, but it wouldn’t leave my head Friday morning during the quarterfinal between Novak Djokovic and David Nalbandian in Monte Carlo. There you had a square red stage and an audience huddled over it, all next to a big blue sea. Usually this combination registers as little more than scenic to me. But today it made me think, maybe inaccurately, of a Greek theater. What used to happen on its stages? Catharis? An outward expression of the larger group's innermost psychological issues? Right? Watching Djokovic and Nalbandian fight themselves and each other for two sets, it seemed to me like a very modern ritual of catharsis. A catharsis of stress.
The spur for these thoughts came from a conversation I had this week with Allen Fox. He’s a former Davis Cupper and Pepperdine men’s coach, and a guru of everything mental in tennis. It’s hard not to learn something about the sport when you talk to him. Last year I wrote a piece for this blog, which was then adapted as an article in TENNIS magazine, about the excuses all tennis players make, and how they’re both ridiculous and inevitable. Fox takes the idea a step farther. While I’ve always thought of an excuse as a kind of lie to yourself, he says that it’s rarely a lie at all, that most excuses are, to some degree, true. In this sense, even the garden-variety “it just wasn’t my day,” qualifies as an excuse. We really can’t live without them; they’re what allows us to explain defeat, put it behind us, and try again. Fox says that unconsciously most of us start working on our excuses even before a match is over, instead of using that mental energy to figure out a way around whatever issue we're having. To him, good players are, at the most fundamental level, problem solvers. It’s not that they play their best, or even anywhere near it, more often than the rest of us. It's that they know it doesn’t matter. What matters is the ability to ignore that little excuse, that little escape hatch, that’s being prepared for you in one dark corner of your brain.
This week I talked to Fox for a magazine story I’m writing about how to approach, from a mental perspective, various stages of a match—the first game; the game after you’ve broken serve; if you're way ahead; match point, etc. In the middle of our conversation, he observed that tennis’s scoring system may be the most stress-inducing of all sports'. It’s one of the very few that isn’t purely cumulative; there are pressure moments built into the score—ads, games, sets—all the way through a match. These are particularly nerve-wracking because they’re all-or-nothing situations. If you play a long deuce game and lose it, you end up with nothing; ditto if you play a long set and lose it. You can win six games and dozens of points, but if you lose a tiebreaker, you walk away with nada. It’s a sport designed to keep you from escaping pressure. I’m rarely as nervous in a match as I am after I’ve come back from 0-40 on my serve to 30-40. I know that one shank will render my good work over the previous two points worthless.
From my experience, which wasn’t contradicted by the pros at Monte Carlo today, stress works equally on the player who’s winning and the one who’s losing. It’s a cliché of the sport that, right after you break serve, you’re in danger of being broken right back. That’s because you’ve done the natural thing and taken a mental breather after pushing hard and going through the tension of trying to break your opponent. Conversely, if you’ve been broken, you may react by letting your mental guard down and getting discouraged. Either way, you’re doing what we all do automatically: You’re running from the unpleasant experience of stress. I’m particularly, maybe even unnaturally, guilty of running as fast as I can from it on a tennis court. I’ve lost matches because, in the back of my mind, I was afraid to build a lead. I knew that if did I build it, I would then be faced with the horrible pressure of not blowing it. Call it pre-choking.
Djokovic is not that bad, of course. On most occasions he survives the stress, both of his opponent’s making and his own making. What he isn’t good at is hiding it. Against Nalbandian he cruised through the first set and played well to break early in the second. That’s when, just at the moment when he spotted the finish line coming up over the hill in the distance, the doubts set in. He breathed more deeply, he threw his hands in the air in exasperation for the first time, he took extra time toweling off and bouncing the ball before he served. The question was not whether Djokovic could beat Nalbandian to the finish line, but whether he could avoid tripping himself before he got there.
This is another terrible thing about the stress of tennis: Rather than dissipating when you play well, it builds to its maximum as you get closer to match point. There, on that precipice, you can see, feel, taste, victory on the other side—it tastes like relief (catharsis) more than anything else. It’s natural, as you get close to match point, to begin to hope you get there, rather than trying to make it happen. But of course you can’t hope anything into existence. Djokovic, despite some self-inflicted stumbles, made it across, in part because he got some help from Nalbandian. The Argentine rushed a backhand down the line at break point and never threatened again. After that moment, he may have been guilty of his own form of escape, of subconsciously caving into the bogus but convenient excuse that “it wasn’t his day.” It’s harder to tell with Nalbandian. He doesn’t ask as much from himself on the court as Djokovic does.
Stress, release, stress, release: What else is there to our days? I go to a meeting, the meeting ends, and I feel elated for no reason, except that the one event that I had planned for the day, the one event where something could conceivably have gone wrong, or at least unpredictably, is over. I don’t even care how it turned out; what’s important is that it’s done. This is the theatre of tennis: The sport takes one person—a proxy for you—and forces him, all alone, in front of the rest of us, to play a game that has the most tension-filled scoring system imaginable. He’s acting out our daily life in a much more glamorous, risky, and frightening way than we’ll ever experience. We watch because we want to identify with these player-actors at their most nervous and human. We want to know that it happens to everyone. But we also watch because we want to see them overcome those human nerves in ways that we know we never could. It must be terrible for these player-actors to live this out for us. It also must be addictive as hell.
Two moments stick in my head from Friday's matches (I didn’t see Verdasco react in his own inimitable way to the pressure of a lead). At match point, Djokovic hit a drop shot, which is the classic flee-from-stress maneuver, and one that he goes to regularly. As it sailed toward the net, he extended his arm forward, physically hoping that it would make it over, end the match, and let him relax again. The other moment came earlier in the day, when Rafael Nadal, down break point at 2-1 in the first set against Juan Carlos Ferrero, belted a few shots that might normally have won him the point. JC got them back, and Nadal ended up at the net, where he nearly made an excellent drop volley off a well-hit passing shot. But the volley caught the tape and landed on his side. I expected Nadal, like most other players, to stand and look at the net and the ball, put his hands on his hips, and allow himself a little stress-free dip into the well of self-pity—“how could the net do that to me?” Instead, without even glancing at the ball, he turned around, walked quickly back to the baseline, and called for the towel. He was right: Ferrero had played an outstanding point and there was nothing he could do about it. There was no reason, as Allen Fox might say, to let the perfect become the enemy of the good enough.
Two moments, two reactions to stress. As a member of this clay-court theatre’s worldwide audience, I enjoyed one—Djokovic’s—because I could identify with it. I enjoyed the other—Nadal’s—because I couldn’t.
Courts, players, tournaments, arenas: They shift in
your mind even as they appear, seemingly unchanged, on your TV screen through
the years. It’s not an evolution; that would imply improvement and some kind of
an endpoint. My relationship as a spectator, with, say, Mikhail Youzhny, has
traveled in a sort of zig-zagging sideways line over the course of his career.
First there was early curiosity, then approval of his odd backhand, then annoyance
with his temper, then admiration for his skill after his wins over Rafael Nadal, then
shock—blood trickling down a player’s forehead will do that—then boredom with
his middling results, then no opinion at all. But that won’t be the end of it:
Today, when the veteran Russian appeared ready to grit his way to a three-set
win over David Nalbandian, I briefly, very briefly, saw him as a grizzled
warrior, a guy who goes out and gives everything emotionally each week. A
couple minutes later, when he was broken after botching an ill-chosen drop shot
and smothering an easy backhand into the net, I saw him as a sympathetic
figure, proof that the pros can choke like the rest of us. Then, after Youzhny had lost and was walking away from his handshake with Nalbandian, I was back
to having no particular opinion of him at all. He’s just a very good tennis
player with the same very short haircut he’s always had. Until the next time I
see him play, when my reactions and opinions will start all over again.
These kinds of minute-to-minute, point-to-point changes in
my perspective on players are pretty common for me, and I’m guessing one of the
reasons that most tennis fans can keep watching the same pros face off
against the same opponents on the same courts year after year. It isn’t just
the points and the matches that are different, but our feelings on any given day
about the performers themselves. I’m not a full-time fan of many of the pros, or a
non-stop hater of too many, either—few people are all good or all evil, right?
I got onto this line of thought on Wednesday morning seeing
Rafael Nadal open his clay season in Monte Carlo with his latest new look from
Nike, a blue shirt to go with the now standard knee-length Bermuda-style shorts. Last
week I’d watched a very different-looking Rafa beating Roger Federer at the
same tournament a few years ago. This was the Rafa of the bicep, the pirata, the
long, grungy hair, the dark stubble, and the louder grunt. Compared to the
bright, sleeved version we saw today, the old Nadal had a menacing countenance. I’d
liked the old Rafa back then, had never thought of him as an intimidating
character, but now I could undertand how some might have seen him that way. Like
Federer, he’s been styled for celebrity. All of their early
grunge has been buzzed away. The old Rafa from that clip was obviously the same
person we see now. The strokes and the mannerisms haven't been transformed. But
at the same time it was a completely different Nadal, one frozen in that moment
forever, a moment before he reached No. 1, when he was still the challenger to
Federer’s champion, when he was still fighting upward and not yet defending his
place on the totem pole or in the world. That Rafa no longer exists. The evolution of our athletes shows us, as much as anything shows us, that time, even in the course of just a few years, keeps discarding us and making us new.
What has time done to my perception of the other guys I’ve
seen at Monte Carlo this week so far?
Novak Djokovic: I tuned in this morning just as he was going
through his inevitable second-set doubt session against Florent Serra. The jaw was out
and the mouth was a little open. I was ready for him to stick the tongue into
the cheek, but it never quite got there. I realized then that where I once saw
the cockiness in Djokovic, now all I saw was the vulnerability that shadows him every step that he takes. I’m less in awe of his game, but more entertained by
his personality. Because of that, I look forward to his matches, even if
I don’t always love to watch him hit tennis balls. Will this be the final stage
of my relationship with Djokovic? How could it? I look forward to a long and
hopefully unpredictable future with this comically engaging athlete. Right now,
he’s as transparently human as they get.
Tomas Berdych: This may be the most pleasant surprise of my
2010 tennis-watching season—a chance to dig Tomas Berdych’s game. Is it the
cool green checked shirt? Is it the ground strokes that are finding the court?
Or is it the little bit of positive energy, the new assured spring in his
step that I’m enjoying? Where Djokovic has been more entertaining as his
results have become more up and down, Berdych is showing signs of being a more
engaging person as his results improve. In the past, he had the stony, recessive quality of
someone who didn’t want to give it all emotionally, because he knew he'd blow it in the end anyway. That only made the focused aggressiveness with which he went
after Richard Gasquet on Tuesday more energizing. We love winners in part because they love themselves so much more; like rich people, we admire them deep down for doing and feeling what we secretly believe we should be doing and feeling all the time, for showing us excellence and freedom and triumph. Until they win too much and love themselves too
much. But that day is a long way off for Berdych.
Juan Carlos Ferrero: I remember watching JC lose to Tommy
Robredo many years ago in the Grandstand at the U.S. Openin a fifth-set tiebreaker. In those
days, Robredo was a crowd-pleaser, even a ham—he pretended to shoot a line
judge with a machine gun at one point, a move guaranteed to make a New York
crowd fall in love with you (what this says about New York crowds, I don’t
know). All of which made me root for Ferrero. He was the classy
Spaniard, the proud one, the guy who did it the right way and didn’t play to
the crowd. That approach, along with Ferrero’s game and ranking, went out of
style for a while. But now, seeing him as an elder statesman who has plugged
away solidly for the last nine months, his personality—still solid,
low-key, proud, a little melancholy that he didn’t end up being the man, but
living with it—suits him well. I don’t expect a fireworks display from JC, so I'm happy with
what I do get.
David Nalbandian: The first Wimbledon final I attended was
in 2002. Nalbandian, a relative nobody, ruined it by (a) being in it, and
(b) not showing up at all. From there, though, over the next three or four
years, I became a big fan. The smooth whip on the backhand, the balance on his
forehand set-up, the unhurried movement—how could any tennis player not love to
watch the guy? I didn’t really watch him as a true fan, I guess, because I
wasn’t all that troubled by his losses. I was invested in the game, not
the person. Today, watching him win that match with
Youzhny, I felt the same way. My spectator’s relationship with Nalby remains
one of distanced and ironical awe. “There’s Dav-eed. So good. Such a screw-up.”
That unchanging sense felt right for the moment. The sun was
going down as Nalbandian and Youzhny wound up their match. It was the same
late-afternoon sun I’ve loved to see on TV from Monte Carlo for years. I’ve
never been to the tournament, but I feel like I know it well. The view over the
Mediterranean is obviously one of the best in tennis, but I prefer the
one from the player's chair that you see on the changeovers. It’s eternal tennis: A
racquet sits in the foreground, the umpire’s chair looms above, the low
bleachers farther out, and beyond that is nothing but bright sky. For an American who knows
the hard courts and parking lots and giant new concrete arenas in Indian Wells and Key
Biscayne and Flushing Meadows, the clay season’s old-world atmosphere is one to
be savored—it brings a deeper flavor back to the game each spring, just as the clay adds a level of stylish sliding and spin-heavy shot-making. Seeing Nalbandian
get ready to serve the ball there on Wednesday, sweating and struggling and
striking the ball brilliantly as always, it made me think of all the hundreds
of long-haired, short-shorted legends from the past—Kuerten, Borg, Nastase, Panatta, Orantes, Pietrangeli, and farther back—who have done the same thing on those same courts. It
made me think that in Monte Carlo at least, the players may change, but the
game stays—in its color and personality and combat—the same.
Does tennis need more of Wayne Odesnik? Do we need more
outlaws, à la pro wrestling? Vince McMahon couldn’t have trained up a better
one than the snarling, stalling, defiant, and annoying Odesnik who showed up in
Houston last week. He played his role perfectly right to the end, losing a tight
three-setter to the shining, albeit hesitant, hero of the day, Sam Querrey. Not
only was he not apologetic, it was Odesnik, the ATP pariah and alleged drug cheat, who could barely bring himself to shake his polite opponent’s hand
afterward. This guy is box-office gold.
As objectionable as Odesnik’s presence at the tournament
was, his semi with Querrey was one of the more entertaining matches of the
year. Odesnik forced his opponent, a generally gentle giant, out his
psychological comfort zone. One of Querrey’s strongest assets is his ability to
stay calm no matter what the situation. His deeply even-keel approach is 180
degrees from that of, say, Rafael Nadal’s, but it serves him well. Now we know
that it’s really the only option he has. As soon as Querrey made the match
personal—he had guaranteed victory beforehand—he lost his cool, and his game
went with it. Suddenly we had a voluble and irritable Sam Querrey on our hands,
one who thinks out loud, shakes his head in confusion, visibly questions
his own decisions, and even half-tries to drill a ball at his opponent. Personalized aggression isn’t Sam’s forte; I can only
imagine that Andy Roddick would have wasted no time in leveling Odesnik in this
situation. All of which made Querrey’s play at the end of the match more
impressive. The final game was his best. He played with control and tactical
intelligence, looping heavy balls deep before moving forward and going for a
winner. Querrey may not make any guarantees in the future, but he did
exactly what he said this time: He refused to lose. A lot of guys must be thanking him for it.
Now we put the ridiculous behind us and move on to one of
the more sublime moments on the calendar. Today marks the ATP’s Continental
shift to Monte Carlo, the Mediterranean, and red clay. It was all there this
morning when I got up, just as I remembered it: The court on the cliff, the
blinding sun above it, the sea rolling out behind it, and Richard Gasquet
hitting an ill-advised jumping backhand into the net on it. Some things never change.
I guess I’ve given up on Gasquet ever going as far as his potential could take
him, but I still enjoy what head-scratching glimpses I can get of his game.
Who else will be seeing in Monte Carlo? Let’s start by
asking who we won’t be seeing. Five of the Top 10: Roger Federer,
Juan Martin del Potro, Nikolay Davydenko, Andy Roddick, and Robin Soderling.
Consider it a warning about making fewer tournaments on the schedule mandatory.
Monte Carlo, despite its history and locale, is 50 percent of the tournament it once
was.
Top Half
Has Novak Djokovic ever been the first seed at a Masters
event? With Federer’s absence and Nadal ranked No. 3, he takes over
the top rung on the draw this time. It’s a tricky moment for Djokovic. He
played poorly in the U.S., and he just announced that he’s dropped Todd Martin as
his sometime coach. The fit between the über-cerebral Midwesterner and the
volatile Serb was an odd one from the start, and Djokovic’s serve certainly
hadn’t thrived in their brief time together. This was the time last year when
Djokovic played himself out of a slump and into three top-flight slugfests with
Nadal, two in finals and one in a semifinal. He lost them all, but he came up with some
of his finest tennis of the year during the clay season. That means Djokovic will have plenty of motivation, and plenty of pressure, to defend those points this time
around. He’ll start that defense fresh, and presumably hitting away the way he
likes.
He’s helped by his draw, which has put him on the opposite side
of Nadal and Murray. Djokovic is slotted with the solid-but-bordering-on-too-tall-for-clay Marin Cilic; Fernando Verdasco, who somehow has never been past the
quarters of any Masters tournament; the dangerous Tomas Berdych, who is showing
signs of a renaissance; Tommy Robredo, whom I can't come up with any pithy phrase to describe; and Stan Wawrinka, who beat Federer here
last year. Sleepers include David Nalbandian, Marcos Baghdatis, and maybe Igor
Andreev, whose forehand has always made me wonder why he hasn’t had more
success in clay Masters events. Like Mr. Sauce, he’s never even been to a
semifinal.
Semifinalists: Djokovic, Berdych
Bottom Half
Now that I think about it, this half, with the exception of
five-time defending champion Nadal, is pretty much as open as the top. Murray
is the second seed here, and he played Nadal in a tremendous semifinal at this
tournament last year, but he’s also coming in wounded from the spring
hard-court season. Clay, paradoxically, requires more point-ending ground
strokes than slow hard courts, and that isn’t Murray’s forte—he was as shackled
as he’s ever been in his losses at Indian Wells and Key Biscayne. The flipside
is that he may feel a lot less pressure in Monte Carlo. He won’t be expected to
win a clay event like this one, and he’ll be coming in having taken a last-minute wild
card, which may help lower his expectations and free up his game. But I’m not
counting on it.
Along with Nadal and Murray, this half includes the
bottomlessly unpredictable Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, the earth-bound Juan Monaco, the
aggravating Nicolas Almagro, teen wild card Bernard Tomic, the gracefully aging Juan
Carlos Ferrero, the dangerous—to himself and his opponent—Thomaz Bellucci
(wait, I see that Bellucci already lost—the danger must have been all on his side of the court this
time around), the dogged David Ferrer, the fabulously named Fabio Fognini, and
the aging-even-more-gracefully-at-the-moment Ivan Ljubicic. We also have the sport's official new tank commander, Eduardo Schwank, who ended a recent match by intentionally foot-faulting on both his first and second serves on match point (I can't decide if that's funny or depressing). Unfortunately, one of my
favorite players to watch when he was a junior, the sure-handed Oleksandr
Dolgopolov Jr. of Russia, who I haven’t seen in the pro ranks yet, was beaten
by Julien Benneteau in the first round. Hopefully, I’ll get another chance.
Not a bad lineup, but do any of these guys sound like a
serious match for an in-form Nadal? Whatever his issues have been coming to
Monte Carlo, they always magically vanish once he sets foot on center court. He
likes this surface in particular; it reminds of the clay in Paris. When he
find it under his feet again, Nadal hits with more authority and walks with a
new spring. One by one, he takes his methodical revenge on the guys who have
beaten him on other surfaces over the course of the last year.
Semifinalists: Rafael Nadal and . . . frankly, I have no
idea. Considering that I was about to pick Bellucci, I think I’ll just
leave the space blank. Who is your pick?
There’s no spring anymore. The phrase has become accepted
truth in the Northeast, or at least in the peculiar ecological zone known as
New York City. Here it can feel like we’ve gone straight from slushy winter to
muggy summer, with no time to prepare our minds, our skin, our hair,
our clothes for the jolting turnabout. Most years I’ve maintained that this is little more than a myth, that there's a blustery, unpredictable little bridge between the two meteorological extremes that can still be identified as spring. But it’s been hard to argue that case this April. After a gray and dismal March, the first eight days of the month progressed from unseasonably warm, to the dog
days of 80-degree August, to near-stifling humidity by Wednesday night. The
fever has broken for the moment—it’s more typically drizzly and gray as I
write this on Friday—but it was a longer dream of summer than I can ever
remember having so early in the year.
I’m not complaining; it was a pretty sweet dream. Doors
flung wide open in the lobby at work. Warm air on the back of my neck while I
typed. The novel thrill of standing around outside, doing nothing more than
looking at a garden-variety Manhattan cross street and listening to its
incidental soundtrack. A blue and red barber-shop tube rotates upward, a sign of eternal motion, of the city and the world spinning. (Not that I would ever get my lid butchered in that place; you get
what you pay for in NYC when it comes to haircuts, and $20 is just enough to
get you out the door alive.) Next to the barber is a tiny, busy, 1940s-style shoeshine stand wedged under a red canopy. Across the street are hot-dog vendors’ umbrellas and a Halal food truck.
A car horn honks from around the corner. “More Than a Feeling” plays vapidly, aridly, irresistibly on the speakers at a Korean deli. A woman walks one way in knee high black socks, two others pass her the other way in
rolled-up jeans and canvas sneakers. (You can picture thousands of women around
New York looking outside in the morning, throwing their polka-dotted Wellington rain boots in the closet, pulling out their jeans, and patiently rolling
them up to just the right fashionable spot—how do they know where it is?) At my feet floats a McDonald's hamburger wrapper. What makes its crinkled
yellow so beautiful, so intense to the eye?
This past weekend, when the dream of summer was at its peak, I
saw another inexplicably intense-looking yellow object bouncing along a
Brooklyn street: a tennis ball, the ultimate symbol of spring for some of us.
Two teenagers, maybe brothers, were in front of their apartment building,
tossing the ball back and forth over the dark green awning that covered the
entranceway. One kid would throw the ball over the awning, the other would bounce
it back to him. There was no order to what they were doing, though. One of them
chucked it 20 feet in the air, the other banged it off an iron railing next
door and made it bounce crazily out into the street. The stuff of an aimless
teenage summer afternoon. As I passed their building, one of them picked up the ball
and they headed in the direction of a park near the East River. They looked pleased, in a conspiratorial way. It reminded me of a scene from the Simpsons: Two bums are underneath a bridge,
tickling each other with feathers and laughing hysterically. One of them says, in a scratchy voice, “Who needs money when we got feathers?” I imagined one of these Brooklyn kids saying, “Who needs friends when we’ve got . . . a
tennis ball."
A tennis ball can do a lot. It adds motion and time to the
static facts of the objects around you. It inserts an unpredictable element
into space. It also made a perfect substitute for a baseball when my friends and I
played pick-up games in our back yard as kids. An actual baseball might have smashed a neighbor’s
window, and a wiffleball was hard to pitch and didn’t carry a satisfying
distance. A tennis ball was solid but springy. When you caught it right with your
aluminum bat, you could stand at the plate—in this case, a five-sided stone in
the middle of our patio—and look up in awe, like Babe Ruth or Roy Hobbs or Mike
Schmidt, as it arced over the giant pine tree at the edge of the yard and
landed, after a bounce or two, in a driveway two doors down. For us, watching
it fly felt like an escape. To our
elderly neighbors, it might have looked like a miniature yellow UFO touching down out of the sky and
heralding an invasion from outer space—“This is the first sign, Martha, it's the
tennis balls!” The only trouble was the tendency of those balls to end
up on the roof of the house next door, where they found their way into a drainpipe
and caused some serious water damage years later. Personally, I’d say it was
worth it.
The ball had other uses. Nothing got the family dog tearing
around the furniture like the prospect of digging his teeth into its ragged
felt. Eventually, in his excitement, he’d forget about what he
was chasing and just keep running, faster and faster, a brown blur across the
floor. When I was 12 or 13, I would spend a few minutes in bed, before I went
to sleep, tossing a tennis ball above my head, trying to catch it
while only glimpsing its dim outline in the dark. Maybe I thought this would
improve my hand-eye coordination; or maybe I thought it would help my ball
toss, I can’t remember. But I did get pretty good at throwing it straight up so
that it fell straight down into my hand. Or, almost as often, into my face.
(Wait, I do remember why I did this. I read an article about Dwight Gooden
where he said he’d been so obsessed with baseball as a kid that he’d tossed a
ball above his head in bed before he went to sleep. I must have thought: I’m obsessed with tennis,
so this is kind of thing I should be doing.)
Of course, a tennis ball is not a baseball. A baseball is a no-nonsense ball, a blue-collar ball. It’s wound tight and is solid inside. It doesn’t give you any extra, manufactured bounce. It lands with
a thud, and it hurts so much when it hits your head that you think you might have brain damage—or at least that’s what I thought when Jeff Waltman threw one
to me in a Little League practice and it went past my glove and straight into
my forehead. A basketball, on the other hand, is a world unto itself; a kid can spend a productive afternoon trying to perfect a behind the back dribble or learning to spin it on his
finger. I succeeded at the former, but never quite got the latter move to work.
A tennis ball is more artificial. It’s friendlier, brighter,
lighter, but it lacks any kind of street cred or gravitas. Turn it in the right
direction and it looks like a smiley face sign. Lighter than a baseball, it
doesn’t feel as good to toss back and forth at long distance—it seems a little lost without its eternal
partner, the racquet. In a move toward greater artificiality, tennis, unlike baseball, overthrew its white-ball tradition and went to optic yellow for TV in
the 1970s. It even flirted, during the boom years, with orange and purple. I’ll
never forget the latter color, because I once tossed a purple tennis ball in
the air, hit it with a baseball bat across our lawn, and watched as it bounced
toward the garage and approached my sister, who had just rolled out of the garage
on a Big Wheel. The ball, as if laser-guided, hit her right in the eye. I don’t
think I hit any tennis balls across the lawn for a while after that.
The garage. I have a better memory of it. That’s where,
after school when the weather got warm, when we could run around outside again, I would come back home to find three
baseball bats and balls lined up on a rack on the wall. On the cement floor,
next to an ancient Scott’s push lawnmower, was an old, gritty, comfortable leather basketball. And in
front of them was an orange hopper, packed with tennis balls. Everything else
in the garage—the mower, the hose, the garden tools—looked darker, duller; each of them represented a chore. When I
think about my initial love for sports, for the fun and escape they brought, it goes back to the contrast between those work objects, and the brighter bats and balls scattered between them. The baseball, the
basketball, and even more so, the tennis balls, glowing inside the hopper, were ready to be bounced. They were ready to fly. They were ready to be thrown,
hit, spun, made to do anything I could make them do with a racquet. They were
ready, after months of dreaming of summer, for me to bring them to life.
***
Have a good weekend. I'll be back Monday with a (slightly belated) Monte Carlo preview. The tennis season starts fresh once again.
