There's word that Louis Armstrong Stadium and the Grandstand, the two original stadiums at the National Tennis Center, will be razed in the near future. Blame the swamp and ash (not Ashe) heap they were built on. The two were originally one arena, the Singer Bowl, constructed for the '64 World's Fair and named after its sponsor, Singer Sewing Machines. Pre-Open, it was most famous for being the scene of a near-riot caused by Jim Morrison in 1968 (you should be able to see a little of it here.) Otherwise, here's some more of the history behind the place.
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The story of the U.S. Open is a story of glacial democratiziation. From 1881 to 1914, the U.S. Nationals (now called the Open) was a see-and-be-seen Society event, held at the Newport Casino at the height of the summer "season" and attended by the resort town's parasol-spinning matriarchs. When the sport expanded and became a serious athletic contest—and the players started complaining about those spinning parasols behind the court—it moved to Forest Hills Gardens, New York, where it was held from 1915 to 1977. That was closer to the commerical heart of the country, but it wasn't a big leap in social strata—the Tudor-dominated Forest Hills was planned as a WASP-only community.
By the 1970s, though, the power of the WASP establishment had waned as the country’s economic base shifted to the Sun Belt’s oil and aerospace industries. With that wealth, tennis followed. Texas oilman Lamar Hunt began the first major pro tour of the Open era, World Championship Tennis (WCT), and made Dallas a new hotbed for the sport. In 1973, the most-watched match in history was played not on Wimbledon’s Center Court, but in Houston’s Astrodome, where Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes. In 1977, as Georgia farmer and avid tennis player Jimmy Carter entered the White House, the USTA followed suit and elected its first president from the deep south, 66-year-old William Ewing “Slew” Hester of Jackson, Mississippi. Invariably caricatured as Ol’ Slewfoot, a bluff, beady-eyed, cigar-chomping, wildcat oilman and scion of a state political family, Hester was also one of those rarities in the tennis establishment: a gentleman entrepreneur and an energetic force for change.
“I’m a real hustler, a salesman,” he said, someone who liked to “drink all night and play tennis all day.” He had built the 26-court River Hills Tennis Club in his hometown in the early 1960s and then stumped the country, cocktail firmly in hand, successfully selling his fellow old cronies in the USLTA on the idea of professionals at Forest Hills. But Hester remained underestimated in New York, where he was, in the words of Tennis Magazine's Peter Bodo, “pegged as a stupid redneck.”
As with Newport before World War I, it was clear by the mid-70s that tennis had outgrown Forest Hills. During the two weeks of the Open, the West Side Tennis Club, now wedged in by high-rise apartment buildings, threatened to burst it own walls. The club’s narrow pathways and viewing areas were overrun; fans lay face down on the ground to see whatever they could see from beneath the windscreens at the backs of courts. There was limited room for the sponsor tents and merchandise booths that now ate up large swaths of ground at all tournaments. The grass, never as firmly rooted as in England, was chewed up so quickly and thoroughly that it had to be spray-painted green for the TV cameras.
An even bigger and more intractable issue was the lack of parking space for the new suburban fans who wanted to experience the “carnival at Forest Hills.” There was very little space in the streets that Frederick Law Olmstead, Jr.—son of the man who designed Central Park—had planned 70 years earlier. By 1977, as New York’s notorious Summer of Sam drew to a close, a spirit of lawlessness had taken hold of the tournament. Trash spilled out of giant bins and floated on the courts after a rainstorm. A spectator was shot during an evening session featuring—who else?—John McEnroe. Rebellious fans unhappy over the rescheduling of a match threw oranges and paper cups onto the court in protest. And they got their way. Tennis’s clubby past—members at West Side still wore all white—had come face to face with its colorful, big money present.
Hester knew the tournament had to find a new location, and after looking out an airplane window one night in January ’77, he knew where it was. “You throw a dart in the dark and drill,” he said of his job as an independent oilman, and that’s pretty much how he went about moving the U.S. Open. As his plane flew into La Guardia that night, Hester glanced out at the land below him. There were several inches of snow on the ground in Flushing Meadows Park. Taken by the beauty of the scene, he looked more closely. He caught a glimpse of Louis Armstrong Stadium, a disused and graffiti-strewn outdoor exhibition hall and performance space built for the 1964 World’s Fair and originally called the Singer Bowl. Hester had his drilling spot.
He also had a new partner. After 62 years, the West Side Tennis Club was out, and cash-strapped New York City was in. The USTA agreed to spend $5 million to lease the land around Armstrong Stadium, build a tennis center, and use the space for sponsored events for two months out of the year (it ended up costing $10 million). The other 10 months it was to be a municipal tennis facility. For the first time, a Grand Slam would be played on public courts, on a hard surface similar to the one used by the waves of recreational hackers who had picked up the game over the previous decade in public parks all over the country. It was also, not coincidentally, a surface where most U.S. pros thrived. Now all Hester to do was have it finished by the fall of the following year.
Most observers familiar with New York construction thought it was impossible, that he would be eaten alive by the industry, if not by the city itself—the plan required the approval of nine different agencies before it could even get off the ground. Gene Scott, the patrician Yalie publisher of Tennis Week and self-appointed conscience of the sport, believed that the Open would likely still be in Forest Hills in 1980. “It pushes the outer limits of wishful thinking to believe otherwise,” Scott sniffed. When another writer, Herbert Warren Wind of the New Yorker, visited the site in May, he was stunned to find out how much work was yet to be done. He mentioned his concern to Hester, who “smiled broadly and easily” and said he believed that the new, eight-layer DecoTurf II surface would be laid down on August 27, three days before the tournament started. That's basically how it turned out.
On August 30th, 1978, the National Tennis Center opened with 12 fast-food stands and nine bars in Armstrong stadium alone. This might have seemed a little dangerous, considering that the sides of the arena were steep enough that Hester would say, “If a drunk fell out of the 51st row, he’d end up somewhere on the sideline.” Every one of the 70-odd flags on the grounds was red, white, and blue. There had been no time for landscaping of any sort—it was steel and concrete for as far as the eye could see. The newly minted cheerful slob tennis fans of New York City didn’t care. They came in tube socks and T-shirts, chinos and sneakers, sleeveless denim jackets and skull-and-crossbone tattoos, Lacoste shorts and Madras jackets, short shorts and halter tops, designer jeans and polyester shirts unbuttoned to the waist, and often with no shirts at all. Behind sunglasses of every shape, color, and size, they stuffed themselves with shrimp cocktail and strolled around licking ice cream cones. They yelled out as players were serving and jammed the outer walkways of Armstrong to survey the field courts below. Sometimes they jumped the fences and plopped themselves down on one court to get a better view of the match that was being played on the next court. In the evenings—the Open was the first Grand Slam to stage night matches—when the place was jammed, the 18,000 inside the stadium could unleash a formless, unceasing roar more commonly heard at NFL arenas than tennis clubs. Ten years after taking over the sport, the American tennis empire had its capital. The U.S. Open was no longer a baby Wimbledon. It had left the private club and the imitation English village in Forest Hills for the public spectacle of the modern concrete sports arena. The Lawns were made of asphalt now.
The game had come a long way in a short time, and the new view could be dizzying. When you climbed to the top of Armstrong Stadium as the sun set, a haze of orange pollution could be seen spreading over the steel canyons of the Manhattan skyline. It looked like the city was on fire.
But tennis hadn’t completely given itself over to the great unwashed: There was plenty of quiche at the concession stands.
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The move from Forest Hills to Flushing Meadows didn’t take the U.S. Open far geographically. It didn’t even get it out of Queens. But it transported tennis from a British vision of the modern world to an American one. At the beginning of the century, Flushing Meadows had been a vast dumping ground for all of Brooklyn’s garbage. In 1925, F. Scott Fitzgerald memorialized it in The Great Gatsby as a “valley of ashes—a fantastic farm where ashes grow like wheat into ridges and hills and grotesque gardens.” It had been a lifelong dream of another famous New Yorker, the cantankerous, high-handed city planner and Machiavellian master builder Robert Moses, to create the city’s greatest park on top of those ashes, one that might even be worthy of naming after himself. Moses, whose career spanned much of the century, saw New York as an ever-expanding mural, with its population stretching farther and farther east. In his vision of the future, its citizens would drive on his parkways, past his monuments and parks and beaches, and gather together at its center, in his sprawling Flushing Meadows Park. He wanted to one-up Frederick Law Olmstead—his son designed Forest Hills Gardens—and upstage his stuffy, rinky-dink, 19th-century Central Park in Manhattan.
Forest Hills had been the earliest example in the U.S. of a "Garden City," part of a late-Victorian urban-planning movement that was started to counter the urbal sprawl caused by industrialism. Olmstead, Jr., and the Garden City designers believed that the only way to maintain any kind of society, and sanity, amid the urban jungle was inside discrete, green neighborhoods. Tennis in Forest Hills fit that vision; all over the country, the sport’s clubs were part of the glue that held communities together.
Robert Moses had a different vision. He believed in leveling old urban neighborhoods. In 1898, Garden City founder Sir Ebeneezer Howard put his ideas for modern planning in a manifesto entitled "Tomorrow: A Peaceful Path to Real Reform." Fifty years later, Moses described his method in somewhat different language: “When you build in an overbuilt metropolis,” he said, “sometimes you have to hack your way with a meat axe.”
Moses believed in the car, and he believed that cities should be shredded to make room for the expressways that would carry them. His modern world would be vast and public: Jones Beach, which can hold half a million people on a summer day, and Shea Stadium were two of the creations of which he was most proud. (Though you have to wonder about the man’s historical judgment. He believed that Shea, which was knocked down in 2008, was New York’s answer to the Roman Colosseum.) He thought of Long Island as a potential Eden for the millions of people crammed into New York City. Moses would get his expressways, his bridges, and his steel-and-glass office buildings. But he never got his park.
Reading the Old Testament in the 1920s, he came across the passage, “Give unto them beauty for ashes [so that] they shall repair the ruined cities . . . ” This would become his motivational slogan regarding Flushing Meadows. He succeeded in covering some of the dump with green for the 1939 World’s Fair, though the 50 million cubic yards of refuse that was removed barely made a dent in the ashes. In 1964, Moses got a second chance, in the form of another World’s Fair, again at Flushing Meadows. He had himself named president of the Fair, believing that the revenue from it would allow him to build a green space one-third larger than Central Park. Instead, it proved to be his undoing. The Fair, despite its kitschy, eye-catching mid-60s futurism, was disorganized and drew disappointing crowds. Moses, for one of the few times in his career to that point, was viewed as a deluded, power-hording failure.
When Slew Hester glimpsed the old Singer Bowl from the air 13 years later, he saw one of the ruins of that failure. It sat next to other rusting, graffiti-strewn, Ozymandian structures that, seemingly out of forgetfulness, had never been razed: the stainless-steel Unisphere, a pair of observatory towers, a life-size model of a rocket ship. These were ruins of an optimistic, pre-Vietnam American past, a Star Trek vision of the future that soon looked hopelessly naive. While Moses didn’t create a park that would make anyone forget Olmstead, and Long Island remains few people’s idea of Eden, he had put green where there had been garbage. Late in life, when public opinion turned against him, he pointed to his work at Flushing Meadows. How could they criticize the man who had given them beauty for ashes?
Still, the ashes had left their mark. To many spectators, it was unclear whether Moses and Hester really had stamped them out after all. They seemed to live on in the stench of trash, sweat, and cooked meat that arose during the two humid weeks of the U.S. Open, the ripest of all tennis tournaments. In 1981, they finally exploded onto the grounds. The third-round match between Ivan Lendl and Mark Vines in the Grandstand—the Singer Bowl had been chopped in two to form a main stadium and this more intimate, 6,500-hundred-seat arena—was stopped when clouds of noxious smoke and ash began to drift across the court. While Lendl was winning the first set, a pungent haze settled inside the arena, and cinders fly. A nearby garbage compactor had begun to burn, necessitating a call to the local fire company. “I never seen a tennis match called on accounta fire,” an usher told Bud Collins, as they gazed at a “black and smelly mist rising from behind the south wall of the Grandstand.”
Lendl decided to call the match on his own. After angrily demanding a delay, he put on his jacket and silently stalked off the court to a lively chorus of boos. Half an hour later, the young Czech would stalk back onto the court and win the match, but he never got much happier—he was a no-show for his press conference afterward.
Over the course of the next decade, Lendl would have more success at Flushing Meadows than any other player. After 1981, he would reach the final a record eight consecutive times and win three titles. He would move to nearby Connecticut, and in 1992 become a U.S. citizen. Ironically, the ex-Czech’s mercenary, workaholic style would find a perfect home in tennis's new American empire. His style wasn’t elegant, and he would never be a crowd favorite in his adopted country—he didn't even get to be the champ you loved to hate; instead he was, according to SI, "The Champion That Nobody Cares About." It didn't matter. Like the even more unpopular Robert Moses, Ivan Lendl would make some beauty of his own out of the ashes.
There’s a phenomenon in basketball where a team gets behind, scraps hard and expends maximum mental and physical energy catching up, evens the score, and then immediately deflates. It isn’t just that they’ve exhausted themselves physically. The psychology of the game changes as well. There’s no longer a target out in front, urging them on.
Something like that happened to Rafael Nadal today, and it happened in the second point of the third set. He had begun the match, as he had begun the tournament, on the flat side, and his opponent, Roger Federer, had succeeded in changing the usual dynamics of their encounters by nudging him out of the patterns he likes. Nadal forced himself to find some more energy in the second, and his dedication to aggressiveness tilted the rallies back in his favor. The first point of the third went the same way, as Nadal ran Federer along the baseline to go up 0-15. Federer’s early confidence had vanished, and he looked as if were groping for an answer. Getting broken here would extend Nadal’s momentum and begin to make Federer’s first-set performance look like a mirage. Now Nadal had him on the run again in the second point. Rafa moved inside the baseline and lined up for an open down the line backhand. He had the lead in his sights for the first time all day. It must have blinded him, because he caught the ball late and fanned it into the alley. He put his hands to his head in disbelief. Federer held. While Nadal would put together a strong hold of his own in the next game, Federer had evened the scales back up. Nadal’s run was over.
And that’s all it took. Federer began to serve well, as he had in the first set, and he had the confidence on Nadal’s next service game to chip and charge successfully on one point, and then break serve by cracking an aggressive return, a tactic that he had been trying to employ, with various degrees of success, all afternoon. He was, as they say, in full flight from there, and Nadal couldn't turn the tide a second time.
This was a quality match, but not an intense one by Federer-Nadal standards. Points and games went by quickly; it took just 90-some minutes to get through three sets. What can we take from it? As far as the play itself, the most intriguing element was Federer’s determination in the first and third sets not to let Nadal lock his forehand into his backhand and dictate the terms of the rallies. This is as effective as Federer has ever been with his topspin crosscourt backhand against Rafa. Just at the point in the rally when he usually loses control, Federer stepped forward and sent a surprised Nadal scrambling to his left. In the crucial game of the first set, with Nadal serving at 3-4, Federer fended off a ground stroke assault with his backhand, and then broke serve by snapping off a sharp crosscourt backhand angle, an angle that stunned Nadal.
Is the topspin crosscourt backhand the answer for Federer? Notice that Nadal changed things up in the second and had success going wide to Federer’s forehand. Nevertheless, along with the backhand, two other gambits that Federer tried today worked. He won points serving wide to Nadal’s backhand in the deuce court, and his commitment to returning aggressively, while it resulted in a quite a few free points for Nadal, worked when he really needed it. It's a gamble, yes, but one he almost certainly needs to take in the future.
So we end the year exactly where we’ve ended it for the last five seasons. With Nadal and Federer at 1 and 2, and with another big title going to one of them. This event felt more like déjà vu than normal, though. Federer capped a post-U.S. Open stretch where he went 21-2, and looked as sharp as he’s looked over any extended period in the last three years. He seems energized, and more important, more narrowly focused on what wins for him, after a few months with a new coach. There’s a sense of slashing urgency to his game right now, particularly on the return side. While Nadal was able, as he usually is, to throw a wrench in his plans, Federer was simply playing too well all week to be stopped for long, even by Rafa. Maybe it was the lighting or the bright red shirt or his attacking game, but Federer seemed to stand a little taller in London. He’s brushed aside all talk of decline, added a new wrinkle to his match-up with Nadal with his backhand and his return, and made 2011 a two-man race to start. Still, my favorite Federer moment of the tournament came in his semi-rambling and highly excited victory speech. He thanked the ball boys and said that if the players had to pick up their own balls, the matches would go on forever. How does that come to his mind right then? Brilliant and goofy, Federer goes out like the Federer of old.
Nadal, on the other hand, looked weary in his runner-up speech. Weary from winning, I guess; he did a lot of this year. Whatever happened today, 2010 still belonged to him. He lost the final, but it was a characteristic tournament for him—there was a sense of deja vu to his performance as well. In every major event aside from the French Open, Nadal has struggled at first, improved over the course of a couple of years, and finally won it. In Australia, he reached the semis in 2008 before bringing home the trophy in 2009. At Wimbedon, he lost two finals to Federer before winning the third. After semifinal appearances in 2008 and ’09 at the U.S. Open, he struck gold this summer. Nadal had never been to the final of the WTF, and he started this one looking like he never would get to the final of it. Now he has—after his first-set loss to Andy Roddick on Monday, he seemed to will himself to believe that he could. If history tells us anything, we know what will come next for him here.
Nadal also gave us what he usually gives us: a classic, grueling, back-and-forth, emotionally draining match. His semifinal with Andy Murray may have been the best of 2010, and it ended with what was the highlight of the week for me. Nadal was nearly apologetic when he hugged Murray at the end. As Murray walked away to his chair, Nadal gave him one extra pat on the back, with a look of commiseration that his opponent would never see. It was, on a smaller-scale, similar to the arm he threw around Federer’s neck after their 2009 Aussie Open final. Brilliant and empathetic, Nadal went out of that match, and out of the best season of his career, like the Nadal of old.
Tennis fans in the U.S. may have a new Thanksgiving tradition on their hands. It’s not one that at first glance seems to make a whole lot of sense. We’ve got turkey, we’ve got stuffing, we’ve got Detroit Lions football, we’ve got afternoon naps, and now we’ve got . . . Jimmy Arias?
As odd as that combination sounds, the most notable aspect of the World Tour Finals in London, both this year and last, is that it has given us a solid week’s worth of Arias's commentary. (Never mind that he’s doing it from Los Angeles.) If he’s not the best in the booth, which he might be, listening to Arias is at the very least an eye-opener, because of how much he contrasts with Masters Series regulars Robbie Koenig and Jason Goodall.
I like those guys. By this point, they’re kind of like your tennis drinking buddies; companionable, if a little excitable. Arias is also companionable, but on a more intellectual rather than emotional level. He’s dry and low-key. Whether he’s talking about the event or the players, he doesn’t do hype or hyperbole. He doesn’t resort to dramatic clichés—I’ve been grateful to the point of tears every time a player like Federer or Nadal makes a good shot on an important point, and Arias doesn’t say, “That’s what the great ones always do.” He doesn’t talk too much, but he uses his words well. And Arias is funny. Commenting on the fact that the ATP’s Sportsmanship Award seems to go to the No. 1 player each year, he said, “I guess it’s easier to be a good sport when you’re winning every match.” That also happens to be true.
What Arias is best at is finding the crucial pattern of play in a match. In men's tennis today, you can count on a certain number of points in each game being one with the serve—maybe an average of 1.5? And you can chalk up a certain number to random unforced errors. The rest, when each guy is hitting well from the baseline, tend to return to a familiar pattern, one that’s slightly different with each match-up. These patterns are generally rudimentary, but once all the aces and errors are accounted for, they can be the decisive factor in a match.
They’re rudimentary, but they're not always easy to spot. Usually a commentator will notice whether a player is being aggressive or not, but won’t get far beyond that. Arias will go farther. When Nadal played Berdych on Friday, he pointed out early that the key for Berdych would be moving Nadal far to his right by going hard into his forehand. Berdych did this once and was able to follow it up with a forehand winner. A couple of points later, he came forward without first moving Nadal off the court and was passed.
Early in the match between Federer and Soderling, Arias pointed to Federer’s short backhand slice, and the trouble that it gives a tall player like Soderling. It turned out to be the driving dynamic of the set. Midway through, Soderling found an answer by moving around and hitting that slice with an inside-out forehand. At 2-2 in the tiebreaker, though, Soderling failed to get around on that shot and Federer, over the course of a long rally, got Soderling on the run and eventually exploited his tiny error. That point gave him the mini-break he would need to close out the breaker and the set.
Federer showed pretty much everything he can do from the baseline in that rally. Another announcer might have said, after yelling “Unbelieeeevable!” that Federer “has all the shots.” Instead, Arias pointed not to the greatness of one player or another, but to the particular pattern that had led to Federer’s winning the point. (As an aside, he also noted during the first set that when Federer gets tight, he tends to take the ball a little too early and the mishits fly from there. I’d never heard that before, but I had noticed something similar on his forehand in a tight spot in the match against Murray this week.)
Would Arias wear well if he were in the booth more often? I prefer John McEnroe’s voice, and Arias will never have Mac’s cache—he’s the guy you want for the finals of majors. But I think I would watch matches differently, maybe a little more intelligently, with Arias around. You can’t ask any more of a commentator than that.
Actually, there is just one more little thing I would ask, every once in a while. I like Arias’s logic, and his refusal to play the awed fan, and I like that after that 2-2 point in the tiebreaker between Federer and Soderling, he waited and then calmly said, “There are two things that amaze me about that point.” And his subsequent observations were good ones. But in the moment before he said those words, I could hear, somewhere in the back of my head, Robbie Koenig yell, “That's a moster closs!” and Jason Goodall follow it up with, “It had to be inch purrrrfect.” I have to say, I kind of missed it.
Thanksgiving asks us to be thankful on command, which isn’t all that easy. When I walked down the street this morning, was I as thankful as I should have been for that last yellow leaf hanging from an otherwise barren tree on my block? Probably not—once it’s gone, after all, there’s only cold hard colorless winter ahead. If you have to think about appreciating something, how appreciative of it can you really be?
But there is one thing that I have no trouble being thankful for, and it happens to fit right in with this column. Even better, I get to appreciate it virtually every day. Here’s what happens: I walk into my gym, and on the way down to the locker room I pass the treadmills. There I see a line of people running in place, staring straight ahead at nothing—this gym doesn't equip its treadmills with little TV sets; all you get for your veiwing pleasure is another treadmill-runner staring back at you from the other side of the room.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I pass a dark room. Inside are a dozen people bicycling in place, as fast they can. Disco blares and a man yells, like a friendly drill sergeant, at the cyclists. It is at this point that I am officially thankful—thankful that I don’t have to get on a treadmill or walk into a dark room full of bicycles. Thankful, above all, that I picked up a tennis racquet as a kid, which saved me from those fates.
I realize that running and spinning have their appeal. I do the former in the summer, and I know people who swear by the endorphin rush they get from the latter. I need that rush, too. It lightens life, clears the cobwebs and the sweat, promotes sanity. Everything is easier to savor—your food, your music, your Martini—with exercise. Even bad music. Last week I walked back from the gym and stopped at the bagel store. The place pipes in soft 1970s pop, stuff you don’t have to pay attention to. It was the same on this morning, but the song that was playing as I waited in line—the ultimate in bubblegum pap, King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight”—suddenly sounded like a happy masterpiece. Its most comical line, “Everyone here is out of sight,” seemed like the simple truth of life revealed. Everything did feel kind of out of sight.
(It works with good music, too, by the way. Recently I played a morning squash game before work and put on my IPod on the subway ride afterward. As the IPod will occasionally do, it landed randomly and fortuitously on a forgotten favorite, Tom Waits’ “Hang Down Your Head.” I'd liked him in college, but I’d never been part of his cult, exactly; not enough tune to his songs for me. But on this morning, riding a squash rush, the song hit hard in a sad, mesmerizing—and tuneful—way. It’s a melancholy break-up song, but its elegiac quality was exhilarating in the moment.)
Back to my point, which is that tennis and squash offer more than the raw, mood-altering endorphin rush of exercise. There’s the mental exercise involved in strategic thinking, of course, as well as the hand-eye coordination and delicate touch needed to put the ball exactly where you want it to go. More important, there’s the society that surrounds these sports, that’s created by them. Ten years ago, the common conservative, small-town lament was that people in America were “bowling alone”; we weren’t joining together in clubs and on teams anymore. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik provided the liberal-urban counter-point, that the modern yuppie equivalent of the bowling league was the gym, where we were satisfied to be alone together. That seemed like a true, if not exactly comforting, explanation.
Tennis and squash bring us a step closer. We compete alone and together. While you may or may not like the round-robin format at the pro level, I’ve found it to be the best way to play the two sports. As a teenager, I was part of a loose group of players who got together and took over the local college tennis courts each day around 6:00 P.M. (There’s another societal change in the direction of workaholic yuppiedom—I’m still at the office at 6:00 these days). We rotated partners each day, but there was no set schedule. You’d finish a match with Gary, and call over to Rob, who was two courts down, “We’re on for tomorrow, right?”
The same is true at my club today. Two guys who are part of my rotation might be playing each other on the court next to me. On a changeover or during a break, I'll set up a future game with each of them. I can’t tell you why this simple interaction is so re-assuring. There’s a sense, I guess, that there’s always a match coming up, and that moving from one opponent to the next will always keep the sport fresh. Still, while it’s hardly cutthroat competition, the competitive aspect does count. “How did you do against so-and-so?” is always the question the next day. It's important to keep something on the line, so that tennis doesn't become just socializing.
The round-robin can be taken a step further in squash. My club has four courts, lined up next to each other, which means you can rotate between four or five opponents over the course of one afternoon. Soon, maybe next weekend, I’ll walk into the club, past the trudging treadmillers and the maniacal spinners, and walk up to the squash courts. There might be five or six people there (men and women compete in singles in this sport). One might be stretching. Two other might be talking about football or Wall Street or their 3-year-olds. Another will be out on the court, warming up, hitting that little black ball against the bright while walls. Like a tennis court on a sunny day, the squash court will appear to have all the energy of the world gathered inside it. The purity of the white walls set off by the simple red boundary lines is more than beautiful—it makes you hungry to get out on it.
Here’s the moment I’ll be most thankful for. The guy hitting on that court will turn around and see me. He’ll lean out and ask, “You ready?” I’ll take off my warm-up jacket, grip my racquet, start walking forward, and answer, with more antipication than I've had for just about anything else all week: "Let's do it."
Rafael Nadal vs. Andy Roddick; Roger Federer vs. Andy Murray. The first was a scrap, the second a dud. But they had one major element in common: Each featured a player following, consciously or unconsciously, the consensus advice of millions of pundits, paid and unpaid, around the world. Both Murray and Roddick have been challenged many times by many people for many years to, somewhat vaguely, “be more aggressive.” Each of them seemed to have chosen this year’s World Tour Finals to begin following that advice. How did it go? It very nearly worked for one player; it backfired on the other.
Picking up where he left off in Key Biscayne this spring, Roddick won the first set over Rafael Nadal. This was partly due to the heavy layers of rust that coated the Spaniard’s game. If he wanted to “improve the image” of his 2009 performance in London, as he said before the tournament, he didn’t get off to a great start. If anything, Nadal only called that image back up from the place in our memory banks where we store things that may or may not seem plausible in retrospect. By the time he’d shanked his third forehand over the baseline and wide of the sideline (at the same time), I thought, “Oh, yeah, he really was awful here last year, wasn't he?” It hadn’t seemed possible after his 2010 season.
But Roddick had something to do with Nadal’s discomfort. In fact, for the better part of two sets, it appeared that he might have found discovered a highly counterintuitive winning tactic against the world No. 1: serve and volley to his forehand. Roddick kicked high-bouncing serves to that side, which gave him time to close on the net and forced Nadal to take his forehands high and hit them even higher, with his customary topspin, and Roddick was waiting for the shoulder-high volley. The tactic almost got him to the finish line, but at 3-3 in the second-set tiebreaker Roddick changed the pattern and served and volleyed to Nadal's backhand. And he got a little unlucky. Rafa hit a crosscourt return that landed on the outer edge of the sideline for a winner. He went on to hold out the breaker. When Roddick smothered a forehand into the net at 5-6, his best chance had passed.
Nadal did "improve the image" in the third set, and he reminded us of something else: How resourceful he can be. He didn’t begin with the confidence to hit his forehand down the line, but he didn’t panic or get angry about it or think it just wasn’t his day, the way so many players would. Instead, he gradually began trying out a safer version of the shot as the match went on, one with lots of margin over the net and away from the lines. By the third set he was criss-crossing the court like the Rafa of old, hitting a forehand from one alley, and then backpedaling quickly enough to hit a forehand winner on the next shot, from the other alley. His last few holds were done with impressive confidence, confidence he had completely lacked just a couple of hours later. Maybe it’s proof that a tennis player can always be motivated, whatever his past accomplishments may be, by plain old embarrassment. The specter of London 2009, when he lost six straight sets, loomed. Even though Nadal had won three majors since, he wasn’t going to let that happen again.
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So you’re playing in front of your home fans—not exactly in your own country, but close enough to call home. You’re playing in front of a packed house at a very big event, one which features only the best of the best. Your mom is there; your brother is there with his new wife. The whole thing has the feel of a formal occasion as much as it does a tennis tournament. You’re playing a guy you want to beat more than any other, a guy you might have to beat in the future to win a major. And you look like you’d rather be anywhere else on planet earth.
Such was the case with Andy Murray on Tuesday in London. The guy he wanted to beat, Roger Federer, knocked him down early. Federer forced the action with even more haste than usual, and he did it in a relaxed and utterly self-assured manner. He broke Murray’s serve at 1-1 by sending a forehand pass a couple inches from his head. It all came together to rattle the Scot. He looked totally at sea as he watched routine slice backhands curve wide and forehand drives find the net. Federer won 12 of 13 points early in the first and—a rarity for their matches—was never threatened on his serve.
Murray flattened out his backhand and went for more off both sides in his first match, against Robin Soderling. It worked: Soderling was two steps slow to everything. Murray tried it again against Federer. It didn’t work at all. It only gave Federer a chance to rifle a few vintage passing-shot winners, and it threw Murray off his usual backcourt rhythm. He looked uncharacteristically off-balance on many shots.
He also, as I said, looked like he didn’t want to be there. This is a downside of the round-robin format. Even if someone isn’t tanking, and even if they begin the match wanting to win as badly as they normally do, there is something in the back of your mind that says, “I don’t have to win to stay alive.” It can make a difference, especially when you get behind early.
Then there’s Federer, who never seems to suffer from lack of motivation, never seems to get up on the wrong side of the competitive bed. We saw that Nadal pumped himself up in part out of fear of repeat embarrassment; it gave him the patience to work himself into the match against Roddick. What motivates Federer? Whatever it is, it’s always there, motoring quietly and efficiently at the back of his mind. Federer, like Nadal, also reminded us of something that makes him special. Serving for the set at 5-4 in the first, he overcooked a forehand long and then came in behind a mediocre forehand approach and was passed. He was down 0-30. Then he missed his first serve and challenged the call, even though the ball had obviously been out. Federer was a little tight and a little agitated.
So what did he do next? He reached back and snapped off a difficult overhead. He went straight back to the forehand well and hit a sharp-angled inside-out winner. He hit a big first serve. He wrapped up the set in four points. Federer had showed his nerves, and then he had gone ahead and played right through them as if they didn’t exist. In those four points, he didn’t hit the ball from between his legs. He didn’t make a spectacular running forehand from an impossible position. He didn't track down a seemingly ungettable drop shot. But as I am so often with Federer, I was left wondering: How did he just do that? Opponents can attack or stay back, be more aggressive or less, listen to the pundits or not, but there's isn't much you can do against that.
You know, promotions, even at their hokiest, do seem to work. A couple of weeks ago I was musing about whether year-end championships in general were closer to exhibitions than meaningful events, and how the fact that they come so late in the year, so far removed from the majors, makes them seem less significant than they should be. But then you get the Top 8 players in monkey suits and prop them up next to the prime minister, and suddenly I’m all set for the ATP World Tour Finals.
And they put on a good show. Special court, special lights, and a very deliberate pacing of one singles match per session—two per day—that allows you to focus closely on each one and makes each seem like something of a heavyweight fight (though I’m not sure I would feel satisfied paying for a ticket to see one three-out-of-five-set singles match). The round-robin format, where you go around in circles for a week rather than advancing step by step toward the final, de-emphasizes the ultimate result a little and places it on the quality of the matches themselves. It’s a slightly different way of watching tennis; because everyone hangs around for longer, you focus on the group, rather than any of the individuals, more than normal.
Two groups, that is, each consisting of four players. Let’s take a look at what’s in store in each.
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Group A (I lobbied for naming it Group Awesome instead, but obviously nobody listens to me): Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Tomas Berdych, Andy Roddick
This section doesn’t start until Monday, when we’ll see Djokovic vs. Berdych during the day, and Nadal vs. Roddick at night.
When Nadal dropped out of Paris, I sort of wrote him off as contender here as well. But looking over all eight guys and where they are at this very late stage in the year, the world No. 1 is looking like a better bet. The surface isn’t too fast, and while he won’t be working with that U.S. Open confidence anymore, he didn’t come into the Open with a ton of momentum and he still won it. Nadal is more rested than the rest, and he’s got, as he will certainly say in the coming days if he already hasn’t, a “special motivation” to do well in London. He’s already said he wants to “erase the memory of last year,” when he lost all six sets and finished dead last in the event.
Nadal won’t have it easy, of course; no one does in the WTF. He opens against Roddick, who beat him in Indian Wells in March. Roddick is coming off two solid weeks in Basel and Paris, and after such an up and down season, he still seems hungry; he’ll also be pumped up to play in the WTF in London, where he’s a crowd favorite, for the first time. Djokovic has a very good record against Nadal on indoor hard courts. But Djokovic was gassed in Paris, and he’ll likely be a little conflicted about this event. How much emotional and physical energy will he want to expend this week, with the Davis Cup final looming? Whatever he says, part of his brain will be on the future. Throw in Berdych, a guy Rafa has owned in recent years, as his third opponent, and I like Nadal’s chances of advancing.
Semifinalists: Nadal, Djokovic
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Group B: Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Robin Soderling, David Ferrer
The WTF wastes no time getting down to business: It kicks off Sunday afternoon with Murray vs. Soderling, a match that stands a good chance of determining who will grab the semifinal spot here. It’s a tough one to call. Murray was brilliant in Shanghai, and not so brilliant anywhere else. The home crowd can have its negative effects on him; I thought he was little over-amped in his round-robin match with Federer last year. Soderling showed grit in making his way through two Frenchmen in the semis and final in Paris, he’s beaten Murray this season, and he loves the great indoors. Whoever wins, I'd expect this to be a dogfight.
What happens after that? Ferrer is the weak link here, though you know he’ll make the other guys work for it. How about Federer? It’s tough to tell how he’ll be. He’s had a very good fall, but he’s also played a lot, and his last match, against Gael Monfils in Bercy, was a bummer. If his nerve has begun to fail him at match point, is there a time when it will start to fail him earlier? I’ll believe it when I see it. Federer has always been successful at this tournament, and even if he does blow another close one, the format will forgive him. And wouldn’t it be nice to get a shot at his buddy Rafa, after not giving himself that shot in the last three majors?
Last year we saw a surprise winner in Nikolay Davydenko, and we’ve seen a few surprise finalists over the years, including Ferrer and James Blake. Does anyone fit that bill this time? Berdych, while he says he wants to prove to people he actually belongs here, is too much of a long shot, as is Ferrer, despite his previous appearance in the final. But Soderling is not out of the range of possibility. As I said, a lot will depend on that opening match.
Semifinalists: Soderling, Federer
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Semifinals: Soderling d. Djokovic; Nadal d. Federer
The Rally returns, only two days later than scheduled. This time fellow tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and I will talk about a familiar, but seemingly inexhaustible, topic: Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.
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Kamakshi,
I know you wanted something lively for our non-playing-week rally post, but are you sure you want to step into the middle of the Federer-Nadal fan wars? It is a fascinating topic, not so much because of the players themselves or even the arguments of their fans, but what it shows about our perceptions—though I'm not exactly sure what that is at the moment. So let me start with some questions.
First, is the fan rivalry more intense with these two than with past players, or is it just that the Internet has made it more obvious? I don’t remember an iron divide between Agassi and Sampras fans, but the Graf-Seles wars still rage online 20 years after they had their best matches on court.
Second, is there something about tennis itself that discourages bipartisanship? It’s the rare sport that gives you a chance to see two individuals meeting each other face to face. Maybe more important, it’s a sport that offers fans, especially on TV, easy scrutiny of a player’s every move, gesture, grunt, word, snarl, hair flick. We judge tennis players on how they walk, celebrate, fight through adversity, and call for the towel as much as we do the way they hit the ball. A lot goes into being a tennis fan. Unlike team sports, your favorite isn’t chosen for you, by the city where you happen to live. That makes the relationship an intense one, always in need of justification to the people who don't agree with you. I don't need to justify the character of any of the Philadelphia Eagles (except, well, bad example...)
Maybe, like the U.S. Congress, it’s evidence that we’re not wired for bipartisanship in the first place. As different as Nadal and Federer are in some ways, they’re alike in a lot of others, and they seem to get along well, as you can see from above. Yet on this blog and Pete’s blog, the idea of being a fan of both of them equally seems a little weird—or maybe just boring. When Tennisworld started, and to a lesser extent, when my blog started, both in 2005, most of the comments addressed the game as a whole rather than the merits of one player over another. But that slowly changed and people settled into different camps, which is the dynamic that drives much of the commentary now.
It may be inevitable that, as objective as we try to be, we’ll choose favorites for reasons beyond our comprehension, and all of our perceptions will be colored by that fundamental preference. What I’ve wondered is whether being a fan of one player makes those perceptions more or less reliable. From my own experience, I’ve begun to think that it’s the fan who sees his or her beloved tennis player in the truest light.
So my final question: What do you think of that?
Steve
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Steve,
The answer is that Federer is the greatest of all time. Except that Nadal is greater. But Federer is the greaterest. No, Nadal is the greaterestish of all. No, Federer; no, Nadal; no...
And this is the problem. In general, being a fan of a player is a basic and vital part of pro tennis. It’s how most people are first drawn to the game, and it’s by watching their player that they get to know other pros and the intricacies of play well enough to develop an attachment to the sport itself.
Rivalries, too, are integral to tennis. Rooting interests play a big role in making a match emotionally relevant. But rivalries also invite polarization. Federer and Nadal are certainly good enough and different enough to make for a compelling rivalry—despite comparable demographics and values, they symbolize very different things.
Almost everyone agrees that Federer vs. Nadal is a great spectacle that elevates the sport to its highest level. The challenge is that it can also produce a level of intensity and polarization that threatens to suck everything else into its orbit.
I don’t object to what people want to discuss, of course, except to the extent that it becomes impossible to talk about anything without it turning into a pitched battle between Federites and Nadalians. Looks like Murray’s hitting his forehand better these days, doesn’t it? Oh yeah? It’s not as good as Federer's! Federer hah—Nadal's forehand is way better. No, Federer. No, Nadal..
Where were we? Oh yes. It’s a bit like the Cold War, a bipolar world where you’re either with us or with them, where neutrality only means you’re a spy for the other side, and where everything is defined in relation to that bigger conflict.
Or, as you said, a bit like American politics these days. It seems bipartisanship breaks down when there’s a perception of threat (or perhaps more accurately here, a threat to our perceptions), and Federer and Nadal are not only a threat to each other on court, but to each other’s claims as GOAT.
The Internet does plays a huge role in the level of intensity, because it’s made fans an independent entity for the first time, given them a voice. I’m sure people thought the same things before that they do now, it’s just that we didn’t know what we were all thinking and couldn’t talk to each other about it. Federer-Nadal is the first big epoch since the participatory Internet (blogs, message boards, social media) became fully mainstream.
So yes, it’s fair to say it’s an amplified version of a phenomenon that has probably always existed. In my subjective experience, the topics that shattered the peace and tranquility of the tennis community on the Internet in the late 1990s were:
—Graf and Seles and the stabbing —the Williams sisters and race —Sampras' Grand Slam record chase and its meaning (this is incidentally when we get the origins of the word GOAT)
For whatever reason, some players also seem to attract more militant supporters. I know this is probably asking for a storm in the comments (don’t take it too seriously), but here are the players I’d loosely say have the most reactionary fans:
1. Venus and Serena Williams 2. Roger Federer 3. Monica Seles 4. Rafael Nadal 5. Stefan Edberg (though they’re always polite)
So two questions for you: One, what’s the good and bad in these wars? You made an interesting comment about fans seeing their beloved player in the truest light—what does that involve? Second, are you brave or foolish enough to make some general characterizations about Federer fans versus Nadal fans? We’ve all become familiar with the the on-court battle. What's the dynamic of the proxy battle?
Kamakshi
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Kamakshi,
It’s true, sometimes I feel like I should begin every piece here with a warning: “This Post is Not About Roger Federer.” When I was at a Davis Cup tie a few years ago, I wrote a few pieces praising the winners, the U.S., and talking about Andy Roddick’s dedication to the cause. I noticed a few of Federer's loyalists in the comments talking about how easy it was for the U.S. to win, that it must be nice to have a great doubles team to rely on, that Roddick wouldn’t care about Davis Cup if he could win Wimbledon. The point being, that by praising Roddick for his dedication I was somehow implying a criticism of Federer, who skipped Switzerland’s first-round tie that year.
And you’re right, there are upsides and downsides to this war (I can’t bring myself to write Fedal, and definitely not TMF). When the discussion gets going, you can almost hear an “Oh God, here we go again” cry go up. But at the same time, it’s become so central that talking about anything else starts to seem drab and beside the point, and you can sort of feel people wishing that someone would come in with a vicious attack on either Federer or Nadal to get it started again—or maybe that’s just me. Either way, the stakes suddenly become much lower when you write or talk about anything else. As you said, Federer-Nadal is a vortex, and it even sucks other players into its orbit, like pawns in a greater game. Robin Soderling became a pet of Federer’s fans, and persona non grata among Nadal’s, after he beat Nadal at the French and thanked Federer for giving him “a lesson” in the final. Then, of course, he reversed those results the next year, so I’m not sure exactly where he stands. Maybe the Sod has broken free of the vortex and matters on his own now.
When I talk about a player’s fans seeing him in the truest light, I guess I’m saying that they’re close enough to see him the way a parent sees a child—no one has spent as much time, say, watching Federer’s mannerisms and game as his most ardent fans. Just as important, no one has spent as much time feeling his emotions with him—when you root for someone, you understand that player’s point of view; some of what they’re feeling seeps into you (it’s a strange relationship, isn’t it?). I’ve written about this before, but during this year’s Australian Open, I found myself rooting for Federer, and I noticed things about him that I’d never noticed. I could tell when he was nervous much more easily. I’ve also found myself rooting for Nadal in the past, and his fans typically say I “understand” him. I guess it depends whether you think a parent sees a “truer” version of their kid than anyone else. Maybe not, maybe they overlook or forgive obvious deficiencies. But fans do have insights into their favorites that other close observers don’t. Of course, they also say things like, “I love how Roger’s sweat stains are always heart-shaped.”
Stefan Edberg had intense fans? I had no idea. I guess the gentlemanly types get that? Or was it just his hair? I was more of a Wilander guy myself. We can understand sympathy for Monica and the polarizing effect of the Williamses. In my experience, Federer’s fans are touchier than Nadal’s, maybe because he has been so dominant for so long that he seems to have elevated himself above all criticism—why nitpick the greatest tennis player ever when you should just be appreciating him? Or maybe there’s that gentlemanly aspect of his character as well, which get people to be protective of him. Federer makes his superiority look like the natural order of things. Nadal’s fans seem fanclub-ish or cultish, like they’ve known all along about this goofy but great kid that the world is just beginning to appreciate. That might change if he stays No. 1 for three or four years. I wrote something recently about how Nadal had had a good fall, but that he still needed to be at his best to win on hard courts; anything less and he would struggle. Someone commented, “Why is there always a ‘but’ when it comes to Rafa, why can’t you just say he's had an incredible year?” Greatness brings defensiveness. There’s more to defend.
What does each group dislike about the other player? Federer fans seem to think Nadal is falsely modest; Nadal fans think Federer is pompous. I'd say that each player has a different idea of what constitutes a genuine answer to a reporter's question. Federer believes in the truth as it applies to him, as he lives it—I''ve been the best for so long, the proof is in the results, so why should I pretend otherwise? Nadal is more philosophical, his truth more general. He's a tennis player, and tennis players lose, so it's natural for him to lose. The fact that they have these different ways of looking at the world makes their rivalry deeper and more interesting, and it makes their fans that much more exasperated when the other side can't see where their guy is coming from.
Overall, the whole thing is a positive, and I've been happy to learn on this site what tennis players can mean to people. I’ll finish by citing two commenters whom we’ve met, and who sit on opposite sides of this fence. Andrew Burton is a Federer fan—but not a bodyguard—who is always excited to see what Roger will do next and how he’ll play, no matter how seemingly insignificant the event. Seeing that type of passion from Andrew and others has made the tour more exciting to me, less routine; it’s easier to get into a tournament like Stockholm or Basel when you know that people get so much pleasure out of seeing what Roger Federer is up to, whether it’s his game or his hair or his shirt or his kids or the pattern of his sweat stains (sorry to bring that back up). That makes the whole sport more fun.
AmyLu is in the Nadal camp. A comment she posted a few years ago during the Australian Open stuck with me. Rafa made his debut for that season Down Under; he hadn’t played, or been shown playing, in at least a month. ESPN showed him walk on court and lift his hand quickly to the crowd the way he does. Then they cut to a commercial. AmyLu said something like: ‘I just got my first glimpse of Rafa of the year. Now all is well with the world and I can go back to studying.’ It’s worth the wars to know that a tennis player can make someone feel that way.
Steve
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Steve,
Good points all. I agree with the general characterization of Federer fans and Nadal fans—the overall impression, though obviously there’s a lot of difference between individuals.
I think part of the touchiness is succumbing to the temptation to believe Federer is actually perfect, because he actually gets darn close to how a lot of people would indeed draw the perfect No. 1. Secondly, he climbed the mountain first, and now Nadal is at the gates, as it were. The established order must be defended.
Nadal is the challenger, and his energy and modern flair promise new and exciting things that it’s inviting to be a part of. Yet Nadal’s wins have often been in the context of Federer’s defeats, and sometimes the latter has taken prominence (Australia being a prime example). So there must be loud advocacy to make sure Rafa gets his due.
It’s natural, but it’s just a stage of fandom. You won’t feel about the next player the way you do about Federer or Nadal, probably. These two have attracted a lot of new and lapsed fans who are in the first flush of their enthusiasm. It’s great, but they don’t always realize that not everyone is in the same stage they are. Hence the “you're a Federer/Nadal hater” or “you’re a Federer/Nadal apologist” reactions (often to the same thing!) to what are, from the writer’s perspective, quite dispassionate comments.
Thinking about it, you’re right that we have a more ‘authentic’ perspective on a player when rooting for him (after all, people generally give themselves the benefit of the doubt). But paradoxically, it only increases the difference between perspectives. Pete’s post earlier this week contrasting a Federer-centered and Nadal-centered view of the London draw captured this quite amusingly. (Our goal for the next series should be to come up with a topic he doesn't write about the same week. ☺)
The flip side, as you say, is that it’s nice to see such delight taken in the whole tennis experience—identifying with a player, being captivated by the contests and getting to know the whole culture and vibe of the game. Hopefully what’ll last is the culture Federer and Nadal have united to create, and not what divides their followers.
Meanwhile, spare a thought for the tournament director of the Paris indoors, who spearheaded the faster courts at the event this year: “Before, we were accused with a slower surface of choosing it because of Nadal and now we are accused with the faster surface to do a favor to Roger.”
Carlos Moya, who announced his retirement from tennis this week at age 34, was a lot of different things as a player. He was a physical force, with a low-to-the-ground solidity, a talent for backpedaling, and a live right arm; the Spaniard was an early adopter of the sleeveless look. I’ve been told that he was, and, I suppose, still is, handsome. So much so that he inspired one former female employee of Tennis Magazine to travel from New York to Key Biscayne for the sole purpose of attending his press conferences (and sitting on the beach during the hours when he wasn’t giving one). At the same time, there was an Old World reserve to the way Moya carried himself. In that way, he was the opposite of his fellow Mallorcan Rafael Nadal, who lets you know what he’s feeling with every snarl and eyebrow-raise. Moya kept things back.
His record could be seen as surprising. He finishes with 575 match wins, which puts him fourth on the ATP career list (can that be right?). That’s a testament to his longevity and his consistency over 15 years on tour, but the fact that the number is surprising is also, unfortunately, a testament to how little Moya did at the majors for most of his career. After reaching the Aussie Open final in 1997 and winning the French Open in 1998, he never threatened at another one. He turned, mysteriously, into a perennial quarterfinalist. Something, or someone, always got in his way in that round. That might make you think of Moya was a “transitional figure,” that the physical baseline game he brought to the sport in the late-90s quickly passed him by. It’s true, except that every tennis player is a transitional figure to some extent. From an historical perspective, Moya may be remembered best as the guy who made Rafael Nadal believe he could be a pro.
I liked to watch Moya play. He was calm but not boring, a little remote but still engaging. He played classic baseline tennis but he wasn’t robotic about it. It was fun to see how far he would go to his left to hit a forehand—would he climb into the stands? That, I suppose, is why he didn’t win more majors. He had to throw himself so far out of position so often that his game became riskier and more easily exploited than it should have been.
Seeing him over the years, it became clearer that Moya held back a lot. Like my former colleague, I liked to go to his press conferences, too. He had his monosyllabic moments, but I was always surprised by how articulate he could be in English. He came across as reasonable and mature. And funny—this week Moya said that he had “played his best tennis last century.” And maybe even goofy. I called his phone in Mallorca once for an interview and was greeted by an answering-machine message that he and his roommate—Carlos Moya had a roommate?—did as a back-and-forth rap. He liked to have a good time, and that may also explain why he fell from the heights he reached so young.
Two moments stick out, though, that showed how emotional Moya was about the sport, whatever his flaws or shortcomings. A few years ago, he won a minor tournament in South America. He hadn’t won anything for a while, and it was clear how much it meant to him. He didn’t just celebrate; he exulted from somewhere deep—he looked moved by winning a tennis match, as if it was a gift he never expected to get. (There’s some of that in the way Nadal celebrates as well.) But as deeply emotional as Moya was in victory that day, it paled in comparison to the depths of pain that registered on his face after he lost to Guillermo Coria in the quarterfinals (of course) at the French in 2004. Staggering to the sideline after shaking hands with Coria, Moya looked simply broken, his eyes hollow. It went past disappointment to . . . I don’t know, somewhere I never want to go myself, that’s all I can say.
Moya was first upstaged by the overweening excellence of Roger Federer (Moya called him “Feddy” and said, with a smile, that deep down he was “crazy”; takes one deep character to know another, I guess). And then he was upstaged by the brilliance of his kid brother, Nadal. It was in talking about Nadal, though, that Moya made my favorite comment of his. He was asked whether his willingness to practice with Nadal when Rafa was very young had helped his friend get better more quickly. Moya immediately answered, “Well maybe, but he helped me get better, too, even then.”
'Dios, Charlie. Thanks for showing us how deeply tennis can cut, in both directions.
Sometimes less is more. Other times, it isn’t. Other times, overkill works out just fine. This weekend in Paris was one of those other times.
Last week over at ESPN.com I wrote about how I was relishing not having any WTA results to think about for the first time in 10 months. I said the ATP should try to follow suit by cutting its season a few weeks shorter when they meet about the topic in the coming days. As I wrote those words, the men’s tournament in Bercy was getting started, and it felt a little beside the point. Nothing of historical import was going to happen. Rafael Nadal had pulled out, and neither Novak Djokovic nor Andy Murray seemed especially broken up by their losses.
I also said that tournaments take on a life of their own as a week progesses, and by Saturday Bercy was brimming over with it. The fall season is clearly excessive, but if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have seen the back-to-back, back-from-match-points-down, semifinal classics won by Robin Soderling and Gael Monfils.
Of course, if you go by that logic, you would say that there should be 10 tournaments every week of the year. What Bercy showed again was what makes the Masters Series successful as a whole—like the Slams, each of its eight events has a unique atmosphere (the two newest ones, Shanghai and Madrid, are in the process of creating theirs). Bercy has a cool main stadium, and a cool pre-match light show to go with it. But as the week went on and the crowds grew day by day, what it had more than anything was French fans. Americans routinely malign them as nasty and fickle, and it’s true, I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side. They had no trouble booing Roger Federer's lucky net cords in the semis or cheering Soderling's double-faults in the final. But like Philly sports fans—talk about nasty and fickle—the French also bring a unified emotional intensity to the tennis arena. You can see the difference most easily at the Canadian Open. A crowd at a quality night-session match in Montreal has a singular energy; a night match in Toronto is a mellow Midwestern affair by comparison.
What’s best about Bercy is that, unlike at Roland Garros, the French players respond well to that intensity. Monfils has reached the final two years in a row, and this time Michael Llodra was a few inches from joining him. Neither has done as well at big-time events anywhere else. But as close as Llodra was to the final, Monfils was just as close to giving the Paris faithful a double-dose of heartbreak on Saturday, when he had to save match points to beat Roger Federer for the first time in six tries.
Watching Monfils make his purposeful way around the court in the first set made me think of a story about Jimi Hendrix. At a certain point, concert promoter Bill Graham grew tired of watching the guitarist showboat his way though sets. Hendrix played the guitar with his teeth, behind his back, upside down; he made a spectacle of his performances whenever possible. Graham challenged him at various times to cut out the nonsense and play it straight, to give his best. One night Hendrix took him up on it. He went out and played one of the deepest, most riveting set of musics Graham had ever seen. At certain moments, Monfils’ performance against Federer was like that. He didn’t play to the crowd, he didn’t throw his arms to the sky, he didn’t rap to himself—he left the demented-cheerleader act at home. And did you see what happened at the end of the first set? Instead of blowing the tiebreaker, the way he normally would against Federer with a tentative of ill-conceived play, he was the one who stayed solid, saved a set point, and let Federer self-destruct. Who thought they would ever see that? As Robbie Koenig said, "Well, well, well, what do we have here?"
Federer, probably assuming that Monfils would hand him the first set, came to life after that. In the second, he began to hit the ball with the same "conviction," as the commentators (correctly) like to say, that he’d been hitting it earlier in the week. Re-energized, he played a much better tiebreaker of his own and looked like he’d broken Monfils’ will when he went up 4-1 in third. Then it happened, again. For the fourth time this year, Federer lost after holding match point—an improbable five of them this time. The one I remember most clearly was an inside-out forehand into a wide-open court that clipped the tape. To lose five match points involves a certain amount of bad luck, but when something similar happens four times in one year, it also constitutes a trend that goes beyond luck. To me, the phenomenon is a reflection of the gradual change that has gone on in both Federer’s game and in the way his opponents view and compete against him. The latter is catching up with the former.
Tomas Berdych, at Key Biscayne, and Novak Djokovic, at the U.S. Open, both saved at least one match point before beating Federer. Each of them had raised their games above their normal level and been the better player for most of those matches. Each should have won, but each had trouble making themselves believe it, because of who their opponent was. Both of them blew their leads and found themselves facing match points. And that’s when both of them felt comfortable again; they had nothing to lose again. Berdych and Djokovic went big on those match points and connected. After that, they believed again. Monfils, who like Berdych had never beaten Federer before yesterday, won the first set, lost his way when he glimpsed the finish line at the end of the second set, and then, down 1-4, with nothing to lose, began to swing freely.
A player’s success isn’t just a result of his own form and confidence. It’s a result of that form mixed with the form of his opponent, as well as how his opponent perceives him. Berdych, Djokovic, Monfils, and the fourth player to save a match point against him this year, Marcos Baghdatis, have always been second (third, 10th) fiddles to Federer (Djokovic was the only one who had a win over Federer before 2010). As his results have become less Olympian, and as his game has gotten slightly more erratic, these players know at some level that they finally have a shot. So they go in, as Monfils did yesterday, more eager and determined than normal. But as they get close to winning, the second-fiddle complex kicks in. Whatever he may be playing like on this day, he’s still Roger Federer in their minds. Perceptions of invincibility die hard.
And beating the previously invincible can make for a hard letdown. That’s what happened to Monfils on Sunday against Soderling. The Frenchman couldn’t find his range, or the right balance between patience and aggression; he spent most of the afternoon erring on the side of too much patience. The other thing that happened to Monfils, it must be said, was Robin Soderling. He served brilliantly and hit his inside-out forehand even better. Despite going to a tiebreaker, the second set felt like a foregone conclusion. Soderling was in complete, easy control.
I asked before the tournament whether Soderling could be considered among the game’s elite. He’s not quite there yet, but this is a big step in that direction. He reached a Slam final this year, and lost to either Federer or Nadal at three of them. For the last two years, he’s come up with big upsets but hasn’t followed them up with big titles. Now he’s got one. I’ll never love to watch the guy play—even his inside-out forehand winners, dynamic shots in anyone else’s hands, look mechanical and routine. But I did gain some respect for Soderling this weekend for the classy way he handled his win over Llodra. It was a crushing loss for the Frenchman in front of the home folks, one that Soderling was plainly lucky to survive—he even flinched in surprise when Llodra’s forehand pass at match point caught the tape. Soderling’s celebrations have had a vicious quality at times in the past, and as he closed in on the victory Saturday, I hoped he wouldn’t overdo it and rub Llodra’s face in his defeat. He didn’t.
It was a breakthrough for Soderling, and also for Monfils. He has a win over Federer now, and he got it in part by acting and playing within himself. Should we hope for more? Maybe Bill Graham’s story can give us a clue. Later that night, Hendrix went out for another set. He smiled at Graham from the stage and happily proceeded to pull out all of the most ridiculous grandstanding moves he could come up with. He put the guitar behind his head, between his teeth, between his legs, behind his back. That’s what he loved to do, and the crowd loved it, too. I hope Monfils loves to win more. He’s a lot more entertaining when he plays it straight.
I tried to serve to learn to serve and volley, I really did. But I was a baseliner, and that’s all there was to it. That’s pretty much all there could be to it.
It was watching Michael Llodra play this morning that made realize why there haven’t been many guys who can do both equally well. Llodra is one of the few natural volleyers and net-rushers around, but his ability to do that comes with trade-offs. He has a one-handed backhand and a conservative grip on his forehand, a combination that makes shifting his grips when he gets to the net relatively easy, but which keeps him from being able to dictate from the back of the court. It’s not a matter of choice; he has to come forward to win. (As you can see, if you do commit to this style, you can still win with it, though a nice fast home court doesn’t hurt.) The reverse is true for baseliners, who are constantly being told to come in more “just to mix things up.” It’s certainly possible for someone with a semi-Western grip and a two-handed backhand to get better around the net, but they’re still going to have the best chance of winning when they’re at the baseline.
The problem for me was that I liked to serve and volley. I just couldn’t win points doing it. There’s a sense of adventure to it that’s missing from the baseline grind. You hurtle in and force the action. You have to react immediately, without knowing what type of shot you’re going to need to hit. You have to improvise athletically—bend, lunge, leap—which is a pretty exciting thing to do. The whole court is yours—front, back, above your head, down at your toes. You don't just hit the ball at chest height while standing inside a two-foot strip at the back of the court.
Richard Evans reported seeing Bjorn Borg serve and volley very late in his career in a tournament in Geneva. He’d won the first set in his usual manner, from the backcourt, then shifted to a net-rushing style in the second. His opponent, pleasantly stunned, won the second easily, before Borg grudgingly went back to the same-old, same-old and wrapped up the third. The same was true for me when I played my usual opponents as a kid. I’d serve and volley for a while, enjoying the chance to create different angles, come up with half volleys, jump back for overheads. But I’d eventually get broken doing it. At the end of the match my victorious opponent would say, “I’m glad you decided to serve and volley today. You should keep that up.”
To me, from a spectator’s point of view, there’s nothing about serve and volley tennis that is intrinsically more entertaining than baseline play. There were widespread complaints through the 1960s about how boring the Big Game had become, when both guys were coming in on every ball—points were monotonously short, the same way they could be monotonously long when Borg, Vilas, Lendl, and Wilander were at the heights of their powers 10 or 15 years later. It’s variety that’s entertaining, and that’s why watching Llodra play in such a completely different way from the norm now has been so much fun this week.
It’s a different sport from the first shot on. Llodra’s serve doesn’t exist by itself, the way it does for a baseliner. It’s linked to his next shot; it’s a method to get him to the net—serve and volley can’t be pulled apart. The flow between the two makes the big gun/stay back serving style of most guys today seem disjointed. And because he’s hitting the ball from a little farther inside the court, Llodra can get a sharper angle on his wide serve into the ad court. One major appeal of the serve and volley is that you get to see cause and effect very clearly and very quickly. A purpose is decipherable in each swing. This is also true for Llodra’s slice backhand. Even if he doesn’t get there immediately, you can see that each stroke is a way to eventually move him forward.
Once Llodra is at the net, you get to see a wider variety of angles than you normally do. The court can suddenly be carved up in a dozen new ways, and with his masterful backhand volley—one of the finest strokes on the tour—Llodra is the guy to carve it up. There’s an in-your-face satisfaction in seeing a ball belted past someone else from the baseline. The angled volley provokes a slightly different reaction. It’s elegant and thought-out at the same time; it’s a rapier cut rather than a rifle shot. There’s also, as I said, an adventurous quality to running forward and taking the ball out of the air, of using the other guy’s shot to form an angle for your own.
If everyone served and volleyed, I’d be writing a piece about the beauty of baseline tennis whenever I had the chance. The problem with the Big Game of the 60s is that players' ground strokes, which they used primarily to defend or get them to the net, were so minimal and utilitarian. The world awaits the special talent who, having internalized the advances of power-baseline tennis, is just as adept at serving and volleying and can make use of the entire court with equal facility. Boris Becker may be the closest the sport has gotten to this since I’ve been watching, though I'm sure Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall weren’t too shabby at it, either. Roger Federer could be, because he can play the net, but he’s found that he’s best at it when he’s following a forehand in rather than his serve. Andy Murray has the skill, but not the mentality. For now, this week, on this slick surface, we’ve had Llodra. The over-30 Frenchman is still around to remind us that an alternative tennis universe exists. It’s always an eye-opener.
