18 posts categorized "April 2011"
 Much of the appeal of sports is in the risk-free banter that surrounds it: the Monday morning moaning, the second-guessing, the speculating, the once-a-decade all-out go-flip-a-car-over celebration.
This isn’t quite as true in tennis. The individual game doesn’t give its fans as many opportunities to play armchair QB as team sports do. You can spend a long evening at a bar discussing the moves that the GM of the Yankees or Arsenal or the Sixers should make. You can spend the next evening discussing the pros and cons of the latest decision made by that team’s coach. And then, after all that, on your seventh beer, you can start to break down the performances of the various performers. But tennis players don’t come with GMs, and what their coaches tell them is largely kept secret. All you really have to go on is the performance on the court, and half of that is up to the player’s opponent. What can you say about Rafael Nadal if he loses a set to Ivo Karlovic? Why weren't his arms longer so he could reach for all of those aces?
Which leaves us with, for the most part, speculation. How is Julia Goerges going to do now? Can Novak Djokovic win the Grand Slam? Who has the better upside, Dimitrov or Raonic? When will Andy Murray cut his hair? And the perennial, Can Andy Roddick win another big one? The honest answer to these questions is, of course, “I don’t have a clue,” or “We’ll see.” But that doesn’t make for very good banter; it makes for a long, quiet night at the bar.
The most frequently asked speculative question in tennis at the moment is, as I’m sure you’re aware, “Is Roger Federer done?” I get asked it at the gym, at the dentist, at the tennis club. (Though I’ve heard it considerably less since his loss to Nadal in Key Biscayne; maybe people think they know the answer at this point.)
To respond intelligently, to say something other than “I don’t know” or “We’ll see,” you first have to figure out what “done” means. Does it mean Federer will never win another tournament, never beat Nadal or Djokovic again, never win a Slam, never return to No. 1? Let’s take the answer from Federer’s point of view, or our best guess at it. He’s said he wants to get back to No. 1, and we can believe him: He only needs a couple of weeks there to break Sampras’s career record for most weeks at the top. Federer also said at the start of the year that he cares about winning any tournament he enters. And he certainly doesn’t want to spend the rest of his life losing to Djokovic or Nadal in semifinals. But it’s still about the majors for him. If Federer had to choose between returning to No. 1 and not winning any Slams, and winning a Slam but never returning to No. 1, which do you think he would take? If it weren’t for the odd element of the Sampras record, I’d say the latter. I don’t think Federer would be nearly as enthusiastic at this stage of his career if he didn’t feel like winning majors was still a real possibility. I wonder if he’d be playing at all.
Let’s say winning at least one more Slam is our baseline for Federer’s future success, for what he and his fans would find satisfying. The thing about winning majors is that a player of Federer’s caliber is never “done.” It’s not like a baseball or soccer season, where each loss sinks you deeper in a hole and farther from the playoffs and the championship. A loss at Wimbledon has no bearing on how he’ll do at the U.S. Open. Everything can be fixed with the luck of the draw. Look at Federer in 2008, the first time that the word “done” was thrown around with his name. He was thrashed in the French final and edged out in an epic at Wimbledon by Nadal. A month later, Federer appeared to be reeling—he lost to Simon, Karlovic, and James Blake at the Olympics. Then, Andy Murray beats Nadal in the U.S. Open semis and Federer is back in business. His title at Flushing Meadows that year didn’t necessarily mean that he was “back,” just as his loss to Nadal at Wimbledon that year hadn’t meant he was “done.” Each Slam is an entity unto itself, a new draw, a blank slate.
Federer will be 30 in August, an age that’s traditionally seen as a Rubicon. The common wisdom is that tennis players decline precipitously because they lose that all-important “first step.” And this seemed to be what happened to Stefan Edberg and, to a lesser degree, Pete Sampras—serve and volley is all about those quick movements. Pat Rafter probably quit at the right time. But looking back at a century of men’s champions, you see a lot of variety in how they aged. Maurice McLoughlin flamed out fast, but Bill Tilden was competitive well into his 30s and, on the pro tours, well beyond. Pancho Gonzalez, a serve-and-volleyer, won matches at Wimbledon in his 40s, while Bjorn Borg, because of burnout, took an absolute nosedive at 25. John McEnroe may be the best over-50 player in history, but he also won his last major at 25, a victim of the game’s changing equipment and emphasis on power, as well as his own distractions. On the other hand, Andre Agassi and Jimmy Connors won Slams after 30.
So for every champion there’s a unique story. What's unique about Federer? There’s his dominance from 2004 on, of course, and his Grand Slam title record. But I’d point to another of his signature achievements as the most useful in assessing his future ability to win majors: His 23 straight Grand Slam semis. I’ve said in the past that what Federer does better than anyone else is take what he’s given—90 percent of success is showing up, Woody Allen said, but in this case it’s no joke. Federer, while he hasn’t reached a Slam final in more than a year, has kept showing up. He still loses very few matches to anyone other than Djokovic and Nadal. How did Federer get that 2008 U.S. Open title, when we were starting to talk about his demise? By showing up for the final when the No. 1 player at that time, Nadal, didn’t. Now, of course, there's a second guy in that mix, which makes it more difficult. But Djokovic has never dominated for a long stretch, and never been to a Wimbledon final. It won't get any easier, but even at 30, Federer can bide his time, make his semis, and take his chances—he still knows how to win these events better than anyone.
Federer may not get back to No. 1 and break the Sampras record, which would be a bummer. He may never beat Nadal or Djokovic again, which would be infuriating (and unlikely). But the good thing is, to make the rest of his career a worthwhile endeavor—and to keep us from saying he's "done"—he doesn’t have to.
 Last week’s New Yorker—or this week’s New Yorker, or the one from two weeks ago, I can never keep it straight they show up so fast—included a long, ambitious, yet very readable article by the novelist (and tennis fan) Jonathan Franzen. It was about a lot of things at once: individualism, technology, the early history of the novel and the reasons for its popularity, and his late friend David Foster Wallace.
I liked most, though not quite all, of Franzen’s novel, The Corrections. I liked his book of essays more, though reading it on the subway was a little embarrassing—it’s called How to Be Alone. He’s very much alone in this piece as well. After a year spent publicizing his last novel, Freedom, Franzen has the bright idea to go live on a deserted island, read Robinson Crusoe, and allow himself to grieve for the first time for his friend and fellow writer. Wallace’s wife gives him some of her late husband’s ashes to scatter over the island. It doesn’t take long before Franzen finds himself desperate to be back on his couch, drinking a beer, and watching a football game.
The article has gotten some buzz because Franzen is willing to punch a few holes in Wallace’s sainted reputation. He believes that his suicide, while driven by his illness, was also calculated to hurt his wife and friends as deeply as possible, and at the same time raise himself to the status of legend with his readers. The piece is worth reading just for the honesty of these sections. (I also confess to being ready to hear something less-than-saintly about the Le Grand DFW at this point.) Also interesting to me was Franzen’s progression away from Crusoe and its “radical individualism” at the start of the essay and toward another early book that he takes on the trip, Pamela, by Samuel Richardson, a favorite of mine that I also discovered late. Franzen ties that shift in his reading to Wallace in a brilliantly complex way that it’s beyond my powers to summarize here (it’s worth a read, I’ll leave it at that).
But what resonated most to me was an aside that Franzen threw out in his section on the history of the novel. He talks about the work of a critic named Catherine Gallagher:
The 18th century was not only the moment when fiction writers abandoned the pretense that their narratives weren’t fictional; it was also the moment when they began taking pains to make their narratives seem not fictional—when verisimilitude became paramount. Gallagher’s resolution of the paradox hinges on yet another aspect of modernity, the necessity of taking risks. When business came to depend on investment, you had to weigh various possible future outcomes; when marriages ceased to be arranged, you had to speculate on the merits of potential mates. The novel, as it was developed in the 18th century, provided its readers with a field of play that was speculative and risk free. While advertising its fictionality, it gave you protagonists who were typical enough to be experienced as possible versions of yourself and yet specific enough to remain, simultaneously, not you.
Reminds you of something, right? You can substitute the word “tennis players” for “protagonists” in that sentence and have a pretty fair description, with the rest of the paragraph, of the appeal of tennis specifically and sports in general. We get to watch other people take the risk, make that crucial judgment between boldness and conservatism. Sports, if only artificially and vicariously, let us know what a moment that counts feels like.
***
As with baseball, the NBA goes from excruciatingly dull during the regular season to extremely exciting once the play-offs come around; it’s a total switch-up. There are always complaints about the length of the Association’s post-season, and it does get a little wearisome when the last two teams are staggering up and down the court in the middle of June. But if you’re going to shorten anything, it should be the regular season. It should be all playoffs in my opinion, just like baseball should be 16 games rather than 162. Can you imagine how exciting each game would be?
Last night I got to watch some of Joakim Noah for the first time this year. Basketball fans, do you hate the son of Yannick? The designated “hustle guy” for the Chicago Bulls, the top seeds in the NBA’s Eastern Conference, Noah is exceptionally easy to despise. He’s always scrapping, always ripping the ball away, always fist-pumping and screaming and sweating, always around—I can’t think of many players with his moderate talents who have had such a big presence on a court. Even his own fellow Bulls detested him at first, but in the end he’s the kind of guy who love to have on your team. Those who hate him now wouldn’t mind his hustle if he brought it to their arena. (Is his scrappiness a product of his tennis background? When I think of NBA stars who I could see playing tennis, I think of Kobe Bryant. Upper-middle-class, self-centered, ornery, blessed with amazing body control—perfect for our sport).
Thinking of Noah reminded me of doubles teams, and how much fun it is to “play with the enemy,” to take someone who had long been a foe and get on the same side of the net with him. There’s a subversive appeal to it; you’ve put aside differences, expanded your circle of friends, pledged yourself to the higher good of the game.
In high school, there was a player for a rival team that we all hated—I’ll call him Keith—who was crafty with the racquet but much craftier with his line calls—he was a bald-faced cheater, in other words, and there was nothing we could do about it. Keith didn’t have the skills to win in singles, but he was extremely hard to beat in doubles.
One summer we were both at a 16-and-under tournament looking for doubles partners, so we put our names in as a team. It was borderline sacrilege, but also kind of a thrill. Maybe I was being paranoid, or secretly hopeful, but people really did seem to be shocked by the high school rivals pairing up. What was the world coming to?
We did well, and I didn’t notice any cheating on Keith’s part through the early rounds; he didn’t need to. I also earned a measure of respect for his intelligence as a player. He did the most with what he had, and was an extremely opportunistic and confident competitor. We reached the final and, naturally, played the top doubles team from his school. We had a break point near the end of a close first set. Our opponents closed for an easy volley but hit it dangerously close to the baseline. Keith, in a movement of sinister swiftness that I’ll never forget, moved in front of the ball so that he was blocking it from our opponents—his own classmates—and confidently shouted "out!" just as it touched down a full five inches inside the line. We’d broken. Keith picked up the balls, and before our opponents could say anything, got set up to serve.
What would have been the honorable thing for me to do? I guess it would have been to admit my partner’s wrongdoing and give them the point. I didn’t do that. I’d chosen to play with Keith, and deep down, I hate to say it, but I kind of liked his style. We won, but I can’t remember if I felt guilty when we got the trophy or not. Something tells me I didn’t.
***
By now, as April winds down and the temperature in New York starts to rise a bit, I can start to feel tennis in the air. My club opens in early May. What do I think about first when I think about getting out there again? I think not about hitting a ball but about walking around on a court between points. After a winter of playing at close quarters on a squash court, a tennis court feels like a vast space in which to roam, or walk, with your thoughts—walking has a purpose, but it isn’t rushed, either; you’re not idle, but you’re also not working. It's the perfect way to be alone—no wonder Jonathan Franzen likes tennis.
What am I anticipating the most? An afternoon, an empty set of courts, and a mishit ball that lands 50 feet away. I’m looking forward to making the long, unhurried walk to go pick it up.
 Judging from the general tone of the comments I’ve seen around the Internet, as well as from various writers, some people seem just a little bored by this edition of the clay season—i.e., Rafa’s Spring Rampage is past its sell-by date. As I wrote yesterday, I don’t share the sentiment: One of the big reasons we watch sports is to see excellence, and this happens to be excellence of historic proportions. I suppose if Nadal won every tournament on all surfaces all year, it might start to get old, but as it is, his domination is short enough that it builds its own drama. Each year we wonder: Who can possibly beat him? One person usually does.
Grumblers, this is your week to tune in. No Nadal—what could be better? Instead, we get three smallish, 250-level men’s clay events, one in Munich, one in Estoril, one in Belgrade. In place of Nadal’s never-ending trophy-biting quest, we get a new story: The return of Novak Djokovic, and his own quest for No. 1.
All of these tournaments are well under way, but let’s take a look at what they might show us in the days to come. Who knows, you might even find yourself wishing for the return of a certain trophy-biting Spaniard.
***
Estoril Open, Estoril, Portugal
450,000 euros; red clay; 250 ranking points
Maybe I spoke too soon: For a Nadal-less 250, Estoril has a lot going for it. Soderling, Verdasco, del Potro, Tsonga, Raonic, Simon, and Adrian Mannarino, if you can dig him—wait, he lost already. Forget it, this tournament’s over.
But we carry on, even without Mannarino; what else can we do? Raonic has continued to improve in his clay studies; he won his first round over Igor Andreev. Frederico Gil (kind of a weird first name, no? is there usually an “r” after the F?) has continued his Monte Carlo roll with his own first-round triumph; he might continue it farther, considering that he plays a reeling Verdasco next. Del Potro, dipping into clay for the first time, won in three sets.
In the long run, the big questions belong to the top seed, Soderling, and to del Potro. They reached the semis and final, respectively, two years ago at Roland Garros. Both are now on the comeback trail from injury, in del Potro’s case long term, in Soderling’s much shorter. While the Swede has had the early season wind knocked out of his sails, there’s time for him to get it back as he makes his way to Paris.
Serbia Open, Belgrade
416,000 euros; red clay; 250 ranking points
The field in Belgrade is probably the weakest of the three events this week—Victor Troicki is the second seed. But it offers the most intriguing speculative storyline: Will Novak Djokovic’s break leave him rested, or rusty? Has he done the smart thing and gathered himself for round two? Or has he unwisely ceded the momentum to looking-better-every-match Nadal?
Djokovic couldn’t ask for a better way to work any rust and find his clay game. He'll play qualifier Adrian Ungur first, then the winner of the fabulously named Blaz Kavcic and almost as fabulously named Dick Mello. I think it will work out OK for Novak; he didn’t win his home tournament last year, so this one should mean a lot to him.
BMW Open, Munich
450,000 euros; red clay; 250 ranking points
And here, finally, we have a tournament. There are, or were, 32 players entered. They will continue on through this week until there is a winner. Among those who will compete to be said winner will be Mikhail Youzhny, the first seed, Nikolay Davydenko, Marcos Baghdatis, Marin Cilic, Sergiy Stakhovsky, and Grigor Dimitrov.
Will this event have any bearing on the future? The chances are slim: Maybe Davydenko can find a little more of his old form, which took him to two French semifinals. Maybe Baghdatis can do the same. Or, most interestingly, Dimitrov will find some of the form that seems destined, in my opinion, to make him a star. Or maybe the most intriguing element has already happened: Second-seeded Stan Wawrinka was upset in the first round by Dustin Brown. Has the wind gone out of Stan’s sails as well?
Long season. Enjoy this week while you can; it might not last in the memory for long.
 It was the least surprising of weekends, it was the most surprising of weekends. What was the best part of it? For me, it was the sight of Julia Goerges's father, Klaus, as he watched his daughter win the biggest tournament of her career before her home country fans in Stuttgart. As a rally progressed, his face would crumple itself into every expression imaginable—one moment he appeared to be on the verge of a stroke, the next he was grinning with sheer relief. He looked, unlike so many highly involved tennis fathers, like any other dad in the world.
What we usually hope for on the WTA side these days is a sense of a building storyline, a budding rivalry, a player turning into the next star, a player we can count on. So far this year, Caroline Wozniacki has given us the closest thing we’ve gotten to that, with her dual quest for glory and popularity. But what we’ve mostly gotten is the old “one thing after another” version of tennis history, where events simply give way to other events. Kim Clijsters wins the Australian Open and disappears; Li Na charms the world in Melbourne and the next thing we know she has to deny rumors of her retirement; Victoria Azarenka runs through two tournaments and then pulls out of the next with a seemingly inevitable injury. Andrea Petkovic looks ready to beat the world No. 1 twice in a row and continue her climb . . . and then she doesn't.
In some ways, Goerges’s win was one more random event. Coming to Stuttgart, she was ranked No. 32, owned one career title, and was 0-2 against Wozniacki. Though if you looked more closely, the last of those things wasn't quite as bad as it seemed on the surface—in their last meeting, she had led Wozniacki 5-3 in the third before losing in a tiebreaker. Goerges was also coming off a confidence-boosting win over Sam Stosur in the semis, in which she had won the first, dropped the second, but saved her best tennis for late in the third set. Goerges used the crowd’s energy to hit a few shots that seemed to stun even her.
That was the case from the beginning in the final. The match had a team-sports atmosphere, and it gave Goerges not so much a boost in confidence as a boost in determination, the determination to take her chances against Wozniacki when she had them. The German’s down the line forehand winners, not easy to hit past Wozniacki on clay, appeared to fly on the collective wishes of just about everyone in the stadium. What was most surprising, and fun to watch, was how Goerges was able to hold her nerve and not let those hopes grow oppressive. She finished the semi with a winner, and the final with a serve that pulled Wozniacki so far off the court that she went out of camera range. That’s as good as an ace in my book.
On clay at least, Goerges matches up well with Wozniacki. She moves better on the surface than she does on hard courts, she takes a big enough cut to get the ball through the court on it, and, most important, she’s tall enough to take Wozniacki’s high-bouncing balls, even her moonballs, and hit them in her strike zone. Still, I never expected Goerges to hit them with such power and accuracy for so long. As solid her ball contact is—she reminds me of Lindsay Davenport in the way she strikes the ball—Goerges has very long and overly elaborate strokes, the kind that seem ready to go haywire at any moment. But Wozniacki wasn’t able to rush those strokes; she was on the defensive and forced to throw up desperation moon shots.
Where does this leave us in the saga of Caro? She reached another final, OK; she played with intelligent aggression in dismantling Agnieszka Radwanska in an entertaining semi, yes. She played an inspired Julia Goerges in the final, sure. But she was also out-hit by a much lower-ranked player, and she had no answer for it. Wozniacki is a smart player who will learn from this, but she’ll also remain vulnerable to the hot hand on clay.
It wasn’t just Klaus Goerges who looked like a normal person, rather than a stage dad, yesterday. Her daughter did as well. There was something very natural and relatable in Goerges’s reactions and emotions all week. And that remained true until the end. She was so genuinely shocked to win the match that she simply laid down in the dirt, which got all over her legs, her dress, and her face. This was one case where a random WTA event felt like the best result of all.
***
 What are the great sustained performances in Open era history? There’s Evert’s 125 straight wins on clay and 48 of 49 Grand Slam semis. There’s Sampras’s six straight years at No.1. There’s Federer’s 23 straight Slam semis, as well as his five Wimbledons and five U.S. Opens in six years. There’s Navratilova’s outrageous record from 1982 to 1989, as well as her 1442 career singles wins. There are others; I’m sure Steffi Graf did something ridiculous along the way.
In 2006-07, Rafael Nadal gave us one of his own when he won 81 consecutive matches on clay, the most ever on one surface for a man. But as the years go on, it has become clear that he’s slowly been building another, one that will hold a unique place in men’s tennis—his dominance of the clay-court swing from 2005 on. Since ’05, Nadal is 184-6 on dirt; even his closest historical clay rival, Bjorn Borg, can’t match that kind of percentage. The Angelic Assassin, long considered, and maybe still considered, the best clay-courter ever, was 245-39 on the surface for his career.
I’m not going to try to say what the “greatest” of these sustained performances is. That would mean having to call the others “not as great.” But Nadal’s is special. It isn't a matter of winning one tournament over and over; it's a matter of winning a surface, winning a swing, winning not just a major but its tune-ups, three of which happen to be prestigious events themselves. For more than half a decade, Nadal hasn't failed in this quest. True, he lost once at Roland Garros, in 2009, but that year he also won in Monte Carlo and Rome and reached the final in Madrid, an arduous task in itself and a set of results that virtually any other player would have been happy with. Yes, he has lost other matches along the way—to Federer in Hamburg one year and Madrid another, to Juan Carlos Ferrero in Rome, to . . . well, that's about it.
Somehow the extent of Nadal's dominance has begun to work against him. By now, for many fans he’s just a guy doing his job, using his ridiculous excellence on this particular surface to his unfair advantage—hardly a newsworthy event, or even one worth watching. No wonder Rafa looked a little sluggish at times last week in winning his seventh straight title in Monte Carlo. There has to be slight decline in motivation at some point, doesn’t there?
That’s the thing, though; there doesn’t seem to be any. Jimmy Connors is a Nadal fan, and you can see why; with both of them, their desire to win was as intergral to their personality as the sound of their voice or the color of their hair of the spin on their lefty serves. One of the hardest things for most players in this individual sport, and one that is rarely mentioned, is to get yourself to that place, mentally, where you can compete with all you have. It’s not automatic for most of us, but Nadal, like Connors, appears to reside in that place. More than most pros, I have trouble imagining Rafa doing anything but playing tennis.
Seven titles in Monte Carlo, six now in Barcelona, five in Rome, five in Paris, one in Hamburg, one in Madrid: If he lost in the tune-ups and then waltzed in and cleaned up at the French Open anyway, that would prove his superiority on clay. But Nadal doesn't waltz anywhere. He flies from the trophy ceremony in Monte Carlo to get back on the dirt and start it all over again in Barcelona a couple of days later. And while many fans and observers, including myself, wondered if he were making a mistake in adding this tournament back to his schedule, it seems, for now, to have worked out. Nadal played better tennis this week than he did last. He flattened out his backhand and found the corners with his heavy, rolling forehand. He hit winners on defense and on the run, and he didn’t drop a set. Is this boring? Personally, I enjoyed seeing the particular arc that Nadal found on his forehand; the ball, as it comes off his strings, flies across the net, and dive bombs inside a line, has a life of its own. The trajectory, with its big dip in the middle, is distinctive.
“Stay humble, stay hungry,” is the way Mary Carillo characterized Uncle Toni’s lifelong advice to Nadal. It’s the latter command that Nadal follows most closely at this time of year. Win after win and title after title only testifies to that hunger. There’s a good chance Nadal will lose a match during this clay season; as dominant as he’s been, he’s only run the table of clay Masters once, in 2010. And whether he lets on or not, he has to feel extra pressure when he’s on clay; anytime he loses on it, it’s an earth-shaking moment, the tennis equivalent of a presidential assassination. Like everything else, though, that only adds to his desire not to let it happen.
One reason we watch sports is to see that somebody cares. But there's another reason not to ignore Rafael Nadal’s long-running clay-season excellence: You won’t see anything like it again. Looking at it in the long view, every one of his titles at this time of year is a stunner.
 First in a series on great tennis books that I've recently discovered (no, I don't mean the one pictured at right).
As I’ve mentioned over the last few months, I’ve been writing a book about the men's game in those fabled roughneck 1970s and 80s. It’s finished now, and it’s coming out on May 17. When I think about that, what keeps going through my head is the title of a book by John Madden. Back in his buffoonish beer-commercial days, he published a searching memoir entitled, Hey Wait a Minute, I Wrote a Book.
Mine is called High Strung: Bjorn Borg, John McEnroe, and the Untold Story of Tennis’s Fiercest Rivalry. The title is narrower than the subject matter. The book is really a look, through the lens of the 1981 U.S. Open, at the era of men’s tennis that ended at that tournament. It takes a snap shot of the lives and careers of the four semifinalists—Borg, McEnroe, Jimmy Connors and Vitas Gerulaitis—as well Ilie Nastase, who was in rapid descent at that moment, and Ivan Lendl, who was in rapid ascent, and who represented the game’s future. Through these guys we hopefully get an idea of how much the sport had changed in the previous decade, and what it had done to the players, both good and bad. (You can pre-order it here.)
I didn’t do much but write the book for a period of about six months, finishing it while I was at the Australian Open. It got to the point where I would see people watching football on weekends and wonder what they were doing with their lives, why weren’t they working on Sunday afternoons? As much writing as was required, there was equally as much reading. I wrote a fair amount about the history of tennis, especially in the United States, which meant making my way through stacks of tennis history books and magazine and newspaper articles. I was amazed by much I didn’t know, even about people and players and events of which I was familiar. Which only makes me realize that there’s still a ton more I must not know.
The upshot is that I gained a profound new respect for tennis writing in general. This is not the popular opinion, even among lovers of sportswriting. George Plimpton dismissed tennis writing as fuzzy and fizzy. In an interview with the New Yorker, Jon Wertheim was asked the usual question, “Why isn’t there more good tennis writing?” Wertheim mentioned David Foster Wallace, of course, and put in a good word for Bodo’s Borg piece that I talked about last week, and . . . that was about all he could come up with.
Wallace is beloved by literature fans because he brought a frenetic modern highbrow sensibility to tennis; he made it seem kind of hip, in an extremely nerdy way, of course. But that isn’t the only way to write about the sport; it’s also not possible to do on a regular basis. Part of the appeal of his pieces was that he was dropping in on the tennis scene and giving us an unjaded outsider’s macro-eye view of it. There’s no way he was going to produce something like his 10,000-word take on the U.S. Open that he did for Tennis Magazine in 1995 on a regular basis.
Nor is it necessarily the best way to write about it. As much as I like Wallace, I’m not sure he could have written a book that was as enjoyably informative and addictively readable, to me, as My Life with the Pros, a memoir by Bud Collins. Bud will never be studied in a literature class, but he strikes the right, light tone here.
Last summer, at the men’s tournament in Toronto, I visited my friend and fellow tennis journalist Tom Tebbutt’s house. He has a fantastic collection of wood racquets from all over the world, and a smaller but to my mind equally good collection of tennis books. Looking at the aging collections of the correspondents from the big British papers, a tennis writer today can allow himself to feel like he’s part of a tradition (one that doesn’t really exist in the U.S., where there have been far fewer writers dedicated to just this sport). One American name that popped out at me on those shelves was that of Al Laney. I knew he had been the tennis writer for the New York Herald for decades, and that he and the Times’ Allison Danzig were the big names in amateur-era tennis writing. Fittingly, Danzig retired as the Open era began, in 1968, the same year that Laney published his memoir of his days on the tennis circuit, Covering the Court.
Tom was surprised that I’d never read Covering the Court. He happened to have two copies, so he lent me one, which I still have. Laney, in first-person remembrance, focuses primarily on tennis in what for him were its most glorious years, the 1920s of Bill Tilden and Suzanne Lenglen, but there are interesting observations up through the 1960s. I’ve tried to read the Frank DeFord biography of Tilden but found it a little dry, and I’ve tried to read The Goddess and the Golden Girl, a book about the Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody, only to find its length and exhaustiveness daunting. But Laney’s way of telling those same stories, through his own recollections, brings them to life in a way that those two books never do.
This is because Laney is, first of all, a tennis fan. He’s very good at describing how his feelings about the top players change with the years. His first hero is Maurice McLoughlin, the California Comet, whom he watches as a kid in the Davis Cup in 1914. McLoughlin, the first champ raised on public courts, made tennis a national sport. But as his name implies, he burned out quickly. Laney sees him again five years later, at Forest Hills in 1919, and sees something different in him:
I had strange, mixed feelings as I watched McLoughlin through a series of early matches, one of them on the same court where he had been so luminous a few years earlier. He was the same dashing figure and I could see nothing outwardly different. There was the same dynamic service and overhead play with which he had thrilled Forest Hills in 1914. The relentless years had not stood still for him, though, for I had heard everywhere that the old California Comet had declined and had read that he would probably retire after this season.
Strangely, this knowledge did not disturb me as I thought it should. I had seen him in his glory, but what had been concealed from the schoolboy’s eye was now revealed. Now I realized that both Brookes and Wilding could have beaten him on tennis alone but could not withstand the inspired outbursts that made him godlike, with the light of heaven flashing from his racquet.
That light is extinguished for Laney, who sees more clearly with age. Through McLoughlin, too, the writer gives us an idea of how much had changed in the world during those five years, the years of World War I. Everything is different at Forest Hills in 1919; the old world of tennis, of Newport and society, the world that McLoughlin had helped shatter, has vanished. There’s a new hero rising, Bill Tilden, and Laney can’t stand him. He first encounters him on a back court that year, bossing around a group of photographers.
Tilden was in charge, telling them exactly how they should do their work. He was not to be champion for another year, but already he was acting the part and a little more. . . . It was a face on which no expression of humility seemed possible; there seemed to be a conscious feeling of superiority. I thought as I watched that I had never seen such arrogance, and such distasteful mannerisms. This was not in the tennis tradition I had pictured to myself. It definitely was not in keeping with the past.
Laney goes on to chronicle the 1920s, the Era of Wonderful Nonsense, in his words, which peaks in 1926 with the Lenglen-Moody match in Cannes. He describes the build-up to the match as temporarily blotting out all other worldwide news (we thought we were frivolous now).
By the time it came off it was of worldwide interest, and never again in the history of sport was such an event allowed to go under such ridiculous and fantastic conditions. It could have filled up Yankee Stadium, but it was played at a not very attractive club of six courts.
Laney’s on-scene description is memorable as well. The area surrounding the club is so completely jammed that the only way he and the other writers make it in is by following a flying wedge made by the photographers on the scene. In the press room, he finds himself surrounded by the world’s best writers, James Thurber included, some of whom have been taken off battlefield beats to cover this womens’ tennis match.
The Musketeers, Budge, Jacobs, Wills, Crawford, Vines, Cram, Gonzalez, the pros: Laney eventually gets around to them, though you feel like his heart is always back in the sport’s early years—two-thirds of the way through the book, it’s still 1939. He makes an interesting point about the barnstorming professional tours, about which he never develops any love, despite the quality of the players. An amateur-era writer at heart, Laney thinks of the pros as somewhat cynical, never playing a meaningful match, willing to play pointless exos night after night. He considers their careers hard to assess because this.
I have covered and written about dozens of professional matches. But it is next to impossible to remember anything significant about them, and with one or two notable exceptions, I cannot find enough detail to describe one of them, as the amateur tournaments and team matches have been recalled. I submit that the principal reason for this is that not one of these matches had any real meaning in the sense of the Davis Cup or amateur championship meetings. They are easily remembered as occasions, but do we really remember them as tennis contests? Did Kramer beat Riggs on the night of the big blizzard at the Garden? I’m not sure he did. Or did he?
Laney goes on to say that he can’t even recall the professional debuts of Rosewall and Laver. This leads him back to perhaps the book’s best moment, the moment when he really does remember seeing Rosewall for the first time.
 These were memories to cherish and the first was one of the nicest tennis experiences of all, the discovery of Rosewall, because it was shared with Réné Lacoste, the old Musketeer. It was at the Orange Lawn Tennis Club, in New Jersey, on a day during the Eastern Grass Courts in the early 1950s. Lacoste, a wealthy businessman with international connections, had come to this country partly in their pursuit, but also to enroll his son in Princeton. Having a free afternoon, he drove over to renew acquaintances and see some tennis.
It was a stifling day. The heat rose from the grass in waves that could be seen enveloping players and even watchers in the shaded boxes on the high ground behind the two show courts. I found Lacoste seated in a corner box reserved for important guests, under hanging branches where a faint breeze stirred. He had a woolen scarf about his throat, its ends tucked into a woolen jacket, and I remembered that weak lungs had forced his retirement before his unusual tennis powers had begun to wane The Melancholy Gaul, we called him in the old days, and the reason for it was still apparent. A rather sad, modest, almost humble man, extremely cultured, a combination rare enough among human beings, not to mention famous athletes.
With my back to the court, I saw Lacoste’s face light up as though a switch had been turned on. He was looking over my shoulder at the court, where two players had come to warm up. I turned around and there was Rosewall hitting balls back and forth with Dick Savitt. Réné sat up straight and I moved my chair out of his line of vision.
I had supposed it was the chance to see Savitt that interested him—Dick had been Wimbledon champion. When I spoke of Savitt, however, Lacoste said, “No, it is the little one. Beautiful player, and so young!” Each time Rosewall pulled out one of his spinning backhands into a corner, Lacoste would smile his shy, rather plaintive smile. With Savitt ahead, he said of Rosewall, “I think he could beat the other one even now, if he only knew how good he is. Never mind. He will find out.”
The tennis tradition is passed down, one player of genius recognizing it another. Laney was there for it all, and if Bud’s book is the most readable account of the pro era, Laney’s does the same with the amateurs. It’s a tradition worth being part of and trying to live up to, for players and writers alike.
***
Have a good weekend. I’ll talk about another favorite and newly discovered tennis book next Friday.
 It's that time again, time to make the perilous click on the comments bar. Thanks for reading and taking the time to post if you did. Traffic here and on Tennis.com in general has been stronger this year than ever.
***
Steve, its a good thing you aren't the umpire.
Everyone has an irrational side, and it may show up on various occasions in different facets of life, but we do have to pay consequences for everything in life.
We are all held to the strictest codes right from childhood, right from school. It makes sense from the management point of view. We have ethics, codes of conduct even at workplaces...athletes have a job too and are required to follow the strictest codes. These codes may change from time to time, but whatever is there has to be followed to prevent chaos and unfairness.—LadyJulia
It is a good thing I’m not an umpire. I once umpired a Little League game that a friend was coaching and totally botched the only call at second base that I had to make. Hesitated before making a signal, and then still, by all accounts, got it wrong.
But in this case I’m not talking about enforcing rules, but judging the players on the correctness or incorrectness of their behavior. I don’t want any players breaking any rules that are on the books, from foot-faults to time between points to being coached from the stands. And I don’t enjoy seeing a player throw a tantrum, even if I do think the history of tennis would be a lot more boring—poorer in general—if there had never been a Nastase, Connors, or McEnroe, no matter how awful and cringe-worthy they might have been on certain occasions. What I mean is that I could see myself, in a professional match, if I thought I’d been robbed of a call, going pretty much bat---- insane, and I’m not even an excitable person normally. That thought always goes through my head when I watch the players start to lose it.
***
My experience is that most politicians, business men, journalists etc who are questioned regarding their job performance are extremely defensive and that includes just about every tennis journalist I've been in contact with (with possibly one or two slight exceptions, I won't say who :))—CWATC
I guess this means I wasn't one of the possible slight exceptions. But no, just as I would struggle to maintain my composure on court, I would struggle not to get sarcastic in the press room now and then if I were a player.
***
This whole piece brought to mind the trial of Barry Bonds. Many are lamenting the money, time and resources supposedly wasted on it. I plainly disagree in so much as he lied to America. He had no ethics on or off the field. He's one of the guys that took away everything that's good and right about baseball. I, for one, hope he's found guilty and Hank Aaron's record is restored. But that's another story altogether.—Michele
I hate hearing Michael Wilbon on PTI say that the trial is a waste of time because “nobody cares.” I do care, and I think a lot of other people do as well. Bonds helped make an entire era of baseball seem illegit. As we’ve been saying here, sports, while it isn’t life and death, is a place where ethics get played out on a public scale, which makes it important. So important in Spain, it seems, that a cyclist like Contador can appear to be protected by the authorities. That doesn't help anyone. Making sports stars untouchable heroes just makes it harder for fans to keep believing in the legitimacy and significance of what they’re watching.
***
Steve - talking of poems - you should get a collection read on CD (wait, do people still buy CDs?) and listen rather than read.
Updike *shivers*—Jewell
OK, maybe I’ll try that—which one should I get?
Updike, yes, he does come out of another era, male-chauvinism-wise, if that’s what you mean. He even said that the biggest job his editors at the New Yorker had was to remind him of that. He seems to go out of his way in his fiction to make himself, or his fictional stand-in, look like a jerk. He’s nicer in his essays.
***
I am now going to order and then gobble up Bodo's Courts of Babylon slowly, savoring every juicy bite, as I would a young, succulent lover.—Slice and Dice
Well, I wanted people to appreciate Pete, but don’t overdo it. It is a good book; even better is his Inside Tennis. And his old longform magazine profiles were excellent as well. Like most of us, I think, Pete is at his best when he’s closest to the sport. I thought his stuff from Miami this year was very good.
***
Your defense of Bodo is condescending... why not just say his writing is a masterpiece instead of drawing attention to people who like to bash him? I would not have been aware of this if you had not brought it too attention.—Joseph
It’s fun to bash back now and then, especially in defense of a friend.
***
which made me think that both Bjorn and John Lennon had this reliance on svengali figures (Epstein, Bergelin) that seemed to allow them superstardom but cost them any semblance of normalcy. today's superstars have learned from their trailblazing and are less endangered, but somehow more boring as a
result. (and what does that say about us, the spectators?)—d
There was a lot of the Beatles in Borg. The svengali, the screaming girls, the global fame that was unprecedented in their lines of work. And later, a depressing recognition from both that they would never come close to matching their first acts.
***
when federer loses now, it looks like he has no chance to win. he just can't produce what is needed, and after failing a few times, he resigns. even in the indian wells match against djokovic, the set he won seemed incongruous and not indicative of anything. today melzer played great but still, federer should have been able to muster (thomas?) up 1 or 2 breaks out of 7 chances. in which case, this would have been a match. but on those points, he looked overmatched. and then deflated.
when he wins, it's the opposite. he's got it from start to finish. no more close calls.—d
You have a point. Thinking back to the end of 2010, he appeared to be on virtually all the time. In 2011, when he’s off, he gets progressively further off. He won a five-setter over Simon in Melbourne, somehow dropped a set to Robredo there as well, and took the second set from Djokovic in Indian Wells. Other than that, all of Federer’s wins and losses have been in straight sets in 2011.
***
Well, well, well...
How times have changed! This article was not about Novak and there were so many posts about him!
I feel Novak has indeed arrived if people hate him so much that he's always on their minds and they can't wait to write about him.—Yolita
"The only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about."—some professional wit
***
"Mike Ness? The Pogues? Jonathan Richman? Heck, the Strokes?
You guys are old!"—susan
It’s true, I’m even older than the Strokes. A few years ago, a girl just out of college in our office couldn’t believe that I was older than Gwyneth Paltrow, because she is, like, “so old.”
I try to find new music, I really do. But I usually just end up finding old stuff I’d never heard before.
***
Steve,
what kind of tennis did/do you play in terms of style?
I am really curious to know!—noleisthebest
I’m a lefty so I should have played like John McEnroe and served and volleyed, but I loved Borg as a kid, so I unwisely copied his baseline style. Now I've internalized Nadal's run around the backhand at all times style.
***
“We wanted the mystique back”
That's exactly what Borg, the player, was: pure mysticism, a glittering star. Unfortunately, Borg, the person, seemed to get lost inside his own creation (if it was his, at all, or the people who surrounded him, we don't really know), an aloof and distant star. A true dichotomy, if there ever was one—Abraxas
Let me finish with a bonafide bon mot, from the much loved and loathed John Updike, that could sum up the Bjorn Borg saga:
“Celebrity is a mask that eats into the face.”
 Why is April the cruelest month again? Let me remind myself with a Google run. Right, it does that thing, according to Eliot, “breeding lilacs out of the dead, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” Hmm, actually that sounds about right. I guess there was a reason I liked that poem so much in college, even if it starts on kind of a downer. First there’s the title, "The Waste Land." Then, right below that, there’s the equally enticing name of its first section: "The Burial of the Dead." At that point, you might wonder what you’ve gotten yourself into. It doesn’t get any happier as it goes, as I recall.
Anyway, this past Sunday, as I walked over to the tennis courts in a nearby park—to watch, not to play just yet—April had not made Brooklyn look anything like a wasteland. The opposite, in fact: The Borough was in half bloom, dull roots obviously stirring all over the place. The haphazard lurch from hibernation back to life had begun. On block after block there were trees and bushes busting out, brighter than they will be all year. In between were hundreds, thousands more that remained barren. Through the branches you could see clouds flying. The ground was half mud. The wind had a chilly snap that curled around you and smacked you in the face whenever it could. It only felt good in the sun, but it really felt good in the sun.
The courts were full, as they usually are. I’ve lived in New York long enough that I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be able to walk onto a set of empty municipal tennis courts and play for as long as you like for no money at all. A summer permit in New York is now $200, up from $100 a year ago, and people aren’t happy about it. It’s not easy finding courts, or, if you do, staying on them for more than one hour on the dot. An alarmingly loud alarm bell rings at the Central Park facility to let you know when you have to make yourself scarce. I hate thinking of all the courts that are sitting empty, left to slowly peel and crack, in dozens of towns just a few miles away in New Jersey or on Long Island.
But the action is here, in Ft. Greene Park, which has eight green hard courts. The neighborhood is at the multi-cultural heart of Brooklyn, and the park has a hipster vibe that spills over onto the tennis courts. Woolly beards are popular, as are Chuck Taylors and even beat-up black shoes. Diva worship is also in evidence; a black man in a blue bandanna had virtually all of Serena’s mannerisms and sound effects down perfectly. Few matches seem to be played; mostly people simply hit the ball back and forth. Is this what tennis is to the majority of people who hack around at it? A lot of players here look like they’ve had lessons at some point in their lives. They have the rudiments of strokes down from muscle memory, but it’s tough to tell how good they are. It’s always tough to tell how good a tennis player is just from watching them hit. Competition changes everything; in my experience, a very low percentage of people who can stroke the ball decently when they’re just hitting can make that stroke hold up during points.
Another standard feature of New York tennis quickly makes its presence felt: the minder. There’s always someone lurking around checking your permit, and the man on duty on Sunday in Ft. Greene was a stickler. A couple tried to take a baby carriage, with baby, on court. No go—“that’s against the rules,” the minder informed them. They had to park the kid outside the fence and try to keep him or her from crying while they played. And the pros think it’s tough to concentrate at Flushing Meadows.
I sat down on a bench behind the court and started to read; rec tennis makes for a good background visual and soundtrack—it’s nice to have there, but you don't want to watch too much of it. It was blustery, it was raw, it was a little too chilly for total comfort, but the book was good enough to be distracting.
The trouble was, I couldn’t concentrate on the words. In front of me was another Brooklyn staple, the urban attention seeker. This particular hipster beardo, apparently, has decided to make performance art with a hula-hoop. (Everyone has their thing here; Brooklyn is the do-it-yourself entreprenerial capital of the universe, packed with all sorts of modern-day mom-and-pop clothing shops, restaurants, bars, specialty liquor stores, cheese shops, pig-butchering classes, you name it. At times it can make me yearn to go to a Red Lobster in a strip mall.) The hula-hoopist spun his intrument over his head, skipped rope with it, twirled it on his arm, and watched for any recognition from the bench sitters.
Worse, to my left an even more reliable New York stereotype had arrived: the loudmouth. Not a bellower, exactly, but something more insidious and aggressive, a guy who simply loves to hear himself talk, in a voice loud enough to sound authoritative. The conversation was all one-sided; when his friend was speaking, you could hear the loudmouth getting impatient.
He was loud enough to break my concentration, so I shut my book with a look in his direction—he didn’t notice, of course, being knee deep in his own verbal blizzard—and departed for a bench all the way at the end of the courts. Was it the day, was it the weather, was it New York, or did people seem better in theory than they did in practice? What does it mean to love books, movies, music, cheeseburgers, the world around you, and then get so easily annoyed by the actual humans you find there?
I tried to read again, but kept coming back to these thoughts as I watched the couple try to play while simultaneously making sure their baby didn't disappear. In his book Inside Tennis, Pete Bodo made the point that nowhere do you reveal your true self more fully than on a tennis court, where you're alone with just your thoughts to keep you company. Is this true? I had wondered it again while watching Milos Raonic and Ryan Harrison in Indian Wells. Harrison was edgy, annoyed by ball kid mistakes; a fan behind me called him “crybaby.” But in the dealings I’ve had with Harrison off the court, he’s been sensible, modest, a nice, level-headed, earnest kid all around.
Which is the “real” person? And what does it say about someone if they can remain calm and assured on a tennis court? The hero of Inside Tennis is Bjorn Borg, the man who deals with pressure better than any other. But, as the world would find out later, it came at a serious cost. Borg was forced to ignore and control his emotions—a whole side of his “true” personality, in other words—to an extreme degree. And no one would ever say that he had the most successful personality away from a tennis court. The opposite, in fact. So which was the true Borg?
I’ve played enough tennis to know that it can bring it a side of you that you might not even know exists. At the Division III NCAA Championships in 1989 at Kalamazoo, a roving official stopped behind my court and decided that I was crossing over the center line when I served (which I wasn’t). He called a foot fault on me at 3-3 in the first set. I basically lost all concentration on the spot and was broken. A few games later I lost the set. After the last point, I took a ball and hit it as hard as I could directly at the official, into the fence in front of him (no, I wouldn’t have hit it at him if the fence hadn’t been there). He gave me a warning and added, “I hope that ball wasn’t directed at me.” I never calmed down and lost the second set quickly.
Is that truest version of myself? It’s one version, and I think if you take the cases of Borg, Ryan Harrison and myself together, you would say that tennis proves that we’re all kinds of personalities at once. Think of your own stream of consciousness as it pours through your head. In the 10-minute walk from my apartment to the park on Sunday, I had swung all over the place in my mind, even if I didn't show any of it on the outside. I was pleased with the day and the brownstone-lined streets, yet at the same time dozens of thoughts of the future made me unaccountably anxious and irritated. The only thing I can say for sure is that whatever I felt at one minute, I knew I wouldn’t be in that mood in an hour, or even have the same opinion on a given subject. These are our real travels, the uncontrollable travels of the brain. At any moment, sympathetic thoughts can cross paths with terrible ones. Or, as Bob Dylan so succintly put it: "If my thought dreams could be seen/They'd probably put my head in a guillotine."
The couple stopped playing, collected their crying baby, and left. The sun went down and the snap in the air grew chillier. I got up and started to walk out of the park. I walked past yet another beardo, looking up into a tree. “God,” I thought, “a birder.” He turned around and said, “See that? It’s a falcon.” I looked up and saw a highly dignified bird standing tall on a large branch, serenely ignoring the gawking humans below. I looked back the falcon as I walked out. He didn’t change expression or take note of anyone. He had our attention without even seeking it. Animals: So much cooler than we are.
 So far it's been calm sailing on the men’s clay-court seas—Nadal a winner, Federer shanking away but seemingly happy to get in a few matches, Djokovic wisely gearing up for the next phase. Only Andy Murray has given us any kind of a roller-coaster ride so far. First he declined to cut his hair before appearing in public, then he resurrected his game from the ashes, then he drop-shotted a cripple, then he looked like he might do what the Tennis Channel’s Nick Lester called “the unthinkable” (love that overdramatic phrase) and beat Nadal on clay. What does Murray get for all of his trouble? He’s on the sidelines with an elbow injury.
With wild man Andy out, it should be even calmer for a couple of weeks. Of the big guns, only Nadal is in action this week, in Barcelona, and next week he and Federer are both off while Djokovic is back at it in Belgrade. The gap should be filled by the women, most of whom have begun their own countdown to Paris at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart. Can anyone do anything unthinkable there?
***
Porsche Tennis Grand Prix, Stuttgart, Germany
Red clay; $721,000; WTA Premier
Familiar names greet us from all sides of this compact, 32-draw event. The dutiful Caroline Wozniacki is at the top, of course; her foil at No. 2, Vera Zvonareva, is at the bottom; most interesting is the presence of the tour’s hottest player, Victoria Azarenka. She’s on Zvonareva’s side.
The combination of its small size and strong field makes this a no-nonsense draw—everywhere you look there’s a name that pops out at you. Big matchups could happen very early. Wozniacki will likely get either Petkovic or Jankovic in her second round. Zvonareva might get Stosur in hers. Li Na and Azarenka could face off in that round, as could Schiavone and Bartoli, if A. Radwanska doesn’t knock off Schiavone first.
Two weeks ago in Charleston, the story was Wozniacki. With Azarenka, Wozniacki, and Zvonareva in the same draw again, the story and the pressure shift to Azarenka. Now the question will be asked of her: Is she for real, is this little run she’s started going to lead anywhere? At a time when we see so many hopeful ups and disappointing downs from quality players—Stosur, Na, Jankovic, Schiavone, Bartoli all come to mind—can she join Wozniacki and Zvonareva as a reliable winner? On the other half of the draw, and on a slightly lower scale, can Andrea Petkovic do the same? It would add a lot to the WTA right now if both of them turn into long-running, upward-trending stories by the time the French Open rolls around. But I'm not exactly counting on it.
***
Barcelona Open Banc Sabadell
Red clay; 1,995,000 euros; 500 ranking points
As with the Monte Carlo Country Club, I’ve always wanted to see the spot where the Barcelona event is held. Its looks old-line, vintage, low-key. But it seems as if the tournament itself has expanded in recent years. Where it was once heavy on Spaniards and dirtballers, it’s gone international, much to the chagrin of home-country boy Fernando Verdasco, who took exception to the appearance fees paid to aliens like Robin Soderling and decided to take his presently declining game elsewhere.
As we noted, Murray, the second seed, is out, as is the No. 5 seed, Berdych. But there are a lot of people still here: Gasquet and Monfils, winners this morning, are each on Nadal’s quarter. Soderling and Raonic, who continued to find success on clay against Stepanek today, are on the other side of that half.
On the opposite side are Fed-killer Jurgen Melzer and the man who beat him in the semis in Monte Carlo this weekend, David Ferrer. Almagro, Monaco, and Dolgopolov are also here, though the latter might not be by the time you read this. He’s on court with Nikolay Davydenko right now.
Will any noise come from this quiet week for the men? I suppose it all rests with Nadal. Is he overdoing it by playing? It does seem strange that he would mess with the schedule that allowed him to sweep all of the clay events for the first time, in 2010. On the other hand, Nadal does look like he could use the work. It’s just that it’s going to end up being a lot of work by the time the second week of the French gets here. From his statements so far, he doesn’t expect to win every match this spring, and catching up with Djokovic in the 2011 race for No. 1 has begun to creep into his interview answers. Hey, it’s clay, it doesn’t come around all that often over the course of the year, and nobody loves it as much as Rafa. As fans, don’t we want to see the best-ever on this surface do his dirt-filled work as often as we can?
 “You find something new each time.”
This is a phrase that’s used—not very often—to describe a favorite movie or book or record or painting or TV series. At first glance, the work in question seems simple and straightforward. It’s only later, when you think back on it or revisit it, that its subtler touches and hidden complexities become apparent. You know you’ve found a classic—Exile on Main Street, Late Spring, Speak, Memory, The Warriors—when those touches never stop revealing themselves.
There may come a time when Rafael Nadal’s game stops revealing itself, when I’ve stopped finding new things in it or finding new ways to think about it. But it hasn’t happened yet. The simple surface of his style—hit heavy topspin ground strokes—is more deceptive than any other player’s. It’s the details that surround that simple style that keep you watching, even when he's marching to his seventh straight title in Monte Carlo and beginning yet another assault on a new clay-court season.
As Nadal said after the final, he wasn’t at his absolute best during this tournament. His serve came and went, he said he felt tired at times and that he wasn’t moving on the clay as well he would like. Nadal was so far off his game, in fact, that he even lost a set, to Andy Murray in the semifinals, something he hadn’t done in two years here. And there were moments in his long, grind-it-out final against David Ferrer when I started to think his clay dominance had finally become boring—if there was ever an argument for best-two-out-of-three in Masters finals, this was it. But as the war of attrition progressed through a 75-minute first set, I kept thinking about a remark that the Tennis Channel’s Chris Wilkinson had made repeatedly about Nadal’s game the previous day. When Nadal would come up with a fabulous get and go on to win the point, Wilkinson chalked it up not so much to his raw speed or defensive skills, but to the fact that he has the unique ability to get to a ball on the dead run and then do something special with that shot or a shot later in the same rally. It’s the physical aspect of Nadal's game that makes us overlook the racquet skills that complement it, and which raise his game above the norm.
It was true time and again in the final. Rather than his strength or endurance, it was what Nadal could do with the ball from a seemingly hopeless position that separated him from Ferrer, and what separates him in general from his opponents. Here’s a partial list of moments that stick in the mind from both the semis and the final:
—Murray hits a ball crosscourt wide to Nadal’s forehand side. Nadal scrambles into the alley and scrapes it back over the net. Murray hits the next ball down the middle. Nadal gets to it on the full run. Instead of just popping the ball back deep, which most of us would have been happy to do in that situation, he tries a backhand drop shot while still in mid-stride. The shot surprises Murray, who reaches the ball but can’t get it over the net.
—Nadal is up a break at 3-2 in the first set against Ferrer, but he’s down 0-40 on his serve. It’s been a somewhat shaky and unpredictable start for both guys, with three early breaks and what seems sure to be a fourth. But Nadal gets the score back to 30-40. On that point, Ferrer hits what appears to be an ungettable drop shot. But Nadal gets it. After a full-stretch slide forward, he just manages to put his strings under the ball. Rather than just pushing it over the net, though, he controls it well enough to drop it back for a winning shot. The score is deuce. Nadal goes on to hold. The early unpredictability of the match is over and he slowly puts a stranglehold on it.
—In the second set of the final, Ferrer hits either an overhead or a high volley (I can’t remember which) toward Nadal’s forehand. Nadal is clearly on the defensive, and in most cases a player would be pleased just to return this shot. But Nadal improvises by hitting a flat forehand, instead of his usual heavy top, and taking some pace off the ball. Perfectly controlled, it moves on a low line down the middle of the court and an inch or two over the net, so that Ferrer can’t put the next ball away. I don’t recall how the point ends, but that forehand stays in my mind as what I can only describe as a pure tennis shot, one that feels good coming off the racquet because it’s such a delicate one to get right. But once again, it was the physical quality of Nadal's get that overshadowed the delicate aspect of the shot that went with it.
I could go on, but I’ll finish by going back to something more familiar from the Rafa reportoire. As the second set progressed, he began to lose his backhand and some of his confidence. Ferrer, somewhat predictably, helped him out by totally botching his service game at 5-5. Nadal, still struggling, reached 30-30 in the next game, two points from the match. He chose that moment to make what was likely his most aggressive play of the entire set. Instead of starting another crosscourt rally, he took a forehand down the line, hit it close to the sideline, and followed it forward for a winning volley. That ability to show nerves and then, with calibrated boldness, shrug them off at the crucial moment is, as we like to say, the mark of a champion. It’s also something I’ve seen Rafael Nadal do more often, with more success, than any other player.
There's more than one way to recognize a classic. You might, as I said, keep finding new new elements in it to appreciate every time you watch. Or, and this is the more satisfying way, you might see something for the thousandth time and find it just as stunning and brilliant as you did the first.
 This has been the mellow Monte Carlo. It used to be that the heart of the season began to beat right around now, but this time the tournament almost feels like a one-off, a clay tune-up for the more significant clay tune-ups to come, with the French Open way out there on the horizon.
You can chalk it up to a phenomenon previously unknown in tennis, something called the Novak Djokovic Effect. It’s akin to the John McEnroe Effect, and in more recent years to the Roger Federer/Rafael Nadal Effect: At certain points in time, the absence of any of these players from a tournament would have robbed it of a good deal of its urgency right from the start. Without them, an event didn’t quite matter, or matter nearly as much as it did with them. It’s a measure of how far Djokovic in 2011 has come that he has reached that status. Too bad, too: He was forced to choose between his two home tournaments, one in Monaco and the other in Belgrade. It’s been a little weird to hear about him practicing on the courts at the MCCC this week, but skipping this one and, hopefully, living long enough to fight in Paris was the right decision.
Along with the Djokovic effect, we’ve also suffered from the Incredible Shrinking Masters, that annual moment when we go from the Slam-like, dual-gender, 96-draw events in Indian Wells and Key Biscayne to a relatively sleepy 56 men at a country club. It’s about as close to the leisurely days of the game’s amateur era as we get today. But there are upsides to everything, right? The fewer players, the more individual attention we can give to the ones whom we do get to see. Which leads to thoughts, and questions, and the hazards of trying to answer them.
***
The Tsonga Perplex: What is it with the guy?
One day, when he’s playing Juan Monaco, he’s clearly the tougher, stronger, and more motivated player. The next day, against Ivan Ljubicic, he clearly . . . isn’t. In that surprising defeat to the older man, Tsonga appeared unsure of himself, unsure of how to compete. It’s an even more perplexing case than that of his fellow free-spirited Frenchman Gael Monfils. At least with Monfils, flakiness is part of the deal up front, and, if you’re inclined that way, part of the appeal. Tsonga at least makes a show of being a serious character, but the results can seem just as flaky. Or is it just that his ball-striking has gotten less clean over the years, and he’s tried to rely on athleticism more and more?
The Gulbis Confirmation: He’s not the flavor of the month
For the last three or four years, and especially last year, Ernests Gulbis was a pet favorite of mine, a guy whose matches and even press conferences I would go out of my way to see. Now, not so much. It isn’t just because he’s gone back into flounder mode, though that doesn’t help—the guilty appeal of underachieving does wear off after a while. It’s also that a serious fan of anything, be it music or movies or fancy New York burger joints, ends up living for novelty. Indie rock fans, say, will always look forward to discovering a new band much more than they will waiting for the third album of a band that they already like—they’re old hat by then. The match between Gulbis and Milos Raonic this week was a good example of that cruel phenomenon. There you had the flavor of 2010 going up against the flavor of the last three months. We’ve gone from embracing the erratic and sometimes very funny baby-faced slacker to liking the methodical and serious baby-faced grind. That’s tennis—it’s appeal cuts many ways.
The Murray Conclusion: This guy is good
Was it me who began this week assuring you that we shouldn't expect too much from Andy Murray? Should I end it by speculating that he might just have the best chance of anyone of knocking off Rafael Nadal on clay this year? No, I won’t go that far, but these two played an epic two-set semifinal here two years ago, after which Nadal said that he, at least for that moment, feared Murray more than anyone on the dirt.
But no, it’s just a little early to crown Murray the French Open champion. We just had him washed up for the year a few short days ago. For now, I’ll just say how much fun it’s been watching him this week. He’s moved as fluidly as a genuine dirtballer, he’s played with the mix of craftiness, steadiness, and occasional aggression that the whole world has been calling for from him for years. And while he hasn't registered any monumental wins, it does make you think that clay is a nice place for him to ply his particular trade; he can hang back, be patient, and ultimately win with his superior all-around ground-stroke game. At a time of big rips and heavy top, it’s always fun to see Murray slow the game back down.
His match with Gilles Simon was a particular pleasure. The first set, with both guys carving around the ball rather than belting it, was relaxing. The second set, when the crowd whistled at Murray for drop-shotting an injured Simon, was edgy. What was most amazing to me was just good Murray’s drop shots were. So good that even the whistlers had to pause to applaud, before they went back to whistling.
The Federer Question: Did He Seem Less Than Totally Desperate to Win Against Melzer?
In the middle of the second set, down a break and with things looking bleak, Federer watched Melzer hit a mediocre drop volley and . . . kept watching as the ball bounced once, and then bounced twice. He pretty clearly could have tracked it down if he’d set out to do so from the start.
That’s not to say Federer wasn’t trying, of course, but there did seem to be a lack of outrage on his part about losing the first two sets of his career to the Austrian. Like Soderling and Baghdatis and Berdych and Davydenko and maybe even Gulbis over the last year or so, Melzer was due to get a win over Federer—he beat Djokovic at the French last year and Nadal in Asia in the fall. And he played excellent tennis from start to finish today. He pushed Federer back with his backhand, which he took early and hit deep. In the in end, with the wind swirling and the dust kicking up, Melzer did the smart thing by continuing to move forward. Melzer is a very human player; you can read his emotions easily. He was fighting to keep his excitement and anxiety down in the last two games. It was nice to see him get to let them out.
It’s obligatory at this point that we ask, after a Federer defeat, whether it’s a “sign of his decline.” It is, but as I said last year after his loss to Berdych at Wimbledon, it’s only another sign of his decline into normalcy. It’s against the normal run of things for a guy to keep beating other quality opponents every single time out for years on end. That period of his career is over, as are, almost certainly, the three-Slam seasons. But this stage doesn’t seem too bad, either, all things considered: This was, as we’ve been told many times already, Federer's first loss to someone other than Nadal or Djokovic in 2011; more significantly, it was his first loss before a semifinal since Wimbledon last year. Comde to think of it, even that is above the normal run of things.
Afterward, Federer, who blew a lot of break points, shanked a lot of balls in the closing stages of the match, and was on the defensive much of the time, said he was happy to get some clay matches in and happy to get to go train at home. Like Monte Carlo itself this time, there wasn’t a lot of urgency about Federer’s performance. As we’ve learned this week, Paris is still way out on the horizon.
***
Have a good weekend.
|
