The most articulate devotees of any sport don’t merely watch it or play it. They make it into a metaphor for life itself. Sports, it seems, can’t just entertain us or get us a little exercise; they must teach us something as well. Roger Angell writes about how baseball teaches even its best players about the inevitability of failure. Dave Hickey writes of the hierarchy-destroying power of basketball's structure. C.L.R. James tells us about the intricate democratic community created during a cricket match. That's chopped liver compared to what soccer allegedly does, though. According to one writer, the ball-kicking sport “explains the world.”
What does tennis explain? Many of its most articulate devotees believe that it reveals the world to be, beneath the thin, genteel veneer of civilization, a place or raw combat, a place where, when it comes down to it, we’re on our own. Tennis teaches us resourcefulness. It teaches us to be proactive and aggressive. It teaches us sportsmanship and obedience. It teaches us, first of all, to buy a can of balls before we get to the courts.
It also teaches us, as I’ve learned again this summer, how jarring it can be to try something new. In tennis, trying something new means playing a new opponent. This can make the sport, even for someone who has been at it for years, feel brand new again. What could be better than that? The problem is, “new” also means “unfamiliar.” Playing a new opponent forces you out of your comfortable rut, forces you to hit shots you normally don’t hit, move in ways you normally don’t move, re-learn to anticipate and strategize. As I said, it can be jarring, frustrating, a little scary. That’s why we get in comfortable ruts to begin with.
My tennis rut for the last four or five years years has consisted of four regular opponents. John, a crafty lefty who gets to everything. Don, a thoughtful tactician with a mean two-handed crosscourt backhand. Jimmy, who hits a forehand with such severe topspin that I’m forced to take most balls above my head. And Rich, a good athlete and solid all-around player who has made himself much more consistent in recent years.
Against all of these guys I know exactly what I need to do, and points and sets play out in familiar, almost automatic patterns. Against John, I try to work the ball inside out, to his weaker backhand; many rallies are decided by whether I can connect on an overhead (this was always a favorite shot of mine, but it has become much more erratic as time has gone on). Against Rich, who has a strong backhand, I try to hold serve, and then look for openings with my down the line forehand; we end playing a lot of tiebreakers. Against Don, the most philosophical of the bunch, I wait for his mind to wander for a point or two. He’s much tougher in matches that mean something; he saves his concentration and competitiveness for those. Against Jimmy, I try to keep my arm from falling off.
It’s a measure of how many distinct levels there are to tennis, as well as how difficult the sport is, that over the last few years I've found few other players who match up well with me. Guys fresh from their college teams are generally too fast, too good; while others who look like they can hit the ball during the warm-up turn out to be too inconsistent during points. (I hate playing rhythm-less, hit-and-miss, no-workout tennis; give me a pusher, and some exercise, anytime.) Other promising-looking opponents completely fold when the sets begin.
This month, though, I seem to have found a new opponent, Rob. We did two-on-ones drills with a mutual friend before trying some singles (maybe tennis is really a metaphor for something else: dating, and how hard it is to find the right match). Rob and I are about the same age and ability level, but I could see immediately that he brought a wild card to the game, something that my regular opponents didn’t: A live arm. He has a legitimate, good-athlete snap on his serve, a reliably authoritative overhead, a point-ending topspin crosscourt forehand, and, strangest of all these days, a very good topspin one-handed backhand. I had a hunch that he had played baseball, and I was right. But I was surprised to learn that he had been a second-baseman, a position that doesn't require a gun for an arm. I can only imagine what kind of arm you need to be a pitcher, or a third baseman, or a right-fielder, and what kind of serves those guys would have.
Rob and I have played just twice, and we haven’t worked up to sets yet. It was too bloody hot on one of the days we played to bother with anything overly competitive, so we played service games to 10. Even so, I felt like I had to find a new approach to tennis against him. First of all, he can hit aces, which will mean an adjustment on returns. He can take what would normally be rally shots against my other opponents and put the ball away immediately with his forehand. I feel surprisingly slow trying to catch up with those shots so far, but then again I’m not anticipating them or positioning myself for them yet; they seem to come out of nowhere. And on his backhand side, Rob likes to play a little Federer-esque short slice crosscourt backhand. I’ve had to run forward, bend for that shot, and try to guide it up the line and deep into the corner, none of which I’ve had to do on a regular basis in years.
So far I haven’t played well against him. My answer to his forehand has been to try to hit bigger on my own forehand, which has led, more than anything else, to errors. Wild, ugly, ball-landing-near-the-back-fence errors. This, I guess, is the typical first answer to the unfamiliar: trial and (ugly) error. I was hoping to get another look at his shots today, but it rained in Brooklyn this morning. Maybe next week. Maybe then I’ll start to find the right spot along the baseline to position myself for his forehand. Maybe I’ll start bending more easily and guiding that little approach up the line and into the corner with more pace. Maybe I’ll discover a serve that he can’t handle or a trajectory—high or low—on my ground strokes that he doesn’t like. Maybe he’ll start to miss. Hey, I’ll take that, too.
Whatever happens, I’ll have learned another lesson from tennis. None of us owns one game, just as we don’t own one personality. We change and emphasize difference aspects of our style with each opponent; we find different strengths and hide different weaknesses, with each person we play, with each person we meet. Tennis can get us in a nice comfortable rut, but it can also give us a chance to leave that rut and discover something new about ourselves.
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The tennis court isn’t the only place where I’ve been confronted with the unfamiliar this summer. I’ve also found it on the squash court. Normally squash is a winter game for me, one which I put aside when the weather gets warm. But this month the weather has been a little too warm for tennis at times. On a few of a our recent 99-degree days in New York City, when the sidewalks appear to sweat, I’ve opted to head back inside my air-conditioned gym and trade tennis racquet for squash racquet.
My opponent yesterday was a recent Wesleyan grad, Matt, whom I had last played, one time, six years ago, when he was a local prep schooler in Brooklyn Heights. (Matt, who started his first job this week, must feel like those days, his high school days, are from another lifetime. They seem like they could have been last week to me. I’m still in the same apartment and at the same job.)
Matt was a good college player who trained at the famous Heights Casino, an incubator of squash talent. In other words, to me, an entirely untrained hacker, he looks like someone who knows how to play squash. He hits hard, has clean shots, and most important, knows where to move and how to control the all-important “T.” That’s the spot in the middle of the court where the service lines come together. Plant yourself there and you’ll control the rally and make your opponent do all the running, the same way tennis players used to control points from the net. Against me, Matt pretty much owned the T, and the rallies; I owned the back of the court, which is exactly where you don't want to be.
I didn’t mind at first. I knew I was destined to lose, and running is why I play squash in the first place. I was happy to blast the ball with him and work up a sweat. But even when you’re playing for nothing more than fun and exercise, and even when you know you’re not in the same league as your opponent, losing seven straight games does get a little old. So I resolved to get him off the T one way or another and try to save face by winning one game.
Like a lot of tennis players who try squash, my best shots are touch shots—you need more stamina in squash, but you need to be more proficient with a racquet in tennis. So I started to drop shot Matt, and I started to win points. He said, after one of those drops, “You figured me out; you’re moving me forward. I play better when I’m set up.” I won my one game for the afternoon.
Surprisingly, controlling a few rallies and winning a few points didn't just give me more confidence, it actually made me faster. Late in the game that I won, Matt hit a perfect return, low and along the opposite wall from me. He’d been making that return all day, and I hadn’t gotten anywhere near it. This time, though, I felt like a new, much better player as I moved across to cut it off with one long lunge. I got to it and flicked a quick little drop shot back along the wall, a millimeter or so above the “tin” (the squash equivalent of the net). Matt couldn’t get to it. Instead, he turned around and said, “Wow!” We were both surprised. But why should we have been? That’s what any racquet sport, where it’s all up to you out there, will teach you. It will teach you that you can always do more than you think you can.
Are professional sports turning a corner in the steroid era? Or, to put it more hopefully, are we turning a corner out of it? There are tentative signs of change in two sports that have been famously tarred by the performance-enhancing brush, cycling and baseball. A pair of exercise physiologists, writing in the New York Times on Sunday, believe that the latest Tour de France was the cleanest since 1990. They cite slower times on moutanin climbs and credit cycling’s adoption of a “biological passport” testing system, which “aims to detect the underlying markers of doping rather than the doping products themselves.” As far as baseball goes, the most notable aspect of this season has been its own drop in production. Home runs have plummeted since the pumped-up glory days of Bonds, Sosa, and McGwire, when players went untested, and this year pitchers are more dominant then they have been in decades. While cycling has toughened its testing, the biggest advance for baseball is that there is testing at all, and that former folk heroes have been disgraced.
Of course, there are all kinds of caveats to drop in right about now. We know that pitchers also took steroids back in the pumped-up glory days, and many observers credit the drop in run production to the widespread use of a new pitch, the Mariano Rivera-inspired cut fastball. We also know that just last year all-time slugger Manny Ramirez was caught using even after he'd been caught before, while the winner of the 2010 Tour de France, Alberto Contador, tested positive for clenbuterol. We know that just as testers catch up, athletes move on to something new and less detectable. Beyond that, we hear very little about steroids in the NFL, the NBA, track and field, swimming, and other sports, even though athletes across the board are bigger and better than ever. We also hear and read, despite a fair share of rumor mongering, very little about steroids and tennis.
And we’ve read a little less about it in 2011. The ITF, which administers the testing programs for the ATP and WTA, has for the last few seasons put up a year-end PDF on its website listing which players were tested when and how—urine, blood, or for EPO; in competition or out of competition. Last season the organization even briefly listed who had missed their all-important out of competition tests—it wasn’t a short list—before taking those stats down. It was, at the very least, good reading for anyone with an interest in how these things are done, as well as unending fodder for conspiracy theorists.
For 2010, however, the ITF has taken a step back. Rather than put a “Tests per Tournament” PDF up, the way it did in 2008 and 2009—see 2009’s here—it has settled for a “Testing Summary” for 2010—find it here. Instead of telling us that Federer or Nadal or Djokovic or Serena or Maria were tested out of competition on a specific date, we find out how many total tests were administered at, say, Indian Wells—there were 63, in case you're wondering, 32 men and 31 women. After having seen the individual names in the past, this information is now maddeningly non-specific.
Why the change? Stuart Miller, who runs the program at the ITF, wouldn’t say. The ITF is, he has stated, conforming to the standards of the World Anti-Doping Authority (WADA) when it comes to making information public. Perhaps the ITF felt that a player’s reputation could be unfairly tarnished by a seemingly small number of out-of-competition tests next to his or her name. But on the surface, the testing summary shows that some improvements in the system have been made. In 2009, there were 154 out-of-competition tests; in 2010, there were 219. In 2009, there were no out-of-competition blood tests given at all. In 2010, there were 10—six for men, four for women. Maybe the ITF felt like identifying the subjects of these tests would throw an immediate and unfair cloud of suspicion over them.
The upshot is that the testing program is less transparent for observers of the game, and for fans who want to believe that tennis is clean, that its testing system may be getting stronger and making a difference. Whatever the reasons behind the change, by withholding information that it once released, the ITF is providing more fodder for conspiracy theorists because it looks like it's hiding something. Should we, now that out-of-competition blood testing has begun, feel like tennis is turning any kind of corner in policing steroids? Despite that hint of positive news, it’s a little harder to know.
It’s time to peek, with trepidation, into the comments again. If there was any doubt as to whether Novak Djokovic would inspire fan passion to rival that of Roger Federer's or Rafael Nadal's, it has been put to rest on this website. A reminder: Wherever your loyalty may lie, whether you've decided to spend your time reminding me of my incorrect predictions, or accusing me of writing while American, try to say something constructive or interesting or funny. Insults, etc., will be deleted. And it will make this column much better in the future.
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In agreement up to a point [with my article about today’s male players being gentlemanly on court]. But both Nadal and Djokovic do a lot of chest-thumping and fist-pumping, which I find to be less than sporting—trudat
Yes, fist-pumping and chest-thumping and screaming in celebration were not part of the old Aussie rules, the ones that are still the standard in most people’s minds for tennis behavior. But the sport does evolve, and I’ve come to like this new aspect of it. While they may annoy their opponents, and while repeated exhortations by my own opponents would almost certainly annoy me, I don’t believe Nadal’s leg kicks or Djokovic’s chest thumps are done with vicious intent. They’re meant to fire themselves up and bring their desire to the surface, which I don’t see as unsporting. I can understand why fans who believe that Roy Emerson and Co. were the be-all and end-all of tennis decorum would be appalled, but to me the show of positive energy and emotion is added entertainment.
But maybe I'm the wrong guy to ask: I was also a fan of Lleyton Hewitt's lawnmower multi-punch routine and "Vicht!" fingers-to-the-forehead sign. I guess you pick your Aussie style.
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Everyone was a little madder and badder in the late 70s, early 80s. But then again, if you lost your s&%t on court it didn't get broadcast over the Internet a million times. You have no choice but to be more respectful on court today. Look what happened when Ferrer hit a ball in the stands in the general direction of a crying baby. And then there's Serena but I don't want to start a riot on this thread so I'll stop there.—Michele
The Internet of the Johnny Mac era were the new “shotgun” microphones that started to appear courtside in 1980 and especially ’81. McEnroe and Gerulaitis complained that they made it sound as if the players were louder and more aggressive than they really were. McEnroe, typically I guess, thought they had been invented mainly to capture what he was saying. Gerulaitis compared the situation to baseball, where players weren't followed around by microphones. “What do you think Reggie Jackson says when he runs into the wall in right field?" Vitas asked. "'Ooh, I hurt my heady-poo?'"
But it’s true, anything you do now is instantly available everywhere forever and ever. And there was more of a sense of rebellion in general in those days. The 60s got to tennis a decade late.
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An alternate hypotheisis. I agree that evolution is going on here but I suspect it is not the players evolving but the game. Perhaps it is something about how power is generated with the new racket technology - start out slow and smoothly harness power from the legs with loose body dynamics for maximum racket head speed. I find when I am aggressive, I snatch at the ball, which either flies towards the fence or meekly crosses the net. Perhaps it is today's tennis audience unwillingness to tolerate even the slightest bad behavior - witness the boo's Djokovic gets when he begins even the slightest complaint. Either way, both are apsects of today's game that weeds out the hotheads from the top echelon of the game.—5.0 wannabe
I’m not sure about your power argument, but one evolutionary element I left out of my post on today’s sporting men is the effect of Hawk-Eye. It lowers the temperature all around. And, as you said, it may make tennis audiences less tolerant of negative acting-out, because it happens so much less often now.
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During my junior year in high school, in Rhode Island, we used two elements of the VASSS scoring system -- the no-ad game scoring and the 9-point tiebreak. And I loved it. Each game could be decided in a sudden death point, once the score reached 3-3 (like 40-40, or deuce). The receiver, naturally having the disadvantage (in those days, anyway), had the option of which service box to take the serve, thereby mitigating the server's advantage somewhat. It made for all kinds of interesting tactical decisions, because if I was receiving at 3-3, and my opponent had double-faulted in the ad court at 2-1 or 3-2 to bring it to sudden death, I might just make him serve into the ad court again, begging him to try NOT to think about his previous double-fault. Or, if my opponent was a lefty with a wicked slice serve that tailed away from my one-handed backhand, I might choose to receive the 3-3 point in the deuce court, taking away his most prominent advantage.—Slice-n-Dice
Now that I think about it, I played No-Ad all through high school and college. I don’t know if it was better or worse than deuce games—you got used to it, and there was an added sense that the mentally stronger and calmer player, the one who could handle those 3-all points, was going to prevail. But I did think it could skew a match too far toward those sudden-death points. I can remember winning and losing matches by extremely misleading scores. The tiebreaker, yes, that was essential, if only for TV viewing, but tennis is already weighted toward the “big points” enough as it is to go with No-Ad.
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It's quite weird, but through tennis I got to I utterly love the windows of anti-normality; ok, it's nice to watch Wimbledon or RG semis and final matches after lunch, but there's something unreal and infinitely exciting and thrilling about huddling on a chair in front of the computer in January, thick woolen socks on, radiators blasting at full capacity, in the middle of the night, everything deadly silent, I feel like I'm stealing life transfixed by the luminent blue courts, blinding sunshine and sweating, lobster-red crowds trying to watch the match. So I do look foward to the American summer, esp USO and my trips to the fridge where cold grapes have now become my traditional "strawberries and cream" of the last slam.—noleisthebest
It’s true, watching at oddball hours makes you feel like a true fan and maybe appreciate what you’re seeing more. One of my favorite tennis memories is staying up until something like 3:00 A.M. to see Younes El-Aynaoui beat Lleyton Hewitt at the Australian Open in 2003 (it was the match before the epic with Roddick). It wouldn't have been the same if I'd taped it and watched it at my leisure the next morning. As great as it was to go to the Australian Open this year, I missed the wee-hour viewing from the other side of the planet
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yes, we are not gracious winners- we are gloating!! you are right, nole is much more gracious than some of his fans. that's why we like him.—parker
This, at least, is funny.
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I really like the title of this "rally": The New Landscape. I'm really enjoying The New Landscape in both the men's & women's tours. As a Rafa fan, it has been hard to see him beaten so regularly by Nole. But, he's been beaten soundly each time, and as a tennis lover i enjoy watching anyone playing "in the zone" as Novak is doing. It's been a real delight to watch him play, and i'm plenty up for "more of the same". Of course, i am hoping that Rafa finds a way to turn the situation around and return to winning against him instead of losing (Haha I'm still hoping the same for Rog against Rafa)- but i'm also really digging the "challenge" that Novak's offered the other top guys. Can anyone meet it? Not yet. But i hope they can.—jodiecate
Thanks for your sanity and overall positivity about the sport as it stands right now
So it begins, that all-too-brief brief window of time when tennis lovers in the U.S. get to feel like normal sports fans. For the next six weeks or so, we can come home from work and, quite possibly, find a live tennis match on the tube. On weekends we can run our errands and take our naps and mow our lawns knowing that the DVR is taping a semi or a final for us. Can you imagine? This is how team-sports fans get to feel all the time.
Last week the men opened the window in Atlanta, a tournament that looked much less painful in the evening—maybe someday they’ll try out my idea of an all-night-match event down there. This week the men, including Atlanta champ Mardy Fish, move on to Los Angeles. But it’s the women who are the bigger story for the moment. They get their own American summer started with an intriguing, high-quality draw in Stanford. As you may already know, that draw has Maria Sharapova and Serena Williams in a potential face-off very soon. Too soon, unfortunately, for ESPN or the Tennis Channel, which don’t get to Stanford until Friday. Our all-too-brief window of normality is even briefer than I realized.
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Bank of the West Classic, Stanford, Calif.; $721,000; hard courts There was some giddy Internet and TV talk this past weekend about how Sharapova had “thrown down the gauntlet” at Serena Williams. What did Maria say, exactly? That she was looking forward to playing Serena sometime this summer (they’re each entered in four tournaments before the Open); that they’ve had some “tough matches” in the past; that rivalries are good for tennis; that she likes playing Serena, even though she doesn’t have a good record against her. Oh yes—it is on.
Sharapova is the second seed here behind Victoria Azarenka. It won’t be an easy run for either of them. The draw is small—32 players—but decently stocked. The bold-faced names include Marion Bartoli, Sam Stosur, Julia Goerges, Agnieszka Radwanska, and, somewhere between bold and plain text, seventh-seeded Ana Ivanovic. Unbolded and unseeded names of note include Sabine Lisicki, Serena, Daniela Hantuchova, and, of interest to American fans, Christina McHale.
Considering that none of these women has won a major since Serena did it at Wimbledon in 2010 (the current Slam queens, Clijsters and Kvitova, have regally held themselves out this week), this tournament will serve as a jumping off point for everyone. Azarenka, Sharapova, Lisicki, and Bartoli will want to continue their All England momentum. Serena will want to get in as many matches as she can. Goerges will want to prove that this spring was no fluke. Stosur will want to prove that last spring was no fluke. Ivanovic, you would think, will just be happy to be back on California hard courts.
Starting with, but not ending with, Maria vs. Serena, this should be a fun tournament. It’s enough to make me wish, even after I temporarily swore it off after the French/Wimbledon double, that I was back on the road.
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Farmers Classic, Los Angeles, $619,500; Plexipave; 250 ranking points As the big dogs continue their summer siesta—it seems to get a little longer each year, doesn’t it?—the rest of the men scatter themselves to the 250 winds this week, in Umag, Gstaad, and Los Angeles. The latter has the highest-profile draw, topped by the first two seeds, Fish and Juan Martin del Potro. We know the American loves the hard-court season, and with his new Top 10 status he’ll have one more reason to love it: the appearance fees. Let’s hope he doesn’t play too much or peak too early this summer.
Del Potro may love this time of year even more. He began his own ascent into the Top 10 at this point in 2008, and extended that run the next season all the way to a U.S. Open title. This should, finally, be the moment when we can say he’s officially back, at full strength, with all the match preparation he could hope for. I’ll be interested to see how del Potro does from here through the Open. Did his year away permanently halt the momentum that took him to that title at Flushing Meadows? At the French and Wimbledon, he gave Djokovic and Nadal a scare for one set, but he was clearly a level below them overall; he wasn’t consistent enough for Djokovic, and he didn’t play the big points the way Nadal did. Is that where he’s going to continue to be for the long haul? The “Next” label that del Potro wore in 2009 is no longer available, after all. Djokovic has grabbed it back from him, and he doesn't look ready to give it up again.
Other names in L.A.: Ryan Sweeting, winner in Houston, who opened with a nice victory over Somdev Devvarman; Gilles Muller, enjoying a mini-renaissance of late; Fernando Gonzalez, still playing tennis, perhaps holding on until next year’s Olympics; Marcos Baghdatis; Grigor Dimitrov, who may have already faced Tommy Haas by the time you read this; blue-collar grinder and screamer Alex Bogomolov, Jr.; James Blake, also still playing tennis; Ernests Gulbis, also still playing tennis, from what I've heard. And, in a first-round match to watch, the returning Richard Berankis vs. rising Ryan Harrison.
Dang, this tournament sounds good, too. That’s tennis for you; just when you feel like getting out for a while, it pulls you back in. Now if only I didn’t have to wait until Friday to see it on the tube, like a normal sports fan.
It's becoming an annual summer question: Where is Mardy Fish heading? The American, who enjoyed a post-Wimbledon surge in 2010, has now cracked the Top 10 for the first time at 29 years old. But his prospects remain hard to gauge. In the last month alone, he has experienced a career high—reaching the quarterfinals at Wimbledon—and followed it up with a near-tragic low when he lost both of his singles matches against Spain in Davis Cup. Even Fish’s victory this weekend in the BBQ pit otherwise known as Atlanta, which included a straight-set lesson for his upstart countryman Ryan Harrison in the semifinals and a Houdini-esque escape against John Isner in the final, raised as many questions as it answered.
It starts at the most fundamental level, with his style of play. “What is Fish’s game, exactly?” I asked myself while watching him win his second straight Atlanta title. This isn’t the first time this question has crossed my mind. Tennis players can usually be categorized as defender or attacker, grinder or net-rusher. Not Fish: He’s none of those things precisely. His serve is his one undeniable weapon, but he doesn’t follow it to the net often or use it to set up a putaway ground stroke. And while he mostly tries to win from the baseline, Fish doesn’t have the big forehand that defines so many players’ games today. He loops his and uses his stronger two-handed backhand down the line to break open points; though he’s very selective about when tries that as well.
Fish says that he likes to “come forward,” and more than most players today, he can do that. A few times in Atlanta he showed his ability, in the middle of a rally, to read when his opponent was going to float a defensive shot back and then cut that shot off in mid-court with an athletic, improvised volley. Fish has the instincts of a net player, a rare commodity today, which makes it surprising that he doesn’t put those instincts to use more often. In the final against Isner, he was content to rally, perhaps to tire the big guy out (it worked). As we know, Fish’s fitness has vastly improved over the last 18 months, and this has allowed him to do two things: run down more balls and outlast his opponents. And that’s how he won yesterday; while Isner staggered through the better part of the last two sets, Fish barely broke a sweat and never looked winded. In this sense, Fish’s game is a microcosm of modern men’s tennis and it’s slow march backward, from net to baseline, from first-strike aggression to all-court steadiness and stamina.
And his game has fit the modern moment well. While Fish’s style is harder than ever to define, he has used his newfound strengths to record the most consistent results of his career. He has made solid progress everywhere, winning a series of smaller titles last year and going farther at both the French Open and Wimbledon than ever before. All of which leaves Fish, as he prepares for his biggest tournament of the season, the U.S. Open, in an intriguing and still-unresolved position. For the first time in his 10 years on tour, he’s the standard bearer in the U.S., and a guy who has a right to imagine himself appearing in Grand Slam semifinals. The question is, Can he actually imagine himself there?
Fish has always operated in the shadow of his old friend Andy Roddick. He still defers to Roddick as the emotional hub of the Davis Cup team and the guy who, even if he’s no longer the highest-ranked player in the U.S., is still American tennis’s leading man. Fish has been the beta to Roddick’s alpha; he may have more all-around tennis skill than his friend, but he lacked Roddick's swagger, and his expectation of greatness—even Harrison, at 19, burns with more overt fire and desire than the lower-key Fish. Beyond his relationship with Roddick, Fish’s expectations have also been tempered by the era he has played in. In most other periods, a player with his serve might believe he could make a run to a Slam final or even steal one when the rest of the world wasn’t looking. Not these days; these days the quarters have to suffice. That’s where Fish ran into Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon this year. In his press conference afterward, Fish didn’t sound crushed; and, why, realistically, would he be? He had exceeded his past expectations of himself. “I’m certainly glad I played on a stage like that before I hang it up,” Fish said after his loss to Nadal on Court 1 at Wimbledon. "This is one you really want to do well at one time. You know, I would have liked to have gone a little farther.”
"I would have liked to have gone a little farther." Highly reasonable words, but for those of us who know American athletes by their bombast, it must come as a bit of a shock to hear the country’s best tennis player speak in such humble, even resigned terms. But as we saw against Spain in Davis Cup, this is a new role for Fish. He played some great tennis over that weekend, and his heroic performance against Colombia the previous fall had put the U.S. back in the World Group to begin with. But in Austin Fish was unable to ride the crowd support to an upset win over David Ferrer in the do-or-die fourth rubber. He never looked like he believed he could pull it off. There was no realistic reason he should have believed—Ferrer is the toughest of the proverbial "tough outs"—except that that’s what the U.S. team needed its best player to do.
To take the next, difficult step upward, Fish may need to become less realistic. He did pull off an incredible comeback against Isner on Sunday, but he didn't really expect it to happen. Down 1-5 in the second-set tiebreaker, he walked around the net post on the changeover and went straight to the opposite baseline without stopping for the customary water break, even though it was 110 in the shade—Fish thought he was, literally, toast. Afterward, when the miracle had been accomplished, he (very rightly) admitted that he had been lucky. Fish should have lost the match; he played passively and let an obviously gassed Isner nearly squeak his way through the second set. While defense and endurance have gotten him to the Top 10, maybe focusing on his own strengths is what needs to come next. Fish is, as we said, more skilled than most around the net and one of the few who really is comfortable moving up in the court. Perhaps that's where his path should take him from here. Perhaps that's how he'll "go a little farther."
But the first step foward is always mental; it's in the mind before it's in the hands. I’ve seen Roddick win many matches that are similar to Fish's win over Isner. Roddick will fall behind a lower-ranked but hot-handed opponent, but he’ll never lose the belief that the guy is going to come down to earth. When that happens, Roddick typcially doesn’t attribute it to luck, but to reality—“You know in the back of your mind that the guy is ranked No. 60 for a reason,” Roddick will explain afterward. It’s a cockier attitude than Fish’s, the attitude of a long-time Top 10 player, but it’s not any less realistic. It’s the attitude of a player who has always—or at least until very recently—had the highest expectations for himself, and who has made good on many of them, by winning a U.S. Open, by reaching three Wimbledon finals, by leading a U.S. Davis Cup team to a title.
Mardy Fish is right to defer to Roddick. He has passed his friend in the rankings, but he can still learn from him. He can learn what a Top 10 player can expect from himself.
What do you think of when you think of summer vacation? It might be the fine smell of sunscreen, or the perfectly greasy and way-too-big cheesesteaks down the shore. It might be a boozy, sloppy sunset bar in Montauk or Fire Island. It might be the seagulls that wake you up in the morning in Ocean City, or the green-headed bugs that attack you when you’re not looking on the beach. It might be the spare, plain, puritan lighthouse at Watch Hill, and the dark wood in the town’s one cozy restaurant at night, its light the only light for miles. It might be the late afternoons, when everyone around you picks up their beach chairs and heads back over the dunes, but you stay out because the warm wind is whipping over you and the light is too good to miss. Or, it might be that moment when you’re behind the wheel, ready to roll out on the highway, and a good song comes on the radio or on your IPod, and you start to sing along—and then you get on the highway and run smack into a massive traffic jam. You stop singing; you turn the sound down; the song’s rhythm and forward motion seem to mock you now. You tell yourself to be patient. You’ll get there.
Wherever you happen to live, you might think of something similar. All of these images come to my mind at this time of year, but another, more distant memory has returned more recently. It comes from when I was 13 or 14, when I was more obsessed with tennis than I ever would be again—it still wasn’t too late, at least in my mind, to believe that I might become a pro. That dream didn’t last for much longer; I think it officially died when Boris Becker, one year older than me, won Wimbledon around the same time that I was trying to crack into the Top 10 in the Middle States 16s.
My one recollection of a family vacation from that summer is of me in lying down in the very back—the “way back”—of our Chevy Caprice Classic station wagon absorbed in a tennis novel called World Class. It’s a fictional version of tennis’s pioneering pro tours, written by Jane and Burt Boyar, who spent time with Laver and Gonzalez and Drysdale and Buchholz and Lamar Hunt and company in the 60s and 70s and wrote their highly romanticized account of their valiant exile from, and ultimate acceptance by, the official amateur version of the sport. I loved that book when I read it, and finding it again in the Tennis magazine library I can see why. On the first page, the book’s hero, aspiring American tennis player Christopher Hill, is jogging:
“He veers from the water to the softer dry sand that shifts beneath his feet, forcing the muscles of his legs to strain harder. Approaching his starting point he returns to the water’s edge, breaks into a wide-open spring, and vaults the jetty, facing the sky. 'I know it, gulls,' he thinks toward the seagulls around him, 'I’m going to be the best tennis player in the world.'"
What 13-year-old aspirant wouldn’t be hooked by that? Though I do begin to wonder about my teenage taste when I flip further into this tale of ritzy, jetset, sporting romance and begin to encounter lines such as this:
“Predictably, the lunch was superb.”
Or this about a major event in a female character’s life: “When Katherine was 17, her parents left early one more morning to go yachting. In the evening a policeman arrived at the apartment to tell her that there had been an explosion and her mother and father were dead.”
Death by yacht explosion: Isn’t that always the way with parents?
Or this, which I can’t quite picture my 13-year-old self reading: “Palazzo-pajamed Mrs. Frederick Webb Philipson III posed languidly at the door of the famous Philipson mansion, surveying Christopher. ‘I’m soooo happy to meet you, you beautiful child.’ Her eyes traversed the length of his body.”
Still, looking at the book again, it makes me think that our earliest experiences or passions never really go away. Is it a coincidence that nearly 30 years after I read this book, 30 years after an early tennis obsession ended, that I would write one of my own, about the next wave of professional tennis players that followed the ones the Boyars chronicle?
Anyway, the point of this post is to say that I’ll be on vacation from this column next week, for the first time this year. What will I be reading this time? Since this seems to be my summer of Dylan, I thought I would try his memoirs from a few years ago. I’ll leave you with one story about the man that likely doesn’t appear in his book, but which I’ve heard elsewhere.
Dylan and guitarist Robbie Robertson were in a hotel room during their tour of England in 1966. The two of them, three sheets to the wind, were playing guitar and tossing ideas back and forth while a friend listened. Dylan was at his creative peak at that point, and the observer said that despite their virtual incapacitation, the two were cranking out a slew of incredible new songs, riffs, fragments, vocals. He thought he was hearing the next great Bob Dylan album taking shape right in front of him.
The next day, the man saw Dylan.
“So when are you guys going to record those songs?” he asked.
After a double Grand Slam hiatus, the Rally—featuring tennis writer Kamakshi Tandon and myself—picks back up and looks at the state of the pro game at mid-season.
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STEVE TIGNOR: We haven’t talked here in a couple of months, Kamakshi, and obviously a lot has happened in that time. There’s always such a long build-up to the French Open and Wimbledon, and then they’re over in a flash. For months we say, well, wait until the French, wait until the Slams, then we’ll see who’s really playing well, then we’ll get the meaningful matches. This year, on the men’s side, the majors threw us a curve before taking us right back where we had been for the first five months of the year. By the time it was over, Novak Djokovic had legitimated his early season run, and showed that his confidence and overall excellence weren’t just a product of his momentum during that time—he showed he could get them right back once that momentum had been stopped. I picked him to lose to Nadal in pretty much every tournament leading up to and including Wimbledon, and he proved me wrong every time. I'll go out on a limb: I think he’s here to stay.
I guess the question, though, is how long will his stay be. Is he going to be roughly what Nadal has been to Federer, the guy who has his number, who's ready to succeed him? Or, as Nadal said after Wimbledon, is this just as seasonal thing, and is Djokovic’s level bound to drop?
I’d take the second of those two options. First, Federer did just beat Djokovic in Paris, so he isn’t out of the picture. Second, Nadal at 25 is too young to suddenly begin his decline. And tennis, despite its lack of a definable year, really has worked in single seasons lately. In 2008, it seemed that Nadal had overtaken Federer; the next year Federer was back at No. 1. Last season it looked again like Nadal, with three Slam wins, was ready to grab the baton for good. But again he’s slipped a little.
Djokovic says he’s “lost his fear,” but as Nadal knows, it doesn’t take long to get scared again—he was the two-time champ at Wimbledon and Novak was the rookie, but it was Nadal who was nervous.
Then again, I’ve been betting on Nole’s level dropping all year so far, and look where that's gotten me.
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KAMAKSHI TANDON: From Federer-Nadal at the French to Nadal-Djokovic at Wimbledon—quite symbolic, really. Like you, Djokovic points to his rebound from the Federer defeat at the French as the most significant achievement during this period. The timing of the defeat was very tough, costing him a significant achievement or two, and it upped the stakes at Wimbledon. He came into this period in a bit of a can't-win position—the more he achieved, the more the pressure to back it up by doing it at a Slam. If he hadn't won Wimbledon or the French, people would be asking where it all went wrong.
At the same time, losing wasn't all bad. It removed the burden of the streak and reset things a bit. It's easy to forget that Djokovic looked a little vulnerable at various stages at Wimbledon, like against Marcos Baghdatis or Bernard Tomic. The fact that the Serb was able to shake that off and carry on and win signals that he can do it when it's business as usual, not just in those rare periods when everything comes together.
That's what separates the dominant from the merely dangerous, and makes it look like he's here to stay. Of course, he's been "here" for a while now, always sneaking in periods of success in between Federer and Nadal's dominant patches, so it's only the 'to stay' part that's new. It implies that his current level will be his normal level from now on—and that's what we're debating. Will it?
On the one hand, I don't think you go back to being a run-of-the-mill player after doing what Djokovic has done. On the other, as Nadal pointed out, everyone has highs and lows. He's right, of course. Nadal never loses perspective, except maybe when he's complaining about the schedule. The hardcourt Masters events will be interesting because they'll come after the first real break Djokovic will have had since the beginning of the season—the first real chance to decompress, let things sink in, and then try to get pumped up to go again.
The second question is how Nadal responds. For the first time, he finds himself getting thumped repeatedly by another player—at the French, Uncle Toni said Nadal had never lost to someone four times in a row, and it's now five. But at the same time, he hasn't been playing as well as he did a year ago, when all the wins and confidence made him look almost untouchable by the second week of the U.S. Open. Can he get back to that level fuelled by defeat rather than victory? Another thing to wait and see.
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TIGNOR: I think we can count on Djokovic’s consistency to keep him up there and in constant contention. His game itself has never been all that up and down; it was always his confidence level, as well as his conditioning, that suffered from swings. He doesn’t win with risk; he wins because he doesn’t have any easily exploitable weaknesses, so it may now be to his opponents to find a solution to him. And yes, coming right back after the Federer loss in Paris should help him recover from any big losses in the near future. Djokovic has to feel now that he really does belong at No. 1; that was something he hadn’t seemed sure of since he failed to crack the Rafa-Rog duopoly back in 2008.
Or something like that. As you said, we’ll have to wait and see. Two other thoughts come up in relation to this. The first is that I keep waiting for the top guys—formerly Rafa and Fed, this year Rafa and Djokovic—to crack just a little. To lose in, say, a quarterfinal of a major, or go out early at a Masters event. I guess I’m still living in the past, when Sampras and Agassi and Becker and guys like that occasionally took an early whipping, when you were happy to see them play twice a year, let alone the five times that Nadal and Djokovic have already faced off in 2011. That’s another question to me for the future: How long can this type of top-line dominance last? I think it’s been great for men’s tennis, but will it ever get old?
My second question is about Djokovic himself. Do we think he has the star quality, the ability to inspire such passionate fan groups, as Rafa and Federer have? Or will he be more of a representative of his own country? It’s hard to imagine him becoming deified, à la Federer—"Djokovic as Religious Experience," anyone?—but being No. 1 does things to people’s perceptions of you.
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TANDON: More than most, Djokovic's play has been influenced by his emotional state. In the past he's gone through unsure periods where he plays passively and gets beaten. That may be what doesn't return, at least for a while. On the other hand, his game does look risky to me when he's playing like he wants to—all those shots that right now land perfectly placed in the corners, but wobble when he's off. That will remain a danger in the high pressure matches, I think, and it'll be especially interesting when he plays Federer again, or someone threatening like Juan Martin del Potro.
The one matchup we haven't seen for a while is Djokovic and Murray, so perhaps we can get reacquainted with that during a part of the season they both like a lot.
The dominance of the top guys is just astonishing. Are they really so good that they can win on their bad days as well as good, or do they just have so few bad days? It's hard to categorize it into one or the other; I've seen evidence of both. And it's not just the top guys—the men's game has been pretty heirarchical for the past few years. You know I don't like the phrase "it's good for tennis," but it certainly allows for big matchups on the big occasions, even if it means the early rounds seem a bit rote.
What it has done for Djokovic, though, is give him instant chops as No. 1. I mean, he had to go through both Federer and Nadal to get there. Two Grand Slams, four Masters, 43 straight wins. Since Nadal won his first Slam, there have been only four occasions when the winner wasn't Federer or Nadal, and three of those four times it's been Djokovic. He's done it the hard way, and just overhauling those two gives him status it would otherwise take much longer to achieve. I don't think he's got quite the cult potential of Federer and Nadal, but he's much more of a showman and much more willing to play around in public. Look, he ate the grass after winning Wimbledon. The morning after he won, he did the usual round of interviews—running an hour late, as usual, though apparently this time is wasn't his fault—and went from being emotive one second to tossing out one-liners the next. It's a different feel. Do you think people will like having a fresh focus, or look back for their familiar figureheads?
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TIGNOR: Nadal talked about possible reasons for the unprecedented dominance in men’s tennis at Wimbledon. He seemed to think this was a stronger generation than past ones because each of the top guys felt the pressure to always perform at their best, to maintain their spot in the “top positions.” They know they can’t afford to give away a match at an important tournament. I guess you could say that Federer’s dominance inspired Nadal, and their co-dominance has now inspired Djokovic. He said something to that effect at Wimbledon; the ultimate proof is that, as you said, it took 43 straight wins, two Slams, and four Masters titles to get him there. If I had to choose between this type of regularity in the finals of big tournaments, and something more random, I think I would take this. It’s not the same as Chris and Martina, who played 17 straight Slams finals; that would have been OK if Martina hadn’t been so dominant in those matches. Rog, Rafa, and Novak have still given us a certain amount of variety and unpredictability within their hegemony.
As far as Le Djoker's star potential, I think it's there. He's certainly not a duller character than Rafa or Fed, and I love his game as much as those two guys'. It isn't as immediately unique or eye-catching, but he makes versatility, consistency, and defense into a snappy tennis cocktail—a cocktail with a slightly acquired taste. Along the way, his personality has grown as well. Where he used to seem brash for his britches, he's now the tour's leading gentleman—winning helps your graciousness quotient, too. The big upward shift will happen if he becomes a dominant champion; that gives you an automatic star aura.
I mentioned Chris and Martina above, which reminds me that we haven't talked about the women at all yet. What did you make of the French and Wimbledon, and their effect on that perennial trouble spot, “the state of the WTA”? This is always a two-headed question for me. On the one hand, I saw many tweets from fellow writers and fans and tennis junkies about how great the two events were for the women. And for the most part I agreed. Some superb matches—Schiavone-Jankovic, Schiavone-Pavlyuchenkova, Sharapova-Garcia in Paris, Date Krumm-Venus, Bartoli-Serena, Lisicki-Li at Wimbledon (I'm sure I'm forgetting a few)—and two new faces in the winner’s circle, in Kvitova and Li, made them compelling in a much less predictable way than the men’s tournaments. I personally don’t mind not having name players in the latter stages of these tournaments; I’m just as happy to see other players get their shot at glory, and see how they react to it. There’s been a joy in discovery at these last two women’s tournaments.
Then there’s the other hand, which I encounter when I leave Twitter and go to my tennis club. There nobody knows an Azarenka from a Pironkova from a Kvitova; they say the women all look the same and play the same way. I disagree, but I still don’t like hearing that. I want to see new faces, but at the same time, without stars and familiar stories, the tour can start to take on a minor-league vibe, especially when compared to the men’s side, with its huge celebrities (of course, this is an American talking; you can't say Li's win didn't draw an audience). So anyway, as always, I’m torn when it comes to tennis. I like it enough to enjoy watching whomever is winning, but at the same time I don't want to feel as if it's a tiny niche sport with ever-declining mass appeal.
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TANDON: There are probably a few layers to it. The increased uniformity creates the conditions for heirarchy—a more uniform calendar, more uniform surfaces and more uniform playing styles. It makes sense: you're better on X surface playing X way against X players and that's what you face most of the year, then you're going to win most of the time.
But on the other hand, this is exactly the same scenario that seems to have created utter anarchy on the women's side, so maybe the top guys are just that much better than the rest. It's a cycle, too, with periods of anarchy and heirarchy, change and continuity. Right now we've got two extremes.
In the end, I like having both fields there because you get a bit of both—no need to decide what you prefer. The best combination—look for the tight women's matches early, and then gear up for the big men's matches in the later rounds.
And things change. As I keep saying, at the end of the 1990s it was the exact opposite—great men's early-round matchups, big women's showdowns later. We tend to separate the men and women, but people experience everyone together and having both sides brings variety and balance. The good thing about dominance at the top is that it's simple, accessible, large-scale—lots of mass appeal. That's what you have with the men right now. The state of competition on the women's side is too complicated at the moment and requires too much time, investment and knowledge to really understand; it's hard to get mass appeal from that. But if you're really into it, there's a lot more to chew on. I certainly find a lot more intrigue when first scanning the women's draws than the men's these days. So you take your pick depending on who you are. The men for your tennis club, the women for your Twitter group.
The big win for the women this year, I think, is that we're starting to regularly experience good matches again. The problem for a while was that there would be all these great matchups that almost invariably fizzled, but now you're seeing a lot of exciting contests, at least in the early rounds. Almost all the Centre Court matches at Wimbledon went three sets, for example. The next big step is doing that in the later stages. It's been a long time since there was a real classic in the semifinals or finals. There are a whole parade of players—Kvitova, Li, Schiavone, Wozniacki, and so many more—but they need to stick around to stick in people's minds like Clijsters, Serena, Venus, Sharapova do, and had to do to get there.
It's about familiarity and legitmacy, and both are achieved by memorable victories against memorable opponents. Federer got to the top of the mountain, Nadal scaled him and then Djokovic did the same to Nadal. The stars make the matches, but first, it's the matches that make them stars.
“A lot of people believe competition is like life. That’s not how I see it. I love to win, I love the competition, and I’ll try my best until the last moment. But what happens away from the court is not going to affect what happens on the court. We can try our best on the court and when we are off it we can be close friends, because we are talking 10 minutes before the match.”
These words were spoken by Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon this year. He was referring, in the opening line, to those aging hellions John McEnroe and Jimmy Connors and their contention that today’s male pros like each other too much, that the sport lacks edge. Nadal, as you can see, wasn’t buying it. He thinks that the matches themselves, even when they’re contested in a sporting manner, provide plenty of compelling friction on their own.
In the past, I’ve looked at this generational difference from the spectator’s standpoint. I like today’s sportsmanship, but I also love hearing the old Jimbo-Mac-Nasty war stories from the roughneck days of the 70s and 80s. I love seeing the world’s No. 1, Novak Djokovic, set an example by applauding his opponent’s good shots, even when he’s behind in the score. But I also like to laugh at the recollection of the “Cough Classic” between John McEnroe and Boris Becker in the late-1980s. In a highly testy contest at the Paris Indoors, Becker appeared to intentionally cough every time McEnroe started to serve. This got McEnroe so enraged that he started doing it back to Becker. Oh, for the days when men were little boys.
Two weeks ago, I picked up a racquet again for the first time this year. Since then, I’ve been looking at this behavioral divide from the perspective of the players themselves. Mainly I’ve been wondering how the kids today manage to pull it off.
For example: In one match I played recently, my opponent, who is also a friend, began to take just slightly longer between serves than I liked. I found myself waiting in the return position impatiently. This didn’t bother me through the first few games, because I was winning them. But when I started to miss a few balls, it seemed to me that my opponent began to take even more time before serving. Was it my imagination, or had he added an extra pre-serve ball bounce? Was he spending a few more seconds shifting his body around at the baseline before finally going into his motion? I don’t know if it was perception or reality, but by the middle of the set I was muttering under my breath, “Jesus, will you hurry up?” As I said, my opponent and I are friends, and we were friends after this match as well. I forgot all about it in minutes once we got off the court. It's on court when things go a little haywire.
Another example: Again I was playing a friend and regular opponent. Again I got an early lead. Again I started to lose said lead. Again I became annoyed. It wasn’t any perceived gamesmanship that was bugging me. What got on my nerves this time was his infuriating ability to get to shots of mine that I was sure were going to go for winners. After his third scrambling stab backhand came crawling back over the net, I practically shouted, “Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” as I ran up to hit it. When another one crawled over a few points later, I rushed my swing in irritation and buried the ball into the net. “Hate this baby tennis!” I semi-yelled, not quite loud enough to be heard.
It wasn’t like this was anything new, either. I know this opponent is fast and an excellent defender. Once, a few years ago, he was running my shots down in a similarly enraging manner and forcing me into horrendous errors when I finally managed to put a ball past him. He said, with total sincerity, “Hey, great shot.” I turned my back, looked at the court darkly, and muttered . . . well, I can’t tell you what I muttered exactly. Let’s just say it ended with “you,” but it didn’t start with “thank.”
Maybe it’s just me. Maybe I’m a bad example. I remember nearly shedding tears of hatred—if there is such a thing—while playing a nemesis of mine in the 14-and-unders. Maybe that’s not normal. Or maybe it’s my generation. I grew up watching McEnroe and Connors and hearing that the sport was no longer a place for gentlemen, that it was, as Jimbo told us,“a goddamn war out there.”
But I don’t think I’m all that strange. I’m guessing most tennis players have felt at least a tiny bit of blind, uncontrollable disdain for a perfectly nice person on the other side of the net. “The heat of competition” is a phrase for a reason, and it describes a very real, if utterly irrational, phenomenon. All of which makes me wonder how Nadal and his colleagues at the top of the game today avoid it. They play for such high stakes, and they play each other so often: How is it possible for them not to take their matches personally?
From all appearances, they don’t, and the trend is only increasing with each new star. Federer never had any time or use for gamesmanship; I remember being surprised in his press conference in 2004 at Roland Garros, after his loss to Gustavo Kuerten, when an obviously frustrated Federer mentioned how much he liked playing Kuerten because, essentially, there was no nonsense during his matches, no attempts to intimidate or agitate. Nadal, as we can see above, is able to keep competition from getting personal. And if anything, the two Grand Slam winners who have come after them, Novak Djokovic and Juan Martin del Potro, have taken on-court camaraderie to greater heights. Each of them will embrace their opponent in defeat and happily applaud the other guy's good shots. The Djokovic-del Potro third-rounder at Roland Garros this year may have been the most sporting tennis match I’ve ever seen.
I loved watching that match (even if it will never be as funny to think about as the Cough Classic). I’m so used to the fellow feeling exhibited by the current generation of men that anything less would have seemed completely unnatural. But bad feelings between competitors aren't really unnatural, are they? How can two guys going toe-to-toe for hours and not start to take what happens between them at least a little personally? The top players have learned to do it.
And maybe that’s why they’re top players. Maybe, rather than being a stylistic change or a generational shift—from the roughnecks of yore to the gentlemen of today—today’s sportsmanship is the result of an evolutionary process: Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, and del Potro have learned that they play their best when they don’t make it personal. It a little like the Bjorn Borg phenomenon. The Swede, a self-described madman as a junior, went ballistic in a televised match, which he subsequently lost. From that point on, he decided that he would have to bury his emotions if he wanted to play his best tennis. This was not an original thought; what was unique about Borg was that he could actually do it—for the rest of his career. Part of what makes the top guys today unique is their ability to control and channel their emotions in a productive way. That, as much as anything else, may explain why all of the guys I’ve mentioned have Grand Slam wins, while the prickliest and most outwardly negative of them, Andy Murray, doesn’t.
It seems that Jimbo was wrong after all. Tennis isn’t best thought of as a “goddamn war.” It’s best thought of as . . . a tennis match. It’s best to think like Nadal does in his quote at the top of this article. The fact that he knows that he's going to be friendly with his opponent when he walks off the court helps him keep the sport in perspective and, more important, keep any potentially distracting anger in check.
If only I could watch and learn from today’s kids. But it’s probably too late. I’m an evolutionary relic, I guess, a species destined to let the “heat of competition” get to him. I’ll keep trying, though. Next time, when I’m in the throes of a meltdown and my opponent says “nice shot,” I’ll try to put a “thank” in front of the “you.”
“It’s a historic victory and a dream come true,” Spain’s Davis Cup captain, Albert Costa, said on Sunday.
Normally, you might think that Costa would reserve big words like these for a win in the Cup finale. After all, his nation has won four of them in the last decade, and this weekend’s tie in Austin merely sent them on to the semifinals. But it wasn’t the round that mattered to Costa; it was the location.
“We never won in the States,” he continued. “For us it is a great breakthrough.”
It can be easy to forget, in light of those four recent titles by Spain, that it’s the U.S. that is still the all-time Cup-winningest country, with 32 titles and 29 runner-up appearances. It can be easy to forget that for someone like Costa, who played with Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, as well as his counterpart captain this weekend, Jim Courier, beating the U.S. in tennis must still feel like a monumental achievement for a relatively small country with a relatively short history of top-level dominance in this sport. It’s also easy to forget that just three years ago, on a fast indoor hard court in Winston-Salem, N.C., a similarly constituted American team swept the first three matches against a similarly constituted Spanish team, losing just one set along the way. Keeping all of those things mind, you can understand why Costa pulled out the big words, about breakthroughs and dreams coming true.
Watching the tie, what felt different this time around were the mental attitudes of the two teams, especially the attitude that the Spanish singles players, Feliciano Lopez and David Ferrer, brought to their matches. It was an away tie, on a court that was specially designed to favor their opponents, but they acted as if they were the ones feeding off the energy in the building, while Andy Roddick and Mardy Fish looked unsure of themselves at crucial moments. Lopez and Ferrer have both had their moments of fragility in the past—the former blew a lead against Roger Federer in Madrid this year, and Ferrer has caved against top players. But Davis Cup has brought out their best. While Rafael Nadal has been in and out of the competition during his career, Lopez and Ferrer, along with Lopez’s usual doubles partner, Fernando Verdasco, have helped form the backbone of this new dynasty. Lopez won a critical match over Juan Martin del Potro in the final three years ago in Argentina; in the following year’s final, Ferrer came from two sets down to beat Radek Stepanek 8-6 in the fifth. Spain went on to win the Cup both times.
Ferrer is No. 6 in the world and was at least an even bet to beat Roddick or Fish. The crucial match was the very first one, between Fish and Lopez, which the Spaniard won 8-6 in the fifth set; by ranking, Fish, No. 8, was a solid favorite over Lopez, No. 23. I’m not sure what verdict should be rendered about Fish’s performance in this match, and in his loss to Ferrer. It was his first Davis Cup tie as the U.S.'s No. 1 player and putative leader, though Fish maintained that Roddick was still the guy “we all bounce off.” Fish showed some heart by saving a lot of break points and never folding when he was behind. It’s hard to fault him for losing a long and close four-setter to the ultra-solid Ferrer, two days after losing a long and close five-setter to Lopez. Fish summed up the positive, but also heartbreaking side of his weekend: “I’ve played five Davis Cup singles ties in a row and every one has gone at least four hours. I’ve lost three of them and it’s really frustrating to lose that one. To play how I’ve played this tie and not come away with a win, it’s pretty tough.”
It’s hard to disagree with that, but at the same time I didn’t feel like Fish made the most of the advantage he had coming forward in the court, especially on break points. With his forehand as shaky as it was, he wasn’t going to out-rally Ferrer, and while he did try to press Lopez, it still felt like he left opportunities to press the Spaniard, especially on his famously vulnerable backhand side, on the table there as well. Lopez’s final backhand pass was as brilliant as it was surprising, but Fish’s approach gave him too much time to set up. Fish is a Top Tenner now and the anchorman for the U.S., but it’s taken him a very long time to get to both of those places. At the advanced age of soon-to-be-30, can he get himself to believe, deep down, that he belongs there?
There’s no disgrace in losing to Lopez and Ferrer, both of whom played inspired tennis, but all three singles matches were up for the grabbing, including Roddick’s straight-set loss to Ferrer. Roddick opened that one by gunning his forehand like it was 2003, but even the faster surface didn’t allow him to keep gunning for long. The first crucial moment came at the end of the first set, when Ferrer, at the behest of Costa, made a correct challenge on a ball that appeared to have given the tiebreaker to Roddick; the second key point came in the middle of the second set, when Roddick had an opportunity to go up a double break at 4-0 but couldn’t make it happen. Still, while those two moments could have swung things considerably toward Roddick's side, I never got the feeling that he believed he was going to win this match. It’s been said in the past that Andy has a strong sense of pecking order—he believes he should beat those below him, often to the point of extreme aggravation if he doesn’t, but that he has trouble believing the same thing against those above him. Ferrer, a solid No. 6, seemed to command that kind of respect from Roddick. Even in front of his hometown fans, Roddick couldn’t rally; he went out with two double faults.
There was a lot of talk a few months ago that this surface was too fast and foreign even to be legal, but if anything it was the Spaniards who used it more effectively. If anything, it was their team that had the closest thing to a serve-and-volleyer, in Lopez; and Ferrer, while he rallied most of the time, took his chances to sneak forward when he saw them—the guy can volley, too. The away crowd, the foreign court, the veteran opposition: The Spaniards faced it all down and completely reversed the result from Winston-Salem in 2007. It was the Spanish team who used the Davis Cup moment, the pressure of playing for their country and the energy of their teammates on the sidelines, in a way that the Americans didn’t. This was as impressive a performance as the Spanish team has delivered in their Cup-winning years. It’s what a dynasty looks like in action.
It was also what Davis Cup looks like in action. After two weeks at Wimbledon, I had thought I would have had enough tennis for the time being. But Davis Cup is something different from other forms of tennis. By the time Fish and Lopez had split sets, by the time the Texas crowd was whooping it up and the Spanish team—could they have looked any more foreign?—was on their feet, I was pulled back in. All the emotions were there, from crushing disappointment for Fish to absolute respect for Ferrer.
My favorite moment, though, was seeing Lopez, after he'd missed what seemed like 999 backhand passes, finally pull one off at match point. The audience was stunned into silence. Fish was stunned enough to throw his head up in disbelief as the ball landed in. More stunned than anyone was Lopez. He stopped for a second before reacting with scream and a clutch of his head. A backhand pass at match point at 7-6 in the fifth set in Davis Cup? As Lopez's captain said, that’s what they call a dream come true.
For much of its 125 years, tennis has seemed to exist outside history. It was sealed off from the professional sports revolution for decades, hidden behind club walls; its signature tournaments remained unpaid and uncommercialized all the way until 1968. Even now the biggest of those tournaments enforces a dress code that isn’t even “so last century”—it’s so the century before the last one.
This is the point in the season when the game goes into a full-blown time warp. After two weeks in their all-whites at Wimbledon, the birthplace of tennis, many ATP pros jump straight across the Atlantic to visit America’s version of the All England Club, the Newport Casino. This building, the first designed by McKim, Mead, & White, is where the U.S. Nationals (now known as the U.S. Open) were first held, in 1881. The tournament, and big-time tennis, left the old-line resort town and its rows of mansions behind long ago—the Nationals moved to Forest Hills in 1914—but for one brief, strange, and electrified moment in July of 1965, the staid old town and its staid old sport found themselves perfectly aligned with history, and the rapid changes in it that the 1960s were producing.
From July 6 to July 12 of that year, the Casino didn’t know what hit it. To start, for the first time in its 85-year history, professional tennis players were allowed to walk on its lawns. Ten male pros, including Rod Laver, Pancho Gonzalez, Ken Rosewall, and Pancho Segura, were invited there by tournament director Jimmy Van Alen, a child of Newport's mansion row and as unlikely a revolutionary as history has known. “A lot of people,” said one of Van Alen's "guinea pigs," Butch Buchholz, “thought the grass would turn brown when we pros stepped on it." The event that they put on may still stand as the most unconventional in the sport’s history.
Van Alen is most famous now as the inventor of the tiebreaker, even though he hated the 12-point version that became the standard; he wanted “sudden death,” in the form of a 9-point breaker, rather than what he derisively termed the “lingering death” of the 12-pointer. By 1965, Van Alen, a ukele-playing former captain of the Cambridge (England) tennis team who had grown up with Rembrandts on the walls of his bedroom—Bud Collins dubbed him the “Newport Bolshevik”—had been on a decade-long war against deuces of all sorts. It had all started when, as tournament director in 1954, he had watched in an ever-escalating rage as two lesser-known American players, Hamilton Richardson and Straight Clark (are those classic tennis names or what?), played a final that ended with these tongue-twisting scores: 6-3, 9-7, 12-14, 6-8, 10-8. The match lasted long enough that Van Alen had to move the doubles final, which included Rosewall and Lew Hoad, and which most of the fans had come to see, to a smaller side court without enough seats. From then on, Van Alen was hellbent on ridding the sport of those “damnable deuce games.”
“Any fathead can do better than this,” he said.
But the tiebreaker was only the first of Van Alen’s many hare-brained schemes for revolutionizing tennis and making it palatable for the masses (the masses that this blue blood had never met). None of them, including the tiebreaker, were even considered by his fellow amateur tennis officials—they thought Van Alen was a traitor to his sport, if not his class. So he took his money and his schemes to the dark side, to the pros. Van Alen’s experimental tournament at the Casino in ’65 finally gave him a chance to do tennis his own loony, and fun, way.
He offered $10,000 in total prize money, a princely sum in those days, but the cash came with a catch. The players had to play by his rules, known as VASSS—Van Alen Simplified Scoring System. That included the tiebreaker, which had yet to be named and was referred to at that point as an “extra game” (for some reason, Van Alen's original breaker was an eight-pointer; naturally the first one played ended at 4-4, which necessitated a second tiebreaker). VASSS also jettisoned the traditional knock-out tournament in favor of round-robin groups. Games and sets were the next to go; matches were scored point-by-point, ping-pong style, up to 31. Even more ridiculous, the money that each player had earned—Van Alen awarded $5 per point won—was tallied up and flashed on a scoreboard above the court. When a match was over, Van Alen stood beside the court and rang a bell.
“Sounds half-VASSS to me,” Segura quipped.
And what about the court itself? It wasn’t safe from Van Alen, either. In a sign of how much has changed, he had a new service line installed three feet behind the baseline, to deter the serve-and-volleyers who then dominated the game to an often-boring degree. The pros generally went along with the experiment, though Pancho Gonzalez threatened to quit mid-match and yelled, “How did I get myself talked into this?” (Van Alen’s wife, Cindy, watching from the sidelines, remarked that Pancho “must be a horrible person to live with.” When Gonzalez got wind of the comment, he repeated it incredulously to his friend Segura. Little Pancho wasn’t all that surprised: “She doesn’t know the half of it, does she buddy?” he said.) The worst of it for the pros may have come at night, when Van Alen held parties in the Casino and performed on the ukelele.
In the end, the one thing that didn’t change were the winners. Laver finished first in points, Rosewall second. And while only the “extra game,” the tiebreaker, survived from his scoring system, Van Alen did introduce another element to pro tennis that would make a strong comeback in the following decade: electric lighting for night matches.
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That's where the second part of our Newport summer of ’65 saga picks up—with electricity. Two weeks after Van Alen took down his lights at the Casino, another, very different revolutionary figure arrived in town, similarly bent on shocking the traditionalists in his own line of work. On July 25, Bob Dylan went electric at the Newport Folk Festival.
Dylan, along with his partner in pure-minded leftist politics, Joan Baez, had been the darling of that gathering the previous two years, and he was the headline act again in ’65. This time though, he chose the festival to make his break with folk purity. Rather than the old socialist-style work shirts and jeans he’d always worn, Dylan showed up in a leather jacket. Rather than strum his acoustic guitar—symbol of all that was uncommercial and authentic—he plugged in an electric guitar—symbol of all that was popular and thus base and stupid—for the first time anywhere. Rather than sing with Baez, he was backed by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band, which included Mike Bloomfield on lead guitar. The band played and the crowd booed until, as legend has it, old folkie and former Dylan backer Pete Seeger pulled the plug on the whole thing. Dylan, of course, had the last word. After his electric debacle, he wrapped up his later acoustic set with a message to the pure-minded folk cult: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” Dylan was officially a star; he had left purity and politics behind. Rock and roll, for the first time, was going to be taken seriously. The quasi-socialist youth movement that had grown up around folk was dead.
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Is it merely a coincidence that these two events, Van Alen’s wacko tennis tournament and Dylan going electric, happened within two weeks of each other? While it’s true that one had nothing to do with the other, the ideas behind them were the same, and they were part of the same set of changes that transformed the country over the course of that decade. In both cases, a refuge from commercialism—amateur tennis and folk music—was successfully invaded. Not long after, those refuges would disappear.
The Newport Casino was the second old-guard tennis establishment to (grudgingly) welcome the pros; Longwood in Boston had done the same the year before when it held the U.S. Pro Championships there for the first time. Looked at chronologically, these were the warm-up events that were necessary before the pros could finally leap the highest club walls of all, those at the All England Club, which they did when they were invited to play an eight-man tournament there in the fall of ’67.
In this sense, tennis was running right alongside the rest of 60s history. That decade was, more than anything else, about the collapsing of hierarchies and dissolving of boundaries. The inspiration was the end of segregation in the South, but the idea radiated everywhere. Martin Luther King's famous use of “free” made it a buzzword everywhere (free love, free jazz). Old boundaries between men and women started to fall; in 1968, the same year that professional tennis players made their Grand Slam debuts, women were allowed to enroll at Yale and Princeton for the first time (it never fails to boggle my mind that this happened so recently). At the same time, Pop Art permanently erased the divide between fine art and commercial art. Bob Dylan, starting at Newport in ’65, erased the boundaries between rock and folk, between commercial and non-commercial music.
“Open” was tennis's version of “free”; open tennis was a call for freedom from the outdated restrictions of amateurism. James Van Alen, the Bolshevik of Newport, may have seemed slightly cracked at the time, and much of his vision went unheeded. But he’s a crucial figure in the sport’s history not just because he invented the tiebreaker. By desecrating the previously pure Casino lawns for three years—he held his VASSS event in 1966 and ’67 as well—he made it easier for the staid old sport to collapse another hierarchy: the ancient distinction between gentlemen (amateurs) and tradesmen (professionals). He let the pros inside the club, and they never left. Once opened, the sport has thrived beyond even his wildest imaginings.
It’s doubtful that Jimmy Van Alen played “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” on his ukelele on the final night at the Casino in that revolutionary summer of '65. But it would have been appropriate.
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Enjoy the Davis Cup, as well as the pro tennis from Newport, this weekend. I'll be back on Monday.
