25 posts categorized "August 2011"
 NEW YORK—Tennis needs contrasts in styles and personalities, we're often told, and that's just what we got on the Grandstand today. While they’re about the same height and were sporting the same black ponytails, it was hard to imagine two players whose approaches to the game differed more than Marion Bartoli’s and Christina McHale’s.
On one side of the court, in between points, Bartoli was executing the following extended ritual: Turn around, bob and weave like a boxer, do deep knee bend, get back up and do sneaker-squeaking split-step, turn back around, bob and weave a little more, finish with not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, not six, but seven fist-pumps. Plus a thigh slap, can’t forget the thigh slap; one time the French eccentric was so agitated that she slapped her right thigh with her right hand, and then reached over and slapped it again, harder, with her left hand: “Bad thigh.” No wonder Bartoli was having trouble running by the end of the first set.
On the other side you of the net you had 19-year-old Christina McHale of New Jersey. What was she doing? Not a lot. Even after she lost a tough rally, the most we got from McHale was a quick turn, an index finger quickly pointed toward her towel in the corner, and a couple of polite words to the ball kid. McHale is low-key; you might even call her no key. She would be a normal person in any other walk of life, but in the age of the grunt and the fist-pump and the “Vamos!”, McHale is an oasis of reserve on a tennis court. Watching Bartoli do her calisthenics, I started to think, “Come on, Christina, do something, stop being so lazy!”
But it was McHale, after an unsure start, who grew stronger, and seemingly faster, as the match wore on. Afterward, Bartoli said that she was most impressed with McHale’s movement, and McHale herself agreed that that’s her strongest suit. But I was more impressed with her understated perseverance, especially when it looked like she was going to go down 1-4 in the second set. McHale saved two break points and won that game with a smooth kick serve out wide that forced Bartoli to hit from above her head. It didn’t appear to be a crucial moment, but when McHale broke in the next game and found her footing after that, it was clear that it was. It was a big day for the local girl—Grandstand crowd, No. 8 seed as an opponent, natiional TV audience—and her nerves could easily have gotten the best of her, but her natural calm amid the storm served her well.
McHale was asked about how she held nerves together, especially when she went up in the second set and could start to see the finish line. Her answer was exceptionally teenage, but it also revealed a willful streak beneath the shy exterior.
“Yeah,” McHale said, “I knew that, like, I had to try. I had to try and compete really hard in the second set because she was going to try even harder.”
McHale has learned about desperate opponents the hard way. This spring she led Sara Errani 5-0 in the third set at the French Open before losing 9-7 and breaking down in tears. She said then that she had “panicked”; today McHale said that that match had taught her an important lesson: “That was a really, really tough loss for me,” she said, smiling slightly at the terrible memory, “but I think it’s helped me learn to close out matches earlier.”
Every tennis player wants to close out matches as soon as possible, of course. Every tennis player tells herself to focus, to “Come on!”, to try harder. But you get the feeling that McHale has the ability and the even-keel demeanor to make her desires and intentions into reality, to put theory into practice. She knew, today, that she couldn’t let Bartoli hang around. She knew she couldn’t panic again. So she gave herself a little spark with a rare fist-pump in the middle of the second set and won going away.
Dogged grinding, both the physical and the mental kind, is a big part of the McHale game, but there’s more to enjoy about it. She has deceptive pop on her serve—her hardest deliveries clocked in around 110 today. And she plays within herself; when she gets a short ball, she places it rather than belting it. She learns on the job; after that slow start, McHale eventually found Bartoli’s weakness—her side-to-side court coverage—and exploited it with crosscourt-down the line combinations.
McHale has close-to-textbook strokes that don’t appear like they would break down under stress easily, and she’s not one-dimensional—she’ll follow a flat first serve with a kick, and a low slice backhand with a high, looping forehand. She’s a counterpuncher by nature—think Caroline Wozniacki or Lleyton Hewitt—with good returns and passing shots, but like those players she’s not good at punishing short balls or generating her own pace. But that can be a blessing in disguise, because it keeps her from being reckless. She knows she can’t win a point with one shot.
By the time McHale walked into the press room afterward, the dreaded word—“Oudin”—was already in the air, and reporters were already asking her if she had “any idea what this ride was going to be like going forward now?” (McHale’s answer: “No.”) Have we found the next Oudin, and is that a good thing for Christina McHale?
Like Oudin was two years ago, McHale is an appealingly innocent figure. She talked today about how excited she was to get “Rafa’s autograph” the first time she came to the Open. She’s as reserved off the court as she is on it, and she may not translate as “America’s sweetheart” the way Oudin, the blonde, “come on!”-yelling, Georgia girl, did. And as for McHale's game and its future, who knows. She doesn’t have the explosive power that wins Grand Slams, but she seems to be a thinker and a no-nonsense competitor. Many tennis fans will like her simply because she doesn’t make a sound when she hits the ball.
The ride starts now. McHale faces Maria Kirilenko, a similar type of grinder, next, and would likely get Sam Stosur after that. That’s the future. Today, on match point, as Bartoli jumped up and down and took two more huge practice swings for the road, McHale, the woman who doesn’t win points with one shot, did just that, with an ace up the middle. She closed the way she wanted to—fast and early—and she closed like a star.
 NEW YORK—It started to feel more like the U.S. Open I know and sometimes love today. The first sign came at approximately 2:00 P.M. this afternoon. At that moment I shifted, hopefully, into what appeared to be the shortest and quickest line for Southern BBQ sandwiches in the food court. And then I stood. And stood. And stood some more. It was unclear what the hold-up was, but there was a lot of standing going on in general. Still, in the end the brisket was good; at $10, it even felt like a bargain.
While the temperature got a little hotter today, and the crowds a lot thicker, it wasn’t an afternoon packed with marquee action. That’s what happens when the first round is spread over three days and six separate night and day sessions; by comparison, it takes Wimbledon and the French Open at total of two sessions to get through the same number of matches. It makes the early days in Queens the easiest to keep up with, but I miss the madness of the other Slams.
Couple that spread-thin feel with a draw that features 32 seeds, and you can go a long way before you see an especially memorable or meaningful match. But this is the Open, and everywhere you go, there’s something to see, and think, and hear, and smell, and like, and maybe learn, along the way. Before they get away from me forever, here are a few thoughts from a first Tuesday at Flushing Meadows.
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It’s the sound of tennis that makes all the difference
On Court 4, Nikolay Davydenko and Ivan Dodig are hitting the ball back and forth, moving each across the baseline, trading forceful two-handed backhands and sliding forehand gets. It’s good stuff, good enough that gasps—or at least fast intakes of breath—are heard from the crowd during lon rallies. One woman, seeing a Davydenko seemingly impossible squash shot retrieval, even puts her hands to her mouth and shouts, “Oh my goodness.”
She might be excitable, in her polite way, but she’s not wrong. It's good stuff, with the mix of pace and precision that most of us come to the outer courts to see. At the same time, though, Davydenko and Dodig are playing standard modern baseline tennis. Each has a two-hander, and neither comes to the net during these points. The rallies are long, and while they take each player all over the court, you wouldn’t exactly call them varied. In other words, this is the type of tennis that we routinely hear derided as boring and one-dimensional.
And, when I imagine watching it on TV, I can see where it might be dull. But it isn’t. Seeing the ball and the players move this quickly at close range is part of the appeal, but so is the simple sound that their strings make at contact. It lets you know, indisputably, that some ball is being played out there.
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Can we now equate “stylish” with “Federer-esque”?
Frank Dancevic, the veteran Canadian who qualified here but lost in the first round today, has a peculiarly stylish game for someone you would have to label as a journeyman. I have to check myself, though, when I say he has style; is that only because his game resembles Roger Federer’s? Dancevic has the one-handed backhand that he can come over or slice, the same easy motion on his serve, and he hits his forehand with same cross-the-body swing path. That, in today’s terms, equals beauty on a tennis court.
Federer has been so high-profile for so long, and been called the paragon of tennis elegance for so long, that I wonder if he owns the entire category at this point. It now seems difficult to convince some fans, particularly those of a traditionalist bent, that a player with a two-handed backhand can be called “stylish" at all.
Anyway, I enjoy watching Dancevic play while he's serving. Then his opponent, Marsel Ilhan, of Turkey, takes the ball, and I know Dancevic, for all of his subtle flair, is in trouble. Ilhan’s first delivery sounds like a rifle shot. Only Roger Federer has ever gotten points for style in tennis.
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Keeping tennis players straight can be tough
Dmitry Tursunov is serving on Court 10. He’s cruising around in his peeved surfer style, casual in body language but edgy in demeanor. There are very few spectators as his match with Steve Darcis begins. Two guys walk up near me and start watching.
“This is the Australian guy, right?” one of them asks.
Tursunov’s baseball hat over his curly blonde hair has apparently led them to think that he’s Lleyton Hewitt. They seem to be happy with that idea.
“This guy’s crazy,” the other one says, with obvious relish, as they take their seats.
******
Luxembourg has a flag
Gilles Muller is on Court 9, perhaps the least visible of all the side courts here. It’s stuck in the middle of a row of them, with no bleachers. But this has not deterred the Muller faithful. There are approximately four of them. Their signature seems to be that they paint their lips and the area of their cheeks to the left and right of them, in the color of the flag of Luxembourg; it's basically a multi-colored stripe across the middle of the face, and it looks weird. But they’re smart enough to know that unlike many countries—say, Spain and the United States and now Serbia—no one has a clue what the flag of Luxembourg looks like. So they’ve helped us out by emblazoning their T-shirts with the word “Luxembourg.” Why one of them is in a cowboy hat and another has a Statue of Liberty foam cap on, I have no idea.
The four of them are not loud, but they are indefatigable. They chant Muller’s name. They chant “Hey, hey, hey.” And then . . . they chant Muller’s name again. I can’t help but think that it’s a sad day in New York when the rowdiest people on the grounds are a bunch of guys from Luxembourg.
Muller wins and high fives all of them afterward.
*****
A player can have a bad year, and so can a fan
I saw Adrian Mannarino play for the first time in Melbourne, where he completely befuddled Ryan Harrison in the first round. I wasn’t impressed by Mannarino, really, but I was intrigued by his strokes and his game. He seemed to do a lot with very little. He cruised about, used abbreviated swings, and had good hands. And he always looked like he had just gotten out of bed.
I enjoyed watching him live again in Indian Wells, and on TV during the clay season. Mannarino was, in my mind, a tiny twig on the Miloslav Mecir family tree (and yes, that is the nerdiest phrase I’ve ever written). But the tide started to turn in my opinion at Wimbledon, when the Frenchman walked on Centre Court with gimmicky black sneakers (he wasn’t allowed to play in them) and then put up feeble resistance against Roger Federer. Today, though, my Mannarino fandom reached its low point, during his dispiriting, plainly boring straight-set loss to Florian Mayer.
By the time I get there, in the second set, Mannarino appears to be hitting forehands out intentionally. He’s pretty much clearing Court 11 of fans along the way; at each changeover, more people flee. Then, when he’s down 0-5 in the second, Mannarino decides to argue with the chair umpire over . . . something. The ump pretends not hear him, then gives him a curt nod when he’s done, as if to say, “Are you finished?” Mannarino looks into the crowd in disgust. A woman in the front row purses her lips and tilts her head at him: “Boo hoo.”
The nice thing about tennis, though, is that there’s always someone else to watch. Today it’s Mannarino’s opponent, Mayer. From his awkward, wing-flapping service motion to his super-flat strokes to his jumping backhand—it looks he’s celebrating the chance to hit that shot—the 27-year-old German is unorthodox in all ways, and streaky as hell.
We’ll see if I do any better as a Florian Mayer fan.
*****
Sometimes you can’t explain it
Ana Ivanovic, who is finishing the day in Ashe, is skinnier than ever. Her legs taper down to next to nothing by the time you get to her shoes. Her lack of heft doesn’t seem to be helping her in the first set today; Ivanovic’s shots lack their old pop to start.
When she goes down 1-3 in the first set, I feel like I’m watching a re-run from yesterday afternoon, when another recent star gone south, Melanie Oudin, continued her run of bad, nervous play. Ivanovic looks worried, even fatalistic. She’s tried a lot of coaches over the years, a lot of changes, a lot of fixes, to her service toss especially. Watching her avoid stepping on lines, and even, it appears, on ball marks—between points, she’ll suddenly take an extra long stride out of nowhere—I find myself wishing that she would stop thinking so much.
But that’s the problem when you’re losing in tennis—there’s no one answer, and that includes the “just let it flow and don’t think” advice that we hear so often. Have you ever tried to not think? Not all that easy, is it?
All seems lost and Ivanovic appears doomed to eternal frustration. A phrase for this post comes to my mind that seems appropriate for Ivanovic: “Every tennis tournament has 127 unhappy endings.” Contrary to what we're taught and what we hope, most of the time the fairy tales don’t come true. Even the most talented players, even with all the hard work in the world, never solve their problems or get out of their own way.
As I write those words, though, Ivanovic starts winning. Serves find the box, ground strokes find the court, and her opponent starts to miss. She finishes the set with a forehand winner on the line and lets out an old-fashioned, full-throated, “Adje!” Who knows why, after all the struggles, it all came out OK today.
Every tournament has 127 unhappy endings; fortunately it also has a lot of surprises.
 NEW YORK—The story of the 2011 U.S. Open thus far? It’s got nothing to do with Maria Sharapova's latest shriek or Petra Kvitova's first-round defeat. In fact, it’s not about any player or human at all. It’s about an egg.
When the Wall St. Journal reported this past weekend that Novak Djokovic has spent time in a pressurized, egg-shaped chamber, tennis took a trip into sporting science fiction. The egg, made by CVAC systems in California, simulates conditions at various altitudes and, according to the company, may allow athletes to absorb more oxygen. They get the benefits of exercise while sitting still, and they’re bodies recover faster and adapt to various conditions more easily.
On a snowy day this past winter I had a chance to see the egg in question, when I took a trip across the Hudson and spent an afternoon with Gordon Uehling, III, a former pro who is in the process of building a high-tech athletic academy, called CourtSense, in the area around his family’s home in Alpine, N.J.
Uehling, who worked with Djokovic at the Open last year and coached Christina McHale before she left to train with the USTA last season, has big ambitions for CourtSense and spares no expense to try to fulfil them—he’s a likeable, intelligent guy, and I came away impressed with his enthusiasm for tennis and for experimentation and systematic training in general. He has an indoor court and one made of Roland Garros clay at his family’s compound. He’s taken over two local indoor clubs and staffed them with his own pros, including their director, former touring pro Geoff Grant. And he’s brought a holistic, futuristic method to training young tennis players. He breaks down strokes with computers and hooks his athletes up to a machine that reads their brainwaves, to help them understand their reactions on court and combat negativity. (I’m planning to make a return trip to have my brain read after the Open.) Uehling even told me he helped Djokovic with his balance on his service motion last year.
The now-famous pod is in a training center at CourtSense, and there was someone sitting in it when I stopped by. At 7 feet long, it looks small and claustrophobic; Vince Spadea, who has spent some time there, told the Journal he wouldn’t go near it. Grant said it was like being in an airplane at take off; his ears popped. “It’s weird, it’s definitely something from the future,” he said.
The question today is whether the pod should be legal. If it does what CVAC says its does—boost red blood cells—then it’s akin to blood doping, and if you can get the benefit of hard-core exercise while sitting and talking on your cell phone, it’s a competitive advantage. Five years ago, WADA addressed oxygen contraptions like this by labeling them against “the spirit of sport,” but didn’t ban them. The next question, of course, is: If you do ban them, can you detect their use? There’s obviously no substance to test for. Either way, now that an athlete of Djokovic’s stature has said he’s been in one, WADA should make a definitive statement on the egg’s legality.
That said, it should also be made clear that this was not the reason for Djokovic’s surge over the last year; it’s not a “secret weapon,” as the Journal called it. Uehling told me that Djokovic used it a few times at the Open in 2010, and Djokovic said the same thing when he was asked about it yesterday. It’s not even clear what its effects are; some athletes swear by it, and Grant said he did think he could recover faster after trying it, but CVAC’s claims for it are still just claims.
Djokovic now says he’s not going to hop into the egg this year, because he doesn’t want to break his routine. And it will remain in New Jersey when he flies home after the Open. But, as he said yesterday, Djokovic wishes he could take it with him on the road. How long will it be before this athletes’ dream comes true, before players in all sports are having their hotel rooms outfitted with an egg in each city? All the more reason to find out what these things really do, and for WADA to rule on whether a professional athlete should be allowed inside one of them.
 FLUSHING MEADOWS—At 11:00 this morning, I was standing between Court 13 and 14 when I realized that something felt distinctly different. I glanced around, trying to figure out what it was. I saw an empty seat in front of me. I saw one to the left of me. Then I noticed that there was plenty of walking space in between the two courts. It was nice, but it was also . . . weird.
Hurricane Irene cleared out all of the weather in the New York area and left nothing but sun and blue sky. It also cleared the grounds of a good number of fans. That’s a bad break for those who couldn’t make it here, obviously, but it was nice for those of us who have seen this event try to stuff more and more humans into the same amount of space over the last 10 years.
It also meant that this was an ideal day for walking the grounds and seeing what could be seen. It should always be so easy to get around this place.
*****
11:10 A.M.: Court 13
“Kei! Kei! Over here, Kei!”
It isn’t just the players inside Ashe Stadium who are superstars in their home countries. And they aren’t the only ones hounded by fans and media. Kei Nishikori, unseeded but conspicuous in shiny white clothes and a blazing red headband, stands on his toes and looks, a little warily, ahead of him. At the entrance to the court he can see two reporters from separate Japanese TV crews—WOWOW is one of them—doing their pre-match stories.
Nishikori finally decides it’s time to make his move. As he walks toward the entrance gate, cameras click, people call his name, and one woman tries to get him to stop and pose for a photo with him. He keeps going, head down, with TV cameras jabbed practically up his nose.
His entrance takes nearly as long as his match. Nishikori loses the first two sets to Flavio Cipolla and retires. The cameras click as he walks off.
*****
11:30 Court 14
“Nice hitting.”
What’s unique about the New York sports fan? The rudeness? The loudness? When it comes to tennis, there are two defining characteristics: Familiarity, and mispronunciation.
The former is in evidence this morning as Alexandr Dolgopolov makes his violently graceful way around the baseline on this side court. On one point, he jumps straight up for a forehand and whips his racquet around his head; on the next shot, he connects on his distinctive flat two-handed backhand on the run for a winner. The crowd in my corner lets out a collective “Whoa!” The noise is followed by a lone woman, who tells Dolgopolov in a gently encouraging voice, “Nice hitting.”
On the next point, Dolgopolov is pushed out of position and forced to run for a backhand along the baseline. He gets there but can’t get it over the net. His new fan is still encouraging. “Nice get, though,” she says.
Dolgopolov goes on to win easily, and as always he takes the winners and the shanks, the drops that land perfectly and the ones that hit the tape and fall back, in stride. From shot to shot, he’s one of the sport’s most entertaining players, but watching him I think back to his press conference in Melbourne at the start of the year after his five-set upset of Robin Soderling. He was happy with it, of course, but you got the feeling he would have been virtually the same person whether he had won or not. This is admirable, and, in most situations, healthy—as the words inside Centre Court tell us, tennis teaches you to take triumph and disaster and treat those two imposters just the same. What it doesn’t tell you is that the guy who wrote those words didn't know anything about sports, and if you do take wins and losses the same way you probably won’t make it to Centre Court again.
Dolgopolov, on the surface at least, takes his victories and defeats in stride, and he’s had the kind of up and down season you would expect with that attitude.
*****
12:00: Court 8
“Oh . . . damn.”
This is the reaction of one gravel-voiced man after a backhand pass by Fabio Fognini. It's an impressive, surprising shot: The Italian is stretched, but he plants his left foot, à la Novak Djokovic, and tomahawks the ball flat and low past his opponent at the net. Fognini doesn’t have the kind of home-country support that Nishikori enjoys, but he’s hit a nerve with the dozen or so Brooklyn and Queens denizens that slouch in the bleachers on this far side court.
On the next point, Fognini tracks down a seemingly ungettable drop volley from his opponent and flips a one-handed backhand up the line. It lands near the sideline, and for a second there’s no call. Finally, the linesman signals that it was out. Fognini stares at the chair umpire, sticks his pinkie in his mouth, and flicks it back out. The man behind me says, “This one’s got some personality!”
*****
1:00: Louis Armstrong Stadium
“God!”
The most promising young American of the season is playing, but the stands are still largely empty. The only energy in the stadium is the boiling negativity coming from the red head of that young American, Ryan Harrison. He’s just gone down two sets to Croatia’s Marin Cilic, after serving for the second. Harrison takes the lord’s name in vain and slides his racquet from the baseline most of the way to the net. It’s approximately the fourth time that his racquet has left his hand during the last half-hour. The crack it makes on the court is enhanced by the absolute silence that surrounds it, a silence that is eventually filled with the unexpected sound of boos.
Harrison’s U.S. Open is over soon after, and it’s a painful comedown in a lot of ways: a comedown from his successful summer of improvement, a comedown from his first-round win here last year over Ivan Ljubicic, and a comedown from his energizing loss in the second round in the Grandstand—there was nothing but rousing cheers for the kid that day. Harrison’s problem in this match is one of positioning. Time and again Cilic’s loopy, medium-paced balls land unthreateningly at the service line; time again Harrison waits well behind the baseline for them to come to him.
Typically, Harrison recognizes and diagnoses the problem afterward. “My positioning was pretty far back,” he says. “That was partly due to the fact I wasn’t feeling like I was able to step up and hit my shots the way I normally would.”
“But the thing about my game,” Harrison continues, “that allows me to compete even when I’m not feeling good is that I have different backup plans where I can use my speed and athleticism to give myself a shot.”
Harrison is right; he’s a scrambler and improviser and someone who likes to dig himself out of trouble. He’s not a guy, so far, who dictates methodically from the start of a match, or even from the start of a point. It’s a riskier, hit-and-miss way to play, and today Harrison missed.
*****
1:30: Court 17
"OK, Richie! One more, baby!"
Here is the second trademark of the New York tennis crowd—the blithe, even enthusiastic mispronunciation of a foreign player's name. It's hard to know what the "Richie" in question—Reeshard Gasquet of France—will make of this encouragement, not to mention of being called "baby" by a man. On second thought, though, this phenomenon may really just be another form of the first charateristic of this crowd, the desire to treat the players familiarly, like friends. We take the foreigners and make them into Americans.
We're out on the Open's new show court, tucked into the far fringe of the grounds. The arena is a success, a cross between one of the Aussie Open's intimate midsize stadiums, and a distant show court at Indian Wells, where the rest of the world disappears.
Inaugurating it are Gasquet and Sergiy Stakovsky. But Gasquet doesn't seem all that happy about it. He's immediately annoyed that the ball girl is not handing him the towel in the proper way, so he grabs it from her and shows her how to open it up as she runs toward him.
The next game Gasquet is annoyed again. A shot by his opponent lands near the line and is called good. He raises his hand to challenge. Hawk-Eye shows that it was out by a millimeter. Gasquet walks toward the umpire angrily and raises his arms. How could she not overrule that? How could she not see the millimeter of space between line and ball?
A few games later the same thing happens to Stakhovsky. He challenges a close Gasquet shot that is called in. Again Hawk-Eye shows that the ball was a millimeter, maybe less, over the line. Stakhovsky smiles and raises his arms, in mock anger, at the ump. He's the friendlier, funnier player, and of course he loses.
*****
3:30: Grandstand
“She should have bounced it.”
These are the quiet words of Tom Gullikson, spoken to his fellow USTA coach José Higueras as they look on in an undercrowded Grandstand. The player they’ve come to watch, American Madison Keys, at 16 the youngest player in either draw, has just taken a towering lob out of the air and sent the overhead flying long.
Keys is a work in progress, but you can see why the coaches are here today. She’s listed at 5-foot-10 but, being all arms and legs at this point, she looks taller than that. More important, this daughter of a basketball player and longtime Evert Academy student has the modern fundamentals in place: live arm; pistol-crack first serve; real, if thus far disjointed, kick serve; and a strong, traditional closed-stance forehand when she has time to set up. Keys is also already wearing kinesio tape on her shoulder, so she’s got that part of the pro routine down, too.
Today Keys overwhelmed veteran American Jill Craybas for the better part of two sets, until she got tight at 4-1 in the second. But Keys, from today’s evidence, is calm rather than fiery, and that calm pulled her through when it appeared she might give the whole thing away. Keys is also, you may be interested to know, perfectly quiet when she hits the ball.
This was only the second time that Keys had seen Flushing Meadows. “It’s so exciting,” was her smiling assessment of her day.
*****
6:30: Court 4
“Come on, Melanie, let’s go!”
The sun has begun to set, and a tentative late-day crowd has gathered on the other side of the National Tennis Center, to see the young woman who was in Madison Keys’ sneakers two years ago here. It’s only the third game of her match against Italy’s Romina Oprandi, but Melanie Oudin is already breathing hard. She's heavier now, tense, and her forehands keep finding the net. When she wins a point to get to 30-all in the third game, cries of encouragement go up—“OK, here we go, Mel!”—but they don’t sound all that hopeful. Oudin nets another forehand at break point, and breathing audibly, walks to the sideline as many fans turn and walk away.
From Madison Keys to Melanie Oudin, from a bright moment of promise in the Grandstand to a gloomy, hopeless half an hour of harsh judgment on Court 4, a single afternoon at the U.S. Open spans every emotion. Everyone who plays tennis, the sport where you take all the glory and all the pain, knows there’s a chance that either scenario can unfold when they walk on the court. The possibility of humiliation is real, and what makes every match a gamble.
It’s easier, on a sunny day like this, just to watch.
 NEW YORK—From a Brooklynite's perspective, Irene, the tropical storm that once was a hurricane, cut us a break. Instead of being locked inside playing Yahtzee in the dark on Sunday, we got an unexpected chance to walk through our neighborhoods on a still-blustery day and survey what minor damage we could find. That’s as far as we could go, though; not only was the National Tennis Center closed, all public transportation remained suspended until Monday. So it was back inside after a while, where a DVD of Breaking Bad’s first season saved the day. This show has been on for three years? How did I not know about this?
As far as tennis went, while the weather washed away Arthur Ashe Kids’ Day and wreaked havoc with the pros’ practice schedules, there was still plenty to read about as the Open hustled for an on-time start on Monday. Which makes this a good time to return to the sport’s chattering classes. I can’t pick up a stack of London tabloids the way I could at Wimbledon, but the small army known as the New York Times has already laid siege to Flushing Meadows. What the Gray Lady lacks in outrageousness, it will more than make up for in sober breadth of coverage.
Hmmm, now that I’ve put it that way, the thought is almost enough to make me miss the News of the World . . .
*****
I’ll begin over at ESPN.com, where investigative sports reporters Paula Lavigne and Alok Pattani shocked us a couple of weeks ago with this vaguely bombshellish headline: “U.S. Open random draw questioned.”
So we were right all along: Americans have been getting a free ride here for years! Or, wait, no they haven’t, at all. Some of our young prospects, such as Devin Britton, Coco Vandeweghe, and Scoville Jenkins, appear to have gotten the seriously short end of the draw stick. For example, the now-retired Jenkins faced Andy Roddick in the first round one year, and Roger Federer another, a fact that Lavigne and Pattani say was statistically bizarre.
What they found overall was that the very top players at the Open, on both the men’s and women’s sides, had a better-than-normal chance of facing an extremely low-ranked player in the first round. This is interesting, certainly, and players and fans in the past have suspected the USTA of foul draw play. But Lavigne and Pattani’s sample is thin; they only go back 10 years. And do we think that the USTA would risk all of its credibility to make sure that Federer or Roddick or Jelena Jankovic—Vandeweghe's first-round opponent a few years ago—made it through their opening rounds?
—In other news on ESPN.com, every one of their expert prognosticators, from Darren Cahill to Matt Wilansky, has Serena Williams as the winner. Only one, Patrick McEnroe, has Rafael Nadal defending his title. And four of them see Victoria Azarenka going out early, which might be surprising until you remember that she plays Serena in the third round. On second thought, that's not exactly a bold pick for an early exit.
*****
—Is Mardy Fish ready to believe? He says he can't wait to get out there, he’s excited, it’s a different pressure but he welcomes it, yet he can’t quite go alpha, because the American alpha is still in the house. “It’s one of those experiences that not everybody can go through,” Fish said Saturday in wrapping up his answer about pressure and expectations. “I can understand just a little of what Andy [Roddick] has gone through and respect the job that he’s done with it and how well he’s handled the expectations with his play.”
Venus Williams inspired her little sister to surpass her. The opposite seems to be the case with Roddick and his metaphorical little brother, Fish (they lived together as kids). Does Roddick’s presence keep Fish from thinking of himself differently, from thinking of himself as an alpha player, as his country’s best, as a potential Grand Slam winner?
—Speaking of possibly unnecessary pre-tournament humility, Andy Murray found a way to take issue with John McEnroe’s assessment that this Open was Murray’s best chance at a major.
“It’s a silly thing to say . . .” Murray claimed. “I have a chance of winning for sure. Whether it’s my best chance or not, no one has a clue like that.
“You’re going to have to play an incredible event to win. So I feel like I’m ready to do that. But to say that it’s my best chance, no one knows.”
I’ve always liked Murray, from a personal perspective, for his realism, which is a hair’s-breadth away from the dour—he’s a fellow-traveler, in that sense. And he’s certainly being realistic here; of course no one knows if this is your best chance, McEnroe was just doing what he does, talking. This sounds to me like a realism that’s a hair’s-breadth from the resigned.
*****
—OK, it’s time to dive into the Times—what Tom Wolfe called secular America’s version of the Ganges—and see what their U.S. Open army has dug up.
At the high literary end, we have the distinguished British novelist Geoff Dyer writing about “Cruising for (Tennis) Partners.”
I’m glad to find out that Dyer and I share a third passion, other than jazz and John Berger. And I enjoyed his article about seeing lots of tennis courts from planes in the U.S., and the difficulty that the world traveler has in finding a suitable partner to play on them. But I also wondered whether he may have taken the sexual subtext of the title a little too far when he ended one paragraph with this sentence—
“The prospect of encountering a partnerless female with a half-decent backhand is too blissful even to contemplate. It’s dispiriting enough trying to pick up guys."
And started the next paragraph this way:
“Let’s say you’re at Mission Dolores Park in San Francisco, lurking around like a pervert . . . “
—All the way on the other, non-literary side of the Times coverage is this piece by Ken Belson, on what the USTA does with its garbage from the tournament. “Last year,” Belson writes, “the association sent 52 tons of food waste from the kitchens at the tennis center to a farm in Connecticut. That helped reduce the USTA’s carting costs by about 30 percent.”
Missing the Sun yet?
—The most high-profile of the Times’ tennis stories over the weekend was this cover piece in the Magazine, featuring Andy Samberg posing as various champions of the past in shots created by the great Walter Iooss, Jr., of Sports Illustrated. I’m happy to see tennis, and tennis history, given this kind of exposure, but one question: Why Andy Samberg? I like him as a peeking Johnny Mac on the Centre Court lawn, but the rest of the shots are hokey, IMO.
The text that accompanies those shots is a piece by Gerald Marzorati on tennis rivalries. He talks about the opposing characters of Borg and McEnroe, and references the shift from amateur to professional eras. Much of it sounded familiar, and I realized why when Marzorati described Mac’s rivalry with Borg as his “satori.” This was a word and an idea that appeared in my book on the same subject, High Strung. I’d never heard the word before, to be honest; it was inserted by my editor in place of the one I had written, “utopia.”
—I’ll finish by veering slightly off the tennis track to mention one more recent Times piece, “Another Thing to Sort of Pin on David Foster Wallace,” by Maud Newton. In it, she (sort of) blames the current writing style that pervades the Internet—nerdy, self-questioning—on DFW. I don’t really agree; I’d say Gawker is more influential. But I don’t mind Wallace getting taken down a notch or two. That’s not because I think less of his writing that I once did, but because there’s a sense among lit types that his tennis articles were head and shoulders above anything else ever written about the sport. They weren’t.
But they were great, and walking around Brooklyn today in a breeze strong enough that I wondered at times if I were going to be lifted off the ground, I thought about his first tennis article, for Harper's, which he eventually re-titled “Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley." In it, he describes the challenges of playing tennis in Illinois windstorms. Here’s the close, when he and his hitting partner go airborne:
This all happened very fast but in serial progression: field, trees, swings, grass, then the feel like the lift of the world's biggest mitt, the nets suddenly and sexually up and out straight, and I seem to remember whacking a ball out of my hand at Antitoi to watch its radical west-east curve, and for some reason trying to run after this ball I'd just hit, but I couldn't have tried to run after a ball I had hit, but I remember the heavy gentle lift at my thighs and the ball curving back closer and my passing the ball and beating the ball in flight over the horizontal net, my feet not once touching the ground over fifty-odd feet, a cartoon, and then there was chaff and crud in the air all over and both Antitoi and I either flew or were blown pinwheeling for I swear it must have been fifty feet to the fence one court over, the easternmost fence, we hit the fence so hard we knocked it halfway down.
*****
I'm glad that didn't happen to me, but I'm also glad I got to read about it. Tennis, without hurricanes, starts Monday.
 NEW YORK—Did you happen to know that Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe were rivals once upon a time? You may have heard something about it this year. I wrote a book about it, Matt Cronin wrote a book about it, HBO did a documentary on it, and there’s even been a strange advertising campaign for underwear centering on the two old-timers—can we look for the same thing from Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in 30 years?
Anyway, my version of the Borg-Mac story, "High Strung," is really the story of the 1981 U.S. Open, and the cast of characters, led by Superbrat and Ice Borg, from that tournament and that era. It was a turning point in the sport’s history, and not just because it was the last Grand Slam that Borg would play. The game itself was changing, and that transformation—from wood racquets to graphite, from the net to the baseline—was summed up in the epic, five-set, fourth-round match on the Grandstand that year between an old-schooler, Vitas Gerulaitis, and the leader of the new school, Ivan Lendl. Two chapters of "High Strung" are devoted to their clash and the personalities behind it. Here’s a condensed version. Hopefully, if you’re on the east coast somewhere, it will be good for a hurricane-ravaged day before this U.S. Open kicks off.
*****
Over the course of his 10-year career, Vitas Gerulaitis has been compared to, among others, Joe Namath, Elvis Presley, and, most often, his good friend and tormentor Bjorn Borg. After his first match at the 1981 U.S. Open, though, Gerulaitis sounded more like one his fellow Brooklyn natives, Vinny Barbarino, the Sweathog played by John Travolta in the hit TV series of the day, Welcome Back, Kotter.
In the obscure outer reaches of the National Tennis Center, Gerulaitis walked off a jam-packed Court 16 after beating Terry Moor in five sets. He was met by his father, Vitas Sr., a tennis instructor who had first put a racquet in his son’s hand, and who had been the first head pro at Flushing Meadows. Senior gave Junior a congratulatory kiss on the cheek. The son thought it was a bit much.
“Jeez, Dad, now it’s a big deal when I win one round, huh?” the younger Gerulaitis said with mock annoyance. “Don’t have a coronary over one match.”
But Gerulaitis was as happy and relieved as his father. “This is the kind of match I’ve been losing,” he admitted.
Up to that point, 1981 had been a lost season for Gerulaitis. For half a decade he had been a fixture near the top of the rankings and a regular semifinalist and occasional finalist at the Grand Slams (he even won a star-depleted Australian Open in 1977). One year earlier, Gerulaitis was the 5th seed at Flushing. Now he had plummeted to No. 15. He came in to the tournament, according to the New York Times, as an “afterthought.” In the less charitable words of the Daily News, he was “a guy who didn’t belong with the contenders or even the pretenders.”
Like his colleagues Ilie Nastase and Bjorn Borg, Gerulaitis had spent much of the 1970s playing and living hard. As a new decade dawned, the candle that he had burned at both ends had begun to burn back. Part of this was the inevitable aging process. At 27, Gerulaitis discovered that he couldn’t maintain his legendary, round the clock, Broadway Vitas pace and still expect to hold it together on the court.
“I took a month off and didn’t practice,” Gerulaitis said as the Open began. “In the past, I was able to take a week off, play around, party, and get by. This time I found out I couldn’t. I guess I just lost my interest in tennis this past year.”
A few defeats early in the season had shaken Gerulaitis’ confidence, and a trip through the European clay-court circuit had been a disaster. “I wasn’t in the best shape and it showed,” he said. “I lost a couple of matches and said, ‘Ahhh, no big deal, I’ll come back.’ I lost a few more and I heard people say, ‘He can’t run anymore.’ Then I got the self-pitying trip. You know, ‘poor Vitas this, poos Vitas that.’”
By the time he got to Germany during that tour, the self-pity had to infect Gerulaitis, though he could still play it for a laugh. Before leaving for Europe, he contacted Robert Lansdorp, a California coach who had mentored Tracy Austin, and asked him to help him with his training. “We went to Germany to play the Hamburg Open,” Lansdorp recalled, “and he was playing this little Spaniard who I thought was a ball boy. Vitas cramped. He finally lost in a tiebreaker and they had to bring out a stretcher to carry him off. As he’s being wheeled by me he looks up and says, ‘Lansdorp, go home. I’m ruining your reputation.’”
It wasn’t just Gerulaitis’s age that had begun to show. While he remained a friend to all of them, inside he had grown weary of his role as an eternal sideshow act to Borg, McEnroe, and Connors. After turning pro in 1972, Gerulaitis had improved and risen steadily until 1977. At Wimbledon that year he reached the semifinals for the first time. But there he ran into the man who became his personal glass ceiling, Bjorn Borg. Year after year, Slam after Slam, when Gerulaitis would make a great run, the Swede would be waiting for him at the end of it. While he had stretched Borg to five memorable sets that day at Wimbledon, a pattern had been set. “I sometimes wonder what would have happened if he had won that match against me,” Borg said years later. “If he had beaten me, his career might have been very different.” It was the first in what would be a life filled with what-ifs and might-have-beens.
Stalled at No. 4, Gerulaitis watched as McEnroe, his Port Washington kid brother, took what he had always desired most, a title in his hometown at the U.S. Open. Finally, in 1980, there had been a breakthrough. At the Masters in New York, Gerulaitis beat Connors for the first time, after 16 straight defeats. True to Vitas’s freewheeling, no-ego style, the win inspired him to the heights of self-deprecatory chest-puffing, while giving tennis a lasting bon mot: “Nobody beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row," he said.
Nobody, that is, except Bjorn Borg. Coming into the 1981 Open, Gerulaitis’s record against his friend was a mortifying 0-20. (Today it’s officially listed as 0-16 by the men’s tour; maybe Vitas hadn’t been joking after the Connors match.) Gerulaitis once said that he began every match with Borg with a dozen new ideas about how to beat him, then watched as his nemesis blew each of them to pieces. By 1980, though, Gerulaitis couldn't be philosophical about it any longer. After beating Connors in January, over the next five months he would lose to Borg four times, including a dismal 6-0, 6-2 drubbing in Monte Carlo, and an equally lopsided blowout loss in the French Open final, 6-4, 6-1, 6-2.
“I got to Connors," an agitated Gerulaitis told John Feinstein of the Washington Post in September 1981, “I got to McEnroe, but I just couldn’t get to Borg. It got frustrating. I just got tired of chasing, chasing, not getting there. I took time off because I wanted to get away from tennis for a while.”
But coming back from that break had been hard, and Lansdorp, for one, had been left to wonder how much Gerulaitis’ nightlife had begun to affect his attitude toward the game. “He lied to me,” Lansdorp said. “I would ask, ‘Do you do drugs?’ and he would say, ‘No.’ But then he would disappear on me for a whole week. I’d call the hotel but I wouldn’t see him for two days. I asked him in the beginning but I never asked again. It was my business but it wasn’t my business.”
So far 1981 had been a bust. And there were clouds on the horizon, clouds that would soon grow much darker. But Gerulaitis, who loved to play in his hometown even if it had never loved him back, would make the Open the site of his reclamation, and become the biggest surprise of the two weeks. He followed his win over Moor with two easy victories in his next two rounds. In his straight-set third-round win over the tenacious Harold Solomon, Gerulaitis said he played well enough to "have some confidence finally.”
Even so, it appeared that Vitas’s run would end in the next round, where he was scheduled to face the No. 3 player in the world and the sport’s stony new face of doom, a 21-year-old Czechoslovakian who had already been referred to by Tennis magazine as “the world’s toughest player”: Ivan Lendl. Few recognized it at the time, but their match on a jammed Grandstand court would pit tennis’s past against its future. The 1981 U.S. Open had reached its middle weekend, and the sport had reached a turning point. Was it ready to make that turn?
 *****
If Vitas Gerulaitis was showing signs of early decline in 1981, Ivan Lendl had spent the year going in the other direction. At the French Open, he had beaten John McEnroe for the first time, before losing to Bjorn Borg in a five-setter in the final. With the dogged hard work for which he would become famous, he had improved his backhand immensely and, with the help of his mentor Wojtek Fibak, had begun to adapt to life in America—Lendl had defected from his native Czechoslovakia the year before. In 1981, he stayed at Fibak’s estate in Connecticut during the Open; the next year he would move into his own place in the same area. The next year he would also reach the first of eight consecutive U.S. Open finals.
At the time, the tennis world was consumed with the Borg-McEnroe rivalry. The American’s rise appeared to mark a changing of the guard in the sport, and it did, but only for a brief time. It would be Lendl, the dour, sallow, robotic, Czech with the heavy baseline game and killer forehand, who would be the sport’s real future. He would bring serious physical training to the genteel game. He would bring nutrition fads, aerobics at dawn, sawdust, and the now-obligatory racquet switch at every ball change. Lendl believed the properties of his frames altered just slightly over the course of seven games; he was mocked at first, until virtually every other top player started doing the same thing.
Most important, perhaps, Lendl helped bring the open-throated, midsize racquet to the men's pro game. He was an early adopter of the new, more explosive frames, and no player would symbolize or exploit this shift in emphasis more than Lendl. The game that he played with his sledgehammer Kneissel, which was based around a heavy serve and powerful ground strokes, is the one played today by the vast majority of pros.
This change in how the sport was approached was summed up by a conversation that Lendl had with his friend Bill Scanlon at a tournament in Tokyo at the end of 1980. Scanlon was scheduled to play Borg, whom Lendl had recently beaten for the first time. Riding from the stadium to the hotel, Scanlon asked Lendl for some advice on playing the great Swede.
“Billy,” Lendl said, “you just rally with him in the backcourt until you get a forehand you like. Then you crash it hard, crosscourt.”
Scanlon, still thinking in terms of classic tennis strategy, finished the thought. “And then I can approach the net because his backhand is vulnerable?”
Lendl paused and shot Scanlon a quizzical look: “No, he doesn’t get the forehand back!”
There was a new tactic in tennis, called power.
*****
Up to that point, the most notable moment of Lendl’s Open had come in his third-round win over Mark Vines on the Grandstand. During that match, a nearby trash compactor had exploded—these were the gritty days of NYC and Flushing Meadows—and ash and cinders had been sprayed into the arena. Lendl, ignoring the chair umpire, had wasted no time packing his bags and stalking off court—to, naturally, cries of “Choke artist!” from the beery Big Apple crowd.
Now, two days later, Lendl walked into that same Grandstand, which was filled beyond capacity for his fourth-round match with Gerulaitis. Talk had already begun about a possible semifinal match-up between McEnroe and the young Czech. Lendl had won their quarterfinal at the French Open, and many believed he would do it again here. But Gerulaitis was inspired. For the first time that he could remember, his hometown crowd was on his side.
“I kept thinking, ‘the boy is back,’” Gerulaitis said after the match. “It was the first time they were behind me. Maybe it’s because I’m ranked about 2,000 now.”
The twitchy Gerulaitis and the stone-faced Lendl couldn’t have made for a starker contrast. Over the years, Gerulaitis had become a ball of tics on court. Before every serve, he dipped his head, shook his blond locks, and peeked back over his right shoulder. “He looked like a rooster checking the henhouse for interlopers,” sportswriter Michael Mewshaw said. At this point in his career, Lendl emphasized intimidation. He wore dark clothes when he could, and his facial expression never changed even as he leveled one of his Howitzer forehands straight at an opponent’s head. While Gerulaitis used little bunny steps to sneak up to net and angle off volleys, Lendl pounded the baseline with heavy-footed strides. The difference could be heard even in the sound of their shots. Gerulaitis’s left his strings with a light ping; Lendl’s with a resounding thud.
Their match was a see-saw marathon. By the middle of it, Gerulaitis was so worked up that he fired a ball at a lineswoman, only to hit a spectator in the leg. He repeatedly harangued the umpire to “give someone else your seat, it’s the best in the house.” After losing the fourth set, 6-3, he walked to the sideline and saw his coach, Fred Stolle, stand up and lean out from the crowd. “He told me to stop bleeping around,” Gerulaitis said later. He settled down and the two players began the fifth set.
“Vitas was always a tough opponent for me,” Lendl says. “He was quick and he rushed straight up the middle of the court, so it was hard to find an angle to pass him.” That’s how most of the points in the fifth set developed, with Gerulaitis chipping and coming forward and Lendl replying with a rifled passing shot. The two remained knotted at 1-1, 2-2, 3-3.
From the vantage point of 30 years, tennis seemed to be moving in two directions in this set. Gerulaitis, a student of the great Aussies of the 50s and 60s, was going back in time, to the serve-and-volley, chip-and-charge Big Game of previous decades. Lendl the power-hitting baseliner was taking the sport forward all the way to the present day. A few months later, the two would face each other again, in the final of the 1982 Masters at Madison Square Garden. Gerulaitis, his 1981 slump well behind him, came in on a high. The same was true for the ever-improving Lendl. Gerulaitis got the better of their duel for two sets and seemed to have victory well in hand. But the tide began to turn when he was up a break and 2-0 in the third. In that game, Gerulaitis took a return of serve and rushed the net behind it. An angry Lendl took out his frustrations by drilling a forehand right into Gerulaitis’s forehead. Vitas was floored, literally, even if he wasn’t too worried for his health: “I have nothing in my head to really damage anyway,” he joked afterward. But the momentum had shifted, and Lendl would come all the way back to win. Symbolically, tennis had changed as well. In the future, the rifle-shot forehand would rule, and players would come to net at their peril.
At 3-3, 30-30 in the fifth set at the 1981 Open, Gerulaitis made the same move he would later make at the Masters. He took Lendl’s serve and followed it in. Lendl also did the same thing, slapping a forehand right at Gerulaitis. This time, though, the future was denied. Rather than taking it on the forehead, Gerulaitis deftly ducked to his left and knocked off a volley winner. “I decided at the beginning of the day that he was going to have to hit 2,000 passing shots,” he said. “He made 1,999 of them.”
Gerulaitis went on to break serve and, to the roars of the crowd, serve for the match. He walked to the back of the court and saw a familiar face. Patrick McEnroe was a 15-year-old ball boy working his older brother’s friend’s match. Gerulaitis looked at him and said, “Give me a good one, Lenny,” using Patrick's childhood nickname. He took the ball that McEnroe tossed him and won that point. A minute later he reached match point.
The two players rallied. Gerulaitis thought about coming to the net but stayed back instead. He didn’t want to give Lendl another crack at a passing shot—or a shot at his forehead. The safe play worked. A Lendl backhand caught the tape and fell backward. Gerulaitis lifted his arms and exulted. Tears came to his eyes as he put his hands to his lips and blew kisses to his 6,000 new supporters. “I love you, I love you,” he cried. The slump was over. Vitas had made it on Broadway at last.
Gerulaitis was last glimpsed on his day triumph running from reporters in the parking lot. “The boy is back!” he called out from the driver’s seat of his yellow Rolls-Royce.
 NEW YORK—Has there been an official, rubber-stamped changing of the guard on the men's side this year? Not yet. But there has been head-spinning change nonetheless. Consider where we are now, with the final Grand Slam of the season set to begin—assuming Ashe Stadium is still standing on Monday—and where we were as the season’s first major began in Melbourne. You might have forgotten all about it, but the big story in the days leading up to the Australian Open was the so-called “Rafa Slam.” Only nine months ago, Rafael Nadal was the talk of the sport and its projected future king. Even Roger Federer said he was looking forward to seeing if his rival-buddy could pull off four majors in a row.
Nadal didn’t pull it off, of course. Instead, the Aussie Open marked the emergence of a new future king of the sport, Novak Djokovic, who won the event handily. Now we’re watching Djokovic make his own history, and wondering whether Nadal is yesterday's news. The (borderline-pointless and unanswerable) question of the moment is: If Djokovic wins the U.S. Open and continues on as he has this year, will he have recorded the greatest single season in men’s tennis?
We’ve got a ways to go before we can talk about that, and whatever he does, he’ll be hard-pressed to top Rod Laver’s calendar-year Salami in 1969. A more significant question for the men's game might be: Is Djokovic someone who will dominate for the long haul, like Federer and Nadal; or is he something else? Will we be back here next year talking about another player’s quest for history? Whatever the answers end up being, Djokovic will get a taste of No. 1 pressure at a major for the first time this week. While there are 128 men in the draw, and 128 stories to go with them, this U.S. Open, for the moment, is about Nole above all else. Let’s see what he and his 127 colleagues have in store for them.
*****
First Quarter
Djokovic has been dominant in 2011, but, after the two North American hard-court tune-up events, he does come to New York with a couple of question marks over his head. He won a very close match over Mardy Fish in the final in Montreal, but it was his performance in Cincy that was more concerning. In the semis against Gael Monfils, Djokovic went into the type of frustrated funk we used to see from him, but which he had banished from his brain so far this year. While he recovered in time to win that match in three, Djokovic had very little left, mentally or physically, for the final against Andy Murray, and he eventually retired with a shoulder problem. Are these shades of Nadal in Melbourne? Rafa came there after catching a virus, retired with a leg injury in the quarters, and never looked like the world's best player.
Djokovic’s draw won’t hurt him. He opens with a qualifier, gets the winner of Pere Riba and Carlos Berlocq second, and is scheduled, if all goes according to plan—which, of course, it never does—to face Monfils again in the quarters. Possible obstacles: Davydenko in the third round; Gasquet, I suppose, in the fourth; and a semi-hot-handed Tomas Berdych in the quarters.
Djokovic may be hurting or a little burnt from all the winning, but he likes New York, he likes hard courts, he’s been to two finals here, and he hasn’t lost to any of these guys in a long time.
First-round matches to watch: Gael Monfils vs. Grigor Dimitrov; Gasquet vs. Sergiy Stakhovsky; Davydenko vs. Ivan Dodig
Dark horse: Berdych
Semifinalist: Djokovic
*****
Second Quarter
One reason that it’s all on Nole at the moment is that his two putative rivals, Federer and Nadal, have been so iffy of late. Federer has landed, yet again, in Djokovic’s half, and he comes in on the heels of two demoralizing defeats to younger, bigger hitters, Berdych and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. But a five-time champ is always a five-time champ, and Federer has already pulled off one Slam stunner over Djokovic, in Paris, this season.
Federer starts with Santiago Giraldo, gets the winner of Dudi Sela and Thomaz Bellucci after that, and might see an up-and-comer in either Ryan Harrison or Bernard Tomic in the third round. If he gets through all of that, the seeds he might face in the second week include the hard-charging Mardy Fish and the sporadically charging Tsonga, who has beaten Federer twice this summer already. It’s not a draw guaranteed to make Federer feel old—Fish is a fellow elder statesman—but it is one that should force him to up his game. The days when Federer could scroll down his bracket to find a line-up of familiar whipping boys—Davydenko, Youzhny, the old Berdych, the old Soderling—are behind him.
Just as intriguing is Fish’s fate. Is he now fit and confident enough in his game and his game plan that a bad day or a bout of nerves won’t sink him? His win over Nadal in Cincy made me think so, but his tight second-set loss to Murray in the next round was a tonic—the doubts linger. Still, Fish has come a long way, so far that anything less than a serious run at the semis would be a bitter disappointment to him. You probably couldn’t have said that even as late as last year. He likes the surface, and he’ll have the crowd.
First-round matches to watch: Harrison vs. Marin Cilic; Radek Stepanek vs. Philipp Kohlschreiber; Tomic against whichever qualifier he can trip up
Third-round match to try to imagine: Federer vs. Tomic
Semifinalist: Fish
*****
Third Quarter
It’s nice to be the fourth seed these days. It's not that Andy Murray hasn’t earned the position, but it does make life a little easier knowing that your section won’t include one of the winners of the last seven majors. Instead, Murray looks across his quarter and finds sixth-seeded and currently-in-decline Robin Soderling. He also sees, in this relatively quiet corner of the tournament, Juan Martin del Potro, Stanislas Wawrinka, John Isner, and Marcos Baghdatis.
Murray is in a familiar situation. He’s pulled himself together admirably, after the sting of a late Wimbledon loss, to win one of the Open tune-ups, this time in Cincinnati. In other words, he’s gotten his fans hopes up yet again, and we know what happens then (the hopes go down, in case you don’t know). Two years ago Murray lost early and badly to Cilic; last year he did the same against Wawrinka. Murray has always loved the Open, he won it as a junior, and it once seemed to be a more likely place for him to break through than in the cauldron of Wimbledon. It still does, and I’ve picked him to win here before. His draw looks good this year, and he’s on the opposite side from Djokovic, but lots of things have looked good for him in the past.
Dark (and exceedingly tall) horses: Del Potro, who has a soft first few rounds, and John Isner, who is in Soderling’s section and has had a good week in Winston-Salem.
Tricky first round: Murray vs. Somdev Devvarman; the Indian won’t give the counter-puncher much to punch
Budding American feel-good story: Alex Bogomolov, Jr., who is having an unlikely Indian Summer; he might get the Sod in the second round
The Hyphen Bowl: Guillermo Garcia-Lopez vs. Daniel Gimeno-Traver (Who has the better hyphen? We’ll find out soon)
Semifinalist: Murray
*****
Fourth Quarter
He’s the defending champ and a Letterman guest, but Rafael Nadal comes to New York in weakness rather than strength. A close loss to Dodig and a not-close loss to Fish have us wondering where Rafa’s confidence is. Did his defeats at the hands of Djokovic affect him that much, to the point where he’s not the same player in general? The way he talks, it doesn’t sound all that hard to believe.
Last year, Nadal didn’t dominate the summer season either, but all of that changed when he walked onto Ashe Stadium in black clothes, yellow sneakers, and armed with a new 130-m.p.h. serve. I wouldn’t count on him getting his aura back so quickly this time around. There hasn’t been a sense that he’s building to anything; if anything, it's been the opposite. His nerves nearly unraveled him against Fernando Verdasco in Cincy.
Nadal plays Andrey Golubev first, perhaps Mahut second, and most interestingly, Ljubicic or Nalbandian after that, both of whom have troubled him in the past. Overall, though, this is a draw that Rafa should welcome. He’s scheduled to face David Ferrer in the quarters; while Ferrer has beaten him twice in hard-court majors, he’s also been injured of late, and Nadal has owned him everywhere else. Otherwise, there’s not much that meets the eye: The two other top seeds here are Youzhny and Almagro. If Nadal is searching for his lost confidence, this is the right quarter to find it.
Dark horse: Andy Roddick—he’s been struggling with mind and body, but he’ll have the crowd and he has a nice draw; a night match against Ferrer in the third round might do the trick.
Semifinalist: Nadal
*****
Semifinals: Murray d. Nadal; Djokovic d. Fish
Final: Djokovic d. Murray
 For the last 12 months, each women's Grand Slam has begun with an all-purpose, two-word intro: “wide open.” That’s how many of us have described, for lack of any better ideas, the draws at the last four majors, a time when Serena Williams was either on the sidelines, or shaking off the rust that had gathered during her time there. At some level, those two words still apply as we head into the U.S. Open. Defending champion Kim Clijsters is out, and aside from Serena and fellow elder super-diva Maria Sharapova, there are still very few players that you could say are safe bets to reach the second week.
But in those months a new dynamic has begun to develop in the WTA. Call it new guard vs. old, or, more specifically, insurgent and possibly totally random new champs vs. established winners. In Australia, we saw Clijsters continue the veterans’—namely, she and Serena’s—long and seemingly unbreakable run of success. But in Paris and at Wimbledon, we were suddenly confronted with rookie Slam champs in Li Na and Petra Kvitova. Throw in the surprising steadiness of Victoria Azarenka, the breakout Wimbledon run by Sabine Lisicki, and a strong end of 2010/start of 2011 by Caroline Wozniacki, and you have a lot unfulfilled potential floating around the tour at the moment.
At the same time, despite all of that newness, it’s been an empire-strikes-back type of summer. Maria Sharapova has returned to the winner’s circle in Cincinnati and to a Wimbledon final, while Serena put her foot and serve down in Stanford and Toronto—so hard that she claimed a toe injury the following week.
Rather than being wide open, the WTA has a tentative shape coming into the New York, and a tentative new set of intros: It’s Serena and Maria, super-divas of the last decade, against the world. Let it begin.
*****
First Quarter
Can a top seed be a dark horse as well? In Caroline Wozniacki’s case, I’m thinking yes—she's certainly not one of the favorites. Her season is in free fall as we speak, and she just demoted her coach to mere overbearing-father status. But if the recent examples of Andy Murray and Agnieszka Radwanska are evidence of anything, this could be a blessing in disguise. Each of those players won a tournament after splitting with a coach (in Radwanska’s case, her own overbearing father), and played more freely and easily doing it.
Wozniacki’s draw doesn’t hurt. The second seed in her quarter is Li Na, and you never know what’s coming next for her. The French Open champ has never been a smash on Broadway, and she hasn’t been lighting up the courts in the U.S. this summer. Svetlana Kuznetsova is the best athlete and most dangerous player—to her opponents, as well as herself—in the section, but after the season she’s had it's hard to see her putting together an extended run.
Who else? Andrea Petkovic, the 10th seed overall, isn't a bad choice. She’s had her best year so far, has beaten Wozniacki, and has a showwoman’s spirit that shines at Flushing Meadows—she also plays with an extreme lack of margin, but let’s not worry about that for now. Last year in New York, she brought the guns out in her Petko-dance; maybe she can do the same with those low-marging shots during the matches this time.
Potential American upset artist: Vania King
Sentimental favorite: Kimiko Date-Krumm
Semifinalist: Petkovic
*****
Second Quarter
Here we get a glimpse of CBS’s Labor Day weekend hopes, a likely third-rounder between Azarenka, the top seed here, and Serena Williams, the 28th seed overall. Standing in Azarenka’s way are Gisela Dulko or Rebecca Marino; Williams, meanwhile, opens with Bojana Jovanovski, a talented young Serb who is a year or two away from doing something—besides introducing a Bjork-like derivation of the current WTA shriek, that is; art-pop fans should love it. Still, that’s not an easy opener for Serena.
At the bottom of the draw is Francesca Schiavone, another theatrical player who should flourish in New York. Also here: Jelena Jankovic, a past finalist and a runner-up last week in Cincy; Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova; Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez; and the somehow-seeded-16th Ana Ivanovic. Is it possible to speculate on her from one day to the next at this point? There have been signs of life with coach Nigel Sears so far.
Young American to catch, maybe for the first time: Sloane Stephens
Semifinalist: Williams
*****
Third Quarter
Will the real Petra Kvitova please step up to the baseline? Or is there a real Petra Kvitova? The Wimbledon champ has had a perhaps predictable let down in North America, but she does get up for the big events. She announced herself by beating Dinara Safina at the Open a few years ago, and she looked very strong through the first weeks in both Melbourne and Paris this season, before putting in two strong weeks at Wimbledon.
Kvitova has also shown the ability to throw in horror-show matches on any given day—the bigger problem so far is that when she doesn’t have it, she really doesn’t have it, and there’s not much middle ground or potential for a turnaround. Still, on paper, she should handle her half of this quarter: Dulgheru, Niculescu, Craybas or Madison Keys, Safarova, Wickmayer, and the semi-surging Radwanska.
The bottom of this section is anchored by the tournament’s other favorite, and the player Kvitova smoked in the Wimbledon final, Maria Sharapova. She comes in looking sharp, with her spring momentum intact, but with her biggest question, her serve, unanswered and likely never to be answered. On Sharapova’s side are youngsters Heather Watson and Melanie Oudin, who knocked her off here two years ago, China’s Shuai Peng, a veteran whose career year has earned her the 13th seed, and the woman occasionally known in England as Julia Gorgeous—make that Goerges—who has been struggling.
First-round matches to watch: Sorana Cirstea vs. Yanina Wickmayer; Aravane Rezai vs. Flavia Pennetta
Young American to watch, likely for the first time: Madison Keys
Dark horse: Radwanska
Semifinalist: Sharapova
*****
Fourth Quarter
Vera Zvonareva is the tournament’s second seed, but like its first, she comes in as something of a dark horse of her own. The Russian has shown signs of life after what has been a mostly deflating 2011—she seemed to hit her head against her own ceiling in the Melbourne semis, where she lost to Clijsters, and lost her upward momentum. On Zvonareva’s side are Lisicki, the previously unmentioned and mostly AWOL Venus Williams, and the 14th seed, Dominika Cibulkova.
Up top is Marion Bartoli, a much-improved player who remains too vulnerable on defense and to the hot hand of an opponent to build on her sporadic successes; Sam Stosur, who is on her best run of form since the spring of 2010 and should be OK as long as she doesn't have to play her personal kryptonite, Sharapova; and Nadia Petrova, who remains good for an upset but probably not a semifinal run.
The question mark is Venus. She’s won this twice, she reached the semis last year and had Clijsters on the ropes in that round, and she generally loses only to the eventual champion. After the injuries and the illnesses and the years, what does Venus have left? The semis are hers for the taking, but it seems like a lot for her to take at the moment.
Young American to watch: Christina McHale
Semifinalist: Stosur
*****
Semifinals: S. Williams d. Petkovic; Sharapova d. Stosur
Final: S. Williams d. Sharapova
 In the proud sportswriter’s tradition of trying to find and accentuate the negative, I’ve always wanted to write a column about how the U.S. Open qualifying tournament is overrated. Granted, it might read a little like Christopher Hitchens’ infamous rip job on Mother Teresa, and it would almost certainly make me look like the world’s most ungrateful tennis fan. But I’m enough of a contrarian that, if everyone in the world says something is perfect, I’ll try to find a reason otherwise. And contrary to public opinion, the qualies aren’t perfect.
For example, they’re always advertised as being free, but that’s only if you want to put yourself through a brutally slow, 40-minute ride on the 7 train to Flushing Meadows. If you choose to drive, it'll cost you 20 bucks to park; that is, if you can find the right barbed-wire parking lot, which might involve three circles around the entire grounds, followed by a U-turn or two.
Also, while the weather has been superb so far this year, it might get hot, so watch out for that. And don’t go there thinking you’re going to see Roger Federer . . . wait, you do get to see Federer and the other stars practice on the show courts now? You see, this is where my overrated idea begins to founder.
While I’ve spent too many sweltering afternoons watching Jeff Salzenstein and Cecil Mamiit duke it out against fellow journeymen over the years, I can’t really argue against going to the qualies. Even if it does run you $20—plus $4 for every water and $12 for every corned beef sandwich and $25 for every T-shirt—they’re a pretty good deal. You might not see the absolute highest quality tennis, but you do get quantity.
Every so often, you do get to glimpse top-level guys as well, either on the way up, or when they’re (perhaps temporarily) on the way down. One year, I was greeted by a friend who said, “You gotta see Soderling. He can really rake.” I followed him out to a distant court and found what, at the time, seemed like the tallest natural baseliner I’d ever seen. Soderling could, indeed, rake, and I’ve never enjoyed watching the Sod more than in that initial few moments. Another time, that same friend and I caught a teenage Andy Murray, already a U.S. Open junior champion and known quantity, moaning and groaning and drop-shotting his way to a three-set win. You could see all of his positives and negatives already in evidence. The bratty self-doubt and the startling variety of shots were both there—even then, Murray reminded me of fellow genius-brats John McEnroe and Ilie Nastase, and made me wonder if having that kind of variety didn’t mess with your head a little, or, perhaps, whether having a messed-up head was essential to being able to do a lot of different things with a tennis ball.
But genius is rare in the qualies, So is sustained excellence. This tournament, contested by outsiders who desperately want to get inside, is about flaws, both overcoming and succumbing to them. If that doesn’t sound dazzling, it’s still a very useful thing to see. Nothing will make you appreciate the difficulty and brilliance of a Novak Djokovic down the line backhand than seeing the same shot tried many times, and missed many times, all over the grounds during the qualies. It will make you watch the real Open, once it begins, with new, more appreciative eyes.
As for the qualies themselves, they’re a chance to wander through a less-crowded National Tennis Center, wait in shorter lines for food, and find wider spaces in the stands where you can lean back on the bench behind you and put your feet up on the bench in front of you—you can forget doing any of those things by Monday. While most of the players you see won’t be budding Murrays or Soderlings, the true fan will find favorites to root for anyway. I’ve known devotees of Michael Russell, Zach Fleishman, Jaime Yzaga, Bjorn Phau, a young Jelena Jankovic, and a dozen other players who caught people’s eye with a certain shot or smile or walk. My friend Jon Levey and I liked to watch an Italian with the last name Veronelli—I won’t Google his first name; not knowing it is somehow part of the charm of the memory. He was a tall, long-haired, somewhat awkward player who fought hard and inevitably lost the match we were watching. Somewhere along the line, Levey and I connected Veronelli with the old cheesily romantic ads for Riunite wine that we used to see on television as kids. “Ah, if only I had just a little Riunite,” we imagined Veronelli thinking to himself on court, “I could win this match.” (As good American TV watchers, Riunite, rather than Dante or Michelangelo or Fellini, was our cultural reference to Italy.)
Anyway, that’s part of the qualies’ appeal—you choose your own favorite and make your own entertainment out of a mellow afternoon away from the office. Of course, it’s not always going to be mellow when a desperate band of outsiders are struggling to find a way inside, to the Show. The last day of qualifying is as intense as it gets in tennis, intense in a more ragged, realistic way than, say, a Grand Slam final—every top player has, at some level, made it; to lose in the last round of the qualies is the definition of not making it, of coming just short of the dream. For many of these players, there’s a chance they’ll never get this close again. It can make for as many ugly moments of failure as it can for heartwarming successes.
A couple of years ago, I watched as Laura Robson, British teenager and junior champion, experienced one of those ugly moments. Up 4-0 in the third set, two games away from earning a spot in the Open the hard way, she collapsed and lost. After the last point, she sunk down on the sidelines and started sobbing. It took her a long time to stop. There would be other days for Robson, but she probably wouldn’t have believed it if you'd asked her right then.
How could I call the qualifying overrated after seeing something like that? It’s not the official Open, but on the last day of the qualies, you can see a personal—human, ugly, ragged, triumphant—Grand Slam final on every court.
 This is my last post before a brief, pre-U.S. Open vacation; you'll have to survive the rest of Cincy without me. For my Racquet Reaction on Mardy Fish's win over Rafael Nadal, go here. See you next week.
*****
When it comes to choosing a racquet, I’ve always been a fair-weather player. Nothing but a No. 1's frame will do for me.
I started, in the early 1980s, with my first idol Bjorn Borg’s orange and black Donnay, a sledgehammer carved out of wood. Under pressure from the midsize graphite revolution, and wanting to stick with a winner rather than a retiree, I switched to my second idol John McEnroe’s equally club-like Dunlop Max 200g in 1984. Even as Mac himself began to fade, I stuck with the ol’ green-and-black through high school, until the next great American player, Pete Sampras, came out of nowhere to blitz his way to the 1990 U.S. Open title. Sampras was never an idol of mine, but I immediately loved the 85-inch, and extremely dead, version of the Wilson Pro Staff that he used. It took me 10 years to trade that one in, and even now, when I pull it out and take a few swings, it still feels perfect—perfectly dead.
By the time I reached 30, though, 85 inches wasn’t quite getting it done anymore. I moved on to another, larger, friendlier version of the Pro Staff, the purple 5.3. No racquet has ever felt quite so right in my hand, but Wilson stopped making it fairly quickly, and my last one finally broke in half. Plus, the best player who endorsed it was Magnus Norman. The Swede was No. 2 for about a minute and a half, but whatever his ranking and whatever his nationality, he was no Bjorn Borg.
Each summer, for the last few years, I’ve picked up a new racquet in Tennis magazine’s offices. That’s not a bad perk, but it has kept me from getting grooved with any one frame. There hasn’t been much rhyme or reason to my choices, and I’ve had to alter my game slightly each year to fit my new, temporary racquet. One summer it was a Boris Becker Serve Man model; another year it was a Yonex with a very open string pattern. Last year I went back to my roots with a thin-beam Donnay. And I did gravitate to a new No. 1 player’s racquet one season, when I had a brief, difficult relationship with the Wilson that Roger Federer was using at the time, the NCode or the KFactor or the BLX or whatever it was called that year. Federer’s 90-inch frame wasn’t easy to swing, but when you swung it right, the ball went to good places. I’ve always been amazed at how the pros basically want the toughest thing they can find to play with, and then they proceed to make it even tougher by adding all kinds of weight to it. I tried one of Yevgeny Kafelnikov's Fischer frames one year at Wimbledon and had to put it down after 15 minutes. I’m not sure what it did to my arm, and I don’t want to know. It took half the fortnight to recover.
This summer, when I got back from Wimbledon and began searching the offices for my new summer stick, our gear editor, Richard Pagliaro, suggested I try Novak Djokovic’s 100-square-inch Head racquet. I was torn. I’d never used anything bigger than a 95, and I didn’t want to admit that I might need the bigger head to give me back a little of the power I’ve inevitably lost. But Djokovic was a No. 1 now, so I decided to keep the tradition going and took it hiome.
I didn’t love it at first. The extra head size bothered me. It’s just a little more racquet that you have to get through the hitting zone, and that’s particularly tough on one-handed backhands. (It’s the two-handed guys who typically use the big frames, and I can see why Roger Federer would be loath to move up.) But after a few sessions, I got the hang of the Head. My first serve had more pace, second serve had more bite, and I was even coming over my topspin backhand more easily, and occasionally keeping it in the court. My opponents immediately noticed the difference. I had to admit it: I really had needed the extra space.
Of course, all problems were not suddenly solved forever. I still missed just as many first serves, still threw in ugly shank backhands at inopportune moments, and still hit my share of ill-advised crosscourt approaches—there was nothing the Djoker’s racquet could do about that.
It’s been a good abbreviated summer on the courts nonetheless, and the bigger stick has given me some new life, and perhaps new prospects for improvement. I’ve been able to move back farther behind the baseline again, a particular pleasure for anyone who plays in New York. There’s rarely much room behind any court here, but a couple of them at my club do give you some space. It’s fun to roam, take time to set up, launch topspin balls from far away—we always tell Gael Monfils to move up in the court, but I can see the appeal of hanging back, even if it isn't the smartest way to go.
On humid weekday afternoons I’ve gotten to play on an otherwise empty set of courts, with only the rising sound of the cicadas all around us for company. In the evenings, I’ve played until the only thing you can see is the yellow of the tennis ball coming out of the dusk. I’ve been unable to get any number of songs out of my head as I’ve played; today’s was “Marianne,” by Nolan Strong and the Diablos, not a bad tune to have stuck in there. And I’ve given myself the usual wide variety of instructions and reminders in my mind: “Reach up” for my serve; “hit out” on my second delivery; “attack the ball” on returns. I even tried a tribute to my favorite departing TV show this year, Friday Night Lights: “Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose," I mumbled to myself as one set began. Just so you know, it’s not true.
I also, for a few games, found the Zone. They say it’s a peaceful, Zen kind of place, where you can’t miss even if you tried, and that is how it felt. I really didn’t think I could miss a forehand from any part of the court, and for the span of maybe 20 minutes I didn’t. And then it was over. There was no explaining it's coming, or it’s going; it wasn’t connected to anything I told myself or what I ate that day or how much sleep I had or even what I was consciously thinking. One minute I felt like if I swung all out at a forehand, whether it was high or low, crosscourt or down the line, it was going to find the corner. But by the start of the next set, I felt different as I swung. It felt like the ball might go out, might sail long if I took a big cut, and that made all the difference. I didn’t start shanking forehands all over the place, but I stopped hitting winners.
Our confidence, or at least my confidence, seems to move like a pendulum. It swings between poles, and every so often it swings into the elusive zone where you can make the ball go exactly where you want it to go. It’s true, as they say, that when you’re there, you’re not really thinking; your arm takes over for your brain. But it’s not as if you can control this, either. You don't play well every time you stop thinking—more often than not, the opposite is the case.
No, you can’t talk or think you’re way into the Zone. It doesn’t last long. And it’s sad to leave it behind when it does go. But where else in life can you feel, for a few minutes at least, that you can do no wrong?
*****
Have a good weekend and enjoy the rest of Cincy. I'll be back mid-week for the Big Show. Until then, I've got Clarissa and Soft Machine and some time at the beach—what else do you need?
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