29 posts categorized "September 2011"
 “Was this the greatest night in the history of baseball?”
That question was posed by an ESPN anchor to Tim Kurkjian, the network's MLB expert, on Thursday morning. A few hours earlier, two teams, the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox, had completed historic end-of-season collapses at virtually the same moment. Kurkjian's answer? Do I really need to tell you? Yes, of course it was the greatest single night in the century-and-a-half history of the national pastime. And I agree, it was exciting, even if I did manage to fall asleep somewhere along the way. But I wonder: Will anyone outside of those two collapsed cities, Boston and Atlanta, remember it in a year?
Hyperbole is what we do in sports—we're the greatest ever at declaring things the greatest ever. Write a post about Victoria Azarenka’s bad shoulder, and an hour later you’ll find 10 commenters screaming at each other about whether Laver or Federer is the One True Goat. I’m not totally against this kind of chatter. I’m not spoilsport enough to declare that “Goats don’t exist"; I really do think Roger Federer is the best ever, and that the 2008 Wimbledon men’s final was the “greatest match of all time.” But there must be moderation in all things. How about we have a Goat summit meeting once a year? We could schedule it over the Christmas holidays.
There hasn’t been much moderation surrounding tennis’s latest greatest achievement, Novak Djokovic’s 2011 season. It didn’t even take half the year before speculation began about whether it was the best in men’s tennis history (or, for those of us who wanted to inject some futile last-minute sanity into the discussion, Open era history). There was a reason, or reason enough, for all of this premature talk: Djokovic wasn’t losing, to anyone. But there was also a wish among fans and commentators and editors to believe that we really were witnessing something historic, despite the cold hard fact that after his loss at the French Open, Djokovic would never match Rod Laver’s gold-standard Grand Slam of 1969. The desire to see history, and believe that you’re part of it, is strong.
Now that the biggest moments of Djokovic’s 2011 are over, and injury has slowed him, we can make a better assessment of his accomplishments. If his season isn’t the Greatest, what is it? First of all, it’s obviously not over yet. If he skips the Shanghai Masters, he will likely play three more events, in Basel, Paris, and London. If he wins all of them he could improve his record from its current 64-3 to something along the lines of 78-3. I would guess that this isn’t going to happen, except that I've already guessed that a lot of things wouldn’t happen for Djokovic this year that did. However he wraps it up, though, this has been one of the best seasons we’ve seen. Only five other men in the Open era (Laver, Connors, Wilander, Federer, and Nadal) have won at least three majors in a year, and no one has won five Masters events to go along with them. Yes, the Masters Series is a fairly new invention, but it’s still a testament to Djokovic’s consistency and surface versatility. Only McEnroe’s 82-3 in 1984 and Federer’s 92-5 in 2006 are in the same winning percentage stratosphere.
To me, though, another stat should, in the future, give people a true idea of Djokovic’s excellence this year: His 10-1 record against Federer and Nadal. That’s like killing two Goats at once; or like someone coming along in 1981 and dominating both Borg and McEnroe—you can’t say Djokovic had it easy. In fact, the only reason that his season isn’t vying with Laver's is that the Greatest of All Time, Federer, played some of his greatest tennis, in the year’s greatest match, in the semis of the French Open. And Djokovic was still a couple of points from sending it to a fifth set and most likely winning it. But while Federer came out on top, it was Djokovic’s streak, and the surreal quality of his season, that made that afternoon in Paris the most dramatic of the year.
Whether Djokovic’s 2011 is “better” than Federer’s '06 or Mac’s '84 or Rafa’s '10 or Connors’ '74 can be hashed out when it’s finally over and the numbers are all in. But I will say that the experience of watching him through this year has been unique. Djokovic started on top of the mountain in Melbourne and only got better from there. He won when we didn’t expect him to—against Nadal on clay—and he won when the expectations were immense, at the U.S. Open. He bounced back from the crushing disappointment of Paris to win Wimbledon, and came back to win when he really didn’t need to, against Andy Murray in the semis in Rome. What makes Djokovic’s season special to me was that it seemed like one long sustained performance—while he triumphed in a dozen different ways, it felt like one big, brilliant winning match, played on every surface, all over the world. I don’t think his season will end up being called the Greatest, but it may be the Most Elevated: Nobody has gotten closer to levitating on a tennis court than Djokovic did in 2011. May he rise again soon.
*****
Have a good weekend.
 Is the Revolution in the Rain in danger of drying up already? What began as a fight over playing conditions and player safety at the U.S. Open has very quickly moved on to, well, slipperier ground: money, the schedule; the schedule, money. In other words, places we've been before.
Whether it’s going to be different this time around depends on whom you ask. The big player meeting that Andy Murray called for in Shanghai, where he said everything would get worked out “for sure,” is not going to be quite as big without Roger Federer, who pulled from the event. It might not even happen at all. And, as predicted by Andy Roddick at the Open, there’s little agreement, even among the game’s stars, on what should be changed. Murray, Roddick, and Rafael Nadal want the schedule “fixed,” but the other two members of the reigning Big 4, Federer and Novak Djokovic, seem fine with it. Federer, at 30, just doesn’t play the tournaments, like Shanghai, that he doesn’t want to play. If you can’t get those guys, who would seem to have similar concerns about injuries, burnout, and career longevity, on the same page, how can you hope to unite them with players ranked in the 20s, 30s, 40s, and 100s, who have their own sets of issues?
Still, even though the odds of anything happening look daunting, and even though we have this conversation every fall, Murray and Roddick are continuing to talk, and talk pretty big. They’ve brought up the idea of forming a bona fide union, and even mentioned going on strike to get what they want—once they figure out exactly what that is, of course. On balance, their words, after a brief honeymoon period during the Open, haven’t generated a lot of good publicity. The reaction has mostly ranged from, “Who do these brats think they are?” to “We’ve heard it all before.” But the brief history of labor unrest in tennis does tell us that moves that seem radical or foolish at the time can eventually bear fruit.
Through the distorting lens of history, the 1973 Wimbledon boycott seems like an obvious and necessary step, something anyone could support. The tour had been professionalized for five years, yet the players’ lives, and their ability to pursue their livelihoods, were still controlled by volunteer officials. They could still suspend Niki Pilic for choosing to play a tour event instead of Davis Cup. How did the public and press react to this overdue call for justice? By vilifying them. The British people backed proud old Wimbledon and saw the players as greedy ingrates controlled by American business interests.
(Aside: It’s largely forgotten, though, that the Wimbledon boycott didn’t represent the final shot in the professional revolt. That was fired the next year by the unlikely insurgent Jimmy Connors, when he sued the ATP for backing the ILTF when he was banned from the French Open for playing World Team Tennis, a rival of the ATP’s at the time (wow, that was a complicated era). When the ATP backed down, Connors and his manager, Bill Riordan, claimed that only then did the players have real “freedom”—they could finally play anywhere, anytime, for anyone. But that freedom came at the cost of solidarity; tennis from then on would go the way of Connors and Bjorn Borg, stars whose allegiance was to themselves rather than any other players.)
More relevant to today’s situation was what happened at Flushing Meadows in 1988. That was the year of the famous “parking lot revolution,” in which the ATP's biggest stars, led by Hamilton Jordan, held a press conference outside the main gate at the National Tennis Center (they'd been denied access to the press room by the USTA—some battles never change) to announce that they were breaking away from the Men's Tennis Council and starting their own tour. Believe it or not, the reason this time wasn’t money or freedom. It was about creating a better-organized, less-scattershot sport. Basically, the top players wanted to play each other more often, in bigger and more significant events. Before that year's Open, Mats Wilander complained that he had played only three other members of the Top 10 the entire season. At another press conference, John McEnroe said, “It’s not about money, that’s what needs to be said right off. What we’re trying to do is to present a better image of tennis to the public, so they will see more big matches between the top players.”
What’s funny in retrospect is that the old guard, players like John Newcombe, who had fought simply to be paid for their work, couldn’t understand how it could not be about money. At the time, Newk thought the parking lot revolution was too radical and idealistic, too much risk for too little reward. Looking back, though, it’s clear that the ATP again got what it wanted in the eventual creation of the Masters Series (first called the Super 9). The Series forces the top players to play each other all year long, in significant events. I don't think it's a coincidence that men’s tennis has never been stronger, and that great rivalries have since flourished. Even the old solidarity—or at least the old mutual respect—has returned.
So what’s the message for Rafa, Andy, Andy, and any other would-be revolutionaries today? On the one hand, seemingly radical steps can work, and that when the players have taken them, the game has progressed and improved. The parking lot revolt also shows that the game's stars can be leaders, with or without the rank and file. In that sense, if there is a broad enough problem, forming a union to better represent their interests, particularly at the Grand Slams, makes sense. But when Murray and Roddick complain about the number of mandatory events, they’re flying in the face of their tour’s own history. The Masters Series doesn't work unless the events are mandatory.
The players should have more say at the Slams, which are not run by the ATP; but that’s hardly a world-changing topic. The bigger subject where I agree with Nadal, Murray, and Roddick is on the length of the schedule. It goes on too long, both for the top players and for me as a fan; we could both use an official, no-tournaments-played-anywhere off-season. Players could get away, rest their minds and bodies, play a (limited number of) exhibitions, maybe even make an improvement or two; fans could also get away, forget the game, and savor it more when it does come back. To my mind, that’s the next step in re-organizing the tour and, as McEnroe said during the last revolution, “presenting a better image of tennis to the public.”
Never gonna happen, you might say, and you’d probably be right. But history says that the players can make difficult things happen when enough of them agree and commit to a change. Whether that's ever going to happen is another story.
 Indian Summer came to Brooklyn this past weekend. That meant the return of sun and humidity, and, according to most forecasts, a ton of rain. This was bad news at my tennis club, where our annual year-end tournament, which lingers through all four weekends of September, appeared destined for some U.S. Open-like disruptions. But unlike this year’s real summer, the Indian edition defied the weatherman and stayed surprisingly dry. That meant on Sunday I got to play some tennis, with a friend, and then watch some tennis. The match I saw was a B-level doubles quarterfinal. It wasn’t close, or good, but there’s something about seeing people compete, at virtually any level, that is compelling to me. The highlight on this day was overhearing one player snap at his partner: “Just do what I tell you, OK?” Whatever he was doing, it worked, because they won.
I didn’t play in the tournament, in singles or doubles, and I haven’t played it often over the years. The pesky U.S. Open gets in the way, but I’m not sure I would enter anyway. Tournaments are generally a little too much for my adult competitive appetite. I like playing people I know, mixing the competitive with the social—life off the court is serious enough. So on Sunday, while the tournament was going on around me, I played an old friend and USTA-league doubles partner, Jeff, who had moved out of the city three years ago.
Speaking of the club tournament, Jeff won it a few times before he made that move, with his wife and two young children, from Manhattan to Westchester in 2008. Soon after he got there, he was diagnosed with stomach cancer. He went through chemo and endured multiple surgeries afterward due to complications. As late as this past June, he was back in the hospital with another problem. At that point, he and his doctor decided to try some new things with his treatment, and he’s been OK since. He played doubles in another USTA 4.5 league in his area this summer, and came out of nowhere to reach the final of the men’s open singles at his new club.
Jeff was ready for more, so we played a match—he has a bigger appetite for competition than I do, and he’s been starved of it for a while now. It was déjà vu, as they say, all over again, right from the first ball. I hit my hardest serve down the T and it came straight back at me. Jeff was as fast and consistent as I remember him, and his looping topspin backhand that pushes me into the back fence was just as irritating. The only physical difference in him was in the shoulders, which were thinner. Because of that, he doesn’t have the same pop on the ball, especially on his serve. But he got to everything I threw at him, including an admittedly diabolical drop shot—maybe my appetite for competition hasn’t shrunk that much, after all—and he wasn’t winded even after 90 minutes of fairly long rallies.
The membership at the club hasn’t turned over too much since he left, so we were interrupted many times by people who were glad to see Jeff looking and doing (and playing) so well. He’s also a tennis-history buff, so afterward we talked about old pros and matches and wooden racquets. I said at one point, “You must have wondered if you’d ever get on a court again.” He nodded and smiled and said, “Yeah, definitely.”
On one level this was a dumb statement by me. He wasn’t just worried about whether he would play tennis again; he was worried if he would ever see his wife or kids again. Getting back to them, and to his job, must have been foremost in his thoughts, but the way he answered me, it was clear that tennis had entered his mind as well. That made me think about seeing him back on court now, doing all the things that a tennis player must do. Not just the running, but the timing that goes into every shot, the body coordination and control it takes to make even the supposedly simple ones look so simple.
The gap between that, and the days spent in a hospital, seemed too vast for my mind to span. Jeff had a sort of starry look when he remembered wondering if he would ever play tennis again, and it must have felt just slightly short of miraculous for him to find himself in a full-scale singles match. Not that he didn’t show some flashes of frustration out there. He thought that one of his looping backhands was going to loop long, so he let out a grunt of disgust, only to see the ball drop inside the baseline. I eventually won the point, and we laughed at his outburst. “You would have had to invoke the Serena rule on me there,” he said. Hopefully, I would have let it slide (hopefully).
The same must be true for people who play other sports. The golf course, the soccer pitch, the basketball court: To someone who is ill, they must all feel like they’re a million miles away, residing in some other, unattainable universe; too far, perhaps, even to worry about. All sports require a level of coordination that we regularly underrate, but tennis, to this biased player’s mind, requires the most. Later, I thought about Jeff moving to his right for a passing shot. I thought he was going to go down the line, so I covered that part of the net. At the last second, he flipped it crosscourt, behind me, the same way he had many times in our matches in the past. It's a shot he owns, one that his body can do from memory.
Tennis, even at a moment like that, is hardly essential to existence. But for someone in that position, it might be just as important, because it's a symbol of how far you've come—you've come back, not just to life, but all the way back to a particularly beautiful and unexplainable, and just plain fun, part of life: a crosscourt pass on the run (even the words sound good). Tennis in that sense might seem to be a luxury, but in its casual intricacy, in its invisible blend of the psychological and the physical, of grace and power and speed and touch and eye-hand coordination, it can also look like the ultimate expression of health.
 Last week I wrote, in an apparently rehashed reference to Television’s “Marquee Moon”—sorry, the band only had one album worth hashing in the first place—that the tennis tour beat would kick back in very soon. I didn’t feel it this weekend, even as I watched Jo-Wilfried Tsonga slash confidently and more resourcefully than normal through some testy competition from Alexandr Dolgopolov and Ivan Ljubicic in Metz, France. I swore to myself after his no-show against Roger Federer at the Open that I wouldn’t tout Tsonga again anytime soon, or at least until he wins Paris. He did look good last week, but Metz, as you could tell from the hairstyles in the front rows, isn’t Paris.
No, it took until this morning for the drumbeat, very faintly, to sound again in my ears. I was watching the end of Tsonga-Ljuby on the DVR when I finally gave in and focused my eyes on the Tennis Channel’s annoyingly informative ticker scrawl at the bottom of the screen. There I learned that Agnieszka Radwanska has already won her first round in Tokyo. I also learned that she's the ninth seed. Could that be right? There are eight players in Tokyo ranked higher than Radwanska? “Must be a pretty good tournament,” I finally decided.
Tokyo is more than pretty good, really; it’s as good as we can expect from the WTA at the moment. It’s a full 64 draw, with Caroline Wozniacki at the top and Maria Sharapova at the bottom. In a year led mostly by the men, it’s the women who have broken out of the gates first this fall.
*****
Toray Pan Pacific Open
Tokyo
Hard courts; $2,050,000
Draw here
TV schedule here
There once was a time, in the 1980s, when it appeared that Japan might become the next Empire, and that included taking a bigger slice of the worldwide tennis pie. Now it’s China who is Next, and who is duly courted by the ATP and WTA, each of whom has installed major mandatory events in its biggest cities. But the still-prestigious and lucrative Toray Pan Pacific Open remains as a legacy of Japan’s moment.
The women are all-in this time around; everyone without Williams for a last name is present and accounted for. That’s a lot of names, and a lot of storylines. Here are a few, in brief:
Caroline Wozniacki: Are we still down on her, her game, her imitations, her gimmicks, her future, and maybe even her voice? Yes, she failed to engage Serena at the Open, but her comeback win over Kuznetsova was the more important match. Coming from way back brought out the cussedness and happiness that we used to see in Wozniacki all the time, but which had been missing since the spring. This was the type of tournament she was winning back then.
Victoria Azarenka: She also lost to Serena in New York, but the match included the best set of tennis of the tournament. Is it possible to build on a loss? If it is, that’s the one. She might get Caro in the semis.
Kristyna Pliskova; Karolina Pliskova: They’re both already out, but now I know there are two Pliskovas. That's helpful.
Christina McHale: She plays Paszek to start. The Open is over; the work begins.
Sam Stosur: Of course this is the big story. What type of breakthrough champ is Stosur going to be? We haven’t had much luck with the other two this season, Li and Kvitova. It won’t be an easy start for Sam, either: She begins with a rematch of her fierce Open battle with Maria Kirilenko.
Laura Robson: I confess that I’d stopped believing in her as of last year. I know that’s a little early, considering that the Brit was only 16 when I abandoned all hope, but I didn’t think she would ever have the speed. I’m happy that this young player with personality is starting to prove me wrong. Robson, a wild card, won her first round over Alexandra Dulgheru 2 and 2. Now she plays someone else I’ve occasionally, unhappily, given up on, Ana Ivanovic.
Vera Zvonareva: Where are we on the Zvonareva curve? Upswing or downswing? This seems like her kind of tournament to win. Having just turned 27, though, I wonder if her best moments are behind her, and whether her Slam-winning window closed in 2010.
Petra Kvitova: You don’t just win Wimbledon and disappear forever, right? Still, I don’t think Kvitova will be ready to do major damage here. She seems utterly lost, or utterly found, from one match and event to the next, with very little in between.
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova: It would make a lot of sense if she came out and won this one. Which means she won’t.
Maria Sharapova: She’s been the champ here twice, but winning tournaments is no longer her specialty. Her serve gets in the way at some point.
Angelique Kerber/Bojana Jovanovski: The former beat the latter in the first round, 1 and 0. Kerber is obviously getting better, but is it too early to worry about the young Serb Jovanovski, who, as the year began, seemed to be the WTA’s best new hope? Or are the new hopes now going to come, like Kerber, Stosur, Zvonareva, and Li Na, from the older rank and file?
Another story to watch in Tokyo and beyond.
*****
PTT Thailand Open
Bangkok
Hard courts; $587,000; 250 ranking points
Draw here
TV schedule here
My friend and colleague Chris Clarey is calling for a moratorium on the term “Big 4” to describe the top male players, until Murray wins a major. I’m not sure I can agree, considering that Murray, along with Novak Djokovic, was the only man to reach all four Slam semis in 2011. And with Federer pulling out of Shanghai, where he was the runner-up last year, Murray could finish the season ranked No. 3.
His fall push, and Murray usually has one—he was the guy who straight-setted Federer in that Shanghai final in 2010—will begin this week in Bangkok, where he won’t have to face any other members of the, um, Oversized 4. Instead, Monfils is the second seed, Simon the third, and, believe it or not, Guillermo Garcia-Lopez is fourth. You might go so far as to say that Murray has the field to himself. The fifth seed, and the one closest to him, was Ivan Dodig, and he’s already been knocked out.
Other names: Grigor Dimitrov, the hardest-working early-round loser in tennis; Ernests Gulbis, who was surging there for a minute this summer and could play Dimitrov in a potentially entertaining and exasperating second-rounder (the winner would get Murray). Donald Young, who opens with Igor Andreev. And Pablo Andujar, a sometimes-exciting player—his loss to Nadal at the French was one of the season’s underrated best—who reached the final this past weekend in Bucharest.
Now, a day later, Andujar is in Bangkok. The tour is beating.
 How much can we learn from observing other tennis players? Part of me suspects that it’s the only way we learn the sport, and that all of the tennis lessons in the world, all of the “racquet back”s and “ move your feet”s put together, won’t help you as much as a few glances at a pro’s service toss or forehand stance. When I began to go to clinics when I was 10 or 11, it wasn’t our club’s teaching pro who taught me my Western grip and low-to-high swing. It was two players whom I watched from a distance: one was Bjorn Borg, the other was an older kid from my local courts, the best young player in town. If today’s No. 1 men’s player, Novak Djokovic, is any indication, athletic talent begins with the ability, and the desire, to mimic what you see.
In my case, that desire, because it's automatic and unconscious, didn’t end when I was 12. It has stayed with me and is still with me today. So much so that sometimes I don’t notice it myself. Six or seven years ago, during that brief window in time when Andy Roddick was at the top of the game, and his forehand seemed to be the state of the art, I heard someone on the next court who was watching me say something like, “He tries to smack his forehand like Roddick.” I hadn’t realized it, but he was right; the idea of Roddick’s inside-out forehand, which was once a weapon for him, and which I’d watched countless times during that period, had seeped into my motion, my footwork, my mindset.
As Roddick descended and Roger Federer ascended, I tried to follow in the Swiss’s footsteps as well. This time it was more of a conscious effort, which may explain why it was mostly a failure. None of my shots remotely resemble Federer’s, but when he was at his best, there was no way not to be influenced by him. Mid-match, I would try to get myself to move like him, with an easy flow around the court and an easy, loose swing into the ball. The trick was to stay relaxed, but at the same time to be more aggressive with your feet. It typically worked, until it didn’t. I found that it was much easier to get myself into this mode when I was winning than it was when things started to go south. After a few misses, I would tense back up. I guess it’s not surprising that Federer, until very recently, has been one of the game’s great front-runners. He’s at his best when he’s at his easiest.
As a lefty, though, the player who has influenced me the most in recent years has been my fellow sinister-sider, Rafael Nadal. The many hours of watching him construct rallies have been well spent. Without thinking about it, I now play to a lefty’s natural strengths more than I ever have. I swing my forehand more sharply into my opponent’s backhand corner. As Nadal has shown against Federer and many others, it’s not a shot that needs to be a winner to be very effective; by adding sidespin to it, you can get the ball to tail away from the other guy’s backhand in a hurry. It’s also a play that leads to the type of easy volleys that we see Nadal hit so often. I’ve started to imitate Rafa on those shots as well. He hits them the way a good clay-courter should hit them, by angling them off and not relying on pace to get them past his opponent. When I do the same thing, by carving around my crosscourt backhand volley, the ball will bounce a little wider and shorter than normal, and often just out of reach of a surprised opponent. It helps, I suppose, that I play almost exclusively on clay.
How about the latest No. 1? I’ve switched to Novak Djokovic’s racquet this summer, but the game has yet to follow. As with Federer, I don’t hit the ball like Djokovic, and defense will never be my specialty the way it is his. We’ll see what happens; judging from the past, one of these days, I’ll find myself doing, or attempting, something Nole-esque without even realizing it. Hopefully I won’t try to copy his sliding open-stance backhand dig on asphalt. That might be the last thing I do on any type of court.
From this evidence—and I can't be the only one who keeps internalizing this stuff—we're always learning from other, better tennis players. What I wondered during this year’s U.S. Open was whether all of that exposure would give my game any kind of temporary bump upward in quality. This used to happen when I was a junior, though for some reason it was never as noticeable on a tennis court as it was on a pool table. I owned a copy of The Color of Money in high school, and it never failed to help when I got on the tables at the bowling alley in town. (Of course, it could also have been the ear-splitting Bon Jovi and the deep stench of cigarette smoke embedded in the green felt that put me in the mood.) A few minutes of watching the sharks in that movie were enough to raise my own level for an hour or two. I think, as much as anything, it was the simple sight of seeing their shots drop in the pockets over and over that gave me an unconscious feeling of confidence.
(Aside: I should also note that The Color of Money has lived on in my mind when I play tennis as well. If nothing is going right, a phrase from one of those sharks, Grady Seasons, comes back to me: “It’s like a nightmare, isn’t it? It just keeps getting worse and worse.” Tom Cruise says those words back to him in this scene (Seasons comes back with one of the all-time great retorts: “Ya got lucky, ya lucky [so-and-so]”). The scene also contains another immortal line, when Paul Newman, after putting the 1 and 9 balls in the corner, gives a bearded John Turturro this friendly piece of advice: “Wipe your nose, will ya, junior?” Tennis could use some more of that, don’t you think? Maybe from Federer to Djokovic on a changeover?)
This year, after nearly three weeks of watching, I finally got out to play on the Wednesday after the Open. Visions of Rafa and Nole still danced in my head. But as I waited for my partner to show up, I started to watch a decent-looking local junior on the next court. The kid, who might have been 16, was warming up. Or, I guess that’s what you would call it. He stood flat-footed as he slapped at his ground strokes. He practiced a tweener as often as he did his forehand. He loafed through the early drills that his coach did with him. He didn’t appear to get to full speed until half an hour into it. At first I shook my head, until I remembered that on a lot of days when I was 16, I hadn’t looked a whole lot different when I was practicing.
By the time my partner got there and we started to hit, all the visions of tennis greatness I had witnessed at Flushing Meadows had been replaced by the image of this loafing teen. It worked like a charm. I went out with one simple plan: Not to be like him, or like my own teenage self. If I was going to take the time to play, I might as well give myself the best chance to do it well. I had one goal, not to be lazy, and I achieved it. I played with a clear mind from start to finish, and may have had my best day of the season so far.
Knowing who to imitate is part of being a good tennis player. But it seems that knowing how not to act on a court can come in handy, too. Plus, it’s a whole lot easier not to look like a lazy junior than it is to look like Novak Djokovic. Maybe I’ve been watching the wrong people all this time.
*****
Have a good weekend.
 We're Rallying again, post-Open-style. Kamakshi Tandon and I take a last look back at the season's final Slam, and look ahead to to see what it might mean for the future.
*****
TANDON: It's striking how little there was to take away from the U.S. Open in tennis terms. Sam Stosur’s upset of Serena Williams was the stunner of the tournament, but was it really anything other than the chaos we've come to expect in the women’s field? (Angelique Kerber was in the semifinals, if you noticed.) And even the low expectations of surprise on the men's side turned out to be inflated, as the top four all made the semifinals. The matches were certainly worth watching, especially that careening rollercoaster disguised as the first men's semifinal. And there were a few nice early round stories. But all in all, nothing too earth-shattering.
Just as well, because there would have been no time to pay attention. Was this a tennis tournament or some performance art version of the collapse of organized society? Earthquakes, hurricanes, a possible plague (17 retirements or walkovers), collapses, feuds, rain, mutiny, washouts, cracks in the earth, blowups, griping, carping, fines, threats... and that was just Andy Roddick and John McEnroe being double-booked on the practice courts.
No one came out of it looking that good, honestly. Some of the U.S. Open’s long-standing problems came home to roost—the slapdash original construction of the grounds, the scheduling concessions made to TV, the roof challenge (even the dumb practice of putting the seeds in after the draw is done). The top guys took what were legitimate questions about the integrity of the competition and tried to parlay them into what are essentially money issues, a song and dance that continued last week during Davis Cup, and if it keeps up it's going to come back to bite them.
And man, what a fortnight for ugly behaviour, particularly among the Americans. Ryan Harrison's racquet-tossing exit, Mike Bryan apparently having some incident with an official that got him fined $10,000, Andy Roddick giving public earfuls to commentators and Brian Earley, Mardy Fish getting 'fired up' at his opponent, Serena Williams getting 'intense' with officials again—anyone else? It was a trying tournament, but still—coming in, who would have thought Donald Young might be the American standard bearer for good behaviour at the U.S. Open?
It wasn't just Americans, of course. Philipp Petzschner's refusal to acknowledge that a ball had come off his leg instead of his racquet during the men's doubles final ended things on a scandalous note. As you know, Petzschner is one of the players I like to romanticize, so that one stung a bit. Some were more debatable. Federer drew flack for calling Djokovic's match-point-saving winner 'lucky', which might have got a bit overblown even if it wasn't his finest moment. And was Caroline Wozniacki's imitation of Nadal's press conference cramps funny or distasteful? I thought it was pretty funny, there was no nastiness there.
So where do we go from here? As I've said, I think it makes the U.S. Open scheduling a pressing matter going forward -- Federer pretty much said they had to pick between a roof and Super Saturday, to start with -- but I don't see any easy fixes with the CBS commitments running at least another two years and the roof costing $200 million. Do you? And what else can't be ignored after these two wet and wild weeks?
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TIGNOR: For a young country, the U.S. has certainly developed some strong, and not so admirable, tennis traditions. You mention that this tournament pointed up the shoddy construction that originally went into Flushing Meadows, and the bubble that closed down Armstrong did remind us that the site—originally built for the World’s Fair on 1964—rests on landfill and is located below the water table. It was both ironic and totally unsurprising that this was also the year that the Open chose to debut its new show court, 17, before it was even completed.
The same goes for player behavior. Serena Williams shaking her racquet at the umpire reminded me of no one so much as Jimmy Connors doing the same thing 20 years ago against Aaron Krickstein. The fact that he won and she lost will make the biggest difference in how the events are remembered. But the Yanks behaved badly all around. Even Donald Young, who you semi-sarcastically hold out as our new paragon of virtue, told someone in the audience during his loss to Andy Murray to “shut up.”
Since those two wild weeks are fast receding in our minds, let me focus on a few pieces of news that, if they don’t stay news in general, will likely stay with me and affect my thinking on the sport.
Stosur
For the time being, the women’s Open has made me stop worrying and enjoy the WTA for what it is. It may “need” stars—the ratings for the women’s were way up because of Serena—but my two favorite moments in the women's game in 2011 were seeing Li Na of China hold the trophy of France, and Sam Stosur put her last forehand past Serena for her first major title. Neither of these women are stars, Li has been horrible since, and I have no particular expectations for Stosur. But to me those finals, with the emotion of their breakthrough wins, were much more exciting than seeing a certified star, Kim Clijsters, win the Aussie Open.
Djokovic/Federer
The famous forehand return was a great shot, the shot of the year by far. But was it a good sign for Djokovic? If we had any doubts that the old Nole, the one who would pull the plug and go for broke when he was frustrated, still existed, this moment dispelled them. He won’t always make Shots like that.
The Roof/The Money
Seeing the quandary the Open is an admittedly guilty pleasure. When Ashe was rising higher and higher, there was talk even then that retractable roofs were the wave of the future and the USTA would have trouble putting one on something so mammoth. But they went for mammoth anyway. Now, 14 years later, they’re stuck. From my perspective, this Open had to be one of the riskiest, and potentially worst, fan experiences you could have in sports. Just the tiniest bit of mist in the air, and you get nothing for your money. If you have tickets for the evening—most likely very bad tickets—and one match goes long during the day, you can be waiting for hours outside the gates. Once you’re inside, you may not leave until 2:00 A.M. And Andy Murray is right: It isn’t just Super Saturday that reeks of greed, it’s stretching the first round over six sessions, when Wimbledon gets them done in two.
On the other hand . . .
I was happy to see the players do some banding together at the Open, but since then, whenever I hear Murray or Nadal talk about their grievances in press conferences, I start to think that the first thing they need to do is quiet back down and hire a new CEO they can trust, preferably an ex-player, and who knows his PR-speak. Murray should also stop complaining about mandatory events (i.e. tournaments with no appearance fees)—the mandatory Masters are far and away the tour's most successful creation.
As Roddick said during the Open, getting just 20 ATP pros to agree on anything is a stretch. I do think, after this year, that there’s an opportunity to do something about Super Saturday, even if it means that the tournament gets less money from CBS. I don’t think anyone would be bothered if the Open failed to increase the winner’s prize money for one year—Serena even rolled her eyes when she was informed of her half-million U.S. Open Series bonus prize. Beyond that, it seems like revenue sharing is one place where they can get widespread agreement; 13 percent sounds scandalously low.
It also makes me think that Rafa's scheduling plan, which is basically to have all Slams and Masters and Masters Cup done by October, and let the 500s and 250s keep going for the rest of the year, isn't a bad one (in a perfect world kind of way; try selling that one to the Paris Masters tournament director). It would give the top guys a real off-season, and let the rest of the tour keep making their living.
Madison Keys/Sloane Stephens/Christina McHale
I'd almost forgotten about them by the time the tournament was over, but it wasn't a bad two weeks for American newcomers on the women's side. Who has the most potential of these three? I can't tell, but I liked the way all of them played and competed. Keys, at 16, with all kinds of athleticism, might be the one to watch most closely, but Stephens is a step closer at the moment.
Petzschner
His sin, not owning up to a ball hitting him, is one of the worst, in my opinion, and I’m sorry he has been taken down a notch in your eyes. But I can think of one upside: At least he wasn’t an American.
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TANDON: Agreed, the sport has given us a lot of reasons to be proud recently but this U.S. Open, for the most part, wasn’t exactly one of them. So its impact is going to be about what comes out of it. From our side, a little empathy goes a long way—no one behaves perfectly all the time, everyone gets angry sometimes, and sometimes it’s quite justified too. Expecting flawless handling of tense situations just means being constantly worked up. As long as the intentions weren’t bad, it really comes down to how they react afterwards—Fish had a rare ugly moment, indicated he was sorry, so that’s pretty much it. For Serena, there’s a lot more work to do because it’s happened before and she doesn’t seem to think she did anything wrong (though various damage control efforts do at least indicate she realizes other people think she did something wrong). Petzschner can’t take back what he did, but expressing regret would do a lot to rehabilitate him—make it a moment of weakness rather than a longstanding flaw. Is the USTA going to ignore what happened or do what it can about the scheduling—play the first round over two days instead of three, for example? That’s going to have a bigger impact on relations going forward than this year’s rainy mess.
The player unrest over scheduling is a complicated topic that maybe we can revisit later. I wonder if they’ve been following the NFL and NBA and a couple of football disputes in Europe a little too much and have forgotten that unlike league sports, tennis players are independent and can pretty much do what they want as long as they’re willing to ‘pay the price’ (give up a bonus, pay a fine, take a pr hit—okay, technically there’s a suspension rule now, but it’s pretty toothless for the ATP). That doesn’t mean the players don’t have a right to push for what they want or that they’re wrong in their criticisms (it’s a mixed bag, in my opinion), but it does change the way they need to approach the issues, and the way we need to think about them.
The one thing about all thing—it’s going to make the fall a lot more interesting.
 I’m guessing I’ve used this metaphor before—after 1,159 posts, it’s hard to remember for sure—but we’ve reached another post-crescendo point in the tennis season. The noisy summit of Flushing Meadows was followed by a moment of tour silence for Davis Cup. Now the first few scattered notes of the next movement are tentatively being played, as small tournaments in Korea and China, Metz and Bucharest get underway. Maybe it’s just me, but it reminds me of the moment after the final double-guitar build-up in Television’s “Marquee Moon,” when the notes float in the ether for a few seconds, before the beat begins all over again. (Actually, I’m sure it’s just me.)
The tour beat hasn’t begun in earnest again; that will happen when the women get to the Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo next week, and the men begin their own Asian swing. Until then, there are four 32-draw, warm-up to the warm-up events, two on the men’s side, two on the women’s. The men are in Bucharest and Metz, France; the women in Seoul and Guangzhou. I’ll cover one on each side. If nothing significant comes from them, at least hardcore tennis junkies will still have scores, floating in the ether, to stare at and mull over.
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Moselle Open
Metz, France
Hard courts; $616,255; 250 points
Draw here
You can find the Bucharest draw here. The tourmanent's name—the BRD Nastase Tiriac Trophy—calls up memories of bad boy entertainment, but there’s no one quite as memorable in the tournament itself.
Metz, on the other hand, is well stocked for a 250; I guess it helps to be in France, if you’re looking for style points. Tsonga is the top seed and Gasquet No. 2. In between them are experts' favorites like Llodra, Dolgopolov, Baghdatis, Malisse, Kohlschreiber, and Rochus. Compare to that the mostly American draws from the early part of the summer—in Atlanta and L.A.—and Metz more than holds its own.
Tsonga is coming off dual beatdowns by Federer and Nadal, but overall he’s played some of his best tennis in the period since Queens in June. Dolgopolov also appeared to be ready to surge again at the U.S. Open. Unfortunately, he plays Baghdatis in the second round. If you’re a tournament director, that’s probably a little too high in quality for so early in the week; one of your bigger names will be out by Wednesday.
Two players to watch:
Gasquet: Can he bounce back from a disappointing loss to Karlovic at the Open and a shellacking by Nadal in Davis Cup? His season has been a promising one otherwise.
Dimitrov: OK, he’s spent 2011 doing what he needed to do, leaving the Challengers behind and making himself a fixture in main ATP draws. Now comes the next step—beating seeded players. (Update: That will have to wait another week (or two or three or four), as Dimitrov was bounced 2 and 2 by a qualifier in the opening round).
Name to try to pronounce, or just spell correctly, before he’s out of the tournament: Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy of France. He plays Kohlschreiber in the first round.
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Hansol Korea Open
Seoul, Korea
Hard courts (Deco Turf); $220,000
Draw here
We’ve been missing Serena Williams for most of the year, but it’s the rare tournament that has also missed the entire next tier of WTA stars, Wozniacki, Zvonareva, Azarenka, and Stosur. The Seoul draw is, or was, topped by Francesca Schiavone, but she’s already out, in straight sets, to Vera Dushevina. That leaves Marion Bartoli as the highest-ranked player left. She’ll play the sometimes-dangerous Vania King next.
Other names getting a jump on the fall season: the not-quite-as-promising-as-she-seemed-to-be-three-months-ago Julia Goerges, who had a hot start to the year but has played a lot of tennis since. Maria Jose Martinez Sanchez, who doesn’t drive as many players bananas with her drop-shot-heavy game as you’d think she would. And fourth-seeded Dominika Cibulkova, who has a potentially entertaining second-rounder with qualifier Yaroslava Shvedova.
Blast from the past: Eleni Danilidou
If this one doesn’t do it for you, the draw for Guangzhou is here.
The beat has yet to kick in again, but it won’t be long.
 Whenever it’s scheduled and wherever it’s played, one thing will likely never change about Davis Cup: It will continue to be a paradoxical mix of the frustrating and rewarding, for both players and fans.
Frustrating in that it can force top pros to overdo it physically or risk being accused of a lack of patriotism; rewarding in that it offers other players an immediate chance at redemption, or at least an immediate chance to put a painful loss behind them.
Frustrating for the way it’s unjustly ignored by the populace at large; rewarding for the way, if you’re enough of a fan to be intrigued by all of tennis’s psychological possibilities, it can feel like the sport's version of an alternate universe.
Frustrating in that, every time it comes around, especially when it comes around right after a major, it can seem like overkill at first; rewarding in how it sucks you in with its fervor and unpredictability nonetheless.
All of these attributes were on display over this past weekend, from the two high-profile semifinal ties to the unusually compelling relegation matches. I admit that, as tempting as Spain-France and Serbia-Argentina sounded, I wasn’t sure if I was ready to take a full, weekend bite of tennis so soon after taking the midnight train out of Flushing Meadows. Three games from the bright red bullring in Cordoba, though, and tennis felt new again.
For me, it might have been the outer landscape that had changed, but for the players Davis Cup alters something more fundamental: the mental landscape. Unlike everywhere else in this inward game, the Cup gives the pros a chance to do something for someone else, whether its playing for them or cheering for them. Sometimes that’s just what the doctor ordered, other times it’s just what the doctor would have forbidden. Here’s a look at how the latest round of the event played out in the minds and bodies of a few of its protagonists.
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In the summer of 1982, John McEnroe suffered one of the bitterest losses of his career when he fell to Jimmy Connors in five sets in the Wimbledon final, after being two points from winning. Soon after, he got on a plane to St. Louis to play a Davis Cup tie for the U.S. versus Sweden. With the teams tied 2-2, McEnroe faced that year’s new French Open champion, a teenage Mats Wilander, in the deciding rubber. The two men played for more than six hours before McEnroe came away with one of the most famous and satisfying wins of his career, and clinched the tie in the process. The Wimbledon loss didn’t hurt quite as much. McEnroe would later call it one of the great experiences of his career.
 At this year’s U.S. Open, both Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer suffered bitter defeats at the hands of Novak Djokovic. Federer’s, like McEnroe’s, was tough because of how close he was to winning. Nadal’s was tough because of how far, in the end, he seemed from conquering Djokovic, the man he had always beaten at the game’s biggest events.
The tennis season is long, but what a difference a single week can make within it. Federer walked off the court in New York and soon found himself walking onto another one in Sydney, 14 time zones away. You could have forgiven him for wondering what the heck he was doing there, in a relegation tie versus the Aussies. By Sunday, he knew. Federer shook off any effects of jet lag—I would have had the bends—and beat Lleyton Hewitt and Bernard Tomic in four sets each. Then he cheered as his doubles partner, Stan Wawrinka, shook off his own dispiriting U.S. Open defeat, to Donald Young, to clinch the tie with a surprising five-set win over Hewitt in the fifth rubber. My last image of Federer in New York was the devastated version who dragged himself, hollow-eyed, into his post-semifinal press conference. The only image I saw of Federer in Sydney was the one above, a shot of him standing with the Swiss and letting out of an open-mouthed yell of support for his teammate. That had to feel good.
The same was doubly true for Nadal. In the course of four days, he went from the dark of night, and the darkest point of his season, in Flushing, back to the hot sun of his home country, and his favorite surface. When he got there, Nadal was reportedly exhausted and in a foul mood, and he spent some of the weekend complaining about having to be there so soon. But the quick turnaround, however difficult it might have been physically, appeared to help Rafa psychologically. Even on clay, he played with a more expressive and aggressive abandon than he did on the hard courts at the Open. He seemed to take a season’s worth of frustration out on poor Richard Gasquet and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.
The turnaround, image-wise, was the same as Federer’s. When Nadal left New York, he was glassy-eyed and somber; he hadn’t appeared to want even to glance in Djokovic's direction during the trophy ceremony. Six days later, when Nadal clinched the tie in Cordoba, his clothes the color of the Spanish flag and a full house on their feet, he looked to his teammates and pumped his fist. There was no trace of the past in his eyes or his smile.
Jimmy Connors was the original pro tour warrioer, but DC wasn't the self-centered Jimbo's cup of tea; he beat Mac at Wimbledon in '82 and then skipped that tie in his hometown of St. Louis. When Connors was asked how he would turn around a losing streak against a certain player, would always remind people that “every day is a new day” for a tennis player. As Federer and Nadal found out this weekend, that’s as true today as it’s ever been, and it's as true in Davis Cup as it is anywhere else.
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 No one would mistake David Nalbandian for Jimmy Connors, or any other pro tour warrior. In many ways, the Argentine is the opposite. An indifferent and erratic competitor when he’s out there for himself, he saves his warrior's game for Davis Cup, where he’s been as successful as any player of the last decade. Nalbandian did it again on Friday against Serbia, when he played with a perfectly measured assertiveness in beating Viktor Troicki.
In this, Nalbandian is similar to two other players of his generation: Marat Safin and, before 2011, Novak Djokovic. Safin played more from a sense of obligation than competitive drive when he was on the regular tour. It was easy for him to pack it in or let his frustrations get the best of him, because he rarely seemed to need to prove himself to anyone. In Davis Cup, though, he had something to play for, namely other people. This made him a different player mentally. The setting and the occasion kept Safin's emotions in check for him. Like Nalbandian, he was the anchor of his country’s team.
With both guys, Davis Cup has given us a chance to see just good they could have been if tennis were always played for team and country, rather than self. Nalbandian beat Troicki by easily controlling the rallies from the middle of the court. He’s a different player when he’s leaning forward than when he’s retreating, and in this match, much more than in his tour matches, Nalbandian made sure he was playing from a position of strength, rather than trying to defend. Safin’s negative edge largely vanished in Davis Cup; it’s Nalbandian’s diffidence that disappears.
Neither man possessed the kind of self-motivation that drives the game’s all-time greats. Neither man was selfish enough. Watching Nalbandian in Belgrade Friday, I started to think that if tennis itself weren’t so much about self—self-belief, self-motivation, self-glory, self-defeat—Nalbandian’s game might have been remembered the way we’ll remember Federer’s, as an exemplar of easy brilliance. But tennis, as we’ve read, is an inner game, and Nalbandian has always needed a drive from without.
 Through 2010, I began to think of the man on the losing side of the Argentina-Serbia tie, Novak Djokovic, as someone who might be destined for a career like Safin’s or Nalbandian’s. On his own, Djokovic could let his demons get the better of his considerable talents. When he played for Serbia, though, he had a reason, outside of his own head, to stay calm. In 2011, Djokovic, after winning the Cup, became the first player that I can remember to transfer his Davis Cup self to his tour self. He took his calm from Belgrade last year and kept it in Melbourne—and Paris, and Wimbledon, and New York. Djokovic's inner motivation became as a great as his outer, and in a way that made sense. Unlike Safin and Nalbandian, Djokovic had begun his career firmly believing he would be No. 1 in the world. Davis Cup didn’t create a self-belief where there wasn't one. It reminded him of one that already existed.
This weekend, though, the team event was one match too many for the new pro-tour warrior. Like Nadal and Federer, Djokovic proved that every week is a new one in tennis. But where they turned their Open pain into joy, Djokovic went in the other direction. The man who danced on their graves in New York ended his Sunday in Belgrade face down on the court, with a scream of agony. As Jimbo said, there’s always another day in tennis, and no one has lived that motto like Djokovic this season. Now he can finally look forward to taking a few of those days off.
 These are high times for fans of men’s tennis. The Open wraps us with the top four players putting on a display of the modern game at its best, and the following weekend they’re in action again, playing for their respective countries in Davis Cup. Two of them, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic, should be part of the semifinals, while Roger Federer, defying all laws of jet lag, plays in Sydney. That's one roundabout way of putting a semifinal defeat behind you.
Pete Bodo has the Davis Cup story here; I’ll have a wrap up of the semis on Monday. Before I move on, I wanted to take a moment to look back, in sketches, at the Grand Slam season just completed. This was the first time I’ve worked all of them, for their duration, and thinking back to three weeks spent writing from Melbourne and Paris, and nearly that long writing from London and New York, it feels like a lot. It was enough, anyway, for me to begin to get a sense of the dizzying scope of the pros’ lives. It isn’t just the length of the season, but the breadth of it as well, the way it asks them to perform in such far-reaching locations, that’s overwhelming and disorienting. And exciting.
With the last of the Slams, the U.S. Open, still fresh in the memory, here's a brief scene from each of the four majors of 2011.
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For a lot of people in tennis, the Slam season begins on the hill above Melbourne Park, in the towering, decaying brown brick that houses the local Hilton hotel. The tennis center is a short downhill walk from there. On the way down, you pass what is, in the grand scheme of sports, an even more impressive sight, the fabled Melbourne Cricket Ground. The home of the 1956 Olympics, the MCG seems to be the rare classic sporting venue that has lost none of its luster even after being refurbished. Surrounding it are statues of famous cricketers soaring in mid-swing or mid-bowl. I wrote when I was there that the statues provided a crucial element to the game: its myth. These players are portrayed as athletic gods; looking up at them, you almost can’t help but become a fan of the sport (even if, like me, you have no clue what the rules are).
Melbourne Park, which has yet to match the MCG sculpturally—a dumbfounded-looking Rod Laver greets you in the middle of the grounds—is a few steps farther down the hill. It’s characteristic of this easy, unceremonious, sports-loving city that both of these venues are within walking distance of its downtown. They’re so close, in fact, that you can hear them.
Two nights before the Aussie Open’s main draw began, I had dinner downtown. Afterward, I walked back over the bridge across the Yarra River that leads to the tennis courts and eventually back up to the Hilton. Even before I got to the bridge, though, when I was still on the city side, I began to hear the pops of tennis balls being hit. At first I thought I might just be hearing things after spending 20 hours on a plane. But they grew louder as I walked. Eventually I joined half a dozen people who were standing on the bridge, looking down on the final rounds of qualifying, which had stretched into the evening. There was a fiery red sunset breaking out to my right, and I was still a little dazed at the thought of being in Australia at all—“Am I really on the other side of the world?” But there they were, matches going on under the lights, on the blue courts I’d seen so many times on TV, in the heart of the city. We watched in silence, serenaded by Melbourne’s street performers on the other side of the bridge, as the players slugged it out and the season began.
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The most highly anticipated match of the French Open’s first week was the third-rounder between Novak Djokovic and Juan Martin del Potro. Djokovic’s season-spanning win streak was still alive, and fast becoming the biggest story in sports. Del Potro appeared to be one of the very few men alive who was capable of breaking it.
Roland Garros officials made the mistake of scheduling the highly anticipated encounter last on Chatrier, the center court. Even a long Parisian spring evening wasn’t long enough to get the match in, and as the sky got dark, the two players were finally tossed over to the smaller Court Suzanne Lenglen. This made for a mad, and mostly futile, fan scramble from one side of the grounds to the other. There were suddenly a few thousand people who thought they were going to see Djokovic-Del Potro and were now stuck outside of Lenglen as the match began. They weren’t happy about it, and as you might expect in Paris, they let their feelings be known.
I waited until the rush was over before I made a move across the grounds. By then the wide walkway between the stadiums was jammed, shoulder to shoulder, with angry tennis fans. They shouted and whistled and chanted and raised their arms, but there was nowhere for them to go. I slowly wove my way through the mob, past two suspicious security guards, and into the gates.
Inside it was a different story. There was rapt attention all around the arena, a sense of collective awe at seeing two stars at such close range. You could hear every grunt and slide and frustrated admonition. I took the lone remaining seat in an overstuffed press section right behind the baseline, where Djokovic was roaming the far reaches of the court. He seemed to be sliding all the way from one sideline to the other. From the outside, you could hear the yells and chants of the unlucky fans from Chatrier. The two men played superb tennis under the chaotic circumstances, and they played it in the most sporting manner imaginable. Djokovic and del Potro applauded each other’s winners, and overturned calls in their opponent’s favor, as a matter of course.
There was, briefly, a moment of chaos on the court as well. Del Potro, after losing the first set, turned the tables in the second. Djokovic was rattled; he looked as frustrated as he had looked in months. But darkness fell just in time, one more thing that went the Serb’s way in his do-no-wrong 2011.
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If you run, you can make it from the back of Wimbledon’s main press room, where the American media is stationed, across the All England Club's main thoroughfare, under the gangways of Centre Court and up the steps to the press benches, in the 90 seconds of a changeover. Sometimes, if you’re late, the usher—who dresses in what looks to me like full military regalia—will see you coming and hold the rope open for an extra second, saying “Hurry!” as you run.
Other times you don’t make it. You might see someone you know along the way, or you might be stuck behind a slow-moving fan, or you might barely avoid a full-on collision with a moving truck. When that happens, you stand in line and watch the scoreboard and groan every time it goes to deuce and wonder what moment of brilliance you just missed when the crowd roars. One time this year I was at the front of the line, and the usher caught a glimpse of the photo on my credential. He squinted, “Is that really you?” I said yes, it was me, when I first came to the tournament in 2002, sans facial hair, and that I didn’t really feel the need to make myself look any older. He smiled and nodded and showed me his photo, which, judging from his spiky hairstyle, looked like it was taken in 1983. From what I can tell, the hair is mostly gone now.
We all know how frustrating it can be to have to stand in line outside a court while play goes on without you. But I don’t mind it as much in this spot. On a sunny day, the light blasts out of the stadium and down onto the steps, and the ball makes the distinct echoing sound that it doesn't make anywhere else. The steps lead up and into the light, and it's a moment of high anticipation as you climb them. If it’s not tennis heaven up there, it’s the closest thing we’ll ever have: Centre Court.
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By midnight on the U.S. Open’s final Monday, the press room in Ashe Stadium had cleared out. Of the hundreds of desks in there, three were still occupied. I had just finished a post about the men’s final when we received an unequivocal message: the lights went out. The Open was shutting down; it was time to go.
I picked up my stuff and tried to do as I was told, but the doors were all locked. Finally I ran into a grounds worker who led me through a mini-maze of corridors, to the one remaining unlocked door, which at that moment was propped open with a wooden block—if that block had slipped, I might still be in Ashe Stadium right now.
It had only been four hours or so since Novak Djokovic had won the final point over Rafael Nadal before a full house of 23,000 people. And only about three hours since a group of his Serbian countrymen had filled an entire stairway, chanting, “Olé, olé, olé, No-lay, No-lay!” But now the National Tennis Center was a ghost town, deserted except for the clean-up crew, who had their work cut out for them. Ashe appeared to be in a state of lockdown, with all of its massive gates firmly bolted. Had there really been a tennis tournament here for the last two weeks?
All of the exits to the grounds were also locked, except for one small one on the north side, an area I had never even seen before. I made it through and headed over to the commuter railroad that would take me into Manhattan; I had half an hour until the 1:00 A.M. train. I was the only person on the station platform, my only company was the buzz of crickets. They sounded strange in concrete-heavy Flushing Meadows; usually they’re drowned out by all of the trains, planes, and automobiles that crisscross each other in this transportation hub.
The lights above Ashe were still on full blast, and the American flag at the north end of the court was still blowing straight out in the wind. But where there had been non-stop activity for the last three weeks, there was silence and emptiness now. Everyone had cleared out. Djokovic was likely dancing on a bar somewhere in Manhattan, while Nadal was probably asleep on a plane over the Atlantic. Had they ever been there at all? Had the Open ever happened at all? Tennis, like the traveling carnival it is, had staged its show and moved on.
*****
Enjoy the Davis Cup and have a good weekend.
 NEW YORK—Yesterday we looked at the players and performances that we’ll remember from this year’s U.S. Open. Now it’s time to render a verdict, before it's too late, on those that we’re probably going to forget. I’d even forgotten a couple of them myself before I wrote this. When a Grand Slam is going on, two weeks can seem like a very long time.
*****
Angelique Kerber
Here come the German women: We knew about Julia Goerges and Andrea Petkovic; over the last two weeks we discovered the heavy-hitting lefty Kerber. She was given a smooth road to the semis when Maria Sharapova was upset, but I liked the way she never gave in against Sam Stosur in the semis. Down 0-5, Kerber started getting to balls she hadn’t been getting to before, and was just a point or two from making it very interesting. An A for effort, and an A- for the tournament.
The Rebellion in the Rain
When Rafa, Andy, and Andy made their feelings known about playing on wet courts, I thought it would be a one-day story, that everything would go back to normal once play began again. Two days later, the Open, after listening to player complaints, scheduled a day between the men’s semis and final for the first time since the tournament came to Flushing Meadows in 1978.This may not be the end of the story, after all.
As Roddick later said, it will always be hard to get a lot of pros with different agendas to band together, but at least the idea is in the air now. Roddick himself is a leader, and Rafa showed his wisdom when he said that he realized the players’ needs aren’t the be-all and end-all of tennis, that there’s a lot more to the sport. You could do worse than having those two guys involved in a union. First order of business: Try to push to end Super Saturday for good. Second order of business: Revenue sharing, which is something every player has a stake in.
Worry: By the end of the tournament, Andy Murray said that he wished the Open hadn’t re-scheduled the final for Monday. If a player can’t even agree with himself, that’s not a good sign. A-
P. Diddy
He was kind of left out in all of the celebrating in Djokovic’s box after the Federer match, but kudos to him for sticking it out. A-
Caroline Wozniacki
She was a disappointing against Serena, but this was still the best major she’s had since Australia. Her comeback win over Svetlana Kuznetsova brought back the toughness, and in the end, the joy, that had been missing from her game for months. An experience to build on. B+
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova
She’s moving forward. She beat the woman, Francesca Schiavone, who beat her in Paris, and more important she did it by coming up with big shots to break serve at the end of the third set, against one of the game's savviest competitors. Then she played Serena. B+
Christina McHale
Like fellow American Donald Young, she got the home folks riled up for a day or two before fading away quickly. She has clean strokes and a quiet tenacity, which should keep her moving up, if slowly. B+
Andy Murray
Bad: He finished with yet another confused and angry loss to Rafael Nadal. Good: He admitted afterward that he needs to do something about his negativity and volatility on court. He’s right. Still, while it may be hard to recognize now, this was the best season of Murray's career; he reached all four Slam semifinals for the first time. It won’t be easy, but he needs to fix his ’tude if he’s going to go farther next year. B
John Isner
He looked good all tournament and seemed ready to reach a Slam semi, or maybe even a final. And he looked very good in the last two sets against Murray. Isner continues to surprise and improve. Next step: Some serious inroads at a Masters tournament this fall. B
Andy Roddick
He played a great match against David Ferrer on his new favorite court, No. 13, then had nothing left for Rafa the next day. For a few hours, Roddick seemed to take charge of the entire U.S. Open, and while he might have done it with better manners—“What are we doing out here, Brian?”—he had a point. While officials bumbled, Andy got on with things. B
Donald Young
Remember him? It was nice to see him win, and nice to see him smile, but the old problems—too much anger, too little power—bubbled back up in his fast loss to Murray. This tournament is something he can build on, obviously, but he’s got a ways to go, consistency-wise, before we’ll see him as a fixture in the Top 30. Or 40. 50? B
Irina Falconi
A great, patriotic winning leap, then it was quickly back to earth in an 0 and 1 drubbing at the hands of Lisicki. B
Vera Zvonareva
Really, what is it about Stosur that gives her such fits? Granted, the woman went on to win the Open, but eight straight losses to a lower-ranked player is hard to figure. B-
Jo-Wilfried Tsonga
OK, I can relax for the next couple of months, knowing the French guys will never do anything major at a major. At least until Tsonga or Monfils win Paris and I start wondering again. B-
Maria Sharapova
The serve problem isn’t going away, and fighting spirit can’t always make up for it. C-
Philipp Petzschner
He didn't admit that a ball had hit him. Some say, "That's what officials are for." And baseball fans know that a batter isn't expected to admit that a pitch didn't hit him when the ump says it did. But to me, this is what elevates tennis. In this sport, truth, rather than the official's call, is paramount. F
Decision to Put a Women’s Semifinal on the Grandstand
Armstrong was out of commission, and there were only so many hours in the day on Saturday to put matches on in Ashe. But if this one had involved Sharapova, rather than Stosur and Kerber, you can be pretty sure it would have been played in Ashe on Friday night. In the end, it only made Stosur’s final-round victory—in the big stadium—that much sweeter. F
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