18 posts categorized "October 2011"
 How you typically picture a certain player says a lot about them. I think of Novak Djokovic skidding for a backhand save. I think of Martina Navratilova on the full, flying run toward the net. I think of John McEnroe making contact with his serve, a grimace of effort across his face.
With Petra Kvitova, I start by trying not to think of the celebratory yelp—or is it a word in Czech?—that she has begun to make after each winning point. Instead, I begin by blocking that sound out and thinking of her leaning forward at the baseline, eyes wide, feet restless, impatiently waiting for her opponent to serve so she can knock the ball back down her throat. Kvitova has been compared to Navratilova because her lefty-ness and her nationality. She's been compared to Lindsay Davenport because of the aggressive heft of her shots. But seeing her ready to return, I think of Monica Seles, another lefty who lived for the chance to bash one more ball.
Fans of Kvitova's might wish that the 21-year-old Czech, who cemented her place as the WTA’s Player of the Year—official or unofficial—with her sixth title of the season in Istanbul on Sunday, weren’t quite so restless and impatient. They might wish that she wouldn’t always go for the first strike, or hit virtually every ball at full throttle. It would, if nothing else, probably make her matches a lot less time-consuming to watch, because the quality of her play wouldn’t swing quite so wildly, so often. But that return stance, and that impatience to batter the next ball, is what Kvitova is all about—sometimes for worse, mostly for better, soon for best.
Great champions from McEnroe to Nadal have been known as perfectionists—they don’t like to make a mistake. Kvitova so far has won with anti-perfectionism. She sacrifices consistency and point-construction for raw power and risky placement. She knows she can hit a winner with any shot when her feet are set, so that’s mostly what she tries to do. In one sense, if you think of the old advice, “play to your strengths,” this is a smart move.
Because what sets Kvitova apart from her peers, or at least the peers who made it to Turkey, is her ability to hit blatant winners, so why shouldn’t she try to maximize that? Kvitova’s ground strokes are also fairly flat and penetrating, rather than safely, smoothly spinny. In the future, developing a safer rally shot, one that allows her to be patient, to choose her spots to be aggressive rather than taking the first opportunity, may allow her to become a dominant No. 1. For now, though, I’ve never seen a great player with so little in-between game or neutral gear. Kvitova makes all of her shots, and then something snaps and she misses all of her shots. Yesterday she broke out of the gates and won the first five games from Victoria Azarenka; she lost the next five almost as quickly. Unlike Seles when she was dialed in and at her best, so far the price of Kvitova’s tremendous shot-making is an extremely low margin for error. What makes her great is what makes her awful.
But what makes Kvitova great is exactly what her opponent, Azarenka, lacks. I’ve speculated that as good as Vika is, as much as she’s improved both physically and mentally this year, and as much heart as she showed in making two major comebacks in the Istanbul final, she doesn't have the one thing that most Slam winners have in common—the ability to take the racquet out of her opponent’s hand. The ability, in other words, to win points outright, whether it’s with a serve or a forehand, and not rely on the other person to help out with a miss. Azarenka does have power, especially when she can step into a backhand, but her game is about moving the ball around and using her athleticism to eventually outplay an opponent in a rally. What she lacks is the killer punch from anywhere. Through the first two sets, Azarenka controlled many of the rallies, but often couldn’t convert them with a putaway. I won’t go so far as to say that she’ll never win a major, but it won’t be easy for her.
The start of the third set was a perfect nutshell example of what separates these two players. In the first game, Kvitova faced four break points—she had just lost the second set and the match appeared for a second to be slipping away from her. But she rallied on the strength of good serving and, more important, forehand winners. In the following game, it was Azarenka's turn to face a break point. Like Kvitova, she set up for a forehand into a wide-open court. Unlike Kvitova, when Azarenka let loose with it, she sent it 10 feet long. Kvitova had a one-break lead that she wouldn’t surrender.
These two players are 21 and 22, they’re ranked No. 2 and No. 3 in the world, and they fairly dominated this tournament in the absence of Serena Williams and Kim Clijsters. We’ll see what happens when the latter two elder stateswoman return, but there's a new WTA generation shaping up at the top of the rankings. While its third member, Caroline Wozniacki, held onto her No. 1 spot this week, Istanbul felt like the moment when Kvitova, who went 5-0, passed everyone else on the outside. Her winners were obviously impressive, and she showed more touch around the net than she ever has—how about that McEnroe-esque sharp-angled backhand volley winner while turning her body in the other direction? Kvitova is adding to her list of shots that very few, if any, of her opponents can match.
What I liked most, and what seemed different, was how determined she was to battle her way through the bad patches. In the final, it wasn’t Kvitova’s return or her forehand that got her to the finish line. It was that ultimate first-strike shot, the serve. On crucial points coming down the stretch, she swung it wide in the deuce court, and Azarenka had no answer for it—the racquet was essentially out of her hand. This was a more patient and tactical Kvitova than we've seen.
Next Martina, next Lindsay, next Monica, next No. 1? Next exasperatingly inconsistent talent, or next dominant champion? After watching Kvitova light up Istanbul for a week, after seeing more finesse and a champion’s finishing grit, I’d say we just want what was next from her. I'm looking forward to whatever comes after that.
 You’d think, after looking at and listening to the pros long enough, that a tennis writer wouldn’t be able to learn anything new about them. Not true: There are various ways of watching tennis, and the journalist’s is always cluttered with distractions. You must go to press conferences, you must read transcripts, you must write sentences, you must meet deadlines and make your editor happy (the last two are optional for bloggers). All of this takes away from your actual observing time. Compare this to the way a TV commentator watches a match. During the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, I did online text commentary for the gold-medal matches for NBC’s website. This required, aside from a jarring wake-up call each morning at 3:00 A.M., that I have something to say about every point. I was surprised by how much this discipline affected the way I viewed a tennis match. Among other things, it made me realize again just how important the serve is, more important than even the stats would lead you to believe.
It was an eye-opening experience, but I’ve never been able to discipline myself to watch tennis that way again. If you’re not forced to formulate a thought during each point and verbalize it afterward, your brain isn’t going to work that hard on its own. On the other hand, I’ve been lucky enough to get to see the pros live, from fairly close range, on a regular basis. That’s always eye-opening as well, but in a physical rather than analytical way. A player's presence counts for a lot.
This week I’ve watched the tennis from Istanbul in another, perhaps unique way. I’ve been writing the Racquet Reactions that this site has been putting up after important matches, and sometimes not-as-important matches, for the last year—I think I did my first one on a Roger Federer practice session that was streamed from Stockholm in 2010. The RRs, which were the brainchild of our online editor Ed McGrogan, have been popular. They’ve also created a whole new tennis version of the wild west in the comments section. For the writer, they impose a schizophrenic discipline. You have to pay attention to virtually every point, which is time- and energy-consuming (you have to particular attention to women’s matches, which can turn on a dime). Then, the minute it's over, you must gather the match together and make some kind of point about in 45 minutes and 500 words.
For a writer used to covering the sport in a more distracted and wide-ranging way, the benefit of all of this time narrowly spent—there’s not much chance for multi-tasking when you’re Racquet Reacting—is that you get to watch tennis uninterrupted. Whatever your level of familiarity with a player, you learn new things about her; or at least you’re reminded of things you may have known about her three years ago but had forgotten in the torrent of new observations that you must make with each tournament.
This week I did seven RRs and got a long look at all eight women who played in Istanbul—I didn’t see any of the ninth, Marion Bartoli. Here’s something I saw, learned, or remembered about each of them.
*****
Petra Kvitova: The we’ve-seen-the-future-of-women’s-tennis-and-her-name-is-Petra-Kvitova bandwagon, after emptying out at the U.S. Open, is filling back up. I’m on it, even if I think she will always be prone to error-filled walkabouts. What makes her backhand such a dangerous shot is also what makes it an inconsistent one: Rather than using it to set up her more reliable forehand, she takes a big cut and goes for the kill with it.
Even if she never realizes her immense potential, I’m on the Kvitova bandwagon because she can hit shots that no one else can. Case in point: Vera Zvonareva, in their match on Tuesday, hit a hard serve down the T in the deuce court. Kvitova lunged for her forehand, met the ball well away from her body, but still had the power and control—the unlearnable shot-making skill—to hit it inside-out and place it an inch from the sideline for a near-winner that stunned Zvonareva. I guess, since Wimbledon, I’d forgotten she could do things like that.
*****
Li Na: Comedians are famous for having dark sides, and the WTA’s resident joker is no exception. I’d seen her berate her husband in the stands many times, but I’d never seen her put on the icy glare of self-disgust that she wore when he tried to give her some advice at the start of the second set against Stosur today. Li appeared to have receded behind a set of thick mental walls. No wonder he refused to come out when she requested him the other day. And no wonder she can struggle so mightily at times; when it goes bad for Li, it goes really bad, and she stops believing it's going to get better.
*****.
Caroline Wozniacki: She clinched No. 1, but otherwise it wasn’t a banner week for Caro. She was overpowered by Kvitova and suffered some strange competitive lapses against Radwanska and Zvonareva. Still, what intrigued me were the moments when this defensive-minded player did hit out on the ball—when she bent low, took a Kvitova bullet return, and redirected it with a forehand up the line; when, down a set and a break, she threw her customary caution to the wind and knocked off a forehand mid-court winner with ease. No one would accuse Wozniacki of false humility, and most of the time she doesn’t lack confidence, but I wonder if she’s a better first-strike player than she lets herself believe she is. Percentage tennis has gotten her to where she is; but it probably won't get her further.
*****
Vera Zvonareva: I know all about the meltdowns, but I’d forgotten how, even if she doesn’t rip her tape off or kick her racquet across the court, Zvonareva’s game can still unravel in a hurry. Which is a shame, because if you take Serena and Kim out of the picture, Vera, when she’s going well, may have the best mix of aggression and consistency of any woman in the world. In her first sets against Radwanska and Wozniacki, when she was swinging freely and easily, she was untouchable. Then her mind got into it. One dumb shot against Radwanska, a forehand from way behind the baseline that she tried to hit for a winner, was enough to shake Zvonareva’s confidence completely. Three points later, she couldn’t do anything.
*****
Victoria Azarenka: She wasn’t tested enough to show me anything new in her game, but I will say that I’m tentatively, maybe ironically, in favor of the racquet-dropping, finger-pointing, tongue-wagging victory celebration that has become her trademark. On the one hand, “classy” is not the first word that comes to mind to describe it; on the other, she means no harm, and I would miss it if she quit doing it. The NFL comes to women’s tennis.
*****
Maria Sharapova: There were two versions of her on display in Istanbul. The good Maria who takes the time to construct points, and the bad Maria who, at tense moments, hits each ball hard without linking her shots together or building them into something.
After her two losses, Sharapova gave her opponent a muted but not disrespectful handshake. Even Stosur, who hadn’t beaten her in nine previous tries, got no special recognition. No hugs or words of congratulations: This seemed right, and even admirable, to me, coming from Sharapova, whose ambition and professionalism has never allowed for chumminess.
*****
Agnieszka Radwanska: My favorite, Aga. She rose from the dead against Zvonareva only to bury herself against Kvitova today. Watching the former match, I thought that I’d never seen anyone whose level of play improved in inverse proportion to how dejected she looked. So much for body language: Radwanska should begin every match by scrunching her face into a frown and stamping her foot. She’d never lose.
*****
Sam Stosur: Um, she has a good forehand? Kick serve works nicely, too. Sometimes you can't find anything new.
*****
Have a good weekend and enjoy the semis and final. I’ll be back with a wrap on Monday.
 It’s amazing what a few people in the stands will do, isn’t it? Fill the seats up with civilized, attentive fans, and you’ve got yourself a tournament worthy of being called a season-ending championship, whatever may happen on the court. Or at least that’s the way it's felt for the first two days—has it really been only two days? we’ve seen a lot of tennis—of the WTA’s eight-woman year-ender in Istanbul.
Has a new tennis hotbed been born? It may have something to do with the ticket prices, which are about as much as you’d pay for a movie in the United States. But however those 21,000 people got there on Tuesday and Wednesday, the crowds in the arena alone have made this the most enjoyable WTA Championships to watch on TV that I can remember. The one slip-up has been the bright green court color, which makes it harder than it should be to see the ball on television. The reason for it—bright green is the corporate color of tournament sponsor Oriflame, a Swedish cosmetics company—only makes it worse.
With a squint here or there, I’ve been seeing the ball fine, and seeing most of the action so far—you can find four of my Racquet Reactions here and a piece on the tournament I did for ESPN.com here. Now for some other thoughts about it that haven’t made it to print, or screen.
*****
I wrote earlier this year about the circular, never-get-anywhere nature of tennis news. In this sport, the news is rarely new; it just happens to get talked about again at each big event and then forgotten until the next one, when we realize that nothing was done about it the last time around. Istanbul has been no different. Two eternal issues in particular have made headlines—or, if not actual headlines, at least they've made it to the Ticker on Tennis.com.
The first and lesser of the two has been some chatter about the WTA wanting to hold a dual season-ending championship with the men. It’s certainly been chatted about before; the last WTA chief, Larry Scott, quit after trying and failing to bring the two tours under one roof. It's also an odd time to be talking about changes. The men’s World Tour Finals has been a major success in London the last two years, and it appears that the women, after wandering the earth for a decade, have found a home in Istanbul.
The more prominent, if no less tired, issue is grunting. It’s back again primarily because world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki has made her strongest statement against it yet, accusing some women of using their moans and shrieks to distract opponents. More important long-term, though, is the fact that WTA head Stacey Allaster has acknowledged the problem and begun talking about rooting it out at its source, in the juniors. I’ll reiterate my own opinion here: Typically a grunting player will bother me for a game or two, and then I won’t notice it anymore. The non-grunting women don’t seem to like it, but they do get on with playing the game anyway and don’t use it as an excuse for losing afterward. I also don’t believe that grunting players intentionally do it to distract; on the other hand, I also think they could, with a little practice, stop doing it and not hurt their games.
Nevertheless, something needs to be done, simply because so many fans are put off by it. Rooting it out in the juniors, while the right long-term solution, isn’t going to change anything in the next two or three years. Can decibels be measured during matches and fines assessed afterward? That would get the job done considerably faster.
There you go. I eagerly await having this discussion again in Melbourne in January. And in Paris in May. And in London in . . .
*****
One perennial WTA issue hasn’t been raised this time around: coaching. Has the tour's long-running “experiment” with it been accepted as part of the sport? That’s fine with me if it has.
What’s interesting, if we are going to accept coaching, are the variety of effects it can have on a match. Petra Kvitova was broken in her first two service games by Vera Zvonareva on Tuesday. She called her coach out and didn’t lose serve again until late in the second set. At the opposite end of that spectrum was the case of Li Na yesterday. She called on her husband-coach after being broken, but, smart man, he refused. Looking, and playing, a little ticked off, Li smacked two disdainful return winners and broke back. There are many ways to coach tennis, it seems.
Sam Stosur’s coach doesn’t believe in coming on court, because he can’t do that at the Grand Slams. His approach seemed to have been vindicated when Stosur won the U.S. Open. Except that the Wimbledon winner this year was Kvitova. She has obviously benefited from on-court advice here, but had no trouble going without it on Centre Court.
The most famous or notorious on-court coacher is Wozniacki’s father, Piotr, who conducts a long and agitated soliloquy in front of his daughter in the middle of each set. Without understanding a word of what he’s saying, it seems to me that he’s there to make her feel his agitated competitive urgency when she walks back on court. In some ways, it works—Wozniacki is a gritty competitor, and she gutted out a three-set win in her first match. In other ways, though, it must help wear her down. That’s how she looked by the end of her second match, which she lost, and how she's looked for much of the second half of the season.
*****
One final issue that's typically raised in women’s tennis is the inability of many of them to hold serve consistently. This was the case in the match between Maria Sharapova and Li Na, who essentially broke their way to a first-set tiebreaker yesterday. It’s a given in the sport that numerous breaks of serve in a row are an indication of “bad tennis.” And Sharapova and Li did play their share of that. But they also made it difficult on each other by playing so well in their return games. Sharapova drilled her returns at Li’s feet, while Li roped hers into the corners. Those shots were as impressive and entertaining—and as “good”—and any service aces and service holds would have been.
*****
With that, I see that the third day from Istanbul is about to begin. I’ll be back to Racquet React after the second and third matches.
 Opinions differ about year-end championships. Some see them as brutal battles between the best in the world; others as glorified exhibitions that come too late in the year to mean anything. For some reason I find them relaxing. Especially on the women’s side, the season’s questions—whether Maria will ever come back, whether Caro will win a major, whether a new WTA star will ever be born—have been answered and the suspense is over. Yes, the year-end No. 1 spot will be decided, and one woman may become the first to stake a strong claim to being Player of the Year, but those seem like secondary concerns to the matches themselves. The tennis will be high quality, and if we’ve learned anything about the WTA this year, it’s that, head-to-head records aside, nothing is written in stone.
What we do know is that the tournament has left the open air of Doha for a roofed arena in Istanbul. The photo-ops haven’t been as good so far—Turkey doesn’t have an indoor ski slope that I know of—but it won’t be as hot for the players. Keeping that early caveat of general WTA unpredictability in mind, here’s a look at the week ahead. I’ll go group by group.
*****
Red: Caroline Wozniacki, Petra Kvitova, Vera Zvonareva, Agnieszka Radwanska
Head to heads:
Wozniacki
vs. Kvitova: 3-1; vs. Zvonareva: 4-4; vs. Radwanska: 4-1
Kvitova
vs. Wozniacki: 1-3; vs. Zvonareva: 2-3; vs. Radwanska: 2-0
Zvonareva
vs. Wozniacki: 4-4; vs. Kvitova: 3-2; vs. Radwanska: 2-3
Radwanska
vs. Wozniacki: 1-4; vs. Kvitova: 0-2; vs. Zvonareva: 3-2
OK, what did that tell us? Anything? As expected, Wozniacki, world No. 1, has the best overall record against her opponents, at 11-6, and Radwanska, world No. 8, has the weakest, at 4-8. Zvonareva is right in the middle, with a .500 winning percentage.
What it tells us is that a round-robin format, as opposed to a one-and-done format, favors the day-to-day consistency of Wozniacki—she reached the final last year. But could it work for the extremely inconsistent Kvitova as well? She won’t be punished as harshly if she goes walkabout for an afternoon.
Also of interest:
Zvonareva has had success at this event in the past, reaching the final three years ago. She has a 7-6 career record; Wozniacki is 5-4.
Kvitova and Radwanska, on the other hand, are making their debuts, so we’ll see how they handle facing such stiff competition every other day.
Radwanska may be the lowest-ranked, but she’s played the best tennis this fall. She’s 11-1 since the U.S. Open and recorded her third win of the season over Zvonareva in Tokyo.
Kvitova, meanwhile, has bounced back some from her post-Wimbledon slump, going 8-2 in the fall and winning in Linz.
Wild card: Kvitova. She could easily go 3-0 or 0-3. The key to the whole group may be her match with Zvonareva, which opens the event on Tuesday morning.
Semifinalists: Wozniacki, Kvitova
*****
White: Maria Sharapova, Victoria Azarenka, Li Na, Sam Stosur
Head to heads:
Sharapova
vs. Azarenka: 3-3; vs. Li: 5-3; vs. Stosur: 9-0
Azarenka
vs. Sharapova: 3-3; vs. Li: 1-4; vs. Stosur: 4-0
Li
vs. Sharapova: 3-5; vs. Azarenka: 4-1; vs. Stosur: 0-5
Stosur
vs. Sharapova: 0-9; vs. Azarenka: 0-4; vs. Li: 5-0
There are some strange twists in these records, particularly Sam Stosur’s. It’s feast or famine for her—mostly famine. She can’t beat Maria or Vika, but she can’t lose to Li. It’s a definite trend for her: Sam also has a strangely excellent record against Zvonareva.
If the past is any guide, and it seems to be a pretty good one where these players are concerned, things look clear-cut. Sharapova has far and away the best overall record, at 17-6, followed by Azarenka at 8-7, Li at 7-11, and Stosur at a not-too-scintillating 5-13. Sharapova has been hurt recently and is just 2-1 since the U.S. Open, but starting with Stosur on Tuesday should give her a boost.
Also of interest:
Sharapova is 13-5 in her career at this event, but she hasn’t won it since 2004. She’s 1,000 points behind Wozniacki for the year-end No. 1 spot, and has a slim chance of catching her.
Azarenka comes in as the hottest player on this side. She won last week in Luxembourg and has been more consistent this season than any in the past. While she hasn’t proven to be ready to win a major—she hasn’t had the firepower—a Williams-less year-end championships could make for a convenient stepping-stone in confidence.
Li has been, by her own admission, awful over the second half of 2011. She lost in the first round at both the U.S. Open and her big home-country event in Beijing in October. She’s making her YEC debut.
Stosur may not like her chances against Sharapova or Azarenka, but she did pull herself out the doldrums to reach the semis last year, and her U.S. Open title has to give her some kind of extra confidence. Doesn’t it? Maybe not—look what happened to Kvitova and Li after their own Slam breakthroughs.
Semifinalists: Azarenka, Sharapova
*****
Possible press-room theme developing
Wozniacki: “It’s a tough group, but both groups are tough.”
Sharapova: “You’re going to get a tough group either way and tough opponents.”
Li: “There are two groups and both are tough.”
Tough for the players, no sweat for the rest of us. It’s time to sit back and watch the best of 2011 try to kill each other. The U.S. TV schedule is here. I'll have the Racquet Reactions for the first two matches each day, and a wrap-up here each afternoon.
*****
Semifinals: Azarenka d. Kvitova; Sharapova d. Wozniacki
Final: Azarenka d. Sharapova
 Who says tennis is stuck in an ancient rut and resistant to all change? I left the sport behind for a week and came back yesterday to find that a sensational, revolutionary advance had been made in Stockholm: The ball kids were equipped with little pieces of netting—think mini lacrosse sticks—to help them gather up the balls. No more bending and stretching and grabbing and hustling like over-sugared children. If they could get to the ball when it was still bouncing, all they had to do was nonchalantly put their net around it, without even breaking stride. After a while, I started to think they looked lazy doing it, that it was all a little too easy now. What are we paying these kids for, anyhow? (On second thought, are we paying these kids?)
We’ll see if this long-delayed ball-boy liberation spreads as quickly as the Arab Spring. Otherwise, it was a moderately consequential week of fall tennis, the final lull before the frenetic stretch run. On the women’s side, Victoria Azarenka made herself a favorite for the season-ender in Istanbul with an easy win in Luxembourg, while Dominika Cibulkova won her first career title, in Moscow—I would have guessed she would have won something else along the way, but titles can be deceptively difficult to come by. (I also would have guessed that Gael Monfils would have won, even if it was just by accident, more than three tournaments, but that's all he had coming to Stockholm last week.) The match of most significance, though, was the ATP’s first all-Serb final, in Moscow, between Janko Tipsarevic and Victor Troicki.
With his win in that match, Tipsarevic took home his second title of the fall and kept himself alive for a spot in London. His success, as well as Troicki’s, reminds me of Fernando Verdasco’s in 2008 and 2009. Verdasco said that his clinching win in the Davis Cup final in Argentina and subsequent run to the semis at the Australian Open had been inspired in part by watching his countryman Rafael Nadal win Wimbledon, something a Spanish man hadn’t done in more than 40 years. Tipsarevic has said similar things about his own inspirational countryman, Novak Djokovic, this season. Tipsy and Novak are friends, while Verdasco and Rafa aren’t, really; but both pairs are tied together as Davis Cup teammates—they’re more than just separate individuals in an individual sport. Tipsarevic’s surge at 27 years old is also another case of the “next” good player coming not from the juniors, but from the ranks of established pros. He won the Aussie Open junior title way back in 2001. I haven't seen much of his play this fall, but Tipsy has always been a go-for-broke kind of guy, trading pace for consistency. He's obviously found a better balance lately; it's hard to think of a better example of that balance than Djokovic's game in 2011.
Speaking of established pros, two others, Monfils and Jarkko Nieminen, also contested the one match I did see over the weekend. What these two men had established, as much as anything else, were two very bad records in finals. Monfils, a perennial Top 15 player, came in with a 3-10 record, while the 30-year-old Nieminen was 1-9. The good news was that one of them had to improve on that.
That player was Monfils, who won in three sets, but both men showed why they’ve had so much trouble in these moments. Nieminen, a pesky, soft-hitting lefty—he’s a veteran, yes, but I don’t think the Fin quite qualifies as “wily”—played fine, steady, even controlling tennis for much of the first set. Then, at 5-5, down break point, he got a look at a nice, fat, mid-court forehand—and pulled it six inches wide. Nieminen wasn’t happy, but he didn’t look all that surprised either. Monfils went on to hold easily for the set.
Then, naturally, it was the Frenchman’s turn to let his opponent off the hook. Good players will loosen up with the lead and front run, but Monfils takes the concept to its illogical extreme: He loosens up so much that he appears aimless out there. In the second set, he took a step back and allowed Nieminen to dictate his own fate.
As I said, one these two reluctant titlists had to win. The match was finally decided at 2-1 in the third set. Monfils had a break point, and both players ended up at the net for a little cat-and-mouse display. Monfils overdid it, of course, sliding a forehand gently crosscourt when the down the line was wide open. But he won the point anyway when Nieminen’s next flick shot caught the tape. Monfils had the break, and this time he really did front run with it.
It was an entertaining end to a quiet tennis week. The crowd in Stockholm was upbeat and vocal in their support for their fellow Scandinavian, and the match was played in a similarly upbeat spirit. Monfils now says he wants to win in Bercy, but there’s no reason to speculate about his future—it’s always c’est la vie with him, anyway. What I enjoyed most on Sunday wasn’t his tennis as much as the variety of expressions he brings to each match. For the most part, he’s jettisoned the more annoying ones as he’s grown up—there was no rapping to himself or off-his-meds chest beating in Stockholm. Instead, Monfils smiled after well-played points, laughed at his own stupid line-call challenges, rose up with a look of showy, I-know-it's-phony-but-it's-fun-to-try-to-look-tough-anyway fierceness when he served for the match, crossed himself and thanked the heavens after the final point, and made his eyes bulge comically as he pretended not to be able to lift the huge Stockholm globe trophy (one of the best trophies of the year, by the way).
Gael Monfils: By almost blowing a match that should have been his easily, he made it more fun for all of us in the end. Some things in tennis really don't change.
 You might not love Andy Murray’s attitude or his mouth. You might not love his forehand or his slump-shouldered walk. You might not love his sometimes-passive style of play or the way he gets crabby at 30-all in the first game. You might think he kvetches a little too much about all of the oversize checks he gets to take home. You might be skeptical that Murray, who, after his win in Shanghai today has eight Masters titles and zero majors, can get it done when the pressure is undeniably on.
You’d have a reason to think all of these things; with his skills, the lack of a Slam title will always be what’s mentioned first about Murray, rather than anything that he has won. But after his latest fall surge, which followed yet another bitter Slam defeat, at the U.S. Open, you’d also have to admit that the guy keeps giving us a reason to watch him, write about him, enjoy what he can do on a tennis court, and, yes, believing in him. Murray is less renowned than Rafael Nadal or David Ferrer for his persistence and ability to bounce back, but his career is proving to be, among other things, one of great resilience.
Murray, as you probably know by now, just completed an Asian-swing hat trick, winning in consecutive weeks in Bangkok, Tokyo, and at the biggest tournament of the three, the Shanghai Rolex Masters. He didn’t do it smoothly, like Roger Federer. He didn’t do it with rousing passion, like Rafael Nadal. He didn’t do it with athletic precision, like Novak Djokovic. He didn’t even change his much-maligned attitude or playing style a whole lot. This was a purely Murray-esque win, with anxious misses, ill-advised tantrums, and rectangular-lipped roars intact. And that might be the best thing about it.
“I was really happy with the way I focused,” Murray said after beating David Ferrer in a half-ragged but mostly convincing 7-5, 6-4 final. “It’s hard to explain. It’s almost as if you’d think the more matches you win, the less pressure you feel. I was hitting the ball well, but there’s still a little bit of tension because you want to try and keep the run going. . . . I wasn’t necessarily playing my best tennis the whole way throughout, but I served well when I needed to and I chased the ball down.”
In other words, Murray made the best of what he had. He won even after he gave back breaks of serve at the start of both sets. He beat a fellow grinder while only coming to the net 10 times. When he could, Murray went hard to Ferrer’s forehand and opened up the point from there, but when he got behind in rallies, he still made Ferrer finish the point. The Spaniard often couldn’t do it.
Murray has beaten Ferrer four straight times on hard courts, and it’s a good matchup for him. He can defend like Ferrer, but he has a little more versatility on offense. Still, Murray could never break free today. He let Ferrer off the hook at 3-1 and 4-2 in the second set, and he needed two aces to save himself at 4-3. In the end, he relied on a possibly weary and slightly off form Ferrer to help him along.
“This week I think overall it’s satisfying,” Murray said. “I didn’t necessarily feel like I played amazing tennis, I just did the right things, made it very difficult for my opponents, and won a tournament of this size when I still felt like I could have played a little bit better.”
No one knows his own game like Murray, and he described it to a T when he said he “made it very difficult for his opponents.” Now that the hat trick is complete, we move on to the next question: What did it mean? Did it mean, for example, more than his win in Shanghai last year? Did Murray show anything more than what he’s always shown, an ability to make life difficult for his opponents? I think there are two positives to take away.
First, his serve and his forehand. The serve will come and go, but it’s getting him out of more holes than it once did. As for the forehand, he went after it the way many of us have wanted him to go after it against Nadal in Tokyo, and he was rewarded for it in the end. Murray never matched that level of aggressiveness in Shanghai, but he was still committed to trying to dictate with his forehand.
Second, his mental approach. Murray said he felt, paradoxically, more pressure as the wins built up, and he showed it in the quarters, the semis, and the final with his hair-trigger temper. This time, though, he fought off his own negativity with shows of positive emotion. More important, belying his perfectionist’s style, he put the screw-ups behind him and won anyway.
Maybe this is all just another false alarm and Murray will come crashing back to earth when he faces Djokovic, Nadal, or Federer in the later rounds at the World Tour Finals and the Australian Open. Maybe we’ll keep hearing those guys reassure the world, after they’ve beaten him, that Andy will win the big one someday, don’t worry, he’s too good not to. Even if that does happen again, it’s time to give Murray his due as a fighter in his own right, and a player who brings a unique personality and approach to the sport. Murray doesn’t win with Federer’s smoothness or Djokovic’s precise athleticism, but no one else leans into a backhand quite like he does or hits a perfect running forehand crosscourt pass every single time.
Murray has taken a ton of tough losses over the years, and he’s deserved the criticism he’s received for them. He’s also internalized it—after his semifinal loss at the U.S. Open, he said that if you only count the majors, he’s had a “terrible” career. That’s obviously nonsense—how many players in the history of the game have reached the semis at all four majors in one season, as Murray did in 2011?
What’s frustrating for me is the sense that Murray still hasn’t shown us all he can do. I can’t remember the exact match, but early in Shanghai he was, very briefly, completely at his ease on court. For a few minutes, it seemed that he could do anything with the ball, and he wasn’t hiding his cockiness about it. He curled his shots this way and that, cut under the ball with more slice than needed, carved volleys at unnecessary angles, came in on nothing and made it work because of his anticipation, and generally played circles around his opponent. It was like watching Dolgopolov, except that it all made sense. It was really more like watching Federer in “full flight.” Murray can do it all, and his full flight could soar as high as Federer’s. But it’s unlikely he’ll ever be relaxed enough to get up there for very long. In the meantime, if the forehand keeps getting punchier, and he can keep putting the bad moments behind him, he may not need to get all the way up there to win a major.
But before we start Slamming Murray again, it’s worth noting that he hasn’t let all of those tough losses crush his ornery, methodical spirit. (And it’s not like they don’t affect him deeply. We’ve seen him go into emotional tailspins after his last two Aussie Open losses before eventually digging himself out.) Murray claims he’s had a terrible career at the majors, but that only covers eight weeks of the year. Those of us who love the sport watch it the other 40-some weeks as well. And those of who love the sport, for its subtle shot-making and emotional violence, should be glad that Andy Murray is still coming back for more of both.
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I'm off this week, but I'll be back for the women's season-ender in Istanbul. Have a great week.
 By 10:00 this morning, after a week spent watching every match from the Shanghai Masters, I officially felt like I was in two places at once. Familiar sounds from the tournament—Andy Murray screaming, Mohamed Lahyani booming, the crowd oohing and aahing in the middle of points—blended perfectly with the familiar sights and sounds of New Brooklyn. These were, among others: Children at recess screaming, construction crews booming, and locals oohing and aahing as Norah Jones—yes, that Norah Jones; don't tell me you haven't been glued to the saga of Windowgate—walked her dog down the street. I fully expect her to be at the corner bar this Sunday eating wings and watching the NFL with the rest of us.
Meanwhile, as soon as I started to talk about the rise of the volley in Shanghai, Andy Roddick and David Ferrer spent three sets and two hours this morning making it disappear again. And it mostly stayed away through the four quarterfinals on Friday. Here’s what else caught my sometimes-sleepy eyes.
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I wish I had something, an observation, a joke, a pithy remark, an insult, to bring to Ferrer’s third-set tiebreaker win over Roddick, but I don’t. Or, at least nothing that hasn’t been said many, many times before. Ferrer keeps grinding no matter what—this was the second straight day in which he came back after dropping the first set—while Roddick’s approach shot, especially his slice backhand approach, always lands short. That’s a killer against Ferrer. But as close as this match was, what was most notable to me was how many potential turning points came and went, and nothing turned until the very end, when Ferrer got a mini-break for 4-2 in the third-set breaker.
My only potentially original thought had to do with Hawk-Eye. Early on, Ferrer hit a serve that was called long but was close. He took the slightly odd step of asking Roddick what he thought—the two players have the same management, so maybe the Spaniard thought he could trust the American. Roddick said he wasn’t sure, Ferrer challenged, and it turned out that the ball had indeed been long. I wondered about the ethics of one player, in another situation, subtly, non-verbally tricking an opponent into thinking he should challenge (not that Roddick did anything like this), and thereby getting him to waste one (Ferrer was reckless enough with his challenges today to run out of them in the third set). Maybe the player would take an extra-long look at the call, even if he knew it was correct. This would certainly be within the sporting code of, say, baseball, and part of me likes the head game aspect of it. But it’s not tennis.
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In all of the matches played this week, the best tennis I've seen was produced by Kei Nishikori in his straight-set dismantling of Alexandr Dolgopolov today. It was a clinic in contemporary baseline tennis, without ever seeming clinical. Nishikori did all of those seemingly simple things that really aren’t so simple when the other guy is trying to do them to you at the same time. He controlled the center of the court. He hit the ball where Dolgopolov wasn’t. There was nothing risky or fancy about it, but also nothing conservative about it either. Nishikori saw a weakness, Dolgopolov’s backhand pass, and he went after it. And he was confident enough, after his fine week of tennis, to save six break points in the first set. When Nishikori served for it at 5-4, he went down 0-30. From there, he made four straight first serves to four different spots and came back to hold. Dolgopolov is usually the crowd-pleaser, but anyone who likes purposeful tennis had to like Nishikori today.
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Tennis, as Florian Mayer found out the hard way today, is a game of New Days. Nothing is quite the same as it was the last time you went out there. Yesterday, in his win over Rafael Nadal, Mayer’s serves landed on the lines and his drop shots dropped a few inches over the net. His backhand volleys went in and his topspin forehands landed deep and bounced high. From the beginning of his match today against Feliciano Lopez, a man five leagues below Nadal, it was clear that none of those things were going to happen again for Mayer. And it wasn't just his bad cough or sickly look that clued you in.
Serving at 2-3, he stopped in the middle of a crucial point to challenge an in call on the baseline, only to find out that the ball really had been in. Mayer then made a bad backhand error to be broken. Later, on an easy forehand, he let the ball drop out of his strike zone and shanked it wide. Yesterday it wouldn’t have mattered, he would have made the shot anyway.
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We’ve accused Grigor Dimitrov of copying Roger Federer’s style, but it really does make sense to copy the best. Copying Richard Gasquet is a riskier proposition. That’s what, at first glance, it appeared that Australia’s Matthew Ebden had decided to do. The backwards white baseball cap and the wide stance for ground strokes made him look like a Gasquet impersonator. That was, until he hit the ball. Ebden is much more of a meat and potatoes aggressive baseliner, with none of the mercurial, occasional genius of Gasquet. And probably little of the disappointment that always comes with that genius, either.
Ebden did what he could against Andy Murray today, and did what he could to keep the weeklong net-rushing renaissance alive. But it wasn’t nearly enough, as the much steadier Scot sat back and pierced those attacks with his usual passing-shot brilliance. On the surface, this was an easy one for Murray, but two questions came to my mind while watching it.
First, why did he have a fit over one missed shot in the third game of the match? It was 1-all, 30-30 with Ebden serving when Murray missed a makeable return. He immediately yelled something, stared toward his box with that blind-man-raging look he gets, pointed his index finger in the air—“Oh no, I didn’t!”—and finally decided that the whole thing was “------- unbelievable.” I can only imagine that Murray felt a certain amount of extra pressure to beat a player he should obviously beat. Either that, or he’s about to snap once and for all.
Second question: It’s much easier said than done, but isn’t this the type of match where Murray should get habituated to the more aggressive style of play that he’ll need in the later rounds of most tournaments? Like Andy Roddick, Murray does what comes naturally early in an event; both of them play safely because they know that safe will win. Then they suddenly find themselves in a match where safe won’t win, and it’s hard to adjust. Aggressive play is now out of their comfort zone.
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We'll see what Murray is comfortable doing in the semis, where he gets Nishikori, and Lopez gets Ferrer. With all due respect to the nation of Spain, it’s the former that I’m looking forward to watching tomorrow in my personal Shanghai-Brooklyn dual universe. Enjoy the weekend. I’ll be back with a post on the final.
 I’ve never fully understood the question, “Which is the hardest tournament to win?” The French Open is the most popular answer, but in that case shouldn’t the question be, "What’s the most grueling tournament?" Or, "What tournament gets your socks the reddest?" When it comes to overall difficulty, aren’t all of the majors equally tough, since all of the world’s top players are there and primed to play their best? When, say, Pete Sampras was No. 1, wouldn’t Wimbledon have qualified as the toughest to win for the other 127 players in the draw? Conversely, you can hardly say the French has been the most difficult for Rafael Nadal to win. It’s hard for him to lose there.
Anyway, sorry for beginning this post on a tangent, but the thought hit me while watching Shanghai today. That’s because the same question of difficulty is often posed about the majors and the Masters: Which is “tougher”? At the former, you play three of five with a day of rest in between; at the latter, you play two of three, possibly for five days in a row. I’ve always sided with the majors, because that’s where, for lack of a better cliché, champions are made. But this morning, when I flipped on my TV and saw that poor old beat-up over-30-year-old Juan Carlos Ferrero had to go out again, 24 hours after winning a three-setter over one of his countrymen, Fernando Verdasco, and face another, much more determined countryman, David Ferrer, I had to admit: The Masters are pretty tough.
Here’s a look at day four from Shanghai.
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Ferrero, nevertheless, came out firing, as if he’d had a good month’s rest. He won the first set 6-1 and threatened in the second. But then Ferrer did what he does—i.e., he stayed the same. Tennis's bricklayer just keeps pushing forward, from one point to the next, like he's pushing a wheelbarrow. Watching him gut out the second set and then twist the knife in the third, I started to think that Ferrer is in an enviable position from a psychological standpoint. Unlike his other countryman, Rafael Nadal, he’s not expected to win every tournament he enters, or virtually any tournament he enters, for that matter. He’s Top 10, he makes great money, but if he loses, Ferrer just moves on to the next event and tries his best there. You don’t see a lot of angst from the guy. If Nadal loses a first set to Ferrero, the Internet blows up with “end of an era,” “Nadal is done,” “What the bleep is wrong with Rafa?” talk. When Ferrer loses that first set, nobody says he’s finished, nobody says the Ferrer Era is over, nobody says anything. Moral? Aim for No. 6 in life, not No. 1. You won’t have the pressure, but you’ll still get the dough.
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It’s too bad no one really cares about the fall Masters events, because they offer some of the most entertaining and varied tennis of the year. The courts in Shanghai and Paris are quicker than those used at the other 1000s, and you can see the result: more attacking and more net play. Florian Mayer was all over it in his win against Nadal today, but he hasn’t been the only one to have success up there. Percentages of net points won have been solid across the board. Grigor Dimitrov was 17 of 20 in a losing effort against Andy Roddick; Kei Nishikori was 16 of 19 in a winning effort over Tsonga; Mayer was 21 of 29 against Nadal. More players have snuck in behind their serves than normal this week. It’s an easy way for Andy Murray in particular to get more aggressive and use his normally underused quickness and hands in the forecourt.
Of course, it hasn’t all been a cake walk up there. Tsonga was 9 for 19 in his losing effort to Nishikori. But while it may not be translatable to other, slower surfaces, those kinds of winning percentages make me believe that the net, despite the power and spin of the modern ground stroke, is still there for the taking.
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What about Andy Murray? The questions seem to be what they always seem to be at this time of year: Is he for real? Do these fall wins mean anything for his Slam chances? The track record isn’t good. Murray dominated the fall a few years ago and came to Melbourne the prohibitive favorite, only to get sick and lose early. He won Shanghai last year and then went down in flames in the Aussie final.
If I didn’t know better, though, I'd say that Murray’s win over Nadal in Tokyo had the makings of a game-changer. First, he finally seems to have absorbed the lessons that Novak Djokovic has taught us about how to play Nadal. Murray stood on the baseline and used his backhand like a forehand to move Rafa and defuse his topspin. Second, unlike at Wimbledon, where one errant forehand caused him to go back into his defensive shell, Murray kept pushing forward even after losing the first set. He has been undecided about how to play Rafa lately, but this time he tried to win with his forehand and with aggression, and he was rewarded for it. If he can’t carry that plan into his next match with Rafa at a major, he’ll never win one.
As for Murray’s sketchier win over Stan Wawrinka today, it reminded me of something former Chicago Bulls coach Phil Jackson once said about his wild man player Dennis Rodman. The Zen Master believed that Rodman, over the course of a season, would build up some “weird energy” that had to come out in some way. The same seems true for Murray. He was coming off two straight tournament wins and he had won the first set over Wawrinka, but when the second started Murray needed to let out some weird negative energy of his own. For the first time, he started to look at his player box. Then he started to yell at it. Then he started to play poorly. Then he started to curse. Then he started to pull his clothes. But when the third set began, it was gone, and he made a point of trying to fire himself up again.
For now, I won’t worry about Murray’s Slam chances when he’s picking up the slack for the rest of the Big 4 in the fall.
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You can add Rafael Nadal to that list of slacking stars. He lost to Florian Mayer in straights today. It was an upset, of course, but not a huge surprise. First, Nadal is never at his best in the fall—when was the last time he won a Masters event during this time of year, Madrid 2005? And second, Mayer, whom Nadal had never played, is a tricky matchup for Rafa. The German has a two-handed backhand that, like Djokovic and Murray, he can use like a forehand to dictate. He can also hit flat and through the court. And he has a good wide serve that hooks to Nadal’s backhand.
Mayer had all of that working and more today. He lost a total of four points on his first serve. He hit crosscourt backhand winners and kept Nadal off balance by looping forehands high to his backhand. He even put Rafa on a string with his jumping drop shot and lob combination.
I didn’t think Nadal played badly overall. He was disconsolate about his return afterward, and he should be. He had no answers for Mayer’s serve. Nadal grew uncharacteristically tentative when he was up 4-2 in the first-set tiebreaker, and at 4-4 he made an even more uncharacteristic poor decision when he ran way wide in the deuce court to hit a forehand return and nearly put it in the seats. Is this a residual lack of confidence after his beatings by Djokovic? Or was this just not his day, the same way it wasn’t his day against Melzer here last year? I’d vote for the latter. I think it’s easy to make too much of the Djokovic defeats and their long-term effect on his mentality when he faces lesser players. Nadal lost to Ivan Dodig in Montreal and came back to reach the U.S. Open final.
Plus, Mayer played great. He had played equally well against Nalbandian earlier in the event, and I should have seen this one coming. Mayer, 28, has always been fatally streaky, and has always had much more game than his results would indicate. Who else can do as many different and strange things on a tennis court—from two-handed volleys to jumping backhands to jumping drop shots—yet make them all fit together smoothly?
Even his celebration was eccentric. After he landed a backhand pass on the baseline at match point, Mayer put his hands behind his head and rolled his eyes upward. Joy didn't come first; disbelief did. Believe it, Florian, you were that good.
And believe it, tennis fans, he joins Lopez, Dolgopolov, and Matthew Ebden in the quarters of Shanghai. These Masters are tough. (Weird, too.)
 “There’s like 15 people in here, you can hear everything they say.” This is how Mardy Fish described playing in the main stadium in Shanghai yesterday. And it’s true, the tournament, like its sister event in Beijing, always gets off to a slow start from an audience perspective. Even Andy Roddick and Rafael Nadal played to wide swaths of empty seats in their featured evening matches. Sometimes it seems that the number of corporate logos—Rolex, Heineken, FedEx—outnumber spectators.
Today, though, there was a pretty lively atmosphere in the second stadium for a distinctly non-marquee match between Feliciano Lopez and Alex Bogomolov, Jr. Most likely the bulk of the crowd had wandered over from the main arena after Dmitry Tursunov pulled out of his match with Andy Murray, but however they got there, it was good to see them.
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Juan Carlos Ferrero is the ghost of men’s tennis, a figure from its past, a might-have-been who can haunt today’s players on the right afternoon. That’s what the 31-year-old has done so far in Shanghai by hanging tough and pulling out close matches against Mikhail Youzhny and Fernando Verdasco. By the end of the third set today, Verdasco looked particularly haunted. He had gone through his usual series of poses—testy, sullen, surly, glum—and finished in exhausted resignation.
Ferrero can still do that to you. After years of wear and tear, the body and the game will never be what they once were. This season alone he missed three Grand Slams because of injuries to his wrist, knee, shoulder, and hip. And he’s filled out and slowed down too much to merit his old nickname, “The Mosquito.” But those years have also helped Ferrero’s mind. He's a calmer competitor now than he was during his peak nearly a decade ago.
Like fellow former No. 1s Lleyton Hewitt and Andy Roddick, Ferrero now looks like the state of the art from the transitional mini-era known as 2003, between Pete Sampras’s last major, at the 2002 U.S. Open, and before Roger Federer fully took flight, at the Aussie Open in 2004. JC's ground strokes and speed are no longer stunners, but it’s still fun to watch this lifer who once thought he would be a king compete against players at his level.
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Commentator Jason Goodall is a man of the stock phrase. “Inch perfect,” “staring down the barrel of a gun,” and others I can’t recall right now. But what happens when you start one of your phrases and realize midway through that it doesn’t exactly apply to the situation at hand? (“Situation at hand”: Is that another?)
In the second game of the Ferrero-Verdasco match, Verdasco reached break point. Goodall seemed to think that he had already broken, so he began the line that he saves for this moment: “He’s drawn first blood.” By the time Goodall got to “blood,” though, Verdasco was lining up in the ad court to receive serve. He obviously hadn’t won the game yet. Goodall, light on his feet, amended his stock phrase just in time: “He’s drawn first blood—almost.”
Could this be a new way for commentators to let us know that a player has reached break point? It’s certainly dramatic, if a bit of a letdown at the end.
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The return of serve, statistically, is the difference-maker in men's tennis today. The three ATP players currently at the top of the list for percentage of return games won are Djokovic, Nadal, and Murray; the top two players in percentage of games won on serve are the much-lower-ranked John Isner and Ivo Karlovic.
Of course, this doesn’t mean the return itself is more important than the serve; Nadal ranks highly in this category because of his excellent ground-stroke game in general. But it does show that the return can be where a match is won or lost. Watching from Shanghai this week with this in mind, I feel like the return is also the shot where the pros waste the most opportunities, because of the way the sport is currently played.
Jurgen Melzer was behind 0-4 in a third-set tiebreaker today to Santiago Giraldo. At that point, he abandoned his normal baseline game, took a second serve on the rise with his two-handed backhand, and charged in behind it. Naturally, he won the point with an easy volley, and almost came back to win the breaker. It made me wonder why more players with two-handers don’t try this seemingly natural, and formerly standard, play. They’ve got the second hand on the backhand, why not use it?
It just doesn’t go with the norm. That norm is what Jo-Wilfried Tsonga did time after time with his return against Kei Nishikori. Even when Nishikori threw in a half-paced kick, the Frenchman backed up, or ran around his backhand to bomb a forehand from behind the baseline. The leaping, open-stance, long-swing forehand that most everyone hits today just doesn’t work as well for traditional approach shots, which require shorter swings and rapid-fire timing to take the ball as it ascends.
But, as Melzer showed in a matter of seconds, the traditional approach is still as effective as ever. It’s easier on the body, too.
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Speaking of Nishikori and Tsonga, the former has finally reached his goal of being ranked No. 45 or higher in the world, the highest ranking previously achieved by a Japanese player, Shuzo Matsuoka. As a fan, I like to watch Nishikori play for his uncluttered-ness. To do what he does at 5-foot-10, 150 pounds—he looks shorter than that to me—requires exemplary timing and technique, and he’s got both on his ground strokes. For better or worse, they're the most purely Bollettieri-esque shots I’ve ever seen.
As for Tsonga, this match involved the usual mix of the joyous and the perplexing (can a person be “joyously perplexing”?). No matter how many times he's gone walkabout before, it’s still frustrating to see him hit a very good drop shot, stand still on the baseline and watch his opponent track it down, then, with an easy ball in front of him, hit a lob over the other guy’s head and again stand still and watch from the baseline. And then lose the point. And the match.
Perhaps commentator Robbie Koenig summed up Tsonga best today: “He continues to go for too much, but that’s just part of his game.”
You really don’t want to turn “going for too much” into a tactic.
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It doesn’t take long for fear to set in when it comes to watching Rafael Nadal these days. In the second game of his match today against Guillermo Garcia-Lopez, Nadal struggled to break serve despite various errors and donations from his opponent. After yet another Garcia-Lopez double fault, Goodall finally said, “If Nadal doesn’t break here, something’s wrong.”
Rafa didn’t break, but nothing turned out to be wrong; he won the match 6-3, 6-2. It was only a case of Nadal struggling with his one major, long-time weakness—he tightens up on second serves on break points early in matches. If I were an opponent, I might even intentionally miss my first one in those situations. Overall, though, if that’s your most noticeable weakness, you don't have too much to fear.
 You may have forgotten by now, but we started 2011 with the beginnings of a youth movement on the men’s side. One by one, name by name, the first week of the Australian Open introduced us to Milos Raonic, Grigor Dimitrov, Bernard Tomic, and Alexandr Dolgopolov. It’s been a bumpy 10 months for all of these young players, filled with injuries (Raonic), creeping but frustrating improvement (Dimitrov), and results that swing violently from one event to the next (Tomic, Dolgopolov). Now, though, as the season winds down, they were all healed, all playing decent tennis, and, along with two other members of their up-and-down generation, Ryan Harrison and Donald Young, all in action on the second day at the Shanghai Masters.
Overall, the kids were all right: Raonic, Harrison, Tomic, and Dolgo won, while Dimitrov and Young lost tight matches to Roddick and Wawrinka, respectively. Here’s a little of what they did, from what I could see many miles away.
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It’s young vs. old day all over the grounds, but the Tennis Channel begins with a look at the tour as it is right now, a face-off between two solid mid-level veterans who have been gradually improving for the last two years, Feliciano Lopez and Janko Tipsarevic. It’s early, it’s still half-dark, and it’s very quiet, both in my neighborhood and in the big empty stadium in Shanghai. All of which makes for odd viewing: While Lopez and Tipsarevic play a long, close first set and give us their share of excellent shotmaking (especially Lopez), it feels like they’re doing it in a vacuum—all you can hear is the ball meeting the strings and echoing for what seems like miles. With so little fan reaction, or noise of any sort, it’s hard to recognize how well they’re playing. That is, until Lopez storms the net in two big steps and slaps down a forehand volley for a winner, then follows it up with a crosscourt forehand pass that clips the sideline. Both shots are greeted with silence, but they’re impressive nonetheless. Lopez is not Nadal, and Tipsarevic is not Djokovic, but the Spaniard’s 6 and 6 win is a pretty fair time-capsule example of men’s tennis today.
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Milos Raonic is back; you can tell by the total lack of expression from his end of the court. All I get to see is his third-set tiebreaker with Michael Llodra, but it’s enough to be reminded of what the Canadian does and doesn’t do well. He still serves huge, and he can still take a forehand from behind the baseline, drive it deep, and follow it all the way to the net for a putaway volley. But that shotgun forehand also makes Raonic itchy on the trigger and liable to pull it one shot too early in a rally. At 6-5 in the breaker, Raonic smashes a serve on the sideline and slams home the next forehand for a winner and the match. It’s been a long one, and as close as it could be. But it hasn’t been enough to elicit a reaction from Raonic. He walks straight to the net and waits to shake Llodra’s hand, then walks straight to his chair to collect his stuff. He’ll play old friend David Ferrer, who beat him easily in Melbourne, next.
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Is showmanship on the way out in the post-Djokovic generation? If Raonic is expressionless, Bernard Tomic takes it even further—it can be hard to tell at times how hard he’s trying, and like the Canadian, he barely pauses to celebrate a very big win today over Mardy Fish. Tomic is trying, of course, hard enough that he tightens up while serving for the match. But his loose walk and ambivalent demeanor ultimately work in his favor. Like everything else about the eccentrically skilled young Aussie, they keep his opponents guessing. For more on Tomic’s upset win, see my Racquet Reaction here.
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A stat: By the middle of the first set between Andy Roddick and Grigor Dimitrov today, Dimitrov had hit 11 winners and made 17 unforced errors, while Roddick had exactly one of each.
Roddick, in his later, conservative years, has become a kind of litmus test. He doesn’t hit many winners and commits very few errors, so it’s up to you to make your shots and make things happen. Traditionally, though it’s not as true as it once was, Roddick has beaten the players he’s supposed to beat and lost to the players he’s supposed to lose to. He’s very good at assessing his opponent’s weaknesses and waiting for them to show up and bite them at the crucial moment.
That’s essentially what happened today against Dimitrov. The Bulgarian’s soft spot—and it’s very soft right now—is his backhand, especially his slice backhand. He chops at it and puts it in the net regularly. Roddick, naturally, was content to play to that side, and Dimitrov couldn’t hold steady with it long enough. He struggled to get more than three in a row in the court.
To me, this is an example of how difficult it is to be a great tennis player, and to fulfill even the most sky-high potential. Grigor Dimitrov has a lot going for him. He can soar for a forehand like a dancer, and open up the court when he hits it. He serves well and has great touch and flair in all parts of the court. But for all of his full-flight talents, unless he learns to do the very basic and earthbound task of getting his backhand into the court four, five, or 10 times in a row, he’s not going to make good on the rest of his artistic abilities. There's no way around the fundamentals.
To paraphrase Bon Scott, it’s a long way to the top if want to hit a tennis ball. If any of these young guys do one-fourth as much as Federer or Nadal or Djokovic, they’ll be lucky. They might even count themselves lucky to be the next Feliciano Lopez or Janko Tipsarevic.
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