It's time to unload the mailbox again. There was a lot of year-end correspondence this time around. Not all of it was well-wishing, exactly, but that's just how it goes around here, right?
*****
2012 Prediction: Roger Federer achieves Grand Slam. What percentage would you give TMF for that amazing career defining possibility?—sfedster
Uncle Toni must step aside. Rafa's playing some idiotic tennis and his body can't make up the difference like it used to.—Martini Hingis
And I thought we Philadelphia sports fans were bad about leaping on and off our teams’ bandwagons.
*****
If the ATP wants to do justice to the NAME of the World Tour Finals, it has to give the impression to the people that all players have an equal chance of winning and deliver the all round best of the best champion.—hitius
The commenter is saying that the WTF’s surface should be rotated, to give each player a better shot at winning a tournament that is supposed to represent the tour as a whole. In theory, while the event has always been played on hard courts and almost always been indoors due to the time of year, there’s no reason it should never be played on clay—it’s not as if that’s a freak one-off surface. The trouble, as the schedule is now, is that this would mean the players would have to come straight from indoor hard courts in Paris and move over to clay two days later.
*****
I wonder if that belief- everyone doing it makes everyone equal- is what has led to the defense of Contador by some of his countrymen. Many, myself included, believe that doping in cycling is widespread. If nearly everyone was cheating, should Contador get punished only because he was unlucky enough to get caught?—JDB
That's not a good reason to let him go; accountability for the winners is the only way to make any inroads into that doping culture, and there has been evidence that doping in the last Tour de France had lessened. If they can't catch and punish athletes in cycling, where doping is so rampant, who can?
*****
I also find the hand-holding children odd -- actually, almost eerie contrasting with the apocalyptic growl of Joe Strummer warning "now war is declared and battle come down." The hot rancor of the song, the icy chill of the fog, the 3 foot-tall innocents leading the buffed and bronzed gladiators to the arena -- all those mixed messages make a girl a little dizzy . . .
But I guess tennis is kind of like that, too.—Ruby
I hadn’t heard “London Calling” being played then, but that’s a funny image and mixed message. I did like Djokovic’s smile with one of the kids, though, as well as his friendly reaction to one of the women who came out to do the pre-match coin toss. Probably his two best moments at the WTF this year.
****
The thing about Federer is that, until recently, he always thought he had Novak's number, always thought he could work it out using the same game. The fact that he beat him in Paris and came close to doing so at the Open proves just that.
But now that initial stubbornness will be fully replaced by real strategic adjustments (he's clearly been working on his return game), and 2012 could be an entirely different ballgame. Novak's got all the pressure, Nadal is suffering from a severe lack of confidence and Murray is...still Murray. It's going to be interesting, that's for sure.—Michele
It's true, the guy gets a new coach, makes a few changes in 2010 with an eye toward being more aggressive, uses them to beat his primary rival and the world No. 1 in last year’s WTF final and then . . . gets knocked off by the other guy in Melbourne, Dubai, Indian Wells, and the U.S. Open. What should Federer expect for 2012? Murray to win 43 straight?
*****
"We’ll debate this forever, but for now I’ll take Djokovic’s 2011, with his 10 wins over Federer and Nadal, for the No. 3 spot."
Although I am happy to see that, at least, you are reasonable enough to put Laver's 1969 and Federer's 2006 season in front, I still don't know how you can consider Djokovic's season better than Connor's 1974. Here is my black and white comparison between the 4 seasons (I would love to read about yours).—Abraxas
Yes, Laver’s 1969 and Federer’s 2006 are safe from Djokovic’s 2011. As far as the other great years, what’s special to me about Novak’s season are the 10 wins over Federer and Nadal. Connors’ record in 1974 was obviously fantastic, and he was perfect at the majors (though he was lucky that an aging Ken Rosewall knocked off John Newcombe, the second best player in the world at the time, at both Wimbledon and the Open). What diminishes ’74 at least slightly is that Connors spent a lot of it racking up wins in the B League run by his manager, Bill Riordan. Here’s how his season was described by Sports Illustrated:
Most pros spent the months between the Australian and French Opens playing Lamar Hunt's World Championship Tennis, a circuit much like the one Robert Culp and Bill Cosby plied on TV's I Spy: Johannesburg, Munich, Rotterdam, Tokyo, Toronto. WCT had the money, glamour and top competition.
Connors contented himself with the International Players Association tour, the vehicle Riordan had created for him. The IPA was an archipelago of Palookaville events in college gyms and bush league auditoriums in Omaha and Roanoke and Paramus, where, Connors recalls, "The crowd was in your lap. Why not involve them?"
Only a handful of top players joined him on the Riordan circuit: Sandy Mayer and his brother, Gene; Vitas Gerulaitis; and most notably Nastase, the lone rival with whom Connors would forge a close friendship. But therein lay the boxing-promoter genius of the IPA. Connors could husband his energies and burnish his mystique for the title fights, Wimbledon and Forest Hills.
*****
Will the slower courts (perhaps NP will not agree that they are slower, but we shall see), and shift to baseline play result in more "dominant" seasons?—Dunlop Maxply
I lamented the slower courts in Paris last month, and I’ve been amazed at how slow Indian Wells plays when I’ve hit there. But I wonder if we’ve begun to overrate how much of an effect the courts have (or maybe I’ve read too much nonsense about the courts being slowed down to benefit Nadal specifically). Decades of trends in racquets, technique, and Bollettieri-style coaching have to be equally big influences on the way the game's played now. But it’s true, we have seen an outsized number of three-Slam seasons recently, though Federer didn’t get his with war-of-attrition type tennis.
*****
yeah, Fed definitely has lost a step, in general - don't know whether Steve meant that that point was 'evidence' that he hadn't, or if he was simply saying that it gave a glimpse of what he could do in his prime (and still can, if not nearly as frequently).—Isis
I guess what I mean is that Federer hasn’t lost as much quickness as I would have thought by this time, or as much as most people seem to believe. He’s definitely less springy and free flowing than he once was, but he still gets to tons of balls I don’t think he has any business getting to, including that amazing get I referenced in the London final. Age can show in a lot of ways, in reaction time and consistency and mental stamina and obviously speed, yet another all-time athlete, Carl Lewis, set the world record in the 100-meter dash when he was 30.
And as the photo above clearly shows, Federer can still do it in his sleep.
*****
Crystal: In my 3:30 a.m. post, I already demonstrated why your comments regarding the 1975 Spanish Davis Cup team and Sampras-Muster are ludicrous and why your comments regarding Sampras-Kuerten and Sampras-Bruguera are largely irrelevant.
Not surprisingly, you, sadly, now try to discount: (a) Orantes straight-setting Borg on Swedish clay one year before Borg won his first Roland Garros crown and a year after Borg won his first Davis Cup match, pro; (b) Orantes straight-setting Borg on Barcelona clay the first year Borg won his first title at Roland Garros; and c) Orantes’ 1975 U.S. Open title on green clay (or Har Tru), won the same year as the pertinent Spain-Sweden Davis Cup tie.—J. Balcells
It's officially on now, tennis.com style. I mean, we all knew Juan Balcells was up on his tennis history, but who knew he could bring it like that?
*****
Oh no ... Steve Tignor has picked Fed to win. I asked you days ago not to curse Fed by picking him to win. It's the only thing that dents my confidence for the upcoming WTF.—Tigress
Nineteen-seventy-four was a big year for tennis. In England, the country of its birth, the sport turned 100 years old. In the U.S., the country of its growth, it was blowing up all over the place. The summer of ’74 marked the dizzying early summit of the tennis boom (or tennis epidemic, depending on your point of view). Fewer than 10 million Americans had played the game regularly in 1970; by ’74, that number had passed 30 million. It’s hard to imagine that another sport has ever grown so quickly in so short a time.
Between 1968, when it was professionalized for the first time, and ’74, when it went mainstream, tennis may have changed more than it had in its previous 94 years. The former “secret sport,” as Bud Collins dubbed it, went from old private clubs to newly constructed public courts; from all-white to multi-colored clothes; from wood racquets to metal; from staid to hip; from net to baseline; from one-handed backhand to two; from unpaid to very well paid; from silent to grunty. One of the original purposes of those all-whites had been to hide the sweat of the ladies and gentlemen who engaged in lawn tennis. Now sweat was the purpose. The sport was part of the new fad for fitness that had begun in the 70s.
Tennis’s ascendance was symbolized by two very different phenomena in 1974. One was the rise of Jimmy Connors to a position of dominance on the new pro tour. The other was the publication of a best-seller called The Inner Game of Tennis by a psychologist living in California named Timothy Gallwey. Talk about polar opposites: Connors was the blue-collar brat who saw tennis as war and had been raised by his mom to be Muhammad Ali in short shorts. The Inner Game was a product of the post-hippie West Coast New Age that told us that the secret to competing well was making the sport a cooperative activity with your partner. Jimbo’s motto was, “It’s a goddamn war out there.” The Inner Game’s was “let it happen.” If Gallwey never actually wrote the words, “be the ball”—that was Chevy Case in Caddyshack, right?—he did give tennis a patina of Zen. That the sport could produce such disparate figures as Connors and Gallwey at the same time showed how much it had grown and how far it had spread.
I knew that Jimbo and The Inner Game had both made their splashes around the same time, but I had never made any other connection between the two until last August. I spent a week in Toronto that month trying to do two things: Write about the ATP Masters event being played there, and researching the book that would become High Strung. I spent the mornings before the matches in my hotel room, reading two books: The Inner Game, and a cheap but surprisingly witty paperback fan bio of Jimbo from 1975 by Jim Burke called The World Of Jimmy Connors. It was perhaps the only attempt to make the Brash Basher of Belleville into a heartthrob. The cover showed the youthful Jimbo with a crooked grin behind the subtitle: “The Superstar of Tennis—His Life, His Loves, His Incredible Career.”
It was a jarring transition to move from one of these tomes to the other, but both were well done in their ways. Burke, who keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek even as he sings the young brat-star’s praises, tells this story about Jimmy’s extremely brief, and academically underwhelming, college career:
“For some utterly inexplicable reason, Connors enrolled at UCLA. He cut most of his classes. But he had money to spend, and he paid a graduate student to turn out a term paper for him. Unfortunately, Jimmy’s critical faculties were undeveloped. The paper was too good to have come from him, but he handed in a mimeographed copy of it anyway. When he got to class, the instructor is said to have taken him by the shirtfront, thrown him against the wall, and ordered him to address the class on the meaning of the paper. His performance was unworthy of the hireling’s efforts.”
Burke also makes it clear from the start that the Jimbo phenomenon was something new for tennis. He opens with the 1975 “Winner Take All” Challenge Match that Connors played against Rod Laver at Caesar’s Palace. To accommodate a national CBS audience, the match was played at 10:15 A.M., but Jimmy apparently had had his coffee. While the 36-year-old legend and fan favorite Laver entered slowly and coolly as always, Connors the upstart villain bounced into the arena wearing a London Fog jacket and answered the crowd’s resounding boos with a bellowed stream of obscenities and insults. By the time Jimmy won a very well played four-setter (see the video here; I’ve posted it a few times in the past; while Connors wins, it’s Laver who is always the revelation) and pocketed $100,000 for a single victory, tennis had changed.
While other sports had gone professional decades earlier, it had taken tennis a long time to forget its Victorian amateur roots. Games, according to those amateur ideals, weren’t played for personal gain; victory wasn’t sought for its own sake. Ideally, it was the social values that sports taught—teamwork, sportsmanship, obedience, perseverance, effort, handling failure—that were paramount. They were part of a gentleman’s education. As the saying went, Britain’s military battles were won on the “playing fields of Eton.”
This sporting tradition spread around the Anglo tennis globe and produced generations of classy competitors from Australia to South Africa to the United States. It was still true even of the American generation that came just before Jimmy Connors. Arthur Ashe and Stan Smith, each of whom began their careers in the amateur era, were upstanding, ramrod-straight military men who competed with an old-fashioned gentlemen’s cool. Connors, a pro from the start, never had time for that tradition. He played winner-take-all tennis and grumbled after losses, “there’s no such thing as a moral victory.” He was from the American, Vince Lombardi school of sporting values; he never pretended that winning wasn’t the only thing that mattered. He never played it cool.
As entertaining as Burke’s Jimbo story was, it was The Inner Game that was the revelation to me in Toronto. We have a first edition of the book, complete with the white ball on the cover, in the library at Tennis Magazine, but I’d never pulled it down and read it. I can see now why it became the franchise that it did, why Gallwey would write a series of Inner Games about everything from golf to skiing to music to work, and why this one would now feature an introduction by NFL coach Pete Carroll, who has all of his players read it.
Gallwey did a stint as a teaching pro, but as the title suggests he doesn’t write about strokes or grips; he writes about the most effective attitude to take to a tennis court. He starts by pointing out how strange it is, when you think about it, that tennis players talk to themselves on court—anywhere else and we’d be called crazy. Who are we talking to? Gallwey says we have two Selves—Self 2 is the natural one, the doer; Self 1 is the evaluator, the scolder. His book is essentially an investigation, using himself and his students in the early 70s as examples, of how to get Self 1 out of the way and get Self 2 to “let it happen.”
That may sound all too hippie on the surface, but Gallwey understands the uses of anger, too. He describes asking a woman on a date, getting rejected, and using his fury at the rejection to crush an opponent on the tennis court. Anger was the Jimmy Connors way: As his then-fiancé Chris Evert said in 1975, “Jimmy needs to hate someone to beat him.” Whether it was an opponent or the chair umpire or some jerk in the stands, Jimbo fed on antagonism.
To Gallwey, it isn’t anger or aggression that’s the answer—it’s playing with a sense of purpose. In the end, he decides that the best, truest, and most successful approach to competing at tennis is to move away from anger and the selfish desire to come out on top. Gallwey watches surfers in the water and wonders why they wait for the biggest waves, rather than just taking the next one that comes along. After all, the act of surfing, of being “in the flow,” is the same, the way that hitting a tennis ball is pretty much the same each time. He eventually sees that the biggest wave is the one that will force the surfer to get the most out of himself, that will increase his knowledge of his own capabilities.
“The basic meaning of winning became more clear to me. Winning is overcoming obstacles to reach a goal, but the value of winning is only as great as the value of the goal reached. Reaching the goal itself may not be as valuable as the experience that can come in making a supreme effort to overcome the obstacles involved. The process can be more rewarding than the victory itself.
Once one recognizes the value of having difficult obstacles to overcome, it is a simple matter to see the true benefit that can be gained from competitive sports. In tennis, who is it that provides a person with the obstacles he needs in order to experience his highest limits? His opponent, of course! Then is your opponent a friend or an enemy? He is a friend to the extent that he does his best to make things difficult for you. Only by playing the role of your enemy does he become your true friend. Only by competing with you does he in fact cooperate. It’s the duty of your opponent to create the greatest possible difficulties for you, just as it is yours to try to create obstacles for him. Only by doing this do you give each other the opportunity to find out to what heights each can rise.”
When I read those lines, I thought, other than the fact that they seemed highly profound, that I’d heard them before. And I had: They were, in a modern American way, an updated version of the old amateur sporting code: Real victory was found in the process rather than the result; you came together with an opponent to test yourself and learn about yourself rather than to crush someone else; you were, paradoxically, taught individual perseverance through teamwork.
One hundred years after tennis had been patented in England, its original Victorian values had been reformulated, perhaps unknowingly, by a Zen Californian. In the early 70s, Jimmy Connors had ripped that civilized, upper-crust veneer off of tennis and reveled in the psychological viciousness beneath it. That wasn’t an attitude that many of tennis’s new recreational players in the 70s could live with for long—we weren’t all as “rabid and foaming at the mouth” (Connors’ words for how he generally felt in those days) as Jimbo. It took Gallwey to re-civilize it for the masses.
While both phenomena—Jimbo and The Inner Game—were produced when tennis was at its trendiest, they shared a remarkable staying power. Seventeen years later, Connors was still foaming at the mouth and revving up fans at the U.S. Open. The Inner Game has never gone out of print. Tennis wouldn’t be the same without either. It's a war out there, but you won't win it until you let it happen.
*****
So who is the better role model on court, Brash Jim or Zen Tim? I’ll report back with my findings next week.
It was with some relief and some regret that I got up this morning and realized that no tennis match from London would be starting shortly. I could get used to having the season spread out the way the World Tour Finals spreads out, two marquee matches every day of the year, rather than the eight jam-packed Grand Slam weeks we have now. The WTF may have come too late to offer us a proper season-ending face-off between the Big 4 at their best, but it still gave us plenty of tennis food for thought, in an easily digestible way. The tournament will be moved up two weeks next season, and I’m happy about that, but its sense of quiet, enjoyable tennis overkill does fit well with the Thanksgiving week in America. It may be too much, but who can complain?
Now that the WTF is finished, and before our attention moves on to Davis Cup and even on to 2012—Mardy Fish just tweeted that his “long, two-day vacation” is over and he’s training again—here are a few thoughts on the week and the tennis just past.
*****
Flying on Overload This was the state of Novak Djokovic at the O2 Arena—that was the word, “overload,” he used to describe how his body felt during the tournament. There was a lot of talk in the fall about how the world No. 1 should have simply pulled the plug after the U.S. Open. In hindsight, Djokovic, who went 6-4 after Flushing Meadows, defaulted from a Davis Cup match, withdrew from the Paris Masters, and looked unsure of why he was out there in general, probably wishes he had. All he succeeded in doing was making himself look human to his opponents again. At the same time, if Djokovic had hung up his racquet in September, he would likely have been criticized as a quitter, for not finishing what he started. Maybe Djokovic learned lesson No. 1 about being No.1: With no one left to chase, you have to manufacture your motivation from the inside.
As for Djokovic’s season in an historic sense, he went from 64-2 to 70-6 and failed to win the season-ender, the way Roger Federer always did in his finest seasons. At the end of the U.S. Open, I would have said Djokovic’s year was the second-best in the men’s Open era, behind Rod Laver’s 1969. Now I’d say his season drops behind Federer’s 2006 (three Slams, 92-5 record) and into the vicinity of McEnroe’s 1984 (two Slams, 82-3 record), Jimmy Connors’ 1974 (three Slams, 93-4 record), Federer’s other prime years, ’04, ’05, and ’07, and perhaps Rafael Nadal’s 2010. We’ll debate this forever, but for now I’ll take Djokovic’s 2011, with his 10 wins over Federer and Nadal, for the No. 3 spot.
*****
The Alternate Hero Award Goes to . . . Janko Tipsarevic. My first reaction, and I’m guessing this was true for a few others, was mild disbelief that Serbia’s No. 2 had moved that close to a spot in the WTF in the first place. My second reaction was mild but pleasant surprise at how well he acquitted himself coming off the bench. He entertained a crowd that had come to see the man he replaced, Andy Murray, and he pulled out his first win over his countryman Djokovic. It was a nice reward for a successful season, and proof to himself and everyone else that he belonged with the best.
*****
Maybe We Really Can All Get Along? The ATP put on another successful year-ender in London, and even made New Yorkers stop regretting that it ever left Madison Square Garden. This tournament, which began as a combination of the ATP’s World Championships and the ITF’s Grand Slam Cup, and which is now run by the ATP, can be seen as an example of the organization and promotion possible if tennis's governing bodies presented a united face to the world. With the European drift of men’s tennis, London is the perfect capital for the sport. With its theatrical lighting and spiffy dress all around, it's created a classy atmosphere that echoes the current tenor of the men’s game, the same way that New York’s rambunctious Masters at MSG reflected the bad-boy days.
Two missteps:
1) If this really wants to be seen as a "fifth major" or something similarly prestigious, it needs a three-out-of-five-set final. The Masters finals were reduced from three-of-five to two-of-three a few years ago to help save the top players over the course of the season. Unless a London finalist is also in the Davis Cup final, there's nothing to save them for here.
2) I know the kids who walked on court holding hands with the players must have been thrilled, but as a fan of sports and competition, I can’t get into it. I try to imagine Jimmy Connors striding on court that way in his pugilistic prime and . . . well, it’s a struggle.
*****
Life is Short, Tennis is Shorter
“Is much easier when you are a teenager, I think. When you have 17 or 18, everything is easier. You play with no pressure. You can win, you can lose, everything is fine. That's a different mentality. You can play more aggressive. For everybody is the same history I think, no?
When you arrive, you hit all the balls like crazy and without think, without pressure. When you are there (indicating at a high level) you start to think a little bit more about you have to play this shot, you have to play another shot, I can't lose this match, I have to win this match for sure.
That’s a little bit more problems. When you are coming up, you play quarterfinals perfect; you play semifinals fantastic; you play final very good; and if you win, is unbelievable. So when you are there, you play quarterfinals, say, Well, is good. Is not my tournament, but you are going back very happy at home.
So that is different view and different perspective of the game. So the pressure is higher when you are in the top. Seems like can be a different thing, but believe me, that's what happen.”
—Rafael Nadal, being self-prophetic in Melbourne, at the beginning of 2011.
I kept thinking about those lines while I was watching a clip of Nadal at the 2006 WTF, when he was 20, and as I watched him at this year’s edition of the tournament. Even in defeat, he was clear-eyed and intense in '06; this time he was frowning and not sure of his abilities. I'm guessing Seville will put him in a better mood.
*****
The Future Achiever Award Goes To . . . Roger Federer? He didn’t have the best season in 2011, or even the second-best, but he ended it the same way he did last year, with a fresh sense of fitness and purpose. He slashed through his opponents with a balanced attack in the fall; more important, he found a way to rebound from mid-match adversity.
Federer went into this season in much the same excellent shape, only to be engulfed by a stronger surge from Djokovic. Whether or not something similar happens to him in 2012, the oldest player in London again gave fans one more reason to keep looking ahead.
I knew there was something I was missing by not being at the World Tour Finals in London. Was it the matches? I could still watch them from home, from a better seat, on my TV. Was it the city? It looks cold and damp there right now, and it seems like the tube hasn’t been too reliable around the O2 Arena. Was it the food? Let me see . . . no.
No, there was another British staple that hadn’t been part of my tennis diet this time around: the tabs. More specifically, the tabs and their sober, considered analysis of hometown “hero”—i.e., perpetual whipping boy and pathetic scapegoat—Andy Murray. It’s not the same over here in the States; you really need to be in London, with a stack of papers and their blaring print and out of context photos in front of you, to experience the full hateful glee of it all.
This morning, though, I did feel little calmer when I came across these two thoughtful, restrained headlines on the Sun’s website:
MURRAY FEARS END OF THE WORLD Andy Murray fears his best year has come to an early, injury-ravaged end
So what did the Sun do when that apocalyptic possibility came true for Murray? It rolled its collective eye at the great Scottish whinger, who had, naturally, blown another golden opportunity:
LAME SET AND MATCH FOR MURRAY It’s a hammer blow for the world No. 3, who arrived in London with a real chance of landing the title for the first time
What else is the tennis press, in London and beyond, telling us as the men’s season reaches its semi-climactic end? It won't be as fun as the Sun, but I'll do my best.
*****
It’s a big step up, or down, depending on your point of view, from the Sun to the Mail. The paper leads its tennis section with this piece of convoluted and mysterious news:
“LTA boost as hope grows of extending ATP Tour Finals deal thanks to tax rules.”
Confused? It means, from what I can tell, that Britain’s tennis association believes that it can get an exemption for the Top 8 from Britain’s heavy foreign-performer tax rate, thus making it more likely that the tournament will stay in London past its current expiration date of 2013. I'm happy that the players will get even richer, of course, but this is good news for the game as well. After drifting for years, the WTF has found a home at the O2 Arena.
—After that substantive beginning, the Mail moves on to the WTF itself with this headline:
MURRAY’S REPLACEMENT TIPSAREVIC BEATEN BY BERDYCH . . . THEN HOBBLES OFF!
—The paper leaves dull old London behind to give us the scoop on an unlikely scandal brewing in Slovakia, of all places.
WHAT WOULD RORY SAY! WOZNIACKI CAVORTS WITH VETERAN TENNIS STAR LECONTE IN BRATISLAVA
Cavorting? What the . . . ? Oh, I see. When you click on the story, you find a photo of Wozniacki sitting on Henri Leconte’s lap during an exhibition. Innocent fun, you say? The paper doesn’t give up that easily. It pairs that photo with a shot of the oblivious, and very possibly cuckolded, McIlroy, who is, “on the other side of the world playing golf in China.” Wake up, Rory!
—Finally, the Mail fizzles out with a drab story about an LTA presentation for the future. I have to say I admire the British papers for actually covering their national tennis organization. The New York Times, or Tennis.com, could conceivably write about a new piece of USTA news every week. But they don’t. Thankfully.
*****
Of course, the most talked-about, and pilloried, article of the last week was Yannick Noah’s charge in Le Monde that Spanish athletes, to put it plainly, are doping. His evidence is that (a) the country is winning everything, and (b) the Spaniards are bigger and stronger; they make French athletes look like “dwarves.”
Noah has been rightly slammed for these comments, primarily for his total lack of evidence. It should also be noted that there are successful French male tennis players who could hardly be called small, let alone dwarfish. That’s evidence, of course, of nothing; it just follows Noah’s logic.
At the same time, the case of Spanish Tour de France champion Alberto Contador, who tested positive for the banned substance clenbuterol after last year’s Tour, continues today in Switzerland. There the World Anti-Doping Agency is asserting that Contador should serve a suspension. The Spanish Cycling Federation, after initially agreeing and recommending a one-year ban, eventually cleared him of all charges. (Contador maintained that he had eaten tainted meat, but WADA says it has discredited that claim.) Last year the New York Times described the Spanish federation’s case as “challenging and awkward,” since it had “to decide whether Contador, its biggest star, should be sanctioned.” The paper quoted the president of the International Association of Professional Cycling Teams on the federation’s dilemna: “Contador is a huge celebrity in his country, and I’m sure that’s in the backs of their minds. They are scared of what happens to the sport if they convict him, and they’re scared of what happens if they don’t convict him.” It didn’t make it any easier when Spain’s prime minister at the time came out in favor of clearing Contador.
None of this is to say that Noah was right to do what he did. He brings a massive cloud of suspicion, with no proof to back it up, over hundreds of athletes in dozens of sports. And the above story is about cycling, which knows no national boundaries when it comes to doping (none of the players on the Spanish Davis Cup team has ever tested positive for anything). But it is to say that Spain, like the United States and a lot of other nations, has its issues with doping and how to police it.
*****
At SI.com, Jon Wertheim is faced with this question:
“We often hear commentators say that so and so has a 'live arm,' but never any explanation as to what exactly characterizes a live arm. I’d be curious to hear an opinion of what it is to have a live arm.”
Jon answers: “My strong suspiscion is that we can blame/credit Brad Gilbert for visiting this term on us. A “live arm” is basically a strong thrower or server who, unencumbered by age, can simply chuck lasers.”
Yes, “live arm” is a generic term with no medical meaning, and BG is always a safe guess when it comes to the origin of a piece of well-used lingo. But I did once have Andy Roddick’s trainer, Doug Spreen, describe the idea of the live arm to me in a little more detail. He said that Roddick, like most baseball pitchers, has “freakishly strong” shoulder and upper back muscles.
—In the previous week’s Mailbag, Wertheim was confronted with this plea from Denise in San Antonio:
“Just wanted to say that I knew when you made your predictions for the 2011 U.S. Open women’s champion, that you were going to jinx that person.”
Wait, I thought I was the jinx. Is there a tennis pundit out there who isn't one?
*****
Toronto’s Tom Tebbutt is the latest journalist to take up the blogger's keyboard, at Tennis Canada’s Love Means Nothing site. Tom is on the Milos Raonic beat much of the time, right down to his exo appearances. But a good place to start is with this post on a visit Tom made to Roland Garros earlier in the month. The grand old place was a ghost town, of course, but Tom’s photos of the red clay still had me thinking about springtime. It, and the new tennis season, will be here before we know it: I’m booking my flight for Melbourne as we speak.
*****
Finally, jazz drummer Paul Motian died yesterday at 80. He was the last surviving member of the great trio that featured Bill Evans on piano and Scott La Faro on bass. I saw Motian, with friend and fellow tennis writer Tom Perrotta, at the Village Vanguard in New York a few times—even in his 70s, he seemed to be booked there every weekend.
That was also the place where Motian helped make one of the most famous jazz records ever, Sunday at the Village Vanguard, with Evans and La Faro. I know few pieces of music that stop and carve up time like the interplay between those three men on this album—when you play it, you really are back on a Sunday afternoon in the Village in 1961. Below is the final song; the three would never record together again, as La Faro died, at 25, in an auto accident 10 days later. Motian kept playing until yesterday.
*****
See my Racquet Reaction on today's match between Novak Djokovic and David Ferrer.
“Oh, yes,” says the commentator over and over. Until he gives up and says, “Oh, come on.” The semifinal between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal at the 2006 World Tour Finals—then known as the Masters Cup—in Shanghai was that kind of match. Federer would win by the deceptively one-sided score of 6-4, 7-5. We may never know what the greatest match of all time is, but I'm going to go out on a limb and say that this, a go-for-broke slugfest from start to finish, was the best 6-4, 7-5 match ever played.
As we prepare, five years later, for another duel between these two players at the same event, a few notes on the best of their three WTF matches past.
*****
—It’s hard to rate this among the Nadal-Federer classics. It stands alone, different from the epic five-setters in Rome, Melbourne, and at Wimbledon. At the time, I likened it to a boxing classic: The five-setter they played in Rome that year was an Ali-Frazier 15-rounder; this was a compressed bloodletting along the lines of the three-rounder between Marvin Hagler and Tommy Hearns—known as the War (see it in all of its scary glory here)—in 1985. On a fast surface in Shanghai, Nadal and Federer stood toe-to-toe and swung out, and they did it from the first game. As the commentator says after the first point shown in this highlight reel: “It hasn’t taken Nadal long to warm up, either.”
—I’ve never missed Nadal’s sleeveless look, but it was certainly a look, and it fit him back then. He’s 20 at the time, and seems a little springier than he does today. Nadal’s backhand, at least in this match, looks better than it has recently; but his serve, with a different, more straightforward motion, was weaker, had less bite.
—This was the end of Federer’s greatest season, 2006, in which he went 92-5, won three Slams, 12 tournaments, and reached the final of 16 of 17 events he entered (it stands as the second-best in the Open era, in my opinion, after Laver's 1969; Novak Djokovic's 2011 could supplant it, but only if he wins the WTF this week). At the same time, it was the first peak year for this rivalry. Nadal won in Monte Carlo, Rome, and Paris, but Federer stemmed the tide in their first Wimbledon final. Looking at Federer, he doesn't appear to have changed much, at least to my eyes. He’s playing extremely well in these highlights—there’s nothing but winners from both guys here—but is he faster or springier or more powerful or better in general? I can’t tell.
—One thing Federer had going on this day, and which he also had going in their final in London last year, was his topspin backhand. But you can see that even when he hits it well against Nadal, it’s an effort for him to get the racquet up and around and over the ball in time, not just to hit it back, but to do anything aggressive with it. He was determined to do it in this match, and he connected. Still, it’s obvious, even from his good swings, that Nadal’s spin is something special.
—The Shanghai crowd hasn’t changed. They showed up for the marquee match, and they showed their delight, vocally, during the more exciting rallies. Hopefully they’ll never learn not to do that.
—Another familiar aspect: Federer gets up a break on Nadal in the first set, then gets tighter than he does against anyone else. He misses a “duck” overhead and is broken. But he’s playing too well on this day to blow it, and he breaks Nadal back for the set.
—The first time I saw Federer play Nadal, at Key Biscayne in 2004, I watched as Federer tried one of his standard plays by bringing Nadal forward with a little slice crosscourt backhand. Where that shot left right-handed players with an uncomfortably low backhand, Nadal, the lefty, just ran up and drilled it for a crosscourt winner. It was clear that this wasn’t going to be a typical matchup for Federer. Late in this match, he tries the same ploy, and suffers the same result.
—At deuce in the final game, it happens again, but this time Federer tracks down Nadal’s crosscourt forehand and, from outside the alley, knocks off what has to be one of the best down the line backhands of his career (second, perhaps, only to the one he hit to save match point in the fourth-set tiebreaker in the 2008 Wimbledon final). Federer follows that backhand up at match point by tracking down a Nadal drop shot and sending another screamer, this time with a forehand, past him for the match. Federer had been forced to show his very best, and he knew it. This was an uncontrolled celebration: a drop to the court, a primal yell—I wonder if he said,"Oh, yes!"—and a full-throttle, over the shoulder fist pump. It felt like more than a win; it felt, after his losses to Nadal earlier that year, like vindication. Federer had ended his best season in the best way possible.
—But the two players saved the finest moment for last, and showed again that they do have a special rivalry, even beyond the forehands and backhands. Done with their war, done with their handshake, they walked to the end of the net and crossed over. As they passed, each gave the other one last slap on the back.
*****
Enjoy Nadal-Federer, Part 26 today. I'll be back with the Racquet Reaction on Tennis.com later.
The ATP's rankings have been largely settled, but its final event is as unsettled as it’s ever been. You would think that 11 months of duking it out against each other would leave the men’s game with an established pecking order, but for the moment, the 2011 hierarchy has largely collapsed. Instead, what we’ve got coming into London are question marks and opportunities.
The question marks start right at the top, with the world’s two best players, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal. The former arrives in London after defaulting his last match due to a shoulder injury, while the latter hasn’t been seen since losing early in Shanghai in October. Out of those questions marks come the opportunities. Roger Federer, the defending champion, and Andy Murray, the Eternal Almost, stand to benefit from the uncertainty above them.
It took a long time to get here, but the ATP’s season-ending championship is upon us. Whatever the results, what’s best about this unique event are the matches themselves. Each one is tough, or potentially tough, and each one is showcased with a session of its own—though, as ticket buyers who find themselves watching Ferrer vs. Berdych rather than Nadal vs. Federer may attest, not all sessions are created equal.
Viewers in the U.S. will get our traditional—and with the ATP schedule shortened next year, final—Thanksgiving week tennis feast. We’ll see how it plays out. Sometimes this tournament yields a surprise (see Nikolay Davydenko’s win two years ago), but more often it doesn’t (see Federer’s five titles, and the Federer-Nadal final of a year ago).
Group A Novak Djokovic, Andy Murray, David Ferrer, Tomas Berdych
Head to heads
Djokovic vs. Murray: 6-4; vs. Ferrer: 6-4; vs. Berdych: 7-1
Murray vs. Djokovic: 4-6; vs. Ferrer: 5-3; vs. Berdych: 1-3
Ferrer vs. Djokovic: 4-6; vs. Murray: 3-5; vs. Berdych: 5-2
Berdych vs. Djokovic: 1-7; vs. Murray: 3-1; vs. Ferrer: 2-5
Which of these numbers stick out or surprise? I knew Berdych’s big game has matched up well of late against Murray—the Czech doesn’t fear him the way he fears the other top guys, and he knows he’ll get to hit his shots—but I didn’t realize that Murray hadn’t beaten him since 2005. Ferrer’s 5-2 record over Berdych is also a little more lopsided than I expected, though the two have only played once since 2007.
Other items of note:
—The early consensus was that Murray had landed in a good spot, away from Nadal and Federer, and with an ailing Djokovic. On paper, though, it’s not all that easy—Murray has losing records against two of his three opponents. As for his sometimes-delicate psychological state, Murray claimed this week that he doesn’t feel the pressure of the British fans and media when he plays at home. After seeing his semifinal performances at Wimbledon over the years, I can’t say I believe him. This tournament, in a sense, is the equivalent of a major for him. It’s the only way, short of winning a Slam, that Murray’s career can move forward.
—Djokovic’s health and mindset will go a long way to determining what happens here. If he’s in decent shape, he should at least sneak into the semifinals as the second player out of this group. On the plus side: He opens on Monday with Berdych, a player he’s beaten seven of eight times.
Semifinalists: Murray, Djokovic
*****
Group B Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Mardy Fish
Head to heads:
Nadal vs. Federer: 17-8; vs. Tsonga: 6-2; vs. Fish: 7-1
Federer vs. Nadal: 8-17; vs. Tsonga: 6-3; vs. Fish: 6-1
Tsonga vs. Nadal: 2-6; vs. Federer: 3-6; vs. Fish: 1-0
Fish vs. Nadal: 1-7; vs. Federer: 1-6; vs. Tsonga: 0-1
What sticks out here? To start, these numbers are a reminder, in case we’ve forgotten, that Nadal is a formidable presence in this group. He has never won this tournament, but he’s 30-11 against his three upcoming opponents. On paper he has to be the favorite to come through here, even if he’s rusty to start. Like Djokovic’s, Nadal’s opener is a fortunate one. He gets a recently injured Mardy Fish on Sunday night. In the last week or so, we’ve heard that Nadal has been training with 2012 in mind, and he undoubtedly wants to be at his best for the DC final, so this may function as the start of Nadal’s new year rather than the wrap-up of the old one. If so, that's a good mindset to have.
Other items of note:
—Jo-Wilfried Tsonga has spoiler potential. The flashy Frenchman has wins over both Federer and Nadal, this fall he won in Vienna and was runner-up in Paris, he plays well indoors, and he should relish the World Tour Finals stage, which he hasn’t been on since 2008. A win by him over Federer—they start the event on Sunday afternoon—or Nadal would throw over the presumed order in a hurry.
—Mardy Fish might be slowed by a hamstring injury; what might be even tougher to overcome is his star-struck mentality. He’s already admitted that he doesn’t feel like he belongs with this group. An ambush of Nadal in their opener—Fish won the last time they played, this summer—would be a good way to overcome that.
—Federer has obviously been on his game. He’s won two tournaments in a row and showed some vintage stuff against Berdych and Richard Gasquet in Paris. But there were some familiarly shaky moments in the second set of the final against Tsonga, moments that he’ll likely have to shake off to advance in London. And while his record against Nadal is poor, he did beat him on this court last year, and has beaten him at other WTFs in the past. If he can open with a win against Tsonga, I think this is Federer’s tournament to lose.
Yesterday we returned to the Readers; today it's Rally time again. In this late-season edition, Kamakshi Tandon and I talk about . . . pretty much everything.
*****
Kamakshi,
This is the time of the season when tennis news starts to sound more manufactured than normal. There’s nothing of historical significance happening on the court, so we talk season length, surface speed, grunt-o-meters, player strikes, all the things we forget about when, say, Novak Djokovic is playing Roger Federer in the semifinals of the U.S. Open—then we can talk about something really important: the ratio of luck versus skill in a certain return of serve.
What seems compelling to you this fall? The best news came from the women’s side, with the success of both the Istanbul event and a new face there, Petra Kvitova. And for all of the WTA’s struggles, it seems to me that they now end their season at the right time. On the men’s side, Novak Djokovic and how he negotiates the end of his epic season is still the most newsworthy item. I don’t think he has the greatest year ever—that has to belong to Rod Laver in 1969—but his could still come in second, depending on how he finishes (and depending on how much he cares). Maybe more important, a win at the World Tour Final would help send Djokovic into 2012 with his momentum back intact. Of the other guys, Federer seems the most dangerous to that momentum. We know he beat Djokovic at the French, almost beat him at Flushing Meadows, that he loves the year-end championships, and that he's winning again. Federer could go a long way to building something for next season in this last event. Then again, he finished strong in 2010, but could never get it going this year.
What else are you watching for these days?
Steve
*****
Hi Steve,
This time of year is a bit like the late stages of a party—most of the guests have gone, and there are just a few of the inner circle hanging out, having some last drinks and maybe, just maybe, helping with the cleanup. It’s a cozy, comfortable little interlude, where the pressure is gone but so is the energy. The matches are there to be watched, but there’s no need to decide what they mean. Like you say, there’s more shop talk—the length-of-the season arrived a little earlier this year, a bit like Christmas has been doing. Lots there to chew on, but maybe we can address it during the off-season itself. What else is happening? A bunch of kitchen table topics:
Djokovic’s season
Just think, if Novak Djokovic had learned to pull out before the match started earlier in the season, he would be at only two losses—perhaps one!—right now, and the greatest season title might still be on the line. The French Open semifinal was too important for him to consider not playing, even with any sort of knee problem, and he was clearly fit enough to have chances in that match even if he didn’t play his best. But if he had taken an ultra-conservative approach, giving up walkovers in Cincinnati and Basel and not playing the Davis Cup semis, or any combination thereof, he wouldn’t have the 4 in that 69-4 right now and might still be on John McEnroe’s heels. Of course, if Djokovic had taken an ultra-conservative approach, he might not have the 69 in 69-4 either—he might have pulled out earlier in Cincinnati or not played at all, and perhaps skipped Basel as well—not to mention other events he might have played with niggles and won anyway. In any case, it sounds like the shoulder problem in the Basel semis got worse during the match, so he might have played that match anyway, and there was always going to be pressure to give it a go in Davis Cup. Cincinnati is probably the one he should have skipped, as our friend Tom Tebbutt suggested at the time and got a bit of scoffing for in some quarters.
I’m not suggesting that we throw out those matches assessing his season—they count in win-loss—but noting that almost all of Djokovic’s losses have come when he’s been in pretty poor shape underlines how stellar he’s been this year. True, even with a more strategic approach he still wouldn’t quite match McEnroe’s 82-3, but a 69-3 or 64-2 going into the Masters would still be right up there in my books given how much more difficult many of the tournaments were. And it’s still the best first half of a season ever.
Tracking Djokovic’s run this season has also made me stop at several points to appreciate what a great streak McEnroe had in 1984, especially for someone who wasn’t known as a rock.
I see your claim for Laver’s ’69 as the best season ever, but I think Grand Slam success and win-loss are almost separate categories. For Grand Slams, it’s Laver, Budge, Federer, Nadal, etc. For win-loss, it’s McEnroe, Djokovic, Federer, Connors and co. If Djokovic had lost the U.S. Open semifinals but gone 82-2, for example, I’d still consider it a landmark even if it doesn’t compare in terms of majors.
Djokovic’s bonus
All that winning means a lot of playing, of course, and Djokovic seems have broken down this fall. Getting hurt in Basel set up the $1.6 million dilemma—show up in Paris and collect the money, or skip it and rest? Even for Djokovic, that’s not chump change, so I’d have been surprised to see him miss the tournament unless he really couldn’t move. The $400,000 given up for missing Shanghai was a bargain by comparison, especially with the travel time saved, though he would probably have collected a million here and there as guarantees at any other Asian tournaments he played as part of the trip.
In Paris, Djokovic reacted pretty strongly to suggestions that he’d shown up just for the money, and credit to him for lasting a couple of matches, but let’s face it, there’s much less chance he would have shown up without the bonus pool on the line. Federer’s been in this position before, as I recall, more quietly. He played.
But that’s what the bonus pool is there for, after all—a kind of guarantee substitute. It is a bit odd for $1.6 million to hang on showing up for one match, but I was surprised to see the arguments that he should get it anyway, for all his exploits this year and the publicity they generated. Would it have been the same if he’d skipped Indian Wells or another tournament earlier in the year, I wonder? Then I see where the instinct is coming from, because the word bonus suggests a financial pat on the back for special performance. In this case, though, it’s just a collective appearance fee.
Scheduling
We’ll talk about the schedule later, but it’s worth talking a bit about the scheduling individual players have done this year. I’ll risk popping a blood vessel if I talk about some of the women (yes, I’m looking at you, Radwanska), so let’s just take the top guys. All four played the US Open semis and went straight to Davis Cup, which made the Asian swing a tough call. Djokovic and Federer both skipped it—seems like Djokovic was in no shape to play, while Federer’s decision was a bit more precautionary: general wear and tear after a brutal New York hardcourt-Sydney grass turnaround for Davis Cup.
Nadal played Asia, but then skipped Paris—he’s got Davis Cup after the tour finals. (Argentine opponents David Nalbandian and Juan Martin del Potro have practically skipped the fall to rest up, but it sounds like they’ve also got more serious injuries to contend with.)
Ironically, though Murray’s voice was the loudest during the U.S. Open rumblings, he’s the one’s who’s put in the most overtime this fall, playing three events in Asia and then taking a wildcard into Basel. The Asian swing certainly paid off—he went undefeated—but he did pick up a slight injury in Basel and had to withdraw.
Thoughts? Tough but necessary calls? Or should they be making more of an effort to do what they’re supposed to? I lean towards the former, but I think it would be better if they were a bit more strategic about their appearances throughout the season, rather than doing everything early on and then leaving the fall events high and dry during this time of year. Of course, the overload is because they’ve done so consistently well—a few early losses might have been a respite. It’s interesting to note that Federer is the only one of the four who’s looking fit and healthy, and it was a similar story last year. He’s consistently said he prefers to have breaks during the season rather than have a longer break in the offseason.
Blue clay
So it sounds like we’re going to have blue clay for Madrid next year at least. I saw the trial court when I was there a couple of years ago, though the current version I’ve seen in photos looks more of a light blue. Maybe that’s just how it is in an outdoor setting, because the practice court was covered. It looks like velvet, which is sort of cool, but it lacks the psychological feel of clay. Roddick liked it, and maybe that’s why! Federer and Nadal don’t sound too happy, which I guess is another sign the player council really has no power.
It’s a reminder why I don’t like Madrid’s philosophy as a tournament. They only care about themselves and their publicity stunts, and not about their impact on the game as a whole. Remember the model ball girls? Sure, blue clay will generate a bit of attention for them, and make the sponsor happy. But on TV it’ll look like hardcourts, it smells like a sellout, and it’ll lose its impact pretty quickly, at which point we’ll be left with a blue eyesore in the middle of the clay season. And no nonsense from the about being able to see the ball better, please. If visibility is a problem, it’s a lot easier to change the colour of the balls than the court.
And looking back…
The women are already over, something I’m still not used to. I won’t go as far as to say Petra Kvitova’s win at the year-end championships provided order to the women’s field, but it did at least provide the prospect of order. It was definitely a relief to get, at the last minute, a legitimate candidate for player of the year—until then, the succession of flavours of the month had rivaled the Republican field. Looking down the rankings, there were a couple of very impressive weeks from all the top few dozen names save a few (yes, I’m looking at you, Wozniacki, Zvonareva, Schiavone, Kuznetsova – far from career-best tennis this season, though a few memorable battles). Luck and skill meant that Clijsters, Li, Kvitova and Stosur—especially Kvitova—happened to have their two-week streaks at the most important times, but almost everyone had a turn this year. Azarenka made an impression with her new attitude, paying off most prominently at Wimbledon. Bartoli – Wimbledon and Stanford. Goerges – Stuttgard and Madrid. And so on. It’s something for them to hold on to when preparing for next season.
Kamakshi
*****
Kamakshi,
I’ve noticed from your tweets that the idea of blue clay isn’t sitting well with you. I remember seeing it in Madrid in 2009 as well. But I thought it looked pretty cool, and it would at least be interesting as a psychological experiment to see if any non-dirtballers, like Andy Roddick, felt better about playing on it than they do. I think the effect would last for a game or two, anyway. I always thought it was interesting that the ultimate master of clay, Bjorn Borg, could never win on the green—really closer to gray—version at Forest Hills. He retired with a shoulder injury at one of them, and lost to his early nemesis Jimmy Connors in two others. But Borg was virtually invincible from the start on the red clay at Roland Garros. No wonder Rafa doesn’t want any color changes.
Still, it’s true, Ion Tiriac, the tournament director at Madrid, has always gone his own way. He took Stuttgart to Madrid when the German audience waned, and then took his fall tournament in Madrid and plopped it down smack in the middle of the spring clay season. I guess you can’t expect anything different from a guy who once spent an ATP board meeting in the 70s going around the room, singling out everyone there, and telling each of them what an idiot he was.
As for everything else at this time of year, I like your end-of-the-party metaphor—like those moments when the streamers have all been ripped down and everyone is bleary from champagne, it feels like overkill right now. I’m sure it does to Novak Djokovic, anyway. I feel like after the U.S. Open he finally paid, physically and mentally, for his relentless success at the start of the year. I get the sense that he felt like he had done everything he or anyone else could possibly do in a year, yet he still had to go to Davis Cup the next weekend, still had to go Asia, still had to come back to Europe, despite already having clinched No. 1. As for entering a tournament for $1.6 million, I mean, why not? Even for a guy like him, if you put that together with $400,000 lost in Asia, that’s, like, real money. I’d come to the office with the flu for that.
What’s interesting on the men’s side now is that it’s wrapping up a lot like 2010, with Nadal skipping Paris and a question mark for London; with Djokovic’s mind and body elsewhere (last year he was getting ready for Davis Cup); and with Roger Federer once again looking like the last man standing. One thing it points up is how much your attitude can affect your performance. The tennis schedule allows for breaks, but not for an off-season, so Federer has adapted his training and his mindset to that. He doesn’t complain about the schedule’s length because he’s been around long enough to know exactly what isn’t going to change. In that sense, it’s not surprising that he’s a steady performer from the start of the year until the very end.
Unlike last year, though, I don’t think anyone believes a strong end-of-season run for Federer portends a strong 2012 for him as well. We saw how good he was at the end of 2010, and then we saw him go title-less for 10 months this year. In reality, it was Djokovic’s finish to last season—U.S. Open runner-up finish and Davis Cup title—that proved to be the prelude to 2011. Is there anything or anyone comparable this time around? Going by the Djokovic example, I’d say that an Andy Murray win at the World Tour Finals or a Rafael Nadal-led Davis Cup title would give those two a head start on 2012. Both, like Djokovic’s DC title last year, would be in front of the home folks and send those guys into the "off"-season feeling very good about themselves. Rafa’s own greatest season, in 2010, came after he put a disappointing 2009 behind him by helping Spain win that year’s Davis Cup.
You’re right about WTA this year; lots of people were good in streaks but not great over the long term—Stosur, Azarenka, Kvitova, Li, Wozniacki, Radwanska. Maybe the WTA is like a real-life Lake Woebegon, where everyone is above average. Do you think Kvitova is the future, again?
I’m also not used to the women finishing early, but I still like it. In the end, the players would be wise to follow Federer’s example and embrace the stop-and-start nature of the schedule. But I care less about the players than I do myself and other fans. I want to get away from those people for a while. And the women are giving us more of a chance to do that. When I read your mention of “Radwanska” above, I suddenly remembered that I’d forgotten all about her. To me, that’s the way it should be. It will make it that much better to see her again in January.
Steve
*****
Hi Steve,
I just think a tournament like Madrid risks delegitimizing itself by resorting to publicity stunts like blue clay. To me, that’s one of the big problems with WTT—the coloured courts, the hoopla, the weird scoring—it just leads people not to take it seriously because it doesn’t look like "real" tennis. (Plus I can never figure out what the score is.) A green swimming pool might be kind of cool too, but I don’t think you’ll ever see it at the Olympics—they just don’t need it. And lest I sound like just a defender of status quo, I do like "night tennis," which involves using fluorescent balls and racquets in the dark. It’s probably a little too radical for a conventional tournament, but I think it would be a completely different viewing experience and I’d like to see a match like that in a big stadium. MSG?
As for the length of the season, I guess I’m a bit stop and start myself—there are times in the year when I need a break, usually right after French, when you can’t get one, and after the US Open. But the prospect of eight weeks without tennis—eight weeks without the option of tennis—is daunting. I even follow the challengers quite a bit when things wind down, especially because the fields are quite good. Did you see that Sesil Karatantcheva beat Michelle Larcher de Brito in a final last week?
And maybe when things get really tough:
Now that’s something for the World Tour Finals to consider. A real season-ender.
One of the things I completely forgot in my topics above was the other Race—the one for ATP CEO. I’ve been amazed how this position has dropped off the radar in the last couple of years. It used to be one of the most high-profile ones inside the game. But there was barely a ripple when Helfant announced he was leaving, and even the talk of his replacement has been muted. I thought Brad Drewett, the ATP’s international group head and London tournament director, would finally get it after being in line both the previous two times, but there’s been little talk about him lately. Richard Krajicek, who sounded like a bit of a peripheral candidate to me at first, now seems to be a popular choice. I guess he’s been on both sides of the fence as Wimbledon champ and Rotterdam tournament director, though it’s strange to picture him in this role. It might also be worth thinking about splitting the chairman and CEO roles like originally planned. Wimbledon chief Ian Ritchie has decided to sit out, from the sound of things, and I don’t know how hampered ATP legal head Mark Young would be by the not-an-American sentiment. It’s all a bit of a mystery to me since I don’t have personal experience with any of them, but I just hope they pick someone who knows the game and cares about it. The only glimpse I can offer is this little story about Brad Drewett from his playing days (from Richard Evans’ book):
Khartoum… remains one of my favorite cities… but in the mid seventies… [there were only two] twentieth-century hotels in town and we were not staying at either. And just to make life more complicated, East Africa Airways had seen fit to collapse about two weeks before we arrived. As any seasoned Africa-hand will confirm, it is easy to fly into Africa but almost impossible, even at the best of times, to fly within it. These were the worst of times. … I had half a dozen players scheduled to come up from a tournament in Johannesburg.
…In fact the whole situation was so difficult that no one could have complained if the players had given up. The prize money in Khartoum was $12,000 for 16 players which, even in those days, was meager pickings and there were no Grand Prix points to be gained… so why bother, right? Well, that was not the way four young Australians saw it. They had a commitment to play in Khartoum and they were going to honour it. So Brad Drewett, John Bartlett, Charlie Fancutt and John Marks got on a plane to London and turned around and flew all the way back to Khartoum. I never dared work out how many hours they spent in aeroplanes. I was just too grateful for what I still consider to be a wonderfully professional gesture.
Let’s see the top eight complain to him about their travails during this week.
"I like your Reading the Readers columns, why don't you do them more often?"
"Well, I'd like to, but that would mean I'd actually have to . . . "
Oh, hey, how are you? You shouldn't sneak up on people like that. Anyway, we were just talking about you. It's time, for the first time since before the U.S. Open, to open up the mailbag. I've talked about doing these on a weekly or bi-weekly basis in the past, but it hasn't happened. So I'm going to try again.
*****
The worst thing abut Tennis Channel: The crawl at the bottom of my tv screen - Relentless, way too big/wide, intrusive, giving scores away as I am catching up via encore.—Mrs. Tennis
Agreed. Giving away scores is bad, but worse is keeping the thing going non-stop. Couldn’t it pop up every 10 minutes, inform us of all those things we already know, and pop back down and out of our lives? Finding out who won the WTA’s popularity award is interesting once, maybe twice, but not seventeen-hundred times.
*****
Benneteau would have been speaking to the fluently bilingual TTebbutt in his native French, not in English. "Paradoxalement" would be a fairly common expression in his own language.—Stephanie Myles
You never know what’s going to generate comments. I wrote a thousand words on Paris the other day, and the only thing anyone noted was my joking mention of Julien Benneteau’s use of “grotesque” and “paradoxically.”
As you said, Stephanie, Benneteau did the interview in French, and it was translated by our friend Tom Tebbutt. That’s what I meant when I said that those two words may have been “found in translation.” Probably should have made that clearer.
*****
I watched a lot of Dolgopolov's matches at this year's U.S. Open, and wondered afterward was he top 10, maybe top-five material. But with his results the past few weeks, I'm wondering if the other players on tour have figured him out.—Van
This brings up an interesting question: Can an opponent figure you out before you’ve figured yourself out? Dolgopolov was dizzyingly and disappointingly up and down all year. To me, having watched his many crests and dips from Melbourne on, he exemplifies just how long the tennis season is, and how tough it is to keep any momentum going for long. His year felt like a career. He doesn't seem built, psychologically, for the long haul, but he'll always be someone to watch for his graceful unpredictability alone.
*****
It's not so much what was writen in the article as what was not. There was no outright codemnation of what went on at Penn State. There was no critisism on Paterno's lack of action. Even in Steve's comment posted above, there was no hint of doubt that maybe doing a reminiscent piece about Penn State at this exact moment was not a very wise decision after all. There are many people who chose to write about Penn State the past couple of days but none tried to be romantic about it (see Jane Leavy's piece on the Grantland). It's not that I'm agree with Steve. I'm just really dissapointed.—Maria
This is in reference to my column about Penn State last week. I didn’t think there was much I could add on the condemnation front when it came to the situation. What I felt I could add was a personal element, since I spent so much time there as a kid, and a tennis element, since I was coached by the university’s tennis coach. I acknowledge the corruption of college athletics and Joe Paterno's complicity in this horror story, but I also thought it was useful at that moment to remember that for every bad actor there are 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 good people involved in college sports, that they still exist in State College, and that one of them is part of our sport.
*****
I actually didn't get the impression that the article was excusing Paterno's actions or giving him a current hero status. On the contrary, I appreciated it as a reminder that a community's ethos (and in this case, a community that is devastated by its leader's inhumanity) isn't defined by one person, no matter much the community previously idolized him.—Suge
Another surprise, which has happened to me before: Sometimes someone else shows you what you meant at a broader level in a story, without you quite being able to articulate it yourself. It’s the upside of criticism, I guess.
*****
Is this a tennis website or what?—Larry
This was also in reference to the Penn State piece. Yes, this is tennis.com, but this is my own column on tennis.com. I write about whatever I want, and there’s no point in telling me to keep it to any specific subject, even tennis.
*****
Glad that you took this "luck" element into this. There is indeed luck involved when crucial shot lands on the line or just outside. Djoker had luck wit him when That Shot landed in. Federer was lucky when JoWilly did not find the line. Who knows how the third set would have evolved. Certainly it would have brought bad memories to Fed because Tsonga has come from behind to win Fed before. Tennis history is written and rewritten by inches and millimeters.—Harry
On second look, I never used the word “luck” in the article, which was about Federer’s win over Tsonga on Sunday. What I did say was that Djokovic, on his famous return of serve at the Open, hit the ball in, while Tsonga, at break point in the second set in Bercy, hit it out. What I was trying to point out is that the fate of a tennis player, and how we think of that player, can be little more than a matter of inches. An inch one way and Federer is “surging”; an inch the other way and Federer is “aging.”
*****
There is never a time to bring out the asterisk because most are not willing to do it for everyone - only their favs. Want to asterisk the FO 2009? Well, we can do the same thing to Nadal's only USO win, can't we?—Alexis
The asterisk in sports: Who came up with this concept? As far as I know, it was a grouchy old baseball official who didn’t like that Roger Maris surpassed Babe Ruth’s hallowed 60 home runs in 1961, and had an asterisk put on it—in the record book—because Maris had needed more games than Ruth to get there.
There are no asterisks in tennis's record books. In the lists of Grand Slam winners, every title is as good as the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it. We should shelve the idea when we talk about the game as well.
*****
the difficulty of "showing up" - "just" showing up - consistently is underrated; Fed's ability to do so all these years is often partly explained (and in some sense almost explained *away*) by discussing the advantages of his fluid playing style, good fortune, etc, etc - and of course there is something to all of that (though, as others have pointed out, people do tend to gloss over any physical issues he's struggled with over the years) - but he has shown a toughness and endurance, both physical and mental, that few (if any) of the current (or maybe even past?) top players have seemed able to match **over the long term**.—**Isis**
The difficulty in showing up is **indeed** hard for a non-player to understand. The pressure of expectations is the greatest pressure, and that’s why Federer’s semifinal streak at the majors is his most astonishing record in my eyes.
As far as Federer in general, it seems that we’re always talking about how he's underrated in one way or another. We’ve heard that his defense is underrated, his serve is underrated, his net game is underrated, his toughness is underrated. And they are underrated—except, in my opinion, his defense, which he’s gotten plenty of credit for and is obviously amazing.
I’d chalk this up to Federer’s smoothness, which obscures the difficulty of what he’s doing, except that the same thing happens with Rafael Nadal. His overt fighting spirit and physicality obscure his competitive smarts and good hands. It’s hard to find flaws at these guys' level, and when you praise one thing in their games, you ignore something else.
The exception on the Nadal side is his backhand. In my opinion, what’s underrated about that shot is how much of a weakness it was against Djokovic this year. The difference in their backhands was the biggest difference in their matches.
*****
Fernando gives kudos to the Tignor for a good piece both in substance and in writing style. Fernando knew you could do it.—Fernando
For a few years, Roger Federer won everything. Majors, Masters, 500s, exos, sportsmanship awards, popularity contests, maybe even a few local elections that he didn't run in: You name it, he owned it. As time went on and younger challengers arrived, he began to save his best stuff for the majors, or at least find it there. The Maestro rose to the occasion when the occasion called, and made himself into the proverbial big-match, three-out-of-five, when-it-counts champ—the likes of Nikolay Davydenko and Andy Murray might beat him in Doha and Dubai and five other out-of-the-way places, but when they got to London or New York or the Australian Open in Melbourne, Federer restored order.
The Aussie Open I’m referencing was played at the start of 2010. Federer beat Davydenko and Murray and collected his 16th, and thus far last, Grand Slam title. Since then, Federer has entered a new phase, one that is just defining itself now. In 2010, he didn’t reach another major final after Melbourne; instead, he rose to the occasion in the fall, when he went 21-2 and finished with a title at the World Tour Finals. A similar story is developing in 2011: Again Federer couldn’t win a Slam; again, if his back-to-back titles in Basel and Paris are any indication, he’s finding his best stuff indoors, at the end of the year. For the moment, he’s no longer rising to the ultimate occasion; now he’s outlasting everyone else. While Federer would rather be winning Slams, the fact that he’s been the last man standing for two straight years, despite his advanced age of 30, is a remarkable—both impressive and somewhat hard to figure—achievement in itself.
What else did Federer’s win in Bercy this past week show us? Here are three things that I took away.
*****
Sometimes your opponent’s crucial shot lands inside the line; sometimes it lands outside The moment that will likely live on longest from Federer’s 2011 will be the famed go-for-broke return of serve that Novak Djokovic hit against him while match-point down in the U.S. Open semifinals. Federer had led two sets to love that day, but couldn’t put it away.
In Bercy on Sunday, Federer got out to a similarly quick start against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, winning the first five games, and the first set 6-1. Everything was working for him, just as it had been earlier in this tournament against Richard Gasquet and Tomas Berdych. Federer pushed Tsonga back with his drive returns, then snuck in on chip returns; the Frenchman was off-balance and reduced to trying for frustrated, all-or-nothing winners. He came up, mostly, with nothing.
Federer had started in a similar fashion against Tsonga at Wimbledon, and against Djokovic at the U.S. Open. Both times, he won the first two sets; both times he let his opponents back in, and in the end couldn’t turn it back around—if you’re looking for defining moments from his 2011, look no further. In Bercy, it appeared that the same thing was going to happen. In the second set, Tsonga found his first serve; Federer struggled to get it back over the net, let alone attack it. At the same time, Federer lost his first serve, and his game began to decline with it. He faced break point at 3-4. The two players rallied, with Tsonga looking like the stronger of the two. Tsonga finally wrong-footed Federer with a go-for-broke forehand. It landed near the line and at first appeared to be in. Tsonga and the Paris crowd began to celebrate, until they realized that a late call had been made—out. Instead of the score being 5-3, with a getting-stronger Tsonga serving for the set, it was deuce.
At Flushing Meadows, Federer landed on the wrong side of the inches game against Djokovic; this time he came out on the right side. Sometimes that’s all that determines whether a 30-year-old player is “surging,” as he is now, or “aging,” as he was a few months ago.
Federer reversed one recent losing trend, but not another It used to be, in his prime years, that the guys who gave Federer the most trouble were the steady types. Rafael Nadal, David Nalbandian, Andy Murray all made the flashier Federer hit a lot of balls, often one or two more than he wanted to hit. As time went on, though, Federer began to lose to a new and different group, the big, unsteady hitters. Berdych, Tsonga, and Robin Soderling all recorded rare wins over him, and they did it at the majors. It seemed that Federer had “lost a step,” as we say, and couldn’t keep up with their rifle shots anymore. Or, alternatively, he wasn’t keeping up with the times when it came to equipment. He needed to switch to a racquet with a larger head to combat the tall boys and their titanic serves and two-handed backhands.
Is it time to put those two theories to rest for a bit? In Paris, on an indoor court, which generally favors heavy hitters, Federer straight-setted both Berdych and Tsonga. He was the faster player in each match, and he pushed his opponents around the court every bit as much as they pushed him. At the same time, neither here nor in Basel did Federer conquer his more common nemeses, the younger and quicker and steadier Nadal, Murray, and Djokovic, three guys who can run with him and last longer in rallies, and who happen to be the only three guys ranked ahead of him. Still, Federer did maintain his place with them.
It isn’t just Federer’s present fall that looks good; his past ones are looking even better On the men’s side, the two biggest stories of the post-U.S. Open season have been Federer’s re-rise, and Novak Djokovic’s struggle with injury, and, I believe, motivation. Whatever happens, Djokovic’s season will go down as a classic, maybe even the second-best of the Open era, if we dare to compare them (Laver’s 1969 remains untouchable).
But the way it has gone for Djokovic since the Open—back injury and defeat in Davis Cup, shoulder injury and defeat in Basel, shoulder injury and default in Bercy—only goes to show how amazing Federer’s own season-ending performances were in his vintage years, 2004, 2006, and 2007. Each time, he won three Slams; and each time he closed with a blowout title at the World Tour Finals. Injury, exhaustion, waning motivation: None of it hampered him. Federer had the No. 1 ranking sewn up each time, but he stayed hungry nonetheless. Whatever the day, Federer played, as we NFL fans like to say, “to win the game.” (See below.) That’s what, even at 30, with 16 Slams in his pocket, he's still doing.
Djokovic could still do it, too. He’s won the WTF before, and he’s generally a strong late-season closer and indoor player. But it won’t be easy. Not only will he have to heal physically, he’ll have to get hungry again when he's already full. He could start by asking Roger Federer how it's done.
It must seem a little odd to anyone who lived in Central Pennsylvania in the 1980s to see Penn State students smashing car windows because the head football coach, Joe Paterno, had been fired. Two decades ago, the sentiment often ran the other way in that little corner of the world. In those days, after virtually every defeat, after each sputteringly unimaginative offensive display—even my 15-year-old friends and I knew exactly what play Paterno was going to call next—the cry would go up in wall-to-wall-carpeted living rooms from Altoona to Wilkes-Barre: “Joe must go!” He wasn’t “JoePa” to the locals, at least not then. There was only one Joe.
One Saturday afternoon in the early 80s, my parents and I sat in a boat with another family on the Susquehanna River listening to Penn State nearly get shut out by a second-rate school. It was only the first or second game of the season, but that was enough for the father of the family that was with us. He picked up the radio and almost threw it into the water. “Joe is through,” he shook his head and muttered. “They can’t do anything!” I think Penn State would end up going 9-2 that year, and the next season Paterno led the school to its second national championship. Joe never went, and the offense, once he loosened up on the play-calling, got better. Still, even in the good years, there was another coach on the team who, in those living rooms from Altoona to Wilkes-Barre, remained more revered than Joe: the architect of Linebacker U's defense, Jerry Sandusky. (Shows you how little we know about anything that happens outside of our own living rooms.)
My hometown, Williamsport, is 80 minutes northeast of State College. Thousands of Penn State graduates live there, and die with the school’s football team. For years, a house across the street featured a large rock in the front yard with the Nittany Lion logo on it. The family next door had it on their RV, which they drove everywhere the team went, from Notre Dame to the Orange Bowl in Miami. Paterno's tentacles spread everywhere. My high school French teacher’s husband had been a linebacker for him in the 1960s. Our head football coach—nickname: Rockhead—had laid down what Paterno called the hardest hit he’d ever seen when he was at Penn State. A classmate of mine, Gary Brown, would star there as a running back while regularly butting heads with Paterno. The football team at PSU, like big-time college football teams in small-town areas all over the country, was by far the most glamorous operation we came into contact with. Penn State was, unlike anything else in Central PA, nationwide. For that it was loved like nothing else. The day Paterno was fired, a friend from Williamsport texted me, “This is the saddest day of my life.” He meant it.
Penn State fans in Williamsport had grown up in the area, attended the big state school down the road, and moved back. Their kids did he same—to these alums, the team was theirs in a way that no professional team can be. My parents, though, were the rare aliens in town; they’d moved there from Philadelphia. My dad was a pro sports fan, and never connected with the PSU mania. They were put off by it, for the most part. When 100,000 people in the school’s football stadium went into their familiar, proud, and frankly obnoxious chant, “We are . . . Penn State!” we generally responded with an eye roll. We weren’t, Penn State.
But I could only hold out so long. With no college football alternative, I eventually went with the crowd. I tailgated and played touch football at Beaver Stadium with friends’ families, and when clean-cut Penn State took on the heavily favored, black-hatted team from Miami for the national championship in 1986, I was so nervous I squirmed up higher and higher on the couch as the game went on, trying somehow to get away from the screen. By the time Miami’s final drive was stopped near the end zone on an interception by Pete Giftopoulos—a Linebacker U name if there ever was one—I was practically on the other side of the couch.
In the stories of the last few weeks, State College has been described as “bucolic,” and inevitably referred to by its nickname, Happy Valley. It really did seem that way to me as a kid. There was a comfortably democratic quality to the place. The streets were lined with nice but not ostentatious houses, and front lawns were not too fussily kept. It was our closest cultural center, the place where we went to buy records that we couldn’t get at the Wee Three in Williamsport, or see movies that we couldn’t see at the mall.
Even more idyllic, to me, was the tennis in State College. I was amazed on my first visit to see rows and rows of public courts scattered around the city. Our high school team had a rivalry with theirs—the State College tennis players were also clean cut, and their families were just as vocally enthusiastic in support as they were of the football team. More important to my game, the college’s tennis coach, Jan Bortner—he started with the women’s team before taking over the men’s job—gave me lessons when I was in high school. A lean, lanky, good humored ex-pro with high standards, he demanded more than anyone had demanded of me in the past, and he helped me develop my best shot, my return of serve—he did this, essentially, by drilling hundreds of very hard serves at me. He also let me know, subtly, that even when I thought I was working hard, I really wasn't; we both laughed when he made a videotape of me playing and I saw how slow I was. He was right, I wasn't working anywhere near as hard as I believed I was. Jan was there for one of my best wins, at an 18-and-under tournament on the campus courts, and he made a long drive to see me take my toughest loss, too, in the semifinals of the PA state championships my senior year. I wouldn't have made it that far without him.
As for that much more famous Penn State coach, I was introduced to Joe Paterno once, very briefly, in the mid-80s. He was walking briskly, head down, in a beat-up blue windbreaker, out of the athletic building while I was walking out of the tennis facility next door. I was with the mother of a local tennis player who knew Paterno—pretty much everyone in the town seemed to know him; he lived among the masses, in one of those tidy little houses with an unfussy lawn. That day, he looked less like a football coach and more like the English professor he had originally set out to be. He was pensive, abstracted, lost in thought until she called to him—“Joe!” Paterno smiled and walked over, shook my hand, and said in his trademark rasp, “Welcome to Penn State.”
I didn’t go there, though three of the top students in my graduating class entered the school’s highly regarded honors program. But I kept rooting for Penn State, and was stunned and gutted when Paterno was fired—no one, even back in the 80s, seriously thought that word and JoePa would ever be used in the same sentence. But Joe finally did have to go, and I’m glad the university went through with it. He was the godfather, for better and, it seems, occasionally for worse, and his demise leaves all of Happy Valley a less idyllic and exceptional place than it has been during the 40 years of his reign.
Still, Paterno was, after all, not the only person at the school. The last I heard, my own Penn State coach, Jan, is still there, and his three kids all attended the university—it's still a great place to live. Jan knew I probably wasn’t going to go to his school or play for his team, but he cared about how I did and did everything he could to make me a better tennis player. While the school’s athletic program has lost its halo forever, and its football fans will never shout “We are . . . Penn State!” with the the same self-assured, exceptionalist pride, I’ll remember Jan as an example of ambition and excellence and good humor, of an ideal college spirit that, whatever we may believe at the moment, really does live on.
