It's highly unlikely that anyone will ever refer to the past 12 years of men's tennis as the “Marat Safin era.” As much as he did over that time, and the man did a lot, it was his contemporary, Roger Federer, who achieved an epoch-defining stature. Instead Safin became the world’s most talented and temperamental sideshow, a show that will be airing its final episode next week at the Paris Masters.

Nine years ago, when the last ball of the 2000 U.S. Open had been hit, a “Safin era” seemed like a very real possibility. Just 20 years old, the Russian had dismantled the best player of the 1990s, Pete Sampras, in three quick sets in front of Sampras' home-country fans. Beyond that, Safin appeared to be an evolutionary leap for the sport. He was 6-foot-4 and blessed with fluid, impeccable timing on every stroke. His two-handed backhand was as much of a weapon as his forehand, and his return was as potent as his serve. He had all the makings of a new model for the men’s game.

The Safin era was destined to be a very short one. It lasted for two months, ending, for all intents and purposes, at the final tournament of that season, the Masters Cup in Lisbon. That’s where Gustavo Kuerten put on the performance of his life, beating Sampras and Andre Agassi on an indoor hard court and catching Safin, who lost in the semifinals, at the wire for the year-end No. 1 ranking. I remember being surprised by how devastated Safin was after this relative failure. You got the sense that it confirmed something that he suspected about himself, that he wasn’t a winner after all. Either Safin was right, or it was the first step in a career-long self-fulfilling prophecy.

Anyway, let’s take a look at the high point of Safin’s brief reign, the long, nerve-wracking final game against Sampras at Flushing Meadows.

—Right off we hear John McEnroe make a telling comment. Sampras is serving at 2-5 in the third, one game from losing the match. Safin has apparently hit a strong return, which McEnroe describes as “routine.” He goes on to say that Sampras’ kick serve bounces right into the “zone” of the 6-foot-4 Safin. McEnroe had identified two elements in the sport that would gain importance in the next decade: height, and the return of serve.

—The first observation we must make is how young Safin looks, of course. He would age pretty dramatically over the coming years. He lumbered around the court in between points even then, but he appears to be calm as he gets set to serve out his first major title. Even after opening the game with a double fault, he stays cool under the pressure of Sampras’ approaches, rifling two passing shot winners on the next two points.

—Sampras at 29 is sweaty and haggard. Ten years earlier, he had served notice of his own generation’s ascent by ending Ivan Lendl’s run of eight straight final-round appearances at the Open on his way to winning his first major. Seeing Sampras take one last stab at Safin—up until this game, he hadn’t had a break point—I have the same reaction I’ve had watching other old Sampras clips. Where I used to think of him as dull and a little smug, his demeanor now seems almost heroically controlled to me now. His method of competing is the opposite of someone like Rafael Nadal’s. Sampras was about not getting fired up; for him, it was about the long-term rather than the moment, about not getting especially high or low after any one point. You can see the conscious effort he makes to settle himself before each return. 

—Each of Safin’s ground strokes would get a little longer and more elaborate over the years. I wonder if this hurt him. Here he’s prepared for anything Sampras throws at him.

—What a torturous game this must have been for Safin. He started with a double, missed every first serve until it was break point, and hit the tape with what must have seemed like a gimme backhand pass at deuce, allowing Sampras a second break point. But he held up like the future champion he wouldn't turn out to be. He saved both break points bravely, by moving to the net for a swinging volley and a spectacular stretch-back overhead. Then he swung the momentum permanently back in his direction by keeping his nerves at bay and outlasting Sampras through a long baseline rally. No wonder Safin got down on his knees and kissed the court afterward.

—Two quotes from Safin about this match remain two of his best, and show both sides of the man.

Afterward, he was asked if he was going to get drunk that night. 

Safin: “Guys, do you want me to say ‘yes’ to put in the press? Between us, I hope so.”

Seven years later, after losing early at the Open, a reporter said, “When you won here in 2000, Sampras said you were able to be No. 1 in the world for as long a time as you wanted to.”

Safin: “See, even the geniuses make the mistakes. He was wrong.”

Was Sampras as wrong as Safin thought? The Russian was No. 1 for only a brief period. That wasn’t because he didn’t want to be there longer; it was because, at some point, perhaps as soon as Lisbon, he stopped believing he belonged there.

Whatever the reason, judging by the way Safin held off Sampras at the Open, he still believed he could be a great champion at this point. In that sense, the 2000 final is a glimpse of a potential alternate tennis history, one in which Safin kept his head and controlled his frustration at the biggest moments. As it was, it would happen only once more, in Australia in 2005. The rest of the time, we got the Safin show. The clip above gives us an idea of what the Safin era might have looked like.

*** 

We’ll see how the show ends in a few days. Have a good weekend

Where would be without the much-maligned media beast? It’s relentless, it’s hoggish, it lives on junk food, and it must be fed every day. But my morning was made so much more pleasant because I could spend it contemplating the ramifications of Andy Murray’s new shirt, rather than . . . rather than . . . I don't know what. Let’s see what else the beast has been chewing on lately.

Adidas’s Turf Expands

I have nothing against the company. It has supported tennis for decades; it has outfitted great young players who were subsequently snatched up by Nike; and it made my favorite black windbreaker, which I’ve worn for about 10 years, much to the chagrin of various people. But I also liked the fact that Murray didn’t wear Adidas or Nike. The Brit’s connection with Fred Perry made sense and rounded out his persona. Now, after signing a rather stunning 15-million-pound deal, he’ll be wearing his own version of Adidas’ Competition line, which as far as I can tell will be similar to the clothes Jo-Wilfred Tsonga wore this year. We can only hope the company comes up with something distinctive for him, the way Nike has for both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal.

Failing that, let’s at least keep Murray from wearing the exact outfit as his opponent. This happens too often in tennis, mainly because so many of the pros are clothed by a single company, Adidas. It robs matches of visual contrast and makes the sport look like a video game. How about this as a solution? If two players walk out of the locker room and see that they’re wearing the same shirt, the lower-seeded player must put something else on. (Full disclosure: I think I stole this idea from Toronto writer Tom Tebbutt.)

Davidoff’s Turf is Challenged

The title sponsor at this week’s tournament in Basel is Davidoff, a tobacco company. It’s one of the last tennis events to be connected with a cigarette-maker; the EU bans smoking advertisements, but Switzerland isn’t part of the EU. There’s been some pressure over the years on Roger Federer, Basel native and the face of the event, to refuse to have his picture in the company’s promotional material for the tournament. It’s a thorny issue, and one that the women’s tour knows well. The WTA made Virginia Slims its title sponsor for many years, leading at least one doctor to claim that the sport, which indirectly associated smoking with female accomplishment and style, was partially to blame for rising cancer and death rates among women from 1980 to 2000. Billie Jean King has disputed the WTA’s culpability by saying that no player ever personally promoted smoking. Whatever Federer’s stature in Basel, he’s still a player, not an organizer, the way King was with the WTA. He can’t be held responsible for where the tournament gets its money. It would be an admirable gesture if he refused to associate himself with Davidoff, but you can’t expect it of him.

As for whether a tennis tournament should be sponsored by Davidoff in the first place, that depends on whether you think that the admittedly loathsome tobacco industry is enough of a threat to public health that it shouldn’t be allowed to advertise at all. If you do, do you then have to ban advertising by, say, McDonald’s? You’d like to think the only reason Basel’s organizers went with Davidoff is because the tournament couldn’t survive without it. You’d like to think a lot of things. Part of me believes the public knows enough about the dangers of smoking at this point that it should be responsible for making up its own mind, and that you can’t do anything more short of banning cigarettes altogether. But that doesn’t make Davidoff’s ostentatiously elegant logo at the back of the court in Basel look any less sinister. Elegant . . . hmmm . . . who else does that describe? A certain Swiss tennis player, perhaps?

Speaking of Basel…

Is the court color there a reflection of the Davidoff colors? I don’t know, but I’ve always liked the way it looks, with that subtle contrast between pink-brown and brown-brown. I also like the way it appears to be playing this week, which is pretty fast. We can stop wishing for the return of the serve and volley in the foreseeable future, but that doesn’t mean we have to give up on all-court tennis entirely. Whether it was the court speed or not, I enjoyed seeing Jeremy Chardy beat James Blake today by intelligently picking his spots to approach the net. When I was watching, mostly late in the second set and early in the third, Chardy spent a lot of time right at the baseline. He seemed ready to make something happen and wasn’t satisfied with sending back a safe ball. And he found ways to get to the net within the confines of a normal rally. When Blake was pulled wide and forced to chip his backhand, Chardy was immediately in the forecourt, waiting to take the ball out of the air. Now if only the Frenchman, who, like most of his countryman, is a nice player to watch, could improve his volley. Still, we have to start somewhere.

So Bad, So Good

OK, so the beast didn’t spit out quite as much material today as I’d hoped. Yeah, Haas has swine flu and Scud seems to be broke, but I can’t make much of either of those unfortunate occurrences, no matter how hard I try. Where to go from there? Let’s try the magazine editor’s trusty stand-by, the anniversary. For that, there’s only one reference book necessary, or even possible: Randy Walker’s On This Day in Tennis History. What we find there under the entry for Nov. 4 is confirmation again that John McEnroe, if he was not the greatest player ever, was almost certainly the most central. According to Walker, on Nov. 4, 1984, “John McEnroe conducts one of the worst on-court tirades of his career, calling the umpire a jerk and slamming a soda can,” as well as hitting a fan with a ball, at the Stockholm Open. You know it as “Answer the question, jerk!” See that lovely moment here and marvel again at the man's ability to inject so much rage into the innocent word "question."

This, according to Walker, is what happened exactly five years later, on Nov. 4, 1989: “Boris Becker overcomes a second-set charge from John McEnroe—and his famed on-court antics—to defeat the three-time Wimbledon champion in the semifinals of the Paris Open.” See this moment, which really does include some of the loveliest tennis from McEnroe that I can remember, here. Again we might ask: The late 80s and early 90s—best era, from a quality of play perspective, in tennis history?

Speaking Again of Basel…

When you think of the Swiss city, what immortal genius do you think of first? Roger Federer? No, it's Friedrich Nietzsche, of course, the god-is-dead guy, who lived and taught there in his 20s. I'm going to give a little fodder to the people over at the site, "Pointless Allusions to Nietzsche in Sports Journalism" (leading contributor: Simon Barnes). Here's Nietzsche seemingly foreseeing the modern media's 24-hour news cycle:

Half-knowledge is more victorious than whole knowledge: it understands things as being more simple than they are and this renders its opinions more easily intelligible and more convincing.

Now that’s something to think about, at least until tomorrow.

For a player of Serena Williams’ rank—No. 1 again, now that the dust has settled on 2009—and importance, there’s never been much talk about exactly what makes her game special. We discuss the ways in which Roger Federer uses his crosscourt backhand chip, and we know that Rafael Nadal can drill an ace up the T when his opponent least expects it. But what about Serena? We know she’s fast, we know she’s fierce, we know she’s got the best serve in the WTA. While those are crucial traits for any champion, we also know that an 11-time Grand Slam winner must bring something a little more distinctive to the court.

Part of the problem is that Williams doesn’t always show us the best, let alone the most distinctive, elements of her game. Even when she wins a major, she’ll throw in a clunker against a lesser opponent that makes you wonder how she ever won all those Slams in the first place. But that wasn’t the case this past week in Doha. Williams won 10 of the 11 sets she played, and she got better as she went. Even though she’d already qualified for the semis, Williams trounced Elena Dementieva in her last round-robin match. In the final, she took her sister Venus out of her game right from the start. There’s something satisfying in watching an all-time great at her best and most determined, with all distractions cleared away.

It was a satisfying performance—the “real No. 1” took home the WTA’s biggest title—and an eye-opening one as well. Or, I should say, it was an eye-narrowing performance. That’s what Serena did all afternoon as she rocked back and forth before receiving her sister’s serve. In the past, she’s been known to betray disgust with herself, or throw a choice word in her opponent’s direction, as she glares across the net. On Sunday, though, Serena betrayed nothing but calmly forceful resolve. She wanted this one, and she started getting it right away.

It used to be said of Pete Sampras that he was a master at taking his opponents out of their games early. Serena did the same to Venus in the first set. She’d start by hitting a wide serve into the deuce court that left Venus flailing and out of position. Then she’d follow it up by going at Venus’ body and handcuffing her, a smart play against someone with limbs that long. It was a serving clinic from Serena in the end. She finished with no double faults and won an astounding 82 percent of her second-serve points—that’s dominance, and it put an exclamation point, if one were needed, on what raised her above her all of her competition this year.

As the set progressed, Serena started to do the same with her returns, taking them earlier and earlier and leaving Venus with nothing to do but scramble for her life. Venus couldn’t save herself; she started to press and she started to miss. At first glance, watching her pull routine shots wide or rifle them into the net, it appeared that Venus was simply having an off day. But Serena had rattled her and forced to try for more than she normal does. The problem for Venus is that, unlike most of her opponents, Serena is just as good at retrieving as she is, and she’s a better attacker. This is part of the explanation for why their matches have been marked by spotty play; they get to balls that would be winners against other players. More important, it also puts Venus in a bind; she has try to out-attack Serena. By the end of the first set, Serena knew that all she had to do was play safely and steadily, keep Venus moving, and direct most of the balls to her sister's more erratic forehand.

Venus found her range from the ground in the second set and held serve without much trouble. She had the upper hand in many of the rallies, and it was Serena who began to find the net. This time it was Serena’s competitive will, as much as her shots, that pulled her through. When she needed a strong serve, she got it; despite Venus’ improved play, she never held a break point. The strongest and most important of Serena’s serves came at 5-4 in the tiebreaker. The two had changed sides with Serena up 5-1 and the match seemingly in hand. Then she made three backhand errors, her worst streak of play all day. Could Serena get a case of the yips? If she did, she didn’t show it. The look on her face after her final miss was not one of anger or exasperation; it was one of benign concern, of a wrong she needed to make right. And she did, with an authoritative ace to make it 6-4—you could see Venus’ back slump after the ball went past her—and a fearless crosscourt forehand at match point. Serena’s celebration was in keeping with her demeanor day. She was outwardly muted—the sisters’ didn’t embrace at the net—but there was deep relief all over her face. It had been satisfying to see her play this match, and it was satisfying afterward to see how much she wanted it.

So back to my first question: What’s special about Serena’s game? There are many elements you could point to, of course, but what struck me in Doha was how the normal rules of the sport don’t seem to apply to her. She can run through an approach shot and still put it right where she wants it. She can hit a backhand winner with her body completely open and parallel to the net. She can make perfectly solid contact with a ball even she's off balance. She can get to a short ball a second late and find a way to flip it inside-out for a surprisingly angled winner. 

Her ability to do this is generally chalked up to the vague and faintly insulting term “athleticism.” And that’s got a lot to do with it, even if it is a cliché. It was said that Boris Becker couldn’t put two service tosses in a row anywhere near each other, but it didn’t matter, he was such an athlete that he just went up and crushed the ball, wherever it happened to be—the normal rules didn’t apply to him. But when it comes to the Williamses, I also think of something Andy Roddick said about the way the sisters trained as kids in Florida. He said that no one worked more diligently or hit balls with more purpose or dedication than they did. What seems like talent or god-given athleticism in a top player is always the product of work as well, work that was done long before we saw that player on TV. Serena is still living off of it. Whatever position she finds herself in as she sets up for a shot, her ability to make something out of it, to hit the ball well, remains automatic.

The 2009 season came down to the Williams sisters, and it came down to Serena. She won two majors, and for the first time since 2001 was at her best at the Sony Ericsson Championships. This may not happen in 2010, when Justine and Kim and Maria are back at full strength—let’s hope Serena can bring this kind of game into the new year. Back in January, at the Australian Open, she had put on an even more dominating performance in the final against Dinara Safina. By the end of that match, as effortless winners came off Williams’ racquet, Mary Carillo asked with some exasperation, “Why can’t I have more of this?” After a week of wild and painful drama in Doha, I found myself thinking the same thing about women’s tennis in general. Why can’t we have more serves like this? Why can’t we have more solid and impressive tennis? Maybe we will next year. Until then, I’m happy to leave 2009 with a reminder, six weeks after she was at her worst at the U.S. Open, of how good the women's game can look when Serena Williams is at her best.

As we’ve been reminded this week, 1997 was not a good year for Andre Agassi. This isn’t normally the case when someone gets married, as Agassi did to Brooke Shields that April. But looking back, it doesn’t seem to have been a relationship built on a rock-solid foundation. Or much of any foundation at all: Agassi started doing crystal meth before the wedding, and when he filed for divorce exactly two years later, he cited an incompatibility in “tastes, natures, views, likes, and dislikes.” I’m not clear on the details of Nevada law, but something tells me you don’t need to list quite that many reasons to go splitsville in Las Vegas.

Andre found no refuge on the tennis court. He lost seven first-round matches, one of which came, in straight sets, at the hands of Justin Gimelstob (not that Justin wasn’t a good tennis player or anything; just sayin’), through the spring and summer. This was a also period in which Agassi now says he was taking the drug. Still, he started to show signs of life in August, just before the U.S. Open, when he reached the quarters in Indianapolis. At Flushing, Agassi made his debut inside brand-new Arthur Ashe Stadium at night against Steve Campbell. Above are five or so minutes from that match.

—These are the latter stages of the 4^th set. Agassi won the first two 6-1, 6-1, and dropped the third.

—Besides the drugs, the losses, and the marriage woes, this was not a strong era for Agassi fashion-wise, either. As much as we’ve mocked the spandex, the mullet, and the acid-wash of the 1980s over the years, at least it was memorable and in some perverse way original. Agassi’s black-shoed, goateed, grunge era look here makes me think of Johnny Rotten after he went back to being John Lydon. The former Sex Pistols leader could never match the bold and flashy outrageousness of his earliest years. What does a punk do when he has to grow up? Did Lydon ever try crystal meth?

—I’d say Agassi is sweating more than normal here, but that could be a combination of the shirt color and me looking for signs of drugs. From what I’ve learned this week, crystal meth is mainly pseuodephrine, iodine, and red phosphorus. It causes, as Agassi, said, a euphoric energy rush. Unfortunately, it also destroys a lot of people’s lives (I guess Agassi’s version of this was the loss to Gimel?). There’s no way I can imagine playing on the stuff or using it as a performance enhancer.

—Agassi is visibly testier here than he will be in the future. Look at the anger after a missed first serve. He’ll eventually lose in the fourth-round to Pat Rafter in four very good sets. My main memory of that match was how hyped-up Agassi was. He was over-hyped, in fact, and it was one reason he lost.

—Could this tournament have been where he tested positive? There are more tests done at Slams, and he was there for more than a week.

—Agassi’s serve is much weaker than it would become. Very little back bend or kick. He can still belt a forehand, though, as he shows on one point, but he had yet to develop the grinding consistency that he would use to wear people down once he devoted himself to getting fit. And stopped, uh, using crystal meth.

—He had also yet to develop his trademark post-victory kiss-blowing gesture. You can see that Agassi was an edgier and less lovable figure in those days. We usually think of his transformation as going from 1980s darkness—mullet, spandex, underachieving, cursing, image is everything—straight into the golden late-career light of multiple Slams, beloved elder status, ultra-fitness, fatherhood, and charity. But 1997 was a grim waystation between those two stops. There was still a negativity about his on-court persona at this point.

—This turned a lot of people off. For fans of the serene and classy Pete Sampras, Agassi will always be defined by his punk image and the nasty, blue-collar edge he inherited from his father. I went the other way; I liked Agassi’s raw humanity. He was surface rather than depth at the start, a constant seeker—remember the early Bible-reading Andre?—and a sucker for fads. He always talked about his desire to be “carried away” by something, anything. What is his crazed devotion to fitness but the flip side of his drug use? As Martin Amis said, we liked Andre because he always took it too far. Like I said yesterday, there’s something extremely American about this, and extremely American, for better and worse, about Agassi.

I don’t like knowing that he lied to cover it up. I don’t like that he played on when he should have been suspended. And I want to know who the heck “Slim” is. Those two first two things, rather than the drug use itself, will likely bother me in the future. There have been stronger reactions: Navratilova and Nadal have each said, in different words, that Agassi has damaged the sport. Nadal also wonders why he had to come out with it at all. Agassi does have a lot of books he needs to sell—his pre-recession advance was something like $4 million—though he still didn’t need to throw this fact in. I have no idea why he did it. All I can do is echo Amis: Agassi's fans loved him because he gave us so much. He's doing it again. He's still going too far.

Your reaction to the opening days of Doha may have depended on whether the camera was focused on the court, or whether it was panning the stands. Sparse and muffled crowds at important tournaments, particularly the early rounds of important tournaments, has been a theme of fall tennis for many years. But I don’t want to belabor that fact in Doha, because the drama of the matches so far this week hasn't been hurt by the lack of energy in the audiences. And this would have been true even if the bleachers had been filled with crickets (though that might have been disturbing to the players). But when Venus and Serena Williams play to a third-set tiebreaker at a season-ending championship in front of a few dozen scattered humans, you know that the event isn’t living up to its potential.

That’s a topic for another week (next week, perhaps). For the moment, I’ll reserve my questions and answers for the matches themselves. If they haven’t been beautiful to watch, they have certainly lived to their dramatic potential.

1. What did we learn from Venus-Serena XXII?

It’s safe to say that never have there been so few witnesses to a match between the Williams sisters. And while it won’t be remembered for the quality of its play—though Venus and Serena rose to the occasion late in the third set—it was a worthy addition to the Williams canon. What I noticed most, and it was something I hadn’t seen in a while, was Serena’s ambivalence. She lost the first set and started the second by belting a couple of balls as hard as she could. It looked like she might be on the verge of cashing it in mentally, which must be a temptation when your sister could use a win to help her chances of defending a title. But fortunately or not for Serena, those belted balls happened to go in. She won that game and recovered her composure from there. But there was still hesitation and unhappiness in Serena’s demeanor.

When we talk about the Williamses’ matches, we usually talk about how hard it must be to have to beat your sister. I'd guess that it’s more complicated, and that those complications lead to wild swings in the quality of the tennis from each woman. You love your sister, you want the best for your sister, but when you get out on the court you also want to beat your sister. Subconsciously, you may even want to beat her more than anyone else in the world, the way siblings often do. Through the third set of yesterday’s match, I felt like I could see Serena negotiating those emotions. She played well and kept her emotions in check all the way to 5-4. But when she served for it, she fell apart and played her worst game of the match. She gave Venus chances and then used her serve to take them back. At the end, she let her relief and happiness out after a crucial backhand winner. Serena had beaten her sister, and her own tangle of conflicting feelings. Best of all, it was over.

2. Is Caroline Wozniacki the future?

She’s young, she’s blonde, she wears Stella McCartney, she just reached her first Grand Slam final and cracked the Top 5, and she may or may not have hooked up with Fernando Verdasco already. What is the ceiling for the so-far unassuming Wozniacki? Is she due for a serious reality check when Justine and Kim come back full time next year?

Watching her slog through two long, winding and surprising matches in Doha—she snuck through in three against Azarenka after losing the first set 6-1, then fought off cramps that had dropped to the court to beat Zvonareva—I’ve been struck by a few things:

Wozniacki’s first serve looks stronger, especially the wide one. Unlike many of her peers, she shows you when she’s enjoying it out there—i.e., she smiles. She’s got great feel on her crosscourt forehand. She’s comfortable settling into a pocket well behind the baseline, but doesn’t move forward or take advantage of winning situations instinctively. She reminds me at times of Martina Hingis, another eastern European transplanted to Western Europe, without the cockiness or the creativity. Like Andy Murray, she gives her opponents room either to hang themselves or to find their games; as we’ve seen so far with Murray, that hasn’t been a recipe for winning majors. More important for fans, though, Wozniacki is a gamer, maybe even to a fault. She played her first match hobbled by a hamstring injury. In her second match, serving for it at 5-4 in the third, she looked finished when leg cramps had her writhing on the court. She got up, served with a tear coming down her face, lost a 31-stroke rally, and still won the game and the match.

Wozniacki will struggle against the more explosive Justine, Kim, Venus, and Serena, but she has the persistence and consistency to beat everyone else on a regular basis—there’s plenty of room for a non-head case in the WTA. She doesn’t have the edge or self-regard of a diva who can bring new fans to the game. But that should only make her more appealing to those of us who watch every day. We know we’ll get her best.

3. Or is Victoria Azarenka the future?

Thinking about the up and downs of Azarenka’s season, the early peaks and later plateaus, the first thing that comes to mind is that the length of the schedule makes it tough for anyone to be good all year—there are just so many different phases, places and surfaces to negotiate. The second thing is that it’s tough for Victoria Azarenka in particular to be good all year. She can open up the court and put a rally in the palm of her hand, but just when you think she’s ready to finish it, the ball may fly haphazardly off her strings for no discernible reason. If you could put Azarenka together with Wozniacki, you’d have the next No. 1. Azarenka can hit through the court, but she doesn’t have the feel of her fellow up and comer. And while she’s fiercer and angrier than Wozniacki, the Dane may be tougher mentally—hanging in there is pretty much what she does for a living.

When the two of them played this week, I mentioned to a colleague that I thought Azarenka was doing a good job of controlling of those fierce emotions, which can get the better of her. Right at that moment, she took a ball and drilled into the stands, incurring a warning for ball abuse. A couple minutes later, she broke her racquet on the court, incurring a point penalty that put her down 5-6 in the third set. On the changeover, she looked at the chair umpire, picked up her racquet, and began slamming it into the court, as if to say, “You want to see racquet abuse, I’ll give you racquet abuse.”

Azarenka should have more upside than Wozniacki; she can make more happen on the court. But sometimes her hands and strings turn to stone—the ball kerrangs off her frame. And while Azarenka’s intensity drives her, it also doubles back and undermines her. Against Wozniacki, she stayed calm and let her mistakes go, until she just couldn’t let them go anymore—the anger is always there. As fans, when Azarenka goes out on court, we know we’ll get her best. The question is whether her best may be too much.

4. Is the No. 1 ranking cursed?

The two women who have spent the most time there in 2009 are Dinara Safina and Jelena Jankovic. Look where they are now. Safina has already staggered out of Doha, injured in part because she wanted to stay No. 1, while Jankovic showed up with less than her best after a long season trying to defend the points that got her to No. 1 in the first place. No wonder the current No. 1, Serena Williams, has never seemed all that interested in staying up there. It doesn’t seem to do good things for you or your game. 

In theory, we shouldn’t have these problems next year. Henin and Clijsters will be back, and Serena will start the season in the top spot. Still, the WTA needs to examine its system and how it weights events. While you can’t control Serena’s results in smaller tournaments—it would be nice if she had won at least one tour event this year—but it’s not like she only plays the majors. Right now, being No. 1 means something on the men’s side, but not on the women’s, at least not anything good. Holding that spot should mean, at the most basic level, that you’ve played the best at the biggest events. It shouldn’t mean that you’ve been the best at supporting the tour. At the very least, it shouldn’t be a cruel joke on its holder.

5. What do you think of Andre now?

Let’s leave Doha for more scandalous places. You know by now that Andre Agassi has admitted doing crystal meth, and that his dad is nuts (the first item is news, the second not so much). These are my reactions to Agassi’s admissions:

—We will likely never hear another player excuse a positive drug test by saying he accidentally drank from someone else’s glass (listening, Mariano Puerta?). If a player says this, I hope no one believes him.

—Guns, crystal meth, mullets. Who says tennis is a country club sport? Agassi’s story is pure red-state America.

—He secretly hated tennis. I wasn't driven into the game by a maniacal parent, but I’ve played just enough to know that hating tennis isn't all that uncommon. By the time I was done with the sport after college, I couldn’t bear even to look at my racquet. I imagine a burger flipper at McDonald's feels the same way about his spatula at the end of the week. 

Now I go to Indian Wells every year and watch the pros practice under the bright desert sun in the morning. What could be a better line of work, an innocent observer might ask. For me, though, when I see them get out there, get the feet moving, get up on their toes, get the racquet back early, try to get the blood and sweat flowing, hit their three or four shots over and over and over (and over), I feel pain. The moral of Andre? This sport can give you a lot, but it's work, often unhappy work, and it can make you do crazy things from time to time.