In my last post I stated that 2009 was a good year for tennis matches. Unfortunately, I realize now that I need to revise that assertion: It
was a good year for men’s tennis matches. From a competitive standpoint, the women
disappointed. Dinara Safina came up lame in both the Aussie and French finals,
the Williams sisters gave us a briefly compelling but ultimately unmemorable
Wimbledon final, and Caroline Wozniacki couldn’t quite make herself into a threat to
Kim Clijsters at the U.S. Open.
That leaves us with just one WTA match that combined the
requisite drama and excellence to qualify as a classic: the Wimbledon semifinal
between Serena Williams and Elena Dementieva, won by Williams 6-7 (4), 7-5,
8-6. Above are a pair of highlight clips that cover much of the second and third
sets. I apologize for the irritatingly excitable announcers—NBC pulled all the
videos of its broadcast. But there’s no way to ruin this one. The tension
builds right to the final point.
—I normally think of Serena as being a fierce competitor
rather than an elegant one. Maybe it’s the traditional clothes or the Wimbledon
setting, but from the start her strokes and movement seem smoother and
more polished. Her extension through her forehand in the first few rallies
shown is exemplary. She also seems to be hitting it with more topspin than
usual, and with a concerted effort to pin Dementieva deep in the court. You can
see that Serena is in a no-nonsense mood.
—Dementieva is counterpunching for the most part. Her game
has always seemed to me to be the tennis equivalent of a blind person who has, in order to survive, developed her other senses to their maximum. Dementieva’s blind
spot—her serve—has forced her to become just a shade quicker along the baseline, make her strokes
a little more compact, and tighten up her reaction time. She’s had to deal with fending off big returns her whole career, which helps her come in prepared for Serena’s
rockets. Sometimes Dementieva looks more like a hockey goalie out there than a tennis
player.
—Hawkeye was cruel to the Russian in this match. The machine
made two calls against her by the barest of margins.
—There are few Hall-of-Famers who are as willing as Serena
Williams to do anything to stay in a point the way she is. If she’s pushed to her
right, she’s not embarrassed to go to the hack slice forehand and pop it straight up in
the air, if that’s what it takes to get the ball over the net.
—Dementieva certainly had her chances. She blew an
open-court backhand in the last game of the second set that I believe would
have gotten her to a tiebreaker. But the most telling moment for me comes when she goes
up a break in the third, 3-1. Immediately, she drills two very makeable
forehands into the net. Dementieva likes pace; the more time she has, the
nervous she can get, especially in this situation against Serena. Also, does
Dementieva not move forward that well? On one point she's unable to take advantage
of a weak Williams return because she can’t get there in time.
—Dementieva has match point at 5-4 in the third. Serena hits a mediocre serve and Dementieva hits a solid backhand return. You think it will be a
typical rally, but Serena decides to take the initiative right away. She
doesn’t do anything spectacular, but she does force Dementieva to come up with
a backhand pass. The Russian mistakenly chooses to go crosscourt, where Serena is waiting. Fortune in tennis still favors the brave. And the good.
—This match reaches its peak with Serena serving at 5-6 in
the third. There's lots of desperate hitting and desperate emotion: Dementieva is left down for the count
after one point, and Serena gets right in her face on another. Most crucial,
Serena hits two aces to rescue herself. In the next game, her ground strokes land on the baseline
multiple times, including twice on the final point. Not surprisingly, she breaks serve. Fortune favors
the brave, the good, and the fortunate.
—For such a tense match, it ends in an odd way. You rarely
see a player miss the last ball of a tight contest by going for winner and
sending the ball wide. It’s easier to gauge the sideline and find the right
margin for error than it is to gauge the baseline or the net—with the match on
the line, why aim so close to the sideline? But Dementieva does just that and
strokes the last ball wide. It's almost as if part of her has decided that destiny
is against her on this day, at this event, against this opponent.
—With Dementieva serving as well as she ever has, there was almost
nothing to separate these two players. Every set was close, every
game hard fought. Why did Serena win? There’s her serve, of course, and her
power, and her speed. But what comes to my mind is the way she reacts to her missed shots, as compared to the way her opponent reacts.
Serena can’t believe she can miss. She can’t believe she can
lose. Dementieva, as much as the thought upsets her, can.
Yesterday at ESPN.com I wrote that 2009 was all about the
trophy ceremony. “God, it’s killing me.” “I’m one of the lucky few who gets
cheered for.” “My lovely wife, who’s pregnant!” “We were yoking…” Whatever del
Potro said in Spanish at the Open. In 2009, the Emotional Generation soared to new heights on the Grand Slam winners’ stands.
Nowhere was this truer than at the Australian Open. The
now-immortal tears and words of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal will forever
overshadow what was, on second look this morning, a sizzling tennis match that
might have defined this era, if Federer and Nadal hadn’t already done that the
year before at Wimbledon. Only Federer’s final set collapse, which is largely
absent from the highlights above, keeps me from rating it higher than No. 7 for
the season. It was a good year for trophy ceremonies, but it was a good year
for matches as well.
—Federer starts out hot, hitting some outrageous winners
reminiscent of his best stuff from Wimbledon 2008. But even in this very early
stage, where he is controlling the action, is there a sense that he’s pressing
more than he presses against anyone else? As someone wrote about Jimmy Connors
when he played Bjorn Borg in one of their Slam finals, Federer’s winners should count for two points
each—that’s how big a risk he’s taking with them. But that's also because Nadal is pushing him out of the middle of the court and forcing him to take chances.
—The revelation, though, is Nadal. Is this the same guy who
finished the season in such tame and dispirited fashion? Here he's up on the baseline, pushing Federer
off the center hash mark, outfoxing and out-varying him with drop shots, on-the-run reflex winners, and short-angle volleys, and playing with that famous
determined kick in his walk and snarl on his lip. He’s also changing directions
with both strokes much more often than I recall. The biggest difference,
though, is that Nadal’s backhand is a weapon. I haven’t seen that full-swing, up
on his toes, sharp crosscourt two-hander in months. I seem to remember he tried
it when he had a break point in the final game of the Madrid final against
Federer and missed it wide. (I remember it because I’ve never felt the air go
out of a building the way it did when the ball landed in the alley.) Did he
make that shot again in 2009?
—These were still the days when the only question worth asking in tennis seemed to be, “Why doesn’t Federer come in against Nadal?” The
answer is right in front of us here: Because Nadal, at his best, can hit a
passing shot on a dime, from either wing, from any spot on the court, with
frame-shaking topspin. You try to come in against that 50 times in a match.
—These were also the days when Nadal was routinely
outplaying and outhitting Federer when it mattered most. Look at the point he
constructs on set point at 6-5 in the first set. Nothing defensive about that.
Even better, look at the rally he constructs on what would prove to be the most
important point of the match, at 5-3 in the third-set tiebreaker. For most of
these five sets, he stood at the center of the court and hit his forehand
forcefully but safely crosscourt, to a spot just behind the service line and
well within the sidelines. The fact that he can tilt the rallies this way and
dictate them without much risk has always been the fundamental reason he owns a 13-7
record against Federer. But at 5-3, when he knew that a winning point would put
him in position to take a two-set-to-one lead, but that a losing point
would still leave him ahead 5-4, he moved his forehand target all the way to
the sideline. Nadal hit that spot, made a rare dash to the net, and angled away a backhand volley. The set was his, and the lead was too much for Federer to
overcome. For anyone who still thinks Nadal is “one-dimensional,” realize that
he’s one-dimensional by choice. When he senses the right moment to do more, the
resources are there and the surprise factor is built-in.
—And then it’s all drowned out by the ceremony afterward,
which is what the world will remember from this day. We all know what happened,
but seeing it again I’ve found my two favorite moments. The first is the
earnest ovation that Nadal gives Federer from behind him as Federer is beginning to
lose it. Nadal pushed the joy of winning the Australian Open all the way down inside him and became instead a respectful and concerned friend. Do you resent that Federer in a sense stole some of
Nadal’s thunder? You shouldn’t: He inadvertently brought out a gracious and
gentlemanly side of the Spanish kid that many tennis fans didn’t know existed
below the biceps and fist-pumps. Even on the trophy stand, Federer brought out
the best in Nadal.
The second moment is the look on Federer’s face when Nadal
finally gets him to smile and walk back up to finish his speech. The greatest
tennis player of all time looks, at that moment, like a nice, embarrassed kid—a nice, embarrassed kid we’ve all been at one time or
another.
In the first two matches on our Best of ’09 list, I’ve prefaced
the discussion by saying that from a quality of play perspective, they left
something to be desired. I’m not sure you can say that for No. 8:
How much better can the quality be when 78 of its points are won with a single
perfect shot, and that the guy hitting them comes up second-best?
What you can say is that Radek Stepanek’s 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5),
7-6 (6), 6-7 (2), 16-14 win over Ivo Karlovic in the semifinals of Davis Cup won’t
be forgotten any time soon. Karlovic’s 78 aces, which is 23 more than his
previous record, is a mark that’s going to be in the books for a while—unless
Dr. Ace himself breaks it, that is. The match's length, 5 hours and 59
minutes, and total games, 82, are just short of being all-time records themselves. And can a contest be any closer? The fourth set, which Karlovic won 7-2 in the breaker, must have felt
like a blow out.
The first time I posted about this match I showed an eight-minute You Tube clip of
Karlovic’s 78 aces. Now they’ve been whittled to a much crisper and more
convenient 2 and a half minutes. The person who put it up, Magnificat3, has also tracked the
directions of Ivo’s bombs: 39 went past Stepanek’s forehand, 39 went past his
backhand. What Karlovic’s height gives him is the ability to ace his opponents
anywhere, including with a flat bomb out wide that lands way up the sideline. He’s the
only person I’ve ever seen hit that serve. And his smooth, bare-bones delivery
must be next to impossible to read. You can see that on a lot of these serves,
Stepanek guesses the wrong way. Watching them go by him one after the next is
comical. I start to crack up right around the one-minute mark.
What we don’t see is how Stepanek hung in to beat
him; all we get here is the Czech looking helpless, until, on the final point, he wins the whole thing. One clue to his victory is that
he seems to take all of Karlovic’s aces in stride. He knows they’re going to happen sooner or later (or always),
and it will only hurt him to get upset about it. Whatever he did to keep
himself in it—I only saw the final set—Stepanek’s achievement is one of the
finest of the year. He survived three sets worth of aces.
The other moment we don’t see is the aftermath. Stepanek was
overcome as he slowly moved from one of his teammates to the next and
eventually into the Czech section of the audience. Karlovic, as usual, looked utterly alone. This is what I wrote the first time I posted about his defeat:
Karlovic’s freakishness has never come across as painfully
as it does here, when he walks off the court a loser after six hours. He takes
it as impassively as always. It’s as if he realizes he’s a guy not destined for
glory, even in Davis Cup, a place where second-tier players like him are traditionally allowed
to shine for a few moments. Instead, he’s destined to be good enough, in a weird enough way, to set a
monumental record even while suffering the most heart-breaking loss of his
career. Tennis has feared the rise of the big server for decades, but Karlovic
proves again that these fears remain unfounded. If this performance showed us anything, it's that tennis still can’t be won with one shot alone. The sad thing
for Ivo is that the sport is better off with him as a loser. At times,
when I see how glum and lonely he can look on a court, I think he knows this.
The ninth most memorable match of 2009 might also qualify as the
most unlikely of the year. It involved that rarest of tennis finds, a Spanish
server and volleyer, trading forays to the net for five sets against a guy who
had recently been on the verge of settling into his second career as a teaching
pro. It was so unlikely that, despite the fact that it took place on my
favorite court, the Grandstand at the U.S. Open; despite the
fact that I suspected that the ex-teaching pro in question, Taylor Dent, might
set off a few fireworks around Flushing this year; and despite the fact that I
was walking past that court as the match was starting, I was not in the arena
to see it. I went home and, kicking myself the whole time, watched it like
everyone else on the tube. I could feel the electricity all the way from
Queens.
Watching the fifth-set tiebreaker in this second-rounder
between Dent and Ivan Navarro, it’s clear that, like the Oudin-Sharapova match
from yesterday, this wasn’t a classic for its quality. There are a lot of
tight volleys, blown sitters, and ill-advised line-call challenges. But the key word in that sentence is
volleys. If this match didn’t prove that serving and volleying can still get
you deep into a major—Dent was beaten soundly by a baseline-hugging Andy Murray in the next
round—it did remind us that constant net-rushing can still produce uniquely
hair-raising tennis. Especially when it’s done by an American, at night, in New
York City.
—We begin with an Aussie commentator noting that Dent uses
one racquet for serving and another for returning. I don’t think I’ve ever seen
this before. The announcer speculates that it’s because he strings one of them a
little looser. Whatever the benefit, it’s got to be hard to adjust your swing on ground
strokes each game. I guess Dent figures he hits mostly groundies when he’s
returning, and mostly volleys when he’s serving.
—It’s hard to believe with this energy and atmosphere, but
the stands aren’t full. Some tennis traditionalists might find the crowd, with its zealous partisanship, its random bursts of
noise, and its sloppy summer fashion, to be of the Ugly American variety. But I’ll bet you would
have liked to have been there, too. Isn’t it a strength of the sport that it can be
played in places as varied as Wimbledon, Paris, and Flushing Meadows?
—I don’t think I’d seen Navarro before this. He seems like not
just an old-school player, but an old-school doubles specialist. As they used
to teach you in dubs, he kicks his first serve in and gives himself time to
close on the net. His forehand volley is strange and stiff, but he’s so far up
in the court that Dent still has trouble doing much with it.
—Up close, Dent isn’t as big as you might think. He’s also a
mellow guy without the sense of entitlement that you normally expect
from a professional tennis player. I always wondered if that was part of his
trouble. He didn’t need to win to satisfy his ego or his sense of himself.
—Would the sport be better if there was more of this type of
tennis? Undoubtedly. For one thing, s & v doesn’t need to be of the same
astounding quality as the best baseline tennis to still be entertaining. If it
lacks the head-smacking wow factor of a winner drilled from behind the
baseline, s & v makes up for it in the relentless, nerve-wracking pressure it
creates. Pressure on the returner to keep the ball low. Pressure back on the
volleyer to make a lightning-quick reaction and decision at the net. Pressure back again on
the returner to make a clean pass, because he’s probably going to get one shot
at it. It’s tennis played at a different tempo, both for players and fans. The compression of the points, especially in tiebreakers, especially in fifth-set
tiebreakers, gives the sport an antic energy. It also imposes more logic on the
proceedings. Rather than rallies that end in errors for no particular reason,
there's always a cause and effect with the serve and volley game.
—I love Dent’s overamped reaction at the end. His
appreciation of the atmosphere on the Grandstand makes you remember that this tournament is not the norm in the pro game. The Open still lives
up to its rowdy reputation. Dent is so psyched up by it that he can’t think
of how to end his speech into the chair umpire’s microphone. So he skips the “thank
you” and comes up with the only appropriate words for the moment: “Let’s go!”
Do we watch sports for the quality of play that’s on
display? The obsession in the U.S. with college and even high school athletics makes it clear that the answer is no. When it comes to team games, we watch to see
the people who represent our school or city try to win, period. Why else would
anyone sit through nine innings of baseball or spend 90 minutes following a
soccer ball as it’s being kicked around a field? But tennis, a game played by individuals who don’t pretend to represent anyone but themselves, is held to a
higher standard. In the absence of an immediate rooting interest, quality of
play can become the primary reason to watch. Unfortunately, the patience required to do that
virtually guarantees that tennis will never appeal to the team-sports-loving
population at large.
So why am I beginning my countdown of the 10 most memorable
matches of 2009 with Melanie Oudin’s upset of Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open?
The number we remember most from this fourth-rounder is Sharapova’s 21 double
faults, a stat that would be enough to turn most matches into an unsightly
mess. I’m choosing it, yes, because I’m an American, and we haven’t had a lot
of new women to cheer in recent years. I’m also choosing it because it happened
in the city where I live, where I could see and hear its effect on fans of the game around me. But mostly I’m choosing it because it’s an example of why tennis, more than
any team sport, is the perfect vehicle to deliver a feel-good drama. Let’s take
a look at the final chapter of this one, in the form of the 10-minute clip above.
—You may not like to watch or listen to Maria Sharapova, but
she served a purpose on this day. She was cast in the role of the haughty,
frowning, 6-foot-tall, mega-sponsored, visored villain from Russia;
putting her on the opposite side of the net from the Little Georgia Peach That Could was as close as sports gets to the Cold War days of old. So much so that
there’s a clip elsewhere on YouTube comparing the whole thing, in bizarre
detail, to Rocky IV, with Sharapova in the role of Drago. I'll let you find it yourselves if you wish.
—Sharapova is the far more experienced player, but she’s the
one who comes up with the wrong answer in a tight situation. At 4-5 and 5-5 in
the third set, you can choke by getting tentative, but you can also choke by
going for too much too fast. Sharapova’s trouble is the latter. She forces the
action at all costs, and the final cost is the match. I’ve always thought of
her as having an underrated tennis IQ, but this was not her finest hour. It’s
amazing how much of the sport is derived from from your serve—if you don’t have
confidence in that, it’s hard to build it anywhere else. Maria’s double faults
not only lose her points, they infect the rest of her strokes. Look at the
backhand she hits to start the final game. You rarely see the semi-robotic
Sharapova mis-time and shank a ball that badly.
—An oddity of Sharapova’s game: When she misses a first
serve badly, there’s a good chance she’ll go on to double fault. It almost makes it
seem like she has no control over the stroke from one point to the next. It goes
haywire every so often, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
—Great shot of Sharapova’s coach, Michael Joyce, shaking his
head in frustration. Sometimes the coach’s emotional wall of stone must
crack.
—What's the best thing about Oudin? Her feet. I’ve written
before about watching Jennifer Capriati’s footwork on a practice court at the
Open years ago. Seeing the hundreds of steps she took every
minute, I knew then and there why I had never become a pro or even come close
to becoming a pro. I could hit a decent forehand, but I couldn't do that. Oudin can.
—John McEnroe says it best here: “Thank god there’s a
tiebreaker.”
—The other thing that makes the
17-year-old Oudin appear to be a special player is the way she hits with
more pace, without pulling the trigger completely, even as she’s trying to
close out the match for the second time. Considering the pressure,
it’s pretty astounding that she was able to maintain that always-precarious balance
between assertiveness and margin for error. Oudin has struggled since the
Open—she’s 1-4 total, and she looked like she was stuck in mud during the Fed Cup final on
red clay in Italy. The expectations are high coming into 2010, but she’s strong
where she needs to be, in the feet and the head. On the final point against
Sharapova, she hit what might have been her best serve of the match, got right
on top of a tricky short return, and made the percentage play by going
crosscourt.
—My favorite Oudin quote from the Open came after her
eventual loss to Caroline Wozniacki. She was asked what had surprised her the
most about her run.
“I never thought that I’d play Maria Sharapova on Arthur
Ashe Stadium at the US Open this year. Definitely did not see that coming. So
that whole match, just getting to play her and beating her, I’ve never met her
before, so shaking her hand after the match was the first time I met her.”
Oudin was the winner, but she was still star struck by the woman she’d just
beaten.
—Like I said earlier in this post, what makes this match deserving of a spot on the Most Memorable list is that it
exemplifies why tennis at its best is the most dramatic and elemental of
sports. Baseball has the game-winning home run, basketball has the buzzer beater,
golf has the visual drama of the ball dropping into the cup and out of sight. But tennis trumps them by reducing everything to the
most visceral aspects of a game: The individual struggle, with her opponent and herself, and the contrasting
emotions of winning and losing. This is only intensified by television,
which invades the space of the players—we forget that it isn’t normal to
see someone that close up all the time; fans who are actually at the match have
a much more distanced and less personal perspective. When I see Oudin’s berserk happiness meet
Sharapova’s stocial embarrassment at the net, I wonder: Is there a bigger
gamble in sports than playing a tennis match? You risk your whole
self when you walk out there.
—For my Top 10 list, I’ll try to add a personal fan’s note about what I was doing when the match happened, whenever I can remember. I watched
this one in Brooklyn, stuck on the couch with a bad cold on a warm day. My girlfriend Julie and I
went for a walk right before the match to a famous Italian sandwich place in
the neighborhood, Defonte’s (see the fabulous tacky New York-style storefront at right). We
watched Oudin while trying to eat gigantic slabs of meat, cheese, and
bread. I almost spilled mine on the floor when Oudin hit her final
forehand. As she ran forward to track it down, I started to get off the couch
without knowing I was doing it. When she hit the ball for a winner, I stood up, half
a sandwich in each hand. I was sweating. Why did I care? Watching it again
here, it’s easy to see the whole thing—the close-ups of the players, the
over-miked sound of the ball and the audience, Dick Enberg’s commentary—as a TV
concoction, a moment of artificial importance. After all, it was just the fourth round, and Sharapova had thrown away nearly a set with her serve alone. Plus, if you want to get technical, it was just a tennis match, and nothing to sweat over.
What was real, though, was that, in a year when many many women’s tennis matches
were lost, Oudin won this one. We saw someone find out how far she could
go right on national TV. And in the close-up on her reaction, we got to see what that felt like.
There’s a reason they call them feel-good stories. Whatever it's significance in the grand scheme of things, this moment felt good.
—I'll finish with my favorite Oudin quote of the year. After upsetting Jelena Jankovic at Wimbledon, Oudin was told by a reporter that, because of her name and ancestry, the French press was claiming her as one of their own. She looked dumbstruck. Then she reassured us. "Yes, my last name, Oudin, is French. But I'm totally American. For sure."
Really? We never would have guessed. But we're happy we got to meet you.
