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Fortune Favors the Good 12/18/2009 - l:31 PM

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.

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Killing Him 12/17/2009 - l:40 PM

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.

No wonder we like these two guys so much.

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Cannon Fodder 12/16/2009 - l:12 PM

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.

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Denting the Net 12/15/2009 - l:41 PM

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!”

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Totally American. For Sure 12/14/2009 - l:49 PM

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.

1431792490_fa65a028d0  —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.

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Fortune Favors the Good
Killing Him
Cannon Fodder
Denting the Net
Totally American. For Sure
On Not Thinking About Tennis
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