Articles by Steve Tignor

No. 8 of '13: Throwback Throwdown

Wed, 11 Dec 2013 12:24:00 -0500

“By next week it may feel like a distant memory, one more cloud of red dust blowing around in the backs of our minds, but Monday’s fourth-round match between Stan Wawrinka and Richard Gasquet shouldn’t be forgotten by fans of great tennis quite so quickly. In a tournament that has already given us its fair share of epics, this one stands above, in terms of drama, quality, and most of all, audacity.”

I wrote those words the day after Wawrinka outlasted Gasquet in the fourth round of the French Open, 6-7 (5), 4-6, 6-4, 7-5, 8-6. Having looked at a few Top 10 Matches of the Year lists this month, it seems that this one hasn't, as I feared, turned into another forgotten cloud of red dust. It wasn't a Grand Slam final, and it didn't determine the No. 1 ranking; in fact, both Wawrinka and Gasquet must have suspected that the road was going to end soon for the loser and the winner—Stan's reward for coming back from two sets down, and running around for 4 hours and 16 minutes, was a quarterfinal date two days later with Rafael Nadal. Yet this match lands at No. 8 on my year-end list for the reasons I mentioned back in June: Quality, theater, and gall. As Wawrinka said afterward, “It was a crazy match.”

Unfortunately, due to the cyber-vigilance of the French Open, there isn’t much video of the event on the Internet, and nothing I can embed in this post. To see the brief, Roland Garros-compiled highlights I’ll talk about below, go here.

*****

—The clip doesn’t give you a full sense of the test, both physical and emotional, that these guys put each other through. We miss, among other things, Gasquet windmilling the crowd into a frenzy, and Wawrinka losing his mind over a line call. But I like the fact that no commentators’ voices can be heard here. It gives the video the feel of a documentary, one that we might call “The Continuing Tragedy of Richard G.” In 2010, I watched Gasquet lose from two sets up on this same court—Lenglen—to Andy Murray. Both times, the place was packed, the crowd was loud, and the hopes were dashed.

—You can, on a few occasions, see what I meant when I used the word “audacity” to describe the play. Wawrinka’s slap-shot forehand winner into the corner is the best example, but both guys let it fly, and neither backed off. Here's what I wrote at the time:

“In Gasquet we had a home-country favorite trying to put his past failures on the same court behind him; it’s doubtful this reserved young man has ever let himself get so far out on the emotional ledge before. In Wawrinka we had a defiant opponent who was living on the same ledge, and occasionally tumbling over it. At one point Stan came unglued, called in the supervisor, and demanded that a line judge be replaced. Watching the two players go for each other’s throats for five sets, the only term I could think of to describe the style of play was “flat out.”

—The stats were appropriately massive. Wawrinka hit 92 winners against 55 errors; for Gasquet, the ratio was 57 to 46. They came to the net 100 times between them and both had double-digit ace counts. Wawrinka was four for 20 on break points, Gasquet two of 11. Nothing, in short, came easy, and the verdict was in doubt until Wawrinka’s 92nd winner, a rifle-shot forehand on his first match point. A few minutes earlier, Gasquet had a break point at 6-6 in the fifth, for a chance to serve for the match. Half a dozen points later, he was shaking hands as the loser.

“I had so many chances,” the still-tragic Richard G. said afterward. “He played incredibly well. It’s incredibly sad, but that’s tennis. Of course it’s disappointing, but I couldn’t give any more than what I gave today.”

—Stylistically, this was a throwback; physically, it was a sign of the times. Gasquet and Wawrinka each, obviously, have one-handed backhands; we know that shot is eye-candy for tennis aesthetes, and these guys have two of most spectacular. But it wasn’t the elongated elegance of their one-handers that made this meeting so much fun; it was the way they went after the ball from that side. The Frenchman’s power is easy, the Swiss’ is heavy; the two collided for five sets. By the fourth, neither of them could be bothered with a safe rally shot, and there was little of the defensive give-and-take that characterizes much of men’s tennis these days. By the fifth, it didn’t look like either player had any more bullets left, but they kept firing anyway.

Yet in the end, the match was decided not by shot-making, but by fitness. Gasquet, to put it simply, ran out of gas.

“I know after three and a half hours of play,” he said, “I start to get tired.”

“I was thinking to make him work, to make him work hard,” a pulling-no-punches Wawrinka said. “I can keep my level going five hours, that’s not the problem. But for him, I don’t think it’s the same.”

The legend of Iron Stan was born.

(Speaking of nicknames, how about one for this match? Gasrinka? Wawquet? The Single-Handed Sortie? How about Stanchard?)

—Wawrinka won and Gasquet lost on this day, but each of them went on to have excellent seasons. Stan made his first year-end championships, and Gasquet returned there for the first time in six years. With fellow one-hander Grigor Dimitrov, they gave hope to style snobs everywhere; though in Paris they showed that it can be more than just a pretty shot. The fact that neither Wawrinka nor Gasquet had any hope of advancing past the next round made their willingness to lay it all on the line for this one victory that much more honorable. One win can be enough.

No. 9 of '13: Teutonic Plague

Tue, 10 Dec 2013 12:25:00 -0500

Serena Williams survived Black Wednesday at Wimbledon—she was lucky enough not to play that day—but she couldn’t make it through Manic Monday. By the time the No. 1 seed walked onto Centre Court to face Sabine Lisicki to start the second week, the tournament already known as Wimblegeddon had waved goodbye to a dozen or so of her fellow marquee players: Nadal, Federer, Sharapova, Azarenka, and Tsonga, to name a few, were all gone. As far as the women's draw went, the consensus around the grounds was, “You might as well hand Serena the trophy.”

That consensus ended when Lisicki beat Williams in their fourth-round encounter, in what might qualify as the biggest upset of them all. Yes, everyone, including Serena, knew that the German loves Wimbledon; she was a semifinalist there in 2011, and London's tabloids have christened her, somewhat creepily, "Doris Becker." But Williams was the defending champion, she had won an Olympic gold on Centre Court the summer before, and she was riding a 34-match win streak dating back to February. At that moment, she seemed to be as unbeatable as any player at any stage that I could remember.

Then she was beaten. The shock of that loss is what what made this match so exciting, and my ninth best of 2013. Knowing the result robs it of its suspense, of course, but the drama of the last few games can still be felt in the video clip above. Here are a few thoughts on the highlights from a match that I watched, sporadically, in a jammed press box. Like the rest of the incredulous Centre Court audience, I didn’t think Serena would lose until Lisicki’s final forehand skidded past her.

*****

—What doesn’t come across in this video is the thunderous quality of the shots these two were hitting. Their ground strokes were slugged with an ATP-like pace, and they echoed around the arena accordingly. What is the same, on second viewing, is the sense that Serena, no matter how well Lisicki was playing, was going to win anyway. She was up 3-0, 0-15 in the third, and when she hit a clean, calm forehand winner to go up 4-2, she seemed to have put the German in her rear-view mirror for good. But with nothing to lose, Lisicki didn’t back down, shot-wise or attitude-wise.

—Serena is the rare top player who will hit her ground strokes differently from one match to the next. She’ll use more topspin or less, slap her forehand or guide it, opt for an open stance or closed, take the ball near her body or farther away. It all seems to depend on her nerves and frame of mind. You can see from the first rally here that she’s hitting her backhand close to her body and forcing it—it’s not as natural as it can be. She has multiple opportunities to win points with it, but she keeps missing long.

—Lisicki is one of a handful of players who can force Serena to play defense. On this day, she did two things especially well, and which made the difference: (1) She stayed in it mentally even after losing the second set and going down 0-3 in the third; and (2) She saved her best tennis for the very end. Judging by this clip, Lisicki was her usual hit-and-miss self until 3-4 in the third. I had forgotten that she went down 0-40 in that game—now you really had to believe Serena was going to win. But Lisicki came up with two of the shots of her life, a backhand winner followed by a forehand winner, to get back to deuce, and eventually held for 4-4.

—Serena always walks slowly between points, but most of the time it's the slow walk of authority. After Lisicki aces her at 3-4, it seems to me that Serena’s slow walk to the other side of the court includes a fair amount of doubt. This isn’t the self-doubt that creeps into her game at times; it’s the doubt that she can stop her opponent on this day. That’s extremely rare for her, but she admitted afterward that she knew Lisicki was going to be a tough out on grass, and she wasn’t stunned that she had lost. That’s also extremely rare.

—This wasn’t the stare-down Serena we’ve seen when she falls behind (think of her last match of 2013, against Li Na); instead, she clapped for at least one of Lisicki's good shots. There’s more uncertainty than desperation in Serena, and it affected the way she played. By the last two games, she's no longer hitting the ball instinctively; she’s trying to balance control and aggression, and she ends up guiding her shots down the middle of the court. It was still enough to save a match point and earn a break point at 5-4, and if Williams had gotten out of that game, you have to think she would have won—Lisicki’s good form doesn’t often last for more than a few games. This time it was just enough to get her across the finish line.

—When she saw her last ball was a winner, Lisicki dove across that finish line and laid herself flat on the grass. The German's similarly dramatic celebration would annoy her semifinal opponent, Agnieszka Radwanska, who gave her the all-time brush-off handshake afterward. The word during the tournament was that Aga wasn't the only woman irritated by Lisicki's histrionics. But her reaction was appropriate here, an emotional exclamation point at the end of one of the season's most surprising afternoons.

No. 10 of '13: Lucky 77

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 15:39:00 -0500

Each year, when I begin researching the best matches of the tennis season, I quickly come to three realizations. The first is that there are always a lot of good matches; even a Top 25 list wouldn’t cover everything worth reliving. The second is that I always forget as many of them as I remember—I watched all of Serena Williams' win over Petra Kvitova from Doha, and all of Rafael Nadal's win over Ernests Gulbis from the fifth row in Indian Wells, yet I didn’t recall a single point of either match until I looked them up on YouTube today.

The third realization, which is also easy to forget, is that the players go through a lifetime's worth of emotional ups and downs each season. Novak Djokovic, Victoria Azarenka, even Richard Gasquet: It’s amazing how many highs and lows they experienced, and bounced back from, over the course of the last 11 months. No wonder Boris Becker said tennis players lives’ should be measured in dog years.

This season was no exception. From Camila Giorgi’s seize-the-night win over Caroline Wozniacki at the U.S. Open to Tommy Robredo’s tragically colossal comeback against Gael Monfils in Paris, good matches came in all shapes and sizes in 2013. For the next two weeks, I’ll recount one of my Top 10, in ascending order of excellence, each day. Here's No. 10.

*****

Andy Murray’s win over Novak Djokovic at Wimbledon wasn’t the best-played or most competitive match of 2013—not by a long shot. But it will likely be remembered the longest and re-watched the most. Murray, as you surely know, became the first British man to win Wimbledon in 77 years, turning a quixotic quest into an heroic one in the space of a fortnight.

That still might not be enough to land this one-sided straight-setter on your Top 10 list for the season. It’s on mine partially for personal reasons. I watched each of Murray’s matches over that fortnight from the same spot in the Centre Court press box. As an out-of-towner, my seat was on the fringes of the media area, where the press sits side by side with paying customers. This had its upside: Each time Murray played, I got to hear the joyous and pained reactions from a different set of fans. There was the woman who sat on the edge of her seat, her hands crossed prayerfully in front of her mouth, for the entirety of Murray's five-set win over Fernando Verdasco. A couple of days later, there was a group of young men behind me who had a Pimm’s or two (or three) too many during Murray’s win over Jerzy Janowicz. During the final, I sat next to veteran British sportswriter Barry Newcombe, who calmly kept score like it was any other match, and expressed his hopes for the Scot with a suitably superstitious reserve. When it was over, we both shot up in our seats and confronted the most shocking sight of the afternoon: Murray fist-pumping right at us.

It was a lucky thrill to be in Centre Court that day, but I hadn’t watched the match the way most people watched it, through a video screen, until this morning. Here are a few thoughts on the clip above, and what Murray’s win looks and feels like six months later and 3,500 miles away in New York.

*****

—In the video's first millisecond, we’re treated to the most inexplicably common, and irritating, commentator mistake in tennis: Pronouncing Djokovic “Jockavich.”

Broadcasters: In this brief clip from the Australian Open, if you listen closely, you can hear Novak himself explaining why "Djo" is pronounced “Joe” to Channel 7's Jim Courier.

—Moving on to the match itself, we get some early foreshadowing of what’s to come: Djokovic drops a gimme volley into the bottom of the net, and loses another point after failing to put away an easy overhead. Murray, meanwhile, is in a relaxed groove on his sometimes-troublesome forehand, and he’s confident enough to hit a winning overhead on a bounce from behind the baseline.

—Yet Murray is working hard, and he's soon exhausted by the combination of hot weather, long points, and raw nerves. This match went just three sets, but by the end both players had ice packs on their necks during changeovers.

Seeing the rallies again, without the suspense, it’s clear that Murray had all the answers that day—most of it was skill, but lady luck was there for him as well. His backhand down the line, both the drive and sidespin versions, was clicking. He hit an ace that clipped a millimeter of the sideline to save a break point at 3-4 in the second set. He had the bulk of the let cords go his way. And when he was on the run, Murray seemed to be literally pushed forward by the energy of the crowd—there were half a dozen balls that he tracked down that I was sure he wouldn’t reach.

—As for that crowd, it was as loud as I've heard in Centre Court; you might even use the word intimidating. Unlike last year, the audience seemed to believe that victory was in their man's grasp; even the presence of that legendary jinx, prime minister David Cameron, wasn't enough to dim their hopes. And while they lifted Murray, they were equally effective in keeping Djokovic subdued. The Serb seemed hemmed in, unable to relax and be himself, the whole day. He built a lead in the second set, but just when we thought he was going to even things up and turn it into the marathon most of us had predicted, he let that lead slip.

At Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, Djokovic lost finals after winning long, five-set semifinals. He had the tougher road than his opponents both times, but it’s no excuse. Winning a tournament isn’t about just winning one match; you need to win as efficiently as possible along the way to be at your best at the end. Djokovic had a great season, but it was also one defined by losses in his biggest matches.

—That doesn’t mean Djokovic went down without a fight here. The final game of this match was easily the most heart-stopping of the season, and I got nervous watching it again today. I can’t remember any game that veered so quickly from the heights of giddy anticipation, when Murray was up 40-0, to the depths of silent, sweaty-palm fear, when he went down break point.

It was hard to blame Murray. Djokovic showed again why he’s so tough when he’s basically given up on a match. Suddenly, everything worked for him—he cracked a backhand return winner, lasered a sharp-angle passing shot from his shoe-tops, and eased a half-volley across the net cord for another winner. I hadn’t realized that Murray very nearly hit a backhand long on one of Djokovic’s break points. Would Murray have won Wimbledon if that ball had landed out? It seems like a 50/50 proposition now.

We’ll never know, because his backhand was called in. From there, Murray came up with a forehand winner on the next shot, saved another break point with a big forehand and a volley, and managed to tune out the home fans, who had temporarily taken leave of their senses, and their manners, to cry out in the middle of rallies. The afternoon had all seemed a little too good to be true until that point, but Murray earned his Wimbledon in the last game.

—Then he threw his hat down, looked up to the press section, and pumped his fists like a crazy man. I know he did this because (1) he happened to be facing in that direction, and (2) he has said he has trouble controlling his emotions when he looks at his family and friends in the crowd. But this was still my favorite moment of the 2013 season, because it was something different, a completely unexpected way for a Grand Slam winner to react these days. Instead of locking eyes and sharing tears with his team in the players’ box, Murray first saluted two different groups that he said had supported him through the rough moments there: The British media, and the fans. You don’t see it in this clip, but Murray high-fived the spectators sitting in the front row in that corner of the court. As he said in his victory speech, he won Wimbledon for everyone there, and he "hoped [we] enjoyed it." It was his sense of obligation, to do his best to end the curse of Fred Perry, that got him to that summit.

In chasing that moment, Murray, in the face of longstanding criticism over his "passive" playing style, stuck with his methodical, long-term plan for improvement. As he said after this match, he took his share of tough losses, but he remained committed to getting better bit by bit, year by year, and trusting that at some point it would be enough. Murray walked his own road to win Wimbledon, and it was fitting that he celebrated it in his own way.

40 Years Ago: Archive

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 14:30:00 -0500

40 Years Ago: Look Out, Cleveland

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 17:24:00 -0500

“Please step in and hit the [expletive] out of the ball.”

This was the simple coaching advice that John Newcombe gave to his doubles partner, Rod Laver, as they walked out to try to clinch the 1973 Davis Cup for Australia over the United States. Laver was 35 years old, had been on one tennis circuit or another since the late 1950s, owned a collective 17 Grand Slam singles and doubles titles, and was considered by many to be the greatest player in tennis history. You might have thought he would have little use for his partner’s rather crude piece of instruction. But as Newk would say later, “Rocket did his best to please me.”

This was the match of the year, perhaps the decade, for Newcombe, Laver, and their Aussie teammates, Ken Rosewall and Mal Anderson. With an average age in the mid-30s—Newk, at 29, was the only player anywhere near his prime—this “Dad’s Army,” as they were sometimes called, knew it would likely be their last Davis Cup hurrah. And it had been a long time coming. As contract professionals, the Aussie greats had long been banned from the old-guard, amateur-run team competition. Newcombe hadn’t been allowed to play for his country since 1967, Laver since ’62, and Rosewall since 1956, when he was a baby-faced 22-year-old. As Newk said, when the amateur establishment finally crumbled and allowed them to return in '73, “the boys were raring to go and ready to make up for lost time.” Newk was so ready that he had skipped most of the pro tour in ’73 to concentrate on winning Grand Slams and bringing the Davis Cup back to what the Aussies considered its rightful home.

As Rex Bellamy, the tennis correspondent for the Times of London who attended the final that year, put it, “Australia went into action with a feeling that here was a chance—for some of them, perhaps a last chance—to show the world what tennis was like in the days when men were men and Australia ruled the world.”

For Newcombe, it was a matter of etching the Aussie tennis dynasty, which stretched back two decades, in stone one final time—literally.

“It was the last time that Rod and Kenny and I would get our names onto the Davis Cup,” he said.

For athletes from Australia, this was no small thing. In the 1950s and ‘60s, under their hard-nosed svengali Harry Hopman, tennis had been the national sport Down Under. Aussie boys dreamed of playing for its Davis Cup team the way American boys dreamed of playing for the New York Yankees. And the Aussies were even more dominant than the Yanks—from 1950 to 1967, the country won 15 Cups in 18 seasons.

Now it was 1973, and the dynasty was in decline. The boys of summers past were on the wrong side of 30, long-haired, mutton-chopped veterans of one-night barn-storming tours around the globe. Despite Hopman’s protestations, his best players—Rosewall, Hoad, Laver, Newcombe, Roche—kept leaving him for the wilderness of the pro game, and no new generation had arrived to take their place. When Open tennis began in 1968, Hopman, the emperor of amateurism, knew his time was up. He would never control Australian tennis the way he once had, so he left for the professional wilderness of America. In 1969, Hopman stepped down as Davis Cup captain and became the head of a new tennis academy in Port Washington, NY. He wasn’t the only one to leave the seemingly dated team competition behind. Writing about the Cup in ’73, Australian tennis journalist Alan Trengove said, “For some, the quest for loot clearly took precedence over patriotism.”

That left the ’73 Aussie team in the hands of one of Hopman’s early protégés, Neale Fraser. His players may have been long in the tooth, but they hadn’t lost any of their bite. Looking back, Fraser called his squad, “The greatest Davis Cup team that any country has ever put on a court.”

It was so great that Fraser had the unenviable task of putting either Ken Rosewall or Rod Laver on the bench.

“I had to tell a fellow who was a far better player than me,” Fraser said of Rosewall, “that he’s not going to play Davis Cup.” Muscles, after waiting 17 years, would make one appearance in doubles that season, in the semis at Kooyong in Melbourne, against the Czech team.

But even successful Davis Cup campaigns usually have to survive an exotic adventure or two, and it was true for the Aussies as well. When they arrived in Madras to play the Indian team, the Australians were informed that they were the target of a death threat issued by the Pakistani terrorist group Black December—not to be confused with the Black September group that had threatened to kill Harold Solomon and Brian Gottfried, the Jewish members of the U.S. team, when it won the Cup in Bucharest the previous year.

The original plan was for the Aussie players who were married with children, which included Newcombe, to go home and let the single men risk it all for the home country. But when a local Indian police commissioner guaranteed the team’s safety and assigned them armed bodyguards, everyone stayed and played. Still, it was something of a surprise when Newk and the boys found out what they were going to play on: Courts made of cow dung.

The Aussies survived those as well, and in November they flew to Cleveland, Ohio, for the final. It would be against a team that had run rampant in their absence: The U.S squad, led that year by Stan Smith and Tom Gorman, were the five-time defending Cup champions.

“By the time we got to Cleveland,” Newcombe said, “we were fired up, to say the least.”

At first glance, the environment seemed almost as weirdly unwelcoming as it had been in Madras. It was cold, wet, snowy, and windy in Cleveland that final weekend in November—the lake was in effect. Perhaps fortunately, or perhaps not, the Cup final would be contested indoors for the first time. That protected the players from the weather, but it also put them inside the Public Auditorium, which Bellamy remembered as a “somber hall perched on the southern shore of Lake Erie...with bizarre touches like billboards for Wonder Bread, and an oxygen kit and spittoons installed along the carpet court.” While the tennis boom was on in America, it apparently had yet to reach the northern edge of Ohio. The crowds for this duel of the dynasties were disappointing.

That didn’t stop the Aussie and American singles players from putting on a classic, eight-hour, 10-set opening day. In the first match, Newcombe and Smith reprised their five-set Wimbledon final from two years earlier. The result was the same—a win for Newk, 6-4 in the fifth—but the tennis might have been even better. Smith led 3-1 in the final set, with a break point for 4-1, but he netted a forehand. In Bellamy’s words, “Newcombe fought back with the fury of a wounded but indomitable lion who knew he had to kill or be killed.” The match ended with a memorable anti-climax at 5-4: A net-cord winner for Newcombe at deuce, and a double fault by Smith on match point. “Such a superb match, such a brutal ordeal for body and mind, deserved a better finish,” Bellamy wrote.

In the second match, Laver made sure there would be no fluke ending against Gorman. The 35-year-old Rocket lost the first set 10-8, and went down two sets to one, but won it going away.

“For three sets,” Bellamy wrote, “this too was a fine match, bubbling with uncertainty in its richly contrasted patterns.”

Over the final two sets, though, Gorman wilted; “something inside of him died in the heat of combat,” according to Bellamy. At the same time, Laver, that seasoned veteran of tennis crises, rose to the occasion.

“Suddenly,” Bellamy said of the Rocket, “he was putting it all together and playing beautifully, like a poet who had been struggling to find a good line and had thought of a great one.”

With the Aussies up 2-0, Fraser decided to go for the kill rather than rest his singles players. He thought that Laver and Newcombe were on a roll, they were fit enough to make the turnaround, and he liked the fact that they would confuse their opponents, Smith and Eric van Dillen, with their alternating righty and lefty serves. Of course, it wouldn’t be easy. The Americans hadn’t lost a Davis Cup doubles match in five years.

“But,” Newcombe said, “as Rod and I told ourselves, they’d never had to play us.”

As the Aussies walked on court, Newcombe asked Laver an innocent question: “Rocket, why not rip your backhand today? It makes me nervous serving to you, because your backhand return is so strong. So when the Yanks serve to you today, please step in and hit the [expletive] out of the ball.”

Laver obliged. On the second point of the match, Newcombe looked at him and said, “‘Now’s the time. Belt this one back as hard as you can.’ Rod, who had the best poker face in tennis, said nothing. But the instant the ball left Stan’s racquet, he leaped forward four paces and performed the best backhand return I’ve ever seen. I couldn’t see a ball, just a blur.”

The ball-blur was past the net man, Van Dillen, in a heartbeat. “His face sank,” Newcombe remembered, “as if to say, ‘I’m way out of my league here.’”

Van Dillen was, and so were the Americans. Laver and Newcombe won 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 to clinch Australia’s first Davis Cup in six years. It would, as Newk predicted, be the last for the nation’s old guard. They celebrated in customary Aussie fashion.

“Boy, did we party,” Newcombe said. “We had a huge dinner, the beer and wine flowed, and we sang and celebrated all night long.”

Even Laver, never the party animal, joined in. Newcombe said his lasting memory of his teammate from that weekend was seeing him “smiling beatifically” in the hotel bathroom that night: “He had the biggest, widest grin on that freckled face of his.” Newcombe was about to say something, but he decided to leave the Rocket to his reverie.

Yet Newk and Laver still had enough in them to come back the next day and win both reverse singles to complete the 5-0 sweep. “We rubbed the American players’ noses in it a little bit,” Fraser said, "which we were happy to do.” Men were men, the Aussies ruled, and all was right in the tennis world again.

But where was the man who had made them men, and launched the Aussie dynasty all those years before? Harry Hopman was on Long Island, with a new protégé, a 14-year-old named John McEnroe. But this wasn’t the same, hard Hopman who, in the words of Laver, had trained the Aussies “to run through a desert,” and who, according to Newcombe, would “go ape-sh*t” when he was two minutes late for curfew. This kindler, gentler Hopman was known to watch a raving teenage Johnny Mac and say, “It would be a shame to break him, with all that talent.”

The old amateur era of total control was over, and Hop knew it—the players had the power now. The men he had molded in Australia were coming to the ends of their careers. The young man he had molded, in a very different way, in Port Washington, was just getting started.

40 Years Ago: Putting Up the Ladder

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 18:07:00 -0500

“The one perfect truth. That number arrives every Monday morning—pure, objective, apolitical, honest, and unwavering.”

That’s how former pro Bill Scanlon described his ATP computer ranking, which he first earned in the mid-1970s. Read now, four decades after those rankings began, his words may sound a little overblown. Surely Scanlon didn’t think a man can be reduced to a number, did he? Perhaps not, but like most of his colleagues of that era, he wasn’t completely opposed to the idea when it came to measuring himself as a player. At least it was a number he could believe in, and that he could control.

There’s that word again: control. On Monday I wrote about how it, rather than money, what was drove the ATP to walk out of Wimbledon in 1973, to protest fellow player Niki Pilic’s suspension from the tournament. The British press at the time made the men out to be ungrateful and greedy; but what they wanted more than anything was, after 60 years of amateur rule, to become masters of their own fates. A month later, in August ’73, the tour took another step in that direction by releasing its first set of computer rankings.

It’s hard to imagine now what the big deal was; weekly rankings have become so associated with tennis that Roger Federer could appear in an (actually funny) commercial about the topic for ESPN (see it at the bottom of this post). That’s largely because we’ve forgotten, if we ever knew in the first place, about what came before. During the amateur era, there were no official, objective rankings. Instead, national federations decided who would be allowed onto the invite list for the Grand Slams, and who would make up the country’s Davis Cup teams.

The players were at the mercy of all-powerful amateur officials, who were known to play favorites. To build their careers, Los Angeles natives Bobby Riggs and Pancho Gonzalez had to work around the head of the Southern California Tennis Association, Perry Jones, who controlled much of amateur tennis in the United States. Jones suspended Gonzalez for truancy, and he tried to keep Riggs out of prestigious national events because he thought he was too short to become a champion. When Riggs finally made it to Wimbledon, in 1939, he proved Jones wrong by sweeping the singles, doubles, and mixed.

The tournaments themselves had their own favorites. As Stan Smith told James Buddell for the ATP’s website earlier this year, “The history leading up to the ranking system included a ‘star system’ as far as entries into tournaments. Some players would be on a list as players that could help sell tickets, and they would have priority over others. The ranking system was a hot point for the players. The ATP felt that it wanted to control the ranking system and not let the ITF or anyone else control it.”

On Monday, August 23, 1973, a year after its formation, the ATP produced its first set of (then-monthly) “computer” rankings based strictly on the players’ results from the previous 12 months. I put “computer” in quotes because, as Doug Robson wrote in a USA Today piece on the 40th anniversary of the rankings this summer, “At conception, there was no computer.”

Mike Estep, who ran the ranking system for much of the 1980s, told Robson, “The computer was just an adding machine that had the ability to divide by 12.” The calculations were done by hand, printed on a giant piece of paper from a dot-matrix printer—“it went halfway around the room”—and “hung like giant tapestries in the locker area so players could verify their results.”

The first ranking list included 186 players, and the man at the top of it was Ilie Nastase. Unlike Scanlon, who was a product of the all-business pro era, Nastase had begun his career in the looser, less-lucrative amateur days. He was honored to be the first No. 1, but this most artistic of players had reservations about the new, coldly meritocratic system of skill assessment. Nasty claimed that the atmosphere changed on tour once the rankings became a fact of life. He had idolized the 1960s Australian greats, men who had brought a macho, self-deprecating bonhomie to the locker room—camaraderie was the name of the game when there was no prize money to be had. Nastase said that hanging out with other players was different once “everyone had a number hanging over them.” Hierarchy, rather than camaraderie, would become the rule in tennis for the next generation. By 1981, John McEnroe would speak for his tour mates when he said, “Deep down, nobody gives a s--t about anybody else.”

The WTA joined the ranking revolution in 1975, and tweaks have been made to both systems over the years. They went from monthly to weekly, the players were given a chance to exclude their worst results, and, presumably, full-fledged computers were booted up. While the system began as a way to eliminate subjectivity from tournament entries, the rankings have taken on a life of their own. The ATP threw a gala party in Manhattan during this year's U.S. Open to celebrate their 40-year anniversary. Federer said “it’s what drives our game," while other players believe that the rankings have played a part in the sport's rapid evolution, quality-wise, since the 1970s. No player can afford to rest on his laurels when he has a number hanging over his head. One thing Scanlon forgot to say about the computer is that it is merciless.

On Monday, I wrote about how the Wimbledon boycott tracked the cultural trends of the times in 1973. The advent of the ATP computer rankings did as well. It’s hard to imagine now, but meritocracy was a relatively new phenomenon in many places in those days. As late as 1964, George W. Bush could enter Yale University as a legacy admission and spend his time there earning “gentleman’s Cs.” The year Bush graduated, 1968, was the first year that women were admitted; since then, entrance to elite schools has become more merit-based, and less connection-based. (Perhaps the legacy admissions that do still exist can be thought of as the equivalent of Grand Slam wild cards.) Tennis, a sport originally reserved for gentlemen, operated on a similarly paternalistic model until 1968, when professionals were finally admitted to its biggest tournaments. Five years later, with the computer rankings, the unshakable ladder of excellence, the men took a big step toward self-rule by making sure that the right players entered them.

40 Years Ago: Separate to Be Equal

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 09:14:00 -0500

Here's part two of my talk with Kamakshi Tandon on Grace Lichtenstein's book A Long Way, Baby, about the women's tennis tours of 1973. You can see part one here.

*****

Kamakshi,

So not only have you read A Long Way, Baby, but you have a copy autographed by Martina. Not bad—though hopefully she's forgotten about its portrayal of her as the pound-packing, "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing" kid. By the time we get to the book's postscript, from 1975, Navratilova is starting to look less like a JFJ—junkie food junkie—and more like a GOAT. It's interesting to remember that some of her emotional aggression on court was inspired by Billie Jean King's foot-stomping ways. (Did you know that Elton John says he came up with the beat to "Philadelphia Freedom" by thinking about how BJK stomped around a tennis court? There's your random fact for the day, if you needed one.)

I'm glad you brought up the rivalry that's at the heart of this book, Billie Jean King vs. Margaret Court. I had read very little about their co-history, and most of it came from the (obviously slanted) viewpoint of Billie Jean. I don't think it ever registered how long they were at the top together, and how intertwined their careers were. King had her first major singles success in 1962, when, as Billie Jean Moffitt, she upset the top-seeded Court (then known as Margaret Smith) in the second round at Wimbledon. They dominated for most of the next decade, though Court dominated more. She finished with 24 majors to King's 10, and a 22-10 head-to-head record against her. In '73, the year of A Long Way, Baby, King won Wimbledon, but Court won the other three Slams.

Which makes me wonder whether a tiny part of the reason Billie Jean has continued to savor and celebrate her win over Bobby Riggs for so long is that it was, finally, a way of one-upping Court. King always said that she had to be No. 1—"Numero Uno," as she referred to it. But for the most part she was No. 2 in her era, behind the Aussie. Fortunately for Billie Jean, the most famous match either of them played was against Bobby Riggs. Court lost hers, King won hers, and that’s what people—with a little friendly reminder from Billie Jean now and then—remember 40 years later.

It's unfortunate that Court's achievements have been overshadowed since, and it was nice to get an idea from this book of what a force she was. There's a good case to be made for Court as the greatest player in tennis history, yet no one seems to want to make it (she obviously didn't score any public-relations points when she criticized gay marriage a couple of years ago). The most amazing thing I learned about Court from Long Way is that her arms are a full three inches longer than normal for a woman her height. Rosie Casals had it right when she nicknamed her "The Arm."

It was also interesting to a get a thoughtful look at Court's personality; as you say, Kamakshi, the author went from finding her "dull” at the start, to "classy" by the end. She would never be a fan of Big Maggie's, but she became an admirer. I was also unaware of how much the conservative Court and progressive King hated each other. That may have been inevitable, being rivals for so long, but it went beyond tennis and into their philosophies of life. Lichtenstein quotes the player Peachy Kellmeyer saying, "Margaret represents everything Billie Jean hates, and Billie Jean represents everything Margaret despises." Forty years later, that doesn't appear to have changed much.

Is there something about the sport that creates polar opposites at the top of the rankings? In this book alone we see two of them, Court-King and Evert-Goolagong. Since then, there has been, to name a few, Borg-McEnroe, Evert-Navratilova, Sampras-Agassi, Serena-Sharapova, Nadal-Federer. Is this something unique to tennis, do you think? The sport does have a way of transforming attitudes toward life into styles of play—it makes sense that Billie Jean King would be an aggressive net-rusher and Chris Evert would be a careful baseliner. Or does this just prove that we're all different, and that you can take pretty much any two people, put them on either side of a net, and call them opposites?

As far as the WTA 1973 vs. the WTA 2013 goes, I think you have the basic differences right. In those days, the Slims had a pioneering, outlaw quality—its existence alone was exciting and new, a political statement of its own. Today, for better or worse, we're used to seeing women get paid well for competing at sports. The fact that it’s no big deal is a sign of success, but sometimes it can seem as if prize money is the WTA’s only success. The tour has made a few of its top players into wealthy superstars, part of the entertainment machine, but it hasn't led to a wholesale revolution in women's professional sports.

Yet when you listen to Billie Jean King talk in 1973, you have to believe that she would have considered this to be triumph nonetheless. The WTA is criticized today for overselling its players' sex appeal, but King was OK with sex appeal—she thought it was inevitable, and that anything that could attract people to tennis should be put to good use. She also always emphasized money; after her years as a starving amateur, she wanted the pro game to be as commercial as possible. Women getting paid to play sports—i.e., getting paid to work, like men—was an important part of the revolution to her. Before their match, Bobby Riggs said that if she couldn't beat an old man like him, "she didn't deserve half her dough." Proving that she and her fellow women players deserved their dough was another motivation for her.

When I look at Serena Williams now, I see a victory for Billie Jean King then. Serena isn't overtly political, or a spokesperson for women everywhere, but she doesn't need to be. Who doesn't respect her as an athlete?

Finally, there’s the question of game style: There was more variety in ’73 than today. I agree that variety is good for the sport, and that we need more of it now. On both the men’s and women’s sides, we need a talented young player to commit to being a serve-and-volleyer, with a one-handed backhand—done well, by the right man or woman, it can still work. Not allowing juniors to play up is an interesting idea, but whatever the rules, it requires one player, and one coach, to do it early and stick with it. One trailblazing player can enough: No top woman player, as we’re reminded in A Long Way, Baby, had used the two-handed backhand before Chris Evert; 40 years later, they all do. Now we’re looking for a Chrissie with a one-handed backhand.

*****

Hi Steve,

I think it's the rivalry that makes the contrast, more than the contrast making the rivalry. If Bob and Mike Bryan were facing each other in Grand Slam finals, we would probably somehow find a way to set them off against each other as well.

Generally any two people, examined closely, will be different enough from each other to be divided along some lines—offensive-defensive, introvert-extrovert, fiery-calm, and so on. And the tension and drama of big matches can intensify such differences till they seem like polar opposites. But there are some pairings that contrast more vividly than others, like Borg-McEnroe and, as we're seeing, King-Court. But what's remarkable is how their differences captured the larger social and political themes the tour itself was going through at that very time.

I'm not sure King thinks of the victory over Bobby Riggs in terms of her rivalry with Court in any significant way—the match was almost too big. Of course, King does say she was opposed to Court playing Riggs in the first place, and it was Court's loss that made her feel she had to face him as well.

But I think you're on to something—there is an impression that King resents Court for piling up titles while King's own energies were split among competing and fighting equality battles. And for not backing the breakaway tour but then taking the prize money it generated. (Court, for her part, said that she hadn't wanted a separate women's tour because she had a lot of friends among the guys and wanted to keep playing and travelling with them.)

In the end, however, King did win in the recognition stakes. You're right that Court's achievements are often underplayed—it's pointed out that 11 of her Grand Slam titles were at the Australian Open, which few top players played, and that somehow leads to dismissing the rest of what she did. But if it helps, there seems to be little question in Australia that she is the greatest, with Steffi Graf getting an occasional look in.

As far as the tour goes, the question of whether money was the achievement is a good one. I feel it must be more than that, but at the same time, money is often the first thing looked at—less money indicates inferiority. And the usual benchmark is the guys. The issue of men's tennis vs. women's tennis is a thorny one, and I won't get into it here (did I hear a phew?). But I think the women have benefited from being alongside the men, and the men have also benefited from being alongside the women—cramped practice courts notwithstanding. The idea was not to be separate but equal; it was to be separate to be equal.

Five years ago, I did an anniversary piece (their time has returned) on the ATP boycott and the formation of the WTA in 1973 that was titled "Declarations of Independence." Just as the men declared independence from the amateur establishment that sought to control them, the women declared independence from the male establishment that sought to pay them less. Showing that they could go out on their own, hold tournaments and draw crowds, was a step in demonstrating their value.

Declarations of independence have the convenience of being quick, but messy. A transition is more stable, but slower. Had the women stayed with the traditional tournaments and just campaigned for more money, they would probably have achieved increases, but the idea of equal prize money might still be a distant goal today. After all, it was just the size of the disparity—20 percent of the amount for the men, frequently—that drove the "outlaws" to the decision that they could do better on their own.

But striking out themselves and having some success, combined with the political atmosphere of the time and the galvanising effect of the Riggs match—it fused the idea of equal prize money with equality of the sexes. The U.S. Open moved to equal prize money in 1973, even before the Riggs match, a huge shift from just a few years earlier. That created a marker that eventually all the Slams would be held to, and now many combined events as well. The Slims tour forced the USTA to come up with more money for its women's events, and also demonstrated that a women's sport could be an economically viable enterprise. Their payments were no longer something given, but earned. The organizers and players (it wasn't just the players) took a risk, but it paid off. It's hard to believe that any of this could have been done as quickly if the tour had not been established.

As King and Lichenstein both had occasion to say, "It's not the money. It's the respect."

Podcast: Offseason Chatter

Thu, 05 Dec 2013 08:32:00 -0500

40 Years Ago: Lady Outlaws

Wed, 04 Dec 2013 08:47:00 -0500

This week I'm going back 40 years, to tennis in the tumultuous year of 1973. On Monday I wrote about the men's boycott at Wimbledon; yesterday I covered Arthur Ashe's trip to South Africa. Today we switch to the women, who were going through their own tennis revolution that season. It was the year of the Mother's Day Massacre, the Battle of the Sexes, the formation of the WTA, and the dawn of equal pay at the U.S. Open.

All of that and more is covered in A Long Way, Baby, a book by New York Times reporter Grace Lichtenstein, who followed the women's circuit(s) in 1973. In this post, and one later today, I'll talk about that book, and the WTA then and now, with Tennis Journal editor Kamakshi Tandon.

(You can read part two here.)

*****

Kamakshi,

My first thought on reading A Long Way, Baby was: How could I have not picked this up this before? It tells the tale of the women's game in 1973, a seminal tennis year that I've researched for my own tennis book and dozens of posts and articles in the past. The oversight couldn't be another manifestation of the sexism in sports that's one of the themes of Long Way, could it?

Whatever the reason, I'm glad I've read it now, because it's entertaining and historically important—I'd put it somewhere in my Top 10 tennis books. Lichtenstein's writing is smart but never slow, left-leaning but not sanctimonious, a product of the feminist moment of the time, yet not dated. A writer for the New York Times and a total tennis outsider, Lichtenstein followed the women's tour for a season—quite a season it was, too. In '73, Billie Jean King beat Bobby Riggs and started the WTA; Margaret Court won three of the four majors but lost the Mother's Day Massacre, and Chris Evert saw her profile rise as a player and star. The sport was hitting its stride, and the women's version of it was breaking through.

Yet the women remained split into two tours in '73—the game's professional future still had to contend with its amateurish past. King and Court led the independent Virginia Slims circuit, while Evonne Goolagong and Evert, who was still a conservative teenager who traveled with her mom, were the marquee names on a tour that had been created by the USLTA. By '73, the U.S. federation, rapidly losing control of the sport it had run for nearly a century, knew it couldn't beat the pros, so it tried to join them.

Lichtenstein travels with both groups. She says the Slims had the feel a professional theatre troupe, while the USTA circuit reminded her of summer camp. She hangs out with all of the players, famous and less so, and we get a glimpse of all of their lives and personalities, as filtered through her somewhat sardonic 70s New Yorker's viewpoint. As an outsider—she didn't know how to keep score when she started the book—Lichtenstein was able to make that viewpoint an honest one, and more critical than I anticipated. She writes that "nobody in the world credited Evonne Goolagong with an excessive IQ." She mocks 16-year-old USLTA newbie Martina Navratilova's accent and penchant for junk food; she's the "pancake champ" who gains so much weight on tour that she has to get all new clothes, right down to her sneakers. Lichtenstein takes a long, cool look at Margaret Court and says to herself, "You're dull." And while the reviews of Billie Jean are mostly glowing, Lichtenstein isn't afraid to call her an "egotist" and describe her, in the days leading up to the Riggs match, as "acting like a paranoid bitch." Yet Lichtenstein always seems fair in her assessments, as well as psychologically insightful.

What did you think? Had you read the book before? I'll send this conversation to you with a question, the obvious question, really: After seeing this view of the founding days of the WTA, how do you think today's version matches up?

I was struck by how much importance Lichtenstein attached to women's tennis at that time—it was, in her's and BJK's minds, nothing less than the feminist movement made physical, made visual. I wonder if any professional tour in any sport has ever begun with so much political hope and baggage attached? For a progressive person like Lichtenstein, it was far more than a game, or a business, or a show. The Slims was proof that women could operate and succeed independently. Throughout the book, there's a sense that she's still a little stunned to see the whole enterprise happening, to see her fellow women doing what, until then, men had only done: negotiating endorsements, working out with a trainer, hanging out in a locker room together. All of these things, of course, are completely normal to us now—a long way, for sure.

How did you like the book, Kamakshi, and what do you think of the WTA then compared to now?

*****

Hi Steve,

Funny you ask, because I've got a story about this book. I read it during the tournament in Toronto one year, a time when Martina Navratilova was in the midst of a doubles comeback. There was a quiet afternoon with no matches when she practiced in the stadium—seeing that it was a not-to-be-missed opportunity to watch the "Lejj" play up close, my brother and I made our way there and somehow slipped into seats right behind the court. She went up to net to hit some balls, and I may or may not have told him, "You're seeing one of the best volleys in history."

Afterwards, people gathered around and she signed autographs. I was already too high-and-mighty to get one, but my brother could. Since we didn't have anything else, I gave him the book. He handed her the beat-up paperback, open to the first page—she took it, flipped to the cover and looked up, probably puzzled to see a young boy in possession of it. "This is an old book," she said. 'Where did you get it?'

"It's my sister's," he replied (I like to think proudly).

So that's why I've got an autographed copy of A Long Way, Baby, though Martina only makes a limited appearance in it as a chubby but talented teenager eating junk food while wearing a T-shirt that reads, "I Can't Believe I Ate the Whole Thing."

Reading it again, I did pause early on when—like you—I came across the part where Lichtenstein talks about learning new terminology like "up a break. " This is the person who's going to be telling me what's going on?, I wondered. But it did at least make me feel like it was going to be an authentic account, and as a visitor she speaks more freely than a regular might have.

Her unvarnished accounts give you a sense, very quickly, of what these players were like, really like—the kind of account you get over drinks rather than the kind you read in a typical magazine profile. They may not be as complete, or as even-handed, but the insights can be more valuable. So Court is conservative, reserved, and gives boring interviews; but later, she also praises her younger rivals with a generosity that impresses Lichtenstein. Chris Evert is the type of person she doesn't expect to like, and tries not to like, but who turns out to be so exactly what she's supposed to be that she ends up liking her anyway. There's a sampling of Billie Jean's energy, both exhausting and inspiring. If Lichtenstein has a favorite, it's Rosie Casals, a cigar-smoking, brash-talking shotmaker who reads philosophers in her hotel room.

All these players of which you've heard, but never saw, are now a little more familiar. There are also parts that make you smile because you know something that came out later, or how things will turn out in ways they don't yet imagine. The Kings' relationship seems to be getting a little rocky? You've got no idea. Evert's soon going to give up tennis to keep house and Googlagong will quit after having a family? Yeah, right.

It's also nice to get a glimpse of some of the lower profile players, like Jeanne Evert and Julie Heldman, who turn out to be rather interesting in their own right. The descriptions are apt—we both know what it's like when a player's eyes switch off and recited answers start coming out—so it's easy to get the vibe between the players and the atmosphere at the different events.

What struck me—and I'd never realized this before—was how symbolic it was to have Court and King, so different in politics and personality, as the dual figureheads of women's tennis during this pivotal time. In a way, they represent many of the conflicts and contradictions that were inherent in the whole enterprise.

What might be interesting sometime is to compare A Long Way Baby, written about 1973, with other books about the women's tour, like Ladies of the Court around 1993, or Venus Envy from 2001, to see how issues and preoccupations change.

Many of the things Lichtenstein touches on are familiar—competing, pressure, winning, juggling school and the tour, losing, money, attendance, sponsors, contracts, traveling, hotels, locker rooms, friendships, guys, clothes, and the like. Sexual orientation gets a mention or two, but no one specifically. There's only one agent around, apart from family members who act for a few players. And there's the faintly scandalous rumor that Margaret Court—gasp—might have tried lifting weights.

But equally apparent are the things that aren't there—coaches, entourages, agents (plural), scheduling, doping, grunting (to think they made fun of Chrissie's yelps), training, gyms, travelling outside Europe and the US, players from outside Europe and the US, social media, naked or semi-naked photo shoots, designer this and that, clothing lines, candy lines...

A long way, indeed.

There are also a few things in the book that you don't see a lot of today—political awareness and activism, for one, and serve-volleying.

Some of the book's focus on feminism and sociopolitical issues may come more from the author than the tour. Lichtenstein does say many of the players weren't as interested in these topics as she would have liked; they were athletes first and women second. But it was also a time when players like King and Arthur Ashe were major political figures, for which there aren't really any equivalents today. Maybe it's just that circumstances have changed—the amount of disadvantage King and Ashe faced perhaps isn't there either.

The women of 1973 were outcasts, iconoclasts, while the women players of today are privileged professionals. Being a socially approved role model and doing charity work to help others is more the thing now.

What do you think—does that mean the effort was a success? What gains have the women made and have there been any setbacks? Is the women's game more respected now or was it then? Like the women's movement in general, it can be hard to draw a straight line.

On the issue of playing styles, it was a different game back then and probably not that arresting when seen today. Still, the accounts of Court's gigantic arm swinging up to hit a volley did make me long for a bit more of that. While I enjoy watching Serena Williams and Victoria Azarenka, the amount of variety seems to have receded a lot even in the past few years.

Carlos Rodriguez had a lot to say about this at Wimbledon—it's good to do interviews where the person gets going on something that's important to them—essentially arguing that if it was up to him, he would introduce different age categories (U-16s, U-14s, etc.) and not allow players to play up. What happens, he felt, is that talented players move up and face bigger, stronger players, and all they can do is try to get the ball back and generate power themselves—they don't have time to "create." Justine Henin was constantly described as very talented—yes, yes, she is talented, Rodriguez said a little impatiently, but she had to develop that talent through co-ordination drills and exercises. He sees a lot of young talented players, but forcing them to progress quickly to attract sponsors means they don't have time to build their skills before they get on the tour.

So that's the opinion of the guy who took Henin from juniors to No. 1. More qualified than mine, anyway (or Patrick Mouratoglou, for that matter), but see what what you make of it. However it's done, though, we could do with a few more players who play like Justine—or King, or Court, or Navratilova.

(You can read part two here.)

Reading the Readers: Dec. 3

Tue, 03 Dec 2013 19:07:00 -0500

It’s the off-season for the players, but not for the readers. Here are a few questions and answers for your tennis down time. If you have your own question or comment for this column, please email me at stignor@tennismagazine.com.

*****

Steve,

Don’t you think it’s wrong for the players to complain that the season is too long, and then, when they do have time off, to play exhibitions?—Simon

No, I don’t think it’s wrong. From a physical standpoint, mental standpoint, and any other standpoint, exhibitions are not like tournaments; they’re not even like tour matches. They’re something like practice sets, and you wouldn’t think it was wrong for a player to get in a practice set during the off-season, would you?

I’m going to assume you’re referring to Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, who embarked on a short tour of Chile and Argentina after finally finishing their long 2013 season. Now, if they had slogged through six weeks together, I would have said it was dumb and greedy. But they got their hits and giggles in quickly, fans saw a few cool shots of them on a glacier, and now we both have December to rest. Like Roger Federer last year, Rafa and Novak had a chance to play for tennis fans in South America, a place they rarely go. And while someone like Nadal may be set for life, I’m not going to tell anyone to turn down the $10 million he reportedly received to play four exhibitions.

I’m in favor of a significant off-season, not for the players’ sake, but for the game’s. It gives fans a chance to miss the sport, and savor it more when it does return. And I think it helps people understand what’s going on when there are individual seasons, with definite breaks in between, rather than one long, rolling, never-ending blur of results.

You might say: I’d still rather have tennis to watch in December than no tennis to watch in December. I’d answer that the lack of it this month will make me enjoy it more when it comes back around next month. Anticipation is a big part of the pleasure of everything.

*****

What is your projected Top 10 for the men next year?—Jamie

I will agree to play this game only if you agree to remember two things:

(1) I have no idea what’s going to happen in 2014.

(2) If I say that your favorite player will not finish as high as you would like your favorite player to finish, this does not mean that I “hate” your favorite player.

That said:

1. Novak Djokovic

2. Rafael Nadal

3. Andy Murray

4. Juan Martin del Potro

5. Roger Federer

6. David Ferrer

7. Tomas Berdych

8. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

9. Milos Raonic

10. Stanislas Wawrinka

I realize that I’m not going out on any limbs here, but if there's one thing that all prognosticators know about men's tennis these days, it's that limbs have gotten very flimsy.

*****

Can you compare what happened during Saturday's Iron Bowl—the college football game between arch-rivals Auburn and Alabama—with anything you've seen in tennis? What about the 2008 Wimbledon final between Roger and Rafa? That match didn't have a sudden, crazy ending, but it had everything else: A longtime, established champion (Federer/Alabama) against an insurgent rival (Nadal/Auburn); momentum swings (Federer saves match points in the fourth-set tiebreaker; Alabama QB A.J. McCarron throws a 99-yard touchdown pass), a time late in the match where we probably thought the favorite would quash the underdog's hopes. Plus, tons of drama, and a great crowd.—E.J. McAnuel

I was thinking about that when the Auburn-Alabama game was over. It seemed to me like the greatest football game I had ever seen, and I was trying to come up with comparable moments from other sports. Nadal-Wimbledon ’08 is about as close as it gets in this era of tennis for me, for all of the reasons you said.

The thing that was different, and that’s different about tennis and football, was the end. In tennis, you can’t have a freak finish like that. One player has to get to match point before he or she wins the match. Auburn, by running back a missed field goal with one second left, essentially won on Alabama’s match point—that adds a level of stunned, berserk, the world-just-turned-upside down bedlam to the celebration. But I guess Nadal beating Federer at Wimbledon in '08 did have some of that feeling, too.

It’s a cliché, but this year’s Iron Bowl was why we watch sports. I saw it with two other people in the room, and we all started climbing out of our seats, eyes bulging, hands gripping our armrests, as the play unfolded and the impossible suddenly became possible. It took a second to realize that this could be the end of the game, that Auburn could win, and, most incredible of all, that Alabama, and Nick Saban, could lose.

My favorite part was the radio call by Auburn’s announcer, Rod Bramblett, which is already legendary—how many college football radio commentators become household names? Even better, though, may have been the contribution of his unnamed partner in the booth. When the runner, Chris Davis, breaks free, and there’s no one between him and the goal line, Bramblett’s co-commentator blurts, happily and helplessly, “Oh my God!”

It was, involuntarily, perfect. He was speaking for all of us.

40 Years Ago: Gentleman Rebel

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 20:11:00 -0500

It's 1973 week at TENNIS.com. Each day I’m recounting an important event from that revolutionary year in tennis, and in American life. Yesterday it was the ATP’s Wimbledon boycott, in which Arthur Ashe was a key participant. Today it’s Ashe’s trip later that year to play in apartheid South Africa. (If you have a sense of déjà vu as you read, it's probably because I told this tale, in a slightly different way, last year.)

*****

“Yes, master.”

When Arthur Ashe heard the maid at the mansion he was visiting in Johannesburg say those two words to him, he stopped in his tracks: “For the love of God,” he thought.

It was November 1973, and Ashe was fulfilling a long-held dream by traveling to South Africa to become the first black man to play in that country’s national tennis tournament. Why would an African-American want to visit the apartheid state? It was two months after the Battle of the Sexes in Houston, and he was following in the footsteps of his friend Billie Jean King by trying to use tennis to inspire social change. King and Ashe were born five months apart in 1943, and their lives had been upended by the same two revolutions: The 1960s, and Open tennis. They believed the world could be changed because they had seen their own worlds change so drastically.

But where King was confrontational, Ashe was cool—a gentleman rebel from Virginia. Black political groups in the U.S. tried to persuade him not to make the trip to South Africa; they believed that the government was using Ashe to make it look humane and reasonable. Ashe, by contrast, believed that the sight of a free black man competing with whites, and beating them, would offer hope. It would also expose the hypocrisy of the regime: Why, a black South African might wonder while watching Ashe play, am I not good enough to be allowed to do the same thing? If the Wimbledon boycott was the tennis equivalent of Nixon ending the military draft in 1973, Ashe’s South African tour was analogous to Tricky Dick’s boundary-breaking trip to communist China the previous year. Except, of course, for the small detail that Arthur Ashe was nothing like Richard Nixon. Ashe took everything in while he was there; in his 1973 tour diary, Portrait in Motion, with Frank DeFord, he recounted his experiences in some of the most thoughtful prose ever written by an athlete.

Ashe spent the week of the South African Open in a state of wonder and fear at the sinister, ever-paradoxical nature of apartheid. He found, to his own amazement, that he was pleased to see “Whites Only” signs at public bathrooms in Johannesburg. If he hadn’t, Ashe said, it would have been like going to Paris and not catching a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower. One day Ashe was followed by a young boy as he walked in the city. When he finally asked him what he was doing, the boy said that he had never seen a free black man. On another afternoon, though, Ashe was followed in a very different way. As he rode in a car, he realized that the government was having him tailed. One South African player, Cliff Drysdale, agreed with Ashe’s anti-government stance, while another, Bob Hewitt, said that he should mind his own business because under apartheid the blacks of South Africa were “happy.”

Ashe ended up playing, and beating, both Drysdale and Hewitt in the South African Open that year. The American was the crowd favorite both times; his trip was a sensation in the country, each of his matches a tennis Super Bowl, and he ended up reaching the final in both singles and doubles. The black fans—or “nonwhites,” as they were known in the totalitarian vernacular there—were so enthusiastic that Ashe had to tell them to quiet down and not cheer the errors of his opponent in the final, Jimmy Connors. Ashe demanded that the normally segregated seating at the tournament be integrated while he played, but that was beyond even his star powers. Whites watched him from up close; non-whites from afar.

Still, the trip was a success, and even some of those who had told Ashe to stay away were converted. His presence, according to one black figure in South Africa, was “an inspiration—and a challenge.” Did it help change anything, the way Ashe hoped it would? Well, consider this: In 2008, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga won the South African Open in Johannesburg. Tsonga’s father is a black African. His victory, which would have been unthinkable three decades earlier, barely made the news. The twin universes of sports and culture were up for grabs in 1973. Tennis should be proud that it had two players like Arthur Ashe and Billie Jean King who were brave enough to do some of the grabbing. You know you’ve succeeded as rebels when nobody even notices what you changed.

Yet like the Wimbledon boycott, Ashe’s trip also ended up being a triumph for his sometime-enemy of the future, Connors. At the All England Club that year, the 20-year-old Jimbo took advantage of the absence of 80 ATP members to reach his first Grand Slam quarterfinal. In Johannesburg, along with beating Ashe in the final, Connors got engaged to the winner of the women’s singles title that week, Chris Evert. In some ways, while they would both win Wimbledon again, after '73 King and Ashe would be players from the game's past, transformational figures who took their fight for freedom in tennis to the world stage. The bright, clear, free, and prosperous future that they opened up would belong to the game's new co-stars, Jimmy and Chrissie. King and Ashe were political so Connors and Evert didn't have to be.

40 Years Ago: Ending the Draft

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 10:30:00 -0500

To historians of the American psyche, 1973 is known as the Year of the Nervous Breakdown. Rock critic Lester Bangs coined the term that summer, when he used the title “1973 Nervous Breakdown” for his review of a Rolling Stones record. Three decades later, author Andreas Killen borrowed the phrase for his book about the year as a whole. Does “breakdown” sound a little grim, or a little exaggerated? Maybe not, if you consider the series of world-changing, and often anxiety-producing, events that the nation endured during those 12 months.

In January ’73, the Supreme Court legalized abortion; the verdict in Roe v. Wade marked the high tide of that era’s liberal movement, and kicked off the left-vs.-right culture wars that are still with us today. A few months later, President Richard Nixon ended the military draft; by the close of the year he had ceased hostilities, and all but admitted defeat, in Vietnam. With that, the most polarizing issue of the previous decade was over, but there were new ones to take its place. Over the summer, the first oil crisis stalled U.S. drivers and put an end to the country’s two-decade economic boom. By the fall, Americans were watching their president’s excruciating demise as the Watergate hearings unfolded, live on TV, night after night. All the rugs of society had been pulled out from under the country at once.

You might think, with so many serious developments in the news, that something as trivial as tennis would have had a hard time making a mark. Instead, the sport followed the world’s lead and produced its own year-long series of momentous events. Tennis was, in many ways, the perfect sport for the moment. As the political ideals of the 60s splintered into the narcissistic concerns of the Me Decade ’70s, Americans took up individual sports in larger numbers than ever—the tennis boom began just as the country’s economic boom was sputtering to a close. Between 1970 and 1974, participation in the U.S. went from 10 million to 30 million.

Even as the U.S. appeared to be in terminal decline in ’73, tennis was riding a wave of newfound popularity and influence, as well as experiencing its own 60-style revolutionary moment. After years of stagnating behind the high walls of its country clubs, the “secret sport,” as Bud Collins dubbed it in during its amateur days, spent the early 70s playing cultural catch-up. In ’73, it would take its place at the center of that rapidly changing culture. It was the year when this individual sport was finally taken over by its individuals.

In 1973, the ATP led a boycott of Wimbledon and created its own computer rankings; Billie Jean King formed the WTA and beat Bobby Riggs in the Battle of the Sexes; Arthur Ashe defied his critics and played in apartheid South Africa; and, in a last hurrah for the amateur era, Australia won the Davis Cup with what has been called the best team ever, even as its old captain, Harry Hopman, moved on to coach the game’s next prodigy in New York. This week, beginning with the Wimbledon boycott, I’ll look at one of those events each day. (To see my write-up of the Battle of the Sexes, go here.)

*****

“Jack, we have a little problem.”

This was how Philippe Chatrier, the tournament director of the French Open, greeted Jack Kramer, the head of the men’s players’ union, when the American flew to Paris to visit him in June 1973. Chatrier’s words almost certainly qualified as the understatement of the season. His “little problem” was in reality the tennis equivalent of a world war. But Chatrier was an old-guard amateur official, and like the rest of his ilk, he had no idea how big that problem was about to get.

The men’s game was in the midst of what the press had dubbed the Pilic Affair. It began, as world wars sometimes do, as a small personal conflict in an obscure corner of Eastern Europe. Niki Pilic (pictured above right) was a highly ranked Yugoslavian player; his uncle, General Dusan Kovac, was the head of the country’s tennis federation. Uncle asked nephew to play Davis Cup for Yugoslavia. The nephew’s answer would change the governing structure of tennis forever.

For 60 years, since the advent of international competition, the world’s best players had chafed under the control of their federations. If they wanted to enter a Grand Slam or be selected for Davis Cup, which in those days was more prestigious than the majors, they had to remain in the good graces of the often-tyrannical federation officials. It was fitting that Pilic’s uncle was also a General, because there was a military quality to amateur tennis, with the players serving as (unpaid) foot soldiers for their nations. If they didn’t follow orders, they didn’t get to compete.

By 1973, though, the soldiers finally had an alternative. With the rise of the professional game five years earlier, many of the top men had signed contracts with tour promoters. That included Pilic, who was obligated to participate in a professional doubles event in Montreal the same weekend as Yugoslavia’s Davis Cup tie. This scheduling conflict, as mundane as it seemed on the surface, represented a collision between the sport’s old dictators and its new capitalists—one of them, either the past or the future, would have to give. Pilic chose the capitalists, and the future: He skipped Davis Cup for the doubles tournament. His uncle, still living in the past, promptly suspended him for nine months from all events run by the amateur governing body, the International Lawn Tennis Federation. That included Davis Cup and the Grand Slams.

In previous years, a player would have had to suffer these consequences in silence. But in the fall of 1972 the men had, for the first time, formed a union, called the ATP. “Player Power,” an echo of the 1960s slogan “People Power,” was in the air on tour in those days. Pilic was hardly the most popular pro, and he was the farthest thing from a progressive. As the British journalist Richard Evans wrote in his essential book on the subject, Open Tennis, the Yugoslavian regularly lectured other players on how “the wife is supposed to serve the husband”; and Pilic's solution to the drug problem was to shoot the pushers first and ask questions later. But the union stood by him nonetheless. To the shock of the game’s old guard, 80 men, including the two most recent champions, Stan Smith and John Newcombe, agreed to boycott Wimbledon if Pilic wasn’t allowed to compete in the tournament with them. (It was only men, too; according to Billie Jean King, the ATP ignored her call to join forces.)

Neither side blinked. Wimbledon upheld Pilic’s suspension, and the players, with Kramer leading the way, walked. The British press supported its beloved tournament, and accused the young pros of greed. “STUPID! THE MONEY MAD STARS OF TENNIS” one headline screamed. But money wasn’t the issue; freedom and control were. Once it was obvious to the amateur officials that the players were willing to give up their ultimate dream, a chance to play Wimbledon, for the sake of another union member, the jig was up. From then on, the players would have the power.

Tennis wasn’t alone in this shift: The world was moving away from old ideals of nationalism and duty, and toward individual choice. Most prominently, in the spring of 1973, President Nixon ended the military draft in the United States; a month later, the Pilic Affair did the same for tennis. A country’s federation would no longer be able to draft its players into service.

While the pros were lambasted as ungrateful money grubbers at the time, their unified stand marked the beginning of a union that is still intact today, and which has helped bring its members astronomical gains in earnings over the last four decades. The Wimbledon boycott was also an accidental marketing coup. With the top men out, two floppy-haired youngsters with newfangled double-handed backhands made breakout runs to the quarterfinals, and caught the eyes of fans along the way. Their names were Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors. The boom had begun.

Playing Ball: Thanks for the Lesson

Fri, 29 Nov 2013 14:42:00 -0500

It’s Thanksgiving weekend here in the States. The trip to the city where I grew up in Pennsylvania brought back the memory of an old tennis opponent.

*****

Anytime I saw Joe, anywhere in town, I knew what I was going to hear. Whether it was at the tennis courts where we played, or inside the Dunkin’ Donuts where he loved to shoot the breeze, or on his front porch as I walked past, he always greeted me with the same four words:

“You’re duckin’ me, lad.”

Every so often, I’d be stopped at a red light, and I’d see Joe’s car stopped at the same light across the street. Both of us would nod and try not to smile. We knew what was coming. As our cars passed each other in the intersection, he’d slow down, lean his shock of black hair out the window, and let me know, in case I’d forgotten, “You’re duckin’ me, lad.”

We might have played each other the previous weekend, or even the the day before, but Joe had his own idea of what “ducking”—i.e., running scared—meant, and which one of us was doing the running. Basically, any time we weren’t on the court, it meant I was trying to avoid taking a beating from him. The line never failed to make me laugh, and I’m sure that’s why he said it.

Joe had his own ideas about tennis in general. For one, he hated the serve and cursed its unknown inventor whenever he got the chance. Where was the stamina, where was the skill, where was the toughness, where was the manliness in winning a point with one shot? For Joe, tennis was a test of will, fought with forehands and backhands, with your legs and your lungs. The longer the war went on, and the more running that was involved, the truer the test was. “The baseline game, lad,” he told me whenever I suggested we play a set, “that’s real tennis.” We’d play to 21, but he would have had the game go to 100 if I’d agreed.

This was a warrior’s philosophy, and a noble one. Yet Joe admitted that there was a hint of self-interest in it as well. You see, he had no serve, and most of the guys he played did. It was the 1980s, a time when good recreational players still served-and-volleyed and chipped-and-charged. The best of them tended to be long and lean; with a nice kicker, a few smooth strides forward, and some old-fashioned skills at the net, they made the baseline a dangerous place for their opponents to stay. I wasn’t a net-rusher, but I could win a point with my lefty serve. Whenever I sliced an unreturnable ball to Joe on a big point, he’d throw his hands up, as if it just wasn’t fair.

Joe wasn’t long and lean, and he couldn’t get to the net in a few smooth strides. He was short and muscular, a fast-stepping, spiky-haired bantam rooster of an athlete who, if he could help it, never wore a shirt or socks when he played. He wasn’t a doctor or lawyer or banker, and it was hard to imagine him in the dining room at the local country club. When he was young, he had been a body-builder, and as far as I know his tennis game was self-taught. His strokes were plain and simple, straight back and straight forward, without an inch of extra backswing or follow through—not much could go wrong with them. He didn't get topspin on his shots, but he rarely missed and was never tired. Joe wasn’t elegant, but what did that mean when you were in a war?

When Joe did miss, though, you knew it. Everyone within earshot knew it. He was famous around town for his volcanic temper—and volcanic is the only word for it. A few errors and he would his clench his fists until it looked he might pop a vein. A few more misses and the oaths, seemingly inspired by the Catholic church services of his youth, would start to flow. When he screamed “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” at the top of his lungs, you knew things weren’t going his way. One match of ours ended with Joe grabbing the chain-link fence at the side of the court and shaking it until I thought it might rip out of the earth. Another time, he walked off after smashing his racquet into a Pac-Man like triangle at the top.

Some people were surprised when they saw us playing. Our games, personalities, ages—none of them matched. But while he had never taken a lesson, and I had taken a hundred, Joe taught me a lot about winning at tennis. Mainly, he taught me that it wasn’t about shot-making; it was about everything else. When he hung with me in a baseline game, I wondered how it could possibly be happening. My shots were smoother, I hit deeper and with more spin, I was taller and younger. Yet I couldn’t shake the guy. And he loved it. When Joe would beat me, he would strut to the bench on the sideline, point his racquet across the net, and cry, “I GOT you, lad!”

As you might guess, he liked to play when it was hot. The hotter, the better. August was his month. I, on the other hand, didn’t like the heat, which was all the more reason for Joe not to let me duck him. One humid summer day, he ran me around long enough that I got dizzy. By the end of our baseline game, I was losing points as quickly as I could. After it was finally over, I dropped straight down on the court. I remember looking up and seeing Joe on the sideline bench. He had his head thrown back, and he was laughing.

I couldn’t help, when I finally caught my breath, laughing with him. It was all part of the game, of course, and Joe was right—I needed to get in better shape. Afterward, he gave me a ride home. He put the air conditioner on full blast and the music at top volume, and played the song he always played: "Gold," by John Stewart (the 70s pop singer, not the Daily Show comedian). I have no idea why he loved it, but it was his soundtrack.

“People out there turning music into gold,” is the refrain. Joe sang along with it, and with every word of the song, as he pounded his knee to the beat. I sat in the passenger with my head lolled back. When I got out and started staggering up my driveway, he leaned out his window and said, perhaps with a wink, “Nice try, lad. Don’t worry, I’ll give you another chance. I don't duck people.”

Thanks, Joe, for making it tough, and making it fun.

The Year in Phrases

Wed, 27 Nov 2013 13:54:00 -0500

So far we’ve discussed, among other things, the players, matches, points, disappointments, and train wrecks of the year on this web site. But what about its phrases? In the age of social media, the players' most memorable bursts, and outbursts, of words become a linguistic shorthand for fans. I mean, where would be without #trymybest, or #suddenfatigue, or #shutup?

Unfortunately, I had trouble remembering many hashtag-ready lines from 2013—I’m guessing Li Na must have given us a few pieces of comic wisdom along the way, but I can’t find them now. A small survey turned up the 10 phrases below that, at least for a time, took on a life of their own this year. If you recall more of them than I do, please share. Together, they tell the tale of the season as well as anything else.

****

“Imagine playing it”

Leave it to a Brit to come up with something droll in his moment of triumph. Murray’s Wimbledon win made him immortal in the U.K., but it was this line, about the insane final game he had to survive against Novak Djokovic, that was still being shown on ESPN when I got back to the States two days after the match. “Imagine playing it”: Nothing more needed to be said.

*****

“I just felt a little bit overwhelmed”

This was Victoria Azarenka’s first answer when she was asked why she had called the trainer, and eventually left the court for 10 minutes, after squandering five match points against Sloane Stephens in the semifinals at the Australian Open.

The better quote from Vika after the match is probably, “I almost did the choke of the year.” And the most memorable line of all from the incident was the assertion from Stephens' coach, David Nainkin, that Azarenka had been “cheating within the rules.” But “overwhelmed” is the word that made Azarenka look especially bad, as if she had taken a break simply because she was gagging.

For the record, again, I think Vika was guilty of not being sufficiently aware of (1) how her timeout would affect her opponent, and (2) how it would be perceived by fans and press. But I don’t think she faked an injury.

*****

“For me, all four of them are boring players”

Ernests Gulbis stunned the tennis world when he uttered these impolitic words about the sainted Big 4. On the one hand, he was right: Most of the answers you get from Nadal, Federer, Djokovic, and Murray are predictable and routine. On the other hand, Gulbis was wrong: Their answers are dull on purpose; like any tennis player, the Big 4 get paid to win, and creating controversy doesn’t help them do that.

Which is exactly why we need guys like...Ernests Gulbis.

*****

“Well, if he gets that far”

Bernard Tomic has never beaten Roger Federer; in fact, he’s only taken one set in their four matches. But that doesn’t stop him from trying to get in the Maestro's head. Bernie said the above words when he was asked, before the Australian Open, about his potential third-round match against Federer. At the time, Tomic was riding high after winning his first ATP title, in Sydney. He wouldn’t ride high much longer. Federer did indeed make it to the third round, where he beat Tomic in straights. It was mostly downhill for the Aussie after that. As the year went on, his traveling team was revealed as bizarrely dysfunctional, and his father was banned from the tour. Perhaps worse, despite Tomic’s enduringly weird game, he began to look less like a “genius” and more like just an OK pro.

*****

“It is the case, there is no space”

Outburst of the Year was a tough call: How can you choose between Jerzy Janowicz’s “How many times?” rant in Oz, and Troicki’s Johnny Cochran-esque “space” tirade in Rome? They were both classics that put tennis in the mainstream sports headlines for a day. Here's the latter:

But Troicki’s version, and the attention it got, may have been the more costly adventure. According to the judges in his ITF doping case, Troicki “came across to us as someone prone to exaggeration to make his point.” As in, perhaps, telling an umpire that you can see a ball mark from space? That’s not the type of thing that’s going to make you look especially rational or level-headed.

Troicki’s rant in Rome took place after he had refused a blood test in Monte Carlo, and before his tribunal hearing in London. You have to think the judges caught his act at some point.

*****

“Cool parties”

“There are people," Serena Williams told Rolling Stone, "who live, breathe, and dress tennis. I mean seriously, give it a rest. She begins every interview with ‘I’m so happy, I’m so lucky'—it’s so boring. She’s still not going to be invited to the cool parties. And hey, if she wants to be with the guy with a black heart, go for it.”

“She,” it was assumed, was Maria Sharapova, and Mr. Black Heart was her boyfriend, Grigor Dimitrov, whom Serena was rumored to have dated the year before. (Though my first reaction was that Serena was talking about Victoria Azarenka and her boyfriend, RedFoo.)

In any event, Sharapova thought the words were aimed at her, so at Wimbledon she aimed a few back at Serena, and her “boyfriend that was married and is getting a divorce and has kids.”

By that point, the whole thing had ceased to be any kind of fun—if there were a Saddest Spat of the Year category, this would be the landslide winner. Thankfully, Serena apologized and the public war of words ended there.

*****

“Listen, you are never going to be, you know, a looker”

These were also sad words, and also uttered at Wimbledon, by the BBC’s John Inverdale. He was, for some reason, trying to imagine what Marion Bartoli’s father told her when she was young, to motivate her to become a better player.

Yet this story of cretinism had its silver linings. First, there was the backlash against Inverdale, which was intense, especially after his lame initial apology, in which he claimed he had just been trying to, you know, “poke fun, in a nice way, about how she looks.”

Then there was the retort from Marion’s father, Walter. “The relationship between Marion and me has always been unbelievable,” he said, “so I don’t know what this reporter is talking about...She’s my beautiful daughter.”

Finally, and best of all, there were Bartoli’s words: “Have a I dreamt about having a model contract? No, I’m sorry. But have I dreamed about winning Wimbledon? Absolutely, yes.”

She was on her game that week.

*****

“They left the Ferrari in the garage”

Radek Stepanek spoke these words after his Czech team beat the Serbs for the Davis Cup title. The “Ferrari” in question was Novak Djokovic, and the “garage” was the sidelines, which is where an absent Djokovic sat while his teammates lost the crucial doubles rubber to the Czechs. The Serbs didn’t appreciate the critique, and in their defense it was a tough call for a number of reasons. They needed Djokovic, who was coming off two straight weeks of tennis, to be fresh enough to win both singles matches; he’s hardly the world’s best doubles player; and the team they did send out there, Zimonjic and Bozoljac, had beaten the Bryan brothers in an earlier tie this year. In the end, though, Berdych and Stepanek played all three days, and they’re the champs again.

*****

“The story of my life”

What is the story of Roger Federer’s life? According to him, after he lost to Tommy Robredo at the U.S. Open, it goes like this: “When I lose, people are shellshocked to see me play this way...But there’s no doubt about it, I’m trying hard out there to make it work. Sometimes it just doesn’t happen.”

What he meant was, when he wins, we say, "Federer makes it all look so effortless." And when he loses, we say that...Federer makes it all look so effortless. As in, was he even trying?

*****

“I made you”

Now we come to my favorite tweet and quote of the year: Serena Williams’ (probable) message to Sloane Stephens after their match at the Australian Open. Serena’s loss was Sloane’s gain that day. And judging by way Serena beat her when they played again at the U.S. Open, she’s never going to let her forget it.

I made you.
— Serena Williams (@serenawilliams) January 26, 2013

Players of the Year: Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal

Sun, 24 Nov 2013 09:47:00 -0500

With the 2013 tennis season in the past, it's time to dole out our annual awards. Look for the winners—for better or worse—throughout this week on TENNIS.com. (To see what's been unveiled thus far, click here.)

Serena Williams: “I can’t say it’s the best season. I can’t say it’s not the best.”

That’s how Serena Williams assessed her 2013, and coming from her, it’s high praise. Maybe only she could look at a year in which she went 78-4, won 11 titles—including two Grand Slams—vanquished all “rivals,” and finished No. 1 and say that it might not have been the finest of her career.

For the record, we can safely put it in her Top 3. In 2002, Serena won three Grand Slams, eight titles, and went 56-5. In 2012, she won two Slams and an Olympic gold medal in singles. But what made 2013 special was how thorough she was.

Serena, at 32, played and won more matches than she had in any of her 15 previous seasons. She knew it was a risk. “It could have been the secret to my success,” she told CNN recently, “or the secret to my demise.” She almost didn’t reach the finish line. Williams said she “hit a wall” the morning of match No. 81, her semifinal against Jelena Jankovic at the WTA championships in Istanbul. Yet she walked through that wall and won the tournament anyway.

The most common observation about Serena’s latest surge is that her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, has made her a more motivated and consistent player. There’s no question he has helped, but it isn’t true that, as CNN put it, he “rescued” her after her first-round defeat to Virginie Razzano in Paris in 2012. It should be remembered that Serena was already back on the rise that spring, before she began to work with the Frenchman in earnest. What made her loss to Razzano especially shocking was that she had gone 15-1 on clay that spring.

Since that match, Serena is 109-5. Mouratoglou has been a source of calm, positive energy and has assisted in rounding out her game, but tennis is never, when it comes down to it during a match, a team effort. Her statistics aside, I thought Serena’s 2013 was memorable for two reasons, each of which showed that even among tennis champions, she's unique.

First, she conquered herself. In 2002-03, when she won her Serena Slam at age 21, she played with the fearless, seemingly nerveless abandon of youth. In 2013, at age 32, Serena was equally dominant, but she was also vulnerable. She won so easily that any hiccup could make it feel like disaster was around the corner. And sometimes it was: Surely her biggest regret is that two of her four losses came at the Grand Slams, to Sloane Stephens in Melbourne and Sabine Lisicki at Wimbledon. But more often she overcame her nerves. Serena struggled mightily with them against Victoria Azarenka in the U.S. Open final and Svetlana Kuznetsova in the quarterfinals at the French Open, yet both times she gathered herself, reined in her game, and eventually won the tournament. Those wins were all the more impressive because they weren’t dominant.

Finally, Serena showed that rarest of champion’s abilities: To be No. 1, and stay No. 1. Most players, even the best players, are at their best when they’re the hunter rather than the hunted. In 2013, Serena began at the top, took on all challengers, and sent them tumbling back down the mountain. After her loss to Serena in the French Open final, Maria Sharapova won one more match in 2013. After her loss to Serena at Flushing Meadows, Azarenka went 1-4 for the rest of the year. Serena finished by fending off the last contender, Li Na, with a willful, imperfect, three-set flourish in Istanbul. It wasn't easy, but the final set was still 6-0.

It may or may not have been her best season of all, but in 2013 Serena Williams walked through walls, both mental and physical. She was vulnerable, yet unbeatable. You can’t coach that.

—Steve Tignor

*****

Rafael Nadal: Thank God for Novak Djokovic. Were it not for his ability to make Rafael Nadal uncomfortable we might be tempted to run Rafa clear out of the game, or perhaps even accuse him of practicing sorcery and burn him at the stake. His entire career seemed to be in jeopardy as recently as February, and yet—poof!—here he stands 10 months later, No. 1 in the world again.

A year ago, Nadal was still tending to his chronically aching knees. Perhaps he was wondering if he should take the civil service exam, or enroll in Mallorca’s police academy if his 2013 comeback didn’t work out. He need not have worried. He spotted his rivals a month’s head start and ended up completing one of the best years in tennis history. Nadal won two of the three Grand Slam events he played (defeating Djokovic in both tournaments) as well as an additional, mind-boggling, eight titles; overall he won 75 out of 82 matches.

I guess that comeback worked out okay, eh Rafa?

Nadal was so dominant that it’s not worth the bother ticking off the highs because there was just one significant low—his first-round loss to Steve Darcis at Wimbledon (one of our Upsets of the Year). That outlier was partly made possible by Nadal’s decision to rest those troublesome knees instead of playing in a warm-up grass-court tournament, which would have helped the quick transition from slow red clay to slick turf. Nadal’s only other notable failure was at the first event he played after the seven-plus month hiatus that began in July 2012. He lost the final at Vina del Mar to ATP No. 73 Horacio Zeballos—then won 19 matches in a row before bowing to Djokovic in the final at Monte Carlo.

So let’s look at some of the numbers Nadal put up this year and put them in a big picture context. Nadal’s winning percentage for 2013, 91.4%, is less than a single percentage point lower than the winning percentage Djokovic posted in his storied dream year of 2011 (70-6, 92.1%). They won the same number of tournaments (10) in the years being compared. Djokovic won three of the four majors in 2011, while Nadal won “just” two this year—but he didn’t even play in the first major of the year.

Nadal also boosted his chance to surpass Roger Federer, his original rival, in the all-time Grand Slam singles champion sweeps. With the two majors Nadal bagged this year he increased his total to 13 titles, and at age 27 trails Federer by just four majors. Given that he’s the “King of Clay” and has lost just one match at Roland Garros, can anyone doubt that he’s on track to shatter Federer’s mark?

In this remarkable year, Nadal was 4-0 against Federer—improving his career head-to-head lead to 22-10. Against Djokovic, his second and perhaps more dangerous rival when it comes to the match-ups, Nadal was 3-3 on the year. But two of those wins were in the Slams Nadal won, and he remains in the lead in their rivalry, 22-17.

With Federer fading, and Andy Murray still unable to claim equal status, the main obstacle in Nadal’s way is Djokovic. It’s a good thing, too, because Nadal’s assault on tennis history ought to happen under appropriately exciting circumstances.

—Peter Bodo

Further reading:

—"Closing Act": Steve Tignor on Serena's most complete season.
—"Rafa Explains it All": Peter Bodo on Nadal's rivalry with Djokovic.

Disappointments of the Year: Sam Stosur and Janko Tipsarevic

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 23:00:00 -0500

Samantha Stosur: It took a long time for the Aussie’s singles window to open; has it already begun to close? After a decade spent deep in the third tier of singles players—she finished 2008 ranked No. 52—Stosur, a longtime doubles specialist, finally cracked the Top 10 three years ago. By the end of 2011, at age 27, she was the U.S. Open champion. While she didn’t do anything as spectacular as that in 2012, Sam was solid enough to finish the season No. 9.

That’s not to say Stosur didn’t have her share of bad losses even in the good years, including multiple early-round exits at her home Slam in Melbourne. But her downs were balanced out by her ups, which typically came when she moved to clay in the spring. This year, Stosur got off to her usual slow start Down Under; she lost in the first round in Brisbane and Sydney, and the second round at the Aussie Open. This time, though, her body wasn’t ready for the turn to dirt. A calf injury forced Stosur to withdraw from Indian Wells and retire in Charleston. First-round losses followed in Stuttgart and Madrid.

Stosur showed periodic signs of life through the summer—a title in Carlsbad, a quarterfinal in Rome—but her most notable match was, unfortunately, a stunning first-round loss to 17-year-old Victoria Duval at the U.S. Open. Stosur admitted that breaking up with her coach of six years, David Taylor, just nine days before the tournament hadn’t helped. By the fall, she was down to No. 20 in the rankings.

Yet all does not appear lost for Sam. Post-Taylor, she finished the year on a high note, winning another title in Osaka, and reaching the finals in her last two tournaments, in Moscow and Sofia. Is a strong start in Oz around the corner? Is the window, at 29, still open? For now, Stosur may just be happy to leave 2013 behind.

*****

Janko Tipsarevic: There may be two lessons to be learned from the recent rise and current fall of Janko Tipsarevic. (1) There’s a statute of limitations on inspiration. (2) Heel injuries are for real.

Like his fellow Serb Novak Djokovic, Tipsy’s world was turned upside-down, in a good way, by their Davis Cup win in 2010. After spending years ranked in the 40s and 50s, he began a slow but steady ascent in 2011. By season’s end, he had cracked the Top 10, a place he would remain until May of 2013. At age 28, the former journeyman had established himself among the game’s elite.

Or so it seemed. Tipsarevic’s decline really began in January, and it was as swift as it was surprising. At first, he appeared ready to pick up where he had left off: He opened the season by winning the title in Chennai, then reached the fourth round at the Australian Open, a run that included an impressive win over hometown favorite Lleyton Hewitt, followed by two hard-fought, five-set victories. In his next match, though, against Nicolas Almagro, Tipsarevic had to retire in the second set.

“I don’t know how I managed to do it,” a disgusted and perplexed Tipsy said after that match, “but I completely screwed up my left heel.”

The fact that the injury was severe enough to force him from the tournament, but not severe enough to force him from the tour entirely, may have been a double misfortune for Tipsarevic. His results immediately tanked—he lost in the first round in five of his next six events—but the heel never healed. Tipsarevic would finish the year with 14 first-round losses, a 20-24 record, and a ranking back down in his old, pre-2011 neighborhood, at No. 36.

And that wasn’t the worst of it. After all of those defeats, Tipsarevic was unable to play the Davis Cup final for Serbia in November because of his now-chronic heel problem. The team lost both of the singles ties he would have played, and with them a chance at their second Cup. Tipsy will have to look elsewhere for the inspiration to rise again in 2013.

Further reading:

—Steve Tignor's Racquet Reaction to Stosur's loss to Duval at the U.S. Open.

Controversy of the Year: Doping Suspensions

Wed, 20 Nov 2013 15:25:00 -0500

The 2013 season began with a sea change in player attitudes toward the game’s anti-doping efforts; by the end of the year, though, the tide was threatening to turn back in the other direction.

In the wake of Lance Armstrong’s public confession of PED use in January, many ATP players went from complaining bitterly about invasions of their privacy by testers to begging for more of them. Eleven months later, after watching a teammate suffer the consequences of bucking that system, one of those players, Novak Djokovic, claimed that he had lost all trust in the process. If the 2013 suspensions of Marin Cilic, Viktor Troicki, and Nuria Llagostera Vives proved anything, it’s that the game’s testing system remains a learning process for all concerned. Unfortunately, all concerned had to learn the their lessons the hard way this year.

Cilic and Llagostera Vives found out that making sure you know what’s in your body is not always as easy as it may seem. Llagostera Vives, a 35-year-old Spanish doubles specialist, claimed she had no idea how she tested positive for d-methamphetamine at the Bank of the West Classic, in Stanford, Calif. The positive test, and lack of explanation, earned her a two-year ban that may end her career. As for Cilic, he discovered the downside of letting your mother buy over-the-counter drugs for you in a foreign language. Through a Kafkaesque series of misunderstandings and mistranslations, the Croat ended up taking glucose tablets, purchased by his mom, that contained the banned substance nikethamide. After voluntarily spending four months on the sidelines, Cilic’s nine-month suspension was lifted. It was determined that he had not intended to enhance his performance with the glucose, and that he tested positive only for a lingering metabolite of nikethamide, which is legal when taken out of competition.

Troicki’s lesson was the hardest of all. The Serb refused to submit to a blood test after losing in Monte Carlo in April. After his own series of misunderstandings with the doctor who was assigned to administer his test, Troicki was given an 18-month ban, which was subsequently reduced to 12 months, the minimum allowed for the infraction. It wasn’t enough to keep Troicki from having to miss Serbia’s Davis Cup final, where his absence played a major role in the team’s defeat, and made his friend Djokovic question the fairness of the entire testing system.

What can we take away from all this, once the sound and fury has dissipated? On the negative side, Cilic’s case pointed up the danger of the “silent ban” in tennis. To start serving his ban voluntarily, he pulled out of Wimbledon, claiming a knee injury. Only through reports in the Croatian press did we learn about the suspension (Cilic denies he lied about his injury). Now fans have no idea whether any player’s injury claim is true. The game would be better off if the silent ban was suspended, indefinitely.

While it’s too late for Troicki and his teammates, his case, and Djokovic’s reaction to it, may do more good than harm for their fellow players in the long run. Djokovic was wrong to criticize the doctor in Troicki’s case as sharply as he did, but he was right about wanting to clear up any similar confusion for himself and others in the future. At the moment, post-Troicki, it would be hard to imagine another player refusing to take a drug test, or at least being very clear about what the penalty might be. Let’s hope that with more clarity and accountability from both sides, the tide toward cooperation between players and doping authorities moves back in the right direction in 2014.

Further reading:

—Silence Isn't Golden, a critique of Cilic's "silent ban."
—Drawing Blood, on the Troicki punishment.

Most Improved: Simona Halep and Stanislas Wawrinka

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 14:59:00 -0500

Simona Halep: The 22-year-old Romanian could also be called the Surprise of the Year. Not many experts, after watching her get throttled by Sloane Stephens—6-1, 6-1—in the first round at the Australian Open in January, would have predicted that it would be Halep who would end the season ranked one spot ahead of her opponent that day. Fewer still would have predicted that the spot would be No. 11, up from No. 47 at the end of 2012. And nobody could have foreseen that Halep, who had never won a tournament before this season, would win not one, not two, not three, not four, not five, but six WTA titles in 2013.

The undersized—she’s 5’6”—but hard-hitting Halep had her reverse Waterloo in Rome in May. Ranked No. 64 at the time, she won three qualifying matches, and then upset Agnieszka Radwanska, Roberta Vinci, and Jelena Jankovic before finally getting knocked back to earth by Serena Williams. But that loss wasn’t enough to shake Halep’s newfound confidence. In June, she won in Nurnberg and s’Hertogenbosch. In July she won in Budapest. In August, she recorded her best victory of the year, a 6-2, 6-2 final-round rout of Petra Kvitova in New Haven. Halep closed the season with titles in Moscow and Sofia, beating Sam Stosur in straight sets in the finals both times.

Halep, who had a sub-.500 tour record before 2013, says she tried to loosen up and play more aggressively this season, but even she never expected it to work this well. Yet the Most Improved still has room for more: While she was 53-17 for the year, Halep was just 4-4 at the majors. Nobody would be surprised if that record gets better in 2014, or if she gets a few more games from Sloane Stephens if they play again in Australia.

*****

Stanislas Wawrinka: It’s a measure of how tough the ATP tour is these days that its Most Improved Player would raise his ranking by a grand total of nine spots. But while others, such as Grigor Dimitrov and Ernests Gulbis, made bigger gains, Wawrinka made his at the most rarefied, and brutally competitive, level of all: The Top 10. At age 28, after years of floating erratically through the second-tier, and playing second-fiddle to his countryman Roger Federer, this heavy-hitting shot-maker qualified for his first World Tour Final and finished the season at No. 8. The potential that Wawrinka had always shown, especially with his sledgehammer one-handed backhand, was finally fulfilled.

We should have known we were getting a different Stan after his performance at the Australian Open in January. There he reached the fourth round and, with Novak Djokovic, staged what may have been the match of the season. Wawrinka eventually lost in the wee hours of the morning, 12-10 in the fifth set, but he had fought the world No. 1, a man he hasn’t beaten since 2006, every step and swing of the way.

Wawrinka built from there. He had success on all three surfaces, and avoided the wild swings in quality and confidence that had plagued him in the past. He reached the final in Buenos Aires in February, lost a close match to Federer in Indian Wells, beat David Ferrer to win an event in Portugal, lost to Rafael Nadal in the Madrid final and the French Open quarters, made the final on grass in s’Hertogenbosch, and capped the season by shredding Andy Murray at the U.S. Open to reach his first Grand Slam semifinal.

It was fitting, if unfortunate, that Wawrinka’s Slam season ended the way it began, with a five-set loss to Djokovic (Stan also lost his last match of the 2013 season to Nole). Yet in New York he showed again that he’s not out of the top players’ league. Wawrinka’s coach, Magnus Norman, said that the goal in 2013 was to make him “stronger,” so he could compete physically with the world’s best—mission accomplished. Now for the next mission: Beating the world’s best. Wawrinka, for all of his improvements, is 3-44 against Nadal, Djokovic, and Federer for his career, and those guys stood in his way again in 2013. If he can get past them a few times next year, Stan might be accepting this award again.

Further reading:

—Video: Djokovic's match-ending point in his incredible match with Wawrinka.
—Steve Tignor's report from Melbourne on "The Nole and Stan Show."

Achievement of the Year: Andy Murray wins Wimbledon

Mon, 18 Nov 2013 11:44:00 -0500

With the 2013 tennis season in the past, it's time to dole out our annual awards. Look for the winners—for better or worse—throughout this week on TENNIS.com. (To see what's been unveiled thus far, click here.)

“I know how much everyone wanted to a see a British winner at Wimbledon. I hope you guys enjoyed it. I tried my best.”

With those modest, matter-of-fact words, Andy Murray became the first man from the United Kingdom to hoist the winner’s trophy at the All England Club since Fred Perry did it 77 years ago. His words were too modest, of course; Murray’s speech may qualify as the understatement of the tennis season. The home-country fans had not only enjoyed his victory, they had made staid Centre Court feel like a World Cup soccer stadium for two weeks. And anyone who had followed Murray’s career from his days as a volatile teen prodigy knew well that he had tried his best. He had, in fact, dedicated his life to the task.

Yet for years it had appeared that his dream would remain unfulfilled. Murray, in many people’s eyes, was the right man at the wrong time, a great talent playing in an era of all-time great talents. He had lost three times at Wimbledon to one of those all-timers, Rafael Nadal, and once to another of them, Roger Federer, in the 2012 final. This summer, groans went up across the U.K. when the draw was made and both Rafa and Roger landed in Murray’s half. If he was going to win it, he would have to do it the hard way.

This year, somehow, the curse of Fred Perry turned into a blessing: Nadal lost in the first round and Federer followed him out the door two days later. Murray suddenly had an open road to the final. But as every long-suffering British tennis fan knew, this was Wimbledon, where Tim Henman spent a decade turning afternoon tea into a death-defying adventure. Murray continued the tradition when he came back from two sets down to beat Fernando Verdasco in the quarterfinals and nearly had to do the same to beat Jerzy Janowicz in the semis.

In the final, Murray played this era’s other great talent, Novak Djokovic. For most of the afternoon, it was smooth sailing. Murray delighted a Royal Box filled with celebrities, as well as a fist-pumping Prime Minister, by winning the first two sets and going up a break in the third. The din reached its height as he served for the match and reached 40-0, triple championship point. But curses that old aren’t so easily broken. Djokovic saved all three match points and earned three break points of his own. Dream had turned to nightmare; the crowd had gone silent with fear.

This time it would be different. This time the fans were right to believe. Murray fought off each Djokovic charge and staggered on long enough to see a final backhand from his opponent clip the tape. “My head was kind of everywhere,” Murray said of that last game. No kidding: In his moment of triumph, the first group of people he turned to and celebrated with were...the press.

Andy Murray, conscientious, methodical, driven, a player who had taken his share of tough losses but never stopped striving to improve, turned out to be the right man at the right time.

Further reading:

—Ed McGrogan's Racquet Reaction to Murray's victory.
—Steve Tignor's report on the final from the All England Club.

On Gods and Humans

Fri, 15 Nov 2013 13:26:00 -0500

This morning I woke up a little early and went straight to my favorite stream-gathering website. This isn't unusual during a big tournament, but today I bypassed the tennis listings and headed to that hodgepodge of mostly un-American activities called the “Other Sports” page. Snooker, darts, figure skating, squash: Anything thought to be on the fringes of the mainstream gets tossed in here. Somehow, despite its hundreds of millions of rabid fans, that also includes cricket.

I had woken up early because, from what I had read over the last few days, this would be my last chance to see the greatest cricketer of his generation, India’s Sachin Tendulkar. He had announced that after 24 years, the test match between India and the West Indies, which began Thursday in Mumbai, would be his last. I had never seen Tendulkar bat. I had never even heard his name until two years ago, when, at age 38, he helped his country to its first World Cup title in a generation. Even then, “Tendulkar” was a mythic figure rather than a real person to me. His name would pop up on Twitter, or be passed around in conversations among Aussie and British journalists at tennis tournaments. What did he look like? Was he retired or still playing? I didn’t know.

I wasn’t the only one. As a character in Joseph O’Neill’s novel, Netherland, says, “There is a limit to what Americans can see or understand, and the limit is cricket.” As O’Neill himself said in an interview, cricket is a “classic symbol of the un-American.” Like most of us in the States, I’ve never understood the rules, and there are enough foreign terms involved to make it feel like the sport's commentators are speaking another language—just typing “test match” and “bat” above felt a little risky, as if I were writing in French. I’d like to understand cricket: C.L.R. James and Simon Barnes have both assured me that the sport is a “complex metaphor for all of life,” and I trust them. But it's a daunting task when you don’t even know what an “over” is.

It’s also tough when you never see the sport played. This morning, I woke up too late to see Tendulkar; a Google search revealed that he had been “dismissed for 74.” As one journalist put it, “Just as expectations were rising for his 101st international century, Tendulkar knicked a delivery to the West Indies skipper to leave Mumbai’s Wankhede Stadium crowd in stunned silence. Tendulkar walked off with his bat raised to a standing ovation.”

That sounds like a fitting exit, but for some, it seems, it comes a couple of years too late. In yesterday’s New York Times, Tunku Varadarajan wrote an article entitled “Where the Gods Live On...and On,” in which he said that Tendulkar should have hung up his bat after the 2011 World Cup triumph, or maybe even before. Varadarajan tries to explain what Tendulkar means to India. “Think of him as a cross between Babe Ruth and Martin Luther King,” he writes, describing Tendulkar as a symbol of the country’s growth over the last two decades, a prodigy who made good on all of his talent yet remained humble and self-effacing, a team player at heart. Varadarajan also explains why he believes Tendulkar stayed too long, to the point where his skills have seriously eroded: He meant too much to his country.

“There is no Indian tradition of graceful retirement,” Varadarajan writes. “The inherent vanity of an authority reluctant to cede the public stage is reinforced by a culture of adulation...by an uncritical elevation of heroes to godlike status by devotees who will not let go. In politics, in cinema, even in corporate business houses, old Indian men do not fade into the sunset. They hobble on and on.”

I don’t know whether that's a valid criticism or not, though from this outsider's perspective, it seems harsh. I hope the writer at least doesn’t begrudge Tendulkar playing long enough to win a World Cup. As a tennis journalist, of course, the story reminds me of Roger Federer’s. If Indian athletes are encouraged to hang on too long, the opposite is often true in our sport. At the first sign of vulnerability, we in the press swoop in with some version of the R question: “When are you going to retire?” “Have you thought about hanging it up?” “Will you keep playing after this year?” "What's left for you to do now?" At a certain point, star players know that every time they lose, they’re going to hear words to this effect afterward.

Federer’s fans can be even more blunt on the subject: Many I’ve talked to wish he had retired in 2012, after he had achieved his version of Tendulkar’s World Cup win, a seventh Wimbledon title and a record-breaking return to the No. 1 ranking. Going out on top has its appeal. We get to remember the player as a champion; perhaps even better, we get to remember him or her as that rare person who managed to avoid old age. Pete Sampras went out like that; he won the 2002 U.S. Open and never played again. The reason Bjorn Borg remains the most mythic tennis player of all time is that, because he retired at 25, we never saw him as anything less than a figure of cold-blooded perfection. We never had to watch the Angelic Assassin get his brains beat in by Ivan Lendl when he was 32.

If Federer had retired after last season, we never would have had to watch him lose to Federico Delbonis. Yet Sampras has hinted that if he had to do it over, he would have kept playing—32 may be old in tennis terms, but it’s a dangerously young age to voluntarily stop doing what you know and love. And I would say that, even if we want to remember our heroes when they were at their best, the most memorable men’s retirements were the ones that didn’t come early. Jimmy Connors and Andre Agassi hung around until they were 39 and 36, respectively, and the sport will always be better for it. We saw them make it look easy in their primes, but it was even more rewarding to see them ignore their bodies and their limits and summon their best when they were over the hill.

Federer’s body, in the form of a bad back, has begun to limit him. He just had his worst season, record-wise, in a decade. Watching him in London last week, I felt like I wasn’t sure where his next shot was going to land—would it be inside the lines, or 15 feet out? I had never felt that way watching him before, never felt nervous for him. Yet like Agassi and Connors, Federer could still summon his best, and he did in his most important set of the tournament. Faced with elimination against the 25-year-old Juan Martin del Potro, Federer hit and moved like the champion we’ve known for 10 years. Even someone who wished he had stopped last year couldn’t begrudge him, or us, that moment.

I liked what Federer said after the tournament when he was asked a version of the R question. He said that tennis is “in the DNA,” it’s something he has always done, and given a choice between playing and not playing, he chooses to play. Like Varadarajan writing about Tendulkar, we may want to protect Federer’s legacy, but he just wants to do what he loves to do. We’ll see more human moments from him in the future, and we’ll take the superhuman when we get it.

As for Tendulkar, I finally saw him bat, in a set of YouTube highlights, this morning. There’s a chance he’ll get up again in this test match; if he does, I’ll try to be up early enough to watch. But for me, he’ll always be a name and a myth first, like the magnificent statues of past bowlers and batsmen that surround the Melbourne Cricket Ground. From a tennis perspective, to me he'll be like Rod Laver, a player I never saw live, and who I now think of as the tennis version of perfection. It’s difficult for me to imagine the Rocket ever double-faulting or shanking a backhand, though he must have done each a thousand times.

Perfect: That’s not a bad way to think of an athlete. But I still wish I had had a chance to watch Tendulkar bat live. And I'm glad I'm old enough to have seen Borg, to know that beneath the ice there was a person. That's why next year I'll be happy to see Federer play on—the magical moments, whenever they happen, will be a reward in themselves. Every God should be allowed to be human, too.