Articles by Steve Tignor

Nadal's blazing Rome return makes the world feel a little more normal

Wed, 16 Sep 2020 20:51:00 +0000

Among the top male players, Rafael Nadal had been the most circumspect about making his post-shutdown return. Asked about the prospect of returning to the tour in the early summer, he instead talked about how he wished he could just do something as simple as get together with his friends and family. Nadal had, after all, seen what the virus did to his native Spain, and what it continues to do even now. Unlike like most of his colleagues, Rafa didn’t play exhibition events during the lockdown, even those in his home country. Faced with the choice of whether to defend his 2019 US Open title, he decided against making the trip to New York.

So the sight of Rafa on court in Rome was a heartening one, a small sign of normalcy in an abnormal time. Even more heartening—for his fans at least—he looked and played like his normal self. During the coin toss, he leaped just as high in the air as he always has. The only difference was the bight yellow mask he wore, to match his bright yellow shirt. Nadal was a little more tan, a little more clean shaven, maybe a few pounds lighter. He was back on his favorite surface, at a tournament he has won nine times. He was ready.

The same could not be said for Nadal’s opponent and countryman, Pablo Carreno Busta. Coming in, there seemed to be three possibilities for PCB in this match: He might be sharp after his semifinal run at the US Open; he might be weary after multiple five-setters and a trans-Atlantic flight; or he might not be prepared to make the shift from hard courts to clay. The answer turned out to be a combination of the last two, because after a few decent games at the start of the match, he put up only token resistance down the stretch. It probably didn’t help that PCB was 0-5 against Rafa, and had managed to win just one set in those five matches.

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Nadal saved a break point in his opening service game, then broke with a crosscourt backhand winner to go up 3-1. That was enough to open the floodgates. From there, Rafa looked like Rafa. He hit forehand winners down the line, crosscourt, and inside out. He tracked down drop shots and flicked them away. He stood as far back as he could to return serve, a much-derided tactic that now has a successful disciple in Dominic Thiem. Nadal slid out to his forehand side and short-hopped hard-hit balls into the open court. He swung a crosscourt forehand pass by PCB on the dead run. He also missed a forehand return on a break point, the way he has some many times in the past, but he finished the first set with two aces. Nadal’s timing wasn’t off, and his speed wasn’t diminished. He even hit a down-the-line backhand winner.

Nadal, who will play either Milos Raonic or Dusan Lajovic next, won 6-1, 6-1, in 73 minutes, which is about as fast as Rafa can finish a match. The King of Clay did King of Clay things, and the world became a little more normal because of it.

US Open Breakthroughs—Thiem as a champ; Zverev as a player to root for

Mon, 14 Sep 2020 16:15:00 +0000

The 2020 US Open men’s final between Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev felt like an audition. Were the understudies ready to take the stage? Was a new generation of players and personalities finally ready to emerge from the long shadows of their legendary predecessors, and continue their tradition of classic Grand Slam finals?

Since 2016, Thiem and Zverev had been marketed as the leaders of the ATP’s “Next Gen.” Four years later, though, “next” still hadn’t turned to “now.” At 27, after three major-final losses, Thiem was in danger of becoming the Prince Charles of tennis—the man who was never allowed to be king. At 23, Zverev had lost the heir-apparent aura that once glowed like a halo from his Borgian blonde hair, and instead gained a reputation as a player who froze in the Slam spotlight. During the summer lockdowns, Thiem and Zverev became more famous for ignoring COVID-quarantine rules than anything they had done with a racquet. On Sunday, with the Big 3 away, the Austrian and the German had the best chance they would ever have to put childish things away and leave their “can’t win the big one” reputations behind.

So how did they do? Did they pass the audition? We can start by saying that Thiem and Zverev made the most of their time on the stage—if anything, that’s an understatement. Over four hours and one minute, these two friendly rivals put on a long, raw, sometimes-awful, sometimes-brilliant, always-imperfect, but ultimately compelling show. There were dull moments and head-scratching moments, but they were largely forgotten as the match wound to its painfully dramatic final act. The winner didn’t start playing well until 4-4 in the fifth set. The loser squandered innumerable golden opportunities. But the end stayed with me for hours afterward, in a way that thousands of higher-quality matches haven’t.

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Admittedly, the drama was a long time coming. In the run-up to the match on Saturday and Sunday, it was obvious how much this final missed the presence of one of the Big 3. Fans may roll their eyes at GOAT conversations and Slam-chase analyses, but they create buzz, tension, stakes—people care about Rafa, Roger, and Novak. There was precious little buzz in the 48 hours before Thiem and Zverev walked on court. That will change, of course, if these two continue to win majors and create a rivalry. But for now, this match was a good reminder of just how much the Big 3 have monopolized the interest of the general public, and how far the Next Gen has to go to create anything approaching that interest. Thiem and Zverev are 27 and 23, but it felt like they were making a debut in New York.

And that’s how the match itself felt: Like two guys, for all of their skill on a tennis court, who were trying to do something they had never done before.

The favorite, Thiem, was a nervous wreck to start. He said his previous experience in these matches only made it worse.

“I was so tight in the beginning,” Thiem said. “Maybe it was not even good that I played in previous major finals. I mean, I wanted this title so much, and of course it was also in my head that if I lose this, it’s 0-4. It’s always in your head.”

Zverev, by contrast, was loose to start. So loose that he transformed himself into the player we had always wanted him to be. He hit his forehand with purpose instead of rolling it in. He came to the net and used his albatross-like wingspan to knock off winning volleys. He took the ball on the rise. He went up 6-2, 5-1.

And then something happened to him. You could see it in his face and his walk. The thought of winning a Grand Slam had, in a matter of minutes, gone from being a distant dream to a reality. But with that change, it also seemed to become a barrier in his mind, one that kept him from simply playing tennis. He stopped nailing his down the line forehand. He stopped closing out points with volleys. He started going for 130-m.p.h. second serves and double faulting, at strangely crucial times.

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Zverev went back to playing defensively, and for a time it worked, because Thiem still couldn’t shake his nerves. But all of that changed when the German went up a break early in the third. At that point, Thiem no longer had anything to lose, while Zverev had everything to lose.

“The match turned when he broke me I think for the first time in the third set,” Zverev said. “I think he started playing better and I started playing much worse. That’s when the match turned. But I still had plenty of chances after that.”

The third and fourth sets played out in the same painful way. Thiem was erratic, but aggressive, while Zverev was in a fog, still unsure of how to get past that final barrier and close out a Slam final. He would double fault 15 times and make 65 unforced errors. But as he said, he had plenty of chances.

“I was super close to being a Grand Slam champion,” Zverev said. “I was a few games away, maybe a few points away. For me, what upset me most is not the third set or something like that, it’s the fifth set. I had a lot of chances in the fifth set, and didn’t use them.”

The fifth set was the one to remember. No longer burdened with a lead, Zverev emerged from his fog and went back to playing proactively. At the same time, Thiem, after launching himself into his shots for three hours, had finally found a semblance of a groove. In the fifth, Thiem was like a man clinging to a cliff with his fingertips; somehow, despite struggling physically, he never fell off.

Serving at 2-3, Thiem went down 0-30, then played four excellent points to hold. He went down 3-5, but survived when Zverev made four quick errors. Serving at 4-5, 30-30, Thiem took a massive cut at a forehand and put the ball on the outside of the sideline; another inch wider and he would have been down match point. Down 0-2 in the decisive tiebreaker, he feathered in a perfect drop volley. At 6-6, in the breaker, he drilled a forehand pass to set up his third match point, the one that he would finally win. Thiem never had his A game, but he kept firing anyway, and that’s what won him the match.

“It’s a Slam finals, I said myself, I mean, I’m playing bad, I’m way too tight, legs are heavy, arms are heavy,” Thiem said. “But I always hope and the expectations that at one point I free up….The belief was always there.”

“Somehow the belief was stronger than the body, and I’m super happy about that.”

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Thiem was the winner, but when it was over, the focus shifted to Zverev. He sat and stared blankly ahead on his sideline chair. He teared up as he told his parents he missed them, and that he would make them proud someday. While Thiem broke through as a Slam champion, Zverev broke through as a player to root for. Has there ever been, in any Slam final, anything as agonizing as his second serve at 5-6 in the tiebreaker? As it crept toward the net, I'm guessing millions of people helped will it over. It made it by a millimeter.

When we think of this match in the future, it’s likely that we’ll remember the speeches before anything else. Zverev spoke through tears, and Thiem spent the bulk of his time talking about their friendship. These two, who share a language, are closer away from the court than the Big 3—one Swiss, one Spaniard, one Serb—have ever been. That friendly dynamic may always make their matches difficult and uneven, but it’s also something that fans may come to appreciate about them. The sport will need new champions, but it will also need human figures that people care about. Zverev, especially, made himself one on Sunday. Anyone who has ever played tennis can understand what happened to him.

Thiem and Zverev won’t be taking over the Big 3’s stage permanently. In two weeks, Rafael Nadal will be the favorite at Roland Garros. Next January, Novak Djokovic will be the favorite at the Australian Open. Neither is going to retire anytime soon. But in New York, Thiem and Zverev gave us a preview of what might be. Next time they may produce better tennis, but they may never produce a match as unforgettable as this one. It’s safe to say they passed the audition.

Red clay, Rafa's return, a speedy run to Roland Garros: A Rome preview

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 16:31:00 +0000

Rome, red clay, Rafa, the Foro Italico: These are age-old signs of spring in tennis. What will they be like in the fall? Players and fans will find out for the first time this week, as the tours head straight from New York to the Eternal City, and straight from asphalt to dirt.

No fans will be there to see it in person, of course, which is a bummer, because the Foro attracts some of the most spirited spectators in the world. But we will get a better look at the site’s sunken arenas in all of their Mussolini-era marble glory. It isn’t just the fans who will be absent. So will many top players, including Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, Dominic Thiem, Daniil Medvedev, Alexander Zverev, Ash Barty, and Bianca Andreescu.

But a lot of top players will be present, including Rafael Nadal and Simona Halep, two Roland Garros champions who skipped the trip to New York. Here’s a look at the draws.

Internazionali BNL d’Italia (ATP/WTA)

Rome
Premier Level 5 (WTA); Masters 1000 (ATP)
$2,098,290 (WTA); $4,105,158 (ATP)
Red clay
ATP draw is here; WTA draw is here

ATP

The headline event on the men’s side is obviously Rafa’s return. He’s a nine-time champion at the Foro, but considering that he’s won Roland Garros 12 times, you might be tempted to ask what’s gone wrong for him in Rome over the years. Never fear, he’s the two-time defending champion, and this year he’ll have a chance to add another La Décima to the ones he already has in Monte Carlo, Barcelona, and Paris.

That said, Nadal, the No. 2 seed after Novak Djokovic, has a tricky opener, against fellow Spaniard Pablo Carreño Busta. PCB was one set from reaching the US Open final on Friday. Also in Rafa’s half: Stefanos Tsitsipas, Fabio Fognini, Andrey Rublev, Diego Schwartzman, and Denis Shapovalov.

While Nadal will be making his post-lockdown debut, Djokovic will be trying to put the one he made in New York behind him. How will he bounce back from being defaulted from the US Open for hitting a line judge in the neck with a ball? Djokovic says he’s trying to come to grips with what happened, and it seems likely that we won’t see him any blast any balls around the arena in Rome. Will he be scarred by the Open experience, or motivated to leave it behind and stop Nadal from moving farther ahead of him in the Slam chase in Paris? The first seed Djokovic could face is Felix Auger-Aliassime. The highest seed in his half is Matteo Berrettini. This looks like a good draw for a man on the mental mend.

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Question Mark: Stan Wawrinka. We know he can play on clay, and he reached the final in Rome way back in 2008. What kind of shape will Wawrinka, who chose to play Challengers in Europe rather than come to the States, be in this week? He could play Djokovic in the quarters.

First-round matches to watch: Nadal vs. Carreño Busta; Benoit Paire vs. Jannik Sinner; Auger-Aliassime vs. Filip Krajinovic; Americans in Rome: Taylor Fritz, Sam Querrey

WTA

This week the women lose two players who did well in New York, Osaka and Serena. But they pick up four Top Tenners who didn’t make the trip there—Halep, Elina Svitolina, Kiki Bertens, and Belinda Bencic.

Halep, a two-time Slam champion and two-time Rome runner-up, is the headline attraction. She won a title in Prague last month, but, like Nadal, she could have a tough start to her Rome campaign. She begins against Anastasija Sevastova or Italy’s Jasmine Paolini, and could face either Camila Giorgi, Dayana Yastremska, Amanda Anisimova or Donna Vekic in the following round.

Karolina Pliskova is the second seed, and the defending champion. That’s the good news. The bad news it that she has struggled so far in the reopening, losing in the first round at the Western and Southern Open and the second round at the US Open. Will a return to Europe and clay help her mood, or at least her game? The Czech will start against either Veronika Kudermetova or her countrywoman, Barbora Strycova. Kudermetova beat Pliskova in “Cincy” two weeks ago.

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If you’re looking for a favorite in the bottom half of the draw, you might look toward Svitolina. She hasn’t played a match since March, but she won this event in 2017 and 2018. She’ll start against either Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova or Shuai Zhang.

First-round matches to watch (there are some good ones): Victoria Azarenka vs. Venus Williams; Garbine Muguruza vs. Sloane Stephens; Coco Gauff vs. Ons Jabeur; Anett Kontaveit vs. Caroline Garcia; Elise Mertens vs. Su-Wei Hsieh; Angelique Kerber vs. Katerina Siniakova; Elena Rybakina vs. Ekaterina Alexandrova; Vekic vs. Anisimova; Giorgi vs. Yastremska; Sevastova vs. Paolini

Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe's idea to resolve Arthur's statue struggle

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 03:16:00 +0000

The historians who try to capture the mood of the United States in the turbulent summer of 2020 won’t have to search long to find a symbol that suits their needs.

Over the last three months, the statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue in Richmond, Va., has come to embody all of the confusion—the sense of a nation being pulled backward and forward in time, and being ripped apart in the process—that has swirled across America since the protests over the death of George Floyd began in June.

Those protests started where Floyd lived, in Minneapolis, and spread to the main streets of virtually every U.S. community. But what happened on Richmond’s main street produced the most profound change in the country’s landscape. One by one, four statues of Confederate leaders that had stood above Monument Avenue for more than a century were toppled. Only a court order temporarily stopped Virginia governor Ralph Northam from sending Lee out on the colossal bronze horse—named Traveler—that he rode in on.

When Lee’s effigy was erected in 1890, officials in Richmond lobbied successfully for it to be enlarged by its French sculptor, so that it would rise higher than the city’s statue of George Washington. Weighing 12 tons and towering 60 feet high on its stone base, it was a monument to the South’s Lost Cause, an attempt to drown Civil War defeat in sentimental grandeur. In 2020, the Lee statue, with that false grandeur stripped away and its plinth covered in political graffiti, has became a meeting place and a public forum where the country’s conflicts play out in miniature each day.

Seen on TV and in newspaper articles, Lee looks as if he’s on his own, a man and his horse on an island, the last statue standing. In reality, one other remains, 14 blocks and more than a mile down Monument Avenue. That distance is fitting, because the person it memorializes, Arthur Ashe, came from a very different side of Virginia and America than Lee. Ashe was a Wimbledon-winning tennis player and social activist who grew up in an all-Black Richmond neighborhood during the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, the last decades of Jim Crow. Where Lee fought for the continuation of slavery in Virginia, and in the South, Ashe showed his city and state what a free Black man could achieve on a world stage.

Now that the dust has begun to settle on the summer of 2020, the memorials to these two men, and the conflicting causes they represented, are alone together on opposite sides of Monument Avenue. Where the base of Lee’s statue is adorned with “Black Lives Matter” and “BLM,” Ashe’s was sprayed with “White Lives Matter” in June (the words have since been erased). No one, in Richmond or in the nation, knows what’s going to happen next. But efforts are underway to write a more complete, and less Confederate-centric, history of the city. If a new project involving Ashe’s legacy is successful, his statue could be a major part of that revision.

The Arthur Ashe monument, in Richamond, Va. (AP Images)

The Ashe statue was installed in 1996, and the three-year process to put it there was, if anything, more controversial than this year’s Confederate removals have been.

Originally, the idea was to place it alongside an African-American Sports Hall of Fame that Ashe hoped to develop in his hometown, as an extension of his book about the history of black athletes in America, A Hard Road to Glory. In 1992, he broached the idea to officials in Richmond, and the City Council approved plans for a 68,000-square-foot building to be constructed in the Jackson Ward district, where Ashe grew up. Around the same time, a Richmond sculptor named Paul DiPasquale expressed a desire to create a statue of Ashe, who had recently revealed that he had AIDS. Ashe approved of the idea, and of placing the statue at the Hall of Fame.

“Arthur doubted he would live long enough to witness its completion,” Raymond Arsenault wrote in his 2018 biography, Arthur Ashe: A Life. “But the idea of erecting a statue of his likeness appealed to him…In a limited but significant way, he reasoned, the statue might enhance a positive legacy in his hometown.”

One of the last things Ashe did before entering the hospital for the final time in early 1993 was send DiPasquale reference materials for the sculpture. Ashe wanted the work to include children and books, “to portray that knowledge is power,” and to show him in his warm-up suit and sneakers. By the time DiPasquale received the material, Ashe had passed away. After breaking down in tears at the sight of the package of photos Ashe had sent him, DiPasquale worked to make his vision a posthumous reality.

When Ashe died, his friend Douglas Wilder, the first African-American governor of Virginia, directed that his body lie in state in the Executive Mansion in Richmond; no Virginian had been honored in that way since Stonewall Jackson in 1863. Six-thousand people crammed the city’s Arthur Ashe Center for the three-hour memorial service, and many more lined the route where Ashe’s casket was carried—Yannick Noah was among the pallbearers—to his final resting place, in Woodland Cemetery, one of the Richmond area’s historically Black burial grounds. A few months later, mourners gathered there again to celebrate what would have been his 50th birthday. They listened as Maya Angelou spoke of a man “superb in love and logic.”

In the months after his death, Ashe’s statue began to take shape in DiPasquale’s hands, and in February 1994, Richmond officials gave the go-ahead for it to be placed on a yet-to-be-determined site on city property. When DiPasquale presented a plaster-cast version at an early unveiling ceremony, Governor Wilder went public with his preference for its location: Monument Avenue.

“These are heroes from an era which would deny the aspirations of an Arthur Ashe,” Wilder said. “He would stand with them, saying, ‘I speak, too, for Virginia.'”

There was no mention of Ashe’s hoped-for Hall of Fame, and the considerable funding needed to build it would never materialize. Instead, Wilder’s pronouncement was the opening salvo in a three-year war over the meaning of Monument Avenue and the appropriateness of a statue of an African-American in a Confederate memorial.

Officials who backed the idea received hate mail. Civil War re-enactors and the Sons of Confederate Veterans protested at City Council meetings. While there was support among the Black community, it wasn’t universal. Ray Boone, editor of the city’s most prominent African-American newspaper, the Richmond Free Press, wrote, “Identifying Arthur Ashe with racist generals of the Lost Cause would scandalize our hero’s shining memory. Subordinating him to a solid line of Confederate figures would intensify injustice, unfairly equating Arthur Ashe to a bronze row of history’s most traitorous villains.”

Boone’s uncompromising editorial sounds right at home in the Black Lives Matter era. But in 1996 it was Governor Wilder’s vision that prevailed. After multiple delays, DiPasquale’s statue of Ashe was installed at Monument Avenue and Roseneath Road, on July 10th, 1993, which would have been his 53rd birthday. Ironically, some members of the City Council were finally convinced to give their approval after hearing a speaker compare Ashe’s character and integrity to…Robert E. Lee’s.

Absent from the unveiling that day was Ashe’s widow, Jeanne Moutoussamy-Ashe. Early in 1993, she wrote her own editorial in the Richmond Times-Dispatch expressing her displeasure with the placement. “Richmond, can you remember that the ‘Arthur Ashe monument,’ as you call it now, was never meant to be just a monument to Arthur,” she wrote, while calling for the statue to be placed at the Hall of Fame. “Somehow, what Arthur wanted has been lost in the shuffle.”

The statue of Robert E. Lee on Monument Avenue, in 2020. (Wikimedia Commons)

A quarter of a century later, Moutoussamy-Ashe’s opinion hasn’t changed.

She says the idea of having a statue on Monument Avenue would have been inconceivable to her husband. As a child, the street had been off-limits to him. And while Ashe’s teenage years coincided with the start of the Civil Rights Movement, the progress that was achieved elsewhere in the South only made Virginia’s politicians more determined to hold off integration at all costs. After Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregated schools in 1954, Virginia began what became known as Massive Resistance, a set of laws designed to subvert Brown, one of which eliminated state funding for any public school that tried to integrate.

Ashe, who entered all-Black Maggie Walker High School in Richmond in 1958, experienced Virginia’s constrictions firsthand on the tennis court. He was annually denied entrance into tournaments held in Richmond’s all-white Byrd Park. By the time he was 15, he was ranked No. 5 in the nation, yet he was barred from playing the Mid-Atlantic Championships in his hometown. The Richmond Tennis Patrons Association, a group of local benefactors, paid for young white players to travel the country and compete, but they didn’t pay for Ashe.

“To the tennis fathers there, I was an untouchable,” he said. In 1959, the West Side Tennis Club in New York invited Richmond’s tennis officials to put together a boys’ traveling team, and suggested that it include the city’s best young black player, Ashe, and its best young white player, Tom Chewning. By then Ashe had read all about Chewning’s successes in the local papers; Chewning had to admit that he had never heard of Ashe.

“It was never an idea of Arthur’s to be on Monument Avenue,” Moutoussamy-Ashe reiterates today. “You have your white Confederates there, and then you have a Black favorite son. It felt divisive, and Arthur wasn’t divisive.”

For Moutoussamy-Ashe, that remains true even now that most of those Confederates are gone. She didn’t want Ashe’s legacy associated with the statues there, and she doesn’t want his presence on the avenue to be seen as “revenge” for them, either. The Hard Road to Glory Hall of Fame was never built in her husband’s old neighborhood, but Moutoussamy-Ashe would still like to see his statue placed in the Richmond that he knew. Specifically, she’d like to see it in Woodland Cemetery, where Ashe is buried.

To that end, Moutoussamy-Ashe has thrown her support behind a new project to restore Woodland and another African-American cemetery in the area, Evergreen. In August, Marvin Harris, a real-estate agent and the founder of the Evergreen Foundation, announced that he had raised $50,000 to purchase Woodland. With assistance from Henrico County and funding help from Moutoussamy-Ashe, Harris plans to clean up the century-old cemetery and showcase the history it contains.

“We’re going to bring this back to where it used to be,” he said at an announcement ceremony in Woodland earlier this month.

Like Ashe, Harris, 72, is a graduate of Maggie Walker High School, and he knew the Ashe family in Jackson Ward. Harris and his fellow students from the school’s Class of 1967 devised the idea of restoring these cemeteries, which had largely been ignored and obscured by overgrowth in recent years. Maggie Walker herself, the first black president of a bank in the U.S., is buried in Evergreen. Ashe is buried next to his mother, in one of four Woodland plots purchased by his father decades ago.

“It’s a big, amazing job that someone had to do,” says Harris, whose crews have begun to clear acres of disused land in Evergreen and Woodlands. “I didn’t know it had come to that state. It’s a daunting task.”

Harris believes that the project will not only restore these two pieces of historically Black Richmond, but draw visitors and teach them about the accomplished African-Americans who are buried there. Last year at Woodland, Harris ran across a family from the Midwest who had followed Ashe’s career, and had come to see his gravesite.

“I told them, ‘Come back in three years, we’ll have this place fixed up,’” Harris says.

Looking at Ashe’s headstone, which sits a few inches from his mother Mattie’s inside a low black fence, Harris says he can relate to his fellow Jackson Ward native.

“My mother’s interred in North Carolina,” Harris says. “I’ve lived my life here in Richmond, but I can understand him wanting to be next to her."

The gravestones of Arthur Ashe and his mother, Mattie, at Evergeen Cemetery. (Marvin Harris)

“When I think of my mother, the strongest feeling I get is regret,” Ashe wrote in 1981.

“I can remember her reading to me and encouraging me to learn, but I can’t remember her voice…More than once, I’ve longed for a memory of my mother that seems just beyond my grasp.”

In 1950, Mattie Cordell Ashe suffered a stroke while undergoing emergency surgery during her third pregnancy, and died three days later. She was 27, and her oldest son was just six. Arthur remembered his father coming home, grabbing him and his young brother, Johnnie, and crying, “This is all I’ve got left.”

Mattie’s death would have a profound effect on her oldest son’s life. He vividly remembered her wake in the family’s home, but chose not to attend her funeral for reasons he couldn’t quite explain. Eventually, his inability to connect to his feelings about her passing led him to speak to a psychiatrist, and try to uncover how her absence had influenced his personality. He came to believe that his famously detached nature may have been a product of losing his mother so early.

“I have never thought of myself as being cheated by her death,” he wrote, “but I am terribly, insistently, aware of an emptiness in my soul that only she could have filled.”

“Arthur wanted to be buried next to his mother,” Moutoussamy-Ashe says. “His father put flowers on his mother’s gravesite each week, and Arthur hoped the cemetery would be taken care of.”

Moutoussamy-Ashe would like to see Woodland’s chapel turned into a museum where the stories of those buried there can be told. She and Harris also believe the statue of Ashe on Monument Avenue should be moved there.

“It would give the statue and the cemetery more historical significance and context,” she says. “It would help shed a fuller light on Richmond’s history.”

“There’s a perfect site for it,” Harris says, “where four roads meet in a circle, where there were fountains once.”

“I know it can be done,” Harris says of moving the Ashe statue away from Monument Ave. “We just to have to get the city motivated.”

"Evergreen is the resting place for thousands of individuals who faced segregation, discrimination, and racial violence while contributing in important ways to the city’s—and the nation’s—vibrant social, political, intellectual, and religious life." (Quote and screenshot, enrichmond.org)

The idea that Harris and Moutoussamy-Ashe have for Woodland dovetails with much of the historical work currently going on in Richmond.

An effort has been made in recent years to uncover and shine a light on the city’s often-hidden, often-painful multicultural past and move beyond the cult of the Confederacy.

“It was quite a moment for this city to see the Jim Crow statues come down,” says Ana Edwards, who is chair of the Sacred Ground Historical Reclamation Project in Richmond. “Feelings were running high, but we finally reached this moment when they can’t be here anymore.”

According to Edwards, the Monument Avenue removals were a sign of a wider, ongoing, and welcome shift in perspective in the area.

“You have to appreciate the progress,” she says. “A few years ago, you couldn’t even say ‘racism’ or ‘white supremacy’ without people curling up into a ball. Now we’re finally starting to scrape everything away and tell the truth about our history. I think Americans like that, we like getting to the truth.”

Edwards has done her part to uncover some of that hidden history. Her organization has restored an African Burial Ground that had been covered by a parking lot, and is working to create a memorial park that will tell the story of the slave trade that went on in the city’s Shockoe Bottom neighborhood.

“When people think of the domestic slave trade, they might think of a single spot where there was an auction block,” Edwards says. “But this was an entire district that was devoted to that business, and its history has been completely invisible.”

Edwards agrees with Moutoussamy-Ashe that the Ashe statue doesn’t make sense where it is now.

“The idea was to honor him as a humanitarian, but unfortunately that was supplanted by the fight over whether it should go in a Confederate memorial,” she says. “It’s disconnected from its community.”

Regarding Monument Avenue, she and Moutoussamy-Ashe would both like to see the city take its time, think holistically, and not simply fill the empty plinths with new memorials to less-objectionable figures. Moutoussamy-Ashe believes the evicted Confederates should be housed in a museum.

“Like it or not,” she says, “they tell a history of this country.”

The statue of her husband also tells a history, one of achievement, progress, determination, and freedom, rather than subjugation. During his life, Arthur Ashe put Richmond, the African-American side of Richmond, on the global map in a way that few had before him. If Harris and Moutoussamy-Ashe have their way at Woodland Cemetery, his legacy and memory will continue to do the same.

For a second US Open, Naomi Osaka shows she wins for more than herself

Sun, 13 Sep 2020 01:44:00 +0000

“Everything I was doing off the court, was sort of on the court, too,” Naomi Osaka said when she visited the ESPN studio after winning her third Grand Slam title at the US Open on Saturday.

She had been asked whether it was difficult for her to balance her recent public support for the Black Lives Matter movement with her life as a professional tennis player. During the tournament, it had been satisfying to imagine that those two very different parts of her life were connected; that the masks she wore before each match, memorializing seven African-American victims of shootings by police or white civilians, really did inspire her to hit her serve and forehand better. But was there actually a link between them? According to Osaka, the answer was yes.

“I’m walking on the court in that moment,” she said of wearing the masks. “It made me stronger, because I had more desire to win, because I want to show more names, and I want people to talk about it more.”

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Tennis is a selfish game, we’re told. You win matches and you lose matches the same way: alone. At the last two Opens, Osaka has shown that this doesn’t have to be the case.

In 2019, after beating Coco Gauff in a night match, she asked the teenager to stay and do the post-match interview with her. Osaka said she hated going back to the locker room by herself after a defeat, and she wanted to spare Gauff that painful experience.

This year, Osaka walked on court carrying the memory of someone who had been lost with her. The seventh and final name was that of Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer in Cleveland six years ago. The desire to remind the world of another Black person’s life, and how it was taken, gave Osaka a greater sense of purpose each time she played.

“I wanted more people to say more names,” she said.

Some players might have crumbled under the weight of those kind of self-imposed expectations. And Osaka had her struggles during this fortnight. But she was always able to settle herself and bring her mind back to the task at hand. For her, that means forgetting about the result, and concentrating on first having the right attitude.

“When I think about winning too much, I go out of myself,” Osaka said. “For me, the key is to stay calm.”

“The quarantine definitely gave me a chance to think a lot about things, what I want to accomplish, what I want people to remember me by,” she said. “For me, I came into this tournament, or these two tournaments, with that mindset. I think it definitely helped me out.”

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In her three-set wins over Misaki Doi in the first round, Marta Kostyuk in the third round, and Jen Brady in the semifinals, Osaka briefly lost her cool and “behaved terribly,” as she put it, but she never beat herself up emotionally. The same pattern held in the final, against Victoria Azarenka. Osaka lost the first set 6-1, and was a point away from going down 0-3 in the second. The match had all the makings of an historic blowout. Osaka slammed her racquet to the court once, but again she managed to return to basics: She was determined not to lose in under an hour.

“I wasn’t thinking about winning after a certain while,” Osaka said. “I thought, ‘I came here with a goal, I’m playing in the final, a lot of people want to be in this final, so I can’t lose 6-1, 6-0.’”

The turnaround began at 0-2 in the second, with a simple change: She started hitting her backhand down the line, to Azarenka’s forehand, rather than crosscourt. It was enough to earn her a hold and slow Azarenka’s runaway momentum. From there, everything flipped, and Osaka dominated the rest of the way. Serve, forehand, backhand: She was stronger than Azarenka in all departments. Even when she was pushed back in the court, Osaka found ways to be the more offensive player.

“Naomi has the power in this match-up, she hits the ball harder,” Mary Jo Fernandez said. “When she got her rhythm, the ball toss in the right, consistent spot, she controlled the points. It was very basic.”

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Osaka has always been described as shy and soft-spoken. After the match she took her time and carefully laid down on the court, in the modern Grand Slam victory pose that Serena Williams and Rafael Nadal have popularized. Why? Because, she said, she didn’t want to fall straight down and risk injuring herself.

Yet underneath that gentle exterior, she is tough, brave, and daring. By wearing the names she wore on her masks, she wasn’t just signaling her support for some vague, anodyne idea of “social justice.” She was specifically protesting police violence against African-Americans. And by winning her third major final in three tries—against Serena Williams, Petra Kvitova and now Azarenka—she proved again that she can’t be intimidated by any stage or any opponent.

“I never played against someone who beat me when I’m trying really hard,” she told Fernandez. That’s not the mindset of a wallflower; it’s one that reminds me of John McEnroe’s, Roger Federer’s and Serena’s—it’s a winner’s mindset.

Osaka took on the responsibility of playing for more than herself over the past two weeks, and she said she felt the pressure of living up to those ambitions.

“Everything off the court was definitely building up,” she said of her time in the bubble. “I had some moments where I was very stressed out.”

“But I think all in all it's the person that's very mentally strong [who wins],” she continued. “For me, it's one step forward because I always wanted to be that type of person.”

Osaka is already mentally strong, and, step by step, she may change how we think of what tennis players and athletes can do with their lives—and their platforms. At this US Open, she showed us that, even in this individual game, you can play your best when you’re playing for more than just yourself.

Alexander Zverev goes from "playing that bad" to making US Open final

Sat, 12 Sep 2020 01:52:00 +0000

“I was actually looking at the scoreboard when I was down two sets to love, and I can’t believe it,” Alexander Zverev told ESPN’s Brad Gilbert after his 3-6, 2-6, 6-3, 6-4, 6-3 win over Pablo Carreño Busta at the US Open on Friday. “I’m playing in the semifinal, where I’m supposed to be the favorite and I’m down two sets to love, and I have no chance, I’m playing that bad.”

“I can’t believe it” is probably what a lot of people were saying to themselves as they watched this strange trip of a semi. Just like every other match at this year’s US Open, there were no fans in the stands in Arthur Ashe Stadium to see it. But this time there was a stunned quality to the silence in the arena. Even the empty seats seemed dumbfounded by the events they were witnessing.

“Strange,” yes; surprising, no. Zverev is famous for confounding all expectations, both positive and negative, in best-of-five-set matches. He tends to start slowly in the extended format, but rarely has he started this slowly against a lower-ranked opponent. In the opening game, he stoned a volley and faced a break point. At 1-2, he was broken when he shanked an easy backhand. He was broken again at 1-4, and again to start the second set, on a backhand winner from Carreño Busta.

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Zverev seemed to hit rock bottom when he double faulted two straight times and was broken for 0-3. But then he fell even further when he was broken one more time for 0-5. Between points, Zverev walked slowly, tentatively, pensively, like a man trying to figure out how it had all gone so wrong, and where he had misplaced his game.

Yet even during that disastrous opening hour, Zverev showed signs of life at the end of each set. It was too late for him to win them, but he did show that a turnaround was still theoretically possible. When Zverev finally broke back at 0-5 in the second set, his trainer, Jez Green, held his palms up, as if to say, “Where has that been all day?”

Typically, as Zverev’s serve goes, so goes his game. And his serve began to go—for aces and unreturnables—at the start of the third set. The love holds began to flow, while Carreño Busta, who at 29 has never reached a Grand Slam final, began to retreat into his defensive shell. Zverev wasn’t exactly a freight train from that point on; he was still capable of throwing in two more very bad service games early in the third and fourth sets. But he no longer looked so lost between points, and he no longer looked so tight during them. The 23-year-old had never come from two sets down before, but he had come back from two sets to one down six times. He understands that the format allows for slow starts and patches of patchy play.

“I knew I had to come up with better tennis,” Zverev said, “and I knew that I had to be more stable.”

Carreño Busta still had a chance at 3-3 in the fourth set. But even as Zverev began to invade the front court, PCB couldn’t mount a defense. Serving at 3-3, he put a routine backhand into the net and sent a routine forehand long. Zverev broke with a huge smash, and, when he broke again in the opening game of the fifth set, he was home free. By the end, as he rained down 130-m.p.h. second serves, he had made a 180-degree turn from this first-set self.

“I wasn’t winning many second serve points,” Zverev said of his 130 bombs, “so I had to change something.”

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It must be nice to have that “something” in your back pocket. Zverev finished with 24 aces and 71 winners, and he lost just seven points on his first serve over the last three sets. He came to net 50 times, and despite covering 13,355 feet over the course of the the contest, he looked stronger at the end than he did at the start.

“I’ve never come back from two sets to love down,” Zverev said. “It was the first time in my career, but I’m happy to do it at this stage, semi of a Slam, couldn’t be happier.”

This scratchy, nebulous match wasn’t a classic, and it’s hard to say that Zverev “stormed” back from two sets down. Carreño Busta, who had finished another five-setter late Wednesday night against Denis Shapovalov, offered precious little resistance over the last three sets. But this was always the way that Zverev—often inexplicable, but just as often difficult to finish off—was going to reach his first major final. Now the question is: Can he confound his way to a Grand Slam title?

In US Open classic, Osaka and Brady push before Naomi pulls away

Fri, 11 Sep 2020 02:41:00 +0000

“Honestly,” Naomi Osaka said—she begins a lot of her interview answers with that word—“I felt like I was just sticking it out.”

That’s what the 22-year-old said made the difference in her 7-6 (1), 3-6, 6-3 semifinal win over Jen Brady on Thursday. As she so often is, Osaka was being humble. This match, and particularly her winning performance in it, was of the highest quality throughout. Osaka forced Brady to play better in the second set, and Brady responded. Then Brady forced Osaka to play better in the third set, and Osaka responded.

Big serves were matched by big serves; Osaka and Brady broke one time each and earned just six break points between them. Winners from one were matched by winners from the other; each woman finished with 35, and each hit significantly more winners than errors. Surges of good play from one side of the net were met by surges from the other, and neither woman went away, or dropped her level for more than a game. Osaka’s machine-gun-style ground strokes—few players generate more power more compactly—were matched by the far-ranging athleticism of Brady, who hit her forehand winners crosscourt, down the line, inside-out, and inside-in. ESPN’s court-side commentators, Rennae Stubbs and Brad Gilbert, had the same reaction from the front row: “These two are clocking the ball.”

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Over two hours and eight minutes, just a few passages of play made the difference. The first came in the opening-set tiebreaker. After staying so solid all set, Brady betrayed her inexperience, and perhaps her relative lack of belief, on a Grand Slam stage. She put a makeable forehand pass into the net. She sent an equally makeable second-serve return long. And she dug a 1-5 hole with by hitting a regulation forehand wide, something she hadn’t done at all to that point.

But one of the highlights of this match was seeing Brady regroup, adjust her tactics, and grow in belief as the night progressed. Through the first set, Brady was unable to do much with the fairly ordinary second serves that Osaka was putting into the middle of the box. But in the second set, she found the answer: She stopped going for outright winners, and started going up the middle and straight at Osaka. The strategy finally earned her a break at 4-3 in the second set. For a few games after that, Brady was the better player. She played defense, she played consistently, and it looked as if her momentum might sweep her all the way into the final.

But then it was Osaka’s turn to adapt. Serving at 1-1 in the third, she was ready for Brady’s bigger returns, and she fired them back for two lethal winners of her own. Osaka continued with two more winners on Brady’s serve in the next game, and broke when Brady failed to challenge a backhand that was called long, but was later shown to have caught a sliver of the baseline.

“I tried to adjust on her serve in the third set,” Osaka said, “and maybe that made the difference.”

Brady hung in through the third and forced Osaka to close it out. Osaka was up to the task—but not without a wobble. Serving for the match at 5-3, Osaka lost control of her toss and double faulted. But as she had all night, she came right back with a big serve—116 m.p.h. in this case—to stop the slide. She followed that with a forehand winner to reach match point, and one last unreturnable serve up the T to win it. Osaka’s wobble, and her ability to right herself all in one game, had a champion’s quality to it

Brady walked off waving to the invisible crowd in Ashe Stadium. Osaka, who is into her second US Open final in three years, said with a smile, “I love the atmosphere, even though there’s no one here.’

The two women put on a show worthy of a 23,000-fan crowd, and worthy of a long ovation when it was over. Hopefully we’ll seem them get one in New York in the future, and hopefully we’ll see them match shots and wits again many more times. For tonight, tennis fans could only applaud from home.

This match was billed as the undercard, understandably, to the Serena Williams-Victoria Azarenka semifinal that followed. Honestly, though, as Osaka would say, it was a hard act to follow.

Medvedev mixes grace and guile to outsmart friend Rublev at US Open

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 23:34:00 +0000

As every tennis fan of a certain age knows, the sport has already had a Big Cat: Miloslav Mecir, the 6’3” Slovak who eased the ball around the court deceptively enough to reach two Grand Slam finals and win gold at the 1988 Seoul Olympics, before back problems forced him to retire at 26.

But if that nickname hadn’t already been handed out, it would apply equally well to Daniil Medvedev—maybe better, because, at 6’6” the Russian is even bigger than Mecir. And even more so than Mecir, Medvedev plays with a cat-like mix of grace and guile. He can lounge at the back of the court for half a set, before suddenly leaping forward to pounce on his unsuspecting opponent. The 24-year-old did both with perfect strategic timing in his 7-6 (6), 6-3, 7-6 (5) quarterfinal win over his friend and countryman Andrey Rublev.

“One point decided two sets,” Medvedev said of a match that was certainly tighter than the term “straight sets” would imply. For the vast majority of it, whoever was serving was in firm control; Medvedev earned one break point, which he converted, while Rublev earned none. But then there were those two tiebreakers, and that’s when we saw that the Bigger Cat really did have the tennis equivalent of nine lives.

The consensus coming in was that Rublev, who is ranked below Medvedev and who had never beaten him at the pro level, had to have the first set. He played like knew it, too, building a 5-1, and then 6-3, lead in the first-set tiebreaker. But from there, with no margin to work with, Medvedev made all the right moves.

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At 3-6, after spending most of the first set counterpunching from behind the baseline, he stepped inside it and hit a down the line backhand that surprised Rublev and skidded past him. At 4-6, Medvedev went bigger-than-normal again with his serve and won the point with it. Then, at 5-6, he backed up, and let a nervous Rublev try to win the set; instead, his forehand drifted just wide. At 6-6, after the change of ends, Medvedev hit the shot of the match, a Djokovichian running backhand that he hooked just inside the sideline. That shot surprised Rublev, too, and he put a forehand into the net. Finally, at 7-6, Medvedev bombed an ace. The set was his, and for all intents and purposes, so was the match.

“Usually, he’s very aggressive,” Medvedev said of Rublev, “but today he was trying to put the ball in the court more. So I decided to be really aggressive in the first-set tiebreaker, and it worked out for me.”

“I think it was a very tactical game today.”

Medvedev also turned the third-set tiebreaker into a chess match, and again he was one move ahead of Rublev. This time the moment of quiet surprise came at 4-3. After spending virtually the entire match returning serve from 10 feet behind the baseline, and allowing Rublev to kick his second serve gently into the court, Medvedev charged in—stealthily, of course—took the ball on the rise, and knocked off a backhand return winner. He led 5-3 and won it 7-5.

Not all of Medvedev’s tricks work; at 5-4 in the tiebreaker, he tried to throw in a surprise serve-and-volley and lost the point. But the fact that he’s always trying something, and his opponent never knows quite what it will be, is enough to give him a long-term advantage. Medvedev is, to use an overused term, a disruptor.

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He’s also, in his own way, a powerful shot-maker. Rublev is known as the harder hitter, but it was Medvedev who had 50 winners to just 22 for Rublev today. By not trying to rip the cover off of every ball, the way Rublev typically does, Medvedev retains the element of surprise.

“He kind of lulls you to sleep, and then strikes from a difficult position,” ESPN’s Brad Gilbert said after watching one Medvedev forehand come screaming out of the far reaches of the court and go for a winner.

With his long frame, and his ability to lay back and attack from deep in the court, Medvedev expands, elongates, and complicates the game in a way that I’m not sure anyone else has. Now he’s into his second straight US Open semifinal, and may be the favorite to win it all this time. Mecir, the first Big Cat, made the final here in 1986. The second one may be heading for even bigger things this weekend.

Naomi Osaka is playing with greater purpose, and a game that's growing

Wed, 09 Sep 2020 01:52:00 +0000

Is there a lesson to be learned from Naomi Osaka’s 79-minute, 6-3, 6-4, no fuss, no muss, quarterfinal win over Shelby Rogers on Tuesday night?

It might be put like this: Power is great, but compact power is much better.

Osaka and Rogers hit the ball with a similar amount of pace from the baseline. Both can drill blazing winners with their returns when they're setting behind the baseline, and especially when they have time to set up and move forward. But Osaka generates her pace with quicker, more compact swings than Rogers, and that makes all the difference.

When Osaka hit a penetrating shot tonight, Rogers had trouble getting around on it, and often had to back up to give herself more time. When Rogers hit a penetrating shot, Osaka was much more likely to be ready for it, to take it without backing up, and to counter it with something just as good, especially when she was on the run. That difference was summed up in a pair of stats: Osaka hit just one more winner than Rogers (24 to 23), but she made 19 fewer errors (eight to 27).

It would have been tough for anyone, no matter how long or short her swing, or how well she hit the ball on the move, to beat Osaka tonight. Since dropping a set, and slamming her racquet, in her third-round win over Marta Kostyuk, Osaka has grown sharper and stronger with virtually every game she’s played. While she made just 48 percent of her first serves on Tuesday, she won 83 percent of them, and faced only one break point (which she lost). Rogers won just 24 percent of points on her return of serve.

“I feel pretty good,” Osaka said, which is the height of braggadocio for her. “A couple of hard matches made me grateful to be here.”

Osaka was favored to win in most people minds, except, perhaps, hers.

“I felt like she had the upper hand because I had never beaten her,” said Osaka, who was 0-3 against Rogers. She said she was happy to use her desire for “revenge” as a source of motivation.

Another source of motivation, or at least satisfaction, for Osaka is the fact that, with every win, she has a chance to wear another mask with the name of another African-American recently killed by law enforcement—tonight she wore George Floyd’s name. Osaka said at the start of the tournament that she had seven masks, and her goal was to show us all seven.

Rather than adding pressure, her embrace of activism this summer seems to have focused her and given her an added sense of purpose. There are two more masks to show, two more Black Americans to memorialize, and two more matches to win.

QF Preview—With the Big 3 away, the time is now for the ATP's Next Gen

Tue, 08 Sep 2020 02:28:00 +0000

There have been a lot of comparisons between the 2020 US Open and the 1973 edition of Wimbledon over the last 10 days. That’s mainly because both tournaments played host to the creation of a new men’s player union—the ATP in 1973, and Novak Djokovic’s PTPA (Professional Tennis Player’s Association) in 2020.

But there’s another possible parallel between the two tournaments: At Wimbledon in 1973, the temporary absence of the men’s elite helped two young, soon-to-be superstars get a foothold at the top of the game. Now, at the 2020 US Open, a similar absence looks like it’s going to give a new generation of male players its first taste of Grand Slam glory.

In 1973, 80 men boycotted Wimbledon, to show support for their colleague Nikki Pilic of Yugoslavia, who had been suspended by his national federation for choosing to enter a pro event rather than play Davis Cup for his country. Seven of the top eight seeds didn’t compete, including Stan Smith, John Newcombe, Arthur Ashe, Ken Rosewall, Tom Okker, Marty Riessen and Roy Emerson. This created an opportunity for 21-year-old Jimmy Connors and 17-year-old Bjorn Borg, neither of whom was part of the ATP yet. The Swede and the American had each made an impression on tour—Connors with his bellicose demeanor, Borg with his long blonde hair, both with their then-rare two-handed backhands—but they were still neophytes at the majors.

A young Bjorn Borg, at the All England Club. (Getty Images)

Despite his cocksure attitude and fearsome two-hander, Connors had lost in the first round at the last two Slams he had played. As the fifth seed at Wimbledon in ’73, he pummeled his way to the quarters, where he exited to eventual finalist Alex Metreveli. A year later he won Wimbledon, along with the Australian Open and the US Open, went 99-4, and rose to No. 1.

Four years younger, Borg had made the round of 16 at Roland Garros in ’73, but it was at Wimbledon where the “Teen Angel” was born. Borg became the Open era’s first heartthrob during that fortnight. He was chased across the grounds, and onto the court, by half of the teenage-girl population of London, it seemed. Long hair flying, he also reached the quarters, where he lost to Roger Taylor in five sets.

Borg and Connors were the first pure products of tennis’ professional era. Unlike most of the boycotters, neither knew what it was like to scrounge out a living on the amateur circuit. They were the beneficiaries of the boycotters’ efforts, and they spent the rest of the decade making them pay for it. Borg and Connors won 19 majors from 1974 to 1983. The last hurrah for the boycott generation came with Ashe’s win over Connors at Wimbledon in 1975.

The dynamic at the US Open in 2020 is obviously quite a bit different, and in some ways it’s reversed. Today there’s a small elite fending off a horde of hopefuls. There are just four key absentees this year: Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Stan Wawrinka and, now, Novak Djokovic. But those four players account for virtually major title—59, to be exact—since 2004.

Laboring in their shadows is the Next Gen, a large and ever-growing group of potential heirs to the Big 3 throne. Having failed to overthrow the kings, they’ll now have a chance to wear one of their crowns while they’re away. This doesn’t mean we’re about the witness the elusive changing of the guard, or the rise of the next Borg and Connors. At Roland Garros later this month, Nadal will still be the favorite, and Djokovic the second favorite. But it does mean we’ll almost surely get to see a Next Genner in a Grand Slam winner’s circle for the first time.

Who’s going to take that first, long-awaited step? Of the eight quarterfinalists, seven could qualify as “next generation.” At 29, Pablo Carreño Busta is a little old, and at 27, Dominic Thiem is on the border. But Denis Shapovalov, Borna Coric, Alexander Zverev, Andrey Rublev, Daniil Medvedev and Alex De Minaur are all 24 or younger. Here are three questions worth considering as their vie for the trophy over the next week.

Denis Shapovalov has already taken out David Goffin, while Borna Coric defeated Stefanos Tsitsipas, who many consider to be the game's best young player. (Getty Images)

Who could spring a surprise?

Denis Shapovalov has looked like a much more mature player at this tournament, and has gained momentum and confidence with each match. With help from coach Mikhail Youzhny and girlfriend Mirjam Bjorklund, he’s figuring out the best ways to use his variety of shot-making skills. He’ll have a difficult, but passable, test against Carreño Busta in the quarterfinals.

Borna Coric is also a player to watch. He followed up his miracle comeback win over Stefanos Tsitsipas with a straight-set victory over Jordan Thompson. Coric has played more aggressively than normal, and would seem to have a chance to ambush Alexander Zverev in the quarterfinals, especially if the German’s chronic case of double-faultitis returns.

With wildly different game styles, a semifinal between Dominic Thiem and Daniil Medvedev would be tantalizing. (Getty Images)

What’s the best potential match-up?

The two favorites, Thiem and Medvedev, could meet in the semifinals, which will likely feel like a de facto final. Thiem is the highest seed left and the one with the most experience in the later rounds of majors. Medvedev was the runner-up in New York last year. The Russian and the Austrian were both in top form on Monday, in blowout wins over Felix Auger-Aliassime and Frances Tiafoe, and they’ll be favored in their quarters—Medevdev to beat Rublev, Thiem to beat de Minaur. Thiem is 2-1 against Medvedev. A semifinal match between them would be an intriguing, and difficult to predict, clash between Thiem’s straight-ahead power and Medvedev’s shrewd shifts of pace and spin.

Who’s the favorite?

It should come down to the Thiem-Medvedev winner. Thiem would seem to be the heir apparent, but I’ll take Medvedev. As we saw last year, the Russian can be virtually unbeatable when he’s on a roll. He hasn’t lost a set so far in New York. I’d say he’s on a roll.

In wire-to-wire war, Serena fends off Sakkari to reach US Open QFs

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 20:39:00 +0000

“Great match, huh?” Serena Williams seemed to say to Maria Sakkari when they met at the net after their fourth-round war on Monday.

Great match, indeed—a great fight from Sakkari and an even better one from Serena, who won it, 6-3, 6-7 (6), 6-3, in two-and-a-half tense hours. The scores may not mark it as a classic, and by the end of this US Open it may be entirely forgotten, but this one was taut and suspenseful from start to finish, and every point was bitterly contested. Games were long; grunts and screams were loud; and serves were held—there were only four breaks in total, and none in the second set. It was, in other words, what many of us had missed during tennis’s long absence.

The win was Serena’s 100th in Arthur Ashe Stadium, a record, against just 13 losses. When ESPN’s Rennae Stubbs asked her about the milestone afterward, Serena, who breaks a record virtually every time she plays, laughed and said, “A new one?” She said she didn’t think about it when she was on the court. She also tried not to think too much about the last time she played Sakkari, two weeks ago at the Western and Southern Open, in a match that ended in defeat for the American. She didn’t need to worry about that; Sakkari was giving her plenty to think about right now.

“She was doing so well!” Serena said of the Greek.

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In her third-round match, against Sloane Stephens, it took Serena a set and a half to raise her game to her opponent’s level. She wasn’t taking that chance against Sakkari. From the start of this one, Serena played with a stubborn, point-by-point intensity; even when she fell behind in games, she wouldn’t let them go. Serving at 2-2, Serena came from 0-40 down to hold. On Sakkari’s next service game, Serena came from 40-15 down to break. In the second-set tiebreaker, Serena fell behind 0-4, got back to 6-6, before losing it 8-6.

In the same way that Serena didn’t give any points away mentally, she didn’t give any away tactically, either. Rather than aim for the lines, she kept her ground strokes safely inside them, with pace and depth. When she connected, her shots had too much power for Sakkari to handle, anyway. Serena actually hit fewer winners, 30, to Sakkari’s 35, yet she was still the more aggressive player, and the one in control most of the time.

Sakkari said later that she didn’t take her chances when she had them. That assessment is probably too harsh. Sakkari held serve six straight times in the second set; she survived a roaring Serena comeback in the tiebreaker; she out-aced Serena, 13 to 12—and she broke early in the third and led 2-0. But she didn’t lose that lead by choking. She lost it because Serena was in refuse-to-lose mode.

You could see it in the way, after hitting a backhand winner to hold for 1-2 in the third set, Serena walked off the court with her held confidently high. You could see it in the running forehand pass—the shot of the match—she hit to break back for 2-2. You could see it in the 124-m.p.h. ace she cannonballed down the T at 3-3. You could see it in the way, before the next point, she pounded the ball into the court off her racquet strings as she set up to serve, and then sent a 125-m.p.h. bomb just wide. You could see it in the way she raised her game at 3-4 in the third, and broke serve with a forehand winner and a backhand winner. And you could see it in the final game, when she watched Sakkari save one match point with an unreturnable forehand, before answering with an unreturnable backhand for the victory.

Serena said she feels less pressure with no fans in the arena, but there’s also less time between points now that the players don’t have to wait for their applause to die down—for the second straight time, she was still breathing hard in her post-match interview. But for the second straight time, she had also survived a three-setter against a much younger opponent. Judging by this match, no matter how tired she may get, she’ll still be tough to beat, because her opponent is going to have to earn every point.

Great fight, great win, great match. And almost surely not the last we’ll see from Serena this week.

A Tale of Two Soldiers, and Tennis Players: Jack Kramer and Joe Hunt

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 20:22:00 +0000

“Strapping blond Californians of serve-and-volley persuasion.” That’s how one tennis historian described the two players who faced off in the final of the U.S. Nationals at Forest Hills in 1943.

Joe Hunt, 24, and Jack Kramer, 22, certainly fit that depiction as they strode side by side into the stadium at the West Side Tennis Club on that warm, late-summer day. Both men were lean and rangy 6-footers. Both were entering their athletic primes. Both were outfitted in casually utilitarian T-shirts and shorts, rather than the white flannel slacks that had long been the standard uniform among the men. Both played a newfangled style of net-rushing tennis—then known as the Big Game, now known as serve-and-volley—that they had pioneered on hard courts out west. And before their warm-up began, both flashed their toothy California smiles for the camera, as if they expected that the best years of their lives, and the best years of their friendly rivalry, were still to come.

Kramer (at left) and Hunt. (Photo courtesy of Joseph Hunt)

But these two all-American young men had something else in common: They were active-duty servicemen on leave from the war that had been raging across the globe for the last four years. Hunt was a graduate of the Naval Academy in Annapolis; he had served as a lieutenant on a destroyer in the Pacific and would do another tour of duty in the Atlantic, before training to become a pilot. Kramer had also tried to become a Navy aviator, but had been turned down because he had 20/30 vision in one eye. Instead, he signed up for the Coast Guard—“anything to escape the infantry”—and would see action in the Pacific during General Douglas MacArthur’s campaign to liberate the Philippines in 1944 and 1945.

The war that Hunt and Kramer were fighting had brought international tennis to a standstill. By 1943, with the sport’s other three major events cancelled, Forest Hills was the only place in the world where players could prove themselves at the Grand Slam level. Wimbledon’s Centre Court had been bombed and wouldn’t be fully repaired until 1950; Roland Garros had been turned into an internment camp; and the Australian Championships was on hiatus while the country’s troops fought in Europe and the Pacific. The United States was also involved in those theaters, of course, but its national tennis championships had been allowed to continue. The Roosevelt administration saw sports as a morale booster.

“We will gladly eliminate tennis if it interferes with winning the war,” USLTA president Holcombe Ward said in 1942. “But our government doesn’t want us to abandon tennis.”

What the U.S. government did want was for its tennis players to do their part in the war effort. Hunt and Kramer joined a long list of top male players—Bobby Riggs, Ted Schroeder, Frank Parker, Wilmer Allison, Gardner Mulloy, Budge Patty, among others—who held military commissions during World War II. At Forest Hills in 1943, five of the eight quarterfinalists were U.S. soldiers. Their service would help legitimate tennis in the eyes of red-blooded American sports fans, many of whom considered the game little more than a polite pastime for the private-club set.

Allison Danzig, sports columnist for The New York Times, wrote of the players’ war contribution, “It’s enough to show that, despite their lip service to the social amenities, the boys in the ice-cream pants aren’t any comfort to Tojo or Adolf.”

While Hunt and Kramer began the ’43 final as happy warrior-athletes, their match would slowly devolve into a battle of the walking wounded. A few days earlier, Kramer had eaten some “bad clams” at a New York restaurant, and after surviving his semifinal with Pancho Segura, he spent the previous day in bed. “But it just wasn’t enough to get all the poison out of my system,” he said.

Still, Kramer hoped he could “sneak by” Hunt; after all, he had been beating him in practice back home in Los Angeles. For a couple of hours, it appeared as if his luck might hold. The two men split the first two sets, and Kramer served for the third at 5-4. That’s when Hunt made his stand. He broke serve with what Kramer called a “fine defensive effort” and captured the crucial set 10-8. Kramer had nothing left. At the start of the tournament he had weighed 168 pounds; by the time it was over, he was a much-stringier 149.

But something unexpected happened on the way to Hunt’s coronation as the new king of U.S. tennis: he started to cramp. Even as he was building a seemingly insurmountable lead in the fourth set, he was limping from one point to the next. When Kramer served at 0-5, both men looked as if they were struggling to stay on their feet. If Kramer could hang on long enough, could he win by default? Hunt reached double match point at 15-40, and managed to put his return in the middle of the court. As Kramer moved forward to hit a forehand, Hunt shuffled unsteadily across his baseline. The ball flew off Kramer’s strings and sailed toward Hunt. It would only become apparent after it landed how close both men had been to victory, and to defeat.

*****

Kramer and Hunt had come a long way since they had first encountered each other at a junior tournament in California eight years earlier. That had been in Santa Monica in 1935, at an event called the Dudley Cup, which also happened to be the first tournament that the 13-year-old Kramer had entered. While the newbie made an unceremoniously quick exit in the first round, he never forgot his early glimpses of Hunt, and the (incredibly strong) local competition.

“Up until that point I knew nothing about tennis,” Kramer recalled. “I showed up at that first tournament in a brown mohair sweater. It was like another world. The other kids all had on perfect tennis whites, Tilden V-neck sweaters, and they all carried two or three shiny new racquets. Little Bobby Riggs was there. Little Joe Hunt, little Ted Schroeder. Throw in the unknown little Jack Kramer and there were four boys who would win six U.S. Nationals titles [at Forest Hills] in the next dozen years.”

Kramer didn’t come from a tennis family, or a country-club family. His father, David, worked his entire life as a brakeman for the Union Pacific Railroad, starting at age 11. But he was determined to give his son a chance to play the games he never had time to play. David introduced Jack to baseball, football and basketball; used the dinning room table for ping-pong matches; and even dug his son a pole-vault and long-jump pit in the backyard. Jack initially gravitated toward baseball, but one weekend he happened to see world No. 1 Ellsworth Vines play an exhibition match at a nearby county fair. Kramer was hooked.

“There I was that day in 1935: 13 years old, a poor kid from the desert,” Kramer said. “And here’s Ellsworth Vines, 6’2”, 155 pounds, dressed like Fred Astaire and hitting shots like Babe Ruth. I never again concentrated on any sport but tennis.”

While Kramer’s father didn’t expect his son to get rich playing the game, he moved the family from Las Vegas to Montebello, east of L.A., because he thought it would be better for Jack’s tennis. David had no idea how right he would turn out to be. Los Angeles in the 1930s was in the process of becoming the world’s greatest incubator of tennis talent, and Jack would take his place at the forefront of a wave of young champions from the area who would dominate the sport, and change how it was played, in the coming decades.

California had been churning out top tennis talent for years, of course, but most of the early stars had come from the Bay Area—Helen Wills, Maurice McLoughlin, Bill Johnston, Helen Hull Jacobs, Margaret Osborne Dupont and Don Budge included. With Vines (pictured at right, from Wikimedia Commons), the balance of power began to shift south, to a band of Depression-era kids who learned the game on public hard courts, rather than at private clubs. The 13-year-old Kramer may not have succeeded in winning a match at the Dudley Cup, but he walked away with something more important: a recommendation.

“Before I left Santa Monica, stunned and beaten, someone kind suggested I see a man named Perry Jones at the Los Angeles Tennis Club,” Kramer remembered. “Jones, of course, ran the Southern California Tennis Association. He was ‘Mister Jones’ if you wanted to go anywhere.”

Perry Jones was the persnickety majordomo of SoCal tennis, and he liked his players to look like they could have come from central casting down the road in Hollywood. The 6’2” Kramer became one of his favorites. Through Jones, Kramer gained entree to the Southern California junior elite, and soon found himself playing at The Los Angeles Tennis Club on a daily basis, competing against older players and future Hall-of-Famers like Vines, Riggs, Hunt, Schroeder, Gene Mako, Sidney Wood, Frank Shields, Bill Tilden and later, Pancho Gonzalez. A tennis academy before the word was invented, the LATC gave this budding Greatest Generation of U.S. tennis a place where they could push each other, and find new ways to win.

“The L.A. Tennis Club was like a laboratory,” said Kramer, whose father arranged his schedule so he could take his classes in the morning and be free to play tennis all afternoon. The person that Jack experimented with most wasn’t one of his junior rivals, though; it was a 45-year-old hydraulic engineer and club player named Cliff Roche. “Coach,” as Kramer called him, brought a gambler’s mentality to the game that suited the young Las Vegas native.

“He showed me that the odds on a court could be the same as with a deck of 52,” Kramer said. “Put the ball in a certain spot, and put yourself in a certain spot, and the chance of the other player getting out of that spot would be the same as drawing a third king.”

Roche was an early adherent of what became known as “percentage tennis.” He emphasized taking the ball on the rise, rushing the net, and, most of all, holding onto your serve. Many of today’s tennis truisms echo Roche’s philosophy: “You’re only as good as your second serve”; “you can’t lose if you’re never broken”; “break down the other guy’s strength”; “make your opponent come up with a perfect passing shot to beat you.”

If Roche was responsible for the theories behind percentage tennis, it took Kramer and his powerful serve-and-volley attack to turn it into the Big Game. In 1938, just a few years after taking up tennis seriously, he won the National Interscholastics; in 1940 he reached the semifinals at Forest Hills. And in 1939, at 18, he became the youngest man to play in a Davis Cup final, a record he would hold for 29 years.

Jack Kramer. (Wikimedia Commons)

That August, Kramer traveled to the Merion Cricket Club in Pennsylvania, where the Challenge Round against Australia would be staged. After much discussion, he was picked to play the doubles rubber. His partner would be Joe Hunt. During the match, which the two Californians would lose to the best team in the world at the time, John Bromwich and Adrian Quist, the fans at Merion began to see newsboys circling the stands and calling out “Extra!” When the players took a break to switch sides, many spectators ran out to buy papers from them. Reading the headlines, they learned that Great Britain had declared war on Germany.

“It was September 3rd, 1939,” Kramer said. “Outside, the world was falling apart and I was too young and naive to know. Hitler was marching into Poland.”

The Australians, who now represented a country that was officially at war, beat the Americans the following day. The Davis Cup wouldn’t be held again until 1946. But more important duties lay ahead for the U.S. team's young doubles partners.

*****

“Joe was something of a hero of mine,” Kramer wrote of Hunt in his autobiography, The Game. “He had always been very kind about playing me good practice matches when I was still only 15 or 16.”

Kramer, forever the kid in the mohair sweater, liked something else about Hunt: “He had beautiful equipment.”

If you wanted to idolize a tennis player—in the 1930s or the 2020s, for that matter—you could do worse than to choose Joe Hunt. Blond-haired, powerfully built, 6-feet tall, friendly and easygoing, he personified the California athletic ideal, as well as the the ideal of the tennis player as a sporting gentleman.

“He was a very good-looking man with a body like Charles Atlas,” Segura told USA Today in 2014. “He drew women to his matches. He would have been good for tennis. He was a credit to the game.”

“He was a carefree, energetic person,” says Joseph Hunt, a grand-nephew of Hunt’s who is an attorney in Seattle. “Bobby Riggs talked about what a fun-loving person he was, and about their friendship. Joe was already known for his big smile when he was two weeks old.”

Unlike Kramer, Hunt very much did come from a tennis family. His father, Reuben, a bankruptcy lawyer who had been a high-level player in Canada and won a few few rounds at the U.S. Nationals in Newport, introduced his three children to the game. Joe began playing at 5, and was winning tournaments before he turned 10.

The Hunt family embodied the southward shift in California tennis in the 1930s. Reuben played for Cal-Berkeley at the turn of the century, and Joe was born in San Francisco. But his game was formed alongside the rest of Perry Jones’ boys at the Los Angeles Tennis Club. Like many of them, he began his college career at USC. In 1938, Hunt won the NCAA doubles title with SC teammate Lewis Wetherell.

“He was an excellent prospect from a very young age,” Kramer said. “He succeeded Riggs as the outstanding junior in Southern California.”

While Kramer has always been credited with pioneering the Big Game, Hunt was every bit as committed to the attacking style.

“He was total total serve and volley, he came to the net on first and second serves,” Joseph Hunt says. “When you read articles from that time, you see Joe described as the best volleyer in the U.S.”

Reuben Hunt dreamed of seeing his son become the world’s best tennis player, and by 1938, Joe seemed to be well on his way to fulfilling that dream. But as signs of war became harder to ignore, he found his desire to serve his country harder to ignore as well. On a trip to play the Sugar Bowl in New Orleans during his sophomore year, Hunt met a player from Navy. As they talked, he grew interested in the Naval Academy, and decided to visit Annapolis.

“That visit changed his life,” Joseph Hunt says. “He never told his family about it. There was a lot of pressure on him to keep going as he was and become the No. 1 tennis player.”

Monday, September 7 is Lt. Joe Hunt US Open Military Appreciation Day:

Instead, Hunt transferred from USC, a hotbed for tennis, to the Naval Academy, which had never produced a top-level player. Then he did something even more unheard of for a budding tennis star: He went out for the football team. Hunt played halfback, and while he made the varsity, he spent most of his time on the bench.

“He was roughed around by football,” his grand nephew says. But Hunt’s teammates loved him, and he loved them, as well as the camaraderie the sport offered. In 1941, Hunt skipped Forest Hills, where he would would have been among the favorites for the title, to play the Army-Navy football game. In appreciation of the sacrifice, his teammates signed the game ball and gave it to him afterward.

Whatever lumps Hunt took on the football field, they didn’t slow him down on the tennis court. He reached the quarterfinals at Forest Hills in 1938, and the semis in ’39 and ’40. In 1941 he became the only man from Navy ever to win the NCAA singles championship. By 1939, Hunt’s tennis skills were deemed essential enough to have him excused from a Naval Academy training cruise so he could play the Davis Cup Challenge Round against Australia. This didn’t sit well with at least one columnist.

“The fact that Hunt has a good forehand and a strong net attack seems a ridiculous reason to excuse him,” Henry McLemore of UPI wrote. But excused Hunt was, and he joined Kramer in the U.S. team's ill-fated mission against the Aussies at Merion.

As we’ve seen, by the time that tie was over, war in Europe had become a reality. Two years later, war in the Pacific would as well. Hunt was scheduled to graduate from the Naval Academy in the spring of 1942, but with the conflict looming, his class’ commencement was moved up. In December ’41, after Pearl Harbor, the U.S. declared war on Japan, and Hunt was called to serve on a destroyer in San Diego.

“Is this the end of the Forest Hills dream?” he may have wondered. He also may have wondered how long there would be a Forest Hills to play.

*****

Jack Kramer had his own Forest Hills dreams, but before he could fulfill them he had to endure what may have been the most prolonged period of bad luck at the Grand Slams of any great player.

At Wimbledon, Kramer likely would have been favored to win the title every year from 1942 to 1945, if the tournament hadn’t been cancelled due to the war. When the event returned in ’46, Kramer was seeded second, but a blister forced him to wear a glove on his playing hand, and contributed to his fourth-round defeat. Finally, in ’47, as the top seed, he stayed healthy and dropped just one set on his way to his only Wimbledon title.

The U.S. Nationals, as we’ve seen, went on during the war, but Kramer’s karma was just as bad in New York. In 1942, he had appendicitis. In 1943, he ate those bad clams. In 1944 and 1945, he was thousands of miles away on a ship in the Pacific. It wasn’t until 1946 that he won his first Forest Hills. But his reign, like most reigns in the amateur era, was brief. After repeating as national champion in 1947, he turned pro and was banned from Forest Hills for the rest of his playing days.

Like many champions, though, Kramer had a way of finding silver linings in his defeats and frustrations. Looking back on his career in the late 1970s, he said he felt “lucky to get appendicitis in ’42 and clam poisoning in ’43.” If he had won the country’s national championship, he believed, the military would have made him a “poster boy.”

“The Coast Guard would have put me in special services, and I would have spent the war playing tennis entertaining the troops,” Kramer reflected.

Instead, Kramer was sent into battle and forced to grow up fast. In March 1944, he was commissioned as an officer and shipped into action on an LST (landing ship/tank) with the Seventh Fleet. There was plenty of action to be had in the Pacific at that time. He made seven landings as a supply officer. The most significant came during the Battle of Leyte Gulf, which launched MacArthur’s successful campaign to reclaim the Philippines from the Japanese. With 200,000 personnel involved, it was the largest naval conflict of World War II. Three days in, MacArthur made his famous walk through the waves and onto the sands at Leyte’s Red Beach, but fighting would continue there until the following spring.

“I was in some real shooting,” Kramer said. “I was in the war.”

Yet it was Kramer’s time alone on the ship and away from combat that would mean the most to him and his career. “I had a lot of time to think,” he said of the hours he spent on his LST’s overnight watch. While his fellow soldiers slept, he reassessed how he wanted to live his life.

“The young man on night watch in the Pacific, gazing at the moonlit sea and planning his postwar life, is a classic figure of World War II,” Sports Illustrated’s Dick Phelan wrote in a 1958 profile of Kramer. “Of all the young men who did it, perhaps none saw his future work out more precisely to specifications than Lieutenant [Jack] Kramer.”

Kramer decided that the game had come too naturally for him, and that he had let himself “drift.” He realized he had thrown away his chance at getting an education, and that his choices would be limited when he came home. “If I didn’t make it with tennis,” said Kramer, who had married his wife, Gloria, just before shipping out, “I was going to end up pumping gas somewhere.”

“I sat out on that old LST,” Kramer told Phelan, “and I did some serious thinking. No more gambling, no more staying up late, no drinking…I decided to go all out for a few major tournaments in 1946. It worked out like a dream.”

Kramer won titles at Wimbledon and Forest Hills immediately after the war. In 1948, he turned pro and was guaranteed $50,000 for a tour with Riggs. By then he was ready for the big leagues. He won the tour, 69 matches to 20, and became the top professional. He continued in tennis as a player, promoter, tournament director, broadcaster—and eventual bête noire of Billie Jean King—for the next 40 years. His signature Wilson racquets were among the most popular in the game’s history. He never had to pump gas.

After the war, he and Gloria had five sons. One of them, Bob, continued his father’s legacy as an L.A.-area tournament director, and also served as a Navy pilot. A few years ago, Bob joined his family in dedicating a plaque at the Mount Soledad Veterans Memorial in La Jolla, Calif., commemorating Jack’s war service. On the plaque (pictured below) is a brief history of his Pacific landings, and the medals he won.

This history, and these honors, weren’t news to Bob, exactly, but they also weren’t things that his father had often brought up or lingered over.

“You know those greatest generation guys,” Bob Kramer says. “They didn’t like to talk about the war. I think they were happy it was over.”

****

Joe Hunt, it seemed, wanted to do as much he could before the conflict came to an end.

As a college student, he had left the sunny sporting life of Southern California to sign up at the Naval Academy and throw himself into the country’s upcoming war effort. Once he graduated, Hunt was sent back to California, where he spent two years on a destroyer, the USS Rathburne, in San Diego and the Pacific. After being granted leave to play at Forest Hills in 1943, he was sent in the other direction, to serve in the Atlantic. Still, it wasn’t enough.

“Joe got the bug to be a flier,” his friend and New York Times reporter Allison Danzig wrote. “Some tried to discourage him, but he made up his mind. It wasn’t alone the glamour and thrill of being a fighter pilot that appealed to him. Aviation, he decided, was to be the next big thing in the future and he wanted in on it.”

In late 1943, Hunt applied for a transfer to the Navy Air Force, and, with his wife, Jacque (who was also a very good tennis player), traveled first to a training center in Dallas, and then to a base in Pensacola, Fla. There he met up with fellow player and pilot Ted Schroeder, who had won at Forest Hills in 1942. Unable to secure leave for the 1944 U.S. Nationals, Hunt and Schroeder staged their own, two-man U.S. championships at the Bayview Park Center in Pensacola that year. A huge crowd came out to see the last two Forest Hills winners take each other on. Hunt would beat Schroeder in what would be the last tennis match of his life.

Soon after, Hunt was transferred to Daytona for flight training. It was there that on February 2, 1945, he went up to 10,000 feet in a Grumman Hellcat fighter plane for a target run. Normally, the pilot would dive to 4,000 feet and then pull out, and that’s what Hunt’s instructors told him to do over the plane’s radio. But the aircraft went into a spin instead, and ended up in the ocean. By the time rescue boats reached the crash spot, it had sunk. Only pieces of it would be found.

“Nobody really knows what happened,” Joseph Hunt says. “It was determined that there was no pilot error, but there could have been something wrong with the plane, or the life raft may have inflated accidentally. He could have blacked out from the G force.”

Two weeks shy of his 26th birthday, Hunt was dead. American Lawn Tennis Magazine put a photo of Hunt in his plane on its next cover, and Danzig paid tribute in the New York Times.

“No finer specimen of an athlete has been seen in the Forest Hills stadium, nor a straighter living one,” Danzig wrote.

“Fame did not go to his head. He was serious in his outlook, but did not take himself or his position in tennis that way….He did the right and fair thing instinctively.”

“Joe was every inch the ideal of what every parent would like his son to be,” Danzig concluded. “He was fine all the way through. Tennis isn’t going to be the same without him.”

Hunt’s training class would graduate in July 1945. As the young pilots waited to be called up and given their assignments, the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and essentially ended the war.

“He may never have had to go,” Joseph Hunt says.

*****

Kramer and Hunt believed their 1943 final at Forest Hills was just the beginning for them. Surely they would vie for more major titles, and team up to bring the Davis Cup home. Surely, they would put on finer performances than this match between a man with food poisoning and another with a cramp. As it was, it would be their last meeting. But while it wasn’t the greatest final in Forest Hills history, it had one of the most memorable conclusions.

Serving at 0-5, 15-40 in the fourth set, Kramer hit a mid-court forehand and moved toward the net. Before he made it there, though, his approach shot landed long, and the match was over. Rather than lifting his arms in celebration, Hunt, who had been nursing a leg cramp for the better of the fourth set, collapsed and couldn’t get up. Kramer walked across the court to make sure his friend was OK.

“There I was, the loser, standing up dead on my feet while he was the winner, fallen in a heap,” Kramer said. “If I’d kept that ball in the court, I think I would have been the champ by default.”

Instead, Kramer sat down on the grass and, one soldier-player to another, shook Hunt’s hand in congratulation.

Kramer and Hunt, just after their match at Forest Hills. (International Tennis Hall of Fame)

*****

Three decades later, in the early 1970s, a young Joseph Hunt—Joe’s grand-nephew and namesake—attended the Pacific Southwest Championships, the tournament that Kramer ran at the Los Angeles Tennis Club.

“I saw Jack there, and somebody in my family said, ‘You have to go meet him,’” Hunt says. “So I introduced myself, and he said, ‘Are you related to THE Joe Hunt?’ He invited me over to sit with him and talk. He said, ‘When Joe died, I lost my greatest rival.’”

“Jack talked about how he and Joe had been Davis Cup partners, but you know what he never mentioned?” Hunt continues with a laugh. “Their Forest Hills match.”

“I think Jack still wanted that last forehand back.”

Osaka eases past Kontaveit after roller coaster match 11 days earlier

Mon, 07 Sep 2020 14:26:00 +0000

When Naomi Osaka and Anett Kontaveit played at the Western and Southern Open last week, it was a three-set roller coaster. When they faced off again late on Sunday night, the match felt more like a locomotive. Instead of ups and down and twists and turns, this was a one-way ride to a destination that felt predetermined the entire time.

It was a fast locomotive, too. After walking on court a little after 11:00 P.M., the two women weren’t in the mood for wasting any more time. That was especially true of Osaka, who played urgent, but never impatient, tennis throughout. An hour and 12 minutes later, she had a 6-3, 6-4 win.

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Osaka and Kontaveit have similar games. They hit hard from both wings and move well, and they don’t try too much fancy stuff. But Osaka, who is now 5-0 against Kontaveit, does everything a little better—or maybe I should say a little bigger. She’s 5’11” to Kontaveit’s 5’9” and she has an even greater power advantage than those heights would suggest. Osaka’s serve reached 120 m.p.h. in this match, and she made 71 percent of her first serves. It’s hardly a surprise that Kontaveit never managed to reach break point, but it’s a bit of a shock that she won just nine of 45 receiving points.

The story was the same from the ground. Osaka was tomahawking her forehand into the corners, sending Kontaveit scrambling back and forth in a futile pursuit of the ball. The Estonian doesn’t excel at mixing in different speeds or spins, or in rushing the net. She was left trying to gain the upper hand in the rallies by out-powering Osaka, a strategy that mainly led to errors. When Kontaveit came up with a good crosscourt angle, Osaka was ready with a better one. Osaka won the short rallies, and she won the long rallies, too

Osaka said she tried to improve her attitude tonight; in her last match, she indulged in a rare racquet toss or two. Mission accomplished: She played with poise and positivity against Kontaveit. She’ll need more of the same in the quarterfinals, where she’ll face Shelby Rogers, a player she has never beaten. Osaka says she’ll consider herself in the underdog in that match. That won’t be true for long if she plays the way she did tonight. This train looks like it’s picking up speed.

A. Zverev is on his own at the US Open, and he seems to be enjoying it

Sun, 06 Sep 2020 23:28:00 +0000

On Friday, as the afternoon wore on and Alexander Zverev and Adrian Mannarino failed to appear for their third-round match in Louis Armstrong Stadium, the tennis world—or at least the one we see on social media—began to collectively freak out. Where were they? Had Mannarino, who was in close contact with the coronavirus-positive Benoit Paire the previous week, been disqualified? Why was the USTA mum on the subject?

The one person who didn’t seem bothered by any of it was Zverev. Even as his starting time in Armstrong came and went, he could be seen kicking back in a lounge chair in his suite in Arthur Ashe Stadium, wearing just a pair of shorts and white socks. When the camera caught him in full chill-out mode, Zverev happily held his hand up, waved, and flashed a, “What, me worry?” grin at the world.

“I’m relaxed. I watched the other match. What else am I supposed to do? I was in my suite,” Zverev said, before adding, with a smile, “I didn’t know the camera was on me that much as well. I only realized afterwards that I was shirtless on TV.”

Zverev’s rampant shirtlessness has been a major topic of discussion during the first week at the Open. But the important takeaway from the above story is less about what he was (not) wearing, and more about his reaction: The 23-year-old German took the delay in stride, the way he has been taking everything in stride in the New York bubble so far.

That includes his fourth-round opponent on Sunday, Alejandro Davidovich Fokina. Zverev made quick work of the world No. 99, 6-2, 6-2, 6-1, in just 94 minutes. Zverev continued his stellar serving with 18 aces. He hit 39 winners against 22 errors. He was helped when Davidovich Fokina hurt his ankle in the third set, but by then Zverev was firmly in control.

“It was pretty good quality,” Zverev said of his performance. He must have been particularly happy to have double-faulted just twice.

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Zverev began the year by reaching his first Grand Slam semifinal, at the Australian Open, and now he’s achieved another breakthrough by reaching his first US Open quarterfinal. But things have changed for him in 2020, the way they have for everyone else. Zverev grew up on the tour, tagging along with his father, and older brother, Mischa, and he has traveled with his family his entire career. When the circuit shut down this spring, though, Alexander cut out on his own for the first time.

“You learn that tennis, at the end of the day, is not everything,” Zverev told CNN last week. “…I kind of went to Europe by myself, and I was alone for about one and a half, two months without my parents, without my brother, without anyone else, and you just learn to appreciate little things more.”

“I had to really grow up in a way, because I had to train myself, I had to go through my daily life myself, grocery shopping, food, everything like that, I had to do it myself, which I never used to do.”

During the break, Zverev began a coaching partnership with Spanish legend David Ferrer; the two will resume working together after the Open. More notoriously, Zverev took part in Novak Djokovic’s Adria Tour—forever to be known as the “ill-fated Adria Tour”—and later was caught on video at a crowded party, at a time when he was supposed to be quarantining. Zverev’s family and coaches cited safety concerns in skipping the trip to New York, which means he’s on his own at a big event for the first time. So far, Zverev, who is staying with other players at a Marriott hotel on Long Island, seems to be enjoying the mix of freedom and containment the best he can.

“All you have is tennis and the bubble, so you can’t really get away from it,” he said on Friday. “You can’t really have a fresh mind like you do at other tournaments.

Zverev’s independence may only be short-lived, but could it help him at the Open, and in the future? For some players, leaving the nest is a positive. Djokovic, for one, thrived as he became less closely identified with his parents. On the other hand, Rafael Nadal never took the experts’ advice and fired his Uncle Toni as his coach, and that worked out pretty well, too.

For now, a second straight Grand Slam semifinal is very much in Zverev’s reach. His next opponent will be Borna Coric, and he’ll be solidly favored to beat the Croatian. Whatever happens, he seems happier on court than he has in years past; six months away from the thing you love will do that to you.

“I think it’s unnecessary to complain right now,” Zverev said of the ups and down of life in the bubble.

“We’re playing.”

Serena Williams took Sloane Stephens’ best, and made it disappear

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 22:05:00 +0000

“I said, ‘Just get a game, Serena, just get a game,’” Serena Williams said after her 2-6, 6-2, 6-2 win over Sloane Stephens on Saturday. “And the next thing I know I won the second set, so I said, ‘OK, great.’”

That’s kind of how it felt from the outside, too, didn’t it? One minute Stephens was on fire and cruising; the next minute Williams was completely in command and on her way to winning 10 of the last 12 games. It was a titanic, 180-degree momentum shift, executed in a span of a few minutes. But even for Serena, it was difficult to feel that shift without fans to heighten the drama with their oohs and aahs, roars and gasps. Without that emotion in the arena, the score just kind of…went in the other direction.

Most of the emotion inside Arthur Ashe Stadium would have been in Serena’s favor, of course. But she said she didn’t need it, as she had all the motivation she needed inside. It wasn’t surprising that Williams turned a match against Stephens around; coming in, Serena was 5-1 against her, and twice before she had beaten her after losing the first set. What was surprising was how thorough this turnaround was. As well as Stephens played in the first set, that’s exactly how well Serena played in the last two. This match was one-way traffic, in two different directions.

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For the first set and a half, Stephens, to use the only appropriate cliché, was on fire. She made nearly 80 percent of her first serves, and controlled the rallies with nonchalant self-assurance. She would roll a forehand or backhand crosscourt and pull Serena wide, and then fire an easy, safe winner down the line. So many shots went past Serena, it seemed logical to wonder: Has she lost a step? Sloane finished the first set with 11 winners and just five unforced errors, while Serena made just 50 percent of her first serves.

“In that first set, she didn’t make any errors,” Serena said. “She was playing so cleanly.”

Still, the question on most people’s minds as the second set started wasn’t, “Will Serena be able to turn it around?” It was, “When will the turnaround begin?” It happened with Serena serving at 2-2, down break point. Sloane was coming off a love hold, and she had yet to show any cracks in her casually confident facade. When Serena sent her first serve down the T at break point, Sloane was there in plenty of time. But instead of giving the ball a rip with her forehand as she had been, she sliced it back. The ball sailed long, Serena eventually held, and then broke serve for the first time in the next game.

Sloane’s momentum went poof, and she won just two more games. It only took one cautious decision by Sloane, on that slice return of serve, for Serena to seize the upper hand.

From there, Serena’s first-serve percentage rose; she made 60 percent for the match and finished with 12 aces. She changed her return position on Stephens’ second serves, stepping forward to meet them earlier. Instead of Stephens controlling from the middle of the court and running Serena side to side, Serena did the controlling, and Sloane did the running. Once the dynamic shifted and Serena stopped making errors, Stephens didn’t have any answers or back-up plans. She’s an excellent defender, but when Serena plays well, a good offense beats a good defense every time.

“It was intense,” Williams said, between deep breaths, as she did her post-match interview with ESPN’s Tom Rinaldi. “We always have some really incredible matches. It brings out the best in my fitness when I play Sloane.”

Deep breaths or no deep breaths, this match was a reminder that, even a few weeks short of 39, Serena hasn’t lost a step after all. She still retains her basic superiority, in skill and confidence, over most other high-level players. She took Sloane’s best, and made it disappear. Now she’ll try to do the same against another high-level player, and one who beat her last week at the Western & Southern Open, Maria Sakkari.

Without fans roaring for her, it might have been a little harder to appreciate what Serena can still do to a hot-hitting opponent. All we can do is tip our caps at home.

Coric saves six match points and wins a silent classic over Tsitsipas

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 05:21:00 +0000

“It’s just so, so sad,” ESPN’s Cliff Drysdale said after watching Borna Coric and Stefanos Tsitsipas walk toward the net to tap racquets in a strangely silent Louis Armstrong Stadium a little after 1:00 in the morning on Saturday.

It’s safe to say that this was the first time that a commentator had uttered those words at the end of an epic five-set tennis match. But they were understandable. In any other year, a raucous and well-lubricated crowd would have joined Coric and Tsitsipas in that arena, and they would have lived and died with virtually all of the 349 points the two men played. The fans would have roared for their 112 winners. They would have been awed by Tsitsipas’s run of untouchable play through the third and most of the fourth sets. They would have shaken their heads and dropped their jaws during Coric’s beyond-belief comeback from 1-5 down in the fourth, during which he saved six match points. They would have stood and cheered Coric as he walked off a 6-7 (2), 6-4, 4-6, 7-5, 7-6 (4) winner after four hours and 39 minutes. And they would have stood and cheered both men for the way they maintained their form and fitness through a fifth set that was as tense as it was punch-drunk.

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Instead, the Greek and the Croat did it all alone, with a few coaches scattered around the stands and a skeleton crew of officials with them on the court. Somehow the atmosphere this match created for those of us watching on TV was nearly as taut, edgy, and thrilling as any other classic US Open night match from years past.

For much of it, the fourth-seeded Tsitsipas was, as expected, the superior player. He was the one with the more varied arsenal of weapons. He was the one who could belt winners from the baseline and dash forward to finish points in the forecourt, while Coric was the road-running retriever who could only rally and defend.

Except that somewhere along the way, the roles were reversed. By the end, it was Coric who was powering his shots to the corners, following them in, and closing at the net—he ended up there 63 times to 54 for Tsitsipas. It was Coric who was saving break points in the fifth set with big ground strokes and deft volleys. It was Coric who, at 4-3 and 5-3 in the final-set tiebreaker—the most important moment of the match—came up with a forehand winner and a service winner to virtually seal the win. It was Coric who essentially stole all three sets that he won.

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Drysdale’s commentary partner, Brad Gilbert, said that this was a night when Tsitsipas would want to go home and “guzzle all the beer and smash every stick in the house.” As he walked up to shake hands, Tsitsipas looked amazed and bewildered by what had just transpired.

During the fourth set, he had steadily raised his level of play, to the point he seemed to be making a statement to the rest of the field that he was going to be a factor in the second week. Tsitsipas reached match point six times, served for the win twice, and led 5-4, 40-0, triple match point on his serve. But he couldn’t connect on the final shot. Each time he went for the kill, he missed.

If there’s a physical flaw with Tsitsipas’ game, it’s that he’s slightly hyper and edgy, rather than relaxed and flowing, in the way he moves and swings. He shanked a lot of balls on big points in this match, and that’s how he ended it, with a forehand that went off his frame and looped well wide of the court.

“This is probably the saddest and funniest thing at the same time that has ever happened in my career!” Tsitsipas tweeted a few minutes later.

Coric has played and lost his share of matches like this in the past, and it was nice to see him come out of his shell and grab this one. Hopefully Tsitsipas won’t be as physically and mentally scarred from this defeat as he was after his equally memorable five-set loss to Stan Wawrinka at Roland Garros last year.

As Drysdale said, the end was sad in its way, but the match wasn’t. Together, Coric and Tsitsipas didn’t need anyone else. They gave us that old late-night Open feeling, all by themselves.

Serena. Naomi. As US Open title contenders go, how about Petra Kvitova

Sat, 05 Sep 2020 04:20:00 +0000

Why hasn’t Petra Kvitova done better at the US Open during her career?

“It’s always pretty crowded,” the Czech told ESPN’s Rennae Stubbs after her mostly impressive 6-4, 6-3 win over Jessica Pegula on Friday night. “I like the peace and quiet.”

Kvitova isn’t shy, exactly, but she is easygoing and low-key. Most years, those are not words that anyone would use to describe the US Open. But 2020 is obviously not most years, and the grounds are definitely not crowded. If Kvitova wants peace and quiet, she can find a lot of it in the bubble.

Is this, by itself, a reason to believe that Kvitova can make it past the quarterfinals in New York for the first time, and win the whole tournament? Probably not. But at 30, with six of the Top 10 absent, this would seem to be the year for her to make a push in New York. So far we’ve talked a lot about Serena Williams, Naomi Osaka, and Victoria Azarenka as potential contenders for the women’s crown. Should we also be talking about Kvitova? She’s one of the relatively few players in the draw with major titles to her name, and there aren’t many who can stay with her power.

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Pegula, despite her scrappiest efforts, certainly couldn’t. Kvitova, who at 6’0” has five inches on the American, set the tone by winning the first 10 points on her serve. While the match wasn’t as one-sided as last night’s blowout win by Felix Auger-Aliassime over Andy Murray, the dynamic was similar: One player was constantly attacking, and the other was constantly defending. Both times, the defender could never find a way to seize control of the points, and basically had to hope that the attacker missed.

In fairness, there’s always reason to hope for that when you’re facing Kvitova, whose game can veer from 10 to zero and back to 10 again multiple times during the course of a match, or even just a game. After winning the first set, Kvitova did have one of her lulls. But this time it only lasted two games; once she clicked back in, the match was out of Pegula’s hands. Kvitova finished with 26 winners to just nine for the American, who would win just 35 percent of her second-serve points. There ends Pegula’s summer run, which included a quarterfinal result at the Western & Southern Open and two wins at the US Open.

How far will Kvitova’s run take her, in her bubble of peace and quiet? Unlike Pegula, her next two opponents, Shelby Rogers and possibly Naomi Osaka, will be better equipped to handle her power. Each also has a win over Kvitova at a major. But the Czech will be solidly favored to beat Rogers, and something close to even money against Osaka.

“I’m so happy I decided to come her and play,” Kvitova said tonight.

These days, showing up may be half the battle.

Felix Auger-Aliassime cleared for flight with clean win over Murray

Fri, 04 Sep 2020 04:47:00 +0000

Felix Auger-Aliassime has long been touted as a future Grand Slam champion. But at age 20, it’s fair to say that some concerns had begun to crop up about his future—or, more precisely, about where he was in his future. He had reached five ATP finals, but he had lost them all, and before this week, he had won just two matches at the Grand Slams. At this year’s Australian Open and last year’s US Open, he had lost in the first round. When it came to forecasting the long-term future of the men’s game, some of the smart money seemed to have moved from Auger-Aliassime to Italian teenager Jannik Sinner.

It’s also fair to say that, with his thoroughly convincing 6-2, 6-3, 6-4 win over Andy Murray at the US Open in Thursday, FAA answered a lot of questions, and allayed a lot of doubts. He played relentlessly aggressive tennis from first ball to last, and never trailed. Auger Aliassime hit 24 aces to Murray’s two, and 52 winners to Murray’s nine; won 89 percent of his first-serve points, while Murray won 56 percent of his; won 97 points to just 68 for Murray; and didn’t face a single break point. With his mix of blistering pace and viciously dipping topspin, with his brutally dismissive return winners and toweringly crisp smashes, Auger Aliassime made Murray look like a man caught in a hurricane inside Arthur Ashe Stadium.

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Murray never could get himself out of the way. Obviously struggling to recover from his five-set win on Tuesday, he came out moving slowly and barely cracking triple digits on his first serve. Murray spent most of the first two sets trapped well behind the baseline, doing his best to fend off and redirect FAA’s blasts. In the third set, Murray stepped forward and tried to swing with the young Canadian; he had a little more success, but not enough to threaten him or ever take a lead.

FAA said he had worked hard on his sometimes-shaky serve, and especially his second serve, during the break. For tonight, he had ironed out whatever was ailing it; along with those 24 aces, he committed just two double faults. On a night like Thursday, he would have been hard for anyone on his Djokovic-less side of the draw to beat.

Auger Aliassime will play either Dan Evans or Corentin Moutet next, but we might be tempted to peek ahead at a potential fourth-round collision with Dominic Thiem. Whatever happens in the short term for FAA, the long-term prospects look good again. He’s been re-cleared for flight.

Three years after having a child, Pironkova wins for moms everywhere

Thu, 03 Sep 2020 19:26:00 +0000

If you were out on Court 17 early on Thursday at the US Open—out there virtually, of course—you might have seen a player hit a shot and use a game style that you dimly recognized from years ago.

The player, a woman with black hair pulled back under a white visor, might not have been instantly recognizable. The shot she hit, a full-swipe slice forehand approach, would have knuckled in the air, bounced unpredictably, and given her opponent fits. The game style she used—an easy, instinctive, flowing, all-court counter-attack—would have looked, as one commentator put it today, “like a walk in the park.” But even if all of this rang a bell, it probably would have conjured up images of Wimbledon grass rather than New York asphalt.

Eventually, the name of this smooth-swinging blast from the past would have come to you: Tsetvana Pironkova. The 32-year-old Bulgarian is a tennis-aficionado’s favorite, one of those players who seemingly has tennis coded into her DNA. With an idiosyncratic arsenal of shots, she owned a game that was as creative as it was effortless. Unfortunately, it may have been a little too much of both, because it was only intermittently successful.

Pironkova’s career, which lasted in its first iteration from 2005 to 2017, was mostly a parade of first- and second-round defeats at the majors. She won just one title, and never cracked the Top 30. Her claim to fleeting fame came at Wimbledon. In 2010, she made a surprise run to the semifinals, and followed that up by reaching the quarters there in 2011. Both runs were memorable while they lasted, as she magically carved up the court with her unusual, thoughtful mix of spins.

Pironkova’s best showing at the US Open came in 2012, when she reached the fourth round. Now, after her 7-5, 6-3 win over Garbiñe Muguruza on Court 17 on Thursday, she’s one win from matching that result. More amazingly, Pironkova’s two victories this week came in her first two WTA matches since she left the tour in 2017.

During those three years, Pironkova had a son, Alexander, and started a clothing line. But as she watched many of her peers continue on tour into their 30s, she felt the pull of competition again. When the WTA eased its rules for returning mothers in 2018, Pironkova saw her chance.

Under the new system, she was able to come back and use the ranking—No. 123—she had when she left the tour three years ago. With all of the withdrawals from this year’s US Open, it was high enough to get her straight into the main draw. There she was joined by eight other moms, including Serena Williams, Kim Clijsters, Victoria Azarenka, and the woman who beat her in the 2010 Wimbledon semifinals, Vera Zvonareva.

“Everything changes,” she said today of her life as a mother. “Your priorities have nothing to do with what they did before. Nothing is the same really. Right now I’m just happy to be playing. Having the opportunity for [Alexander] to watch me also makes me really happy.”

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Pironkova announced her return on March 14, just as the pandemic was shutting the world down. But she says the break gave her a chance to focus purely on her game.

“When I announced I was planning to go back on tour, really the next day almost all the tournaments were starting to get canceled,” she said. “I did have my doubts… but it turned out to be the right decision, I guess, because it actually gave me more time to prepare.”

While Muguruza struggled at times today—she had more success smashing racquets than winners—this wasn’t a case of Pironkova simply cashing in on a terrible performance from a top player. Muguruza led early and served for the first set, before Pironkova got her teeth into the match. First, she caught up to Muguruza’s ground strokes. Then she began to redirect them and take control of the rallies—in her easy way, of course.

“The surface is also really fast,” she said. “… I think I did a good job adjusting.”

By the second set, the old Pironkova style was recognizable again. She whipped her slice forehand into the corner and drew an error. She casually tracked down a drop volley and flicked a forehand past the Spaniard, who was fooled by the last-second change in direction. At the start of rallies, Pironkova absorbed Muguruza’s pace; by the end of them, she was the one dictating. It was all too much for Muguruza, who looked bamboozled by Pironkova’s style, and who grew more infuriated as the match progressed.

“I was just trying to put the ball in the court,” Pironkova said. “I found my rhythm and then I was swinging away.”

Asked about her style of today, Pironkova says she “just tries to combine everything and have a good outcome.” Even with its unusual elements, her game does fit together well. The WTA’s new rules have made its workplace more welcoming for mothers, and we can see the benefits when a player with Pironkova’s unique abilities has a chance to return, and to bring something different and entertaining back to the court. There’s no reason why a game as watchable as hers should have to disappear when she turns 30 and has a child.

“I guess I was mentally prepared,” Pironkova said today. “It’s not something super new. In the same time I was feeling well, I was moving well, I was hitting the ball well. Why not win?”

Brandon Nakashima impresses in four-set loss to Alexander Zverev

Wed, 02 Sep 2020 20:24:00 +0000

For a player who turned 19 just last month, Brandon Nakashima came highly praised.

His game resembles Novak Djokovic’s, we heard. His backhand is up there with Jimmy Connors’, we were told. One look at him and Wimbledon champion Pat Cash signed on as his coach.

After his first-round win over Paolo Lorenzi at the US Open on Monday, Nakashima, who is currently ranked No. 223, didn’t shy away from setting ambitious goals for himself.

“I always wanted to be No. 1 in the world and win a Grand Slam,” said Nakashima, a native of San Diego who turned pro after one year at the University of Virginia, and reached the quarterfinals in Delray Beach in February. “It’s just a matter of developing my game during this time and just trying to get more experiences like this under my belt, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

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Earlier this summer, Nakashima told UBI Tennis, “I’ve always liked to see Federer play, but I think my game is more like Djokovic’s.” During the Western and Southern Open last week, he had a chance to see Djokovic’s game from up close, when he served as the Serb’s warm-up partner before his matches.

“He’s a good guy. He’s definitely funny at times, especially on the court when he’s not hitting. He’s always laughing, having a good time,” Nakashima said. “But when it comes to practicing and hitting on the court, he’s definitely locked in, all down to business, so it’s great to see that.”

On Wednesday, we got a look at how Nakashima’s game holds up against Top 10 competition, when he faced off against No. 5 seed Alexander Zverev. The Djokovichian qualities were noticeable from the start. Like him, Nakashima has the ability to take a hard-hit ball from his opponent, redirect it from a defensive position, and put his opponent on the defensive with one shot. Nakashima favors his two-handed backhand, as Djokovic once did, and, like Djokovic, the teenager will make you pay if you serve to that backhand side.

Maybe because Nakashima’s game is backhand-based, there’s a deceptive, sneaky-good quality to it. In the early going, it seemed to me that Zverev would have the superior baseline game. The German hits a bigger ball, especially from the forehand side, with more work on it. Zverev can drill forehand winners both crosscourt and inside-out, whereas, Nakashima leans on his crosscourt much more. The inside-out forehand is the favored kill shot of most young players, but Nakashima hit very few of them today.

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Yet for the better part of the first three sets, Nakashima had the upper hand in the battle of the baseline—he won 60 percent of the points on his second serve, while Zverev won just 36 percent of his. Nakashima did it not by belting winners past Zverev, but by maneuvering him out of position and finishing points at the net. The American was 35 of 46 up there, and showed good feel and instincts on his volleys.

So why did Zverev win this match going away, 7-5, 6-7 (8), 6-3, 6-1? Why did he dominate the winner count, 60 to 36, and very nearly win it in straight sets? The biggest reason was his serve. Zverev hit 24 aces to five for his opponent, and, despite the excellence of Nakashima’s backhand return, Zverev was never broken.

In men’s tennis, even in the era of the baseliner, one unbeatable shot can count for more than every other shot combined. Zverev routinely fell behind 0-30 on his serve, only to ace his way out of trouble. Nakashima has a nice serve as well, especially the slice wide into the deuce court; but most of the time he has to construct his way to a winning point.

At 19, there’s always time to improve, and playing Zverev over best-of-five had to be a learning experience and a reality check. While he may have idolized Federer as a kid, Nakashima has a pretty good role model in Djokovic. The world No. 1 didn’t get there by bombing aces; he rose up the rankings by doing everything else better than everyone else. If Nakashima is half as good at the modern baseline game as Djokovic, we’re going to be seeing a lot more of him.