Articles by Steve Tignor

With breakthrough title, young Alexander Zverev continues to learn how to be a champion

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 18:30:00 +0000

Stan Wawrinka stood, frozen and flat-footed, in the middle of the court as the ball went past him for a winner. He had been expecting it to come to his backhand side. When it went to his forehand instead, there was nothing the newly-crowned U.S. Open champion could do but put his head down and clap his palm against his strings in a gesture of appreciation at his opponent’s surprisingly good shot.

That opponent, Alexander Zverev, hadn’t smacked the ball especially hard, or placed it perfectly in the corner. All the 19-year-old German had done was send a solid backhand up the line. But Wawrinka understood that it wasn’t where Zverev had hit the ball, but when. This was the tail end of a tense third set in Sunday’s St. Petersburg final, and Wawrinka, the world No. 3, had been pushing hard to make inroads on Zverev’s serve. It was exactly the moment when the Swiss veteran might have expected a teenager to crack under the pressure of trying to win his first ATP title. Wawrinka, tennis’ new king of Sundays, had won 11 straight finals and had been up 3-0 in the third set of this one. Why would he believe this kid would be the one to come back and break that streak?

But Zverev didn’t crack under the pressure. Instead, he kept his racquet steady and found just the right balance of margin and aggression with his backhand. All Wawrinka could do was applaud the kid’s nerve. With that potentially anxious moment past him, Zverev would swing more freely in breaking Wawrinka and holding for a 6-2, 3-6, 7-5 win. It was the first of what is sure to be many tournament victories in the future, and Stan wasn’t the only one applauding it. The men’s tour has been desperate for new blood, and Zverev is the first teenager to win an ATP title since Marin Cilic all the way back in 2008.

“This victory is something special,” said Zverev, who had lost championship matches in Nice and Halle earlier this year. “I played all the finals well. I lost to Dominic Thiem on clay [in Nice], and I could have won against Florian Mayer on the grass [in Halle] ... Now I’m very happy with the win, especially over such a great player like Stan.”

As he implied, Zverev has learned a lot—about his game, about what he’s capable of, about how to win—in 2016. He began the season ranked 83rd, and his 6-1, 6-2, 6-3 defeat to Andy Murray in the first round at the Australian Open hardly boded well for the immediate future.

“This guy has a lot to learn,” I wrote at the time.

Nine months later, Zverev has learned it. He’s ranked 24th, has a 38-21 record and has beaten three Top 10 opponents, including Roger Federer.

There were moments in the spring when you could see Zverev discovering new possibilities in his game from one week to the next. As of last year he was still growing, and he seemed content to rally and use his excellent two-handed backhand as his primary weapon. Now that he’s 6’6”, his serve has become a bomb, and he can club winners with his forehand from behind the baseline. The one trait that Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic all share is a blend of power and control on the forehand side, and Zverev has it, too.

Still, we knew he had the game; coming into this season, it was Zverev’s temperament that seemed problematic. Like his generational peer Nick Kyrgios, Zverev was combustible and prone to self-sabotaging meltdowns—in 2016, I wrote that he “was Borg on the outside, McEnroe on the inside.” Where Kyrgios continues to struggle with his attitude, though, Zverev has improved his. In his win over Wawrinka, he didn’t lose his cool, even when he was down 0-3 in the third. But neither did he over-celebrate afterward. We’ll see what happens in the future, but right now, at 19, Zverev looks, acts and plays with the respect and self-respect of a seasoned pro.

In March, Nadal recognized Zverev’s potential, calling him a “possible future No. 1” who “has all the shots” and “everything to become a big star.” The only time I could remember Rafa being so decisively upbeat about a younger player was when, after he first faced a teenaged Kei Nishikori at Queen’s Club, he said Kei would be “Top 5 for sure.”

Rafa obviously knows what he’s talking about, but Zverev didn’t seem quite ready to believe him when they played in Indian Wells. In one of the year’s best contests, Zverev reached match point only to bunt the easiest of volleys into the net. But like everything else this year, he learned from the experience. In June, Zverev closed out Federer in Halle, and against Wawrinka on Sunday, he held serve convincingly at 6-5 in the third. He knows how to beat the game’s best players, and now he knows how to win a tournament.

Just as important, though, Zverev also knows how hard the climb will be from here. After all, Cilic, the last ATP teen champ, has had a nice career, but he never went on to dominate the sport. Zverev, who must have bigger things in mind than becoming the next Marin Cilic, knows that nothing is guaranteed.

“Of course, it’s nice to have attention and stuff like that,” Zverev said this summer.

But, he added, “there’s been a million future No. 1s that never got to No. 1.”

He has more to learn, but the kid obviously knows a lot already.

The Week in Preview: Asian swing kicks into gear at Wuhan, Chengdu, Shenzhen, Tashkent

Mon, 26 Sep 2016 03:29:00 +0000

A distant, and perhaps rational, tennis observer might be lulled into believing that the sport slows down after the U.S. Open, which, after all, is the last of the year’s four majors. Those who follow the game more closely know that, when it comes to the schedule, rationality is the last thing we should expect. Instead, the tours pick up speed as they come down the homestretch, and the players’ plane rides get even longer as they shuttle from Europe to Asia and back again.

The WTA is already deep into its season-ending Asian swing, and this week it’s in the middle of a lucrative three-tournament sprint, from Tokyo to Wuhan to Beijing. The ATP, meanwhile, is in the process of heading East. The men begin with two warm-up events this week, in Chengdu and Shenzhen, before the top players gather in Beijing and Shanghai starting next Sunday.

Here’s a look at the week ahead, starting with the new WTA showcase in Wuhan.

*****

Dongfeng Motor Wuhan Open (WTA)
Wuhan, China
$2,589,000; WTA Premier 5
DecoTurf II
Draw is here

Going back to the long-lost idea of tennis and rational scheduling for a second, you might think the women could use a week off between the traditionally prestigious Toray Pan Pacific Open in Tokyo, and the Premier Mandatory event in Beijing that begins next week. But what player can say no to a $2.6 million dollar purse, and whatever guaranteed paydays that come with it? Not many, it seems. That’s what the deep-pocketed officials in Wuhan have to offer, and it was enough to lure most of the Top 20. That includes Angelique Kerber, Garbiñe Muguruza, Agnieszkaa Radwanska, Simona Halep, Karolina Pliskova and Venus Williams.

If the tournament is anything like last year, we could end up with a surprise champion, a player who begins a breakout late-season surge, or both. In 2015, an unseeded Venus threaded her way to the title, but it was the woman she beat in the final, Muguruza, who would go on to win in Beijing, go deep at the year-ender in Singapore, and record her first major title in Paris the following spring.

This year, with Serena Williams again not in the draw, all eyes will begin on Kerber. How dominant will the new No. 1 be going forward? Can she replicate her Grand Slam successes on a week-in, week-out basis? We’ll start to get an idea in Asia. Even if Kerber doesn’t live up to expectations, there will be a lot of interesting, and potentially important, match-ups over the course of the week.

Already out: Monica Puig, in straight sets, to Roberta Vinci. If you expected world domination after her run to the Olympic gold medal, you have been disappointed so far.

*****

Chengdu Open (ATP)
Chengdu, China
$840,915; 250 ranking points
Hard court
Draw is here

Speaking of rationality in scheduling one more time, hasn’t Dominic Thiem been telling us he’s going to start thinking long-term and not play as many events in the future? That future has obviously been delayed: After losing in the final in Metz, France, on Sunday, Thiem will fly to China, where he has taken a wild card at the 250 in Chengdu. He’ll also be the No. 1 seed, ahead of No. 2 Nick Kyrgios and No. 3 Grigor Dimitrov.

*****

Shenzhen Open (ATP)
Shenzhen, China
$641,305; 250 ranking points
Plexipave
Draw is here

Tomas Berdych leads the field here, followed by David Goffin, Richard Gasquet, Bernard Tomic, and Alexander Zverev. The biggest element of suspense is whether the 19-year-old Zverev, after winning his first title in St. Petersburg on Sunday, will follow his friend Thiem to China right away. If he does, he’ll join his older brother, Mischa, in the draw.

Qualifier of note: Ryan Harrison, who will open against Guillermo Garcia-Lopez.

*****

Tashkent Open (WTA)
Tashkent, Uzbekistan
$250,000; WTA International
Plexipave
Draw is here

Because no showcase event in tennis should ever enjoy our undiluted attention, the WTA has a second tournament on its schedule this week. With Wuhan monopolizing the big names, Tashkent’s top seed is world No. 58 Kirsten Flipkens.

Full Speed Ahead: How tennis' officials are trying to make a 19th-century game move at a 21st-century pace

Wed, 21 Sep 2016 11:40:00 +0000

A competitive five-set match, all wrapped up in 90 minutes: Is this just the stuff of a TV scheduler’s dream? Believe it or not, it happened last January, when Roger Federer beat Lleyton Hewitt, 4–3 (5–3), 2–4, 3–4 (3–5), 4–0, 4–2, in Sydney, Australia.

Yes, you read those scores correctly. The number that jumps out is 4, and if the U.S. and Australian tennis federations have their way, we might be seeing more of it. Fast4 is the scoring system Federer and Hewitt helped promote, and it sums up what many officials, instructors, club owners and TV programmers are hoping will happen to tennis. Whether sets are played to four, or deuces and lets are eliminated, or tournaments are finished in a day, the goal is to speed the sport up.

“We know that people don’t have unlimited hours to play,” says Jeff Waters, managing director of adult tennis at the USTA. “Everything happens in a specific window of time now, especially with kids’ schedules and how regimented they’ve become. We need to shorten up the window for tennis.”

After 139 years, games still go to deuce, sets still go to six games and the men still play best-of-five at the majors. Why does tennis stick so stubbornly to its unique, idiosyncratic scoring system? Maybe it’s because, to tennis players, “unique” and “idiosyncratic” are good things.

“People want to feel like they’re playing ‘real tennis,’” says Mike Curran, director of tennis and fitness at the Gulf Harbour Yacht and Country Club in Fort Myers, Fla. “That’s a big barrier to experimenting with new scoring systems.”

Just as crucial, according to Curran, is convincing successful teaching pros to run events with alternative formats. Two years ago, as a member of the USTA’s Adult Competition Committee, Curran was asked to try a few out at his club. He was apprehensive about “rocking the boat.”

“I had my little utopia here, with 27 league teams,” Curran says. “Trying anything new is difficult, especially if the players think it’s a gimmick.”

Curran plunged ahead. He tried tournaments with 10-point tiebreakers and 40-point tiebreakers, but neither caught on. Then, in June 2015, he organized a one-day Fast4 tournament. Curran was stunned when 120 people arrived at his club.

“Is this really something that people are interested in?” an incredulous Curran asked himself. The answer, so far, has been an unequivocal yes.

Fast4, which was started by Tennis Australia in 2014, is an attempt to mimic the success that cricket has had with its own shorter-format league, Twenty20. In this format, games are no-ad, sets go to four, tiebreakers go to five (win by one) and let serves are played. Without the ebb and flow that deuce creates, every point moves a match one step closer to the finish line.

“There were some naysayers who thought playing to four wouldn’t be enough,” Curran says. “But when they played five matches in a row in an afternoon, they definitely got enough. And they wanted to come back.”

According to Waters, the USTA wants to “promote creativity” in tennis, especially in how people are introduced to it. Tiebreaker tournaments, timed matches and short-set competitions are all encouraged. With similar goals in mind, the NCAA has recently instituted changes designed to speed up play and reduce the time it takes to watch a dual match. No-ad scoring has been introduced and super-tiebreakers have replaced third sets—even the warm-up has been eliminated.

Timothy Russell, CEO of the Intercollegiate Tennis Association (ITA), says that dual matches, which often lasted four hours or more in the past, are now clocking in closer to the group’s goal of two hours and 30 minutes. He hopes that more rapid-fire play will entice fans to watch college tennis on TV or streaming services.

“The changes have been great,” says Peter Smith, head men’s coach at the University of Southern California. “I love no warm-up. It cuts out a lot of time. No ad has made the matches shorter, but more importantly it makes them more exciting.”

Erica Perkins Jasper, the chief operating officer at the ITA, sees the upside of the condensed game. “With no-ad,” she says, “you figure out pretty quickly which players embrace pressure and which don’t. But the ones who don’t really improve with this format.”

To truly change tennis players’ mindsets, though, Waters knows that college may be too late.

“If we can get kids to play in faster formats,” he says, “they won’t be biased against them when they run into them as juniors and adults.”

An alternative world has been growing for the last 15 years in Tucson, Ariz., under the supervision of Jeff Brack, the vice-chair of the USTA’s Local Play & Competition Committee. In 2001, encouraged by a mentor to “let go of traditionalist thinking,” Brack began looking for ways “to get more kids to play more often.”

“The goal was to get them to participate together for 90 minutes, win or lose,” Brack says.

At the same time, he didn’t want to de-emphasize competition. The kids began with timed matches before graduating to four- and six-game sets. Each player was guaranteed three rounds, and draws were non-elimination.

“The atmosphere was totally different from other junior tournaments,” he says. “The kids had more fun, the tennis was friendlier, the sportsmanship improved.”

Brack also says that the shorter matches helped the kids improve by forcing them to focus on every point, right from the beginning. “There’s no time to be a slow starter in this format,” he says. “We have the formula.”

It’s a formula that, both from a playing and a viewing standpoint, has long eluded tennis. This is an era when two players, John Isner and Nicolas Mahut, squared off for 11 hours, and when the four-hour marathon has become standard at the majors.

“Do we want to make people sit down and watch two players face off for 5 hours and 53 minutes?” asks ESPN vice-president of production Jamie Reynolds, referencing the length of the 2012 Australian Open final between Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. “I don’t think that’s ideal.”

For now, with its daylong broadcasts of the majors, ESPN has accommodated its coverage to the sport’s protracted length. That’s heaven for tennis nuts, but it’s a tough sell in the shorter window of prime time.

Maybe in 20 years we’ll see a competitive, entertaining, five-set final all wrapped up in 90 minutes. A TV scheduler can dream.

Davis Cup Previews and Predictions, Semifinals: Great Britain vs. Argentina; France vs. Croatia

Thu, 15 Sep 2016 16:17:00 +0000

As the debate about whether to revamp the Davis Cup continues—and continues, and continues—the semifinal show will go on this weekend in Scotland and Croatia. And it should be a good one. Despite all of the real, and alleged, problems with the format, the semis will include a showdown between two of the ATP’s biggest stars, Andy Murray and Juan Martin del Potro, as well as two traditional tennis powerhouses, France and Argentina, who are desperate to get in the winner’s circle. Here’s a look at how all of that may play out over the next three days.

*****

Great Britain vs. Argentina
Emirates Arena, Glasgow, Scotland
Indoor hard courts

The best players tend to have gaudy Davis Cup records, in part because competing for their countries brings out the best in them, but also because they’re rarely facing top-level opponents. That won’t be true in this tie’s first rubber, when Murray puts his 29-2 record for the defending-champion Brits up against Del Potro’s 12-4 mark for the Argentines. Murray is 6-2 in their head to head, he beat Delpo in a tight four-set match for the Olympic gold medal last month and he has also been on a roll on home soil over the last two years.

All of which is bad news for Argentina. If Delpo can’t turn it around and come away with a win, his country will face an uphill fight thereafter. Murray is a virtual lock to beat Argentina’s No. 2, Guido Pella, on Sunday, and if he plays doubles with his brother, Jamie, on Saturday, they’ll be favored to beat Federico Delbonis and Leonardo Mayer.

If Del Potro does manage to pull off a win on Friday, much will rest on the result of the second rubber, between 49th-ranked Pella and 55th-ranked Kyle Edmund.

Winner: Great Britain

*****

France vs. Croatia
Kresimir Cosic Hall, Zadar, Croatia
Indoor hard courts

The current generation of French veterans—Gael Monfils, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Richard Gasquet, Gilles Simon—is the best the country has produced in decades, but it has yet to have its name inscribed on the Davis Cup with French generations past. You can see one reason why when you look at their lineup against Croatia; the oft-injured Monfils and Tsonga are missing in action. That means Gasquet will be joined by 22-year-old Lucas Pouille in singles.

That isn’t such a bad thing. Pouille just beat Rafael Nadal at the U.S. Open, and he won a crucial rubber for France over Jiri Vesely of the Czech Republic in the quarterfinals. This time Pouille will have a tougher assignment, when he takes on Marin Cilic in the second match on Friday. As with Great Britain vs. Argentina, though, the key rubber here may be the first one, in which Gasquet takes on Borna Coric. Gasquet has had his share of DC triumphs and disasters over the last decade, but his country is going to need him in this one. Coric, meanwhile, is coming off an impressive fifth-rubber win over Jack Sock against the U.S. in the quarters. Gasquet and Coric have never played.

France-Croatia is a tough one to call. The French doubles team of Nicolas Mahut and Pierre-Hugues Herbert, one of the game’s best, should have the advantage over whoever Croatia puts out there. Can Cilic counter that by winning twice in singles? And who will have the edge in a possible deciding rubber between youngsters Coric and Pouille? I’m thinking the home fans could make a difference.

Winner: Croatia

Who made the grade, and who came up short? Handing out our U.S. Open assessments

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 17:31:00 +0000

No Federer in the men’s draw, no Serena in the women’s final? Neither was a problem for the 2016 U.S. Open. This Grand Slam, which produced must-see matches on a near-daily basis and ended with two very fine finals, was a victory for tennis as a whole. Even in celebrity-saturated New York, the sport doesn’t need stars to keep fans on the edges of their seats.

Now that the tennis circus has passed through the Big Apple, here’s a look at which of its performers made the grade, and which ones came up short.

*****

Angelique Kerber

In baseball, they say you don’t hit home runs by swinging for the fences; you do it by trying for line drives and hoping the ball sails into the seats of its own volition. That’s the analogy that came to mind when I listened to Kerber talk about how she had hit such a towering home run—two Grand Slams, in fact—in 2016. She said she started the year simply trying to improve her game. She and her coach, Torben Beltz, vowed to add some punch to her traditional counter-punch; after all, Kerber played offensively in practice, so why couldn’t she do it in matches? When she made it work at the Australian Open, her confidence and momentum took off from there.

Should we be surprised by Kerber’s rise to No. 1, and her second major title? Yes. Should we be stunned? No. She has always been a world-class athlete, but as a tennis player she was defensive-minded. In women’s tennis, defense doesn’t win you big championships, the way it does in football. Kerber found that out again in the Olympic gold-medal match and the Cincinnati final; both times she let a younger, lower-ranked player push her around the court and beat her. But Kerber learned her lesson, and didn’t let it happen again in New York. The moral of her story isn’t that you can change your game or your mindset at 28. It’s that you can find a way to win with the game you knew you had all along. That forever-to-be-famous forehand winner that Kerber hit at 3-3 in the third set of the final? It has always been her best shot. A+

Stan Wawrinka

Wawrinka has been a highlight-reel hitter for years. At 31, he has turned himself into a complete player and competitor. Starting with his third-round comeback win over Daniel Evans, there was something about the way he carried himself, about the way he yelled and fist pumped and sweated and stalked the court, never seeming shaken when behind. You could see he was on another Grand Slam mission, and even a case of early stage fright against Novak Djokovic in the final didn’t stop him from accomplishing it. Wawrinka says he has learned from the Big Four, and he played like it. While he did his share of gasp-worthy ball bashing in the final, he won the crucial third set the same way Djokovic always has: by scrapping, defending, surviving and, at the end, making a quick surprise strike. Then he clinched it with a couple of stomach-churning holds in the fourth—the way champs do.

The Big Four is dead; long live the Big Five. After 12 years on tour, Stan is a man, and player, in full. A+

Karolina Pliskova

The sound of her shots, perfectly timed, was worth the price of admission. So was the no-wasted-motion efficiency of her service motion. And the effortless way she rocketed the ball into the corner, with little knee bend and only slightly more margin for error. I felt sorry for anyone trying to deal with Pliskova’s backhand return; that thing is on top of you in a hurry. In beating Venus and Serena Williams, and the 46,000 people in their corners, Pliskova showed grit and determination that I didn’t think this casual-looking player owned. I thought she was going to show it again in the third set of the final; but perhaps Kerber made her hit one too many perfect shots, or maybe, after such a remarkable run, her self-belief left her one step short.

It shouldn’t. Pliskova is now No. 6 in the world, and she has more room to improve than any other top player. You only had to hear how awed the audience in Ashe was by her winners—and how completely she silenced them against the Williams sisters—to know how good Pliskova could be for the game. A

Kei Nishikori

He stood up to one of the Big Five, upsetting Andy Murray, but couldn’t do it twice. A-

Caroline Wozniacki

Kerber said this was Caro’s home, and she was right. Ranked 74th before the tournament, she beat two Top 10 seeds on her way to the semis. A-

Novak Djokovic

Injuries, personal issues, a couple of losses at majors, a 30th birthday next spring: The man that some have labeled a tennis machine has shown a human side this summer. It will be interesting to see how he does in the fall, a time of year he has historically dominated. For now, one thing is for sure: With two major titles and a third final in 2016, he’s still the best tennis player in the world. B+

Serena Williams

Injured or tired or both, Serena was a step short, and too many errors long, against Pliskova. B+

Simona Halep

If only she could play on U.S. hard courts all the time. The Romanian’s successful summer in the States came to a premature end in the quarters against Serena. But her uphill battle was fun to watch while it lasted. B+

Anastasija Sevastova

The Latvian’s quarterfinal run was cut short in nightmarish fashion; in her first night match in Ashe, she turned her ankle and struggled to move after that. But nothing could make her effortless game look bad. B+

Venus Williams

If your career is still filled with what-ifs at the age of 36, you’re not doing too badly. This time, in the fourth round, Venus had a match point on the eventual runner-up, Pliskova. When it was over, Venus didn’t waste any time talking about what she needed to do to get better. That’s called doing it right. B+

Juan Martin del Potro

Hearing his name chanted in Ashe was a fitting finale to Delpo’s summer-long, smash-hit revival show. B+

Daniel Evans

Does the Brit always play the entertaining brand of attacking tennis he used to nearly knock off Wawrinka? If so, how can we see more of him? B+

Lucas Pouille

His personality, under the hat and beard, may not be distinctive, but his headlong attack against Nadal certainly was. B+

Jared Donaldson

No U.S. men survived past the fourth round, but another 18-year-old put his name and his whippy, athletic game on the host nation’s radar screen. Donaldson won five matches: three in qualifying, two in the main draw. And he won at least one press conference with his upbeat attitude. B+

Ryan Harrison

After a lot of tough losses, it was good to see the 24-year-old get a tough win, over Raonic, and show that he may be able to play at this level after all. B+

Naomi Osaka

She blew a 5-1 lead in the third to Madison Keys, but it was exciting to watch this huge-hitting, risk-loving teenager get that far in Ashe. B

Andy Murray

After his blowout fourth-round win over Grigor Dimitrov, Murray was the favorite to win the tournament in many people’s eyes. Did that make him tight against Nishikori, in the match forever to be known as the Gong Show? Or was it just one of those days? Even a butterfly escaped his racquet’s wrath. Whatever the reason, Murray kept handing back leads to Nishikori. After a long and successful summer, he ran out of grit. B

CiCi Bellis

It was exciting to see this still-17-year-old Californian win two main-draw matches after qualifying, and bring a contagious energy to the court while doing it. It was sobering to see how far out of Kerber’s league she was in the third round. B

Gael Monfils

Anyone—and this includes me—who feared that the sport’s freest spirit was in danger of becoming too conventional must feel foolish now. Right on cue, the new Monfils turned back into the old Monfils in his first U.S. Open semifinal. But this time he was doing his act in front of a bigger audience, and one that, as the Frenchman admitted, didn’t want to see it. In retrospect, if he had played the conventional power-baseline game he had been using all summer, he would have had a chance against Djokovic, who wasn’t at his best in New York. Afterward, La Monf’s press conference was must-see TV; if only he had shown the same kind of fire on court. B-

Rafael Nadal

He still has the spectacular shots, but once again, in his loss to Pouille, he couldn’t find one when he needed it most. B-

Marin Cilic

The flavor of the summer melted in a hurry when he was faced with Jack Sock and a Labor Day Weekend crowd in Armstrong. His early loss, and virtually nonexistent performance, may have been the surprise of the men’s side. C-

Milos Raonic

After his Wimbledon run, Raonic had sky-high hopes for Flushing Meadows; he even skipped the Olympics to try to make them a reality. Were his hopes a little too high? Raonic didn’t deny it; he blamed his exhaustion in his second-round loss to Harrison on “mental over-exuberance.” In the Canadian’s long-running, stop-and-start climb up the ATP ladder, this was another stop. C-

Garbiñe Muguruza

For the second straight Slam, the No. 3 seed went out in the second round. Looking back on it, the woman who beat her, Sevastova, didn’t even sound all that thrilled with the way she played. C-

Stan Wawrinka, the game’s big hitter and competitor, claims his third major title at the U.S. Open

Mon, 12 Sep 2016 03:44:00 +0000

NEW YORK—“I don’t know what’s happening right now.”

These were Stan Wawrinka’s first words to the audience in Arthur Ashe Stadium after his 6-7 (1), 6-4, 7-5, 6-3 win over Novak Djokovic for the U.S. Open title on Sunday night.

On the one hand, you could forgive Wawrinka’s bewilderment. The 31-year-old was making his 12th trip to Flushing Meadows, and this was the first time he had reached the final, let alone won it. And in Djokovic, he had just beaten an opponent who had won 19 of their previous 23 matches.

On the other hand, Wawrinka also knew exactly what was happening, because he had been in exactly this situation two times before. It was the third time he had played a major final against a No. 1-ranked opponent, and it was the third time he had walked away with the champion’s trophy. After his wins over Rafael Nadal in the 2014 Australian Open final, Djokovic in the 2015 French Open final and Djokovic again on Sunday, Wawrinka and the rest of us really can’t act surprised by anything he does anymore.

We also can’t say that he’s just a hot-and-cold, hit-and-miss slugger anymore. Wawrinka certainly did his share of slugging in this match; he hit 46 winners in 44 games, and drew more than his usual share of oohs and aahs from the capacity crowd when he unsheathed his down-the-line backhand. The new roof over Ashe made that shot resound even more forcefully than it has here in the past.

But Wawrinka didn’t bash his way to this victory. He was also the headier, more stubborn, and ultimately better competitor when it counted most. Wawrinka won just one more point than Djokovic (144 to 143), but he made that translate into a two-set advantage. He saved 14 of 17 break points, and bounced back from a tight opening-set loss against a player who was 51-0 in U.S. Open matches in which he had won the first set. Wawrinka fought off cramps in the third set, and held his nerve through two potentially momentum-killing medical time-outs by Djokovic in the fourth.

As he had all fortnight, Wawrinka competed aggressively, but with very little of the tetchiness that has distracted him in the past. In the third round, he saved a match point against Dan Evans, and he lost the first set two other times.

“I think this Grand Slam was the most painful, physically and mentally, Grand Slam that I ever played,” said Wawrinka, who came into the match having spent 17 hours on court at the Open, nine more than Djokovic. “I was trying to be tough with myself. Trying not to show anything. Not to show any pain....I was suffering on the court, but I’m happy and proud of what I have achieved today.”

The way Wawrinka won the crucial third set was practically Djokovichian in its mix of persistence and opportunism.

Wawrinka went up 3-0; Djokovic brought it back to 3-3. From there, with both men knowing the importance of the set, they see-sawed toward what looked to be another tiebreaker. There were long games, tough holds, big winners, strange errors, and a lot of dogged defense from both men; Wawrinka retrieved nearly as well as Djokovic tonight. Yet Stan seemed on the verge of losing it when he screamed, “He doesn’t give me anything!” even after he had won a point.

Normally, this is just the type of set that Djokovic walks away with, often with a quick break at the end. In last year’s final, he pulled out a similarly chaotic, momentum-less third set against Roger Federer. But this time it was Wawrinka who ambushed Djokovic. Down 30-0 on the Serb’s serve at 5-6, he came to break for the set with a big forehand down the line.

“He was the more courageous player in the decisive moments,” Djokovic said. “...He stepped in and played aggressive where I was kind of more waiting for things to happen.”

Djokovic’s serve was off; he double faulted seven times and made just 51 percent of his first serves. He said afterward that injuries before the event had hurt him on this shot. Worse was his play on break points.

“I didn’t take my chances,” Djokovic said. “I had many break points where I was in the rally, where I had a second shot, where I just missed some easy balls. That’s it.

“Sometimes you get that kind of uncomfortable feeling, and you’re not able to, you know, let everything flow as you want it.”

Wawrinka was in the flow, but it took him nearly a set to get there. That’s why, he says, he has so much more success at the best-of-five-set Slams than the best-of-three-set Masters 1000s.

“In Grand Slam you play every two days, five-set match,” Wawrinka said. “You have a little bit more time to make mistake...Every match I won in a Grand Slam I take confidence of that, and when I arrive in a final I know my game is there.”

To me, the most telling comment on the match came from Djokovic during the trophy ceremony.

“He was tougher mentally,” Djokovic said, “he knew what to do.”

“He knew what to do”: It’s a phrase that used to run through my mind when I watched Nadal play Federer in major-title matches 10 years ago. Federer was No. 1, and he had the more complete game, but Nadal knew exactly what his advantage was: His topspin forehand to Federer’s one-handed backhand. Having that go-to play available at all times made the tactics easy. Federer, on the other hand, had no single, easily exploitable edge on Rafa. Should he come in? Should he slice more? Should he try more drop shots? Nobody ever found out, including Federer.

A similar dynamic has developed between Djokovic and Wawrinka at the majors. While Djokovic is the No. 1 player, and the one with the more consistent all-around game, it’s Wawrinka who has the edge in power, pace and weight of shot. Any ball that Djokovic hits hard, Wawrinka can hit back harder. In that sense, facing Nole must be liberating for Stan: He can’t do anything other than play the game that comes naturally to him.

“He deserves to be in the mix, no doubt about it,” Djokovic said, when asked if Wawrinka has created a new Big 5 on the men’s tour. “He’s a big-match player.”

As for Stan, he’s happy to admit that the original Big 4 have helped him with their example.

“Because of you, I am where I am today,” Wawrinka said to Djokovic, in a moment of warmth on the trophy stand. It was a (successful) attempt to relieve the tension that had built up between them during Djokovic’s two late medical time-outs.

As sturdy as Stan has made himself, it’s easy to forget that he didn’t start that way. According to him, old nerves die hard.

“Today, before the final,” Wawrinka said, “I was really nervous like never before. I was shaking in the locker [room]....I was completely shaking. But the only thing I was convinced with myself that my game was there.”

“Put fight on the court and you’ll have a chance to win,” he told himself.

When it was over, Wawrinka said he didn’t know what was happening. But he does. Djokovic and the rest of us know it, too.

After 12 years on tour and three Slam wins, Stan is no longer just a big hitter; he’s a big competitor, too. And while he may not always be the man, he’ll never be a fluke again.

The sight of the Freedom Tower is a sobering highlight of the U.S. Open experience

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 12:16:00 +0000

NEW YORK—For many of us who have spent the last two weeks working at the U.S. Open, each day has ended with a late-night, or sometimes early-morning, bus ride from Flushing Meadows to Manhattan. It’s a dark and quiet trip. The lights in the bus are turned out, and Queens offers only scattered landmarks along the way: The Paris Hotel, with its miniature Eiffel Tower on the roof; long rows of brick apartment complexes; billboards advertising jewelry, watches, TV shows, Hamilton; McDonalds arches. It’s also a bumpy ride. The bus swings and sways and bounces as it takes its roundabout route toward the Long Island Expressway.

From this vantage point, Manhattan looks like a mythical, Oz-like metropolis in the distance. Its towers—some gleaming, some murky, some in full color—are spread across the horizon. As the bus follows the Expressway’s curves, the buildings shift with them. A set of lights that was visible in one window at the beginning of the ride will reappear in the other window, on the other side of the bus, a few minutes later.

At the southern tip of this man-made constellation is the Freedom Tower. It’s a new entry in the night skyline, but it already feels something like its North Star. The tower isn’t the gaudiest or most spectacular structure in Manhattan, but the light at the top of its spire—exactly 1776 feet above the ground—serves as a subdued and somber beacon for everyone traveling on the roads around the city.

On the way back from the Open, the tower is the first structure in Manhattan that comes into view. Before the building itself appears, the spire pokes up on the right side of the front window. Even when you see the rest of the structure, though, it doesn’t stand out at night; you can’t make out its distinctive, triangle-shaped walls in the darkness. But you can hardly miss its height. If you’re like me, you also can’t fail to be a little awed by it. By the time the bus begins its long approach to the Midtown Tunnel, the tower has moved to its proper place in the left window. In a downtown increasingly crowded with steel and glass, this skyscraper stands alone.

Embed from Getty Images

Fifteen years after 9/11, and roughly two years after it was completed, the Freedom Tower—officially known as 1 World Trade Center—is going through a transition in how it is perceived in its hometown. It’s the same transition that hundreds of important buildings undergone in the past: Elite disdain has begun to give way to a popular embrace.

When the tower opened in 2014, Michael Kimmelman, the architecture critic at the New York Times, ridiculed it as a soulless corporate concoction.

“One World Trade speaks volumes about political opportunism, outmoded thinking, and upside-down urban priorities,” Kimmelman wrote. “[It’s] symmetrical to a fault, stunted at its peak...There’s no mystery, no unraveling of light, no metamorphosis over time, nothing to hold your gaze.”

Worst of all, from the New Yorker’s perspective, “It looks like it could be anywhere.”

At first, from a distance, I could see his point. In an age when technology and new materials are making skyscrapers ever sleeker and slimmer, One World Trade looked bulky and clunky. A tennis partner of mine who works at an architecture firm said he that wished the equally tall, but more eye-catching, new skyscraper at 432 Park Avenue had been designed for Ground Zero instead. But seeing the Freedom Tower up close changed my mind. Its inverted triangles were like nothing I’d seen before, and its glass reflected the constantly passing clouds. The bulk made sense, too. We wanted something study to rise from ground zero, right?

Now, two years after the Times helped set the tone for the tower’s negative reception, the paper reports that it has begun to find favor among the city’s everyday citizens. Under the headline, “1 World Trade Center Gains Popularity in the Pantheon of Kitsch,” the Times describes how it has started to replace the Twin Towers as a “simple, graphic representation of the complex idea of New York.”

The Freedom Tower’s likeness now appears “in movies and logotypes, on knickknacks and letterheads,” on dinner plates, paperweights and shot glasses. It’s outselling the beloved Chrysler Building in souvenir shops in Times Square. And while the New York Fire Department’s logo still includes the Twin Towers, the FDNY replaced replaced them with the new World Trade Center on its 150th-anniversary patch in 2015.

“It got bad a for while,” a Brooklyn pizza maker named Joseph Campagna told the Times. “But seeing the new tower being built was like seeing a light at the end of the tunnel.” An image of the tower is imprinted on his pizza boxes, complete with an American flag flying from the spire.

Embed from Getty Images

One World Trade may look it could be anywhere, but New Yorkers are starting to think of it as their own. For Campagna and the rest of us who live here, the real indignity was that for so long, we looked to where the Twin Towers had once been and saw nothing at all. Without them, the downtown skyline really did seem like it could have been in any mid-size American city. That was obviously never going to cut it.

More than that, there was pain in that empty space. It was a wound of omission, a constant reminder of the possibility that what can built can also be taken away by force. That’s not a feeling Americans are used to having. Even if what was eventually built there was compromised and conservative—as well as, in its name and 1776-foot height, unnecessarily jingoistic—the Freedom Tower has a look of solidity and strength, and that may be all that the New Yorkers who look in its direction every day needed to see. The tower’s existence alone is a testament to resilience, Big Apple-style: It took too long, cost too much and required cutting through a skyscraper’s worth of red tape, but it’s there.

Only at this time of year, during the two weeks of the Open, do I see the tower every day. Taking in the skyline as I ride the bus to the Open each morning, I can see that One World Trade’s architecture has none of the historical resonance, or dazzle, of the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building. With the fall of the Twin Towers, those two 1930s grand dames became even more important to the city. One World Trade, which so far has sat largely empty (the Empire State Building did for many years as well), hasn’t tried to steal any of their well-earned spotlight.

Yet over the last two weeks, as the bus has approached Manhattan, I’ve ignored the classic skyscrapers of midtown. My eye has been to drawn to One World Trade instead. It’s not floodlit, and the lights from its windows are dim; compared to the city’s more exuberant buildings, it looks modest and retiring—melancholy. Maybe someday, when its floors are full and 9/11 loses some of its power to pull us back into the past, the tower that was built to heal a wound will look bright and colorful and exuberant. For now, though, melancholy works. The fact that it’s there is all that matters.

U.S. Open Men’s Final Preview: Novak Djokovic vs. Stan Wawrinka

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 08:16:00 +0000

We all remember what happened the last time these two met in a Grand Slam final, at the French Open in 2015: Wawrinka played lights-out, career-best tennis and handed Djokovic his only loss in 28 matches at the majors that season. Then the two met twice more that year, and Djokovic restored order with two fairly routine wins. He’s 19-4 against Wawrinka now, but I’d say the more relevant number is 8-2. That’s Djokovic’s record since the two played a fourth-round, five-set, five-hour classic at the 2013 Australian Open. The Serb won the match, but the Swiss’ career was born anew that day.

This will be their first meeting of 2016. Lucky for us it will be at a Slam; since their five-setter in Oz three years ago, all of their major-event showdowns have been memorable. This time they took very different paths to get to the final. Djokovic has been the beneficiary of a withdrawal, two retirements and, in the semis, what looked at times like a semi-retirement from Gael Monfils. Meanwhile, Wawrinka has been doing battle since the third round. After saving a match point against Daniel Evans, he beat Illya Marchenko, Juan Martin del Potro and Kei Nishikori, all in four sets.

Whose path has left him in a better position for the final? Djokovic will be rested, certainly, but it’s hard to know what kind of form he’s in. Even as he was beating the mysterious Monfils, his game misfired periodically. As for Wawrinka, he has competed fiercely at Flushing Meadows—nobody has sweated as much as Stan. And by the latter stages of the Nishikori match, he had worked himself into one of his scary hitting grooves. It kind of reminded me of how he looked ... when he played Djokovic in the French final last year.

Winner: Wawrinka

With U.S. Open on the line, Angelique Kerber did what No. 1 players do: Hit the shot of her life

Sun, 11 Sep 2016 01:29:00 +0000

NEW YORK—Angelique Kerber was doing what she had sworn to herself she wouldn’t do. She was pushing the ball.

The German was tied at 3-3 in the third set of the U.S. Open women’s final with Karolina Pliskova, and the tension in Arthur Ashe Stadium was as high as the humidity. It was a match that Kerber, as the WTA’s new No. 1 and the woman with a major title on her résumé, was supposed to win. Instead, she had watched as the 11th-ranked Czech had come back, with big shots blazing, from a set down to take it to a third.

Kerber had started the match assertively and won the first set 6-3. Now that early momentum was long gone, and she had spent the early stages of the third set missing routine ground strokes, many of them into the net; these were errors she hadn’t made all tournament. Each time a ball caught the tape and fell back, Kerber shot a glance in the direction of her coach, Torben Beltz, and raised her arms in exasperation.

Were we about to see a repeat of the Olympic final from last month, when a heavily favored Kerber had allowed another unheralded young player, Monica Puig, to outplay her in a third set for the gold medal? Or were we about to see a repeat of her loss to Pliskova in the Cincinnati final, also last month, when Kerber had first tried and failed to become the world’s No. 1 player?

Was Kerber, who has worked hard to curb her pessimism on court, about to go negative again? Was this defensive-minded 28-year-old, who vowed at the start of 2016 to become more aggressive, about to go back into her shell? To lose three straight important finals to players she was favored to beat would have been an inauspicious start to her reign.

But Kerber had learned from those defeats. Unlike in Rio and Cincy, she managed to stay close to Pliskova despite her shaky form, erasing a 1-3 deficit to get back to 3-3. But when another backhand found the net to make it 0-30 on her serve, Kerber appeared to be in danger of lagging behind again. It had been at the same stage in the second set that Kerber first began to look anxiously at her player box. Soon after, she had been broken, and a match that looked sure to be hers had turned against her.

In the third set, though, the 24-year-old Pliskova, who was new to this stage, couldn’t quite step through the door that Kerber opened. She threw the German a lifeline by hitting two backhands long. Here was Kerber’s chance to make good on her vow to be aggressive, to play with purpose, to “not just hit balls over the net.”

This time Kerber did more. Rather than play it safe, she let fly with a risky down-the-line forehand. This is her best shot, and her point-opening weapon, but as the ball left her racquet it looked like it was heading wide. At the last second, it curled in and found the corner for a winner. Kerber, who had been slump-shouldered for the better part of an hour, rose up on one leg and aimed a fist pump toward her player box.

“When I was going down the line,” Kerber said, “I knew, ‘OK, now I have to risk a little bit, because this is the only chance I can get.’ I took it, so I think this was really the shot of the match from my side. When I won the point, I knew, ‘OK, I have the feeling. Now just go for it.’”

Three games later, Kerber had won, 6-3, 4-6, 6-4.

But if Kerber pushed herself to do more in this match, she can thank Pliskova for motivating her. The Czech was the revelation of the tournament. Her strokes sounded like cannon shots ringing out in Ashe, and they made the New York fans, many of whom were unfamiliar with her game, gasp at times. Pliskova finished with 40 winners, but in the final game she couldn’t find the court.

There was a sense that, after coming so far in the last month—Pliskova beat Kerber, Garbiñe Muguruza and Venus and Serena Williams—she couldn’t quite convince herself she could make the final leap. For someone who had never reached the second week of a major, to suddenly win one may have been too much for her to imagine or believe. But there’s no question that Pliskova can put herself in this position again. She has a lot of room to improve, especially in the footwork department. Already, though, virtually every match she plays is on her racquet.

“I wasn’t nervous at all,” Pliskova said. “Not even during the match. Not even in the beginning. In the end, in the third set, I was very close. But, you know, she’s just playing some good tennis this year. It’s never easy to beat her.”

It’s amazing how quickly a reputation as a Grand Slam champion and a No. 1 player starts to help you, isn’t it?

And it’s amazing how much experience helps, too. Kerber said she thought back to her win over Serena in Melbourne in the third set on Saturday.

“I just told myself, ‘OK, be positive,’” she said. “Believe in your game. I was thinking a little bit [about] the final in Australia, where I was also in the third set. I believed then in my game, and I did today as well.”

Kerber began this year’s Australian Open by saving a match point in the first round against Misaki Doi. Eight months later, she’s a two-time Grand Slam champion, an Olympic silver medalist and the WTA’s top-ranked player.

Officially, on paper, the top player is the one who accumulates the most ranking points. But in the eyes of fans, opponents and the world, the top player is the one who can, when the chips are down in the third set of a Grand Slam final, step in and thread the needle with a perfectly struck forehand. On Saturday that was Angelique Kerber, and that’s why she’s No. 1.

Shot Making: Inside the 14-frames-per-second world of professional tennis photography

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 04:56:00 +0000

The dugout at the south end of Arthur Ashe Stadium was overflowing, but a tense silence reigned inside. A swarm of photographers had squeezed themselves, and the prodigiously long, 12-pound cameras they were hauling, into this small, dark, low-ceilinged room. There they jostled for a view of the court, where Roger Federer and John Isner sprinted in and out of view a few feet above them.

The roar of 20,000 New Yorkers enveloped the players as they pushed each other late into this September evening. Federer had won the first two sets in tiebreakers, and now led 6–5 in the third. This U.S. Open fourth-round match had reached its moment of truth—for Federer, Isner and the people who needed to capture their images for the world’s websites and newspapers.

While Isner gathered the balls to serve, a photographer from a French paper leaned back and exhaled.

“OK!” he barked as he shook out his arms and loosened his shoulders. “Match point!” Then he leaned toward his camera and, like a boxer taking a few shadow punches before a fight, pantomimed the motion of snapping a photo.

His colleagues followed his lead and straightened up in their chairs. Most had chosen their positions carefully after asking themselves a series of questions: Which side of the court would Federer, the likely victor, be on when he won? What did he usually do to celebrate? Which way would he look? Where was his player’s box?

As Federer hunkered down into his return position, the photographers double-checked their lens settings. A few of them had remarked, with nervous excitement, that they had rarely seen Federer so animated. The high-decibel, night-match atmosphere in Ashe, as well as Isner’s supersonic serve, had combined to make the 34-year-old as spry and alert as a man 10 years his junior.

But while that kept these photographers happy during the match, now it made them nervous: Would they be able to capture an amped-up Federer’s reaction to winning? This, after all, was the one shot they couldn’t miss. This was the moment that they had traveled from France, Great Britain, Australia, Japan, Switzerland, Germany, Spain and all over the United States to transmit home.

Within the space of a few seconds, Isner served the ball, Federer returned it, Isner hit it wide, the crowd roared and Federer wheeled around in the direction of his player’s box. Fortunately for this group of photographers, that meant he was wheeling around in their direction, too. As their shutters furiously snapped, Federer shuffled to his left and leapt sideways into the air, roaring triumphantly.

When Federer landed and began walking toward the net to shake hands with Isner, the men and women in the dugout lowered their cameras and looked back through the dozens of shots they had just taken. After an anxious second or two, one woman hugged the camera a little closer to her and said, “Yes!”

She had it.

(Photo by Anita Aguilar)

*****

Welcome to the 14-frames-per-second world of professional tennis photography. As the tours crisscross the globe, this satellite society travels alongside them. It’s a subculture that remains hidden to the vast majority of fans; the photographers, after all, are the people on the other side of the lens from the star players we see. Yet in the age of Instagram, when we’ve come to expect every swing, scream, smile, rant and racquet smash to be recorded for our viewing pleasure, their images are more important to the game than ever.

According to many tennis photographers, those images are also better than ever.

“So many of the players now are unbelievable to shoot,” says Clive Brunskill, a photographer for Getty Images who has been traveling from tournament to tournament since 1982. During that time, the Englishman has seen the game grow increasingly more athletic, artistic and dynamic.

“Roger’s pictures are always graceful,” Brunskill says. “Novak Djokovic has brought a new dimension to the stretch shot. With Rafa [Nadal], you can feel the emotion he puts into it. Sometimes I think, ‘My God, I’m in pain just looking at his picture.’

“You have Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Gael Monfils diving around, and Kei Nishikori jumping up on his shots. We’ll probably look back on this as the best time ever in tennis.”

That photogenic quality doesn’t stop with the men’s game, according to another Getty photographer, Al Bello.

“Serena [Williams] is the total package for the camera,” says Bello, a New York native who has been photographing tennis players for 23 years. “The emotion on her face, the intensity in her eyes, the way she moves and stretches her body; her hair, which is always beautiful in the light. No one gives it up like Serena.”

Off the court, Brunskill has also found the men’s Big Four—Djokovic, Federer, Nadal and Andy Murray—to be more photographer-friendly than past champions. Two years ago, he shot Djokovic’s wedding to Jelena Ristic, and in 2015 he did the same when Murray married his longtime girlfriend, Kim Sears.

“The players are more media savvy now,” Brunskill says. “You never really got to know them in the [Pete] Sampras era. I’ve known the guys today since they were starting out as teenagers. They trust that I’m not going to burn them by leaking a photo from their wedding, or shooting one of them having a drink.”

Still, every so often when he needs a scintillating shot on a dull afternoon, Brunskill finds himself missing the game’s bad old days. When John McEnroe got going, according to Brunskill, it was like the pictures took themselves.

“The players are better to watch now,” he says, “but there were more characters in the past. You couldn’t leave a match with McEnroe because you knew he was going to do something.”

Of course, the trick is to be there, in the right place and at the right time, to gobble those pictures up. In the early days at a Grand Slam, there are hundreds of photo-worthy moments happening at once, and no camera can capture more than a tiny slice of them. A few years ago in the French Open press room, a photographer who had taken an ill-timed lunch break stared at his television in agony as Monfils leaped and slid and roared on a nearby court.

“Oh, look at all of those bloody pictures,” he moaned as the French star gyrated to his home fans’ applause.

As every tennis photographer quickly discovers, capturing even a few of those “bloody pictures” requires a lot of planning and more than a little bit of luck.

“You learn that you’re making the photo, not taking the photo,” says Anita Aguilar, a freelance photographer who contributes to TENNIS.com. “You have to create the moments you want; you can’t wait for them to happen.”

No matter however beautiful or carefully planned, though, every moment in a tennis match is fleeting, which means that having the right equipment to record it becomes paramount. At a time when camera technology is constantly evolving, costly gear upgrades come with the job.

Manuela Davies, a Florida-based freelance photographer, will spend $6,000 for a new camera body, and typically lugs two heavy, hooded Canons, with different lenses, across the grounds at Flushing Meadows.

“The shots are getting sharper all the time,” Davies says. “You have to have [the equipment] to keep up. It’s easy to see when you don’t.”

The biggest technological leap for photographers in recent years, of course, has been the shift from film to digital. It’s a change that, as far as their work lives go, has been a double-edged sword.

“With film,” says Matthew Stockman of Getty Images, “you didn’t know what you had until a roll was developed the next day. With digital, you see what you’ve got right away. It’s easier to experiment and work on your timing.”

For Davies, though, the idea of dropping her film off and calling it a night has its appeal.

“Now I might shoot 500 shots a day,” she says with a laugh, “which means I might be up until 5:00 A.M., agonizing over which ones to save and which ones to dump.”

While technology has advanced, one fact about the job remains the same: the need, by many people, to occupy the same limited amount of space. Before last year’s Wimbledon men’s final, 183 credentialed photographers vied for 73 positions on Centre Court. It gets even more cramped when a major final ends and the trophies come out.

For a champion, a trophy ceremony is a joyous occasion; for a photographer, it’s a mad, scrum-like dash to stake out a coveted front-row spot. After one U.S. Open women’s final, as Serena Williams hopped happily across the stage, a petite female photographer and her much taller male colleague finished a dispute by screaming and jabbing their fingers in each other’s faces. It didn’t appear to be the first time that one of them had ended up in the other’s way.

“Photographers can be territorial,” Davies says. “It’s not an easy world to break into.”

Every new photographer, in other words, takes up valuable real estate. Yet along with competition, the close quarters breed camaraderie.

“At the Open, it’s like a family reunion,” Bello says of the large Getty team that will descend once again on Flushing Meadows this August. “You work closely with the same people every year, so it feels like home for two weeks.”

Three-hundred other credentialed photographers joined Bello and make the Open their home this year. They’ll work 15 days, for up to 20 hours each day, running from court to court while juggling multiple cameras, before riding the media bus back to their hotels after midnight. They’ll look for cool shadows on the sidecourts, follow the low-afternoon sun in Louis Armstrong Stadium, search for celebrities in luxury suites and, above all, try to transmit the beauty of the sport they see up close to the rest of us at home. They’ll finish the tournament, as Brunskill puts it, “completely knackered.”

As long as someone is there to tell them it’s match point, though, they should be OK.

“It will be overwhelming,” Bello says, “but that’s tennis.”

U.S. Open Women’s Final Preview: Angelique Kerber vs. Karolina Pliskova

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 04:35:00 +0000

Kerber and Pliskova know each other’s games very well—this will be their seventh meeting in the last two and a half years. What have they discovered? Judging by their words, it’s the player who won’t be ranked No. 1 on Monday who has learned to believe she can win.

“I definitely feel confident against her,” Pliskova says.

As for the player who will become No. 1, she sounds cautious.

“I think my serve has to be very good,” Kerber said.

How did this reversal-in-confidence happen? After all, Kerber leads their head to head 4-3, and she’s the one who will be playing in her third major final of 2016. Pliskova has never been to the second week of a Slam before this, let alone a championship match.

Their relative confidence levels stem first from the fact that Pliskova beat Kerber easily, 6-3, 6-1, in the Cincinnati final less than a month ago. Kerber was trying to become the world No. 1, but it was Pliskova who was far superior that day. And while Kerber hasn’t dropped a set in six matches at the Open, it’s Pliskova who arguably has had the more impressive run at Flushing Meadows. Not many players have done what the Czech has done here: Knock off both Venus and Serena Williams.

Just as impressive—and scary for Kerber—is how Pliskova has been winning: She’s been dictating with her serve and her laser-like ground strokes. What will Kerber be able to do to counter that if it continues?

“I have to move good,” Kerber said yesterday, “to bring a lot of balls back, and playing also more aggressive [than] I played in Cincinnati. I was just pushing too much the balls there, so I will think I will change this a little bit. Go for it, being aggressive.”

So far at the Open, Kerber has found a productive middle ground. She hits flat, she hits with depth, but she doesn’t take risks. She’ll need that depth to keep the go-for-broke Pliskova at bay, and she’ll need it on her return, especially on second balls. When Pliskova misses her first serve, she can be vulnerable.

Pliskova will have to deal with being in a major final for the first time, but she has already dealt with pressure this week against Venus and Serena. I think Kerber will feel more of that pressure on Saturday. Yes, she’s won a Slam this season, but she’s also lost in the Wimbledon and Olympic finals. Kerber doesn’t want to become No. 1, only to start gaining a reputation for coming in second best.

Winner: Pliskova

In anti-epic loss to Novak Djokovic, Gael Monfils showed he’s still Gael Monfils—for better or worse

Sat, 10 Sep 2016 00:51:00 +0000

NEW YORK—Asked to describe his 6-3, 6-2, 3-6, 6-2 semifinal win over Gael Monfils on Friday, Novak Djokovic said it could be summed up in one word: “Humid.” He may have been referring mainly to the weather—it was a sticky summer day—but it served as a pretty fair description of the weirdness that had transpired on court. The heat went to both guys’ heads, and bodies, and together they produced one of the true anti-epics of 2016.

Djokovic was edgy to start. He asked chair umpire Eva Asderaki twice to have the lights in Ashe Stadium turned off—“It’s the middle of the day”—and told her to “Pay attention a little” after a close call went against him. But Djokovic was a paragon of normalcy compared to Monfils.

The Frenchman had spent the previous five rounds, as well as the better part of eight months, making many of us believe that he was a reformed man; now that he was 30, it seemed, the show was out and the grind was in. On Friday, it only took Monfils a little more than an hour to remind us again that—first for worse, and then for better—Gael is still Gael, and will always be Gael.

At the start, Monfils’ timing was off on everything. Double faulting and shanking forehands, he went down 0-5 in 16 minutes. Then, with Djokovic serving at 5-1, something strange happened. It looked like Monfils, standing in the middle of the court and pushing the ball back listlessly, was trying to concede the set. Except that Djokovic wouldn’t give it to him. Thrown off by Monfils’ lack of effort, he double-faulted, lost his rhythm and was broken. After the next changeover, Monfils continued to push. Why change a winning game?

Even when Djokovic closed out the first set, Monfils stuck to his weird ways in the second. When he wasn’t poking the ball back from behind the baseline, he was rushing headlong into the net, often on second serves. The only thing Monfils wasn’t doing was playing the levelheaded attacking game that had put him in his first U.S. Open semifinal. He seemed determined to pull the rug out from under anyone who believed that he was a changed man. He also seemed determined to agitate the Ashe crowd; when he went down a break in the third set, the crowd showered him with boos.

“For sure people are not ready to see that,” Monfils said afterward of his “unorthodox” approach.

Still, he maintained that there was a method to his madness all along.

“Definitely, I try to get in his head,” Monfils said of Djokovic. “You know, try to create something new for him, you know, to see. When the guy is too good— you know, playing clean and you’re playing very bad, I mean not that good—you need to change.”

“F-ck yes, I’m competing,” Monfils finally said, raising his voice.

If only he had been as energized on court as he was in his press conference.

Whether Monfils’ rope-a-dope repertoire was a tactic or a capitulation, Djokovic admitted that it had an effect on him.

“I was completely caught off guard when he just stood there and chipped the ball back and didn’t do much,” Djokovic said. “But that’s Gael.”

Djokovic, it seemed, was just like any other tennis fan watching Monfils. Asked whether he “pissed you off today,” he smiled.

“Well, I had different phases, I must admit,” Djokovic said. “I had phases when I was pissed off, phases when I was entertained by what he was doing and phases where I was upset with myself.

“It was a great theater experience today.”

By the start of the third set, though, the crowd was no longer into the show. But their boos finally lit a fire under Monfils. Two games after they began, he responded by going on the attack. He broke Djokovic for 3-2, and held with a 138-m.p.h. second-serve ace; even when he was winning, Monfils was doing it in the most puzzling way possible. As he began to entertain the crowd, though, he also began to irritate Djokovic, who tore his shirt in the middle of a game.

Novak Djokovic ripped his shirt off https://t.co/qVKuW9L1MO pic.twitter.com/B0b7C2GMDB
— Kenny Ducey (@KennyDucey) September 9, 2016

Unfortunately, just as this “great theater experience” looked set to reach a dramatic peak, it was cut short by that word again: humidity. Both guys were gassed in the fourth set, and when Djokovic finally steadied the ship with a couple of heavy crosscourt forehands for 5-2, it was over. He advanced to his seventh Open final in 12 tries.

Monfils walks away having reached his first Grand Slam semifinal in eight years. He went out, as always, in his own way, and made the case again for tennis as a game of individual expression, whatever his critics might say.

“It OK, you know,” he said. “It’s not only one way to play tennis ... For me, it’s just myself on the court.”

If any of Monfils’ old fans were worried that he was becoming too conventional in his old age, this anti-epic in Ashe will set their minds at ease.

An injured Serena Williams can beat a lot of players, but Karolina Pliskova had the weapon to stop her

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 16:39:00 +0000

NEW YORK—This wasn’t as bad as last year.

When Serena Williams lost to Roberta Vinci in the U.S. Open semifinals in 2015, she said that, emotionally, she fell into a “dark place” afterward. She felt like she’d gotten people’s hopes up that she could do something “really great”—i.e., win the first calendar-year Grand Slam since 1988—only to let them down at the very end. As her defeat at Vinci’s hands reverberated around the sports world, Serena cut her press conference short and didn’t appear on a court again for four months.

A year later, when Serena lost in the same round to Karolina Pliskova, 6-2, 7-6 (5), the crowd in Arthur Ashe Stadium was surprised and somber, but it didn’t feel like the world had shifted underneath their feet, the way it had after the Vinci match. In her presser, Serena was also somber, but not as devastated or tight-lipped as last year. This was a tough defeat, of course. Serena lost the No. 1 ranking, and thus ended in a tie with Steffi Graf for the longest streak of consecutive weeks at No. 1, with 186. Serena also lost a chance to snap another tie with Steffi Graf, at 22 major titles.

Not breaking the No. 1 record will hurt. “I don’t want to talk about that whatsoever,” Serena said. But this defeat was a little more comprehensible than the one to Vinci, for a couple of reasons.

First, as we learned afterward, Serena was playing with an injured left knee. She said she picked it up “after the second or third round,” while her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, said it happened in the third set of her match the previous night against Simona Halep. Serena was definitely off; she made 31 unforced errors in 21 games. After a dismal first set, she fought to find some semblance of her usual form in the second set, but she never did. Serena began the second-set tiebreaker with two backhands that landed 10 feet long. She finished the breaker, and the match, with another backhand long and a double fault.

Initially, like a lot of people, I chalked up Serena’s sluggishness to the fact that she was playing just 24 hours after beating Simona Halep in a three-set quarterfinal. Serena vigorously denied that this had any effect: “I’m not going to repeat myself,” she said, “I wasn’t tired from yesterday’s match.”

It’s true that Serena does, as she said, play on back-to-back days in other events. But it also wouldn’t have been a surprise if a 34-year-old athlete, even one as famously fit as Serena, wasn’t at her sharpest in that situation.

Mouratoglou wasted no time afterward clueing us in on Serena’s real problem.

“It’s impossible to compete without moving,” he said of the effect her knee injury had on her game. “That’s why she missed so much, so many unforced errors, why she was so slow.”

This wasn’t the first time Mouratoglou had broken the news of a Serena injury after a defeat. When she lost to Ana Ivanovic at the 2014 Australian Open, Mouratoglou revealed that she had played with an injured back, leaving Serena no choice but to confirm it in her press conference.

This time, Moutatoglou’s statement quickly shifted the discussion of the match away from the play itself; instead, it centered on whether talking about injuries amounts to making excuses. From my perspective, I respect the old, stoical Aussie adage, “If you go on court, you’re not injured,” and if players don’t want to to talk about their physical problems, I respect that, too. As a fan and a journalist, though, I want to know the truth. If you really were hurt, and it was a factor in a result, I want to know about it. Injuries happen, and there’s no point in pretending otherwise.

At the same time, Mouratoglou should leave it up to Serena to decide how much she wants to reveal. Over the years, the friendly Frenchman has become a familiar figure in the ESPN and BBC studios. He gives his take on Serena and other players to ESPN, and has previewed her matches in his own segment, “The Coach,” for Eurosport. Mouratoglou is obviously insightful, and he’s not the only working coach in tennis who has crossed into the media sphere. And as I said, admitting an injury doesn’t equal making an excuse. But Mouratoglou went too far last night when he said that if Serena had been “20 percent less injured, she would have won in two sets.” Did Pliskova have nothing at all to do with the result?

Later, Serena reversed her coach’s assessment, and gave Pliskova her due.

“Karolina played great today,” she said, “I think if she had played any less, then maybe I would have had a chance.”

And that’s the core truth of this match. Against a player who simply put the ball back in the court, an injured Serena could have worked her way into this match, found a groove with her shots, and eventually won it. But Pliskova isn’t a player who just gets the ball back in the court. She hits with pace, as much as pace as anyone on tour, and she hits winners—19 to Serena’s 20 on Thursday. Pliskova made Serena react and defend; that’s not something many players can do.

Most important, the 6’1” Pliskova is one of the few opponents Serena has ever played who can match her serve for serve. Pliskova has hit by far the most aces of anyone on the women’s side this year, and she hit seven to Serena’s five in this one. In her previous round, against Halep, Serena enjoyed an 18 to zero ace advantage. Pliskova won 84 percent of her first-serve points to Serena’s 66. On second-serve points, Pliskova’s percentage dropped all the way to 38. Her first serve was the difference-maker.

This match won’t be remembered the way Vinci match will. It was loss in a season where Serena had already lost twice at Slams before. Any defeat is a disappointment for Serena, but any defeat of hers should also come with a dose of perspective. Ironically, that perspective was delivered, a couple of hours later, from the woman who took over her No. 1 ranking, Angelique Kerber.

“I think I played an amazing year,” Kerber said of her sudden rise to the top. “I mean, it’s my third Grand Slam final now in one year, so I just try to enjoy it.”

Three Grand Slam finals in one year: That’s also what the 34-year-old Serena did in 2016. She may not be enjoying it as much as Kerber right now, but as the German says, it’s still pretty amazing.

Angelique Kerber reached her first U.S. Open final by playing with the easy command of a No. 1

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 04:32:00 +0000

NEW YORK—As Angelique Kerber walked down the tunnel in Arthur Ashe Stadium before her semifinal on Thursday night, she was stopped by ESPN’s Pam Shriver. It was time for one of the obligatory pre-match interviews that the players seem to hate and most of the fans I know could do without.

This time, though, there was some breaking news to discuss: With Serena Williams’ loss to Karolina Pliskova a few minutes earlier, Kerber had just clinched her spot as the new WTA No. 1, becoming the first German to do it since Steffi Graf and, at 28, the oldest to reach that position for the first time.

But Kerber didn’t want to hear about it.

“I’m just happy to be in the semis,” she said without cracking a smile. “And I’m looking forward to this match.”

For Kerber, as for any top player, being No. 1 is a great honor, but winning Grand Slam titles is why they play the game. Serena’s loss hadn’t just put Kerber at the top of the rankings, it had left her with a much clearer path to her second major title of 2016. This was no time to bask.

“It was not so easy to go on the court,” Kerber said later, “because I knew it actually before that if Serena lost, of course, that I will be the No. 1. So it was not so easy mentally, but I was trying to, again, not putting too much pressure on myself.”

So Kerber pulled her visor low, put her game face on, and stayed focused on the task at hand through her mostly routine, 87-minute, 6-4, 6-3 win over Caroline Wozniacki. While the German is ranked 74 places ahead of the Dane, this match was still a test of her new status. These two women had been facing off since 2008, and Kerber led their head-to-head by a slim 7-5. It was Wozniacki, the younger player by two years, who had jumped out of the gates and reached No. 1 by age 20. Kerber, meanwhile, was the late bloomer who only cracked the Top 10 for the first time at 24. Had she left Wozniacki in the dust completely?

The answer, based on the evidence of this match, was a definitive yes. Kerber immediately went up 4-0, and it was clear right away that she was going to present an insoluble problem for Wozniacki. On the one hand, Kerber was just as consistent as the famously steady Wozniacki; on the other, Kerber hit with more depth, more authority, and more flat, purposeful pace from both sides.

The tale of the match was told in one statistic: who won the long points. In rallies that were four shots or less, Kerber led 27-26; in rallies that were five to eight shots, Kerber led 17-16. In other words, there was no difference between the two players. But in rallies that lasted nine shots or more, Kerber dominated, 23-8. She never looked rushed or troubled or out of position, and she ended a few points by standing flat-footed at the baseline and casually knocking an overhead into the corner for a winner. That shot really shouldn’t be that easy.

“It’s her second home here,” Kerber said of Wozniacki, a five-time U.S. Open semifinalist. “I was trying to play my game...I was trying to think how I was playing here the last few weeks, also the last few months, and trying to go like this on court, being aggressive and taking my chances.”

Wozniacki kept plugging and pushing forward, and she had some success controlling the action. But the higher risk led to a higher error count than normal for her: 26. A well-constructed winning point was often followed by a demoralizing miscue. Attacking is not her forte.

“Obviously Angie is playing well,” Wozniacki said. “She’s getting a lot of balls back. I thought I was dictating a lot of the game. I was trying to press and stay close to the line. In the beginning she really got me on the contra and just kind of counter-punched me away.”

Afterward, Kerber could finally relax and reflect on her unlikely rise to No. 1 this year, which has been both meteoric and late in coming. Like many people who recount their successes, she said she had never set a goal to reach No. 1, but had simply begun the year by trying to get better and build on the solid season she had in 2015.

“I sit down with my coach,” she said of Torben Beltz, “and we said ‘OK, what do we have to improve?’ And I was trying to...being more aggressive, and not just playing from the defensive end.”

From molehills can come mountains. When the match was over and her first trip to a U.S. Open final guaranteed, Kerber held her index finger up with a smile. This time she was happy to tell Shriver, in her post-match interview, how it felt to be at the top of the game.

“No. 1 in the world,” Kerber said, as if daring to utter the words for the first time.

It didn’t take her long to decide how she felt about them.

“Sounds amazing!”

U.S. Open Previews, Men's Semifinals: Djokovic vs. Monfils; Wawrinka vs. Nishikori

Fri, 09 Sep 2016 02:11:00 +0000

Novak Djokovic vs. Gael Monfils

Both of these guys should be more than ready. Through five rounds, Djokovic has played just nine full sets; Monfils hasn’t lost any sets at all so far. Each is also coming off two full days of rest; no wonder the Open’s schedulers put them on first Friday, even though this match includes the world’s No. 1 player. As well as Monfils has played, at the Open and over the course of 2016, does he have a chance? Djokovic has won all 12 of their ATP meetings, and last month in Toronto he took care of the Frenchman in routine fashion, 6-3, 6-2. But they have had their share of close ones, including a five-setter at the Open 11 years ago that, for many fans, served as an introduction to both of these future stars. This would seem to be the ideal time for Monfils to avenge that long-ago defeat, and finally get a win over his friend. He’s at the top of this game, and Djokovic’s rhythm must be a little out of whack. He began the tournament with possible injuries to his left wrist and right arm, and he hasn’t played anything close to his normal amount of Grand Slam tennis over the last 10 days. Or maybe that’s exactly the combination he needed all along. One thing Djokovic is very good at is making someone who is playing the tennis of his life ... stop playing the tennis of his life.

Winner: Djokovic

Stan Wawrinka vs. Kei Nishikori

Djokovic and Monfils played one semifinal in Toronto, and Wawrinka and Nishikori played the other. Nishikori won, 7-6 (6), 6-1, and went on the following week to win an Olympic bronze medal. Now he’s coming off one of the biggest results of his career, a five-set win over the man who beat him in Rio, Andy Murray. The last time Nishikori and Wawrinka played at the Open, in 2014, Nishikori won in five brutally long, close sets. Either of these big-hitting baseliners can obviously beat the other, and there hasn’t been much to choose between them, form-wise, so far: Wawrinka had to save a match point against 64th-ranked Daniel Evans in the third round, while Nishikori has dropped five sets in his five matches. Stan vs. Kei should be fun to watch, and it may hinge on who wins a couple of crucial points in a second- or third-set tiebreaker. I’m going to say that person will be Stan: He’s good at tiebreakers, and there’s something about saving a match point early in a tournament. It can make you feel bulletproof the rest of the way.

Winner: Wawrinka

U.S. Open Previews, Women's Semifinals: S. Williams vs. Pliskova; Kerber vs. Wozniacki

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 14:50:00 +0000

Serena Williams vs. Karolina Pliskova

How did the women who were on court on Wednesday end up playing their semifinal before the women who had the day off? Maybe ESPN wants Serena at 7:00 p.m. ET sharp, or maybe Serena herself doesn’t want to play the late match a day-and-a-half before the final. Either way, Williams and Pliskova are making a quick turnaround, especially Serena, who played a taxing, three-set night-session match against Simona Halep on Wednesday. She says she doesn’t mind because she plays every day at most other, non-major events. But you have to think that, at 34, she’ll feel the effects more than her 24-year-old opponent. Serena and Pliskova have played once, two years ago in Stanford, and Serena won in straight sets. This time Pliskova is coming in on a 10-match win streak, one that included blowout victories over the two women ranked just below Serena, Angelique Kerber and Garbiñe Muguruza. Pliskova has the serve and the game to beat Serena, too, and I wouldn’t be surprised if she pulled another upset over a potentially sluggish Williams. But while Pliskova is ready physically to do it, is she ready mentally?

Winner: S. Williams

Angelique Kerber vs. Caroline Wozniacki

These two have been playing each other since 2008, and their matchups have stayed pretty even over the course of those eight years. Kerber leads the head to head 7-5, but they’ve split their last four meetings. Wozniacki jumped out of the career gate faster, reaching No. 1 by the time she was 20; now she’s 26 and ranked 74th. Kerber was a later bloomer who appeared seemingly from nowhere to reach the semifinals of the 2011 U.S. Open at age 23; now she’s 28 and is just couple wins short of becoming No. 1. Together, these two counterpunchers play long points, and they’ve been known to throw a moon ball in each other’s direction; five of their 12 matches have gone three sets. Kerber is the better player now, but Wozniacki is on a roll at her favorite Slam, where she has been a finalist twice. How far has Angie distanced herself from Caro this season? Far enough that Caro, who is rumored to be considering retirement next year, can’t win one for old time’s sake?

Winner: Kerber

America's Court: Much has been gained, and a little lost, in the new Grandstand

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 04:00:00 +0000

NEW YORK—“Let’s go, Frances!” a woman in the 10th row cries. She doesn’t say it loudly enough for her player of choice, 18-year-old Frances Tiafoe, to hear her, but it’s the thought that counts, right? “He’s improved so much,” she gushes, mostly to herself.

As she speaks, she also whips a small, yellow fan back and forth in front of her face. The air on this late-August afternoon at Flushing Meadows is stingingly humid, and her yellow fan is just one of hundreds, maybe thousands, of others that buzz back and forth around the bleachers. If nothing else, the U.S. Open’s new arena—the freshly constructed, 10,000-seat Grandstand—is off to a hot start on its first day.

A hot start, and a complicated one. In the afternoon’s featured match, the U.S. crowd is faced with a choice: Do they back Tiafoe, a Maryland native, or his opponent from North Carolina, John Isner?

The match-up is all contrasts: 18-year-old baseliner vs. 31-year-old ace machine, 6'2" vs. 6’10", white vs. African-American. By the second set, there’s a split among the fans, not just in their loyalties, but in the way they express them. The Tiafoe supporters, who are in the majority, band together to chant “Fran-ces!”; they’re rooting for the new face. Isner’s backers, who are fewer and farther between, do their best to make up for it by bellowing, “Let’s go, Johhhhnnnn!” from the far reaches of the stadium. In its mix of unity and division, America’s newest tennis court feels a little like America itself in this hotly contested summer of 2016. And while the Grandstand is only a few hours old, it already feels right at home at the Open.

*****

After 10 days of watching tennis in the Grandstand, that initial impression hasn’t changed. It’s already hard to imagine the National Tennis Center without this court. It’s close enough to Arthur Ashe Stadium to sit in its shadows in the morning, but striking and substantial enough to create its own atmosphere. Even the famously hard-to-please, tradition-loving tennis pros seem to have been won over.

“I used to love the old Grandstand,” Caroline Wozniacki said after winning her first-round match in the new one. “But I walked in there today and just thought, ‘This court is really awesome.’ It’s a beautiful court. It’s going to be a court with a lot of special matches on it in the future.”

“It was an absolute pleasure to play out here,” Tiafoe said after his eventual loss to Isner. “It’s the best atmosphere I’ve ever played in in my life.”

As of last year, or even last month, this level of acceptance would have come as a surprise to most veteran players and Open-goers. As Wozniacki said, the old Grandstand was a beloved venue. In fact, the 6,000-seat show court was supposed to have hosted its final match in 2015, but it was called back into duty over the first week in 2016.

When it is finally demolished, something of the old, original Open at Flushing Meadows will go with it. The new Grandstand is a more beautiful arena, it seats more people, it allows people to circulate more easily, it has a sleeker design, and its location just to the west of Ashe makes it much more accessible. The benches have backs on them now, and there are no pillars obstructing your view.

The old Grandstand wasn’t meant for tennis; it was built as a performance space for the 1964 World’s Fair. But because of that, it was a quintessentially New York and authentically democratic arena. There were no reserved seats, and the best of them put you within a few feet of the players. It was the only court at the Open where fans lined up early to get a prime spot, and happily stayed in that spot all day.

That could prove to be true of the new Grandstand as well; the seats on its west side, which are partially shaded, are already prime real estate. Otherwise the new arena couldn’t be more different from the old. With its circular shape, futuristic mesh covering and west-to-east slope, the arena looks like a UFO—or, if you happen to be hungry, a giant cookie—that has just crashed into Corona Park. In that sense, it fits with the retro-futuristic style of the Unisphere, and the other World’s Fair relics nearby. From the Grand Central Parkway next door, it’s the Grandstand you see first, rather than Arthur Ashe Stadium, and that’s an improvement. Let’s just hope the new court remains at its current slope. Like the rest of the Tennis Center, it’s built on landfill, and slowly sinking.

Inside, rather than putting you on top of the players, the sides of the Grandstand fan out quickly. There are also, unfortunately but not surprisingly, 2,000 reserved seats at the bottom. So far, this shift from democracy to capitalism has been noticeable mostly in the evenings. When a match went late in the old Grandstand, fans jammed the benches; it was the perfect last stop before you had to make the long trek across the boardwalk to the subway. This isn’t the case at the new Grandstand, which is on the other side of the grounds, far from the exits.

Even when fans do stay into the evening, though, most of them can’t get close to the court. On the Open's first Tuesday, the U.S. No. 1, Steve Johnson, staged an epic late-day comeback, but even in the decisive fifth set the lower section remained empty—on TV, it looked like virtually no one was there. Johnson’s win should have generated an electric atmosphere, but no match in the Grandstand has had that “U.S. Open at night" vibe yet.

The new stadium is at its best during the heat of the day, when the sun is out and the players are doing hard battle. The tournament scheduled quality, American-heavy matches there in the early afternoons, and the bleachers were full, especially those on the shaded side. While you’re not on top of the players anymore, you don’t feel too far from them, either. Unlike the colossal, multi-tiered Ashe, the Grandstand is compact enough that all 10,000 people can feel like they’re part of one crowd. Watching from the west, you also feel as if you’re part of a bigger crowd; the stadium rises on that side, allowing spectators to look down on the masses milling around the grounds. The Open, with this latest expansion, has pulled off the neat trick of making the Tennis Center feel less spread out, and more energized at its core.

While the grounds-pass holder is pushed upward, there is some consolation in the freedom that’s offered there. To get to the general admission seats, you walk up a set of steps and around an outer walkway. When I went up the first time, I asked myself, “Where are the lines? Where are the ushers?” The answer is: There aren’t any. You don’t have to wait for a changeover to take your seat; you don’t have to ask anyone permission to go anywhere. And unlike in Ashe, if you walk down far enough, you can find a decent seat. That’s a refreshing, relaxing change for an event that has, out of necessity, become more regimented and security-heavy over the last 15 years.

Whatever the Grandstand’s strengths and weaknesses, the Open’s fans have wasted no time making it feel like home. They head up to the top benches and lie down for naps, the way they did in the old Grandstand. They get behind old standbys like the Bryan brothers and new stars like Dominic Thiem, who was serenaded with “Happy Birthday” on Saturday. And, as always, they offer unsolicited advice to any player who will listen. “Approach down the line, Milos!” one frustrated fan called to Raonic from the top row (I was thinking the same thing after Milos Raonic went crosscourt for the third straight time). “Don’t go for too much, Nick!” another volunteer coach advised Kyrgios. The Aussie, who is highly attuned to everything around him, seemed to take his advice when he won the next point with a safe forehand down the line.

Even some of the old, strange New York-tennis rituals continue. When the former Grandstand was filled to capacity, we used to walk up the staircases outside the arena, bend down or lie on the concrete, and watch what we could—half the court, if we were lucky—from any opening we could find. That’s how I saw Aaron Krickstein beat Vitas Geruliaitis in a five-set epic in 1983. I had a hard imagining anyone being desperate enough to do that in the new, more casual Grandstand, but I was wrong. The back of the stadium looks out on a set of side courts, but you have to contort yourself to get a view of them. That’s what I caught a group of fans doing this week. You can never get enough tennis at the Open.

Once a match is over, the New York fans also bridge their divides. My favorite moment of the first week came at the end of the Tiafoe-Isner match. The two players ended up in an embrace at the net, and the crowd put aside personal rooting interests and cheered for both—they were both good guys, after all, and this was only a sport. Unified is not the word most people would use to describe America in the summer of 2016, but that’s how we felt for a moment on America’s newest tennis court.

Serena Williams knew she needed something extra against Simona Halep, and she found it

Thu, 08 Sep 2016 03:46:00 +0000

NEW YORK—“I knew if I wanted to win this,” Serena Williams said after her 6-2, 4-6, 6-3 quarterfinal victory over Simona Halep on Wednesday, “I really had to step it up in the third set.”

Unlike most of us, when Serena thinks something on a tennis court, she can usually be counted on to make it happen. By the end of the second set, Halep had built up a head of steam; serving at 5-4, she survived an old-fashioned onslaught from Serena and saved four break points to close out the set. But Serena wasted no time stopping Halep’s momentum cold at the start of the third.

At 1-2, with Halep serving at break point, Serena hit a strong forehand return that won her the point and the game. She had been on the verge of breaking Halep in the second set, but hadn’t quite gotten over the hump. Now she had, and a match that had been spectacularly competitive 10 minutes earlier, that had fans gasping at the speed and quality of the rallies, suddenly felt like it was all over.

When Serena said she had to “step it up” in the third set, though, did she actually mean that she needed to take it down a notch? She had broken out of the gates hard in the first set; by the six-minute mark, she had hit five aces and seven winners and was up 3-0. But soon a shank or two began to seep through the cracks, and by the second set that trickle had turned into a flood. Halep finally got her foot in the door when she held serve at 0-1 in the second set, after saving seven break points. But Serena did her part to open that door in the first place; she lost five of those break points on backhand errors.

Once Halep had survived Serena’s final, sustained act of aggression at 5-4 in the second, Serena knew that the mistakes had to go. And so they did, as Serena basically tightened everything up in the third. She would make 43 errors in the match, but just nine in the final set. Her first-serve percentage rose, but her ace percentage fell. Her net game became more efficient; she won nine of 11 points there in the third set. And while she cut down on the errors, she also hit fewer winners; Serena had 50 for the match, but just 10 in the last set. She was also effective with the ultimate control play, the drop shot, and she kept her fist pumps and “Come on!” screams to a minimum.

In many ways, this match reminded me of the more competitive contests between Serena and Victoria Azarenka. In those, Serena would dominate for a stretch, only to grow erratic and watch as Vika fought back. Then Serena would stop missing; it was almost as if she could have played a more slightly conservative game all along and won easily, but what fun would that have been? More remarkable, in those matches and on Wednesday night, was the way that Serena could seemingly will herself to do this in the middle of a match.

After over 2 hours of tennis, 18 aces and 50 winners @serenawilliams beats #Halep to move on. #usopen https://t.co/58PNxuxl7t
— US Open Tennis (@usopen) September 8, 2016

Or maybe that’s just how she woke up on Wednesday.

“I was really rather calm today,” Serena said, sounding puzzled by her own mood. “...I guess that’s just how I got out of bed this morning. I definitely wanted to do some more ‘Come ons.’ I don’t know why. That’s weird.”

Serena admitted that, while the way she won may have been the right way, she would still rather avoid it if she could.

“I don’t really like coming to the net, to be honest,” she said, “but I’m good at the net, I guess. I’ve got to do what I’m good at.”

Credit Halep for pushing Serena to do what she didn’t want to do, in a way that only Azarenka has in recent years. Halep started tentatively, but by the second set the two women were trading blistering ground strokes and skating across the baseline to track them down. In these points, Halep gave as good as she got.

“I think this was the best match that I ever had against her,” said Halep, seeming to forget that she had once beaten Serena, 6-0, 6-2. “I felt that I’m very close and I have chances to win ... I take it, like, with confidence, this match.”

Still, Halep, as I wrote earlier in the tournament, was playing uphill the whole time. Or, to be more precise, she was starting a shot behind. Whatever happens from the baseline between these two, the serve will always be the difference-maker. Serena had 18 aces; Halep had one. Serena won 51 percent of her second-serve points; Halep won 38. Thirty-seven percent of Serena’s serves didn’t come back, compared to just 17 percent of Halep’s. That’s the tennis version of having a great first step. Two decades after her first appearance at the Open, it still has Serena in front of the pack.

Karolina Pliskova, into her first major semifinal, is getting the hang of this breakthrough thing

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 18:16:00 +0000

NEW YORK—Just after her 6-2, 6-2 win over Ana Konjuh, which took all of 57 minutes, Karolina Pliskova was asked how she felt. The 24-year-old Czech didn’t waste any time with her answer.

“It’s an amazing feeling,” she began in her rapid-fire, no-time-to-take-a-breath English.

She then went on to tell us that she loves New York, loves the hard-court season and didn’t think her opponent played her best, but does think we’ll be seeing a lot more of her in the future. All of that information, if you could keep up with it, was delivered in under five seconds flat.

Pliskova talks quickly, but she was especially revved up on Wednesday, and it was easy to understand why. After building a reputation as the sport’s most conspicuous Grand Slam underachiever, she had reached her first semifinal at a major. Two days before, she had reached her first Grand Slam quarterfinal. Four days before that, she had reached her first Grand Slam round of 16. And a week prior to the Open, Pliskova had won the biggest title of her career, in Cincinnati.

She’s getting the hang of this breakthrough thing.

“It was a big step and a big success,” Pliskova said of her performance in Cincy, which included blowout wins over world No. 3 Garbiñe Muguruza and world No. 2 Angelique Kerber. “I took a lot from that week. I’m really happy I took it here with me in New York, and it’s paying even more.

“I was struggling a little with my game [at] the Grand Slams. I knew I can play big tennis and good matches, but I couldn’t just, you know, put it in the Grand Slams. I felt [a] little pressure on myself. [I’m] happy right now it’s all paid off, and I finally [found] my game.”

At its best, Pliskova’s game is icily awe-inspiring. A rangy 6’1”, she has a natural, no-wasted-motion service that has produced 466 aces this season, nearly 200 more than any other WTA player. Pliskova’s ground strokes are just as efficient, and when they’re clicking, just as lethal.

It’s hard to think of a player whose timing is as pure as hers. With little noticeable effort, and with hardly any knee bend, Pliskova makes contact and the ball takes off, supercharged, on a line; if she has hit it well, it doesn’t come back. Over the course of two points late in her fourth-round win over Venus Williams, Pliskova put the ball on or within an inch of the baseline half a dozen times.

Like so many power players, though, the fact that Pliskova can hit these types of high-risk, high-reward shots leads her to try to do it too often for her own good. Watching from the outside, it doesn’t look like she does much to adjust. Whether she’s winning or losing, Pliskova moves quickly between rallies and tries to end them as soon as she can. Of the 93 points that she and Konjuh played, 64 of them were over in four shots or less.

Pliskova says she has improved her return of serve, and that she’s working on her movement, but it’s still “not great.” Typically, though, when a talented player has a breakthrough, it happens in the mind. Pliskova, a noted racquet smasher, says that has also been the case with her.

“I was more angry before with myself on the court,” she said on Wednesday. “So that I [have] improved a lot. Sometimes I’m still smashing my racquets, more in the practices than in the matches. I’m trying to be calm in the match because it’s not really helping me.”

Ironically, the big audiences in Ashe Stadium have had a hand in helping her stay composed. In her win over Williams, Pliskova didn’t want to give the 23,000 people rooting against her any sign of vulnerability. She knew they would pounce.

“I don’t want to show even the opponent, and even the crowd and the people, any frustration,” Pliskova said.

Pliskova will ascend to a career-high No. 6 next week. Having her stay there would be good news for the WTA. At her best, she plays jaw-dropping tennis that belongs in the Top 10, and in the semifinals of the U.S. Open.

Pliskova plays fast and talks faster, and her rise from Grand Slam also-ran to overachiever has been meteoric. That’s just how she does things.

“There are people saying that I could be there earlier,” she said, “but right now I feel great, and I feel it’s the right time for having results like this.”

Four to See, U.S. Open Quarters: Pliskova vs. Konjuh; Murray vs. Nishikori; Serena vs. Halep; Wawrinka vs. Del Potro

Wed, 07 Sep 2016 02:14:00 +0000

Before each day’s play at the U.S. Open, Steve Tignor will preview and predict must-see matches to keep an eye on.

Karolina Pliskova vs. Ana Konjuh

Head to head: First meeting

Kon-juh dig it? The 18-year-old Croat is coming off a statement match vs. Agnieszka Radwanska; not only did she beat the fourth seed in straight sets, but she hit 38 winners to Aga’s nine. But Pliskova wasn’t too shabby herself in saving a match point against Venus Williams and fending off 23,000 fans in the process. Konjuh and Pliskova have never played, but the Czech, at No. 11, is ranked 81 spots higher. The 24-year-old Pliskova is in her prime, and her quarterfinal appearance here is long overdue. She has the serve and the laser ground strokes to beat anyone on a given day; but those lasers, hit flat and low and fast, are every bit as low-percentage as they sound. Konjuh is less experienced, but her firepower comes with a little more margin. That may help on a stage that’s unfamiliar to both.

Winner: Konjuh

Andy Murray vs. Kei Nishikori

Head to head: Murray leads 7-1

These two masters of the backcourt have collided at big events this year; they played in Davis Cup early in the season, and at the Olympics last month. Murray has won both times, once in epic five-set fashion (Davis Cup), and once in routine, straight-set fashion (Olympics). Murray also leads their head to head 7-1, and is coming off one of the most brutally efficient performances of his career against Grigor Dimitrov. Nishikori, a 2014 finalist here and a tougher out in general, should offer a stiffer challenge. He could even win. But it’s hard to think of a logical reason why.

Winner: Murray

Serena Williams vs. Simona Halep

Head to head: Serena leads 7-1

As with Murray-Nishikori, this is a matchup of two excellent players, with a head to head that’s 7-1 in favor of the higher-ranked star. Aside from that one win, in 2014, Halep pushed Serena on hard courts in Miami and Cincy last year. She’s also playing some of the best tennis of her career at the moment; since Wimbledon, she’s won two titles and 17 of 18 matches. Is that enough confidence to make it 18 of 19 against Serena? If Halep is going to beat her, this would seem to be the time and the place, but she’ll need to avoid hitting too many of her floating second serves to do it. Serena, who makes history with every win these days, has looked pretty good, too.

Winner: S. Williams

Stan Wawrinka vs. Juan Martin del Potro

Head to head: Del Potro leads 4-2

The night session closes with a heavy-artillery assault between Del Potro, the man with the game’s most powerful forehand, and Wawrinka, the man with the game’s most powerful backhand. The two have aimed their missiles at each other just once since 2012, under the roof at Wimbledon earlier this year, a match that Delpo won with surprising ease. Look for Stan, who was disappointed in his performance that day, to try hard to redeem himself in Ashe. He also saved a match point against Daniel Evans earlier in the tournament, which tends to make a player more relaxed in later rounds. There has been magic in Delpo’s racquet over the last month, but it has to run out at some point, right?

Winner: Wawrinka