Articles by Steve Tignor

What Stefanos Tsitsipas did to Roger that Federer usually does to foes

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 17:12:00 +0000

If you were like me, you didn’t think that Stefanos Tsitsipas was going to beat Roger Federer until Federer’s final backhand pass landed in the net. Yes, Tsitsipas was up two sets to one and 6-5 in the fourth-set tiebreaker. And yes, he had saved all 12 break points and answered every Federer foray for the previous three hours and 44 minutes. But we had seen Federer wriggle his way out of similar jams too many times before—most famously in the last two Australian Open finals—to believe he wouldn’t do it again, especially against a 20-year-old opponent.

But, as we found out over and over and over again last night, this wasn’t just any 20-year-old opponent. What did Tsitsipas do differently against Federer that so many others haven’t? He did what every up-and-comer should do: He took a few ideas from the Maestro’s handbook, and made them his own. Once upon a time, we called Grigor Dimitrov Baby Fed, but Tsitsipas showed us tonight what part of Federer’s game Dimitrov couldn’t mimic: His instincts. It’s Tsitsipas who has them.

Here are five ways he turned the traditional tables on Federer.

*****

He experimented

Normally, during a Federer match, we hear from the commentators about how Federer is trying to “figure out” the other guy, and all the ways he’s trying to take him out of his game. We typically don’t hear anything like that about his opponent, who is just assumed to have no other options that to stick to his comparatively limited style. I realized that dynamic had been flipped on its head when, in the middle of the first set, Tsitsipas took a couple of steps back on a Federer second serve, and tried a completely different type of return, a high looping backhand, from any he had tried before. It was clear that Tsitsipas was going to act, rather than just react, during this match.

He used the whole court

The story of the match was Tsitsipas’s willingness to come to net. He went there 68 times, and in his post-match interview John McEnroe praised him for keeping the all-court game alive. But it wasn’t just the number of times he rushed the net that matter; it was how and when he did it. Whenever he was in trouble, he forced the issue—on many of the 12 break points he saved, on one of the four set points he saved in the second set, and on his lone match point.

Like Federer, Tsitsipas didn’t just use his forehand to go for outright winners; he used it to set up his net forays. He didn’t bring back serve-and-volley, but he did continue the more recent tradition of forehand-and-volley. There’s an old-fashioned inter-connectedness to Tsitsipas’ game that reminds me not just of Federer’s, but of an Aussie great like Ken Rosewall’s—everything is about putting him in a better position for the next shot, and moving him forward. We know Federer doesn’t like to back up behind the baseline; now we know Tsitsipas doesn’t like to do it either, and he’s just as skilled at holding his ground.

He kept moving in

We’ve been told that you can’t win by coming to the net anymore, so much so that it has become a self-fulfilling prophecy. If players don’t believe they can do something, they’re probably not going to be able to do it. So it’s always amazing to see that it can work, with the right shots, the right skills, and, most of all, the right, ultra-persistent attitude. Even when Tsitsipas lost a point at net, there was no question that he was going to keep going there. After a while, that pressure of having to come up with a pass wore on Federer. By the third set, even Tsitsipas’s most ordinary approaches were good enough to elicit errors from Federer, especially from his backhand side. Pressure is a privilege, Billie Jean King said. It’s also a killer.

In the process, Tsitsipas gave us an example of how a one-handed backhand can work today. Like Federer, but unlike, say, Dominic Thiem, Tsitsipas didn’t try to rally and grind with his one-hander; that generally leaves a one-handed player at a disadvantage against a two-hander. Instead, Tsitsipas used his one-hander to open the court and change the pace, while always attacking with his forehand.

He made Federer think

Most of today’s players, and thus most of Federer’s opponents, play at one speed. They belt the ball from the baseline from both sides, so you pretty much know what’s coming. That has always given Federer, with his one-handed backhand and his ability to change speeds, spins and trajectories, an advantage—opponents have to guess what he’s going to do next.

Against Tsitsipas, Federer also had to guess, because Tsitsipas has multiple options, too. He can use a short chip backhand or roll over it; he can suddenly rush the net from anywhere; most important, he has multiple gears on his forehand. He has the loopy rally ball, but when he needs to, he can flatten it out and belt it into either corner for a winner. Federer looked a step slow for much of this match; part of that, I think, was that he couldn’t predict what Tsitsipas was going to do next.

He had his serve when he needed it

As much as anything else, it’s Federer’s serve—more specifically, his unique ability to come up with winning serves on big points—that has kept him at the top of the sport for so long. Last night, Tsitsipas was the one who threw down the bombs when he needed them. And like Federer, when he missed a first serve on an important point, he came up with something special and surprising on the second ball.

*****

The image I think I’ll remember most from this match was Tsitsipas, at the start of the fourth-set tiebreaker, pacing at the back of the court and verbally urging himself on. It was a way of working off his nervous energy, rather than letting it build. He knew, like the rest of us, that this was the moment when Federer was supposed to beat him to the punch and steal the match from him. Rather than wait to see what the Maestro had in store for him, he beat him there first.

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Three to See, Day 8: Serena-Halep, Keys-Svitolina, Zverev-Raonic

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 13:35:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Simona Halep vs. Serena Williams

Halep was honest in her assessment of this blockbuster fourth-rounder. “In this moment, I’m No. 1 in the world,” she said. “But for sure she’s the best player in the world because she won so many Grand Slams.”

The stats say that Serena should be the solid, if not overwhelming, favorite in this match: She’s won 23 majors to Halep’s one, and she leads their head to head 8-1. Halep’s lone win came in the round-robin phase of the 2014 WTA Finals in Singapore, but even that was technically canceled out, because Serena came back to beat her in the final—6-3, 6-0—later that week.

Still, being the underdog, which she rarely is these days, should help Halep relax and swing away. Like she said, she’s No. 1, but she has little to lose, at least when the match begins. And it shouldn’t be forgotten that it has been two years since Serena won a Slam, a period of time in which Halep has reached the finals of three and won one.

Serves and returns will be key: How much will Serena be able to rely on her serve to bail her out of jams? Will Halep be able to avoid having her own second serve belted past her? After those two shots, the rallies should be fun, and competitive.

Winner: S. Williams

Madison Keys vs. Elina Svitolina

The American and the Ukrainian must be thinking that if Naomi Osaka can go all the way at a major, there’s no reason why they can’t, too. Both have been at the top of the Most Likely to Win a Slam list for a few years, but just when it looks as they’re ready to cash in, they don’t. How about this time? Keys is coming off a season in which she reached two Grand Slam semifinals and a quarterfinal, and Svitolina is coming off the biggest title of her career, at the WTA Finals.

Based on head-to-head history and form over the past week, Keys should be the favorite. She has won both of their previous meetings, one of which was a stirring three-setter at the US Open in 2017. While Svitolina struggled mightily to oust Shuai Zhang in the third round, Keys cruised past a quality opponent in Elise Mertens. If Svitolina can get her teeth into this one, complicate the rallies, and make it a dogfight, she can win. Otherwise, I’ll take the bigger hitter.

Winner: Keys

Alexander Zverev vs. Milos Raonic

The German and the Canadian seem to have redemption on their minds Down Under. Judging by the hype and hope that has surrounded them both over the last five years, you’d think one of them would own a major title by now. But neither does: Zverev is among the world’s best everywhere else, but he’s a perpetual disappointment at the Slams. Meanwhile, Raonic’s once-methodical ascent has been halted by a bewildering list of injuries.

So far in Oz, Zverev has survived a potentially disastrous five-setter against Jeremy Chardy, and Raonic has been steely in a four-tiebreaker win over Stan Wawrinka and a straight-set win over Nick Kyrgios. He and Zverev have met once before at a Slam, at Wimbledon in 2017; Zverev led, but Raonic eventually won in five. Could we see something similar happen on Sunday?

Winner: Raonic

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Kvitova teaches Anisimova how to take an opponent out of her game

Sun, 20 Jan 2019 02:43:00 +0000

For tennis players, “every day is different,” Jimmy Connors used to say. If 17-year-old Amanda Anisimova didn’t know that before this weekend, she knows it now. As brilliantly—spectacularly, perfectly—as everything went for her in her upset set win over Aryna Sabalenka on Friday, that was exactly how horribly everything went for her in her 59-minute, 6-2, 6-1 defeat at the hands of Petra Kvitova on Sunday.

Kvitova had lost to Anisimova in their only previous meeting, in Indian Wells last March, and she was obviously prepared not to let it happen again. From the start, she gave her young opponent a lesson in the fine art of how to take an opponent out of her game. Whatever Anisimova likes to do, that’s what Kvitova wouldn’t let her do.

Against Sabalenka, Anisimova dominated the rallies, flicking winners into the corners seemingly at will. Kvitova’s answer? Don’t let Anisimova get into rallies. She reduced the match to a battle of serves and returns, and never allowed Anisimova to find even the slightest bit of rhythm from the baseline.

On her serve, the Czech put the hammer down by relentlessly using her lefty slice into both courts—but especially, of course, into the ad side. Anisimova could never get a clean look at a backhand return in her strike zone, and she never found a way to counteract that serve. Does she own a slice backhand return? If not, this match is a sign that she should work on acquiring one. Kvitova made 86 percent of her first serves, won 83 percent of her first-serve points, won 60 percent of her second-serve points, and didn’t face a break point.

She was just as proactive in her return games. Kvitova attacked Anisimova’s serve relentlessly, driving the ball deep and down the middle to start, and then, as her confidence grew, into the corners for scalding winners. Kvitova used her lefty-ness to brilliant effect in general, and Anisimova had no answer for her hooking crosscourt forehand.

As for Anisimova herself, she was so overwhelmed that during those rare occasions when she got a good look at a ground stroke, she didn’t have the confidence to do anything with it. She served as poorly as Kvitova served well, and by the second set, she had lost all feel on her backhand.

Anisimova’s incandescent win over Sabalenka had a thrilling, “star is born” quality to it, not unlike Naomi Osaka’s title runs at Indian Wells and the US Open last year. Obviously, Anisimova isn’t going to do the same thing Down Under. But there was nothing wrong with getting excited about a 17-year-old—she’s three years younger than Osaka—who reaches the fourth round at a major. This loss, as much as it will sting, should teach her more about what it takes to play top-level tennis than any of her wins have.

Kvitova moves on to the quarterfinals, to play either Maria Sharapova or Ash Barty. She has followed up her title in Sydney last week with four straight-set demolitions in Melbourne. Every day is different, as Kvitova knows as well as anyone. But if she can maintain something close to her current level, there will be more good ones to come.

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Three to See: Federer-Tsitsipas, Kvitova-Anisimova, Tiafoe-Dimitrov

Sat, 19 Jan 2019 13:57:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Roger Federer vs. Stefanos Tsitsipas

“He could be my son,” the 37-year-old Federer joked after facing 20-year-old Tsitsipas for the first time at the Hopman Cup earlier this month. If that spirited exhibition encounter is any indication, their first tour meeting at the Australian Open on Sunday should be a cracker, and a feast for lovers of tennis in all of its various possibilities. While Federer won their exhibition match in two tiebreakers, Tsitsipas more than held his own during the rallies. Only a couple of ill-timed double faults made the difference.

Federer, of course, will have experience and confidence on his side; he has won 17 straight matches in Melbourne dating back to the 2016 semifinals. Since then, it seems the surface and the conditions in Rod Laver Arena have played exactly to his liking. This time, though, he won’t have the entirety of the crowd in that stadium behind him. Tsitsipas has been buoyed by a vocal Greek contingent this week, one that should only get louder on Sunday night. Tsitsipas, like Federer, has a nuanced game that can take a while to develop. He’s been developing it quickly over the last 10 months, but this match may have come a little too soon for him.

Winner: Federer

Petra Kvitova vs. Amanda Anisimova

Of late, the women’s game has produced some jaw-dropping efforts from its own Next Gen. Most famous among them was 20-year-old Naomi Osaka’s surreally composed win over Serena Williams in the US Open final. If anything, though, the 17-year-old Anisimova’s cool, calm and collected demolition of No. 11-seeded Aryna Sabalenka on Friday in Melbourne may have been even better. Anisimova, playing quickly and with nary a grunt, laced ball after ball past the gob-smacked Belorussian. It was a stunning, potentially future-changing performance.

But just how stunned should we have been? This wasn’t the first time Anisimova has casually flicked away a highly-ranked player. Last spring at Indian Wells, she did something similar to the woman she’s going to face on Sunday, Kvitova. The more pace that Kvitova fed Anisimova, the better and more accurate Anisimova became. Is Kvitova prepared to mix things up if the same thing starts to happen in this fourth-rounder? She better be.

Winner: Anisimova

Grigor Dimitrov vs. Frances Tiafoe

Suddenly, with the success of Anisimova, Tiafoe, Taylor Fritz, Danielle Collins and Sloane Stephens this week, a future seems to finally be taking shape for American tennis. In the case of Tiafoe, is that future now? During his close, clutch wins over Kevin Anderson and Andreas Seppi in the last two rounds, the Maryland native has looked like a different, more confident player—and with a better backhand to boot.

But Dimitrov also looks rejuvenated at the moment. That’s what tends to happen to him when he hires a new coach, and he has a famous one in his camp right now: Andre Agassi. Dimitrov likes the Australian Open, where he has reached two quarterfinals and a semifinal. Last year, though, he was ambushed by a young breakout player, Kyle Edmund; could Tiafoe do the same thing? Dimitrov should already know how dangerous he is: These two played into a third-set tiebreaker in Toronto last summer, before Dimitrov prevailed. It wouldn’t be a surprise if something similar happens in Melbourne.

Winner: Dimitrov

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For Tsitsipas, tennis is as much about learning as it is about winning

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 17:50:00 +0000

When 20-year-old Stefanos Tsitsipas was called to the Australian Open’s main interview room on Friday, he may not have been properly dressed for the occasion. Compared to the summer heat outside, the room was cold, and—according to one eyewitness—so was he.

“He’s frozen and shivering,” French reporter Carole Bouchard wrote on Twitter. “Learning the hard way.”

Life is a learning experience for Tsitsipas these days. Last year, the loose-limbed, long-haired Greek native made the leap from talented hopeful to Next Gen fixture in what felt like a matter of minutes. Actually, it took four whole months: As of April 2018, he was ranked No. 71; by the end of August, he was No. 15, exactly where he is today.

While Tsitsipas’ rise has been meteoric, we’ve found out plenty about him already; enough to know that he’s the most thoughtful and adventurous of the ATP’s young guns off the court, and its most complex and interesting talent on it.

Along with his tennis game, Tsitsipas has also upped his social-media game over the last year. At times, he seems as enamored of making video reports of his travels as he is of playing tennis. Last month, during the long trip Down Under, Tsitsipas tweeted, “Sometimes it makes me really wonder if it’s worth carrying such a big camera while traveling. Sometimes I feel like quitting my travel vlogs...but I just love creating travel content so much!”

Most tennis players, whether out of practicality or incuriosity, see little of the world around them, outside of airports, hotels and tennis facilities. The focus is on winning matches, not expanding horizons. Tsitsipas is the rare young pro who can’t help but try to do both. Like a philosophy-reciting college kid on a backpack tour of the world, he engages with what he sees, and and tweets out the deep thoughts that come to him along the way.

“We are all capable of so much more than we allow ourselves to believe.”

“The French revolution is closer than you might think. I saw it with my own eyes this afternoon, I saw frustration and anger in people’s eyes.”

“When you photograph people in color you photograph their clothes. When you photograph people in black and white you photograph their souls.”

“I pretty much operate on adrenaline and ignorance.”

On Friday in Melbourne, Tsitsipas admitted that he was an introvert when he was younger, but that life on tour had helped him come out of his shell.

“I’m not shy. Actually, I was shy when I was a kid but not anymore,” he said. “I learn to find comfort when I’m with people. I think I’m comfortable meeting new people and having a discussion with someone...But I would love to, yeah, have more friends on tour.”

Tsitsipas’ game is similarly multifaceted and difficult to pigeonhole, but he’s learning to be comfortable with it, too. He’s not a baseline bomber or a jack-rabbit retriever, but rather something in between. He’s 6’4”, which allows him to have a bomb serve, but he’s also a wiry 183 pounds, which allows him to be quick around the court. With his one-handed backhand, he can play with finesse, or move to the net.

It’s the type of game that, like Roger Federer’s once upon a time, can take a while to develop. Yet it all came together for Tsitsipas over the course of a week at the Rogers Cup in Toronto last August. There he put together a magically unlikely run to the final, beating Dominic Thiem, Novak Djokovic, Kevin Anderson, Alexander Zverev and Kevin Anderson before losing to Rafael Nadal. Tsitsipas was, suddenly, a made man on tour, and he’s maintained that high level since.

But his life on the court has also been a learning experience. Tsitsipas may have a philosopher’s soul, but he still has a young man’s excess of nervous energy. And like a lot of other young man, he can let it out in regrettable ways. During a self-punishing tirade at the Citi Open in July, Tsitsipas banged his palm into his skull so many times that the video of the moment went viral. In Basel in October, Tsitsipas was criticized for snatching his racquet away from a ball girl, and later apologized. On Friday in Melbourne, he yelled in the direction of a linesman who made a bad call on a crucial point, and stared him down. Again, Tsitsipas was contrite afterward.

“It was the heat of the moment. I said some really bad things,” Tsitsipas confessed. “I regret saying them. But I really wanted this really bad...So I was really frustrated. I didn’t quite think what I was saying. I wish I could change that and wouldn’t say that. It’s not the right attitude.”

Tsitsipas is self-aware enough to know when he’s wrong, and to own up to it. And in the end, he got what he “really wanted” on Friday: A tough, four-set win over a stubborn opponent in Nikoloz Basilashvili. But passing that test only brings up a tougher one: A fourth-round encounter with Roger Federer. Tsitsipas and Federer have yet to face off on tour, but they did meet in a spirited match at Hopman Cup earlier this month, which Federer won in two tiebreakers.

“He could be my son,” Federer joked afterward.

We’ll get a better idea of exactly where the Greek’s game stands when he gets his next lesson, from Father Federer. Will Tsitsipas receive a master class, or could he end up teaching an old tennis dog a few new tricks?

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Three to See, Day 6: Djokovic-Shapovalov, Venus-Halep, Osaka-Hsieh

Fri, 18 Jan 2019 10:20:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Novak Djokovic vs. Denis Shapovalov

Djokovic and Shapovalov will meet for the first time, in what should be a crackling display of baseline shot-making. We know what the Serb is capable of any stage, and we know what the Canadian is capable of on the biggest of those stages. The teenager announced himself to the world with a win over Rafael Nadal in Canada in 2017; now, after two years of ups and downs but no similarly earth-shaking results, would seem to be the time for the 19-year-old to make another run at a signature upset.

Does he have any chance of getting signature win against Djokovic? Shapovalov says he’s going to study how Nadal has gone about beating Djokovic in the past. Admittedly, Shapovalov’s choices for a role model are limited; not many of his fellow lefties have had a lot of success against Djokovic. But even Nadal himself hasn’t had that much success away from clay in recent years. This match may be the tale of two wings: Shapovalov will be able to do damage with his forehand, we know that. But what about his one-handed backhand? There are few things in tennis more spectacular than a leaping Shapovalov backhand winner, but it’s an erratic shot, and on his return of serve, it’s a liability. Look for Djokovic to slide a lot of serves in that direction.

Winner: Djokovic

Venus Williams vs. Simona Halep

To reach her second straight Australian Open final, Halep is likely going to have to pull off one of the most difficult doubles in sports: Beating Venus and Serena Williams back to back. First up is Venus, which won’t be easy on its own. Venus seems to have left her 2018 funk behind, and is in survive-and-advance mode in Melbourne. She’s won both of her matches so far in three sets, and both times she has found her best tennis down the stretch in the third. Much the same could be said for Halep: She has survived two stiff tests in her first two rounds, beating Kaia Kanepi and Sofia Kenin in three sets each.

All of which means we can probably expect another prolonged struggle when Halep and Venus face off on Saturday. Venus leads their head-to-head 3-2, but Halep has won their last two meetings, and she beat her 6-2, 6-2 on a hard court in Montreal last summer. Venus will, in all probability, be Venus—a tough out. For Halep, though, there could be two conflicting psychological aspects to this match. On the up side, after coming back from 2-4 down in the third against Kenin in the second round, she might feel as if she’s been granted a second life Down Under, and may play with more ease and freedom because of it. On the down side, the prospect of having to go through Venus and Serena may make this match itself more daunting.

Winner: Halep

Naomi Osaka vs. Hsieh Su-Wei

What’s the best way to play Osaka? As Serena Williams found out in last year’s US Open final, feeding her pace isn’t the answer. The harder and flatter the ball comes in, the harder and flatter Osaka sends it back. The better alternative would seem to be to loop and chop the ball with extra spin, and to hit it above or below Osaka’s strike zone, rather than right down the center of it. That happens to be exactly the way Hsieh plays—she’s the ultimate junkballer. No one in the game is as creative and surprising with her slices, drops, side-spins and changes of pace as she is.

Can it work against the world No. 4? Osaka and Hsieh have played once, four years ago, on grass, and Osaka won in three tight sets. Hsieh has had success driving people crazy at the Australian Open in the past, and she might just drive Osaka a little crazy on Saturday.

Winner: Hsieh

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After two rounds, Serena and Novak remain the clear-cut Oz favorites

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 17:02:00 +0000

“Aggressive, with margin,” the great Stanford University men’s coach Dick Gould used to say.

“Aggressive shots, to conservative targets,” is how Paul Annacone, coach to Pete Sampras and Roger Federer, framed the same idea.

Did Gould and Annacone watch Novak Djokovic and Serena Williams play at the Australian Open last night? If so, they would have seen their core piece of advice—to play forcefully but safely—put to brilliant use by the two favorites in their evening matches Down Under.

Serena was up first, against Genie Bouchard. The American was in an all-business mood, and she jumped to a 3-0 lead. In the next game, Bouchard found her feet and lasered a couple of service returns past Serena to break. Serena, predictably, didn’t like that; the fact that she still takes her opponent’s winners personally is one of the reasons she’s still at the top of the sport. During the following game, Serena shot a couple of glares down at Bouchard; you could feel a good, loud “Come on!” about to happen. It finally came at break point, when Serena rifled a forehand for a clean winner and celebrated with a hop, a skip, and a fist-pump. The set was hers.

“I knew, ‘Serena, you’ve got to come out hot, you’ve got to come out firing,’” she said afterward.

But while Serena wins with emotion—she’s still unwilling to accept anything less than near-perfection from herself—she also wins with the same fundamental tactics that Gould and Annacone promote. Against Bouchard, Serena set herself up to win a lot of points by hitting the ball hard, deep, and close to the middle, often on her return of serve. There was little risk in these shots, but they was still plenty of force. Bouchard did her best to hold her ground at the baseline, but the rallies were typically out of her control from the first shot on.

As one tournament favorite walked off, the other walked on. Like Serena, Djokovic was facing a talented opponent and former Grand Slam finalist who is trying to work his way back up the rankings. Like Serena, Djokovic let that opponent know he has a long way to go.

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga is coming back from knee surgery at 33. So it came as something of a surprise when he reached the semifinals in Brisbane two weeks ago, and recorded a win over Alex de Minaur. During that run, I had been impressed by Tsonga’s speed and reaction time; he looked just as athletic and explosive as ever. It only took a couple of games on Thursday night to see that the same wasn’t going to be true against Djokovic.

What we saw instead was the way that Djokovic, with a subtle relentlessness, presses his opponents and takes their time away. Like Serena, he loves to pound his returns deep and down the middle—i.e., aggressively, but with margin—and work from there. Djokovic wasn’t belting the ball at top speed, but Tsonga was still rushed and hitting from his heels. Once he had the advantage in a point, Djokovic could dip into his repertoire.

The heavy crosscourt forehand, the straight forehand drive down the line, the short flick re-drop at the net: He had them all working, and he was also reading Jo’s serve well. While he gave a service break back at the end of the second set, I’m not sure you can really call that a hiccup. It’s just part of the normal Djokovic process—jump out to a lead, work through the inevitable nerves and frustrations, cruise down the homestretch—that he goes through in best-of-five-set matches.

Many of us picked Djokovic and Serena to win this title; that’s hardly a surprise, considering that they’ve won the Australian Open 13 times between them (six for Djokovic, seven for Serena). Now that the first two rounds are over, and the fields have been culled from 256 to 64, there’s little reasons to doubt or rethink those predictions. Neither Djokovic nor Serena have lost a set; no matter what anyone else does, if they’re playing well, they’re the favorites to win any match they’re in, at least on this surface.

The 32-year-old Serb and the 37-year-old American have both suffered through dry spells over the last two years—Djokovic had elbow surgery and lost motivation, while Serena had a baby. Life got in the way, as they say. Neither won this title last year, either; it was just the second time since 2007 that one of them didn’t hoist the champion’s trophy in Melbourne.

Last summer at Wimbledon, after two years in the wilderness, Djokovic bounced straight back—in his customary rubber-band-man style—to the top of the sport. Right now Serena is in a similar place; it has been two years since her last Slam win, at the 2017 Australian Open. You get the feeling it’s going to be tough to keep either off of the trophy podium this time around. Despite all they’ve already done, Djokovic and Serena are both hungry, and they both know the simple secret to tennis that so many forget: “Aggressive, with margin.”

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Three to See, Day 5: Rising stars Anisimova, Sabalenka meet Down Under

Thu, 17 Jan 2019 11:54:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Aryna Sabalenka vs. Amanda Anisimova

There are better-known players in action on Friday at Melbourne Park, but anyone interested in the future of the WTA will want to take a peek at this matchup between two of the tour’s promising newcomers. Last year, 20-year-old Sabalenka established herself as a force on tour. Now it seems to be the 17-year-old Anisimova’s turn: So far in 2019, she has won two matches in Auckland, and two more in Melbourne, including a 6-0, 6-2 victory over Lesia Tsurenko, a player ranked 60 spots ahead of her.

Sabalenka and Anisimova are both state-of-the-art players: They’re tall and rangy, and they like to hit hard, but they also play with a confidence and collectedness beyond their years. The American may catch up to the Belorussian soon, but probably not by Friday.

Winner: Sabalenka

Watch Anisimova vs. Sabalenka,
Ashleigh Barty vs. Maria Sakkari,
Taylor Fritz vs. Roger Federer,
Stefanos Tsitsipas vs. Nikoloz Basilashvili
and Frances Tiafoe vs. Andreas Seppi
LIVE on Tennis Channel, beginning at 7 p.m. ET

Rafael Nadal vs. Alex de Minaur

The Spaniard and the semi-Spaniard—de Minaur has dual Australian-Spanish citizenship—have met once, in the third round at Wimbledon last year. Not surprisingly, Nadal won by a routine, 6-1, 6-2, 6-4 scoreline. But it wasn’t quite the blowout that those scores indicate. In the first set, the 17-time Grand Slam champion and the teenager wrestled for 10 minutes over a de Minaur service game, before Nadal finally broke. By the end, de Minaur, who was making his Centre Court debut, had shaken off the nerves and was fighting tooth and nail with Nadal. When Nadal served for the match, de Minaur pushed him to the limit, saving two match points before succumbing. The rallies were as spirited as you would expect from two of the game’s most cussed competitors.

When they meet again in Rod Laver Arena on Friday, expect de Minaur to jettison his early nerves quickly and pick up where he left off at the end of that third set at Wimbledon—i.e., giving the world No. 2 all he can handle, and matching him step for step and get for get. The question may be: Who will have the upper hand physically, if the match goes to four or five grueling sets? You might think that a 19-year-old would have the edge on a 32-year-old in that department. You might be right. But you’re probably wrong.

Winner: Nadal

Caroline Wozniacki vs. Maria Sharapova

In this third-round fight between future Hall of Famers, Sharapova leads 6-4, while Wozniacki has the edge on hard courts, 4-3. That said, you can’t read too much into their history together, because it happened so long ago; the last time they met was in 2015.

Who should be favored now? Sharapova has obviously been sharp so far this week; she’s lost three games in two matches. But Wozniacki has also won both of her matches in straights and, more important, she’s the defending champion in Melbourne and ranked No. 3 in the world—while Sharapova has been spinning her wheels for the better of a year, and is stuck in the low 20s in the rankings. We know what we’re going to get when they face off: Wozniacki is going to ask the questions, in the form of ball after ball returned safely into the court; it’s going to be up to Sharapova to come up enough correct answers.

Winner: Wozniacki

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As player & person, there’s more to Alex de Minaur than meets the eye

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 16:29:00 +0000

Once upon a time, Australian tennis players went by what they weren’t. Rod Laver earned the nickname “Rocket” from his coach, Harry Hopman, not because he was fast, but because he was so unathletic as a kid (he obviously grew into the moniker). Ken Rosewall, the most unimposing of players, was forever known as “Muscles.” Now, after a hiatus, Alex De Minaur looks set to continue that ironic Aussie tradition.

“Dee-mon!” the fans Down Under chant when De Minaur starts to whirl and blur along the baseline, and track down balls that you don’t think can possibly be tracked down. It’s a convenient contraction of his last name, but “demon” is also the last word that comes to mind when you first see him. De Minaur is 19, but with his carefully parted hair, rail-thin frame and wrinkle-free face, he looks like he’s he’s just entering his teens. When he pounds his heart after winning a tough point, you worry that he might knock himself over.

What’s important, though, is that he keeps pounding. It’s only when you see De Minaur compete that you understand why the nickname has stuck. De Minaur is demonically, unrelentingly quick, and he’s the kind of fighter who never takes a shot off or beats himself. He weighs just 152 pounds and almost never earns a free point with his serve, but over the last three years De Minaur has risen from a ranking in the 1500s to his current, career-high perch at No. 29. Last week he won his first ATP tournament, in Sydney. When tennis’s prognosticators were asked to choose a dark horse in the men’s draw at the Australian Open, most of us picked De Minaur.

It wasn’t just De Minaur’s recent results that inspired those picks. It was also the exhilarating energy that he injects into every match he plays. Over the last season, he has wasted no time in establishing himself as the Next Gen’s premier late-night entertainer. At last year’s US Open, De Minaur stormed back from certain fifth-set defeat against Marin Cilic, before falling in one of the year’s best matches after 2:00 A.M. On Wednesday in Melbourne, he went late again, but this time he thrilled the home folks with a five-set win over Henri Laaksonen.

In both of those contests, De Minaur brought the crowd to its feet with his unique ability to cover ground and keep rallies alive—to make tennis matches resemble squash matches. Like a squash player, De Minaur knows how to recover toward the middle of the court at the same time that he’s hitting a ball. And like a squash player, he knows that there’s no shot he can’t reach if his first step is quick enough. De Minaur, like Rafael Nadal when he first arrived on tour, makes defense into something creative and crowd-pleasing. Sometimes he looks as if he’s skating out there.

The Demon Show couldn’t have come along at a better time for Australian men’s tennis. As De Minaur was clawing his way though his first two matches this week, Nick Kyrgios and Bernie Tomic, the leading Aussie members of the generation before him, were falling in the first round. After years of well-documented ups, downs and fights with the country’s tennis federation, neither looks like the future champion that fans Down Under thought they might be. But where Kyrgios and Tomic have always been conflicted, at best, about how much they want to play tennis, that’s not a problem for De Minaur. He’s taken Australian tennis back to the days of his gritty mentor, Lleyton Hewitt.

But he’s also done something more. Unlike Hewitt, De Minaur isn’t just a grinder or a retriever. He’s comfortable coming forward—he made it to net 41 times against Laaksonen—and he’s always trying to find ways to turn the tables in a rally and go on the attack. Most of all, De Minaur exudes an old-fashioned, un-whiny passion for the battle.

“I wish I was as grown-up as Alex De Minaur on the tennis court,” Andy Murray tweeted last year.

Yet if De Minaur is a throwback as a player, he’s a young man of his globalized time, too. His father, Anibal, is Uruguayan, and his mother, Esther, is Spanish. Alex was born in Sydney, but he has shuttled back and forth between Australia and Spain throughout his life, and he has dual citizenship. He trains in Alicante, Spain, with his longtime coach, Adolfo Gutierrez, but he plays under the Australian flag. For De Minaur, the Aussie tennis tradition wasn’t something to resent, or dread having to live up to. It was something to choose and embrace.

All of which makes De Minaur’s next match, against Spain’s finest product, Rafael Nadal, the most intriguing of the tournament so far, and possibly the most entertaining.

“I can’t wait to compete,” De Minaur said when he was asked about facing Rafa.

Win or lose, that’s all an Aussie tennis fan can ask.

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Three to See, Day 4: Serena-Bouchard, Djokovic-Tsonga, Halep-Kenin

Wed, 16 Jan 2019 12:49:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Serena Williams vs. Eugenie Bouchard

The American and the Canadian are, for very different reasons, two of the best-known players of recent years. So it comes as something of a surprise that there have been no signature matches between them. They’ve faced each other just twice in official action, in Cincinnati in 2013 and Singapore in 2014, and Serena won comfortably both times. At the 2015 Hopman Cup, Bouchard stunned Serena 6-2, 6-1—though that didn't stop her rapid decline.

Five years later, Bouchard still hasn’t recovered; she’s ranked just No. 88 at the moment. Still, of late she has shown signs of the form that once took her to the Australian Open semifinals. She has a new coach in Michael Joyce, she reached the semifinals and quarterfinals of her last two events, and she had no trouble with Peng Shuai in her opener on Tuesday. Theoretically, Bouchard should like the pace that Serena gives her. Whether she can handle it, and for how long, is another story. But this one should be watchable.

Winner: Williams

Novak Djokovic vs. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga

The Serb and the Frenchman have a history in Australia. Their first meeting, way back in 2008, came in the final in Melbourne, a match that Djokovic won in four sets, and which launched him into the same stratosphere as the top two players at that time, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Two years later, Tsonga managed to turn the tables in a five-set quarterfinal. But instead of leading to bigger things for Tsonga, that match would end up being one of Djokovic’s last disappointing results before he began to dominate the sport the following year. He would win five of the next six Australian Opens, and he would win his next 11 meetings with Tsonga.

Is there any chance the result will be different this time? Tsonga, now 33, had knee surgery last year and is currently ranked No. 177. Meanwhile, Djokovic has already fully recovered from his own late-career physical issues and is currently ranked No. 1 again. There’s no plausible way to pick Tsonga to win this match, but he did look surprisingly good, physically and technically, in beating upstart-of-the-moment Alex De Minaur and reaching the semifinals in Brisbane two weeks ago.

Winner: Djokovic

Simona Halep vs. Sofia Kenin

Halep is No. 1; Kenin is No. 37. At 27, the Romanian is in her prime; at 20, the Russian-turned-Floridian is still learning the ropes. Halep’s career record at the Australian Open is 17-8, and she fell just a few games short of winning the title last year. Kenin’s career record Down Under is 1-1, and her record at all four Slams combined is 6-7. Beyond those stats, Halep should feel a big sense of relief and freedom after surviving a stiff first-round test from Kaia Kanepi. Halep and Kenin have never played, and Kenin might be bowled over the by the moment and the opponent.

All of which means this match should be one-sided, right? Even if it is, Kenin, who might as well be the dictionary definition of a “spark plug,” should be worth a look. Striding swiftly between points, slamming her racquet down in sudden fits of rage, and attacking every ball she sees, Kenin, who won her first WTA title last week in Hobart, will inject life into this match, even if it’s in a losing effort.

Winner: Halep

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What’s Venus Williams’ secret to everlasting tennis life?

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 17:21:00 +0000

“Venus: She’s Got It” was the message on one fan’s sign at the Australian Open on Tuesday. For much of her first-round match with Mihaela Buzarnescu, though, that sentiment seemed much more hopeful than it did realistic. When the contest began, the 38-year-old Williams was walking slowly between points, and the compression sleeve on her right arm looked ominous—it was bright and pink, yes, but still ominous. In her opening service game, Venus tossed the ball waywardly and was forced to catch it four straight times. She was decelerating on her forehand and dropping into the net. Even her new, free-flowing hairstyle was bothering her.

This was Williams’ first Grand Slam match in more than a decade without her longtime coach, David Witt; that most-stable of tennis partnerships finally ended in the off-season, after Venus dropped out of the Top 10 and all the way down to No. 38—that’s why Buzarnescu was the seed in this contest, rather than the seven-time Grand Slam champion. Williams’ decline began at last year’s Australian Open, when she lost in the opening round to Belinda Bencic. Early losses at the French Open and Wimbledon followed, and she pulled the plug on her season after a quick defeat at the hands of her sister Serena at the US Open. Was she going to stumble at the starting gate again in 2019? Twenty years after her debut Down Under, were we finally witnessing the long-anticipated, long-defied fadeaway of one of tennis’ most enduring champions? Should that fan’s sign have read, “Venus: She’s Had It” instead?

If you’ve been watching Venus long enough, you know that it’s just when thoughts like this begin to creep into your mind that she immediately erases them again. She began to do that midway through the first set against Buzarnescu. Unable to serve all-out, Williams relied on her slow, sliding slice instead. Instead of leaning back on her forehand, as she did at the start, she made a point of getting up to it and attacking it. When Buzarnescu served for the match at 5-3 in the second set, Venus, perhaps aware of the Romanian’s penchant for blowing big leads, dialed back her aggressiveness and waited for Buzarnescu’s nerves to kick in–which they did. By the third set, Williams was in command, and she closed her 6-7 (3), 7-6 (3), 6-2 win with that rarest of gestures from her: A fist-pump, a “Come on!” and a stare across the net that would have done her sister proud.

“I’m banking on my experience,” Williams said when she was asked what it was like to play without Witt. Some wondered whether she would be “match tough” in Melbourne, having entered just one tournament since the US Open. But can someone who has played 1,025 matches since turning pro 25 years ago ever be anything other than match tough?

“I just tried to play better,” Venus said afterward, in her customarily straightforward, no frills fashion. For her, competing is simple, so there’s no reason to complicate it for the media. “I mean, there were moments when it looked like maybe she had the match at that time. I just kind of forgot the score and kind of focused on my game.”

“Every point is another one you can win,” she said. You can add that to the ever-growing list of Venus Williams’s Mystically Wise Tennis Quotes.

What is Venus’ secret to everlasting tennis life? I’d say it’s about always remembering who she is. She’s known who she was, and what she was going to be—a champion—since her father, Richard, embedded the idea in her head when she was a little girl. “Brainwashing” is how Venus has laughingly described the ways in which Richard convinced her that she was going to be a world-beater. Whatever he did, that sense of herself has never left Venus, and it allows her to play the long game when it comes to her career. Losing streaks, devastating defeats, dips in rankings, injuries, illnesses, burnout: Venus can ignore all of the problems that normally plague a pro player, because she knows that, sooner or later, she’ll be Venus Williams again.

In 2017, Venus’ run to the Australian Open final launched her toward one of the best seasons of her career. In 2018, her first round loss in Melbourne led to one of her most disappointing. Will this opening-round comeback win over a quality opponent kick-start another climb up the rankings? Will Venus be Venus again in 2019? Her 25-year career tells us we can never rule it out.

For today, Venus was happy to live in the moment and do the one thing she loves to do most: Get a win. When it was over, she walked out to the middle of the court, waved to the crowd, and went into her traditional victory twirl. She didn’t make it all the way around quite as quickly she might have in the distant past, but she made it. And her grin was as wide as it has ever been. She’s still got it.

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Three to See, Day 3: Federer-Evans, Khachanov-Nishioka; Bertens-Pavs

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 12:12:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Roger Federer vs. Dan Evans

Federer and Evans have been on tour together for the better part of a decade, but they’ve faced each other just once, at Wimbledon in 2016. You probably have a pretty good idea how that one turned out: Federer won in straight sets. At 29, Evans has been in and out of the game for years, while only sporadically fulfilling his potential. A month after reaching his career-high ranking of No. 41 in 2017, he tested positive for cocaine and was suspended for a year. But he’s never lacked potential; at his best, the Brit has a smoothly appealing all-court game, one that he used to very nearly beat Stan Wawrinka at the US Open in 2016. But does he believe he can beat Federer, in Rod Laver Arena? That’s doubtful. Federer, who cruised past a potentially dangerous opponent, Denis Istomin, on Monday, probably doesn’t believe it, either.

Winner: Federer

Karen Khachanov vs. Yoshihito Nishioka

The 23-year-old Russian and the 22-year-old Japanese are two of the more entertaining members of the Next Gen set. Khachanov is a baseline bludgeoner of the highest order; he finished 2018 by beating Novak Djokovic in the final of the Paris Masters and nearly cracking the Top 10. Many, including myself, are expecting at least one deep run at a major from him this season. So far Nishikoka is a step behind Khachanov, development-wise—he’s ranked just No. 75—but he’s a speedy, left-handed, undersized, exciting shot-maker, and he’s coming off a quarterfinal run in Sydney, where he beat Andrey Rublev and pushed Diego Schwartzman to a third-set tiebreaker. This one should be fun.

Winner: Khachanov

Kiki Bertens vs. Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova

The expectations have been raised for Bertens in 2019, after she made a sudden and semi-meteoric ascension into the Top 10 at age 27 last year. So far, the Dutchwoman seems ready to meet them; after losing early in Brisbane, she made the semifinals in Sydney last week, before narrowly losing to Ashleigh Barty. Is a second-week run manageable in Melbourne for Bertens? She’s in Sloane Stephens section of the draw. But first she’ll have to find her way past world No. 42 Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova, which is hardly a sure thing. The 27-year-old Russian is notoriously erratic, but she has won 12 titles, and has been ranked as high as No. 13. She also won her last meeting with Bertens, in Wuhan last fall, in straight sets.

Winner: Bertens

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Three to See, Day 2: Kyrgios v. Raonic, Halep v. nemesis Kanepi; Venus

Tue, 15 Jan 2019 02:56:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Milos Raonic vs. Nick Kyrgios

When these two towering flame-throwers met in the quarterfinals at Wimbledon in 2014, I thought we were seeing a preview of many Grand Slam finals to come. Instead, four years later, the 23-year-old Australian and the 28-year-old Canadian are ranked 51st and 17th, respectively, and they’re meeting in the first round at the Australian Open. A combined lack of health, and lack of motivation, have kept either of them from fulfilling his potential so far.

That said, this match, the first between them since 2016, should be one of the highlights of the first two days. Raonic and Kyrgios have split their six previous meetings 3-3, and as you would expect from two of the game’s best servers, each of those matches has included at least one tiebreaker. As far as their current form goes, neither made it past the quarterfinals at their first event of 2019; but it’s the Canadian, rather than the Australian, who has typically started well Down Under. While he went out of the first round in Melbourne last year, Raonic has reached a semifinal and three quarterfinals there. For Kyrgios, playing at home has been a mixed blessing—he’s won some thrillers, and lost some. The rowdy late-day crowd in Melbourne (formerly Hisense) Arena should help make this another dramatic, and close, contest. Winner: Raonic

Simona Halep vs. Kaia Kanepi

Halep nearly fell over when she found out that she was facing Kanepi in the first round at last year’s US Open. The big-hitting Estonian was one of the last players the world No. 1 wanted to play, and for good reason. Kanepi knocked her out in straight sets in the first match of the tournament.

When Halep she got the news that she would have to play Kanepi again, in the first round, at the very next major, she was trying on new shoes. Hopefully, for Halep’s sake, she’ll also take it as an opportunity to turn the tables and put that loss in New York in her rear-view mirror. But it won’t be easy. There’s a reason Halep doesn’t like this match-up; Kanepi is taller and stronger, with a more powerful serve and ground strokes. She nearly went on to beat Serena Williams at the Open. Halep has also split with her coach, Darren Cahill, and she didn’t look sharp in her first tournament, in Sydney, where she lost to another aggressive player, Ash Barty, in straight sets. Still, the 33-year-old Kanepi hasn’t played at all since the US Open, and Halep is No. 1 for a reason. Right?

Winner: Halep

Venus Williams vs. Mihaela Buzarnescu

Believe it or not, it’s Buzarnescu who’s the seed, and Williams who’s the “dangerous floater” in this first-rounder. Last year, the 30-year-old Romanian made a stunningly meteoric late-career rise in the rankings, while the 38-year-old American began to show some of her age, dropping out of the Top 10 and down to No. 38. That drop began in Melbourne 12 months ago, when she lost in the first round to Belinda Bencic. Can Venus use this year’s Aussie Open as a place to kick off yet another revival of a career that has already seen half a dozen of them? She’s 51-17 in Melbourne, and she reached the final there as recently as 2017. But Buzarnescu will be a challenge. Venus has never faced the wiry lefty, and she’ll have to hustle to catch up to the sharp crosscourt angles that the Romanian can create from both wings. But if Venus falls behind, she shouldn’t give up hope; Buzarnescu has a history of letting opponents back into big matches. This one may be decided by how well she can close.

Winner: Williams

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Think and act for the better: What I tried to learn from Andy Murray

Mon, 14 Jan 2019 16:46:00 +0000

WATCH: Players leave video messages to a retiring Andy Murray:

Andy Murray went out at the Australian Open the way he came in: by pushing a Spanish opponent to the limit, and thrilling an appreciative crowd, before eventually falling in five sets.

I can still vividly remember waking up in the early morning dark to watch Murray surprise and deceive, and nearly beat, Rafael Nadal in their first meeting in Melbourne in January 2007. The 19-year-old Scot lost to Rafa that night, but not before showing the world that he was a top-level talent, with a creative, original playing style and the tenacity and ambition to make that talent mean something. A future Grand Slam champion was born, and the age of the Big Four had begun.

Twelve years later, with Murray’s similarly gallant five-set loss to Roberto Bautista Agut, it may have ended. By any historical measure, this generation of male players has been around for a long time. But suddenly it feels as if their era is ending far too soon.

“Big Four” has always been a disputed term. Many think Murray doesn’t deserve to be placed alongside his rivals and colleagues Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic and Nadal. And it’s true, he can’t compete with them in terms of major titles won, and he’ll wind up well behind them in any list of all-time greatest players. But Murray’s consistency over the last decade, and the breadth of his accomplishment, put him in their league. He did everything he could reasonably have set out to do, and a lot of things that no other man from his country could do. He was the first British man in 77 years to win Wimbledon. He led Great Britain to its first Davis Cup title in 76 years. He was the first British man to reach No. 1 in the ATP rankings and finish a season No. 1. And like Federer, Djokovic and Nadal, he took on the challenge of becoming an all-surface player, and reached a French Open final. Murray was Big.

There will be more chances to talk about Murray’s game and on-court career. For today, I want to write about what made him significant and unique off the court, and what he taught male athletes, even if many were reluctant to learn from his example.

In 2016, I wrote an article for Tennis Magazine speculating that Murray might end up being the most important player of his generation. This was the period just after the 2015 women’s World Cup, when, for the length of a summer, the members of the winning U.S. team were the biggest sports stars in America. It felt like a gender-politics breakthrough that might prove permanent, and it was one that Murray happened to be embodying in tennis at the same time.

For years, he had been the only prominent ATP player to take an active interest in the women’s game. Early in his career he praised Agnieszka Radwanska’s playing style, predicted that Caroline Garcia would become No. 1 and said he like watching the WTA. None of those things might seem especially ground-breaking or notable, except that in pro tennis, they were. The two tours traveled the world together for much of the year, but the prevailing attitude on the ATP side had always been that you shouldn’t try to compare the men’s and women’s games, and that you certainly shouldn’t pay them the same amount of money. The women, in short, weren’t as good.

Murray, whose mother was his first coach, and who has never been afraid to carve out his own path, was the first male player I know of—and maybe the first male athlete anywhere—to put the women’s game on a par with the men’s, to talk about women as if they really were playing the same sport. In 2015, he took the next step in his feminist awakening by hiring Amelie Mauresmo as his coach. In 2016, in the midst of yet another sport-wide argument over equal pay, Murray made his boldest statement yet, when he sat down at a table full of reporters in Miami and said, “I think there should be equal pay, 100 percent, at all combined events.”

I can remember being shocked, pleasantly, by Murray’s words that afternoon. Their clarity cut through all of the evasions and excuses that normally constitute the equal-pay debate. In Murray’s mind, the men’s and women’s games were of equal value, and that was all there was to it.

Why was this seemingly simple assertion of gender equality such a shock? Because it went completely against the grain of male solidarity, of the jock fraternity. As anyone who has played on an all-male sports team can tell you, it can be tough to fight against a chauvinist tide by yourself. That must have been doubly true within the ATP, where many of the players believe that to pay the women equally is to take money out of their own pockets. There’s a reason Murray was one of the few to go against that grain. It takes guts, and a willingness to be scorned by some of your peers.

There were players who disagreed with Murray, and others who must have resented him. But as the recent testaments from his fellow players show, Murray was still a popular and respected figure on the men’s tour. He made fast friends with the new generation’s resident bad boy, Nick Kyrgios. He traded barbed banter with his coach, Ivan Lendl, who no one has ever accused of being a soft-headed liberal. He professed his love for boxing, as well as for his dogs, Rusty and Maggie May. He made his strongest statements about equality in 2016, and then went on to have the best year of his career and finish the season No. 1.

Let’s go muzz you absolute fkn legend, I want 5 sets
— Nicholas Kyrgios (@NickKyrgios) January 14, 2019

Murray retained his membership in the male fraternity, and in the process proved that being a member of that fraternity doesn’t require excluding or downgrading or ignoring women. That’s a lesson for tennis, which, more than any other sport, has the opportunity to be a progressive leader when it comes to gender equality. It’s also a lesson for men in general, one that goes well beyond sports. Without his voice, chauvinism might rise again in tennis, but he has shown that a different, more broad-minded path is possible, even for athletes. That’s why I wrote in 2016 that Murray might be the most important player of his generation. That’s why, as he makes his farewell tour in 2019, I still hope he can be.

Kickoff each day of the 2019 Australian Open with Tennis Channel Live, reviewing the day's most important news and previewing the day's biggest matches. Watch LIVE at 6 p.m. ET.

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Three to See, Day 1: Federer v. Istomin, Murray v. Bautista Agut, more

Sun, 13 Jan 2019 03:48:00 +0000

Before each day's play at the Australian Open, we'll preview three must-see matches.

Sloane Stephens vs. Taylor Townsend

It has been feast or famine for Stephens in Melbourne. In 2013, she beat Serena Williams on her way to the semifinals, but she hasn’t won a match Down Under since 2014. Her last three trips there have netted three first-round losses. Surely, Sloane will put an end to that run of futility against the 91st-ranked Townsend, when they meet in Margaret Court Arena on Monday, right?

Don’t count on it. Stephens is coming off a 6-0 third-set defeat at the hands of Yulia Putintseva in Sydney, and while the 22-year-old Townsend has yet to make good on the considerable potential she showed as a junior—she won the Aussie Open girls’ title in 2012—she’s a lefty shot-maker and all-courter who Stephens has never faced. It might take some time for the favorite to adjust. Winner: Stephens

Roberto Bautista Agut vs. Andy Murray

It’s the first day of the Grand Slam season, and, naturally, we have our first scheduling controversy. As many are asking: Why would Australian Open officials send Murray out to Melbourne Arena (formerly Hisense Arena, formerly Vodafone Arena), the third show court on the grounds, for what could be his final professional match? It’s a legitimate question: Murray is a three-time major champion and five-time Australian Open finalist, and he may wind up his Hall-of-Fame career on a court that doubles as a cycling track.

But what’s done is done, and now it’s up to Murray to give himself another chance to get back into Rod Laver Arena. It’s not going to be easy. Murray is just 5-4 in his last 10 matches, and he admits that he can only “play up to a certain level” due to chronic hip pain. In his first tournament of 2019, in Brisbane, he went down in fairly routine straight-set fashion to Daniil Medvedev. At the same time, the 30-year-old Bautista Agut is coming off perhaps the finest sustained performance of his career; last week in Doha, he beat Stan Wawrinka, Novak Djokovic and Tomas Berdych to win the title. If your body is hurting, the ever-steady RBA is not the guy you want to face in a best-of-five-setter on a hard court. Winner: Bautista Agut

Roger Federer vs. Denis Istomin

Once or twice a year, Istomin emerges from obscurity—trademark colored spectacles in place—to throw a scare into a top player at a Slam. The 32-year-old Uzbek (he’s of Russian descent) has weapons that are lethal enough to push anyone around, but too erratic to do it for long—lethal enough, in other words, to win him a set, but not lethal enough to win him three. The major exception to that rule came at this event in 2017, when he threw enough haymakers to survive a lengthy five-setter against Novak Djokovic in the second round.

Can lightning, Istomin-style, strike twice on the same court? It’s doubtful. Federer is 6-0 against Istomin, who has lost his last three matches, is currently ranked 93rd, and who spends most of his time at the Challenger level. It’s true that the last two times they played, Istomin won the first set before Federer came back to win in three. But those two matches happened in 2013 and 2014; if anything, Federer is better now than he was then. Istomin is almost surely not the guy Federer would have chosen to face to start his title defense in Melbourne. But while he may surrender a set, he probably won’t surrender three. Winner: Federer

Kickoff each day of the 2019 Australian Open with Tennis Channel Live, reviewing the day's most important news and previewing the day's biggest matches. Watch LIVE at 6 p.m. ET.

Follow the Australian Open even closer with Tennis Channel PLUS. Go to BuyTCPlus.com and subscribe now!

The Coaching Question: What is the future of on-court coaching?

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 20:08:00 +0000

Garbine Muguruza and her coach, Sam Sumyk, have a testy exchange at the WTA Elite Trophy in Zhuhai:

Call it the hand signal that rocked the world.

It was the briefest and most innocuous of gestures. Patrick Mouratoglou, coach of Serena Williams, had sat in Arthur Ashe Stadium and watched his player lose the first set of the 2018 US Open final to Naomi Osaka. So he did what any decent tennis coach would do: he put his hands in front of him and pushed them forward a few inches. It was his way of telling Serena to move up in the court and take charge of the points.

The communication was over in a second, but that was enough time for chair umpire Carlos Ramos to spot it. Ramos handed Williams a code violation for illegal coaching, and the rest of the night—unfortunately—is tennis history.

After Serena’s defeat and the torrential downpour of boos that came with it, Mouratoglou admitted that he had coached her. But instead of saying that he wouldn’t do it again, the Frenchman took the opportunity to assert that tennis’ age-old rule against in-match coaching needed to change. He went so far as to cast the debate as a “confrontation between two ways of thinking: the conservative, traditionalist way, and the modern, progressive way.”

“I have never understood why tennis is just about the only sport in which coaching during matches is not allowed,” Mouratoglou said.

“Coaching is a vital component of any sporting performance. Yet banning it almost makes it look as if it had to be hidden, as if it was shameful. Authorizing coaching in competition and actually staging it so that the viewers can enjoy it as a show would ensure that it remains pivotal in the sport.”

While Mouratoglou’s plea was construed by many as self-serving, he was also articulating a philosophical schism that has divided the sport for the last decade. On one side of that divide are, as Mouratoglou says, the traditionalists. They emphasize that tennis is a one-on-one sport, in which players must solve their own problems—mentally, physically, emotionally, tactically—once they step on court.

On the other side of that divide is a smaller group that believes on-court coaching adds drama and personality to TV broadcasts. They say that the pros are illegally coached from their player boxes anyway, so why not showcase it and derive some entertainment value from it?

Tennis being a traditionalist’s sport, those against on-court coaching outnumber those in favor of it. Yet that didn’t stop the WTA, in 2008, from allowing it at tour events. For the last decade, players have been permitted to request one visit from their coach per set. Labeled an “experiment,” the move was designed with television in mind; coaches are required to wear microphones during their visits.

The rule change was greeted, predictably, with disgust, and even after 10 years WTA coaches and players continue to express reservations about it. But if the experiment hasn’t been accepted, it has accomplished what it was intended to accomplish.

On-court coaching has added an extra dash of personality—a discussable moment—to the WTA. Whether they’re inspirational or embarrassing, the sideline visits are among the most talked-about aspects of any match, and among the most widely shared on social media. We’ve seen jarringly testy exchanges between Garbine Muguruza and Sam Sumyk; soul-searching conversations between Simona Halep and Darren Cahill; and rapid-fire monologues by Piotr Wozniacki, as his daughter Caroline stares straight ahead in stone-faced silence. For 90 seconds, fans can glimpse how players and coaches relate to each other under stressful circumstances.

While WTA CEO Steve Simon acknowledges that on-court coaching has its critics, he remains committed to the idea.

“Coaching, from my perspective, is here to stay as a part of the WTA,” Simon said at the end of the 2018 season. “Coaching is a part of sport. It’s an integral part of the sport of tennis. We can’t say that coaching doesn’t happen and just look the other way. I think we have to support it, and support it in a responsible way.”

Rather than curtailing coaching, Simon would like to see it expanded.

“What I’m hoping for is that as coaching is utilized throughout the sport,” Simon said, “there is an alignment with respect to when coaching is allowed, that it’s at least consistent across the board.”

That might sound like a reasonable enough request, but until this year, the rest of the sport didn’t seem likely to come around to Simon’s way of thinking. Most media, fans and ex-players have long viewed on-court coaching as a betrayal of the game’s individualist ethos, and neither the ATP nor the Grand Slams have seriously considered allowing it. Until now, that is. In 2017, the US Open began allowing sideline coaching visits during qualifying, and the calamitous end to last year’s women’s final in Queens may finally have made the sport’s ultimate traditionalist institution, Wimbledon, think twice about the issue.

“People might say, ‘Shall we all vote for coaching, it’s good for the sport’,” Wimbledon chairman Philip Brook told the BBC after last year’s US Open. “We will say no, but if the rest of the sport say we want to do it, and there are good reasons, then maybe Wimbledon should fit in.

“What we would like to learn from those who have conducted trials is: persuade us why it’s a good idea.”

Is it worth trying to persuade Brook and his fellow Wimbledon officials? Has the time come to institute on-court coaching throughout the game?

We can start by saying that the traditionalists overstate their case when they maintain that, at its essence, tennis is purely a one-on-one sport. On-court coaching has been a feature of the game at multiple levels for decades; it’s allowed in high school, college and USTA league matches. At the professional level, it remains an integral part of Davis Cup and Fed Cup. For much of the sport’s history, Davis Cup was the most prestigious men’s event, more important to the players than Wimbledon or any of the Grand Slam tournaments. It’s hard to claim that, because there is a team captain on the court who can give advice during play, Davis Cup somehow doesn’t qualify as tennis.

Traditionalists have also alleged that allowing on-court coaching during WTA matches makes female players “look weak.” By that logic, Tom Brady and Stephen Curry look weak when they run plays designed by their coaches, Tiger Woods looks weak when he consults with his caddy and Rafael Nadal looks weak when he listens to his Davis Cup captain. All athletes, men and women, are coached.

Another line of argument asserts that on-court coaching shouldn’t be allowed because it isn’t fair to players who don’t have the resources to hire a top coach. But that type of inequality is already built into pro tennis. The highest earners have the best and most expensive support teams assisting them all day, every day. The only time pros aren’t being coached is when they’re playing a match.

Finally, some worry that WTA players will come to rely too heavily on their coaches during tour events, and then flounder when they can’t talk to them at the majors. This hasn’t proven to be the case. All of last year’s Grand Slam singles champions—Wozniacki, Halep, Angelique Kerber and Osaka—regularly call for their coaches when they’re playing WTA tournaments.

And yet, anyone who has ever played a tennis match and felt the thrill and intensity of its hand-to-hand combat, as well as the satisfaction that comes with winning that exchange, will know that the traditionalists have a point. Former world No. 1 Tracy Austin recently spelled it out with particular force.

“I think it should be taken out all together,” Austin says of the WTA’s on-court coaching rule. “I think that it should be mano a mano, whatever tools I have—whether it’s emotionally or technically or tennis-wise—versus yours.

“I hate the fact that someone can come on court and help my opponent if they’re lacking in that mental strength, or to keep that even-keel emotionally. They can change the course of a match.”

In other words, the uniquely tough and thoroughgoing test that tennis sets before its players—that they’re personally responsible for whatever happens once they walk on court—is what elevates this sport above others.

Maybe, in the case of coaching, tennis’ divided nature is a blessing. We can accept that the game takes different forms—team events, tour events, school events, league play, Grand Slams—and different attitudes toward coaching are appropriate for each.

“I think it’s great for TV, and it’s great for the game,” Chris Evert recently said of the WTA’s on-court coaching rule. “With Grand Slams, I’m a little more reserved about that, because I do feel that you have to problem-solve yourself.”

“If I was assured that it would bring more viewership and more spectators, and it would enhance the sport of tennis, I would be all for on-court coaching,” Evert continued. “But I’m not convinced that it’s going to change the dial. I think people will tune in to the Slams because they’re the Slams.”

If we’re going to try to persuade Brook and officials at the other majors of anything, it should be to hold the line against coaching. Let’s keep Centre Court and Arthur Ashe Stadium what they’ve always been: theaters of battle, where the combatants alone decide their fates. And instead of letting Mouratoglou coach in Ashe, let’s encourage him to let Serena figure things out for herself. She’s done it pretty well in her career so far.

This Week on Tennis Channel and Tennis Channel Plus

ATP/WTA Sydney (1/5 to 1/12)
• Stefanos Tsitsipas, Frances Tiafoe, Simona Halep and Sloane Stephens headline the Sydney International. Watch live coverage on Tennis Channel Plus.

WTA Hobart (1/5 to 1/11)
• Watch the action from the Hobart International featuring Caroline Garcia, Belinda Bencic and Maria Sakkari.

ATP Auckland (1/6 to 1/11)
• See John Isner and Fabio Fognini live on Tennis Channel Plus beginning Monday, Jan. 7 at 6:00 pm ET.

FAST 4—Sydney (1/7)
• The game’s best compete in the always entertaining Fast4 format, with appearances by Nick Kyrgios, Grigor Dimitrov and Milos Raonic. Live coverage begins on Monday, Jan. 7 at 3:30pm ET.

World Tennis Challenge—Adelaide (1/7 to 1/9)
• Watch Borna Coric, CoCo Vandeweghe and Victoria Azarenka live from Adelaide starting Monday, Jan. 7 at 3:00 am ET.

AO Qualifying Rounds (1/8 to 1/11)
• Australian Open officially begins with qualifying action. Tennis Channel Plus has fall the action live! Coverage begins Tuesday, Jan. 8 at 6:00 pm ET.

Tennis Magazine Archives: Andy Murray is a rebel in reverse

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 16:17:00 +0000

WATCH: Andy Murray will retire from tennis due to injury

On the news of Andy Murray's impending retirement, we're rerunning a 2016 TENNIS Magazine cover story Steve Tignor wrote about the Scot. The theme then was that Murray, who has emerged as the ATP's most progressive voice in recent years, may eventually been seen as the most important player of his generation. As far as his on-court legacy, the article finished with a guess that, at 29, he wasn't done winning major titles yet, and that his best years might still be ahead of him. While those are behind him now, we do know that he was the best male player of 2016.

***

As he sat down to begin his first press conference at the Miami Open this spring, Andy Murray made for an unlikely-looking radical. Dressed in a blue Under Armour fleece and black sweatpants, with his uncombed hair pushed hastily to one side after a workout, Murray leaned back, put his hands in his pockets and calmly began answering questions. If you knew the world’s No. 2-ranked player only from the steady stream of rants, raves and semi-intelligible soliloquies that flow from his mouth when he’s on court, you might have had trouble recognizing the soft-spoken, levelheaded, 29-year-old new father who sat before the media.

On this day, though, reporters suspected that Murray, despite his easygoing demeanor, was going to have a juicy quote or two for them. They swarmed his table and pushed their cameras, microphones, notepads and whatever recording device they could find into his face.

Two days earlier, Raymond Moore, who was then the chairman of the BNP Paribas Open in Indian Wells, had dialed the tennis world’s outrage meter up to 11—and talked himself out of a job—by stating that the WTA rides on the “coattails” of the ATP, and that, “If I were a lady player, I would go down on my knees every night and thank God that Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal were born, because they have carried this sport.”

Later that day, Novak Djokovic dug the men’s hole a little deeper when he said that ATP players deserve more prize money than WTA players, and expressed his admiration for female pros this way: “They have to go through a lot of things we don’t have to go through. You know, the hormones and different stuff.”

It wasn’t hard to imagine that, behind closed doors, Djokovic’s opinions, if not Moore’s, were shared by some of Murray’s colleagues. Over time, the Grand Slams offered equal pay, but it had never been fully accepted by the men. In recent years, members of the ATP Player Council have talked about trying to make prize money un-equal again.

But Murray was different. He was the only top men’s player who had hired a woman, Amelie Mauresmo, to be his coach, and he was one of the few who deigned to admit that he enjoyed watching women’s tennis. Murray may also be the only male athlete in any sport, ever, to say the following:

“Have I become a feminist?” he asked in a blog post for French newspaper L’Equipe last June. “Well, if being a feminist is about fighting so that a woman is treated like a man, then yes, I suppose I have.”

If the media was looking for Murray to start a fight in Miami, he didn’t disappoint. He openly questioned Djokovic’s logic before taking the opportunity, as any good progressive would, to nudge his tradition-bound sport a little farther into the future. “I think there should be equal pay, 100 percent, at all combined events,” Murray said.

Currently, dual-gender tournaments in Rome, Canada and Cincinnati offer more prize money to the men, but there has never been a public push to change that, the way there was at the majors. Yet Murray is confident in the rightness of his cause. “I think it will happen one day,” he said.

Just as startling was what Murray said next:

“Men’s tennis has been lucky over the last nine or 10 years, with the players, the rivalries which have come out of that. That’s great, but the whole of tennis should capitalize on that—not just the men’s game.”

The idea that superstars like Federer, Nadal and Djokovic should be working to help not just the men’s game, but the men’s and women’s games, really is something new under the tennis sun. For more than 40 years, since the ATP and WTA were formed in 1972, the tours have run on separate tracks. The chauvinistic schism is built right into the names of their organizations: the Women’s Tennis Association was created in part because, as Billie Jean King put it, “the so-called Association of Tennis Professionals wouldn’t admit female tennis professionals.”

In 2009, WTA commissioner Larry Scott proposed merging the tours and combining their star power, but the men were happy to continue going it alone. Now, finally, they have a player in Murray who is willing to cross the game’s invisible net. At a time when the U.S. women’s soccer team and UFC fighter Ronda Rousey have lifted the profile of female athletes in the United States, and women’s sports look poised to grow, Murray seems less like a wild-eyed revolutionary and more like the right man for the moment.

How did this lifelong boxing fanatic, who once talked about his willingness to drill his opponents with the ball from point-blank range, become tennis’ most sensitive son? Murray’s first coach was his mother, Judy, but his sympathy for women’s causes grew from the “prejudice” that he watched Mauresmo endure in the early days of their partnership. When Murray struggled after hiring her in 2014, former British champions Virginia Wade and Tim Henman were among those who questioned his choice.

“The staggering thing was that she was [criticized] every time I lost,” Murray told L’Equipe, “which is something my former coaches never, ever experienced. It wasn’t right...Her competence was under fire. I felt embarrassed.”

When Murray reached his first major final with Mauresmo, at the 2015 Australian Open, he was vindicated.

“A lot of people criticized me working with her,” Murray said. “And I think so far this week we have shown that women can be very good coaches as well.”

By the middle of 2016, Murray and Mauresmo’s partnership, historic as it was, had run its course. They parted ways a day after Murray lost to Djokovic in the Madrid final. The moment was symbolic: While Mauresmo had guided Murray to his highest career ranking, No. 2, made him a more consistent competitor and improved his play on clay, she couldn’t push him up to the top rung of the ladder. Murray and Mauresmo didn’t win a Grand Slam title in their two years together, and his loss in Madrid was his 12th in his last 13 meetings with Djokovic.

The Murray-Mauresmo team broke a barrier and made a point, but in the eyes of the sport and the ever-ravenous British media, it still left him with more to prove. Would Murray want it any other way?

“To suggest that he likes proving people wrong,” English sportswriter Simon Barnes once wrote of Murray, “is to suggest that Richard Burton liked a drink.”

***
While Murray’s recent feminist turn is sincere, it’s also typical of an athlete who has always been driven to show the bashers and naysayers—there’s no shortage of either in his country—the errors of their ways, and to take his own road to success, even if it appears to be a long one. This is a man who, at the tender age of 21, released an autobiography with the not-so-tender title Hitting Back. On court and off, Murray’s instinct is to counter-punch.

It’s a trait he seems to have inherited from his mother. In 2003, frustrated by the lack of resources for tennis in the U.K., Judy Murray took out a £30,000 loan to send her youngest son to train on red clay near Barcelona, Spain.

“It was a big risk,” she told The Guardian. “I didn’t realize what we were getting into, but I knew this was the next step he had to take.”

This wasn’t something that had been done often in the tennis no man’s land of Scotland. But it was prescient. On clay, Murray learned the patient, thoughtful game that has served him well in an era when all surfaces have slowed. Murray’s methodical approach has also served his country well. When it comes to British tennis, he has been a one-man oasis after a century of wandering in the desert.

In 2012, Murray became the first British man since 1908 to win an Olympic gold medal, and, with his victory at the US Open, the first to win a Grand Slam singles title in 76 years. In 2013, on his ninth try, he became the first British man since Fred Perry to win Wimbledon, ending a 77-year drought. Last November he went 11–0 in Davis Cup competition to lead Great Britain to its first title in the team tournament since 1936.

In all of those cases, Murray accomplished something that many fans in his nation had given up hope of ever seeing. And he did it by ignoring his self-appointed advisers, the columnists and ex-champs who told him he needed to be more aggressive; to leave his beloved baseline and come to the net; to stop whining and moaning and barking profane gibberish; to distance himself from his mother—to become, in other words, someone else.

“I think I persevered,” Murray said of his 2013 Wimbledon triumph. “That’s really been it, the story of my career, probably. I had a lot of tough losses, but the one thing I would say is I think every year I always improved a little bit. They weren’t major improvements, massive changes, but every year my ranking was going in the right direction.”

If anything, Murray’s taste for bucking the boys’ club conventions of pro sports has only grown since. In 2014, he replaced Ivan Lendl, the coach who had helped him earn his biggest wins, with Mauresmo. The laid-back Frenchwoman was different from the stone-cold Czech-turned-American in every regard. After the early criticism, though, and as Murray’s ranking rose, she was grudgingly accepted.

But that spring, Murray found himself defending his relationship with another woman: his wife, Kim Sears. After their April wedding, there were questions about how married life would affect his focus. Murray answered them by winning the first two clay-court titles of his career, in Munich and Madrid. In Madrid, he walked off court and scrawled “MARRIAGE WORKS” on a camera lens.

This February, Sears gave birth to their first child, Sophia. When Murray struggled in his return, speculation swirled that fatherhood was proving to be a distraction. Again, Murray wasted no time in shooting down that argument. It sounded like heresy from a pro athlete, but he said his family came first.

“I’d rather be getting up in the middle of the night and helping [my daughter],” he told the Daily Mail, “than winning every tennis match and her thinking when she grows up, ‘Actually, you know what, he was a s----ty dad, but he won a lot of tennis matches.’”

By the time this year’s clay swing rolled around, Murray seemed to be relishing his role as a rogue force on tour. In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, he ignored the traditional code of silence among athletes about doping and went public with his suspicions.

“I have played against players and thought, ‘They won’t go away,’ or ‘They don’t seem to be getting tired,’” Murray said. “Have I ever been suspicious of someone? Yeah, you hear things.”

Murray vowed to continue speaking his mind on the subject. And why shouldn’t he? In this era, the top male players have been the most effective forces for change, whether it’s demanding more prize money or prodding the US Open to get rid of Super Saturday and build a roof over Arthur Ashe Stadium. Murray has been integral to those discussions; if he can get the same authorities to do more about doping, and increase fans’ trust that the sport is clean, he really will have pulled off something radical.

***

For all of Murray’s progress off the court, though, his recent on-court performances haven’t been enough to keep the bashers at bay.

Three years after his dizzying Wimbledon peak, and the back surgery that brought him back to earth, Murray is as steady as ever. In 2015, he went 70–6 against everyone except Djokovic or Federer; the trouble is, he went 1–8 against those two. As well as he played with Mauresmo on a week-to-week basis, he didn’t scale the same heights that he did with Lendl. Instead, Murray has had to watch as his old rival, Djokovic, has used his methods to pass him by.

At the start of 2014, Djokovic hired his own super-coach in Boris Becker. He wanted an ex-champion to do for him what Lendl had done for Murray: Get him over the hump in major finals. Since then, Djokovic has won six Grand Slam titles while Murray has remained at two. According to Djokovic, the difference has to do with endurance, both physical and psychological.

“I get the feeling,” Djokovic said when asked about his matches with Murray, “that if I get to stay with him and kind of work, work, work, not get too loose and too frustrated and not allow him to get into a big lead, I feel like there is a point where I feel that I have the edge, maybe physically.”

Does Murray need a figure like Lendl in his camp, a player whose accomplishments were greater than his own and who accepts nothing less than success? When they were together, Murray seemed just as concerned with not hurting Lendl’s reputation as he was with improving his own. If there’s a difference between his play with Lendl and his play since, it’s in the way Murray has handled adversity.

Before the fifth set of the 2012 US Open final against Djokovic, Murray famously gave himself a pep talk in a men’s-room mirror. He walked back out and won the title. Three years later, when he lost to Djokovic in the 2015 Australian Open final, Murray talked about how distracted he had been when the Serb appeared to hurt himself in the middle of the match. When he was asked whether he thought Djokovic had deliberately tried to throw him off, Murray, rather than dismiss the idea, said, “I don’t know.”

Murray had committed the ultimate sportsman’s sin: He let himself be rattled by something he couldn’t control.

Lendl, it seems, instilled the confidence in Murray that, no matter his opponent, winning was always up to him. Over the last three years, Murray’s old nemeses have gotten back into his head and shaken that confidence.

On the brink of his 30s, can Murray recapture his no-excuses, Slam-winning attitude? Can a sensitive male finish first? As always with him, the fact that so many people think it won’t happen may be the best reason to think that it will.

Originally published in the July/August 2016 issue of TENNIS Magazine.

This Week on Tennis Channel and Tennis Channel Plus

ATP/WTA Sydney (1/5 to 1/12)
• Stefanos Tsitsipas, Frances Tiafoe, Simona Halep and Sloane Stephens headline the Sydney International. Watch live coverage on Tennis Channel Plus.

WTA Hobart (1/5 to 1/11)
• Watch the action from the Hobart International featuring Caroline Garcia, Belinda Bencic and Maria Sakkari.

ATP Auckland (1/6 to 1/11)
• See John Isner and Fabio Fognini live on Tennis Channel Plus beginning Monday, Jan. 7 at 6:00 pm ET.

World Tennis Challenge—Adelaide (1/7 to 1/9)
• Watch Borna Coric, CoCo Vandeweghe and Victoria Azarenka live from Adelaide starting Monday, Jan. 7 at 3:00 am ET.

AO Qualifying Rounds (1/8 to 1/11)
• Australian Open officially begins with qualifying action. Tennis Channel Plus has fall the action live! Coverage begins Tuesday, Jan. 8 at 6:00 pm ET.

Will the Australian Open kickstart a dominant season for Serena?

Fri, 11 Jan 2019 02:03:00 +0000

WATCH—TC Live breaks down the Australian Open draws:

Will we have another year of depth, or a return to dominance? That’s the question I asked in my 2019 WTA preview earlier this month, and the Australian Open looks set to give us our first answer. There are high seeds and proven recent winners, like Simona Halep and Angelique Kerber. There are young guns like Naomi Osaka and Aryna Sabalenka. But there’s also a seven-time Australian Open champion, Serena Williams, still very much in the mix. Here’s a look at how that mix might play out over the next two weeks.

First Quarter

These brackets start with a bang: The top seed, Halep, will open against the player she may have dreaded seeing in the first round more than any other, Kaia Kanepi. Kanepi beat Halep in the opening round at last year’s US Open, and she has a game that’s powerful enough to do it again. In fact, Kanepi may even be the favorite in this one in many people’s eyes.

But that’s only the beginning of this section’s intrigues. Elsewhere, Serena will start against 73rd-ranked Tatjana Maria of Germany. Her sister Venus will start against 25th-seeded Mihaela Buzarnescu. Two-time Slam winner Garbiñe Muguruza will face Zheng Saisai. No. 10 seed Daria Kasatkina will play Timea Bacsinszky. Two potential, unpredictable dark horses, No. 7 Karolina Pliskova and No. 27 Camila Giorgi, are also here. Much of the cream has risen to the top of this draw.

Semifinalist: S. Williams

WATCH—Osaka reflects on a rough outing at Brisbane:

Second Quarter

The top two seeds in this section, Osaka and Elina Svitolina, essentially traded places last summer. When it began in Paris, Svitolina looked like a player who was ready to make a Grand Slam breakthrough; when it ended in New York, Osaka was the one who had made that breakthrough. Which will be the bigger factor Down Under, the confidence that Osaka gained from winning a major, or the hunger that Svitolina still has to do the same? Svitolina ended her 2018 season with a win at the WTA Finals in Singapore; the previous year, Caroline Wozniacki won in Singapore and followed that up by winning her first major at the Australian Open.

Osaka and Svitolina will both have their obstacles to overcome. Osaka starts against Magda Linette, who is coming off a solid win over Maria Sakkari in Hobart. After that, Osaka could face home favorite Daria Gavrilova, and then two-time champion Victoria Azarenka. As for Svitolina, she may go up against 20-year-old Viktoria Kuzmova, who reached the semifinals in Auckland, in the second round. Soon after, she could face Madison Keys, who made the quarters in Melbourne last year.

How fit is the oft-injured Keys? She hasn’t played since October, when she withdrew from Zhuhai with a knee injury. The answer to that question might give us the answer to who will advance from this section.

Also here: Anastasija Sevastova and Qiang Wang. The 27-year-old from China had a breakout fall in 2018.

First-round matches to watch:

Keys vs. Australian teen Destanee Aiava

Azarenka vs. Laura Siegemund

Semifinalist: Svitolina

WATCH—Match point from Kvitova's emphatic win over Kerber in Sydney:

Third Quarter

For a No. 3 seed and defending champion, Wozniacki is generating precious little pre-tournament chatter. In this section alone, three other players, Petra Kvitova, Aryna Sabalenka, and Ash Barty are garnering more attention. Rightfully so: Sabalenka won the title in Shenzhen to start the year, and Kvitova and Barty each looked impressive in their tune-up events in Oz. All three will be semifinal contenders in Melbourne.

Also here: 30th seed Maria Sharapova. The 2008 champion could face Wozniacki in the third round.

First-round matches to watch:

Sakkari vs. Jelena Ostapenko

Wozniacki vs. Alison von Uytvanck

Semifinalist: Kvitova

WATCH—Match point from Goerges' semifinal win over Kuzmova in Auckland:

Fourth Quarter

What’s the state of Angie Kerber? She won this tournament in 2016 and reached the semis last year, but she didn’t play well or look happy in a quick defeat to Kvitova this week in Sydney. She also changed coaches during the off-season. While her first-round opponent, Polona Hercog, has beaten her twice in five meetings, Kerber’s draw looks manageable after that. The first seed she would have to face is No. 29 Donna Vekic.

If Kerber reaches the quarters, who will she find there? The seedings say it will be No. 5 Sloane Stephens, though Sloane didn’t look any happier in her own loss in Sydney, to Yulia Putintseva, than Kerber did. Maybe that’s because she knows she hasn’t won a match at the Australian Open since 2014.

Players of Interest:

Kiki Bertens: The looked great in Sydney, and would benefit from an early loss by Stephens in Melbourne. If she didn’t have a 3-6 career record at the Aussie Open, she’d make a good dark horse pick.

Julia Goerges: The No. 14 seed won a title in Auckland last week. Can this late-bloomer, who can blow anyone off the court when her forehand is clicking, improve on her second-round defeat here last year? She’s reached the round of 16 Down Under three times.

First-round matches to watch:

Kerber vs. Hercog

Stephens vs. Taylor Townsend

Bertens vs. Shenzhen finalist Alison Riske

Goerges vs. Danielle Collins

Vekic vs. Kiki Mladenovic

Semifinalist: Goerges

Semifinals: S. Williams d. Svitolina; Kvitova d. Goerges

Final: S. Williams d. Kvitova

Kickoff each day of the 2019 Australian Open with Tennis Channel Live, reviewing the day's most important news and previewing the day's biggest matches. Watch LIVE at 6 p.m. ET.

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Can anybody prevent Djokovic from winning his seventh Australian Open?

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 19:49:00 +0000

WATCH—Djokovic practices with Murray ahead of Australian Open:

Looking down this year’s men’s brackets at the Australian Open, it’s hard to imagine where the upsets might happen. The top four seeds—Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, Alexander Zverev—all have what we would traditionally call a good draw. The majority of the players they’re slated to face in the quarterfinals—Kei Nishikori, Kevin Anderson, Dominic Thiem—seem less than fearsome on paper.

But that’s how it goes with Grand Slam draws: The upsets sneak up on you. Here’s a look at how this perhaps deceptively straightforward men’s event might play out.

First Quarter

After his win at last year’s US Open, many of us speculated that Djokovic was going to dominate the game for the foreseeable future, in the same way that he dominated it for the first half of this decade. So far, it hasn’t quite worked out that way: Djokovic has lost three matches—to Karen Khachanov, Alexander Zverev, and Roberto Bautista Agut—that he probably wouldn’t have lost in his prime. So which Djokovic will we get in Australia, the confident one of the last two majors, or the shakier one of his last three events?

His draw doesn’t include any obvious or ominous obstacles. He could play Jo-Wilfried Tsonga in the second round; the Serb and the Frenchman played the final here in 2008, but Jo is still working his way back after a long layoff. In the third round, Djokovic could face Denis Shapovalov; they’ve never played. And if the seeds hold, he’d get Nishikori in the quarters. Djokovic has won their last 14 meetings; when they met in the Aussie Open quarters three years ago, he lost just nine games.

Semifinalist: Djokovic

WATCH—Alexander Zverev suffers an injury scare during practice:

Second Quarter

Here we go again: Another referendum on Sascha Zverev at the Slams. This time, the 21-year-old German comes in having won the biggest title of his career, last November at the ATP Finals in London, where he beat Federer and Djokovic in the semis and final. His draw Down Under makes a repeat of that run look like a possibility. The first seed Zverev could face would be No. 29 Gilles Simon, and his potential quarterfinal opponent, Thiem, is a clay-court lover who has never been past the round of 16 in Melbourne.

Players of Interest: Hyeon Chung, Milos Raonic, Borna Coric. Chung reached the semis in Oz last year. Raonic, who has traditionally played well in Australia, was one set from the final in 2016. Coric is coming off a career-best season that concluded with a Davis Cup title for Croatia.

First-round matches to watch:

Stan Wawrinka vs. Ernests Gulbis

Raonic vs. Nick Kyrgios

Thiem vs. Benoit Paire

Semifinalist: Zverev

WATCH—Federer's tearful interview about late coach Peter Carter:

Third Quarter

Last year’s final—Federer vs. Cilic—is projected to be this section’s quarterfinal. What are the chances of a rematch? Both men will face obstacles.

Federer, the two-time defending champion, will have to start by navigating his way past occasional-upset specialist Denis Istomin, a hard-hitter who knocked Djokovic out of this tournament two years ago. The first seed Federer could face is No. 30 Gael Monfils; more intriguingly, the next one he might face, in the fourth round, is No. 14 Stefanos Tsitsipas.

Cilic, who led Croatia to the Davis Cup title last November, will have his own tricky opener, in the form of Bernard Tomic. The Aussie has obviously had his low moments, but he ended 2018 on a high, with a title in Chengdu, and he owns a win over Cilic. After that, Cilic could face Andrey Rublev, and in the fourth round he may see either Khachanov or Bautista Agut, each of whom has posted strong results in recent months.

Player of Interest: Andy Murray. The five-time Aussie Open finalist has a tough opener, against Bautista Agut.

First-round matches to watch:

Federer vs. Istomin

Cilic vs. Tomic

Tsitsipas vs. Matteo Berrettini

Semifinalist: Cilic

WATCH—Nadal withdraws from Brisbane International:

Fourth Quarter

Of the top four seeds, Nadal’s immediate future is the toughest to predict. Since last summer, he has been beset by injuries, one of which forced him to pull out of Brisbane just two weeks ago. Rafa also has a history of getting hurt during the Aussie Open itself. On paper, though, his draw looks manageable. He’ll start against 245th-ranked James Duckworth of Australia; this will be their first meeting. Things could get more interesting if he faces another, younger, faster Australian, Alex de Minaur, in the third round.

If form holds, Rafa would get No. 5 seed Kevin Anderson in the quarterfinals. There’s a decent chance that form may not hold, though, as Anderson has never been past the fourth round Down Under, and he lost his opener last year. This time Anderson’s path should be smoother. He starts against Adrian Mannarino, and the first seed he could face is No. 31 Steve Johnson.

Player and Coach of Interest: Grigor Dimitrov and Andre Agassi. Dimitrov nearly reached the final here two years ago; he has a path back to the quarters this time.

First-round matches to watch:

John Isner vs. Reilly Opelka. At 6’10” and 7’0”, respectively, these two will play the tallest match in major-tournament history; Isner won their only previous meeting, in Atlanta in 2016.

Kyle Edmund vs. Tomas Berdych: Last year’s surprise semifinalist takes on a semifinalist from 2014 and 2015.

Semifinalist: Nadal

Semifinals: Djokovic d. Zverev; Cilic d. Nadal

Final: Djokovic d. Cilic

Kickoff each day of the 2019 Australian Open with Tennis Channel Live, reviewing the day's most important news and previewing the day's biggest matches. Watch LIVE at 6 p.m. ET.

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Takeaways: 10 biggest winners from tennis’s opening-week deluge

Sun, 06 Jan 2019 18:50:00 +0000

HIGHLIGHTS: Roger Federer d. Alexander Zverev in the Hopman Cup final

Tennis made up for lost time last week. After a month and a half away, the sport returned with a deluge: Five tournaments across three continents. The players did what they could to get their reps in before the Australian Open starts next Monday.

That means there have already been a lot of winners so far in 2019. We rank the Top 10, in terms of potential significance, below.

10. Roger Federer and Serena Williams

After 20 years on tour together, the two Goats of the Open era finally met on the same court, at Hopman Cup. More important, they each went undefeated in singles. Yes, Hopman Cup is an exhibition, but if you were worried how these two 37-year-olds would look in the new year, you can probably relax. They look as fit as ever.

9. Lesia Tsurenko (Brisbane runner-up)

As I wrote last week, 30 is the new 20 in tennis, and this 29-year-old Ukrainian looks poised to keep the trend going. In Brisbane, Tsurenko made Naomi Osaka pay for a lackluster performance in the semifinals, then served for the title against Karolina Pliskova in the final. That’s when the bottom suddenly fell out, and she lost 13 points in a row. Otherwise, though, Tsurenko’s newfound cool effectiveness from the baseline will make her one of the proverbial “players no one wants to face” in Melbourne.

8. Tomas Berdych (Doha runner-up)

Yes, he’s back again—hopefully with a fully recovered back. After injuring it last spring, Berdych had to cut his 2018 season short. At 33, how much did he have left? Berdych, who contemplated retiring, wondered the same thing. But he answered his own question this week, with a runner-up finish in Doha. No seed in Melbourne is going to want to see this two-time Australian Open semifinalist in his section.

7. Bianca Andreescu (Auckland runner-up)

We ask again—what’s in the water in Canada? The nation of 37 million has wasted no time in showing off another potential new star for 2019. Andreescu, an 18-year-old from Ontario via Romania, came to Auckland ranked No. 152, qualified for the main draw, and just kept winning. She doesn’t have crazy speed or power, but she can compete: You don’t beat Caroline Wozniacki and Venus Williams, and come one game from the title against Julia Goerges in the final, if you can’t.

6. Daniil Medvedev (Brisbane runner-up)

The 22-year-old Russian has always had a lanky, quirky talent that surprised and frustrated opponents. The question seemed to be whether he had a reliable first-strike weapon that could blow them away. This week in Brisbane he found one: His leaping put-away forehand; at 6’6’, Medvedev gets some serious leverage on the shot. In a changing-of-the-guard type run, Medvedev beat Andy Murray, Milos Raonic, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, before losing to Kei Nishikori in three sets in the final.

5. Kei Nishikori (Brisbane champion)

It may not have been the most awe-inspiring title run of his career—he didn’t beat anyone in the Top 15 in Brisbane—but it still must have come as a relief. Nishikori had lost his last nine finals, dating all the way back to the now-defunct Memphis Open of 2016.

MATCH POINT: Kei Nishikori d. Daniil Medvedev in Brisbane final

4. Julia Goerges and Kevin Anderson (Auckland and Pune champions)

Sticking with the age-over-youth theme, the 30-year-old Goerges and 32-year-old Anderson each won a title this week, in Pune and Auckland, respectively. And they both did it in 11th-hour fashion: Anderson trailed Ivo Karlovic 5-2 in a third-set tiebreaker before reeling off five straight points for the title, while Goerges trailed Andreescu by a set and 5-4 before coming back to win. Over the last two years, Anderson and Goerges have proven to be surprising late-bloomers, cracking the Top 10 and going deeper than they ever had before at majors. They should both be second-week forces in Melbourne.

3. Karolina Pliskova and Rennae Stubbs (Brisbane champion)

Could this relatively new coach-player duo become the Halep and Cahill of 2019? Stubbs helped Pliskova negotiate her way to the Brisbane title this week, a run that included back-from-the-brink wins over Yulia Putintseva in the first round and Tsurenko in the final. Much of the time, Pliskova tried to go without calling Stubbs on court; in the second set of the final, though, with desperation setting in, Pliskova asked for Stubbs, and Stubbs delivered a fiery pep talk. When it worked, and Pliskova finally broke to level the second set, Stubbs looked as surprised as anyone else in the arena.

2. Roberto Bautista Agut (Doha champion)

There’s that magic age again—30. Bautista Agut hit it last April, and this past week he had perhaps the best tournament-long run of his career. In Doha, he beat Stan Wawrinka, Novak Djokovic, and Tomas Berdych in succession for his seventh career title. With veterans like Anderson and John Isner still climbing the rankings well into their 30s, there’s no reason Bautista Agut can’t do the same in 2019.

1. Aryna Sabalenka (Shenzhen champion)

It wasn’t the tournament, in Shenzhen, that she won. It wasn’t the players she beat along the way, none of whom were in the Top 20. Instead, what prompts me to put Sabalenka at the top of this list was the way she we went about winning. It has to do with one word, a word that’s key to the psyche of every successful tennis player: “should.”

Sabalenka doesn’t act as if she might win. She doesn’t act as if she’s hoping or trying to win. She already, at age 20, acts as if she should win. That alone is going to help her win a lot more in the future—maybe the very near future.

HIGHLIGHTS: Aryna Sabalenka defeats Alison Riske in the Shenzhen final