Articles by Steve Tignor

Washington: Raonic d. Hewitt

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 20:57:00 -0400

By reputation and body language, you'd think that Lleyton Hewitt, the little scrapper from Down Under, would never get tight. But his matches have always told a different story, and the one he played against Milos Raonic on Thursday night in Washington, D.C., did as well. It came down to two tiebreakers, and Hewitt gave them both away.

In the first, Rusty handed over an early mini-break by poking a backhand into the net, followed that by shanking a forehand into the stands, and served himself out of it completely by double faulting to go down 5-1. The second tiebreaker was even worse. This time Hewitt gave up the first mini-break by hitting a forehand into the net, then followed that quickly with another forehand in the net, a backhand in the net, and a forehand that landed 20 feet long. Raonic had his 7-6 (1), 7-6 (3) win, the first of his career over Hewitt.

Aside from watching the Aussie implode in the tiebreakers, Raonic won this match, as he does every match he wins, with his serve. He finished with 27 aces; that’s a remarkable number for two sets, but it actually seems a little disappointing considering the start he had. After two service games, Raonic had made 10 serves; eight of them were aces.

But this was also a match that showed Raonic’s gradual improvement in other areas. Two years ago, Hewitt beat him at the Australian Open with low slices that stayed out of the big man’s strike zone. This time Raonic was more consistent from the ground, and he was mobile enough to get around Hewitt’s crosscourt slices into his backhand corner and take them as forehands. Raonic was also adept at short-hopping Hewitt’s deep returns, so adept that the Aussie bared his teeth in frustration and shook his head in disbelief a few times. While Raonic earned only a single break point, he wiped away four of Hewitt’s. On one of them, Rusty had a look at a forehand pass, but he tightened up again and left it in the middle of the net. As Raonic said in his post-match interview, he was happy, after a month away, “to get through and give myself a chance to play better in the next round.” He’ll get his chance in the quarterfinals on Friday against Stevie Johnson, who beat No. 9 seed Ivo Karlovic in a third-set tiebreaker.

First Ball In, 7/31: Big Man on Little Court

Thu, 31 Jul 2014 09:32:00 -0400

It used to be that John Isner only seemed unhappy when he was overseas. Get him in the USA, and he was a fish back in water. Now it may not be enough for the U.S. No. 1 to play in his home country. Yesterday, after his loss to fellow American Steve Johnson in D.C., Isner said he wasn’t pleased being exiled to the second show court.

“I don’t like playing out there,” Isner told reporters afterward. “I just think I deserved to play on [center] court. Simple as that. I like my chances on center court, but he beat me fair and square.”

I suppose you can credit Isner for honesty, and he is the country’s top-ranked male player. But he has also never won this tournament, and he was only the No. 5 seed this year. According to AP, the Citi Open, in part to please international TV broadcasters, put three higher seeds, Tomas Berdych, Milos Raonic, and Kei Nishikori, in the three prime stadium court slots. Officials gave Isner and Johnson the option of taking the 10 P.M. spot there, or moving to an earlier time on another court; they opted for the latter. Tennis tournaments, even those in the U.S., are always run as international events; they get their money from all over the world.

The main problem with Isner complaining is that it was clearly something that he let bother him. Home soil, foreign soil, big court, small court, as a tennis player you have to know that the conditions aren’t always going to be exactly as you'd like them to be.

*****

Injury Time

Injuries seem to come in bunches in tennis, don’t they? After a pleasantly healthy Wimbledon, the U.S. summer hard-court season has been hit with two major withdrawals in the last two days. Rafael Nadal announced on Wednesday that he won’t defend his titles in Canada and Cincinnati after hurting his right wrist in practice this week. On Thursday, Li Na followed up by pulling out of those two events, as well as the U.S. Open, to rest a bad knee.

For Rafa, that means surrendering 2,000 points and falling farther behind Novak Djokovic at No. 2; it could also mean falling behind Roger Federer at No. 3 at some point. Nadal continues to practice forehands, with his left wrist, and still hopes to play the Open itself. On the bright(er) side, you can still say, as you could with his back injury earlier this year, at least it’s not his knees.

For Li Na, a season that began with so much promise has now completely unravelled. She started it at a career-high ranking of No. 2, she won the Australian Open, and she reached her first final in Miami. But that would also be her last final, as she lost early at the French Open and Wimbledon, and split with the coach who had helped spur her rise over the last three years, Carlos Rodriguez. Now she won’t play the final major of the year at all. Li turned 32 this year and has talked intermittently about retirement. Each climb back up the mountain will get harder from here.

*****

Happier Return

Speaking of 32-year-olds climbing back up mountains, Serena Williams played her first match yesterday since she couldn’t put a serve in the court at Wimbledon. She says she feels better, and she looks it. Playing without her coach, Patrick Mouratoglou, in the stands, she knocked back a pretty stiff first-set challenge from big-serving Karolina Pliskova, and then ran away with the second set. Serena has gotten off the mat countless times since she won her first U.S. Open 15 years ago. Is she ready to do it again? Who would count her out?

*****

'Merica, in Hiding

On Monday, Madison Keys played in D.C.; Tuesday it was Sloane Stephens; Wednesday it was Taylor Townsend. All three are promising young U.S. woman, but none of them were broadcast on any TV channel or Internet stream. The Tennis Channel, a U.S.-based network, was at the event all three days, but didn’t show a point of any of their matches. I know there are contractual reasons for this, but there was also a bizarre, these-players-aren't-really-here quality to the situation. The only silver lining, I guess, is that all three women lost.

*****

OOP Analysis

See Thursday’s Order of Play in D.C. here, Stanford here, and Kitzbuhel here.

The day began with a surprise that, in a way, was really just more of the same. In Kitzbuhel, David Goffin beat top seed Philipp Kohlschreiber 6-3, 7-5. I won’t say Goffin “upset” him, because, counting Challengers, the Belgian has now won 34 sets in a row.

Svetlana Kuznetsova vs. Kirsten Flipkens: A lot of top names have departed D.C., which makes this one more meaningful. Despite the time that these two late-20-somethings have spent on tour, they’ve never played.

Lleyton Hewitt vs. Milos Raonic: Rusty has had success against Raonic in the past by keeping the ball low and making him bend. Can the aged Aussie cut him off at the knees again?

Tomas Berdych vs. Vasek Pospisil: Czech in name versus Czech in blood. Pospisil leads their head to head 1-0.

Garbine Muguruza vs. Daniela Hantuchova: Is 30 really the new 20? We’ll know more when the Slovak veteran takes on the Spanish newbie.

Victoria Azarenka vs. Venus Williams: The match of the day is the last of the day, as these two Slam champs and former No. 1s face off in the evening session in Stanford. Believe it or not, Venus has won all three matches, and all six sets, they’ve played.

First Ball In, 7/30: Tale of Two Seasons

Wed, 30 Jul 2014 09:23:00 -0400

It was more of the same on Monday from two women on opposite coasts. In the east, in D.C., Sloane Stephens lost 6-4, 4-6, 6-0 to Christina McHale in her first match since signing on with new coach Thomas Hogstedt. The opening-rounder wasn’t broadcast or streamed anywhere, so I didn’t see what happened in that mysterious blowout third set, but Stephens is ranked outside the Top 20 now, and has yet to reach the semifinals in any tournament in 2014. And for the second straight year, Sloane has made more news in a magazine—this time in an unfortunately titled Elle feature—than she has on court.

Can Stephens learn anything from Ana Ivanovic, the woman on the west coast who kept doing what she’s been doing yesterday? What she’s been doing in 2014 is winning at a surprising rate. With her opening-round victory over Sabine Lisicki, Ivanovic won her 40th match of the season, making her the winningest woman on tour this year. She also did it from a 1-4 deficit in the first set. Ivanovic says she’s happy with her new coach, Dejan Petrovic, a Serb from Australia. Ana has always liked Oz, so maybe she’s finally found her perfect fit: a guy who can speak Serbian but do it in the easygoing tones of an Aussie.

We’ll see—perfect fits don’t tend to stay perfect for long with Ana, but she’s doing something right at the moment. The question for Ivanovic now is whether she can turn herself from a player who has had a good run for a few months, back into the type of player she once was—i.e., one who has a good run all year. Yesterday we saw a prime example of one of the former, Dominika Cibulkova. The Aussie Open runner-up cracked the Top 10 for the first time in March, but has fallen back to No. 12, and hasn’t reached a quarterfinal since April. On Tuesday she suffered another early loss, to an admittedly solid player, Garbine Muguruza. The tour is a grind, the season is long, and most players can’t sustain momentum for more than a few months at a time. Ivanovic may get a chance to show us how much momentum she still has a in a couple days, when she might play the woman she beat in Oz, Serena Williams.

*****

OOP Analysis

See Wednesday’s Order of Play in D.C. here, Stanford here, and Kitzbuhel here.

Naomi Osaka vs. Andrea Petkovic: The 16-year-old Osaka, who beat Sam Stosur on Monday, goes for upset No. 2

Serena Williams vs. Karolina Pliskova: Serena makes her first appearance since...those double faults.

Kei Nishikori vs. Sam Querrey: Here’s an opportunity for the American to get a decent win; Querrey is 3-1 vs. Nishikori lifetime.

Jack Sock vs. Milos Raonic: In theory, this should come down to a point or two, but Raonic has won all five sets they've played in 2014.

John Isner vs. Steve Johnson: The two former college standouts have never played.

Dudi Sela vs. Richard Gasquet: A war of the one-handers.

Kristina Mladenovic vs. Taylor Townsend: Two upset queens of Paris face off. But for the third straight day, a promising U.S. woman won’t be on U.S. TV, or any TV at all. Monday it was Madison Keys who was blocked out, Tuesday it was Sloane Stephens, today it’s Townsend. It hasn’t been good luck for the States so far.

Bojana Jovanovski vs. Sorana Cirstea: Jovanovski seems to have brought her good form from Baku to the States.

Philipp Kohlschreiber vs. David Goffin: Kohlschreiber is the top seed, but Goffin is 1-0 in their head to head, and he’s been on a Challenger tear this summer, winning his last 32 sets.

Dominic Thiem vs. Jiri Vesely: Thiem leads 1-0 in the head-to-head between these two ATP up-and-comers.

For Further Reading

—Andy Roddick went on a Fox Sports podcast rant about not being able to play the U.S. Open with Mardy Fish this year, because he hasn’t made himself available for drug testing for the required three months. It would have been fun to see those two old friends again, and nobody believes Roddick would have doped to get ready for it. But if there’s one section of the rules that the sport shouldn’t wave off, even for a former champion, it’s the anti-doping policy.

—Question for tennis players: Would it be safer to change the post-match handshake to a fist-bump? According to a recent study at a university in Wales, a knuckle-bump spreads fewer germs and is 20 times more hygienic than an old-fashioned clasp of the palms. Doubles players might want to consider going away from the high-five as well; the fist-bump is 10 times more hygienic.

One thing I can’t see happening: Players fist-bumping with chair umpires when they walk off the court.

Singles Hitters

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 17:34:00 -0400

From Fedal to Djokerer to Muzzovic, we now know that every men’s tennis rivalry can be boiled down to a single, semi-comical co-name. As far as I know, though, the trend hasn’t carried over to men’s doubles teams. The only example I can think of is Quisner, the late, not-so-great mash-up of John Isner and Sam Querrey. Is it time for a new one? Jack Sock and Vasek Pospisil may be ready for the one-name treatment. In the past month, the 21-year-old American and 24-year-old Canadian have beaten the Bryan brothers in the Wimbledon final, followed it up with a title in Atlanta, and moved to No. 7 in the ATP’s doubles race to London in 2014. That’s not too shabby for a team that had never played together before. Can we start calling them...Popsockil?

No, it doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, but Sock and Pospisil, who are 10-0 together, plan to keep going nonetheless. After a singles-only week in D.C., they’re scheduled for Toronto, Cincinnati, and the U.S. Open. For tennis fans, and especially doubles fans, that may be the best part of their story. The game could use a fresh new duo that sticks together for a while.

Many of us have talked for years about what it would take to get fans to care more about doubles. Show it more often on TV; increase the prize money; get the stars to play; schedule it on the biggest courts; put the players in uniforms. But I think Sock and Pospisil, with their back-to-back titles, have accidentally found another, simpler key to making doubles more compelling over the long run. It doesn't necessarily have to have the top names; what it needs, and rarely gets, are young singles players who succeed and stay together. I know that, after their infectiously entertaining performance at Wimbledon, I was interested in what Sock and Pospisil would do at their next event. There was a sense that they were an entity.

The men’s doubles rankings have featured plenty of full-time teams in recent years. The Bryans, Nestor-Zimonjic, Paes-Stepanek, Peya-Soares, Granollers-M. Lopez are all in or around the Top 10. But Sock and Pospisil are different in a few ways. They're new, and their much younger—every player ranked above them at the moment is 30 or over; Nestor and Paes are 41. More important, Sock and Pospisil aren’t doubles specialists. If nothing else, the fact that in their first tournament together, they could beat the Bryans, Peya-Soares, Paes-Stepanek, and Bopanna-Qureshi, is proof that youth alone is more than a match for experience in doubles. That enthusiasm and energy is also something audiences respond to.

“We had a lot of fun,” Sock said when he was asked how he and Pospisil had won Wimbledon. “People could see that. I think that’s part of why we did well. We really enjoyed being out there, enjoyed the moment.”

Or, as Pospisil put it when he was asked what their game plan had been against the Bryans:

“Close your eyes; hope you play the best tennis of your life.”

The key, if they’re going to keep playing that kind of tennis together, and keep making crowds appreciate their energy, may be for Sock and Pospisil not to become doubles specialists. If their singles careers are healthy, their doubles profile will stay much higher. But that’s also the tough part. Successful singles players don’t need to invest as much in doubles; the best don’t need to play it at all. But maybe for Sock and Pospisil, the benefits can work in both directions. Each said at Wimbledon that they believed the confidence they got from doubles would translate to singles.

“Any match you win,” Sock said, “especially in Grand Slams, playing in the second week, can only help your confidence in all aspects of tennis.”

Sock played those doubles matches at Wimbledon with a conspicuously more relaxed and upbeat demeanor than what we’ve seen from him in the past. Not too surprisingly, he has reached the semis in singles at both tournaments he’s played since, and raised his singles ranking to No. 60. For Pospisil, the doubles wins have been a relief after a year of injury and frustration.

“These last two weeks have been amazing, to be honest,” he said, “because the whole year was a struggle.”

The last time I can remember a team of singles players creating doubles excitement was at Indian Wells a few years ago, when Alexandr Dolgopolov and Xavier Malisse ran through a strong draw. By the following season, they had gone their separate ways. There’s a good chance that will happen to Sock and Pospisil, and that by 2015 they’ll be another forgotten one-off team—that might even be what they hope to become. But it will be interesting to see how much fun two talented young singles players can have on the doubles court together, and whether they can find a way to succeed at both.

First Ball In, 7/29: New Foe

Tue, 29 Jul 2014 10:09:00 -0400

Suddenly, tennis is getting younger by the week. We began July with 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios’s Wimbledon run, and spent the European clay swing that followed learning about Alexander Zverev and Borna Coric, both 17. Now, back in the States, we’re going younger still. Yesterday in Stanford, Naomi Osaka, a 16-year-old from Japan currently ranked No. 406, upset Sam Stosur. Later, in Washington, D.C., 17-year-old Jared Donaldson of Rhode Island won a set, while another 16-year-old, Francis Tiafoe, made a more-than-respectable showing in his (nationally televised) professional debut. Tiafoe, who trains in nearby College Park, Md, won eight games from Evgeny Donskoy. That’s not bad, considering that Tiafoe is ranked 1024 places behind him.

How did the kid look? I’ll start by saying that he could continue a noble tradition of young men learning the game while their fathers labored at local tennis centers. Pancho Segura’s and Ilie Nastase’s dads were both custodians at fancy clubs, the former’s in Ecuador, the latter’s in Romania. Both of the sons, who were surrounded by tennis from a young age—racquets, balls, nets, and equipment were all over the house—went on to develop unique games. Segura gave the world its first and greatest two-handed forehand. With Nastase, it seemed as if he hadn’t learned the sport so much as internalized it.

Tiafoe’s father, Francis, Sr., a native of Sierra Leone, was part of the construction crew that built the club where his son plays, College Park’s Junior Tennis Champions Center, and later became a maintenance man there. And Tiafoe, as anyone could see last night, also has a unique game. The question going forward, as it is with all prodigies, is whether he has the technique to translate that talent. Does he, in other words, have the right game?

I wouldn’t say it’s in place just yet. The first thing you notice is that Tiafoe’s serve seems to be robbing him of power. His left hand flaps back over his body, going in the opposite direction of the rest of his body, and he gets little leg or shoulder into the shot. That he can still hit a serve 127 m.p.h. may be the ultimate testament to his athleticism.

As for his forehand, Tiafoe and his coaches have worked to reconstruct the stroke, but it’s still whippy and unorthodox; at times he hits it while standing parallel to the baseline. Again, it didn’t stop him from drilling one 104 m.p.h. last night, but he also missed quite a few while running to his right—you would think that would be a shot he would own. On his forehand return, Tiafoe goes to the chip too often, but that should change with experience. He may have learned yesterday that it’s not going to fly in the pros.

Perhaps the best thing about Tiafoe is that, despite his speed and power, he isn’t a bomber or a grinder. He can do a lot of things with the ball—slices, drops, short angles—and create openings on court quickly from either side. Emotionally, he already exhibits a showman’s knack for juicing a home crowd, but he has also had problems with composure. In his loss at junior Wimbledon, I watched Tiafoe blast a ball into the sky and earn a point penalty. Obviously, it wasn’t his first offense that day.

How do cut out the point penalties but keep the positive emotion? How do you develop technique that will make him consistent while still letting him do what comes naturally? How do you avoid the common flaw of U.S. men of this generation, which is an over-reliance on the bomb serve and power forehand? Tiafoe and his coaches have time to figure all of this out. But, considering that Zverev and Coric are already in the Top 200 at age 17, and Kyrgios has already beaten Nadal, they don’t have forever.

*****

OOP Analysis

What followed Tiafoe? Apparently a loss by Madison Keys to Japan’s Kurumi Nara, but U.S. fans will never know how their countrywoman went out. It wasn’t televised or streamed, despite the fact that the Tennis Channel broadcast three men’s matches from the same court that day. WTA International events like D.C. are only required to stream matches from the quarterfinals on (thanks to @matthillsports for this information, of which I was not aware). In this case, it had the effect of making the women’s event look like it was being deliberately hidden from us. What would it cost for there to be more parity when it comes to televising and streaming ATP and WTA tournaments?

And what would it cost for there to be more parity on center courts at these events? Today, four of five matches on D.C.’s main stadium are men’s, while Sloane Stephens vs. Christina McHale languishes on the third show court.

See the Order of Play for D.C. here, Stanford here, and Kitzbuhel here.

Jack Sock vs. Michael Berrer: With two straight semifinal appearances since his Wimbledon doubles win, Sock, at No. 60, is now the second-highest-ranked American.

Sloane Stephens vs. Christina McHale: It may not be seen by many, but Sloane will play her first match since hiring a new coach against a fellow American.

Dominika Cibulkova vs. Garbine Muguruza: Last year’s Stanford champ vs. this year’s breakthrough player.

Ana Ivanovic vs. Sabine Lisicki: They’ve split two matches this year; like Stephens, Ivanovic will also be playing her first match since splitting with her coach.

Venus Williams vs. Paula Kania: The last time we saw Venus she was nearly beating the Wimbledon champ. If she wins this one, she’ll play Azarenka.

Alexander Zverev vs. Diego Schwartzman: One more look at the German teenager on clay.

First Ball In, 7/28: The Week in Preview

Sun, 27 Jul 2014 23:51:00 -0400

Summer is flying by, but the tennis tours are taking their sweet time getting the season’s U.S. swing started in earnest. This week, after the men tested the waters, and the heat, in Atlanta, they jump in at a 500 event in Washington, D.C.; the women join them with an unusually well-stocked draw across the country in Stanford, Calif.

But Europe isn’t dead quite yet. The men play the last clay-court event of their season, in Kitzbuhel, Austria. By the end of this week, everyone on both tours will have shipped out for Canada. Here’s a look ahead at the last week of tune-ups for the U.S. Open tune-ups.

*****

Citi Open (ATP)

Washington, D.C.
$1,399,700; 500 ranking points
Hard courts
Draw is here

In D.C., the field expands, the appearance fees appear, the ranking points increase, and the purse gets richer. Not too surprisingly, the Top 10 also starts to represent. The No. 1 seed is Tomas Berdych, who was last seen wandering madly in the dark at Wimbledon. I’m curious to see how the soon-to-be-29-year-old Berdych fares the rest of this season. He just got waxed by two players ranked below him, Ernests Gulbis and Marin Cilic, at the French Open and Wimbledon. We know he can tweet, but has the Birdman seen better days on court? He starts in D.C. with either Robby Ginepri or Alejandro Falla.

Berdych is joined on the other side of the draw by another Top Tenner, Milos Raonic, who’s making his first appearance since reaching his first Grand Slam semifinal, at Wimbledon. Raonic could face a challenge from Jack Sock in his opening match, though Milos has won all five sets they’ve played in 2014. Down the road, Raonic could also meet John Isner in the quarterfinals. The American was runner-up here last year, and champ in Atlanta this past weekend, and his road has been cleared by Grigor Dimitrov’s withdrawal on Sunday. It will be interesting over the next month to see if Isner can build momentum toward New York without burning himself out. He’s never managed to make his success during this part of the year carry over at the Open.

Also here: No. 4 seed Kei Nishikori, who opens against either Michael Russell or Sam Querrey.

New faces: Francis Tiafoe, a 16-year-old from the D.C. area ranked No. 1135, has been given a wild card and will face Evgeny Donskoy in a night match on Monday. See what you think of Tiafoe; I’m not sure he can get the most out of his game with the technique he uses now. Jared Donaldson, a 17-year-old Rhode Island native ranked No. 326, qualified and will play Rajeev Ram in the first round.

Lucky loser: Sam Groth, who takes Dimitrov’s place.

*****

Bank of the West Classic (WTA)

Stanford, Calif.
$710,000; Premier
Hard courts
Draw is here

With the demise of women’s tournaments in Los Angeles and San Diego, Stanford is the last California summer event standing. The draw, stronger than in most years past, reflects that. There aren’t a lot of soft spots in it.

Serena Williams is at the top of that draw, and all eyes will be on her as she takes her first competitive swings since the famously half-hearted serves she attempted in her mysterious doubles debacle with her sister at Wimbledon. Beyond that, Serena is coming off two stunningly bad losses at the last two majors. Is there more shock ahead for the soon-to-be-33-year-old? Or does she right the ship once again in her home state?

Serena will start against either Kimiko Date-Krumm or Karolina Pliskova. In the next round, she could face the woman who put her out of the Australian Open, Ana Ivanovic. The Serb comes in having recently split with the coach who helped moved her back toward Top 10 over the last year. And she doesn’t have an easy opener, against Sabine Lisicki, who took her out at Wimbledon.

Also here:

—Victoria Azarenka: The world No. 10 will try to make up for lost injury time; she could play Venus Williams in the second round, and Serena in the semis.

—Agnieszka Radwanska: The second seed and last year’s Stanford runner-up will start against either Caroline Garcia or Varvara Lepchenko

First-round matches to watch:

Ana Ivanovic vs. Sabine Lisicki: They’re 1-1 this year.

Andrea Petkovic vs. Ajla Tomljanovic: AT beat AP in their only career meeting, last year in Miami.

Dominika Cibulkova vs. Garbine Muguruza: Domi won this tournament in 2013.

*****

Bet-at-Home Cup (ATP)

Kitzbühel, Austria
$652,326; 250 ranking points
Clay
Draw is here

The ATP’s last, orphan clay event is topped by the man who thrives in this part of the world, Philipp Kohlschreiber—call him the Isner of Germany/Austria. With him is No. 2 seed Marcel Granollers, No. 3 Lukas Rosol, No. 4 Andreas Seppi, potential rookie of the year Dominic Thiem, Gstaad runner-up Juan Monaco, and 17-year-old wild card Alexander Zverev. By now, the German teenager should have earned enough from his summer job to buy his first Porsche.

*****

Citi Open (WTA)

Washington, D.C.
$250,000; International
Hard court
Draw is here

Like last week’s ATP tournament in Atlanta, this week’s WTA event in D.C. has something of an American cast. Nine of its 32 players are Statesiders, though the top three seeds are not. Those three—Lucie Safarova, Ekaterina Makarova, and Alize Cornet—all made significant noise at Wimbledon, and will look to do it again here.

Heading the list of Americans are two young ones who have been traveling in opposite directions of late, Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys. Sloane, after a first-round loss at Wimbledon, is down to No. 22, while Keys, after a strong grass season, is up to No. 27. Keys has something of a tough first round, against No. 38 Kurumi Nara, while Stephens. who will make her debut with new coach Thomas Hogstedt, faces fellow Yank Christina McHale.

Also here: U.S. teens Taylor Townsend and Tornado Alicia Black, both of whom qualified.

Playing Ball: Mixing It Up

Sat, 26 Jul 2014 21:55:00 -0400

Mixed doubles, as any historian of the sport can tell you, was why lawn tennis was invented in the 1870s. New country retreats were being built across England at the time, and the eligible young ladies and gentlemen who retreated to them needed something to do together once they were there. Croquet didn’t offer enough exercise; cricket offered too much. A genteel round of mixed doubles, safely played in long white pants and equally long, sweat-hiding white dresses, hit the demure sweet spot of Victorian seduction.

Funny how much something can change when you lift it out of 19th century England and put it back down in Brooklyn in the humid summer of 2014.

A few weeks ago, my club staged its annual mixed-doubles tournament. When I was there on a warm weekend afternoon, two of its matches were being contested on the courts next to mine. My singles match was a tough one, but by the time my opponent and I were finished, I felt like we were the ones who were being demure. The mixed, from the competition on the courts to the vocal crowd watching on the concrete verandah above, was where the viciousness was.

Gone from this scene, of course, were the long white pants and dresses of old; our club’s only clothing requirement is that men wear shirts, of any color, when there are women around. On this day, the tournament fashion consisted of backwards baseball hats, red bicycle shorts, yellow tank tops, sleeveless T-shirts, sunglasses, a big black knee brace on one of the men, and another on one of the women.

More notable than the sight of these mixed-doubles players were the sounds they made as they played. There was a borderline-tantrum intensity to the tennis, which went well with the stinging heat, as well the high-pitched, whooshing shriek that the summer’s first cicadas were making in the trees that hang over the courts. Tempers were short all over.

“Oh, that was inside the line, inside the line!” one of the men yelled at the team across the net, who had just called one of his shots wide. All heads at the club turned to watch as he stalked forward and jabbed his racquet in the direction where his shot landed. For a second, it looked as if he were going to cross over to the other side of the court. “Come on, I can see the mark from here!” he hollered. By then, all four players, as well as a few members of the audience, were barking at once.

The other team, naturally, was having none of it. The man who made the call walked quickly over to where he thought the ball landed, put the top of his racquet on a mark outside the line, and stared back across the net.

“This is where it landed,” he said.

He sounded sure of himself, but his confidence didn’t do anything to stop the uproar. By this time, my opponent and I were ready to get back to our own match. When we crossed paths at the net, I said, laughing, “That’s where the real competition is.” And as over-the-top as the mixed may have looked, I respected it. Part of me thought: You’re not really playing tennis until you’re red in the face from arguing someone’s call.

A few minutes later, I hit an angled volley that bounced through the next court, and slowly came to rest near the court where the players had been fighting. As it slowly rolled to a halt a few feet short of the sideline, one player, who didn’t see the ball, was in the process of hitting a perfect lob over the opposing net player. When his opponents saw my ball roll up, they stopped and yelled, “Let!”

A second later, as I came up to get the ball, I said “sorry” to the player who had hit the perfect lob.

He smiled. “Can you believe they called a let on that?”

“It’s serious over here,” I said.

For the next half hour, my match was interrupted at regular intervals by various detonations. There were shrieks of pain. There were fist-pumps and loud screams of “Come on!” from both the men and the women. A racquet was smashed, seemingly into powder. One woman was drilled in the leg with an overhead by a man; she spent the next few games limping—in competitive mixed doubles, it's understood that the men can aim at the women, but that doesn't mean it looks especially friendly when they do.

The format also has a knack for bringing out the underlying tension in any relationship. A mother and son team did their best to avoid an argument; they may have succeeded because he spent much of his time saying, “Sorry, mom” after his mistakes. Another couple, though, didn’t bother trying to hide their frustration at their partner’s screw-ups; instead of saying something reassuring, they shook their heads and pleaded, “Why do you always try that?” This wasn’t mixed doubles as demure seduction; it was mixed doubles as divorce proceeding.

When my match was over, I took my place with the crowd on the verandah. There were hot dogs and hamburgers and beer. One match went to a deciding tiebreaker, and each point in the breaker was greeted with loud roars. These weren’t roars of appreciation, exactly. “How could he miss that shot? It was so easy,” was a common refrain. A woman asked me if things were this intense on Centre Court at Wimbledon.

The breaker ended with a whimper rather than a bang. At 6-5, a serve was served, and a return was hit into the net. That was it. There was the sound of letdown in the audience as the four players trooped forward and sheepishly shook hands. The fever of battle had broken, and everyone suddenly seemed to wonder what all the anger was about.

Or had they? I turned and walked out of the club, into a crowded Brooklyn street. As I reached the corner, I heard a screech of wheels. Heads turned as a red car came blazing down the street; it looked angry as it careened past. I wasn't sure, but I could have sworn I saw the man who missed the last shot behind the wheel.

First Ball In, 7/25: The Isner Perplex

Fri, 25 Jul 2014 16:38:00 -0400

Watching John Isner serve can create conflicting feelings in fellow tennis players, depending on which side of the court we imagine ourselves to be on. If you imagine yourself trying to return it, you might wonder, as so many of Isner’s opponent’s surely have, whether the rules of tennis are as fair as they might be. Should we really get two serves? Isner erases all of your hard work with one swing of his racquet. Even against players much more accomplished than he is, that shot alone allows him to remain in control at all times.

But if you imagine yourself serving, Isner shows you how easy the shot, which in reality is the game’s most complicated and difficult, can look. By the time he reaches up to smack the ball at its apex—what, nine, 10 feet in the air?—he appears to be halfway to the net already. From up there, it looks as if he can reach over and place the ball on the other side of the net, wherever he wants it to go.

On Friday morning, while waiting for a court at my tennis club, I watched Isner beat Robbie Ginepri in a rerun on Tennis Channel. The big man saved a match point at 4-5 in the third with an ace, held serve in that game with a second-serve ace that left Ginepri doubled over in frustration, and held for the match at 6-5 with four more aces. On the last one, Ginepri, shell-shocked, could only wave at a simple slice serve from Isner down the T. Isner broke Ginepri’s serve just once, but he broke his spirit with his own serve.

When I went out to play a few minutes later, unknowingly inspired by Isner, I found myself serving with a more relaxed motion. It worked, for a set anyway, and also made me wonder if I shouldn’t keep video clips of great shots—Isner’s serve, Federer’s forehand, Li Na’s backhand—with me to look at on changeovers.

Either way, tennis fans will probably be seeing quite a bit of Isner over the next five or six weeks. I know he’s not the most popular player around here. May I suggest, if you want to improve your own game, watching him serve—and then closing your eyes until the next point begins.

*****

OOP Analysis

See Saturday's Order of Play for Umag here, Gstaad here, Atlanta here, and Baku here. It's semifinal day in all four places.

Marin Cilic vs. Tommy Robredo: A quality semi—Cilic leads their head to head 3-2

John Isner vs. Jack Sock: The U.S. No. 1 vs. the U.S. player who looks most poised for a breakthrough. Isner is 4-1 in their head to head, but Sock won their last match, in Newport, earlier this month.

Fernando Verdaso vs. Pablo Andujar: Verdasco pulled off an impressive double on Friday, beating Struff and Troicki in one day to make the semis. His secret? The man known to himself as FeVer said that after he lost the second set to Troicki, he went into the bathroom and let out 10 or 15 good long screams.

Elina Svitolina vs. Francesca Schiavone: One of the bigger age gaps you’ll see in tennis—Schiavone is 34, Svitolina 19. They’ve never played before.

*****

For Further Watching

It hasn’t been the best week for tennis journalists. We found out that one of the best and best-known among us, Neil Harman, had been plagiarizing his colleagues’ work in Wimbledon's yearbook, and that he has resigned from the International Tennis Writers’ Association, been suspended from his job at the Times, and even shut down his Twitter account. The reporting on the story, by Deadspin, Private Eye, The Changeover, and especially Ben Rothenberg in Slate, was essential, and the punishment was justified and inevitable. Sadly, though, for the many of us who like Neil, the game won’t be quite as fun if he’s not around it in the future.

With that in mind, I will offer the video below as a Friday pick me up. Delpo is hitting backhands again:

Have a good weekend.

First Ball In, 7/24: The Borna Ascendancy

Thu, 24 Jul 2014 19:05:00 -0400

Another week, another teenager makes his mark on the ATP tour. The trend started with 19-year-old Nick Kyrgios’s lights-out run to the Wimbledon quarterfinals; continued last week with 17-year-old Alexander Zverev’s march to the semis in Hamburg; and has now moved to Umag, where today Croatia’s Borna Coric, also 17, won his second match, in straight sets over Horacio Zeballos.

How does Coric compare to Kyrgios and Zverev? To start, he’s the shortest of the three (so far); Kyrgios is 6’5”, Zverev is 6’4”, Coric is 6’1”. The fact that this can make the latter appear to be on the small side is another indication of how much taller the men’s game has become in the last 10 years—Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal are both listed as 6’1”—and how much taller it may be about to become.

It also makes Coric appear to be the scrappiest of the youth brigade. He has a tendency to fly into brief, demonstrative rages, before pulling himself back together again—not the worst body language for a kid his age. More important is what his attitude does for his game. Where Kyrgios is loose and athletic, and Zverev is wiry and polished, Coric is persistent and resourceful.

Winning the first set over Zeballos today was all about finding a way. At 2-3, Coric he hit an ace to save a break point, and he used his serve to fight back from an early deficit to win a tiebreaker. Afterward, Coric, whose biggest win was a five-set upset of Jerzy Janowicz in Davis Cup earlier this year, said he didn’t play as well as he had in his last match. But he didn’t care, winning anyway he could was what mattered. I like that.

LIke Zverev last week, Coric will enter the Top 200 on Monday. If you’re looking for good omens, Umag is where Rafael Nadal reached his first ATP semifinal, at 17, in 2003.

*****

Viktor, Victorious

That’s Viktor Troicki, who also won his second match of the week, over Andrey Golubev today in Gstaad. Troicki, after Umag awarded its wild cards to its own homegrown players, was given one in Gstaad, and he has used it well so far. That fact might annoy a few of his fellow players, but to me Troicki, who served a one-year suspension for refusing to take a blood test last spring, has done his time and shouldn’t become persona non grata on tour. He told TENNIS.com this weekend that the ITF tried to destroy him, though I think in his case the time nearly did fit the crime—he got 12 months; I thought nine was the right number.

But even if Troicki’s bitterness isn’t justified, it may prove useful. He says he’s going to prove that he wasn’t destroyed by the suspension. So far this year, Marin Cilic and Barbora Zahlavova Strycova have come back stronger and more motivated after doping-related suspensions. It won’t be a surprise if Troicki does as well.

*****

Sorie, Lacking

Sorana Cirstea, top seed in Baku, lost 6-1, 6-1 to Stefanie Voegele on Thursday. That should be surprising, but what's more surprising is that Cirstea was the top seed in the first place. Since reaching the final in Toronto last August, she's 10-19, yet she's still ranked 29th.

*****

OOP Analysis

See Friday’s Order of Play for Umag here, Gstaad here, and Baku here.

Juan Monaco vs. Thomaz Bellucci: A Brazil vs. Argentina battle that makes it feel like 2011 all over again. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing.

Jan-Lennard Struff vs. Fernando Verdasco: A war of cool names that was held over from Thursday. Does Struff have the stuff? The winner will play later in the day, against Troicki.

Fabio Fognini vs. Borna Coric: We may find out a little about Coric’s powers of concentration in this one.

Tommy Robredo vs. Pablo Carreño Busta: One Spanish generation will try to hold off the next.

*****

For Further Reading

That was fast: A day after Sloane Stephens announced that she had split with Paul Annacone, we learned that she’s going to be working with Thomas Hogstedt. The veteran coach is most famous for standing over Maria Sharapova on changeovers and telling her that all of her opponents would choke—as well as, of course, helping Sharapova back to the top of the game with his hard-nosed, well-prepared ways. If Sloane has the patience for his discipline, this would seem to be a better fit for where she is in her career than Annacone, a polisher rather than a builder of champions, was.

The Rally: Back on the Bus

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 21:09:00 -0400

Fellow TENNIS.com editor Richard Pagliaro and I discuss the U.S. Open Series, which turns 10 years old this week.

*****

Richard,

It’s been a decade since the USTA, and its go-getter U.S. Open tournament director at the time, Arlen Kantarian, created the U.S. Open Series. But doesn’t it feel like it’s been around for much longer? Maybe that’s a sign of how quickly time passes in tennis, and how quickly eras begin and end. It was just a few years ago when the now-retired Andy Roddick and Kim Clijsters were winning the series and collecting its bonus money, but it feels like a different time entirely. (Just look at the ad above, from 2006.)

Kantarian is long gone from the USTA, but the U.S. Open Series lives on. The idea was to link the US Open and its lead-up tournaments and create a summer tennis season in the States—the events have their own sponsors, standings, and bonus pool, and they’re broadcast at roughly the same time each week on ESPN and Tennis Channel. Kantarian, a tennis outsider when he started, was a big believer in the power of the majors—he wanted the ATP’s Masters Series to be called the “Grand Slam Series” instead. Ten years later, how does his vision look? Has the Open Series been a success, Richard? I'll start by saying that, unfortunately for the blue bus, it embarked on its cross-country journey just as the men's game was flying off to Switzerland, Spain, and Serbia.

*****

Steve,

Arlen worked for both the NFL and Radio City, and I think his vision for the U.S. Open Series was shaped by both. It aimed to create mounting weekly interest, like the NFL playoffs, and peaking with its Super Bowl, while amping up the star power to sell the game's health benefits and pop-culture appeal.

The Open Series's successes have been streamlined TV coverage, increased prize money, and branding. I think its primary struggles are sustaining domestic tournaments (California has lost two traditional events) and enticing non-American stars to play with the bonus money.

When the series launched, domestic summer tournament coverage was cobbled together across several networks (CBS and USA Network still had U.S. Open rights then), so I like the fact that it gave summer tennis a permanent home (ESPN and Tennis Channel) at a predictable time each weekend. I remember Clijsters making history when she won the U.S. Open Series and later the U.S. Open, becoming the first female athlete to cash a $1 million prize check. This year, each U.S. Open singles champion will collect a $3 million check. Bundling the summer tournaments together also gives the game more marketing muscle.

But many of the top players prefer to take a mid-season break before returning for Rogers Cup and Cincinnati, rather than chase bonus money. Do you think that will change, and despite the fact Cincinnati has grown, what will the loss of San Diego and L.A. mean long-term?

*****

Richard,

In a way, the U.S. Open Series shows that tennis is an individual sport even when it comes to tournaments—they live and die on their own. Over the last 10 years, the summer events in the States have had wildly different fates: As you mentioned, long-running tournaments in Indianapolis, L.A., and San Diego are gone; Atlanta and Winston-Salem, even though they're in tennis-centric areas, have struggled; yet D.C., which nabbed a new title sponsor, and Cincinnati, which is now dual-gender, have thrived.

The Open Series also shows that the top players are beyond worrying about prize money. Kantarian thought that offering cash to the winner would create excitement and draw the best players from Europe. But the bonus pool has always seemed like overkill, and Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, and Murray have never been drawn by the prospect of winning it. What gets them over here are the mandatory ATP events in Canada and Cincy. In that sense, I think Kantarian underestimated the eventual power of the Masters Series. The ATP has had more success branding those events and getting the players to commit to them than he thought it would. On the other hand, sponsors like Mercedes Benz have continued to migrate away from the tours and toward the US Open itself. New York, rather than the road that leads to it, is still the place to be as far as they're concerned.

As for the mid-season slowdown after Wimbledon, I think it's good for fans and players to get a break.

What else do you think can be done to help the early events in the Open Series, Richard? Anything?

*****

Steve,

Tennis is a star-driven sport, and the stars aren't going to play those smaller events because peaking for the Open is the priority. It's exciting to see younger players emerge—I remember seeing a young James Blake beat Andre Agassi in the 2002 D.C. semis, for instance—but with U.S. men's tennis lacking depth, those runs become rare.

Some creative tournament directors have tried incorporating other activities into the tournament schedule to draw fans. I remember years ago when John Korff ran a pre-U.S. Open exhibition in Mahwah, N.J., he hosted concerts during the tournament (and have the players on stage with the bands), a beer garden, wine-tasting, chili cook-offs, beach tennis exos, and local sponsor booths with giveaways. From an attendance perspective, it helped because it gave casual fans added value and potentially appealed to a wider audience.

Cincinnati and Charleston (in the spring) have succeeded in making their tournaments community events, but both have title sponsors. A challenge for smaller summer tournaments is, how do you get fans to watch tennis during the busiest season to play tennis? If more courts were available, it would be cool to see some of the smaller events host USTA tournaments simultaneously—the U.S. Open once hosted the National Family Championships during the second week of Flushing Meadows. Newport is a real jewel of American tennis, but because of its surface and spot in the schedule, it hasn't fit in the Series. How do you see the U.S. Open Series evolving in the next five years, Steve?

*****

Richard,

That's a good question. To me, the U.S. Open Series and World Team Tennis were both honorable attempts to transplant ideas from other sports (the team concept, the playoff concept) to tennis, but in both cases the time and effort and money available hasn't been sufficient to change the way this sport operates.

If we want to see what has worked, we need to look at D.C., Canada, Cincy, and, on a smaller scale, Stanford. Each tournament has been around, mostly in one place, for a long time. Each has an audience that is going to show up no matter what. D.C., Stanford, Toronto, and Montreal serve highly populated areas, while Cincy is the biggest tournament in the heartland—people who can't make the U.S. Open will travel there to see Rog, Rafa, Serena, and company. D.C. has a solid title sponsor in Citigroup, which has allowed the tournament to start paying appearance fees again, something it had stopped doing five or six years ago. Cincy also has a title sponsor, but it benefits especially from being owned by the USTA. All of them benefit from being played late enough in the summer that the biggest names from Europe are ready to begin their summer U.S. campaigns.

And that's the problem for any other events—the calendar is full, and the prime early August weeks are already being maximized. The one thing I always wonder at this time of year is whether the Chicago area couldn't put together a summer event. If there's one metropolitan area that's crying out for tennis, it's that one. Oh, and maybe it's time to bring back the bus trip ads, no?

Any ideas from your side, Richard?

*****

Steve,

Sometimes, the tennis calendar is a crowded house; it's tough to redesign a room that's already overstuffed. The crammed schedule means revisions are more realistic to realize than grand visions. Here are a few things I'd like to see for U.S. Open Series:

*More combined events. Obviously cost, facilities, and sponsorship are issues (and questions of how beneficial it is for the ATP), but the most successful American tournaments are combined events. Tennis has that advantage over almost all other sports, but doesn't always realize it.

*Free qualies and practice sessions. The U.S. Open qualies have grown over the years, and I run into some of the same people who return when the Open itself begins. Open the door, invite new and lapsed fans to see the game up close, and some will be impressed enough to come back to these tournaments.

*Expand alliance between community tennis and pro events. The opportunity to win a wild card into the U.S. Open qualies makes the U.S. Open National Playoffs my favorite tennis promotional event. I'd like to see more tournaments do it (Delray Beach has done it for a while), and more tournaments should host sectional, junior, and senior events either right before or right after these pro tournaments.

*Return of tournaments to Chicago and L.A. They are both major tennis cities and have successfully hosted tournaments in the past. While some point to the fact L.A. doesn't even have an NFL franchise anymore as a sign of fan apathy, it's such a strong tennis community they deserve another shot. The USTA once billed the U.S. Open Series as "The Greatest Road Trip in Sports." They could make it a moveable feast and alternate an event between the two cities, as Rogers Cup does with Montreal and Toronto.

First Ball In, 7/23: Ranking File

Wed, 23 Jul 2014 19:22:00 -0400

It was a quiet Wednesday in the tennis world, at least on the courts. None of the top seeds at the three men’s events, in Atlanta (John Isner), Gstaad (Mikhail Youzhny), and Umag (Fabio Fognini), will play their opening matches until Thusday, and neither of the top two seeds at the women’s event in Baku (Sorana Cirstea and Elina Svitolina) were in action today. I guess that’s one way to maintain ticket buyers' interest in your tournament: Keep the big names from losing by keeping them off the court for as long as possible.

To me, the one developing story of interest is Jack Sock’s in Atlanta. He won his second straight-setter, over New Zealander Michael Venus, today, and might face Denis Istomin in the next round. I’m curious to see whether Sock’s Wimbledon doubles victory with Vasek Pospisil, which he said was the best two weeks of his life, has any residual effect on singles game, and his attitude in general. Sock showed more enthusiasm for the sport than I’ve ever seen from him at Wimbledon. Now: How long can those good vibes last, how much can they help, how much does confidence translate from doubles to singles? We’ll find out more from the American this week.

Ranking File

Without much new to ponder today, it may be a good moment to take a step back and see what has happened to the rankings after Wimbledon. This is something of an odd, and possibly transitional, moment on both tours. Here are a few things that come to mind looking down both Top 10 lists.

—Novak Djokovic is back at No. 1; Rafael Nadal at No. 2. This isn’t a surprise, considering how hot Djokovic was at the end of 2013, and how many points Nadal had to defend this spring. That goes double when you think about Rafa’s history at No. 1—he’s never held the spot for back-to-back seasons—and the history of the Nadal/Djokovic rivalry. You can usually bet that the one in second place will eventually be back in first. Still, with the number of points Nadal has to defend through the U.S. Open, it looks like Djokovic will have a decent run at No. 1 before it’s Rafa’s turn again.

—Roger Federer is No. 3; Stan Wawrinka is No. 4. “I’ll always feel like I’m behind Roger,” said Wawrinka soon after he had won the Aussie Open and passed Federer in the rankings. Talk about a self-fulfilling prophecy. With Federer just behind Djokovic and Nadal, the Big 3 is back together again.

—But what about the Big 4? The fourth, Andy Murray, is currently ranked No. 10. That’s partly due to the back surgery that kept him out at the end of 2013, and partly due to a title-less 2014 so far. Murray announced today that he’ll keep working with Amelie Mauresmo. His post-Lendl career will begin in earnest in a couple of weeks.

—Milos Raonic is No. 7; Grigor Dimitrov is No. 9. Two 23-year-olds have joined the adults. This is what revolution looks like on the ATP tour today.

—Simona Halep is No. 3. It didn't take long for this not to feel like a shock.

—Petra Kvitova is No. 4. Kvitova, who can beat anyone, also belongs closer to the top than she has been; the WTA could use her in the mix there.

—Maria Sharapova is No. 6. Like Murray, her ranking dropped after a late-season injury in 2013; unlike Murray, she has begun the climb back upward.

—Genie Bouchard is No. 7. The 20-year-old is behind Serena, Li Na, Halep, Kvitova, Radwanska, and Sharapova. I’m not sure I see her climbing much higher for a while.

—Victoria Azarenka is No. 10. Thinking she has another run at No. 1 in her.

*****

OOP Analysis

See Thursday’s Order of Play in Atlanta here, in Gstaad here, in Umag here, and in Baku here.

John Isner vs. Robbie Ginepri: A native Georgian takes on a former Georgia Bulldog. It doesn’t get any bigger in Atlanta.

Vasek Pospisil/Jack Sock vs. Benjamin Becker/Frank Moser: Can the Wimbledon champs be a consistent force in doubles?

Viktor Troicki vs. Andrey Golubev: Troicki will play the second match of his comeback.

Borna Coric vs. Horacio Zeballos: The 17-year-old Croatian goes for career win No. 2.

Fabio Fognini vs. Albert Montanes: Montanes knocked off another 17-year-old, Alexander Zverev, in his opener. Fognini? What can he do for his next atrocious act?

Donna Vekic vs. Kristina Mladenovic: They’ve both had some good wins in the last few months.

*****

For Further Reading

It was a day for off-court, rather than on-court news. The happenings ranged from:

Not surprising: Andy Murray and Amelie Mauresmo agreed to keep working together, while Sloane Stephens and Paul Annacone agreed not to keep working together. Even in their glory week, at Indian Wells this spring, their chatter felt forced. He specializes in the seasoned pro, and she isn’t exactly that yet.

Semi-surprising: Nicole Vaidisova, former Top Tenner and former wife of Radek Stepanek, is talking comeback at age 25, after four years away. Who knows, another ex of Stepanek's just won Wimbledon.

Surprising: Neil Harman, tennis correspondent for the Times of London, resigned from the International Tennis Writers’ Association after admitting to plagiarism in his work on the Wimbledon Annual, a tournament yearbook that he has written for a decade. I’ve always liked Neil as a person and a writer, and considered his pieces in the Times essential reading, so this comes as a shock. Just as shocking is that Wimbledon knew about it last year and continued to sell the book. Ben Rothenberg has a thorough examination here.

First Ball In, 7/22: The Week in Preview

Tue, 22 Jul 2014 12:03:00 -0400

You might call this week the ATP’s version of a slow dissolve. As it progresses, the last vestiges of European clay, in Umag and Gstaad, mix with the first sighting of a U.S. hard court, in Atlanta. By next Monday, both tours will start new scenes in the States. Here’s a look at what we might see in this last, transitional week, when thoughts of next month's U.S. Open begin to push aside memories of Wimbledon.

*****

BB&T Atlanta Open

Atlanta
$568,805; 250 ranking points
Hard courts
Draw is here

Some day, if the early events in the U.S. Open Series run out of title sponsors, at least one of them might want to rename itself the John Isner Invitational. This is the big Southern man’s time to make his money and earn his ranking points. He’s the top seed, and the only player in the Top 15 in the field. He also leads a highly American-centric draw; 11 of its 28 entrants are from the U.S.

Atlanta did have a slightly more international appeal before Richard Gasquet pulled out on Saturday, and his countryman Gael Monfils followed him home on Monday. This didn’t sit well, obviously, with tournament director Eddie Gonzalez, who said he wouldn’t be inviting the Frenchmen back. As it stands, Isner’s highest-ranked competition will come from second-seeded Kevin Anderson and fourth-seeded Vasek Pospisil.

Already gone: Hometown boy Donald Young, to Dudi Sela, 6-3, 6-0, in the first round.

Player of interest: Jack Sock. Will his Wimbledon doubles title do anything for his singles game, or attitude? He starts against Alejandro Gonzalez, and is in Isner’s half.

*****

Crédit Agricole Suisse Open Gstaad

Gstaad, Switzerland
$574,679; 250 ranking points
Clay
Draw is here

Gstaad officials must gaze across the ocean with some envy at the Atlanta event: I’m guessing they would love to have that kind of local-talent overload. The tournament did land two Swiss players—unfortunately, their names are Yann Marti and Henri Laaksonen, not Roger Federer and Stan Wawrinka. Federer, apparently, has no new equipment to try out, as he did here last year.

Mikhail Youzhny is the top seed, Marcel Granollers No. 2, Guillermo Garcia-Lopez No. 3, and Fernando Verdasco No. 4.

Returning: Viktor Troicki, from a suspension for refusing to take a blood test last year. Troicki was given a wild card into the event, and recorded a good win over Dominic Thiem in the first round.

*****

Vegeta Croatia Open

Umag, Croatia
$574,679; 250 ranking points
Clay
Draw is here

How has Croatia done in the attract-the-locals sweepstakes? With four players out of 28, it can’t match Atlanta’s American haul. But it has outdone the Swiss in terms of interest. Marin Cilic, the country’s biggest star, and Borna Coric, it’s biggest future star, are both here. The 17-year-old Coric, who won his first-round match, looks primed to follow Alexander Zverev's lead and make some teenage noise this week.

In non-Croatian news, top-seeded bad actor Fabio Fognini skates from thin ice onto red clay here. At the other side of the draw is the man who beat him in the Umag final last year, Tommy Robredo.

*****

Baku Cup

Baku, Azerbaijan
$250,000; WTA International
Hard courts
Draw is here

The U.S. Open Series starts next week in Stanford, Calif., for the women, but they’ve already moved to hard courts in Baku, where the first round has been played. The top two seeds, Sorana Cirstea and Elina Svitolina, both won, but No. 3 and 4, Magdelena Rybarikova and Kurumi Nara, are out.

Of interest: Donna Vekic and Kristina Mladenovic. Each has played well lately, and each won their openers. Vekic, while she seems to have been around for years, just turned 18 three weeks ago. The kids, it seems, are still all right.

First Ball In, 7/21: The Not-Quite-Coincidental Weekend

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 18:47:00 -0400

Some co-names, like Bennifer and Brangelina, are eternal. But I’ll bet you thought you had heard the last of “Wozzilroy” after Rory McIlroy ended his engagement with Caroline Wozniacki two months ago. Not so fast—judging by the events of this weekend, we may be hearing quite a bit more from both of them in the near future. In case you had something better to do on Sunday than stare at Twitter, McIlroy won the British Open, his first major in two years, on the same day that Wozniacki won the WTA event in Istanbul, her first title of any sort in 2014.

One of those things, as they say, is obviously not like the other—McIlroy’s victory was the golf equivalent of winning Wimbledon, while Wozniacki won a small tournament where she was the top seed. But both the golfer and the tennis player have been much improved over the last six weeks. McIlroy won the first event he played after the breakup; he now has his first British Open; and he’s suddenly a Masters title away from a career Grand Slam at age 25. Wozniacki, meanwhile, reached the semis in Eastbourne, made the second week at Wimbledon, won in Istanbul, and has reversed a recent slide in the rankings. Rather than plummeting out of the Top 20, as she was this spring, she’s knocking on the Top 10 door again. And she's still just 24 years old.

What, if anything, should we make of this not-quite-coincidence? I’d refer readers to two recent quotes from the athletes in question. 

“I’ve really found my passion for golf,” McIlroy said after winning the Open. “Not that it ever dwindled, but it’s what I think about when I get up in the morning. It’s what I think about when I go to bed.”

“To play good tennis, your head has to be there,” Wozniacki said at Wimbledon. “I’m in a good place in my head right now, mentally. I think that shows on court. I’m just focused on what I have to do out there and what my purpose is when I go on court. I think that shows.”

In other words, now that the wedding is off, both players have more time to devote to their careers, and more mental energy to give to their games. As Wozniacki says above, it shows on the court, and on the course. This, of course, was always the question with them: How were two people whose working lives took them to different places around the globe for 10 months of the year going to find a way to give 100 percent to their careers—neither of which will last far into middle age—and 100 percent to their relationship?

This isn't to say that it was the right decision, or the wrong decision, for Wozniacki and McIlroy not to get married. We’ll see if their co-surge lasts; it has only been a few weeks, after all. But it already feels as if Rory and Caro have gotten back their old games, as well as their old names.

*****

It was a weekend of not-quite-coincidental victories. Along with Wozzilroy’s return, we also had Bernie’s revenge. Was anyone surprised that a week after being dropped by his longtime management company, IMG, Bernard Tomic would win his second career title, and first since January 2013, in Bogota? If so, you shouldn't have been.

Like most counterpunchers, Tomic enjoys having a target. The last tournament he won, in Sydney 18 months ago, was inspired in part by his contentious relationship with Tennis Australia. In his trophy speech there, he made a point of praising his father, John, and pledging allegiance to his family rather than to his country’s tennis association. Later in 2013, at Wimbledon, Tomic pledged that same allegiance to his father, who had been banned from the grounds for allegedly beating up one of his son's practice partners. Bernie, happily fighting the authorities again, upset ninth-seeded Richard Gasquet on his way to the fourth round.

This time Tomic was dropped by the company that had, by the time he was 12, made him a household name among tennis aficionados. And this time Bernie showed uncharacteristic stubbornness in victory. He won each of his last two matches in third-set tiebreakers, the second despite being aced 39 times by Ivo Karlovic. Bogota was only an ATP 250 tournament, but the win was enough to push Tomic from No. 124 up to No. 70. It also followed another solid, fourth-round showing at Wimbledon.

“For me, it was a difficult match,” Tomic said of the final against Karlovic, who was the tournament’s defending champion. “I kept trying and believing in myself. Against him, if you stop believing and trying, he’ll beat you.”

“Believing and trying”: Those are givens for most pros, but not for Bernie. It seems he has recovered from the two hip surgeries he underwent in February. Now the question is: Which authority can he fight next?

*****

“Where did all the teenagers go?” Tennis fans have been asking this question for the better part of a decade, since Maria Sharapova won Wimbledon at 17 in 2004, and Rafael Nadal won the French Open the following year at 19.

One of the answers I always gave to this question is similar to everyone else’s answer: The game requires more physical maturity now. And I think that’s true. But the other answer I give goes roughly like this: “There won't be any more teenagers at the top of the sport, until there's a teenager at the top of the sport.” By which I meant that it would only take one quasar-like talent to make us believe in prodigies all over again. Over its century-long history, the game has always produced them; was it really going to stop now?

As of today, there are teenagers in tennis again. Nineteen-year-old Nick Kyrgios, truly like a quasar, landed on Centre Court and burned up Rafael Nadal in the process. Genie Bouchard reached the semis in Australia at 19, and the final at Wimbledon at 20. This weekend, two even younger players, Ana Konjuh, 16, of Croatia, and Alexander Zverev, 17, of Germany, reached the semis at tour events in Istanbul and Hamburg, respectively. (I didn’t see any of Konjuh’s matches last week, so I’ll stick with Zverev here.)

I had only watched Zverev as a junior. He was ranked No. 1 at that level, but it’s never easy to tell how a young player’s game will translate until you see it with a real live pro on the other side of the net. Last year in Melbourne I had seen Kyrgios win the boys’ Aussie Open title; he was impressive, but I had no clue that he would be capable of beating Nadal at Wimbledon 18 months later.

Now we know what Zverev can do with a pro on the other side of the net. In reaching the semis in Hamburg, he became the first 17-year-old to make an ATP quarterfinal since Nadal in 2003. With his win over Mikhail Youzhny, he became the first 17-year-old to beat a Top 20 player in a decade. Ranked outside the Top 800 at the start of 2014, he’s up to No. 161 today.

On the plus side, Zverev is 6’4”, rangy, and moves well for his size. His most immediately notable shot is his full-cut two-handed backhand, which he wraps around his body. He goes down the line with it, à la Novak Djokovic, to open up rallies; at times it functions like another forehand for him. His serve isn’t a bomb yet, but the motion, like the rest of his game, looks fluid. One thing is certain: Zverev has tennis DNA. His parents are former players from the Soviet Union, and his brother, Mischa, is a 26-year-old ATP pro.

So there are teens on the scene again. Yet the old answer about the game being too physical for them has not been proven false. Zverev lost in the semis in Hamburg, 6-0, 6-1, to David Ferrer.

“He looked a little bit tired,” Ferrer said afterward.

Playing Ball: Easier Said Than Done

Fri, 11 Jul 2014 17:28:00 -0400

Every so often, the spectator should enter the arena, the reviewer should take the stage, the armchair quarterback should stand up and throw a ball across his man cave. It's helpful, now and then, to be reminded of what it’s like to try to do the things we watch and criticize all year long. Friday was that day for me. It was my first time on a tennis court since coming back from Wimbledon, and it didn’t take long for me to start thinking, again, that there are quite a few things about this game that are much easier said than done. Here are a few that came to mind while I was playing.

*****

“Don’t show so much negative emotion”

I’ve given this piece of advice to Serena Williams and Novak Djokovic more than once recently. It seemed to me that they both talked themselves out of Paris, and that Djokovic nearly did the same in his Wimbledon semi with Grigor Dimitrov. He was much calmer in the final, and it helped.

But while Novak may have listened to me, I had trouble listening to myself. In the second game of my match, after my third straight return of serve had sailed long, I stopped, stared across the net, threw my hands up, shook my head, and kept shaking it as I looked up at the sky in pain—I won't tell you what I said. Not surprisingly, I sailed the next return long as well.

Why do we need to dramatize our mistakes, to act out our reactions to them? The tennis court is one of the few places where people can talk to themselves without being called crazy. As Tim Gallwey wrote in The Inner Game of Tennis, the sport shows us that we have two selves. We’re the actor and our own audience, and the game is a play that we perform for ourselves.

Sometimes, when I’m starting to lose it, I’ll tell myself, “Try to play like Borg.” If he could hold it all in, why can’t I? Then the thought passes, I get mad again, and I think, “No wonder he quit when he was 25. That's what you get for hiding your emotions all the time.” Maybe the lesson is: You won’t play better if you're angry, but at least you’ll keep playing.

*****

“Don’t go for so much”

This thought has run through my head countless times as I’ve watched Maria Sharapova. Even when she’s obviously off her game, she keeps firing away, at top speed, into the corners. So on Friday, I tried to take my own advice and do the opposite. When I approached the net, I hit for placement rather than power, chipped my backhands deep, gave myself time to get in, and, as tennis pros like to say, “made the other guy come up with the pass.” The only problem was, the other guy kept coming up with the pass. In an attempt to play the percentages, I had become too cautious

From the outside, a shot that’s hit hard and close to the lines can look unnecessarily risky. What we don’t see is what would have happened if the player hadn’t taken that chance—he or she might have given the opponent an easy ball. It's easy to forget, as we watch, that every shot must strike a balance between too much risk and too much caution, and the outcome might have been just as bad if that balance had tilted the other way.

*****

“Attack your volleys”

This is what I’ve been telling Roger Federer for years. He tends to run through his, relying on his (admittedly reliable) hands, rather then his legs and feet to get him set for the shot. Like Federer and virtually every other pro, I spend most of my time at the baseline. For me, and for many of them, the net can feel like a foreign country.

Djokovic, Sharapova, Andre Agassi, Andy Roddick: All of these major champions have looked, at times, as if they had no idea what they were doing at the net, no idea which way to move, or what to do with the ball when it came to them. I understand the feeling. Suddenly, you have half the amount of time to get ready. Suddenly, your normal grip doesn’t work. Suddenly, you have to fly forward and cut off a shot, rather than waiting for it. Suddenly, as you’re thinking all of these things, the ball is past you.

*****

“Don’t play so far back”

This is the cry of every Rafael Nadal fan. Rafa, when he’s not feeling confident, has a tendency to drift backward. Yes, he’s better when he’s closer to the baseline, but there’s a reason he moves back: It works, too. There’s something reassuring about dropping back on an opponent’s serve—first or second—and sending the return back with more height and topspin. You have time to take a full swing, you don’t feel rushed, and you can still get good depth and pace—the more topspin you put on the ball, the more it will jump forward. Backing up is not the same as giving in.

*****

“Stop choking”

OK, I understand that controlling your nerves is not simply a matter of effort and willpower—sometimes you just can’t do it. Still, perhaps more than anything else in sports, choking in tennis shows how different our outward appearances and our inner emotions are. A player can look the same as he or she has all set, yet play completely differently when it's close. Shots that the player was making look so easy a few minutes earlier are now virtually impossible to repeat. This is what I walked away thinking at the end of the Wimbledon final. Federer had lived by his serve for four hours, until he was down 4-5 in the fifth; then he couldn’t buy one. He hadn’t out and out choked, but something in his mind had changed just enough to change that shot.

The same happened to me on Friday. In my first four service holds, I could hardly have missed a first ball if I had tried. But when I tried to close it out at 5-3, I was just a little less loose in my motion. I tried to force it just a bit. I ended up double-faulting twice and was broken for the first time.

The only saving grace was, unlike Federer, I didn’t have anyone asking me afterward: What went wrong out there? Why couldn't you get your serve in?

*****

I’m going to the beach, and will return on Monday, July 21. Have a good week without me.

Missing Words

Thu, 10 Jul 2014 16:43:00 -0400

Three weeks ago, as I arrived at my desk in a nearly empty Wimbledon press room, I thought I heard a voice coming from the row behind me. It lasted for just a split-second, but I still got up on my toes and craned my neck to see who might be making it. No one was there, but now I understood where I thought the sound had come from: the desk where my colleague and friend Matt Cronin has always sat in the past.

For the first time in many years, Matt wasn’t at Wimbledon. Shortly after the Australian Open, he was diagnosed with a brain tumor. The good news is that he’s had surgery and is recovering, and is planning to rejoin us on tour as soon as he can. I wasn’t surprised that his voice was in my head at Wimbledon. I had the same experience in March at Indian Wells, where I’ve sat next to Matt for half a dozen years. The place didn’t sound the same without him.

More than one reporter echoed that thought at Wimbledon this year—it felt “weird” without Matt. It was weird not to hear him narrating matches from his desk. Weird not to hear him engaging with players in the interview room. Weird not to see him slam his hands down when he couldn’t type any more and announce, “Time for a cigarette.” Weird not to hear him, in the middle of a typically hectic, I-have-10-things-to-do-at-once kind of day at a Grand Slam, take a minute to call his son in California and remind him that he needed to sign up for his water polo team. Weird not to hear his raspy laugh at a midnight dinner when the day was done. Weird, most of all, not to see Matt sitting high in his press-room seat, up on his toes, with his back straight, punching away at his laptop. I never realized how much I slouched until I sat next to Matt.

It’s a feeling that a lot of us in tennis journalism know: Matt, who seems to be on the job 24/7, can make us all look a little slouchy at times. Chris Clarey of the New York Times calls him “the hardest working man in tennis,” and the title is apt. Matt writes for more outlets than I can count, while putting in many hours on the radio each day at the majors. Twenty years after he began in tennis, he's still happy to go through the often-laborious task of getting to know the players as well as he can. None are too obscure for him to cultivate, and he covers the women’s and men’s games with equal interest and respect. Matt’s knowledge of their personalities and their games, which he brings to his radio broadcasts, puts most other commentators to shame. Yet he also sees the humor in taking any sport so seriously. Three years ago, we were at Indian Wells when news broke about the meltdown at a nuclear reactor in Japan. “And I thought my Dinara Safina interview was huge,” Matt joked.

What I’ve learned most from seeing Matt do his job over the years is that journalism is work—work that’s necessary, and that we should be proud to do. The media never has a good reputation, and people are right to criticize us for various shortcomings, but there’s no questioning the dedication of the best reporters; they’ll work any day of the week, until any hour, to do the job. It’s fashionable now for sportswriters to deny that they're "journos" in the first place; Matt, a former president of the International Tennis Writers’ Association, has always stood against that attitude, and has always defended the profession. Like any reporter, he’s competitive about getting interviews and stories, but he’s also been a mentor to many of us. He wants to succeed as a journalist, but he also wants tennis journalism to succeed as a whole. Matt sticks up for his colleagues in the media, in part because he knows that few others outside of our profession will.

In that sense, among U.S. tennis journalists, Matt is our leader. And maybe that’s what was so weird about not having him at Wimbledon. In past years, Doug Robson of USA Today and I have shared a flat with Matt during the tournament. A father of three at home, Matt naturally took over the house-management duties during our two-week stays, making the coffee, watering the apartment-owner's plants, taking out the recycling, organizing late-night dinners at restaurants, and even ordering for us if we were still stuck back at our desks, trying to make a deadline. Over the years, sitting in an empty, late-night Wimbledon press room, I’ve gotten many texts from Matt in which he listed items on the menu and asked which one I wanted.

This year we were on our own; in the flat and in the press room, we missed Matt’s voice, his humor, his laugh, his enthusiasm, his example. His voice isn't one you can forget, and it has obviously stayed in my head on the road this year. I’m looking forward to hearing it again, for real, very soon.

*****

From a writer who was missed, to one who soon will be.

I was stunned, like most people, to find out that Simon Barnes, the Chief Sports Writer for the Times of London, and thus the de facto Chief Sports Writer for Great Britain, had been let go by the paper—“sacked,” as they say so tenderly over there. Barnes had spent 32 years at the paper, which claimed it could no longer afford his salary.

A few of my U.S. colleagues have said they won’t be reading a Barnes-less Times during future Wimbledons. I won’t go that far; the paper’s tennis coverage, led by Neil Harman, will still be essential. But I understand the sentiment. The tournament experience won’t be the same without a Barnes column to start the day.

The best compliment I’ve ever heard anyone give a writer came from a fan of Frank DeFord’s. The reader, whose name I can’t remember, said that when a DeFord feature came out in Sports Illustrated in the 1970s and 80s, he would pick up the magazine, sit down, and “prepare to forget everything and enjoy life for the next hour.” That’s pretty much how I felt this year when, each morning at a café in the village of Southfields near the All England Club, I opened the back of the Times and saw Barnes’ byline. A sunny morning, a sky with flying clouds, a cup of coffee, and his column combined to make me relax and forget, for a few minutes, the work that waited for me.

This isn’t because Barnes is a perfect writer. The pleasure of reading one of his columns, preferably out loud to someone else, comes from how imperfect—how head-shakingly overwrought—they can be, while at the same time still giving us a fresh perspective on the sporting event in question. Barnes’s style, mocked as “pseudo-intellectual” in his own country, make him more human to this fellow writer and fellow sports lover.

Here are a couple of paragraphs from Barnes' Monday column, on the Wimbledon men’s final:

“Reader, have you ever yielded to the temptation of putting something altogether inappropriate on an open fire? Something rather too flammable, paper, say, or straw? And you watch it get warm—and all at once you have a blaze big enough to roast Joan of Arc?

That’s what it was like in that fourth set. It wasn’t that the match caught alight, it was already lit and burning well, but suddenly it became a blast furnace, a heretic-consuming inferno that fizzed and crackled to the sound of demented prayerful cheering as the finest arena in sport felt the heat and went into spontaneous combustion.”

Overdone? You might say that. But you might also say: Why not overdo it a little after such a match? Why not describe it as a “heretic-consuming inferno”? What true tennis fan who watched the match would say those words went too far? Not this one.

But Barnes isn’t all about pushing the verbal limits. He usually hits the right note, with the right words, and the right emotions, in the end. Here are his last lines from his Wimbledon final article, on Federer’s popularity in Britain:

“We admire genius without hope of emulation, and identify heart and soul with the possessor of genius without for a moment fancying that we have it, too....Federer has enriched us again and again. Everybody who watches tennis knows this, but we know it better because he did it right here, in this country, at out tournament, at Wimbledon. In some ways Federer is an honorary Brit, but in truth he comes from the nation of incomparable excellence. We have been privileged to get a tourist visa to visit that place thanks to him."

Barnes is the best-known teller of sports tales because he’s the one who has best understood the importance of sports in our lives. He believes, rightly, that they are the mythology of the modern day, and thus crucial to our understanding of ourselves. He has been derided for trying to put an intellectual’s spin on popular games. But to me, no one has been as good at telling us why they matter.

Wimbledon won’t be the same without Barnes, because it won't mean as much without him. I can’t think of a better compliment to give a writer.

Breaking Tradition

Wed, 09 Jul 2014 11:12:00 -0400

There’s only one thing that never changes at Wimbledon: The myth that it never changes. It’s hard to think of another event in any sport that has mastered the art of updating and renewing itself, while continuing to appear as if it takes no notice of the outside world at all. Yes, they still serve the same Robinson’s barley water and strawberries and cream, and yes, officials doubled-down on the all-white rule in 2014; but this year the tournament also showed off a blueprint of the sleek-looking retractable roof it’s planning to build over Court 1. That would give staid old Wimbledon two more roofs than that capitalist trend-setter, the U.S. Open.

After spending the fortnight—is it our fault or Wimbledon’s that we still use that traditional term to describe it?—roaming the grounds, here are five things that could be changed without altering its eternal appeal. Some would be up to the tournament, others would be up to those of us who like to talk about it.

*****

1. Stop complaining about “slow grass”

Novak Djokovic kept his own victory tradition alive this year by taking a bite of the turf; at the same time, he also did a bit of volunteer research on the state of Wimbledon’s grass. “I thought there was a little less grass than it was a few years ago,” he said, comparing the texture to the last time he last time got a taste, in 2011.

Maybe that was a sign that the grass was cut a little thinner this year, though Wimbledon’s officials say they didn’t do anything different to it. Either way, aces were up, and attacking players found success—Raonic, Kyrgios, Kvitova, Bouchard, Dimitrov, Federer, Wawrinka, Lisicki, and Safarova all made the final eight either by bombing big serves or looking to attack from the ground. I don’t think anyone can say the surface was playing like clay or even hard courts, as so many people have claimed over the years.

To me, the grass at Wimbledon, even after it was changed to a hardier all-rye in 2001, has always made for a unique version of tennis, and one that may be the most entertaining of all. It’s just that in the last 10 years, with the rise of Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Andy Murray, defense became paramount on all surfaces on the men’s side. That cycle of playing styles could be swinging back the other way; if so, it was given an early preview at this year’s Wimbledon. Hopefully, someday, the railers against rye will notice that change, and applaud it.

*****

2. Get rid of Middle Sunday

Like everyone else who works at Wimbledon, I love its day off. Sometimes I wonder how anyone survives at the other three majors, which have no intermissions. But we do survive, and we would at Wimbledon as well. More important, what’s good for those of us on the grounds is bad for the game and its fans. For two weeks in summer, tennis has the attention of the sporting public around the world, so what do we do right in the middle of that rare span of time? We don’t show any tennis on the biggest sports-watching day of all, a Sunday.

This year the break also came on an even more unfortunate day. After rain backed up play over the first week, the sun trolled us all by shining down on Wimbledon’s empty courts on Middle Sunday. Djokovic, among others, called for a change, but tournament referee Andrew Jarrett countered that the grass needs a day for recovery and watering. If there’s a way to play on that grass for 13 of 14 days, it seems to me that there’s a way to play on it on all 14.

*****

3. Take former champions' “suggestions” with a grain of salt

The London papers can never get enough of Wimbledon’s colorful former men’s champions. Boris Becker, Pat Cash, John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors: They all have room to spout their opinions in columns, and for the BBC. Which is fine; I enjoy reading them all when I’m there. But do we need to do more with their viewpoints than that? This year, McEnroe said that tennis should “get rid of umpires.” He’s had this (unsurprising) opinion for some time, much like his opinion that we should get rid of doubles players. This year, though, current pros were asked in their press conferences what they thought of Mac’s idea about going ump-less—as if the idea were something that might actually happen. When Ernests Gulbis answered the question, he thought the reporter had said “vampires” instead of “umpires.” Looking back, it was the most appropriate response of all.

*****

4. Mix the men and women together

Typically, Wimbledon features the men and women on separate days as the second week progresses. This year the rain made that impossible, so we were treated to mixed-gender schedules through the quarterfinals. On those days, the biggest strength of the Slams, their dual-gender variety, their mash-up of male and female style and energy, was displayed in a way that should be the norm. The separate-day system is used because the women play their final a day ahead of the men, and officials want to insure that neither finalist has a scheduling advantage over the other. But maybe, if there was play on Middle Sunday...

*****

5. Find a uniformity about when to suspend play

On one court, the match between Ana Ivanovic and Sabine Lisicki was suspended in the vicinity of 9:00 P.M. On another, Madison Keys and Yaroslava Shvedova were still playing after 9:30, and they only stopped when Keys made a mild protest to the chair umpire, who seemed as if she could have been persuaded to go either way. The day before, Tomas Berdych couldn't get anywhere with his umpire about stopping play after 9:15, despite the fact that it was too dark for the replay system to work. This inspired one of the best lines of the fortnight from Berdych: “You’re better than a Hawk-Eye,” he told the umpire, “you can see in the dark.” But it didn’t do much for the players' trust in Wimbledon’s judgment in these situations.

There's obviously a lot of leeway, and a lot of opportunity for players to sway a chair umpire to do what they want (and get very frustrated when they don’t get what they want). Is there a better system? It’s been suggested that Wimbledon should use light meters, the way cricket does, to provide an objective standard for when it’s too dark to play. More objectivity is a positive, of course, but like a shot clock, would a light meter cause as many problems as it solves? What if the meter goes on at match point? What if it goes on at a moment that’s highly beneficial to one player and disadvantageous for another? Even if you keep the ultimate say-so with the umpire, if play continues when the meter says it shouldn’t, that could lead to even wilder Berdychian rants, and possibly official protests, from the players.

I’d say it’s time to get everyone together, Wimbledon officials, ATP and WTA officials, and players from both tours, to see what can be done to make this a more comprehensible part of the game. Hey, maybe someone will even suggest they put in lights at Wimbledon. Night tennis: Call it a new tradition.

Back to the Future

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 16:04:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—A new generation began to emerge at this year's Wimbledon, but in the end the tournament left us with that 2011 feeling all over again. As they did three years ago, Novak Djokovic, in a classic battle, and Petra Kvitova, in a dominant performance, walked away with the winner's trophies and re-established themselves as Slam-winning forces for the future. Here’s an assessment of their fortnights, as well as those of the players they left in the baseline dust.

*****

Novak Djokovic

“At the time of my career for this Grand Slam trophy to arrive is crucial, especially after losing several Grand Slam finals in a row.” He can say that again. The fifth set of the final may go down as the most important of his career; losing it could have haunted him for years. As it is, by winning, Djokovic joins Bjorn Borg and Rafael Nadal as players who pulled off perhaps the game’s ultimate act of resolve: Squandering a championship point at Wimbledon in the fourth set, and coming back to win it in the fifth. The fact that Djokovic is No. 1 again in the rankings is only fitting: Because of that set, he has, for the time being, put all of those second-place finishes in the past.

To me, the best of Djokovic’s performance in the final happened at the beginning, rather than the end. After spending the final in Paris and much of the Wimbledon fortnight venting his frustration with his poor play—and thereby making it poorer—Djokovic got straight to business against Roger Federer. The first set was the best of the tennis season so far, and rose far above anything else we had seen during this tournament. Djokovic knew there was no time to fall on the court or complain to his box. Watching him lean into his backhand, reflex returns into the corners, and keep a fierce hold on his serve, I thought, “It’s good to have the real Nole back again.” A+

Petra Kvitova

How many times have we asked, after watching Kvitova reel off an untouchable run of points, “If only Petra could play like that all the time”? Now we know she can, we know what it looks like, and we know it’s just as awesome as we thought it would be. Kvitova dropped one set at Wimbledon, and her 55-minute firebombing of Eugenie Bouchard nearly broke her countrywoman Martina Navratilova’s record for the fastest win in a final here.

More than that, we also know that Kvitova, if sufficiently motivated, has the power to make it happen more often. Anyone who saw her play or heard her talk in the early days of the tournament knew that this was special to her, this one was personal. And that extra, bone-deep motivation to win on her favorite court again made the difference. What can we do to get you to feel that way everywhere you go, Petra? A+

Roger Federer

In the past, he has signified perfection on a tennis court; now he signifies a perfection that has aged. As he said afterward, Federer showed that with his health intact, he can still do “great things.” He beat two Top 10 players, employed a more aggressive net-rushing strategy, came back from the dead in the fourth set of the final against a player five years younger than him, and thrilled the Centre Court crowd again. Then, in the final game, the seven-time Wimbledon champion, after fighting uphill for four hours, missed the first serves he’d been making and committed four unforced errors. He's still almost what he once was, and as all of us in our 30s and beyond know, you can't ask for any more than that. A

Eugenie Bouchard

The bloom came off the rose a bit when she was blown out in the final, but I don’t think that’s the worst thing that could have happened to the Canadian at 20 years old. Moving forward and take the next step is what animates Bouchard; now she has another step to take. But while she ended up a humbled figure, hiding under her visor on Centre Court, her run here is worth remembering. We could all learn from her attitude, her ability to ignore fears and worries and distractions, and work without self-pity to improve and overcome each obstacle in front of her. Some players make the physical game look easy; Bouchard does something even rarer: She makes the mental game look easy. Watching her, you might ask yourself: Why can’t I think like that? A

Grigor Dimitrov

Step by step by step by step by step: It’s been a long, slow, and sometimes slippery climb for the 23-year-old former junior No. 1. So long, in fact, that another Next Generation, in the form of Nick Kyrgios, has already arrived alongside him. But now, finally, we know that Dimitrov can play and beat anyone at the game’s biggest tournament. Despite his protestations, Dimitrov is Federer-esque, but his game has a sharp edge where the original’s has an elegant one. As the newest member of the Top 10, and the conqueror of last year's Wimbledon champion, Dimitrov has gone from future to present. He didn’t take the final step this time, but judging by his track record so far, he will. A-

Lucie Safarova

She didn’t make much noise on her way to the semifinals, but she was impressive for a set once she got there. Safarova showed off her athleticism and hitting ability, which are top of the line and make for exciting tennis. But in losing the first set to Kvitova in a close tiebreaker anyway, she showed why we don’t see it more often. Her game gets tangled up with her nerves. A-

Nick Kyrgios

“He moves in Nick Kyrgios ways,” was the chant of the tournament, from Australia’s Fanatics. Those ways are exciting. Many of us have wished in the past that Gael Monfils had been as good at winning as he is at entertaining. By saving nine match points to beat Richard Gasquet and shaking the earth against Nadal on Centre Court, Monfils’s 19-year-old fellow high-flyer from Oz showed that he could be the showman-champion we’ve been waiting for. A-

Simona Halep

Before Paris, she had never been to a Grand Slam semi; now she’s been to two of them, and established herself inside the Top 5—an amazing feat considering that she was virtually unknown 18 months ago. But it doesn’t take long for expectations to rise, and her loss to Bouchard here had the sting of disappointment. Halep rolled her ankle early, and lost both some mobility and some hope after that. That was understandable, but did it also reveal a slight tendency toward pessimism, one that her opponent and future rival from Canada doesn’t share? If so, it won’t help her. B+

Milos Raonic

Raonic, like fellow hopeful Dimitrov, also reached his first Grand Slam semi. Together they gave us some hope that men’s tennis will indeed have a future, even if it’s already 23 years old. This year, with Ivan Ljubicic and Riccardo Piatti in his corner, Raonic has also made unspectacularly steady progress. Here he beat future rival Kei Nishikori for the first time, and began to banish some of the grass ghosts that had haunted him since he slipped and aggravated a hip injury here three years ago. But unlike Dimitrov, he wasn’t ready for the semis, or Federer, once he got there. B+

Angelique Kerber

In beating Maria Sharapova, Kerber made retrieving into a high art for a day. Then against Bouchard, she showed that it’s a tough thing to make it happen for a second day. B+

Barbora Zahlavova Strycova

The most difficult name to type in tennis forced us to type hers more than normal this time. She beat Li Na and won over the crowd with her creative play on the way to the quarterfinals. She also made some of us feel conflicted about how much we should enjoy a good run by a player who, as of last year, was suspended for a failed drug test. B+

Marin Cilic

Like BZS, Cilic found success a year after pulling out of this event after failing a doping test. He’s getting better with coach Goran Ivanisevic, but after seeing him lose the last two sets to Djokovic 6-2, 6-2, I wondered how much better he can get. B+

Caroline Wozniacki

She finished a good grass run by winning three rounds and pushing into the next stage of her career. B

Venus Williams

She went down with a fight to Kvitova in the third round, and took the only set from the eventual champion. A more-than-honorable exit for a 33-year-old. B

Victoria Azarenka

Vika also went out early, as expected, in her return to the majors. But in that brief time she showed that her fight was intact, and her love for tennis renewed. She’s not everyone’s favorite, but her spirit was missed. B

Rafael Nadal

Rafa fought well for four rounds, and had his best Wimbledon since 2011. But by the end of his loss to Nick Kyrgios, he looked weary of facing another nothing-to-lose barrage on grass. As he said, a couple of extra days off before that match hadn't helped, but this surface will continue to be a lottery for him if he faces younger, big-serving opponents. It wouldn't be a surprise if the 28-year-old has just shown his first signs of age on these courts. B-

Sabine Lisicki

Once again, she showed us how much she loves Wimbledon, before showing us that she can still play terrible tennis there. B-

Maria Sharapova

She walked the ledge in Paris, before finally falling against Kerber here. The 10th anniversary of Shazza's title was well-observed in the London press, but it only served to remind us that, for some strange reason, she grew up to be a clay-courter rather than grass-courter. C+

Andy Murray

He was perfect, then he was dreadful, and even Murray didn’t know why. This is the third Slam in the last four where he’s gone down in flames, without a hint of a fight. It’s bothering him, as it should be. Murray is down to No. 10 in the rankings; more important, he’s close to making the Big 4 into a Big 3 again. C+

Serena Williams

Three majors, three early exits for the world No. 1 in 2014. We shouldn’t be shocked next time. But we should hope that whatever was ailing her in doubles, whether it was physical, mental, emotional, or a combination of all of them, she gets over it fast. C

Fabio Fognini

His loose-cannon act is officially tired. But he'll never stop doing it, and we'll never stop watching. C-

For all of our 2014 Wimbledon coverage, head to our tournament page.

Photos from Wimbledon: Day 13

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 23:31:00 -0400

Each day during Wimbledon, we'll bring you exclusive photography from Anita Aguilar, who is covering the tournament for TENNIS.com. Steve Tignor provides the captions.

Henman Hill was turned into a Swiss Alp for the men’s final.

It was a star-studded Royal Box, but Bradley Cooper (with camera) kept his focus squarely on himself(ie).

Chances are Roger Federer won this point. Will and Kate were firmly on Team Rog.

Chances are Federer was about to lose this point. The woman in the front row can’t bring herself to look.

Federer on his invisible horse. If he’s lost a step at 32, I don’t know which one it was.

Federer conducts with his backhand. His slice brought errors from Djokovic, but also sat up on approaches and made for some easy passes.

He made a furious comeback from 2-5 down in the fourth set to push the match to a fifth, and into classic territory.

Great Britain’s James Keothavong had it all under control in his first Wimbledon men’s final.

Djokovic managed to move the way he always does without losing his footing too often.

After a scratchy two weeks...

...he was ready to do whatever it took on Sunday.

The audience wasn’t on Djokovic’s side, but he said that didn’t bother him. “I was also hearing the positive support I got from the crowd, which I thought was not a small number.”

Stefan Edberg (front) and Hugh Jackman (in Panama hat) stand during a break in the action.

In a month’s time, Djokovic has gone from the depths of his final-round loss in Paris to the heights of his second Wimbledon win.

After all of that, the emotion came out in tears, from both men.

Federer said he thought his performance over the fortnight points to “more great things in the future.”

A post-match stroll with his daughters, Myla and Charlene, brightened his mood.

It was all a bit much to take for the eclectic Royal Boxers, including (from left) the Duke of Kent, David and Victoria Beckham, Larry Ellison, Stan Smith, ATP chief Chris Kermode, Samuel L. Jackson, the man who plays Thor, and Ken Rosewall.

Djokovic dedicated the win to his fiancé, Jelena Ristic, his late coach, Jelena Gencic, his family and his team. When it was over, he climbed into the stands to share a bear hug with coach Boris Becker (left).

Nole Finds His Way

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 22:31:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—How do you know a men’s final on Centre Court here will be remembered forever? It must first involve a furious, back-to-the-wall, match-point-saving comeback in the fourth set, one that everyone watching assumes has ripped the heart out of the player who let the championship slip through his fingers. Then it must involve that same player sitting down on the sideline, gathering himself, and defying everything we know about human psychology to win the fifth set anyway.

Bjorn Borg vs. John McEnroe in 1980. Rafael Nadal vs. Roger Federer in 2008. And now Novak Djokovic vs. Federer again in 2014. All of them will go down as classics, and for the same reason. In each case, both players rose to the occasion and responded to a challenge. In each case, the loser’s performance will be recalled alongside the winner’s. McEnroe’s 18-16 win in the fourth-set tiebreaker in 1980 is replayed more often than Borg’s 8-6 win in the fifth set. Federer’s backhand pass to save match point in the fourth-set tiebreaker was the spectacular summit of his loss to Nadal in 2008. And in 2014, Federer’s five-game run from 2-5 down in the fourth, punctuated by a correctly challenged ace to save a match point, brought out the roar of the fortnight from the audiences on Centre Court and Henman Hill.

“I thought the match was a good one,” said Federer, his reaction understandably understated in defeat. “I thought it had everything for fans to like. The swing of momentum in the first set, him coming back in the second, staying even in the third, all the back and forth in the fourth set, and the drama of the fifth.”

After making that list, Federer allowed himself a little more enthusiasm.

“I thought it was a great match,” he concluded, “and I enjoyed to be a part of it.”

Djokovic, also understandably, was a little happier to have been a part of it.

“Sincerely,” he said, “this has been the best-quality Grand Slam final that I’ve ever been a part of. I’ve had a longest final against Nadal in the Australian Open 2012. But quality-wise, from the first to last point, this is definitely the best match.”

“It was just incredibly high-quality tennis from both of us,” he went on. “We didn’t give too much to one another. We didn’t make a lot of unforced errors, so I think there was a lot of winners.” Federer hit 75 winners, Djokovic 68.

The tennis was crisp from the get-go. It reached an immediate peak in the first set, in which both men kept fierce hold over their serves, and neither faced a break point. In the tiebreaker, Federer saved a set point by dropping a forehand smack on the sideline, saved another with a 122-M.P.H. ace, and closed it 9-7 with a “Come on!” But while Federer had won the set, Djokovic had established something just as important; He was going to be a completely different player, and much tougher hombre, than he had been in his six previous matches.

A tense dynamic had been set. Each man tried to push the other off the baseline, and then tried to judge exactly when the right time was to mount an attack. Nothing was easy, neither man gave an inch of ground, and both braved their way forward. Federer had rushed the net effectively over the fortnight, but it was Djokovic who was more efficient there on Sunday, winning 74 percent of his points at net to Federer’s 66 percent. Djokovic won them by getting Federer on the run and attacking his one-handed backhand, but Federer couldn’t make the same kind on inroads on Nole’s two-hander. Federer may gone into that side too often. Djokovic, it seems, was waiting for it.

“I’ve seen a couple of his matches here,” Djokovic said. “He’s coming to the net more often. He’s playing down-the-line backhands more than he has been in recent years. Those were particular changes in his game that I noticed before coming to this match. I paid attention to it and was ready for it.”

The two most significant shots of the day were Federer’s serve and his return—one kept him in it, the other kept him out of it. He hit 29 aces, including five in a row, and won dozens of crucial points with it. After one of Federer’s service winners wiped away a break point, Djokovic took out his frustration by screaming at the service line. Why was it sitting right where Federer was serving the ball, every time?

“He served efficiently,” Djokovic said of Federer, “was using all the angles, was making it difficult for me to return.”

But Djokovic was having even more success in his service games, a fact that wore on Federer, who could hardly sniff a break for three sets.

“I couldn’t figure out why I wasn’t breaking Novak’s serve,” a frustrated Federer said, “or actually creating opportunities. It’s one thing not to break...but it was really not creating enough opportunities to put Novak under pressure. He was doing a good job on his serve.”

Up 3-1 in the fourth, with the title in sight, Djokovic cracked the door just enough on his serve to let Federer come storming through. Earlier in the tournament, against Marin Cilic and Grigor Dimitrov, this type of slip-up had led to rage and angst from Djokovic, which had then led to a run of lost games. Not this time. In the next game, he came out with an upbeat skip in his step, and broke right back. That would be the key to his win: Today, unlike in his loss to Nadal at the French Open a month ago, Djokovic stayed inwardly positive and outwardly controlled.

As Borg and Nadal were before him, Djokovic was put to the ultimate test in tennis—squandering a championship point at Wimbledon—and like them, he found the resilience to put it behind him.

“I could have easily lost my concentration in the fifth and just handed him the win,” Djokovic said. “But I didn’t, and that’s why this win has a special importance to me mentally. Because I managed to not just win against my opponent, but win against myself.”

In the end, Federer, after fighting uphill for nearly four hours, couldn’t fight any longer. In his final service game, he made four unforced errors. He had come within a set of his record eighth Wimbledon title, and afterward a single tear rolled down his cheek—he has now been on the winning end of two classic five-set finals here, and the losing end of two. Perhaps no one in the 92-year history of this court has brought as much quality and entertainment to it.

“I’m happy to see that with feeling normal I can produce a performance like I did the last two weeks,” Federer said after a post-match stroll with his daughters. “That clearly makes me believe that this was just a stepping stone to many more great things in the future.”

Djokovic, of course, will see this as a stepping stone as well, both into a new, suddenly brighter season ahead, but also into his own past.

The first time I met him, in the spring of 2007, Djokovic was a 20-year-old who hadn’t yet reached a Grand Slam final; his first would come a few months later at the U.S. Open. But that hadn’t stopped the Serb, who was invariably called “brash” in those days, from telling the world that he was going to be “the next No. 1,” a feat that would require him passing Nadal and overtaking Federer. I asked him where his confidence came from.

“My first coach, Jelena Gencic, told me I was going to be No. 1 someday,” Djokovic said, “and I believed her.”

In 2011, Djokovic won Wimbledon for the first time and fulfilled Gencic’s prediction by becoming No. 1. After the tournament, he brought the trophy to her in Serbia. A little more than a year ago, Gencic passed away, and today Djokovic pointed that same trophy to the sky and dedicated his second Wimbledon title to her.

Gencic made Djokovic believe he could win matches like this one; it was her confidence that had made him the brash young man who had eventually conquered Federer and Nadal—she didn’t say he “might” be No. 1, she said he “was going” to be No. 1.

In the last year and a half, Djokovic had lost some of that self-assurance in his most important matches. Before Sunday, he had failed in five straight Grand Slam finals outside of the Australian Open. When he hired Boris Becker at the start of this season, Djokovic seemed to me to be trying to find some of that old blind faith in himself; Becker had been the definition of a brash youth when he won at Wimbledon as a 17-year-old.

By all accounts, Becker did what he was hired to do. According to London’s Sunday Times, rather than making any technical changes to Djokovic’s game, Becker tried to “instill the ability to withstand pressure [and] decide on solutions on the run....The most important factors are clarity of thought and avoidance of panic.” Those sound like a laundry list of what helped Djokovic through the roughest patches of his semifinal and final-round wins. Against Dimitrov in the semis, he had survived by starting to serve and volley in the third set, and against Federer he had avoided panic when panic seemed the only option left.

After it was over, Djokovic, who will reclaim the No. 1 ranking tomorrow, walked into the stands and wrapped Becker in a bear hug. When he got back down to the court, he pointed to the heavens and lifted his hands in a short prayer. Someone, he found out again today, was still watching over him.

Photos from Wimbledon: Day 12

Sun, 06 Jul 2014 16:55:00 -0400

Each day during Wimbledon, we'll bring you exclusive photography from Anita Aguilar, who is covering the tournament for TENNIS.com. Steve Tignor provides the captions.

Ladies Singles Final Day started with a classic look—from the streets of Queens.

A sign of things to come. Petra Kvitova greets the crowd with a wave, while Eugenie Bouchard walks on with head firmly down.

Bouchard said it was a little strange carrying flowers instead of a racquet bag for the final. It might have been the most enjoyable part of the afternoon for her.

Royal Box watch: Jack Nicklaus, Keira Knightley, the Duke of Kent, and Martina Navratilova came in all shades.

Genie Bouchard put her foot in it—her racquet head, I mean.

Petra Kvitova said she had to push first, so she wouldn’t get pushed back.

For the second time in a Wimbledon final, Kvitova said she was “in the zone.” She hit 28 winners and lost just 37 points.

All Bouchard could do was try to reflex back the balls that came toward her.

She was knocked back to earth after a dream run, but as she said later, the loss leaves her with more motivation to take the final Grand Slam step.

Kvitova, who had been thinking about this day for a year, was appropriately floored by her pertormance.

Kvitova and her father, Jiri, shared a hug. She said she was happy to give him “a nice present” the day before his birthday.

The trophy ceremony, delayed to close the roof, may have lasted as long as the 55-minute match.

Kvitova in what she calls her home away from home.

Princess Eugenie (center, in red) clapped for the woman who was named after her, Genie Bouchard.

Sara Errani and Roberta Vinci won the women’s doubles for the first time here.

Jack Sock and Vasek Pospisil showed what two young, solid singles players can do to a men’s doubles draw.

Neither was ranked in the Top 90 in doubles, but they beat the world’s top team, Bob and Mike Bryan, in an entertaining, five-set final.