Articles by Steve Tignor

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.

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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.

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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.

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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 as far as interest’s sake. 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 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.

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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 two rounds have 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.

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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?

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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.

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“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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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...

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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.

Coming Home

Sat, 05 Jul 2014 23:00:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—If you flip through the record books, it’s possible to find a few Wimbledon finals that featured a performance like the one Petra Kvitova gave us on Saturday. Billie Jean King’s swan-song, 6-0, 6-1 drubbing of Evonne Goolagong at age 31 in 1975, and Pete Sampras’s three-set blitz of Andre Agassi in 1999 remain towering examples of tennis mastery. But while Kvitova isn’t in Pistol Pete's or BJK's league as a champion, she was their equal for a day—or at least for the 55 minutes she needed to beat Eugenie Bouchard, 6-3, 6-0. Kvitova's first shot was a thunderingly powerful forehand return that Bouchard couldn’t hit back. Her last was an even better backhand that Bouchard couldn’t even reach. Most of the the shots Kvitova hit in between were just as good.

“I knew from the first point what I had to do,” Kvitova said afterward. “I knew I had to push her, before she could push me. It wasn’t a big plan, I just knew I had to play my game."

By making it imperative that she go for her shots as soon as she could, Kvitova and her coach, David Kotyza, freed her up to play the type of overwhelmingly offensive tennis she had first shown the world here in 2011, and which she had repeated only intermittently since. This wasn’t P3tra, the doubting queen of the three-set match, the woman whose racquet runs hot and cold from one point to the next. This was Petra unleashed, liberated from worry, moving from strength to strength. Afterward, she could only explain her play by shaking her head and saying she was “in the zone.” Aces led to forehand winners, which led to backhand winners as her confidence grew, which then led to—and now she knew something special was happening—great defensive gets and winners on the dead run.

“I mean a few shots were really incredible,” Kvitova said, laughing, about her sudden, newfound ability to scramble. “I really couldn’t believe that I made it, actually....Really for the first time I said, ‘Oh my God, this is good!’ I can really run and put the ball back.”

Kvitova said she realized she was in the zone when she ran to her right and came up with a low, sharp-angled backhand pass to hold for 3-1.

“It was a really long shot,” she said, unable to suppress an ever-widening smile. “I did a passing shot. Was a huge rally. Maybe from that time I was like, ‘OK, that’s not normal.'”

The crowd, which was firmly with Bouchard—one London paper has already laid claim to the Canadian by calling her “practically British”—couldn’t help but roar for Kvitova after that winner. But even when the audience isn’t with her, Kvitova is one of those players—their numbers are legion—who feels like she’s coming home every time she steps onto Centre Court.

“I can say it’s a little bit like a Fed Cup [tie] when I’m playing in the Czech [Republic] and I feel the crowd,” she said of what she senses on Centre Court. “My stomach is a little bit funny. It’s just goosebumps.”

Kvitova hit 28 winners, a number that actually seems low, while Bouchard won just 37 points. In perhaps the ultimate sign of how one-sided the match was, Bouchard, despite losing 61 points, only committed four unforced errors. Kvitova didn’t give her a chance to make any more.

Where does this leave Bouchard? Her fortnight had been about the power of clear, composed thinking and a positive attitude to create your own reality, to do things that might seem impossible to other people. Time and again, the 20-year-old said that anything that stood in her way was just another “challenge,” another obstacle put there to inspire her to work harder.

Genie had been so good at imposing her will that her opponent in the semifinals, Simona Halep, claimed Bouchard appeared to be “bigger” than she really was from the other side of the court, because she stood on top of the baseline. But you can only create your own reality for so long before you have face up to it. Today, standing across the net from the six-foot Kvitova, Bouchard didn’t look so tall anymore. She looked small and nervous. She looked, in other words, like she was playing her first Grand Slam final.

“I didn’t feel like I was able to play my game,” said Bouchard, who claimed she wasn’t overwhelmed by the moment. “She really took the chances away from me and was really putting a lot of pressure on me. I didn’t have that many opportunities.”

Bouchard was deflated in her press conference, but her even-keel, occasionally smiling demeanor wasn’t all that different from how she had looked and acted in her winning pressers. She said that after the match was over, while the players waited for the roof to close and the trophy ceremony to begin, she was taken to the room where the winner’s dish was being engraved with Kvitova’s name—a cruel coincidence. Maybe that break gave her a chance to let her emotions settle. By the time she got to the interview room, Bouchard was back on message. She said she would take the defeat as motivation and a learning experience.

“It was a big moment walking out onto Centre Court for a final,” Bouchard said. “I have that experience now. I know what it feels like. I hope I can walk out for many more finals. That’s the goal. I’m going to go back, work on my game, try to get better, because you always need to get better.”

As she said, there wasn’t a lot Bouchard could have done. Kvitova took the racquet out of her hand with her serve and her return. Perhaps Bouchard got a little caught up in playing aggressive tennis at all costs. It had worked for her in her first six matches, but there was no way she was going to take the initiative from Kvitova today. Her best chance may have been to run and play defense and see if Bad Petra could be coaxed out of hiding.

As it was, Bad Petra was nowhere to be found in SW19 this year. Kvitova began this tournament talking about the pain of her close quarterfinal defeat to Kirsten Flipkens 12 months ago, and she played these two weeks as if she were exorcising that pain. From the start, she seemed to believe that the trophy was hers to lose, and she wasn’t going to let herself lose it. You could see it in the way she beat Venus Williams while getting outplayed for much of the day, and you could see it in the way she never relented, or returned to earth, today.

Kvitova said she wanted to finish before the rain came, and she made it by a few minutes. I kept waiting for nerves to do their part, to force her into a few errors or lead to a few dicey moments, but she pounded right through them. The fact that Kvitova could start so well, and finish even better, was what made this one of the most impressive—gobsmacking, really—performances I’ve seen in any Grand Slam final, on this court or any other.

Yet you get the feeling that it could only have happened on this court for Kvitova. It was almost as if, coming back to Wimbledon, she fell in love with tennis again. There was a freedom and passion and determination to her play that isn't always there—her desire banished her doubt. Most of the legends of the past have felt that same inspiration on Centre Court. Kvitova may never be among those legends; she joked today about how far she has to go to match her countrywoman, Martina Navratilova. But on Saturday she put on a performance that will rank with their best.

Champions' Ball

Sat, 05 Jul 2014 22:00:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND— “Well, we know each other’s games. We played many matches on different occasions. As you said, only once on grass court, but we played so many times in semifinals and finals of Grand Slams, different surfaces, big matches over the years. They were very exciting.”

Which of Sunday’s Wimbledon finalists, Novak Djokovic or Roger Federer, do you think said these words in his press conference on Friday? It happened to be Djokovic, but they could have been taken virtually verbatim from a dozen interviews with Federer before their meetings in the past. Both men agree: They know each other’s games well, and they’ve put them up against each other on every surface and in every type of tournament. They've faced off 34 times, and almost split those matches evenly. Federer leads their head to head 18-16.

By now Federer and Djokovic also have a good idea of what they’ll be trying to do to each other.

As Federer put it on Friday, “Well, we both like to be close to the baseline. We both like to take charge, especially on quicker courts...I think for me it’s really important to stay aggressive against him. And especially here at Wimbledon it’s more simple how we need to play against each other. It’s not like on a slow court where you can maybe maneuver the other guy around so much.”

Or, as Djokovic put it a few hours earlier, “The key against him in the game, of course, is trying to not allow him to dictate too much, because he likes to be very aggressive, he likes to come to net. I’m going to have to be able to get as many returns back in the court and try to also stay closer to the line, protect the baseline.”

Yet this match is also something of an anomaly. It’s only the second Grand Slam final they’ve played, and the first came seven years ago, at the 2007 U.S. Open. More significantly, the two have played just once on grass, two years ago here at Wimbledon, under the roof. Federer won in four sets over an uninspired Djokovic, who struggled to find his footing. This Sunday is forecast to be bright, with some chance of showers, especially later. It would seem, as I write this on Saturday evening, that the match will at least start with the roof open. While Djokovic has been in three of the last four Wimbledon finals, grass still favors Federer, the seven-time Wimbledon champion. Novak has never felt entirely comfortable bringing his sliding style to the surface—too often he ends up sprawled all over it.

Form also favors Federer. He has looked masterly in his six wins. He’s dropped one set, to an on-fire Stan Wawrinka in the quarters. Federer has moved well and incorporated his net attack effectively. He hasn’t been pushed to the limit, but he has beaten two potentially dangerous opponents in Wawrinka and Milos Raonic. Djokovic, on the other hand, hasn’t been at his best. He’s given away leads, grown agitated, and ultimately had to scratch and claw and bluff his way to victory.

Their form has been expressed in their demeanor the last couple of days. Federer has come across, as he always likes to come across, as the relaxed and confident veteran, champion, and father figure, the man who has it all.

“Eight is my favorite number,” a smiling Federer told the BBC on Saturday.

Djokovic, meanwhile, has been open about his struggles playing with leads, controlling his emotions, and winning major finals. Outside of the Australian Open, he has lost five straight.

“I want things to go a proper way from the first point to the last,” Djokovic said Friday, “so sometimes I get carried away with emotions....I was a set and a break up and, again, I made some unforced errors and gave my opponent today a hope that he can win the match. That’s something that I definitely cannot allow myself in the finals against Roger.”

Federer is 2-1 against Djokovic this season, and even in his one loss, at Indian Wells, he started fast and won the first set. I would guess the same will happen here, as he rides the early crowd excitement and his own traditionally easy early service holds. The key may come in the second set. Can Djokovic dig in and make Federer doubt? How much belief and fight will Djokovic have if he gets behind? As he says, he has had trouble accepting his runs of bad form lately, and it cost him in his last Grand Slam final, against Rafael Nadal in Paris. If Djokovic can weather the storm, grab one of the first two sets, and make Federer doubt, he’ll have a good chance.

And that’s the question for Federer: What happens if he begins to doubt? Only in the first two sets against Wawrinka has Federer been under pressure, and that pressure was relieved when Stan got hurt. As Djokovic says, if he can make returns and keep Federer off the net, the dynamic will turn in the Serb’s favor. Federer says everything is different this year, and his confidence is back where it once was. If Djokovic throws a few counter-punches his way, we’ll find out, once and for all, if that’s true.

Both men have a lot riding on the outcome. Djokovic desperately wants to end his run of final-round futility at the majors. Federer desperately wants to win this major, because at 32 it might be his last good chance at one, and he hasn't put it in two years of work to hold up the runner-up plate at Wimbledon. We won't know how each of those factors affects them until the match is over. That's why they'll play, and we'll watch.

Winner: Federer

Photos from Wimbledon: Day 11

Sat, 05 Jul 2014 08:08:00 -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.

Where Roger Federer goes, Anna Wintour often follows.

Novak Djokovic had to stare into the sun to serve.

He didn’t like that.

Djokovic on the move. I wonder whether stayed upright through this entire point. It wasn’t easy for him or his opponent, Grigor Dimitrov, on Friday.

Dimitrov played with leaping, sliding, and often crashing abandon in his first Grand Slam semifinal.

Maria Sharapova (in sunglasses) and Dimitrov’s mother (with thumbs way up) showed their approval.

Wonder what Novak found in his bag.

Djokovic and the baseline didn’t get along all match.

Dimitrov hit 48 winners, but couldn’t come up with one on any of three set points in the fourth-set tiebreaker.

Bear meets Rocket: It was a banner day in the Royal Box, with Jack Nicklaus, Rod Laver, Jude Law, and Bradley Cooper (not pictured) in attendance.

Milos Raonic said he wouldn’t worry about who was on the other side of the net in his semi, but he seemed to have a pretty good idea.

Raonic was broken in the first game and never made it a match, but the 23-year-old reached his first Grand Slam semifinal.

Roger Federer is into a record ninth Wimbledon final, and 25th Grand Slam final.

Federer will face his rival Djokovic; the two have played in just one Grand Slam final, the 2007 U.S. Open. They’ve come a long way to meet in another.

The Royal Box saw fit to give it all a round of applause.

As for the side courts, the rest and recovery process has begun for the grass.

The light at the end of the tunnel: Court 1.

The singles draws have been filled out, and only two matches are left to be played.

Which means you have one last chance to get your picture taken with Andy Murray as Wimbledon champion.

Women's Wimbledon Final Preview: War of Wills

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 21:14:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—Eugenie Bouchard and Petra Kvitova aren’t friends, have never practiced together, and have rarely, if ever, spoken.

“I don’t know her that well,” Bouchard said.

Kvitova was even more definitive.

“I don’t know her."

Yet these two have had one big thing in common over the last two weeks. It’s not just that they’ve been the two best players at Wimbledon, they’ve also been the most stubbornly determined throughout. From the start, Kvitova has been inspired by her surroundings. Driven to avenge, or at least forget, her bitter quarterfinal loss here last year, she has played as if the trophy already belonged to her.

On the other side of the draw, Bouchard has played with, as she has said many times, an unrelenting focus on the next task at hand. Point to point, match to match, the 20-year-old has, with the possible exception of Roger Federer, been the most composed and clear-thinking competitor in either draw.

It should surprise no one that Bouchard’s first answer in her press conference today went like this:

“Proud of what I accomplished, but the job’s not over.”

Kvitova was even more blunt in her assessment of her feelings at the moment.

“I want to win, yes,” she said.

The battle of wills alone should make this a compelling match. It’s hard to imagine either woman cracking or caving, yet one of them must.

Who is it more likely to be? Kvitova won their only meeting, last summer on hard courts in Toronto, 6-3, 6-2; though that was obviously against a different Bouchard, one who was ranked outside the Top 40 and hadn’t yet been to three Grand Slam semifinals. The 24-year-old Kvitova also has the advantage in the experience department, having played and won the 2011 final here over a Hall-of-Famer in Maria Sharapova. As far as form goes, the Czech has been at her best these last two weeks, dropping just one set, to five-time champion Venus Williams in one of the matches of the tournament. But Bouchard has gone her one better by dropping no sets at all.

If Kvitova plays something like her best for a full two sets on Saturday, she’s probably going to win. Few women, if any, can stay with her power. You can hope she begins to miss; fortunately for her opponents, she usually does—this wildly up-and-down player is known as the queen of the three-setter. If she doesn’t start to miss, you can try to move her; at 6’0”, mobility will never be her strong suit.

Bouchard has the ability to move Kvitova. She plays on top of the baseline, takes the ball as early as humanly possible, and moves forward on anything short. That will take the Czech’s time away and possibly keep her from unleashing her long, strong swings.

“Bouchard is playing a very solid game,” Kvitova said today. “She’s a very good mover. She’s nearby the baseline. I think it’s very similar to my game. I think it’s going to be a tough battle.”

Bouchard also said she expects this to be toughest match of the tournament—naturally, she claimed that’s exactly how she wants it. So far in this tournament she has won virtually every important point she's played. She snuck through two tights sets against Alize Cornet that she could have lost, and she rallied from 2-4 down in a first-set tiebreaker against Simona Halep in the semifinals.

If the sets go the distance and get into the endgame of tiebreakers, I like Bouchard’s chances. She hesitated just a bit when she had an opportunity to beat Sharapova in the semifinals in Paris. It’s possible she could do the same here with the Wimbledon title in her grasp, but she's still the more trustworthy big-point player. On the other side of the net, Kvitova is more likely to win sets easily, the way she did against Bouchard last year in Toronto and in the 2011 Wimbledon final against Sharapova.

The match’s key shots could end up being Kvitova’s lefty serve and Bouchard’s aggressive return. Will Kvitova swing it wide and turn Bouchard’s two-handed backhand from a weapon into a liability? Or will Bouchard anticipate it, cut off the angle, and get ahead in rallies with it? That battle within the battle will be intriguing.

What will likely be decisive, though, is Kvitova's consistency. Which Petra will show up, and for how long? So far the stakes and the setting have inspired Good Petra to stick around; she's played with a real love for tennis and for this tournament these two weeks. I think she can hold off Bad Petra, and Bouchard, for one more day.

Winner: Kvitova

Present Tense

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 19:34:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—This year’s Wimbledon has been cast as a battle of the generations. A long-delayed future, we’re told, is trying to push its way onto the stage, while a glorious present is clinging desperately to its last moments in the spotlight. So far here, youth has taken a longer turn on that stage than we’re used to seeing. Twenty-year-old Eugenie Bouchard is in the women’s final, while Serena Williams and Maria Sharapova are long gone. Nick Kyrgios, 19, knocked off Rafael Nadal, 28. Milos Raonic, 23, reached his first Grand Slam semifinal.

On the surface, there was no better demonstration of that clash than the first semifinal here on Friday, between Novak Djokovic and Grigor Dimitrov. The top-seeded Djokovic was playing his 22nd Grand Slam semi; Dimitrov was playing his first. This was the quintessential match between youth and age, except for one small problem: Djokovic is 27 and Dimitrov is 23. The fact that they could be separated in years by so little, and in big-match experience by so much, is one more sign of how thorough the Big 4’s dominance has been. It has taken so long for the next ATP generation to make its mark, they’ve threatened to turn into grizzled veterans first.

Yet if Novak vs. Grigor—can we call their matches Grinole?—wasn’t a contest between young and old, there was at least a sense of the familiar facing off against the unfamiliar. It wasn’t especially well-played, but there was an unpredictable, daredevil quality to it, and it was tensely competitive and psychologically testing throughout. Both men spent nearly as much time sprawled on the grass as they did upright. Dimitrov, who at one point fell down and then fell again before he could get up, changed his shoes four times; Djokovic switched once. More than the shoes, though, I’d say the culprit was the dauntless way these two slide across the court. It’s tough to stop on the dust that passes for a playing surface at the baseline.

Dimitrov brought the same, fresh all-court attack he had against another well-traveled 27-year-old, Andy Murray, in the quarterfinals. Slashing, leaping, sliding, slipping, and crashing to the court, at his best he played with an abandon that can only be described as youthful. He opened up rallies with his forehand, fired 15 aces, hit 48 winners, and was 38 of 48 at the net. He also started erratically, double-faulted eight times—including three in one game—let an agitated Djokovic off the hook in the third set, nd squandered three set points in the fourth. It wasn’t a match that Dimitrov should have won, exactly, but it was one he could have won.

“Of course I’m frustrated,” said the Bulgarian, who moves into the Top 10 for the first time with this result. In Australia, he cried after losing a similarly tight quarterfinal match to Rafael Nadal, but this time he was dry-eyed and even-keeled.

“I came out on the court to win,” Dimitrov said. “I think I had a pretty slow start, but at some point I got my act together and I was really playing good tennis. You never know what would have happened if I had taken the fourth set.”

If Dimitrov played the role of youth, in the end Djokovic showed his experience. If we believe the cliché that champions find a way to win without their best, this was a champion’s effort from Djokovic. Up a set and a break, a stage when we might expect him to put the clamps down on his younger opponent, Novak completely froze up, seemingly with nervous tension. On his backhand side, he looked as if he were trying to swing under water, and he was uncharacteristically passive on his returns.

By the third set, he was so agitated he began a running dialogue with the baseline, which he felt was betraying him at every turn. Down a break point at 3-3 and reeling, Djokovic swung tentatively at a backhand. It appeared to be heading into the net but somehow crawled over and bounced twice before a stunned Dimitrov could reach it. It may have been the most important shot of the day.

None of this was new to Djokovic.

“You’re going through different emotions during the match,” he said. “At a certain stage of the match I was frustrated because I, again, allowed my opponent to come back....I've been more self-critical in the last couple of matches with myself than I should have been. I’m a perfectionist on the court. I want things to go a proper way from the first point to the last, so sometimes I get carried away with my emotions.”

Yet nearly as often as Djokovic digs an emotional hole for himself, he finds a way to dig himself out. This time he reasserted himself by rushing the net in the third set. It wasn’t pretty, and or even especially effective—Djokovic was just 27 of 47 up there—but it was a way for him to be assertive and work around the nerves that had locked him up.

“I’m getting that necessary experience,” Djokovic said later, “and understanding when is the time for me to, do what and in what way.”

Was it experience that allowed Djokovic to come back from 3-6 down in the fourth-set tiebreaker, when all of the momentum was with Dimitrov? There's no tactic for how to win three straight points in this type of situation; Djokovic himself has admitted that he doesn't have a “secret” for coming back from match point or set point down. But he’s made daredevil comebacks often enough that at least he knows it’s possible. That's enough to allow his instincts to kick in, and nobody is as dangerous as Djokovic when he's playing instinctively, with nothing to lose. He rallied from 3-6 to win 9-7 with a strong forehand approach, a volley winner, a forehand winner, and a forehand pass that clipped the tape and went over for another winner on match point.

Maybe this is what experience is good for. You can still get tight, you can still get mad, you can still kick the baseline, you can still blow a lead. But you also know that you can do all of those things and still win. The present, glorious and not so glorious, remains on the tennis stage. The future waits again.

For complete Wimbledon coverage, including updated draws and reports from Steve Tignor, head to our tournament page.

Photos from Wimbledon: Day 10

Fri, 04 Jul 2014 08:13:00 -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.

The coin has been tossed...

...and a new rivalry has begun?

Genie Bouchard really does hit the cover off the ball. You can see the bits of fuzz flying around her here.

Simona Halep on the move; unfortunately for her, she rolled her ankle early and said she was unsure about her movement afterward.

Halep also said her “serve was really bad," because she couldn’t push off, but she gets up for this one.

Bouchard is good at ignoring distractions; here she stays in her zone as Halep gets her ankle taped.

Bouchard said she wasn’t ready to return serve on her first match point, but her protestations went nowhere with chair umpire Kader Nouni.

It wasn’t Will and Kate, but the women’s semifinals did attract Eddie Redmayne (right) and Dame Maggie Smith (left, leaning)

...and a well-disguised Colin Firth.

Rafael Nadal isn’t here, but Lucie Safarova seems to be channeling his lefty takeback...

...and follow-through.

Safarova showed off her athleticism on Thursday, but came up a couple of points short in a first-set tiebreaker with Petra Kvitova.

Kvitova has found her best tennis on her favorite courts over the last two weeks.

One more win and she has her second Wimbledon title.

Another day was done at the All England Club. All that was left to watch was the tarp being pulled over the courts.

Acing It

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 19:23:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—Does it seem like it’s a little too soon for Eugenie Bouchard? I’m ready, like every other tennis fan, for a new face, a new game, a new personality, a new star; and Bouchard is a winner on all of those fronts. But are we ready for her to win everything, right now? Where was the struggle and the angst and the uncertainty on her way to the top? Where were the doubts that the rest of us can relate to? She’s made reaching a Wimbledon final look like acing a Chem final: Study hard, show up on time, keep your notes organized, say the right things in class, and you'll be rewarded in due time.

That was my first thought after the 20-year-old’s no-fuss, almost-no-muss 7-6 (5), 6-2 win over No. 3 seed Simona Halep here on Thursday. My second thought, with the benefit of a little historical perspective, was that it always seems like it’s too soon when a new champion walks in from out of nowhere and onto the Grand Slam stage. At the time, it didn’t seem possible to me that Monica Seles could beat Steffi Graf at the French Open when she was 16. It didn’t seem possible that Boris Becker could win Wimbledon, or Serena Williams could win the U.S. Open, at 17. Great players are always a little bit impossible.

The thing about Bouchard is that her success doesn’t seem to have come from a precociously magical talent for hitting a tennis ball, the way it did for the three players I mentioned above. Her 2014 progression looks like the culmination of a six-month, three-step master plan: Start outside the Top 30, reach two Slam semifinals, then go for broke at Wimbledon. After her win today, Bouchard was told that she had looked “subdued in victory”—there was no roll in the grass or tears to hold back from her (leave that for the men). She was asked if any more turbulent emotions had been swirling beneath. The answer, according to Bouchard, was: Nope.

“It’s not like a surprise to me,” Bouchard said in her straightforwardly resolute manner. “I expect good results like this. So for me, I was like, ‘OK, good. It’s a step in the right direction. I get to play in the final.’ You know, I still have another match, so it’s not a full celebration yet.”

There was one moment today, I thought, where Bouchard did express what makes her such an effective competitor—which is the same, in her case, as saying that she expressed her true self. She was up 5-4 in the first set, with Halep serving at 40-0. The Romanian lost two straight points, the second one with a double fault, to make it 40-30. Halep had turned her ankle at 2-2, and now seemed hesitant and negative; she said later that she “couldn’t push anymore in my leg. My first serve was really bad after that.” Here was a chance for Bouchard to steal a set from her doubtful opponent. On the next point, Halep kicked in a slow second serve, Bouchard moved forward for a forehand...and clanked it long.

She stared at the spot where the ball had landed for a split, disbelieving second. Then she turned her head just as quickly away to start her next service game. You could see, once she had made that turn, that the missed opportunity had been forgotten. At 5-5, Bouchard came back, as she did on a number of occasions, from 0-30 down to hold. And in the crucial first-set tiebreaker, she came back from 2-4 to win it 7-5. Halep didn’t play badly for most of the match, but Bouchard always played to win. When there was a key point to be had, it was invariably hers.

“I think what I do well,” Bouchard said, “is I really don’t let it get to me or affect me. You know what? There are challenges everywhere in life. I love being challenged and I love working hard to try to overcome something.”

Halep, on the other hand, admitted that the events of the day were too much for her to overcome. There was the ankle roll; there was the sick fan who forced play to be stopped when she was up 3-2 in the tiebreaker; there was what Halep called Bouchard’s “lucky ball,” a net-cord forehand winner at 4-2 in the breaker; and there was the fact that she was playing for the third time this week.

“It’s hard, yeah, to stay focused, to play every point,” Halep said, “because you are a little bit afraid after injury....I think I played till the end, but in the second set I lost my energy and I couldn’t believe anymore that I can finish the match in the right way for me.”

Bouchard’s run here has been blessed. The Canadian press had talked about a “murderer’s row” of women she would have to go through to win it. But her presumed fourth-round opponent, Serena Williams, was knocked out in the third round; and her presumed quarterfinal opponent, Maria Sharapova, was knocked out in the round of 16. Both times, Bouchard played their conquerors, Alizé Cornet and Angelique Kerber, the very next day, when they were ripe for a letdown. And in the semis, Halep turned her ankle in the fourth game.

Halep and Bouchard will likely play on stages like this many more times. Halep is the more natural player, but today Bouchard was the better competitor—as well as the bigger one. As Halep said afterward, Bouchard is 5’10”, but she makes herself look even more imposing from across the net.

“Her position on the court makes you to see her more,” Halep said. “Her style is to stay close to the baseline. At the return, she stays very in the court.”

Looking bigger than she is; winning faster than she should be. Bouchard is making the impossible look like just another test to ace.

For complete Wimbledon coverage, including updated draws and reports from Steve Tignor, head to our tournament page.

First Ball In, 7/3: Murray Meltdown Edition

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 15:15:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—There are some days as a sportswriter when you wish you could find every copy of your last column and make a towering bonfire of them in your backyard. I know the feeling, and I imagine Simon Barnes of the Times of London knew it too on Wednesday afternoon after he watched Andy Murray roll over on the grass against Grigor Dimitrov. Judging by what Barnes had written two days earlier, he didn’t see that one coming.

“I’d be inclined," Barnes wrote in his assessment of the Scot's first week, "to say that Murray has been playing a bit like God."

God fell, hard, to the green earth here on Wednesday, and the press was there with cameras poised and pencils sharpened.

*****

The Sun set a reasonable, reserved, not-at-all hyperbolic tone with its two Murray headlines:

THE KING IS DEAD!
British summer officially ended at 3:29 P.M.

WILL I EVER WIN IT AGAIN?
Andy Murray crashed out of Wimbledon and fears he may never regain his title

It was true, he did sound as if he were quaking with fright afterward.

“I just tried to enjoy the experience,” Murray said. “You never know if you’re going to get that opportunity again.”

*****

The Star chimes in with a few subtle variations on the Sun’s themes:

MURRAY’S MELTDOWN
Deposed Wimbledon champion Andy Murray fears he will never win Wimbledon again after crashing out in straight sets to Grigor Dimitrov

LION TURNS INTO PUSSYCAT
Andy Murray’s 360-day reign as King of Wimbledon was brutally ended by Grigor Dimitrov

MURRAY GIVEN A RIGHT ROYAL THUMPING BY DEADLY DIMITROV

*****

The Mirror switches to the other side of the net, to seek Dimitrov’s dispassionate assessment of the situation:

I HAD HIM BEATEN IN THE WARM-UP!
Murray’s performance in front of Wills and Kate was painful to watch but at least the end came quickly

*****

The Mail opts for a couple of suitably complex metaphors, and even lumps Muzzard in with that football team the country has been trying to forget:

SURRENDER!
Murray gives up his crown without a fight

ANDY’S CROWN IS TORN AWAY
Oh, how the greats of GB sport have fallen

The paper gives us a rundown of the reviews of Murray’s performance. If Muzzard were a play, he’d be closed within the hour.

“Andy Murray was poor; his body language looked poor, and he gave up his game too easy.”—John Lloyd

“He looked flat at the start.”—Jimmy Connors

“I’m amazed he got rid of Lendl.”—John McEnroe

*****

The Telegraph is almost at a loss for words over the whole thing:

MURRAY SHOCKS HIS FANS INTO STUNNED SILENCE
Scot meekly surrenders his title in a flurry of errors

*****

The Guardian has a surprisingly moralistic take on the debacle:

MURRAY EXITS SHOUTING AND CURSING
Andy Murray left a few expletives hanging in the air on Centre Court as Grigor Dimitrov dismissed the defending champion in three ragged sets

One of those expletives, as reported by photographers near the court, came in a mysterious, rage-filled sentence that Murray kept chanting toward his players box: “Five minutes before the f***ing match!”

Something, it seems safe to say, angered Murray before he went on court. He talked later about how his quarterfinal had gone on earlier than normal, in part because the match between Simona Halep and Sabine Lisicki ended so quickly.

Most of the papers, though, prefer another explanation: Trouble in paradise. Kim Sears, Murray’s girlfriend, was shown leaving the grounds, all alone and frowning. The Telegraph fanned the flames higher with this bombshell news: “The couple left in separate Wimbledon cars.”

*****

OOP Analysis

Novak Djokovic vs. Grigor Dimitrov

This version of the present vs. the future has met four times before, and the present—i.e., Djokovic—has won three times. Dimitrov’s only victory came on clay in Madrid last year, a loss that Djokovic quickly and thoroughly avenged a few weeks later in Paris.

Where do we stand now? Has the future arrived, or does the present have a little longer to live? My first instinct is to say that Dimitrov isn’t ready to go any farther, and that a semifinal loss to Djokovic is the logical place for this year’s run to end for him. But I said much the same thing before Dimitrov's quarterfinal, and he played as if he were the dominant, experienced, and composed veteran. Grass suits Dimitrov’s slashing game, but Djokovic is unlikely to play as poorly as Murray did against him. The top seed will bend, as he often does, but I’m not ready to say Dimitrov can make him break. Winner: Djokovic

Roger Federer vs. Milos Raonic

This version of the present vs. the future has also met four times, and the present—i.e. Federer—has won them all. But three of those matches have been close. Raonic has pushed all of their best-of-three-setters to a decider; two of them, including one on grass in Halle two years ago, have ended in a final tiebreaker. The Canadian’s serve has been effective against Federer, but Federer’s serve has been effective in this tournament. If the match is close, the surroundings may play their part. Raonic says he can ignore the circumstances, but I don't think he's ready to beat Federer in front of this crowd, on this court, at this stage of Wimbledon. Somewhere deep down, the 23-year-old knows there will be more chances; somewhere deep down, the 32-year-old knows there may not be. Winner: Federer

For complete Wimbledon coverage, including updated draws and reports from Steve Tignor, head to our tournament page.

Photos from Wimbledon: Day 9

Thu, 03 Jul 2014 07:54:00 -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.

With Andy Murray and Roger Federer playing, and Will and Kate watching, it was a day to call and make your friends jealous that you were at Wimbledon.

Sabine Lisicki was on the court, but all cameras were on the Royal Box...

...where the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge were in attendance.

Like last year in the final, Lisicki couldn’t rise to the occasion, or even meet it halfway.

It’s all broken right for Genie Bouchard, who eased into her third straight Grand Slam semi of 2014.

Bouchard has even mastered the fine art of challenging without switching your racquet to your other hand.

Simona Halep readies her attack.

After a slow start, the No. 3 seed made quick work of Lisicki to reach her first Wimbledon semifinal.

So did a dynamic Grigor Dimitrov, who dethroned last year’s Wimbledon king, Andy Murray.

Murray wasn’t happy with his own performance...

...and he didn’t seem to appreciate Dimitrov’s, either.

Which side of his body does Dimitrov play tennis on, anyway?

It wasn’t a good day to be an Andy Murray impersonator.

It wasn't a great day to be a royal in the box, either. The Duke and Duchess were not amused.

Novak Djokovic changed shoes, and changed the course of his match with Marin Cilic for the better.

Instead of sprawling on the grass, Djokovic ran with confidence.

His five-set win inspired a pretty serious forearm clench.

Roger Federer rushed the net to good effect against Stan Wawrinka.

“He moves in Nick Kyrgios ways,” the Fanatics chanted, but they couldn’t pull the 19-year-old through this time.

He lost to Milos Raonic in four sets.

Like fellow young(ish) gun Dimitrov, Raonic will make his Grand Slam semifinal debut on Friday.

Friend and Foe

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 22:19:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND— “I was thinking about it midway through the match, actually,” Roger Federer said. “I was like, ‘Oh, I’m playing Stan’ kind of thing. It hit me midway through the second set.”

Federer was thinking about Stan Wawrinka, of course, his friend and Swiss Davis Cup teammate, as well as the man he would ultimately beat today in their Wimbledon quarterfinal, 3-6, 7-6 (5), 6-4, 6-4.

“It goes in phases,” Federer said, describing what it's like to play a friend in such an important match. “You need some energy to push yourself. You want to win the match. You don’t necessarily want to beat him, but you want to win the match. So that’s the odd part. It plays its role during the match.”

Novak Djokovic described a similar feeling a couple of days ago, and admitted that at times on court he questioned whether he should try to hit a certain shot when he’s facing a friend. It’s a phenomenon that has had its effects on the men’s game in recent years, mostly to the benefit of the top players. Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal have toweringly one-sided records against their countrymen.

Federer was 13-2 against Wawrinka coming into their match today, but he had lost their last meeting, in Monte Carlo, in April. Wawrinka seemed to still be riding the high from that win in the first set. He broke Federer at 2-1 with two bomb backhand winners, and finished it 6-3 with a bullet forehand, his 10th winner of the set. It looked like Wawrinka, who was pumping himself up after every good shot, had more than enough mental energy to push back against his friend.

“He really came out of the blocks unbelievably strong,” Federer said.

But was Wawrinka physically ready to go all the way? He saw the trainer at the start of the third set, and he admitted to having a problem afterward, though he wouldn’t reveal the specifics.

“It was tough to play three days in a row,” said Wawrinka, who had matches postponed because of the rain here, “especially when you played the third against Roger. Cost me a lot of energy at the beginning of the match to play that level....The second set was really, really important. I did a few mistakes in the tiebreak. It’s tough to play him. He was serving really well. Was tough to read his serve.”

Not for the first time at this event, we saw a match determined by the razor-thin margin of a tiebreaker. Two shots made the difference here. When Federer and Wawrinka changed sides at 3-3, it seemed that Stan had the momentum. He had been down 1-3, but Federer had shanked an easy forehand, and Stan had followed with an ace. At 3-3, he moved forward for mid-court forehand. Maybe it was adrenalin, maybe it was nerves, maybe it was his injury, maybe it was just a bad swing, but he sent it well over the baseline. Federer had the mini-break.

A few minutes later, Federer was serving at 6-5. The crowd cheered as he stepped to the line; one of those decisive, someone-must-win moments on grass had arrived. Federer, usually such a clutch server at these times, missed his first one. On the second, he surprised Wawrinka by following it to net and knocking off a high forehand volley for the set. The match was technically tied at one-set all, but in reality Federer, with that surprise sprint forward, had sprinted into the lead. Full flight awaited.

For the better part of the last two sets, Federer danced across the grass. He was controlling the rallies now, running around to hit his forehand deep into Stan’s backhand corner, and running down Wawrinka’s ground strokes, which had lost some of their pop.

“He wasn’t like cranking his serve as much anymore,” Federer said of Stan, “he wasn’t hitting as hard and moving as quick as he was in the first couple.”

It seemed that Federer could have danced all night, except that at some point he had to try to serve out the final set, something that has become an adventure for him. It nearly brought him crashing to earth again. Wawrinka reached break point, and Federer squandered four match points, including one with a horribly-chosen drop shot that landed in the net. Federer tried the serve-and-volley surprise again; it worked once, but not a second time. Finally Federer closed it out with an overhead.

“I was calm,” Federer said. “I was nervous, too, that he would get back in the match. Then you don’t know if all of a sudden the adrenaline gets him back into the match entirely.”

Federer’s stat-line was clean—46 winners, 14 errors, 10 aces, 32 of 45 at net, and no service breaks surrendered over the final three and a half sets. He also negotiated his way past an injured player, never an easy psychological proposition.

“Once he did have a letdown physically,” Federer said, “I was able to capitalize on that, which was important today.”

You can only do so much for a friend, after all.

For complete Wimbledon coverage, including updated draws and reports from Steve Tignor, head to our tournament page.

Wimbledon: Halep d. Lisicki

Wed, 02 Jul 2014 12:40:00 -0400

WIMBLEDON, ENGLAND—Simona Halep had spent most of the last 10 days playing her effortless game on the smaller show courts here. Despite being the No. 3 seed and a French Open finalist last month, the no-drama Romanian had remained the walking definition of “under the radar” at the All England Club.

Today, Halep would be ignored no longer. She took her place on Centre Court against Sabine Lisicki, and as she usually does, she made anyone who appreciates quality tennis sit up and pay attention. After being briefly overpowered by Lisicki and going down 1-4 in the first, Halep proceeded to play and run circles around the bamboozled and increasingly helpless German for the last 11 games. Halep's 6-4, 6-0 win was nothing spectacular on the stat sheet—she hit 16 winners and made 10 errors—but it was comprehensive nonetheless. Halep won 63 points to Lisicki’s 40, and made last year's finalist looks like she was standing still in the process.

Lisicki was the stronger player to start, and she pushed the smaller Halep around early. Serving at 4-2, though, Lisicki opened the door when she missed a series of first serves, giving Halep her first chance to get her teeth into the rallies. Halep made the most of the opportunity, as she jumped on Lisicki’s second serve with her forehand. From there, the flow of the points turned in her favor, and Halep showed off her flowing game at its finest. Jumping for forehands, hitting them in combinations to the corners, changing directions with the ball at will, she looked like she was playing a different sport than Lisicki. At the same time, Sabine went into full crumble mode, unable, it seemed, to control the ball off her strings on any of her shots.

Halep moves on to play her second straight Grand Slam semifinal, and first Wimbledon semifinal, against Genie Bouchard. It’s a promising match between the two fastest-rising women players of 2014. Halep won their only meeting, in three sets, in Indian Wells this past March.

For complete Wimbledon coverage, including updated draws and reports from Steve Tignor, head to our tournament page.