Articles by Steve Tignor

2020 Top Matches, No. 6: Coric saves six match points, stuns Tsitsipas

Fri, 04 Dec 2020 14:22:00 +0000

We're counting down the Top 10 matches of 2020 as part of Tennis Channel's Home for the Holidays. Click here to read each selection.

“It’s just so, so sad,” ESPN’s Cliff Drysdale said in a near whisper, as he watched Borna Coric and Stefanos Tsitsipas stagger toward the net to shake hands in an eerily silent Louis Armstrong Stadium at 1:00 in the morning on the middle Saturday of the US Open.

It’s safe to say that this was the first time a commentator had used those words to describe the conclusion to a thrilling five-set tennis match. Then again, we had never had a year, or a US Open, quite like this one, either.

Normally, a raucous and semi-sozzled New York crowd would have joined Coric and Tsitsipas for their night-session encounter, and would have lived and died with most of the 349 points the two men played. The fans would have applauded their 112 winners. They would have been awed by Tsitsipas’s run of untouchable play through the third and fourth sets. As lovers of underdogs and dramatic reversals, these New Yorkers would have cheered Coric through his beyond-belief comeback from 1-5 down in the fourth set, when he saved six match points. When it was over, the fans would have stood and cheered Coric as he walked off the most unlikely of winners after four hours and 39 minutes. But they also would have stood and cheered both men for the way they maintained their form and fitness through a fifth set that was as tense as it was punch-drunk.

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Instead, Coric and Tsitsipas did it all alone, with a few coaches scattered around the stands and a skeleton crew of officials with them on the court. Up until then, we hadn’t known what it would feel like to stage and watch a Grand Slam event without fans. On this night we found out: The atmosphere Coric and Tsitsipas created for those of us watching on TV was nearly as taut, edgy, and exciting as any other classic US Open night match from years past.

For much of it, the fourth-seeded Tsitsipas was, as expected, the superior player. He was the one who could belt winners from the baseline and dash forward to finish points in the forecourt, while Coric was the road-running retriever who could only rally and defend. Except that somewhere along the way, the roles were reversed. By the end, it was Coric who was powering his shots to the corners, following them in, and closing at the net—he ended up there 63 times to 54 for Tsitsipas. It was Coric who was saving break points in the fifth set with big ground strokes and deft volleys. It was Coric who, at 4-3 and 5-3 in the final-set tiebreaker, came up with a forehand winner and a service winner to seal the win. It was Coric who stole all three sets that he won.

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

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How else could he feel? Tsitsipas had reached match point six times, served for the win twice, and led 5-4, 40-0, triple match point. But he couldn’t connect on the final shot. Each time he went for the kill, he missed. Rather than immediately guzzling all the beer in the house and breaking every stick in his racquet bag, though, Tsitsipas took a moment to laugh.

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

Coric has played and lost his share of matches like this, and it was nice to see him come out of his shell and grab this one. At the time, many of us feared Tsitsipas might struggle to recover from the loss, but he came right back to reach his first semifinal at Roland Garros a month later. As Drysdale said, the end was sad in its way, but the match wasn’t. Together, Coric and Tsitsipas didn’t need anyone else. They gave us that old late-night Open feeling, all by themselves, and helped us forget it was 2020 for a few hours.

After a pandemic-driven boost, how can tennis sustain new popularity?

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 18:34:00 +0000

“We’re not physical, the tennis players,” Roger Federer said with a laugh a few years ago, when he was asked who would win a boxing match between himself and Rafael Nadal. “We don’t like to touch each other.”

Federer didn’t know his joking response would soon become tennis’ most attractive calling card. Perhaps no other sport is better suited for the era of social distancing than tennis. Forget six feet; now that most of us are baseliners, we’re happy to stay 78 feet apart and rally from one end of the court to the other.

By the time lockdowns had ended last year, the word about tennis was out; I wasn’t the only person who noticed that courts were busier. In November, the numbers made it official: racquet sales among first-time players jumped 38 percent from 2019, and participation was up 50 percent from the previous quarter. (On Thursday, in a press release from the USTA, “the Physical Activity Council has reported that participation has increased to 10.08% of the U.S. population playing tennis in Q3 ’20 v 6.75% in Q3 ’19, an increase of 49.33%.”)

There can be no silver lining to a disease that has killed so many, of course, but we should be happy if our sport makes people a little healthier and happier.

“The pandemic has helped us tell tennis’ story,” says USTA CEO Michael Dowse. “Everything that was beneficial about it is more so now: It’s safe, it’s good for socializing, it’s good exercise.”

Key Biscayne

How do we make this surge last? Dowse wants to guarantee there are enough facilities and instructors to handle any influx. Last year the USTA committed funds to try to help as many as possible stay afloat. The organization is also broadening its promotions by encouraging people to participate in any way they can, and not just through its programs.

“We want new players to know there are many ways to enjoy tennis,” Dowse says, “whether it’s at a park, or a USTA league, or through cardio tennis. And that the financial barrier doesn’t have to be high. Sales for racquets under $50 have jumped.” [By an increase of 43.3%, per the USTA press release.]

Veteran players may also have a new appreciation for the sport. I shifted to jogging when courts closed; when I came back to tennis, two things stood out. First, the ball: Chasing it took all of the drudgery out of running, and kept me from thinking, or worrying, about anything else. Second, my playing time: When you do a solo exercise—running, swimming, biking—you don’t need to meet up with anyone.

If you’re like me, that can become an excuse not to do it at all. In tennis, we have a date to keep, and someone we don’t want to disappoint. That by itself is motivating.

As Federer says, we don’t have to make physical contact with our opponents. But tennis gives us something else we need in these cloistered days: Someone to see, and a game for us to play.

Naples Grande

2020 Top Matches, No. 7: Serena edges Venus in surreal Lexington scene

Thu, 03 Dec 2020 05:00:00 +0000

We're counting down the Top 10 matches of 2020 from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11. Click here to read each selection.

“It’s annoying,” Serena Williams said when she saw the draw at the Top Seed Open in Lexington, Ky., in August. It was easy to understand why: She was playing her first tournament since the Australian Open, and here she was slated to face her sister in the second round.

“It feels like I always play Venus,” Serena said.

Indeed: This was the 31st tour-level meeting between the sisters, a number that obviously doesn’t include the thousands of practice matches they’ve played against each other.

At first, Serena-Venus XXXI didn’t look as if it would be remembered as one of their best. The summer heat was oppressive, and neither of them had played a competitive event in eight months due to the pandemic. Watching Venus take a long, slow walk to the bathroom between sets, and Serena work hard to catch her breath, I wondered if, at 40 and 38, they just weren’t going to be able to rise to the occasion this time.

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I should have known better, of course. Instead of wilting in the heat, Venus and Serena only got better as the match went on. It may not have been an enjoyable experience for them to have to play each other in front of maybe a dozen socially-distanced spectators, with a highway visible behind the court, but their love for the game and for competition—neither of which they had been able to experience for months—overrode everything else.

Venus was coming off a win over Victoria Azarenka in her first match back, and she still looked fresh in the opening set against Serena. During the lockdown, Venus had made a few adjustments to her serve, and it showed. After dropping the first two games, Venus blazed through six of the next seven to win the first set.

Whatever an older sister can do, a younger sister has to try try to do better, right? That’s been true for Serena and Venus for much of their careers, and it was true again on this day. In the second set, Serena shrugged off her early sluggishness, matched Venus’ serving efficiency, and found her timing on her return.

The third set continued the same back-and-forth, give-and-take pattern as the first two. Serena jumped out to an early lead; Venus responded by going up 4-2; and then Serena had the final answer. With her back to the wall, she locked in and reeled off the last four games. Most spectacular was the running backhand that she hammered for a winner to break for 5-4. After keeping her emotions bottled up, as she often does when facing her sister, Serena let us know how much this match, and the chance to compete again, meant to her.

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“I’ve lost a few tight sets lately,” Serena said, “so I was telling myself I wanted to win this one and try to focus on those last two games.”

“Having no crowd makes things more relaxing,” she added. “I’ve practiced in louder places than this court.”

She has also played her sister in grander venues than the Top Seed Tennis Club, but this might have been Serena-Venus at its purest. There were few fans, few ranking points, and not a lot of money on the line, and neither woman particularly wanted to face the other. But none of that mattered. What mattered for them, even after two decades on tour, was the fight. Rather than a Grand Slam final, this felt like a hardcore practice session, one where Serena and Venus were slugging it out against each other in the backyard. We were lucky to have a chance to watch.

2020 Top Matches, No. 8: Thiem's "unreal" finish ends Djokovic's year

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 05:23:00 +0000

We're counting down the Top 10 matches of 2020 from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11. Click here to read each selection.

“I thought that after my first big title in New York, maybe I’m going to be a little more calm,” Dominic Thiem said, with what looked like a grin from under his mask. “But that was a mistake, I guess. I was just as tight and nervous as before.”

Thiem’s mistake was understandable. For years people had told him that when he finally won his first Grand Slam title, which he did at the US Open this summer, his confidence would flow, and all of the doubts he had harbored would magically disappear. The only problem was, while Thiem’s Open title was a milestone, it wasn’t quite the career breakthrough he might have hoped for. Yes, he had won a Slam. But he hadn’t beaten any of the Big 3 to do it.

So when Thiem took the court against Djokovic at the O2 Arena in London two months later, those old doubts were still floating around in the back of his head. He had beaten Djokovic on big occasions in the past, but he had lost their Australian Open final earlier in 2020 after being up two sets to one.

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In London, Thiem kept the doubts at bay for most of the first two sets, as he and Djokovic threw ground-stroke haymakers at each other. Thiem fired inside-out forehands and 96-m.p.h. one-handed backhands into the corners. Djokovic ran everything down and parried every attack he could. In 35 games, there was just a single break of serve, by Thiem, which won him the first set.

The intensity of the exchanges rose through the second set, but Thiem again gained the edge in the tiebreaker. Four times he reached match point, but four times he was turned away. Djokovic hit a service winner and a forehand winner to save two of them; Thiem double faulted and shanked a forehand to lose the other two. When he put a backhand into the net to give Djokovic the set a minute later, it looked as if Thiem’s doubts about his ability to beat the Big 3 hadn’t been vanquished, after all.

There was no reason to think any differently at the start of the third-set tiebreaker. When Djokovic went up 4-0, the match appeared to be over; in reality, Thiem was just getting started. Over the next eight points, he came up with his most inspired stretch of play of the afternoon—as a TV commentator put it, he went “ballistic.” Thiem won one point with a brilliant crosscourt forehand winner, won another with an even better backhand crosscourt winner, and closed with a smash.

“What he did from 0-4 in the tiebreaker was just unreal,” Djokovic said. “He just crushed the ball, everything went in from both corners…He just took it away from me.”

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That’s what champions do: They take the racquet out of your hand. And yet Thiem’s breakthrough feeling didn’t last long. The next day, in the final, he lost to Daniil Medvedev after winning the first set.

Despite that disappointment, Thiem can still look back on his semifinal performance for inspiration. He knows now that he’ll always get tight against the Big 3, but he also knows that he can beat them, anyway.

2020 Top Matches, No. 9: Muguruza wins tense Rome battle over Azarenka

Wed, 02 Dec 2020 04:34:00 +0000

We're counting down the Top 10 matches of 2020 from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11. Click here to read each selection.

The ninth-best match of 2020 was a battle of the almosts: Muguruza and Azarenka, former No. 1s and two-time Grand Slam champions, each came a long way this season, only to fall one set short of full redemption. In the Australian Open final, Muguruza won the first set over Sofia Kenin, before the young American turned the rallies around and ran away with the last two. In the US Open final, Azarenka suffered a similar fate: Up a set and a break against Naomi Osaka, she didn’t have the firepower to fend off her younger opponent’s fiercer counter-attack.

Despite those bitter defeats, Muguruza and Azarenka held their heads high during the trophy ceremonies afterward. As well they should: Each spent 2020 reminding us how much the sport has missed their powerful games and steely personalities; each finished back in the Top 15; and each ended up as a contender for WTA Comeback Player of the Year.

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In their only meeting of 2020, the Spaniard and the Belarusian also reminded us that we haven’t seen enough of them across the net from each other. When Azarenka won their first match, in Miami in 2016, in two tiebreakers, it seemed like the start of a rivalry that would be hotly contested for years to come. But their next two matches both ended with a retirement. Finally, this fall, we had a chance to see them go toe-to-toe through three tense sets, and to do it in one of the sport’s great venues, Pietrangeli stadium at the Foro Italico in Rome. In this case, the lack of fans was tolerable, because it gave us a chance to see that amphitheater in its white-marble glory.

Muguruza-Azarenka lived up to its setting. While it wasn’t the most beautiful or most brilliantly played match of 2020, it was among the toughest back-and-forth fights. From the start, each player challenged the other on serve. That wasn’t surprising, considering that they both have strong returns and sporadically shaky serves. In the opening set, Azarenka used her superior speed to range behind the baseline, brought Muguruza forward with her drop shot, and closed it out with a smash and a service winner.

In recent years, Muguruza might not have been resilient enough to rebound after a set like that. When she twice went down a break early in the second, it looked like that might be the case again. But service breaks didn’t turn out to be a problem on this day; there were seven of them in the nine-game second set alone. What mattered more was the return, and by now Muguruza was locked in on hers, as well as on her forehand and her smash, which she needed to finish the increasingly long, up-and-back rallies. After four deuces, Muguruza hung onto her serve at 5-3 and leveled the match.

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The third set saw both players raise their levels, even as the momentum continued to see-saw between them. Muguruza went up 3-1, before Azarenka bounced back to lead 4-3, and earn a break point for 5-3. Again, Muguruza proved resilient. She snapped off a backhand winner to save break point, and hit two service winners to hold for 4-4. From there, the momentum swung to her side for good.

“I knew it was going to be a tough battle,” Muguruza said. “I was ready for it. I stood behind her and waiting for my opportunities. She was playing great at the beginning. She took the first set. I kept myself together and said, ‘Okay, let's start another battle in the second set.’”

Let’s hope Muguruza and Azarenka continue to battle this way in 2021, and that we see them face off a few more times. They’re too good to come up just short forever.

2020 Top Matches, No. 10: Federer saves 7 match points, beats Sandgren

Mon, 30 Nov 2020 05:12:00 +0000

We're counting down the Top 10 matches of 2020 from Nov. 30 through Dec. 11. Click here to read each selection.

I know what you’re thinking: “This match happened in 2020?”

Yes, Roger Federer’s Houdini-like run to the semifinals at the Australian Open happened this year. Like everything else that took place before the pandemic lockdowns, it feels as if it comes from a different era. And it does—the 15,000 fans packed into Rod Laver Arena to cheer on the Maestro’s miraculous comeback over Tennys Sandgren prove it. This match is from that bygone era when crowds could gather freely, and no social distancing was required. Who knew that it would soon be a thing of the past?

But Federer’s run, and in particular this final leg of it, shouldn’t be forgotten. It was this era’s equivalent of Jimmy Connors’ much-more-celebrated ride to the semifinals at the 1991 US Open. Federer, like Connors, was 38. And like Connors, he had to stage multiple head-spinning comebacks to make it to the semis. Of course, Federer didn’t add quite as many flourishes as Jimbo: there were no pelvic thrusts, no fists raised high, no fingers pointed toward the four sides of the stadium, no telling the world, “This is what they paid for.” And unlike Connors, Federer’s achievement didn’t land him on the cover of Sports Illustrated. Which is only to Federer’s credit, of course: Even at 38, we still expected him to go deep at the Slams.

In Australia, Federer exceeded our expectations. In the third round, he pulled off his first Melbourne Miracle: Down 4-8 in the 10-point, fifth-set tiebreaker against John Millman, Federer reeled off the last six points of the match. He did it with a subtle tactical shift. After watching Millman hit two straight running forehand passes, Federer didn’t let him have a chance at another. Instead, he went to the drop shot, moved Millman around, and dared him to beat him from the baseline. The Aussie couldn’t do it.

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Then there was the Sandgren match, the Melbourne Miracle II, which was even harder to fathom than the Millman win. By the start of the fourth set, Federer was down two sets to one, his back appeared to be ailing him, his first-serve speed had dropped into the 90s, he had been warned for an audible obscenity, and his opponent was rifling winners past him and breaking his serve virtually at will. Federer’s box of supporters didn’t look nervous; they looked glum, as if they knew the end was nigh.

The end was indeed nigh, but it never actually arrived. Sandgren reached match point seven times; seven times Federer fought him off. He didn’t save these match points the way he usually does, with unreturnable first serves. He escaped much the same way he had escaped Millman: By keeping the ball in play and forcing Sandgren to finish it.

Until that point, the American, ranked No. 100 in the world at the time, had been swinging freely and creating winners from all angles and locations. Sandgren would finish with 27 aces and 73 winners, to just 44 from Federer. But Sandgren’s final swing didn’t come as freely. Instead of pulling the trigger on his match points, he mostly rallied. On a different day, this might not have been a bad strategy; Federer doesn’t usually win by out-steadying his opponents. Except that this time, with the match on the line, he did. Bad back or not, Federer didn’t miss, and eventually Sandgren did. The one time Sandgren made it to the net, Federer didn’t miss his passing shot, either.

“I feel a bit bad in a way because I didn’t feel like he did anything really wrong,” Federer said. “It’s just luck at some point. I’ve been on the other side, as well.”

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Sandgren managed to find some humor in defeat afterward, tweeting, “What’s the rule here folks, a double shot for each match point you didn’t convert?”

"These ones just sting, and they hurt,” Federer said. “I could have blinked at the wrong time and shanked. That would have been it.”

But Federer didn’t blink, and he didn’t shank, and that wasn’t it. His 2020 Aussie Open—part Houdini, part Jimbo—continued into the semifinals, where he lost to Novak Djokovic.

Federer wouldn’t say it, but it was still true: This was what his fans had paid for; this was what they wanted. Now the question is: Will the Maestro wave his wand long enough for them to gather and watch him do it in person again?

Talking a good game: Commentators are more essential than ever

Thu, 26 Nov 2020 14:17:00 +0000

With attendance limited, tennis commentators are more essential than ever. But how much do you know about the people speaking through your screens, and how they do their jobs?

Commentators are our guides to the game, the soundtracks to our tennis-viewing lives. Their voices fill our ears every day. So it’s hardly a surprise that fans love to discuss their relative merits. But while we’re familiar with many of them from their playing days, what have they learned about the sport up in the booth?

“The story of a match isn’t obvious, the framing isn’t automatic,” says Ken Solomon, CEO of Tennis Channel. “It comes from the minds of the commentators, from former players with unique perspectives. They’re calling history as it’s happening.”

How do these former players see their craft? We’ve convened a roundtable of U.S. commentators—Tracy Austin, Brad Gilbert, Jimmy Arias, Leif Shiras, Pam Shriver, Chanda Rubin and Mark Knowles —to give us a glimpse into life on the other side of the screen.

Brett Haber, Paul Annacone, Jimmy Arias bring coaching and playing experience to the booth

How did you make the transition from player to commentator?

Leif Shiras (Tennis Channel): When I was a player, I filled in at the clay-court event in Stowe, Vt. I think availability was my strongest suit, because I usually lost early (laughs). I had long blond hair, so maybe I looked like a star, even though I wasn’t one. I was lucky enough to start working with Barry MacKay, who became my mentor. Later, in 2003, I got in on the ground floor at Tennis Channel, and I’ve been learning from all the champions I work with there ever since.

Jimmy Arias (Tennis Channel): After I retired, I started a junior academy, but I hated it. It was a disaster for my sanity. So I disbanded it and basically did nothing. One day I was at IMG’s offices and saw Jim Nagelsen, brother-in-law of Mark McCormack, who ran the company. He asked what I was doing, and I said, ‘Nothing!’ Then he asked, ‘Do you want to do TV?’ and I said, ‘Sure!’ A few days later I got an offer to commentate for ESPN International. I was nervous, and self-conscious about having a nasally Buffalo accent, so I lowered my voice a little. Early on, a producer said I sounded ‘flat.’ Personally, I thought I was rocking it, but then I listened to myself. She was right, I was flat. It took me awhile to really let go.

Pam Shriver (ESPN): When I was 19, I was asked to commentate at a Tournament of Champions event for CBS. There weren’t many female announcers then, and the big story at the time was the Billie Jean King-Marilyn Barnett palimony suit. So here I am at 19, and the first question I’m asked on TV is about that story—wow! After that, though, it came naturally. I learned from Don Candy, my coach when I was young. Sitting next to him was like sitting next to an analyst every day.

Tracy Austin (Tennis Channel): I was the second seed at Wimbledon in 1983, but I had to pull out with a stress fracture. NBC asked if I wanted to try commentary, and I said, ‘Sure, let’s do this.’ I’d always loved breaking the game down. I didn’t have a big serve, so I needed to think my way through matches. I love it as much in the booth today as I did on the court 40 years ago. I’m still addicted to the sport and its nuances.

From interviews with players to tracking down developing stories, tennis commentary is an all-encompassing job

As a player, did you ever listen to what commentators said about you?

Brad Gilbert (ESPN): People forget how much less tennis was on television 30 years ago. Most players were lucky to get on TV at all. I watched videos of my matches, and I never worried about the commentators’ opinions. That’s the great thing about sports—you just disagree.

Arias: I knew there were some guys who thought I was good, and others who didn’t think so. At the time, I think a lot of people wondered about my game, because I had a different style, and I wasn’t the biggest guy. But I don’t think anyone likes to be criticized. In tennis, it’s all directed at you.

Shriver: I wasn’t overly sensitive, but there weren’t matches on 24/7 back then. I don’t think a tape of my ’78 US Open final against Martina [Navratilova] even exists. Every so often, though, I’ll sit down and watch some of my win over [Steffi] Graf at the WTA Championships in ’88. I get a little narcissistic.

Chanda Rubin (Tennis Channel): It wasn’t a problem for me, because I always hated watching myself. I usually had a good idea of how I was playing, and what I wanted to do, anyway.

Gilbert with John Isner (Getty Images)

What do you try to convey to viewers?

Arias: As a kid, I was sure I was going to be the No. 1 player in the world. Then, at a certain point, I didn’t want it anymore. So I feel like I can relate to the confidence and doubts of players. The only way I can do the job is just to say what I think. I’ve tried to memorize things beforehand, and I was terrible. Every player makes mistakes and chokes, and it’s important to point it out. It’s what viewers expect. Sometimes a player’s coach might ask me, “Why are you so negative?” Usually, though, the players like me after I meet them.

Rubin: Playing and analyzing are opposite skills in some ways; in the booth, your job is to say what you think, and a player’s goal is to think as little as possible. I know I did some boneheaded things as a player, so I try to come in with that perspective, that no one is perfect. I’m always looking for a way to say what’s not obvious, to give a different perspective. But when it’s Day 13 at Roland Garros, what else can you say about Rafael Nadal except, ‘Hey, he’s great on clay?’

Mark Knowles (Tennis Channel): I come at it from the player’s perspective; I think that’s where I can be most valuable. Rather than criticize, I want to respect what the performers do, and give an idea of what happens when you face adversity. There’s so much more going on than just analyzing forehands and backhands.

Austin: The fun part of tennis is that it’s this tug of war on more than one level. It’s our job to point out all the tactics taking place, but also to talk about the emotional side of the sport. You really want people to understand how much is happening out there. Once you see tennis as a chess match, you’re hooked.

Shriver: From courtside, you can understand a match in a way you can’t in the booth. You see the players’ expressions and feel what they’re feeling. And you have an opportunity to bring the audience inside. Uncle Toni [Nadal], David Witt [Venus Williams’ former coach]: they never said no to talking to me, and never sugarcoated anything—tennis broadcasts need more of that access. You can have fun down there, too. I’ll never forget getting [opera singer] Placido Domingo to sing a few notes for us at the US Open.

Steve Weissman and Rubin during a match

What do you think of today’s game?

Gilbert: I love it. I like the slower courts, because I like rallies. From the television side, I’d like to see more innovation. On-court coaching is a no-brainer. The viewer gets a different perspective, and it helps makes matches more competitive. What I want, and I think fans do too, are good matches. On-court coaching would give us more of them.

Shiras: I can’t believe how well everyone hits the ball now. But I do think players miss chances for all-court tennis, to use the forecourt, to play with variety. There’s this singular baseline style now, which can make their jobs harder than they need to be.

Arias: Everyone hits and moves great. When I played, we all had strengths and weaknesses, and we tried to exploit them. Now the weaknesses aren’t as obvious, but I still think players could do a better job of going after them. If I’m playing Nadal, I’m swinging my serve to his backhand in the deuce court and coming in. Most players are fed the same game at academies, and it works, but there’s a lack of flexibility to it.

A Hall-of-Famer, Shriver tries to give fans as much access to the sport and its personalities as she can (Getty Images)

What have you learned from your time in the booth?

Shriver: I understand the importance of the mental game more. After you’ve called match after match, you can predict that it’s the mentally stronger player who’s going to win. I think being a parent helps [Shriver has two sons and a daughter in their teens]. People watch Nick Kyrgios act out and say, ‘That should never happen.’ It’s familiar to me, though; his impulses are those of a young male brain. Having diversity in tennis also means having diversity of personality.

Austin: Tennis players are used to doing things by ourselves, but you always have a partner in the booth; it’s like doubles. I work for Tennis Channel and the BBC at Wimbledon, and I might have six different partners during a tournament. You need to be a chameleon; you need some variation in your game. But that keeps it fresh.

Gilbert: You can’t just rock up and start talking. You put in long days, 12 to 14 hours. But I hope I’m still doing this when I’m 90, because it feels like a dream to be courtside for the epics: Those times when both guys are cracking the ball, and you’ve got sweaty palms because you don’t know what’s going to happen.

Shiras: I’ve learned so much working with legends like Jimmy Connors and Martina. These are people with master’s degrees in tennis competition; there’s so much detail in what they see in each point. I still feel lucky after 20 years to be doing what I’m doing. Once the light in the booth goes on, and the first toss is in the air, things always get interesting.

You really want people to understand how much is happening out there

David Dinkins was a New York City mayor, and a tennis superfan

Tue, 24 Nov 2020 15:17:00 +0000

On Monday night, former New York City mayor and staunch tennis supporter David Dinkins died at 93. Besides his significant involvement with the US Open—he helped broker a 99-year lease of land in Queens between NYC and the USTA—he founded the David Dinkins Tennis Club at "The Jungle," a set of tennis courts off Harlem River Drive.

All photos from Anita Aguilar

The courts, which are featured in the below story from 2015, enriched a community through tennis, and continue to leave a positive impact to this day—just as Dinkins' legacy will do for generations to come.

The sun has just begun to rise over the East River in New York City on a summer Saturday morning, but activity is already well underway inside the Frederick Johnson Playground.

Children, who can feel the humidity building on this July day, dash happily through the spray from a water fountain, while their parents watch from whatever precious piece of bench they can snag in the shade.

But there’s no sitting, and no slowing down, on the eight red-and-green tennis courts just behind them. In one corner, two men go at it hammer and tongs in an all-court battle; the sound of their sneakers scraping the asphalt surface carries through the air. On another court, a middle-aged man and woman pound ball after ball in rallies that seem to stretch for minutes. “Some people are afraid of the heat,” the man says with a scoffing laugh as he takes a cut at a forehand.

In another corner, though, preparations are still being made for play. That’s where Gerry Weekes pushes hard at a broom, sweeping away the last of the leaves and acorns that fall from the surrounding trees. “You want to play, you grab a broom,” Weekes says with a smile. This is the do-it-yourself maintenance ethos of the urban tennis warrior.

Weekes, a Vietnam veteran and member of the tennis team at Bronx Community College in the 1970s, is happy to point out both the blessings and drawbacks of the courts he now calls home five days a week. He shakes his head as he points to a net with a missing crank, and another that sags in the middle. But he brightens as he pushes his foot down and feels the court give way. When the facility was resurfaced a few years ago, a little bit of cushion was added to half of the courts.

“It’s good for the joints on us old-timers,” Weekes says with a smile.

The courts at The Jungle (Photos by Anita Aguilar)

Welcome to The Jungle.

This is the affectionate nickname for the Frederick Johnson courts, which are tucked into a corner of northeast Manhattan across the river from Yankee Stadium. According to local lore, there was once a private tennis facility in the area and when it rained, its clay courts would stay wet longer than the ones in this park, so the members would say, “Let’s go down to the asphalt jungle.”

Half a century later, the spot still lives up to its billing. The playground is bounded by a busy thoroughfare, Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, to the west, and an even busier thoroughfare, the Harlem River Drive, to the east. In between, though, you’ll find a tree-lined tennis oasis, where the sound of traffic gives way to the sound of racquets meeting balls. The complex got its official name in 1971, when it was dedicated to Johnson, a one-armed teaching pro who discovered a young girl named Althea Gibson roaming the streets of Harlem and put a tennis racquet in her hand.

More than half a century after that transformative moment, the sport is still played here from early morning until late at night. This is the rare New York City public facility with lights.

“There probably aren’t quite as many people playing here as there were way back,” Weekes says. As in the rest of the U.S., tennis had its heyday in Harlem in the days of Chrissie, Jimbo, Ashe and Johnny Mac. “In the ’70s, it was full all day, every day. But it’s still a good crowd out here now.”

The playground, which features eight tennis courts, are named after local hero Frederick Johnson, a one-armed teaching pro who gave Althea Gibson her first lesson in 1941 and nurtured a thriving tennis community in Harlem. (Anita Aguilar)

With higher temperatures in the forecast today, that crowd is out early. One of its regular members, Aubrey Smith, a business consultant, takes a break in the shade and explains the Jungle’s appeal.

“This place is the Mecca,” Smith says. “People come out here and play in the snow.”

Smith took up the game a few years ago after a friend died from a heart attack, motivating him to get in shape. But he fell in love with the sport for another reason. “Everything in New York is in your face,” Smith says. “Tennis is subtle, you need someone to bring you on. This place has its elder statesmen, guys who have been here forever who introduce you to the sport, tell you about the great Harlem players. They teach you that tennis is about learning how to comport yourself.”

“The game entices you here,” he adds. So far it has worked well for Smith, who says he has dropped from 250 pounds to about 200 since he picked up a racquet.

For one of The Jungle’s elder statesmen, Reggie Satterfield, tennis is about maintaining his good health as he enters his 70s.

“I used to play 24/7, but now I just hit to stay in shape,” Satterfield says. A transplant to Harlem from Virginia who played on the tennis team at Howard University before going into banking, he claims his days of serious competition are behind him. “I don’t think I can play that modern game, hitting back and forth from the baseline. I miss the serve and volley, drop shots and lobs that we had in the past.”

Smith and Satterfield agree that a big part of what makes The Jungle special is its association with tennis’ past and present. Six years ago, another revered name in the African-American tennis community, David Dinkins, put his own stamp on these courts. With his friend and frequent tennis partner Sam Penceal, the former New York City mayor formed the David Dinkins Tennis Club at The Jungle. Courts were dedicated to legendary African-American tennis players, while Penceal and his wife, Bernadette, began a free family program on summer weekends.

“Family,” as anyone can see from watching Penceal run his Saturday morning clinic on these courts, is the operative word. He doesn’t just teach the neighborhood’s kids, he teaches their mothers and fathers as well. Penceal insists that parents participate in his program.

“The experience is more beneficial all around,” Penceal says. “I want to teach the parents to hit the ball to their kids. If tennis is an activity they can do together, they’ll stay with it longer. And I also want parents to learn to have appropriate expectations for how good their kids might be at a certain age. They should know this game isn’t easy.”

So while Penceal, a charismatic former middle-school principal with a big and easy laugh, demonstrates to the children how to follow through on a forehand and sidestep across the baseline, it’s the children’s parents who serve as their hitting partners. Since Penceal and his wife launched the program, interest in it has only grown in the community.

“Families here need to have things they can do together,” Penceal says. “When children and parents get involved in tennis, it’s a magical experience.”

Grandparents, too. “It’s a beautiful thing, everyone comes together,” says Lawrence Cummings, a local resident whose daughter and 5-year-old grandson are regulars in Penceal’s program. “The parents develop their own skills, and the learning goes back and forth. It has planted a seed with our family; you can see their knowledge and ability grow each week.”

On this day, Penceal wears a blue T-shirt with Dinkins’ name emblazoned across the front. The two played together on courts around the city for decades, but in recent years the former mayor, who is now 88, has finally had to give up his four-day-a-week tennis habit. Still, sitting in his office at Columbia University, surrounded by a lifetime’s worth of tennis photos and memories, Dinkins remains proud of what he and Penceal have accomplished in Harlem, and what African-Americans have achieved in tennis since Gibson, another friend of his, integrated the game at Forest Hills in 1950.

“Sam had no backhand until he played me,” Dinkins jokes of their doubles matches, “but we hit every ball to his backhand, so he has a good one now.

The late David Dinkins. (Anita Aguilar)

“I’ve been involved with The Jungle for many years,” Dinkins continues, recounting how he helped get lights installed there when he was Manhattan borough president in 1986. “A lot of great players have played in that space. Sydney Llewellyn, who was Althea’s husband, was the pro there, and when you beat someone on those courts, you used to brag, ‘I sent him to Sydney!’ But there was no one who was more fun to watch a match with than Sydney. You learned something on every point.”

Dinkins, who didn’t take his first lesson until he was nearly 40, got his start in tennis as what we would now call a super fan.

“There was a tournament at a black country club in New Jersey called Shady Rest each year,” Dinkins remembers, “and I would get a player’s badge and walk around and meet all the players. I was a big fan of Arthur [Ashe].”

It was in his role as a relentless booster for the game that Dinkins has had his biggest effect on tennis. Many fans who have been to the US Open since 1990 still thank the mayor for helping to reroute the jets that once roared out of LaGuardia airport and straight over Flushing Meadows. But Dinkins may be most proud of the many years he spent as a USTA board member, and what he was able to accomplish there.

“My greatest interest and concern was that people playing tennis look like this country,” Dinkins says. “I was there when we named the tennis center for Billie Jean [King]. It was my experience that merely being in the room and having a seat at the table alters things.”

Dinkins at his desk, surrounded by photos of his time in tennis. (Anita Aguilar)

Along those lines, Dinkins is happy to see the USTA elect its first African-American president last year. He was even more pleased that the woman with a seat at that table is his friend Katrina Adams.

“She’s like my daughter,” says Dinkins, whose face brightens at the mention of Adams’ name. “I’m not surprised she is where she is now; she can do everything.”

Dinkins, who says his son, David Jr., “is even worse than me” when it comes to his tennis addiction, understands the value of making tennis a family affair, and understands how important Penceal’s program is in Harlem.

“Through tennis,” Dinkins says as he picks up a photo of Ashe and his daughter, Camera, “hundreds of thousands of youngsters become better people.”

It’s nearly noon at the The Jungle, and a few of those youngsters are on their way home, racquets in their hands and parents by their sides. Penceal, as he watches them go, sees progress.

“I started this because I felt that too many of our juniors weren’t getting good tennis instruction when they started,” says Penceal, whose program has received grant money from the USTA. “And that hampers them later. It was slow getting started, but now I hear kids say they can’t wait to get here on Saturday. I even hear parents say that, and that’s what we need.”

As the heat reaches the 90s, the action on the other courts at the Johnson Playground also begins to slow down. Making their exit are Weekes and his tennis partner for the day, Lisa Marroni. Once they had brushed the court clean, they enjoyed a long morning hit. Marroni is a lawyer who regularly travels north from her midtown Manhattan apartment to play with Weekes; when they’re done, he walks her to a nearby subway station.

“It’s that feeling when you hit a good shot,” Marroni says when describing what she loves most about tennis. “It’s a moment of timelessness.”

It’s a moment that tennis players everywhere understand. If you know the feeling, and if you love tennis—and if you can sweep a court and crank up a net now and then—you’re welcome in The Jungle.

Medvedev's London sweep portends an interesting future in men's tennis

Mon, 23 Nov 2020 00:01:00 +0000

“If you’re Dominic Thiem,” ESPN’s Brad Gilbert said near the end of the championship match at the Nitto ATP Finals on Sunday, “you’re scratching your head, thinking, ‘What’s this guy going to do next?’”

“This guy” was Daniil Medvedev, and Gilbert was right: Over the course of his 4-6, 7-6 (2), 6-4 win over Thiem, the Russian pulled out every club in his bag, tried every trick in his book, and fired every weapon in his considerable arsenal. You can name the cliché, but over the course of this match, and over the course of his 5-0 run in London, Medvedev gave us a glimpse of the tactical acuity and competitive grit that rocketed him up the rankings last year, and made many of us believe that he’s a future No 1.

What had looked like something of a lost, sophomore-slump, adjust-to-the-spotlight type of season has now ended up with Medvedev winning his biggest title, and beating the Top 3 players in the world—Thiem, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal—to do it. No one has done that at an ATP event since David Nalbandian beat Nadal, Djokovic, and Roger Federer in Madrid in 2007, and no one has ever done it at the tour's season-ending championships.

“What a match, one of my best victories, two hours and 42 minutes, three sets, against an amazing player,” Medvedev said.

Medvedev failed to convert any of his fist nine break points, but he eventual broke Thiem, and broke through in London. (Getty Images)

Medvedev needed all three sets, and all two hours and 42 minutes, to make it happen; this win was a process. It’s rare that a player has enough options that he can spend two sets trying out different things until something clicks, but that’s what Medvedev did on Sunday.

He began fairly conventionally, looking to attack with his forehand. When he couldn’t break down Thiem’s defenses, Medvedev tried getting into a slice war with him; instead of driving his backhand, he chipped it low and dropped it short. Again, Thiem had the answers, especially on break points—he saved the first nine that he faced, and wasn’t broken until the third set. Whatever Medvedev threw at him, Thiem seemed capable of ripping a 100-m.p.h. ball off of it.

But for the second straight day, when all looked lost, Medvedev pulled himself out of the fire. On Saturday, he broke Nadal when Rafa served for the match. Against Thiem, Medvedev, facing a break point at 3-3 in the second set, saved himself with stab forehand volley. Then, in the tiebreaker, after falling behind 0-2, he reeled off seven straight points.

Medvedev did it by playing more resourceful and flexible tennis than Thiem. At 0-2, he snuck forward and won a point at the net. At 3-2, seeing that Thiem was almost exclusively chipping his backhand, Medvedev charged in behind his return to that side, and forced Thiem to try to come up with a chip pass, which he couldn’t do. At 5-2, Medvedev served and volleyed and forced a forehand error from Thiem. At set point, he hit an ace.

In the third set, Medvedev stayed one shot, and thought, ahead of Thiem. He broke serve at 2-2 by sneaking forward during a rally again, and winning another point at the net. He held for 4-2 by serving and volleying—and then hanging on for dear life as Thiem missed the easiest of passing shots.

At 4-3, Medvedev followed his serve to the net, only to sprint back to the baseline and win the point from there. And at 5-4, he closed out the match and the title with four service winners. He was 14 for 16 on first-serve points in the final set.

“I always said before this tournament that it would be an amazing story if, here in London, where the tournament was for 12 years, that the first champion would be Russian and the last champion would be Russian, too,” Medvedev said, referring to Nikolay Davydenko’s win at the O2 in 2009.

If Medvedev showed the uses of tactical thinking in tennis, Thiem showed its limitations. For most of two sets, his decision to use the slice backhand looked like a brilliant one. He was able to frustrate Medvedev with his soft defensive shots from that side, before turning around and winning rallies with blistering offensive forehands. If Thiem had gone on to win the match—and he was just one stab volley away—we might be talking now about how much his game has matured, how he’s made himself into a complete player, how he’s ready to challenge the Big 3 in 2021.

But in the end, the slice backhand backfired. Thiem grew so acclimated to it that he couldn’t easily switch back and start driving it again when he needed to. Medvedev challenged him to hit passing shots from that side, and Thiem couldn’t do with his slice. Only at the end, when he was trailing, did Thiem let his topspin backhand fly again, but it was too late.

Last year, Stefanos Tsitsipas nipped Thiem at the wire in the final in London; this time it was Medvedev who found a way to blunt his super-sonic attack. Thiem will still enter 2021 as the most likely player to win a major not named Djokovic or Nadal, but for now Medvedev is the man of the moment. Winning at the O2 obviously doesn’t mean you’re destined for bigger things in the new year: The last three champions were Grigor Dimitrov, Alexander Zverev and Tsitsipas, none of whom owns a major title.

While we can’t say that Medvedev is going to be the best player of the near future, it’s safe to say that he’s going to be the most interesting. Sometimes, watching players bash winners from both sides, you start to think there can be nothing new under the tennis sun—what can stand up to blistering power? Medvedev can, with his blend of variety and consistency; his sudden dashes from the baseline to the net, and then from the net back to the baseline; his crazy-legged speed, and his no-fuss service motion.

Medvedev might not revolutionize tennis, but he’ll add to its possibilities. It’s going to be fun scratching our heads and wondering, “What’s this guy going to do next?”

'Game manager' Djokovic rises when needed to beat Zverev at ATP Finals

Fri, 20 Nov 2020 17:27:00 +0000

“I managed to serve well in the important moments,” Novak Djokovic said after his 6-3, 7-6 (4) win over Alexander Zverev at the Nitto ATP Finals on Friday. “Contrary to the previous match against Daniil [Medvedev], I just managed to find the right shots at the right times.”

What did Djokovic’s two assertions have in common? The word “managed.” And that’s the word that came to my mind as the world No. 1 threaded—carefully, gingerly, cautiously—his way past Zverev down the stretch of their round-robin meeting. In the second set, Zverev hit far more winners; at one point, the count was 22 to three. He controlled most of the rallies. He pushed Djokovic to 30-30 on his serve four times. He had an early mini-break in the tiebreaker. He seemed to be all over Djokovic for most of the set. Yet he ended up losing it.

“Game manager” is a term used in American football to describe a quarterback who doesn’t do anything spectacular, but who knows how to control the flow of play just enough to get his team off the field with a victory. The phrase is generally considered an insult, one reserved for steady, unathletic QBs. In tennis, though, being a game manager means doing something that every champion must know how to do: Win without your best.

Djokovic didn’t start this match in management mode. After failing to find his A-game in his straight-set defeat to Medvedev on Wednesday, he came out hitting crisply and with purpose today, and won 12 of the first 14 points to go up 3-0. This was a win-or-go-home match, with a berth in the semifinals on the line, and Djokovic looked up to that task. But as Zverev settled in, and began to mount a counterattack in the second set, Djokovic retreated. Some of the crispness and pace went out of his shots, and he spent much of the second set on the defensive.

Yet Djokovic always had something extra up his sleeve, some way to stave off a service break. Whenever Zverev got to 30-30 on Djokovic’s serve, Djokovic invariably came up with a service winner, or a strong forehand, or a smart drop shot. It was just enough to keep Zverev, who looked ready to take over the match at any moment, in check.

And then, in the tiebreaker, Djokovic went one better. Down 0-2, and with Zverev charging forward to try to make it 3-0, Djokovic curled a backhand passing shot just out of the German’s reach. Up 4-3 a few minutes later, Djokovic hit an even sharper backhand pass for a winner, and then closed it out on his first match point with one of his best inside-in forehands of the day.

“I read his approach,” Djokovic said of the winning pass at 4-3, “and served well when I needed to.”

With the win, Djokovic advances to the semifinals, where he’ll try to avenge his close defeat to Dominic Thiem in last year's round-robin stage, and try to tie Roger Federer with his sixth ATP Finals title. After an up-and-down 2020, Djokovic has managed to put himself in position to finish it on a high note.

Nadal eliminates reigning ATP Finals champ Tsitsipas; Medvedev awaits

Thu, 19 Nov 2020 23:54:00 +0000

Of all the nuggets of advice that Rafael Nadal received from his uncle and first coach, Toni Nadal, the one that has served him best over the years may have been this: After you lose a set, dig in harder and do whatever it takes to break your opponent in his opening service game of the next set. The other guy is bound to have a slight dip in concentration; if you can take advantage of it, you’ll stop his momentum cold, and restart yours.

That’s just what happened at the start of the third set in Nadal’s 6-4, 4-6, 6-2 win over Stefanos Tsitsipas at the Nitto ATP Finals on Thursday. And it’s ultimately what catapulted him to victory.

Nadal had been the better player for nearly the entirety of the first two sets. In his first nine service games, he didn’t face a break point, and he constantly put pressure on Tsitsipas’s serve; he always seemed to be one winner away from breaking the match open. But at 4-5 in the second, Nadal stumbled just enough to hand Tsitsipas his first break point, and then handed him the set with his only double fault of the night. For many players, this unexpected disaster would have lingered well into the next set. But not with Rafa.

Getty Images

In the opening game of the third, he came up with a highlight-reel forehand pass that seemed to stun Tsitsipas. The Greek proceeded to make three errors—there was that dip in concentration Uncle Toni talked about—and was broken. Granted, that game didn’t decide the match; the two players traded breaks in the next two games. But Nadal had put the second-set disappointment behind him, and his confidence gradually rose as the third set progressed.

Overall, this was about as well as Nadal can play indoors. He used his serve to win free points and set up his forehand. He took his ground strokes as close to the baseline as he could, and moved into the net whenever he had a chance. He won points the way he usually wins them up there, with deft angles, drop volleys, and thunderous, no-hesitation overheads. He kept the ball high to Tsitsipas’s one-handed backhand, and low to his topspin forehand, as often as he could. When he wasn’t moving Tsitsipas along the baseline with his offense, Rafa was forcing him to aim close to the lines, and eventually to miss those lines, with his defense.

The win advances Nadal to the semifinals at this event for the sixth time, and first since 2015. In the same way that he gradually adjusted to the colder conditions and heavier balls at Roland Garros this year, Nadal has adjusted his game to the low-bouncing indoor court in London this week. It has never served him well in the past; this is the one significant title in tennis he hasn’t won. Can he change that this weekend? It won’t be easy: He’ll face Daniil Medvedev in the semis, and possibly Novak Djokovic in the final. But judging by the way he played today, Rafa has done everything he could to give himself a chance.

The Long and Short of It: Debating best-of-three sets vs. best-of-five

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 05:00:00 +0000

"I mean, winning Grand Slam, playing best-of-three demand to the player something else, no? Stronger mentally, stronger physically, be solid for such a long time and for such a long two weeks. So I really believe that's the right thing to do."—Rafael Nadal, on Sunday

"I am more of a proponent of best-of-three sets everywhere. You asked me why. I just feel that we have enough tournaments, enough matches during the year. We have the longest season of all sports, any sport in the world. Tennis has the longest season from January 1 to end of November. Literally every single week you have tournament somewhere."—Novak Djokovic, on Monday

"I think majors should stay best-of-five. It's tradition. It's the way it always was, and it makes it very special."—Dominic Thiem, on Tuesday

The debate over playing best-of-three-set or best-of-five-set tennis on the men's side at the Slams hasn't just not gone away—it may have only intensified since Steve Tignor's deep dive into the subject last June. Published just a few weeks before Djokovic and Roger Federer would play to a 13-12 fifth-set tiebreaker at Wimbledon, this feature expands upon many of the reasons these three ATP Finals participants and major champions used to back up their opinions.

Read on, then vote on Twitter, if you're up for another contentious election.—Ed McGrogan, on Wednesday

Rafael Nadal’s run to last year’s US Open semifinals was many things: thrilling, exhausting, seemingly endless and sadly anti-climactic.

The Spaniard survived hard-fought four-set matches in the third and fourth rounds, then survived an even harder-fought five-setter against Dominic Thiem in the quarterfinals—a gruelingly brilliant contest that ended after 2:00 A.M. and was immediately lauded as one of the greatest matches in US Open history. But it was a triumph that came with a price: two days later, the chronic tendinitis in Nadal’s knees flared again, and he was forced to retire in the second set of his semifinal against Juan Martin del Potro.

By the time it was over, Nadal’s 16-hour on-court adventure had become one more thing: the perfect crystallization of an argument—with both sides’ views equally represented—that has been growing more heated in recent years. The dispute can be summed up with a deceptively simple question: Should the men continue to play best-of-five sets at Grand Slam tournaments, or should they play best-of-three sets instead?

Those with a traditionalist streak favor sticking with best-of-five, a format that has been in place since the very first Wimbledon, in 1877. Supporters see it as a fairer measure of a player’s skills than best-of-three, with the extra set (or two) giving the better, fitter competitor more time to prove his superiority. Because other events on the ATP are best-of-three, the extended format also ensures that the Grand Slams remain the sport’s ultimate trials by fire, and unique events. If generations of past men’s champions persevered through best-of-five, why can’t today’s?

Pat Cash, Wimbledon champion in 1987, states the case for traditionalists when he says, “The simple fact is, best-of-five sets is the ultimate test of mental and physical stamina; it’s what’s worthy of a Grand Slam event.”

Those with a reformist streak are in favor of one of two changes, each promoting gender parity: (1) having the men play best-of-three, or (2) having the women play best-of-five. For many, though, the objective is to lessen the men’s workload. Supporters say playing best-of-three would lead to fewer injuries and leave players fresher in later rounds. It would make matches easier for spectators to sit through, and easier for TV networks to broadcast. And having the men play the same amount of tennis as the women would eliminate an age-old obstacle to the idea of equal pay.

Novak Djokovic, the highest-profile player to sign on to the best-of-three movement, stated the case for change when he said, “This new generation of fans and millennials, they don’t have the great[est] attention span. They want things to happen very quickly. So for the players, as well as to attract more people—more viewers of a younger audience—I think we have to keep matches dynamic.”

At the US Open, Nadal proved both sides’ points at once. First, his win over Thiem was shown as evidence that epic, memorable matches are only possible with best-of-five.

“When things happen like this, the atmosphere and the crowd become more special,” Nadal said afterward. “People get involved.”

Two days later, detractors pointed to Nadal’s retirement as evidence that the lengthier format no longer makes sense at a time when tennis is more physically punishing than ever.

“Best-of-five is carnage,” tweeted the New York Times’ Ben Rothenberg.

Some in the sport agree. One of tennis’ most tradition-minded events, Davis Cup, downsized from best-of-five to best-of-three, and the Olympics will do the same with the men’s gold-medal match. Thus far, though, the Slams haven’t considered following suit.

“At this point, the US Open has no plans to change the best-of-five sets format for the men,” a USTA official says.

Roger Federer put it even more bluntly: “I mean, it won’t happen,” he said last summer. But he was willing to admit that “it’s a fun debate to have.”

So let’s have it.

Would best-of-three-set matches reduce injuries?

Playing multiple lengthy matches over a two-week span comes with risks, but the more important question may be: is there an injury crisis in the first place, and would switching to best-of-three help solve it?

Injuries are unquestionably a hot-button issue on the ATP tour. Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, del Potro and Stan Wawrinka have all undergone surgery in recent years, and Andy Murray is contemplating retirement because of a chronic hip problem.

“With two of the majors on hard courts, and the amount of running the players have to do now, the wear and tear is greater than ever,” Hall of Fame player Pam Shriver says.

But while that may be true, it doesn’t seem to be hurting the players’ longevity. All of the men mentioned are in their 30s, an age at which many past champions had already retired. Federer is the oldest No. 1 in history, and Nadal is the oldest French Open champion since 1968. The sport is more physical than ever, but the players have learned to handle its effects.

Djokovic aside, few men’s players have expressed a wish to discard best-of-five, a format they play in only four tournaments each year. Of the 77 matches that young Alexander Zverev played in 2018, only nine lasted longer than three sets. If the men blame anything for injuries and exhaustion, it’s the 11-month schedule, which allows little time to recuperate.

“It’s not the amount of tennis we play inside that year,” Zverev said last November. “It’s more about how much off time we can actually have. Even if you’re not playing for a week in a tournament, you can’t take that week off; you have to be training...We don’t have time to give ourselves rest.”

Do best-of-five-set matches take too long for the modern attention span?

After 15 years of grinding away on tour, Andy Murray had a sudden change of heart at Wimbledon last summer.

“As a player, I really like best-of-five,” Murray told the New York Times. “I feel like it rewards the training and everything you put into that.”

But that was before Murray was hired to commentate on the quarterfinal between Nadal and del Potro at that same tournament. The five-set match lasted so long—four hours and 47 minutes—that Murray missed a dinner reservation.

“It was an amazing match, it was a brilliant match,” Murray said, “but it was really long to sit there as a spectator.”

Most tennis fans understand how Murray felt; making it through an entire five-setter is difficult. Spectators at tournaments like Indian Wells and Miami, where men and women each play best-of-three, don’t seem to miss the marathons of the majors.

“It’s not easy to watch two people compete for a really long period of time,” Shriver says. “Give me a hard-fought, three-set, two-and-a-half-hour match, which is about the length of a basketball game.”

The downside of best-of-three comes when the matches aren’t so hard-fought. While tournament directors dread five-setters that drag on, they also dread one-sided, best-of-three-set finals that barely last an hour. Last year at Wimbledon, the men’s semifinals—Kevin Anderson vs. John Isner; Djokovic vs. Nadal—went on for 10 sets and nearly 12 hours, and spilled over into a second day. That may be too much tennis, but was it a worse ticket than the women’s semifinals—Angelique Kerber vs. Jelena Ostapenko; Serena Williams vs. Julia Goerges—which lasted a total of 36 games?

The pace of life has quickened since 1877, and attention spans have shortened. But on most days, the Slams have you covered: if you get bored watching a five-setter, you can switch over—with your feet, if you’re at the event; with the remote, if you’re at home—to another match.

Isn’t it time that men and women played an equal amount?

The most compelling reason for change may be the notion that, in 2019, we’re past the days when we believed that women couldn’t, or shouldn’t, play as many sets as men.

“I see no reason why the WTA players can’t play a five-set final for a Grand Slam title,” Cash says. “I think it would create massive interest. Something they deserve.”

What about in the rounds before the final? Extending the women’s matches to best-of-five would pit one desired change—greater gender equality—against another—shorter matches. With their schedules already close-to-overflowing, would the Slams really want to increase the length of women’s matches throughout the tournament?

“I don’t think the women should ever feel the need to play three out of five,” Shriver says. “They put everything they have into best-of-three now, and that makes those matches more intense. Every point feels like it counts, which isn’t true in best-of-five.”

Is there a solution?

Even as the discussion continues, format change doesn’t seem to be on the horizon. There isn’t a groundswell among players or fans for it, and Grand Slam officials have at least one good reason to stick with tradition, as imperfect as it may be: it’s working. Revenues, ticket sales, prize money and television coverage have been on the rise at the majors for years, and have allowed each of the Slams to embark on large expansion projects.

Still, two plausible compromises have been floated. The first would have men and women both play best-of-three through the early rounds, and best-of-five from, say, the fourth round until the final. This would create gender parity, lessen schedule overload in the early rounds, and give the women a chance to produce a historic final.

The problem? If top men’s players started losing best-of-three-set matches early, there would quickly be calls to go back to the old format.

A second proposal would have the men and women play best-of-three in every round, with no tiebreakers in the third set. This would also be a step toward equality, and lead to shorter matches, while holding out the possibility of epic final sets.

The problem here is that Wimbledon just added a final-set tiebreaker for the first time, in the wake of the interminable, 26–24 fifth set that Anderson and Isner played last year (total match time: six hours, 36 minutes).

But according to Courtney Nguyen, who writes the WTA Insider column at the tour’s website, the shorter format would come with a potential benefit.

“You open up the possibility for the top players to play all three disciplines,” she says. “I want tennis to go back to where the top players played everything. Mixed doubles would be a huge draw, as would the doubles.

Fans would have two or three times as many chances to see Federer or Rafa or Serena. I don’t see how that would be bad for business.”

A chance to shorten singles matches, resuscitate doubles and put a star player on virtually every court: it’s a concept that would probably only work if doubles was made mandatory, or if the rankings became a combination of singles and doubles results. But it’s a tantalizing idea, and perhaps the only one that would satisfy traditionalists and progressives.

Until then, tennis will likely stick with another of its traditions: going with what it knows.

Opening the door—Thiem's US Open a sign of evolution in the men's game

Tue, 17 Nov 2020 14:14:00 +0000

“Be careful what you wish for.” Dominic Thiem learned the wisdom of those words at this year’s US Open.

For the better part of a decade, the 27-year-old Austrian had looked forward to the moment when he would play for a Grand Slam title without having to beat either Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic or Roger Federer the ageless Big Three—to do it.

Thiem had put in the mind-numbing work on the practice court. He had thrashed a million tennis balls with his vicious, dive-bombing topspin. He had hot-stepped his way through countless footwork drills to try to make his legs a millisecond quicker. He had adjusted his clay-based game for hard courts. He had replaced his long-time coach with Nicolas Massu, an undersized Chilean who had made the most of his modest gifts and won two Olympic gold medals.

Nobody in the ATP worked out more relentlessly or competed more often than Thiem. Even during the lockdowns this spring, he found a way to play 30 matches, and he won nearly all of them.

In his three previous Grand Slam finals, Thiem had taken a small step forward each time. At Roland Garros in 2018, he lost to Nadal in straight sets. The next year, again at Roland Garros, he lost to Nadal in four sets. At the Australian Open in 2020, he lost to Djokovic in five sets. Finally, in his fourth major final, Thiem seemed to have caught a break from the tennis gods: Instead of one of the Big Three, he faced his friend Alexander Zverev, a 23-year-old who was making his major-final debut. Now, surely, Thiem’s time had come. The experts made him a solid favorite to win.

There was only one small problem: When he started the match, he could barely swing his racquet.

“I was super, super tight,” Thiem admitted. “I was tighter than in a long time. Didn’t even know how that feels anymore. Didn’t even know how to get rid of that.”

It turned out that being the favorite had its drawbacks. Serious ones.

“Maybe it was not even good that I played in previous finals,” he said. “I mean, I wanted this title so much, and of course, there was also in my head that if I lose this one, it’s 0–4.”

“Is this chance ever going to come back?” Thiem began to wonder as he fell further behind. “All these thoughts, which are not great to play your best tennis, to play free.”

Thiem’s US Open win may not have signaled a changing of the men’s guard. (Getty Images)

Was Thiem, who had been on tour for nearly a decade, destined to be the Prince Charles of tennis, the man who was never allowed to be king? His saving grace, it turned out, was that Zverev was even more nervous than he was. Up two sets and a break, Zverev turned into the sport’s version of a deer in the headlights. While Thiem only played his best for a few games of the final, and he cramped near the end, he never stopped going for his shots. After four hours, it paid off with a breakthrough victory.

“I said to myself, I mean, I’m playing bad, I’m way too tight, legs are heavy, arms are heavy,” Thiem said. “Somehow the belief today was stronger than the body, and I’m super happy about that.”

Thiem’s win wasn’t just a personal milestone. It was a breakthrough for an entire generation—or more—of players who had been shut out of the majors, and had their career trajectories flattened by the Big Three. As of the start of Roland Garros in September, Thiem was the only male player under age 31 who had won a major title.

Was this the start of a new era, or was it a blip on the ATP radar screen? We had seen other one-off US Open wins before: Juan Martin del Potro in 2009, and Marin Cilic in 2014. Or was this final between two 20-somethings the start of a transition period, when the Big Three and the Next Gen will vie with each other for supremacy? Even Thiem didn’t seem sure.

“The question is,” he said, “how I’m going to [deal] with the emotions mentally. Obviously, I’ve never been in this situation. I achieved a big, big goal.” But just because Thiem achieved a big goal doesn’t mean Federer, Nadal and Djokovic are going to take their bows and cede the stage to him.

“We can talk about changing of the guards, but the Big Three aren’t going away anytime soon,” says Tennis Channel commentator Jan-Michael Gambill. “It’s amazing to say, since they’re in their 30s, but Nadal and Djokovic could both have five more good years in them.”

Unlike Thiem, Zverev was loose to start the US Open final. (Getty Images)

For tennis lovers of a certain age, the 2020 US Open brought back memories of Wimbledon in 1973. That year, 80 prominent male players, including the two most recent champions, Stan Smith and John Newcombe, boycotted the event over a political dispute between the newly-formed ATP and the sport’s old-guard amateur officials. With the game’s elite on the sidelines, 21-year-old Jimmy Connors and 17-year-old Bjorn Borg, neither of whom had gone deep at a Grand Slam before, lit up the All England Club with their brazen, youthful star power, and reached the quarterfinals.

The next year, Borg won his first Roland Garros, and Connors won his first Wimbledon and US Open. From 1974 to 1983, the Swede and the American won 19 majors between them. The boycott generation, meanwhile, had its last hurrah in 1975, when Arthur Ashe won Wimbledon. The boycotters opened the door, and Borg and Connors happily swaggered through it. They gained confidence at a major event without having to beat any top-ranked opponents to do it.

Is it possible that a similar door was opened—or at least cracked—at the 2020 US Open? Federer was absent due to injury; Nadal skipped the event because of travel and coronavirus concerns; and Djokovic took himself out of it when he hit a ball that struck a line judge. The result was a men's field that, for the first time in a long time, felt young again.

Of the eight quarterfinalists, six—Denis Shapovalov, Borna Coric, Andrey Rublev, Daniil Medvedev, Alex de Minaur and Zverev—were under 25. And that list didn’t include a number of young players, such as Stefanos Tsitsipas, Matteo Berrettini, Karen Khachanov, Felix Auger-Aliassime and Taylor Fritz, who are expected to challenge for big titles in the years ahead. Perhaps seeing one of their own hold up the winner’s trophy in New York will make them feel as if they could be in that position one day as well.

For Gambill, it isn’t the prospect of a changing of the guard that intrigues him. It’s the possibility that now, rather than total dominance by the Big Three, we’ll start to see a wider range of potential champions, as different generations and playing styles collide in the later rounds at the majors.

“To me, it’s an exciting time, and Thiem’s win was good for tennis,” he says. “You have so many different types of players and characters among the young guys.”

Many feel Shapovalov's shot-making and charisma will make him a future star. (Getty Images)

Gambill points to Tsitispas, and especially Shapovalov, as players whose flashy game styles and charismatic personalities could draw young fans to the sport. “I’ve always been a big Shapo fan,” Gambill says of the 21-year-old Canadian. “He’s a fiery guy and a shotmaker. He’s got that X-factor, and a big upside.”

But if we’re looking for the new generation's Big Three, Gambill thinks that, at least for now, we’ll find it in Thiem, Zverev, and Medvedev.

“Those are the guys who have won week in and week out,” he says. “And we’ve seen them beat Federer, Djokovic and Nadal and reach Slam finals.”

Three-time Grand Slam doubles champion Mark Knowles agrees that Thiem’s breakthrough in New York wasn’t a one-off event.

“I know that once you win that first major, there’s a freedom that comes about,” Knowles says. “I think [Thiem]’s a warrior for winning the Open final with so much pressure on him. He’s always adding to his game, and now that he’s got the first one, I think he’s only going to get better.”

Like Gambill, Knowles sees the future of men’s tennis as a productive clash of top-level players, rather than a period that will belong to a single, dominant champion. Zverev, they believe, made new fans with his tearful post-match speech at the Open, which he dedicated to his absent parents. And the experience of having played and lost a major final, while painful, will be a valuable one.

“I really felt for him in his speech,” Knowles says of Zverev, “that feeling of not giving validation to his parents with a Grand Slam title. But that may drive him, and I think he'll have a long, successful career.”

Gambill also thinks that Zverev’s strong start in the US Open final can serve as a model for how he should play in the future.

“He knows he can go out and attack,” Gambill says, “and not just play a chess match out there.”

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Despite Thiem and Zverev’s recent success, it’s Medvedev who many believe could change and advance the game with his disruptive tactics and deceptive playing style. The 24-year-old isn’t another baseline ball machine; instead, he plays with an always-surprising mix of grace and guile. The 6’6” Russian can lounge at the back of the court for a half a set, before leaping forward to pounce on his unsuspecting opponent.

With his long frame, and his ability to attack from deep in the court, Medvedev expands, elongates and complicates the game in a way no one else has before.

“He’s a great player, and an interesting player,” Gambill says of Medvedev. “He’s already come so far in such s short time, and really established himself as a consistent threat.”

“I love watching him,’ Knowles says. “He brings a completely different dynamic than anyone else. He’s smart, he can get emotional, he moves as well as anyone.”

Rather than heralding a revolution, Thiem’s US Open may be a sign of evolution in the men’s game. Ideally, it will begin to shift the tour from a three-man monarchy to a polyglot democracy, with representatives from Austria, Germany, Russia, Italy, Canada, Greece, the United States and Australia—as well as Spain, Switzerland, and Serbia.

“I had it in the back of my head that I had a great career so far, way better career than I could ever dreamt of,” Thiem said in New York. “But until today there was still a big part, a big goal missing.”

Thiem spoke for himself, but let’s hope his fellow 20-somethings believe he was also speaking for them. If Thiem can get what he wished for, maybe they can, too.

No fans, no problem for Djokovic in win over Schwartzman at ATP Finals

Mon, 16 Nov 2020 16:57:00 +0000

“Very strange” was how Novak Djokovic described the fan-free atmosphere inside the O2 Arena for his first match at the Nitto ATP Finals on Monday. He talked about how blessed he had been to experience so many great “atmospheres” in that building in the past, and told the fans watching on TV how much he missed them. There’s just no getting used to the “new normal” of lockdown life for any of us, is there?

Djokovic missed having fans in the building, but he hardly needed them during his 6-3, 6-2 win over Diego Schwartzman. There was nothing strange or abnormal about the world No. 1’s performance, or the result. Djokovic’s versatility was on display throughout. We know he’s someone who can defuse a big server; in this match, in which he upped his record against Schwartzman to 6-0, he showed that he’s also someone who can out-grind a grinder.

Djokovic won at the net; he was 11 of 14 there. He won from the baseline, including 17 of the 28 rallies that lasted nine shots or longer. Djokovic won with his bending wide serve in the deuce court, and with his deep return down the middle. He hit 26 winners to Schwartzman’s 11, and sent his forehands to both corners with equal ease. After breaking Schwartzman at 4-3 in the first set, he relaxed and never looked back.

“It was a close encounter,” until that 4-3 game, Djokovic said. “Then I started swinging through the ball more in the second set.”

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Afterward, Schwartzman summed up the challenge of playing Djokovic at his best: You have to defend the entire court, the entire time.

“Everything is difficult against him,” Schwartzman said. “I think what he’s doing when he’s playing his best, he’s moving the ball from everywhere to everywhere, to every single point on court.”

That can even be true when Djokovic is temporarily missing one of his shots. Early in the match, he tried his drop shot a few times, and put the ball in the net. But that didn’t stop him from trying it again on a break point in the second set. This time the ball went over the net, Schwartzman was sent flying up to the net and back to the baseline, and Djokovic ended up winning the point.

Djokovic is the favorite to win this tournament, and tie Roger Federer with his sixth ATP Finals title. He didn’t do anything today that would change that assessment. He may miss the fans, but he can certainly play well without them. As Schwartzman says, anyone who wants to beat him will have to be moving from everywhere to everywhere, on every single point.

"Gets the call right every time": How tennis went electronic

Sat, 14 Nov 2020 18:46:00 +0000

“We Will Rock You” was blaring from the loudspeakers. Luke Jensen was waving his arms and firing up the crowd. The socially-distanced fans were cheering through their masks. After nearly a month inside a coronavirus-free bubble at The Greenbrier in West Virginia, the 2020 World Team-Tennis season had come down to this: The New York Empire and the Chicago Smash were tied 20–20, and 6–6 in the supertiebreaker, resulting in a sudden-death championship point. Whichever doubles team won it would take home the team title, and $500,000 in bonus prize money.

When silence was finally restored, the Smash’s Sloane Stephens served to the Empire’s Coco Vandeweghe. Vandeweghe sent back a screaming forehand return that seemed, at first glance, to skid across the back of the baseline. Or had it? Confusion reigned as both teams tried to figure out whether they had won or lost. Finally, Hawk-Eye rendered its verdict: The ball had touched the line, and the Empire were champions.

“Imagine if we were using replay there, and one team didn’t have any challenges left?” says Carlos Silva, CEO of WTT. “That’s a half-a million-dollar point. The wrong team could have won, and there’s nothing we could have done about it!”

In this case, there was never any doubt that the call would be definitive, and that the players would see it. Since 2017, WTT has used Hawk-Eye Live, an automated line-calling system created by the same company that handles tennis’ electronic challenge replays. Instead of relying on line judges to make calls, Hawk-Eye’s cameras and computers do the job themselves, complete with human-sounding “out” calls. That means no more overrules, no more challenges, no more linespeople, and, if all goes according to plan, no more arguments between players and chair umpires. Even a young John McEnroe might have felt foolish screaming “You cannot be serious!” into a courtside camera lens.

If you’re a tennis fan who happens to be a technophobe—that is, if you fear that robots will soon be running our lives—this summer may have felt like another sign of the apocalypse. In the battle between man and machine, the machines came significantly closer to claiming a long-awaited victory. Two weeks after WTT finished its season, the Western & Southern Open became the first dual-gender tour event to replace line judges with Hawk-Eye Live. The following week, the US Open became the first Grand Slam tournament to do the same.

Since 2017, Hawk-Eye Live has been used at the ATP’s NextGen Finals in Milan, but it took the pandemic to bring the technology to Broadway. The USTA needed to reduce the number of people inside its bubble at Flushing Meadows, and electronic line-calling was one brutally efficient way to do it. Not quite efficient enough for Novak Djokovic, though. US Open officials, leery of a Hawk-Eye Live failure in a big match, kept line judges on its two main show courts, Arthur Ashe Stadium and Louis Armstrong Stadium. One of those line judges ended up in the line of fire when a frustrated Djokovic blindly smacked a ball toward the back of the court. When it hit her in the neck and she fell to the ground, the world No. 1 was defaulted.

For Silva, a former player who has a master’s degree in computer science, the move to automated line-calling is a no-brainer.

“The speed of the shots has passed a human’s ability to say whether the ball is in or out,” Silva says. “Now that just about everyone is serving 120 [m.p.h.] or more, and people are hitting 100-m.p.h. forehands, we should stop pretending that it’s possible to make those calls.

“The players already rely on the replay system. Now you can just listen to the call, instead of having to challenge and see it.”

As far as reasons for installing electronic line-calling go, the pandemic was an unfortunate one. But there may be no going back for tennis even when life returns to normal. The experiments in the Flushing Meadows bubble were widely considered a success, and the ATP gave the green light for its tournaments to use the technology this fall. James Japhet, managing director of Hawk-Eye North America, told the New York Times that Hawk-Eye Live made 14 errors out of 225,000 calls during the Open’s first week.

“Fourteen is a larger number than we hoped for,” Japhet said. “But all things considered, 14 out of 225,000 isn’t too bad.”

Before the Western & Southern Open, the sport’s most prominent American player, Serena Williams, gave Hawk-Eye Live her seal of approval.

“I think a lot of that will be a huge benefit,” she told reporters. “I think anything electronic takes away human error, which is natural.”

After three weeks with the system in Flushing Meadows, there were few, if any, player complaints.

Using Hawk-Eye Live dovetails with two trends in professional sports. The first is the universal desire to speed up play; any time that is currently lost to the replay-challenge process would be eliminated. The second is the growing desire to employ whatever technology is available to make sure that calls are correct.

Tennis, which went to instant replay in 2006, has been a pioneer in this regard, and has been followed recently by the National Basketball Association and Major League Baseball, which have instituted challenge systems of their own. Gradually, the argument that human error is tolerable, and that its potential unfairness is a price worth paying for the controversy and drama it brings, has lost its persuasiveness. As Silva says, a missed line call can cost a player hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Hawk-Eye Live also has the power to eliminate the one common, problematic scenario that its replay system can’t handle. You’ve seen it a thousand times: A line judge calls a ball out at the same time that a player hits the ball and makes an error; replay then overrules the call, leaving it up to the chair umpire to decide whether or not the call affected the player’s swing. Since all calls should now be correct, that situation shouldn’t arise again.

Still, in a tradition-minded sport like tennis, some will likely be left cold by this emphasis on electronic efficiency. Roland Garros stayed with its traditional system of using line officials and inspecting ball marks this year, and it remains to be seen whether clay events that have long avoided installing a replay system will change their minds with Hawk-Eye Live. It’s hard to imagine clay-court tennis without the sight of a chair umpire and a player hunched over together, pointing at a line, and arguing vehemently over the exact dimensions of an indent in the dirt.

Roger Federer, who has never been a fan of electronic replay, has expressed a desire to keep line judges on the court in the past, and not rob the game of one of its human elements. American player Jessica Pegula told the New York Times this summer that line judges are a “fun part of our sport, and obviously adding the challenges in to kind of question them makes it exciting and more entertaining for fans.”

It is also true that, as the 14 missed calls at the US Open attest, Hawk-Eye Live is run by humans who can make mistakes. For instance, foot-faults are called, or not called, by a live official who is monitoring a baseline camera.

Others believe that tennis would hinder its own growth if it removed line judges, many of whom are passionate tennis fans, and who transmit that passion to those around them.

“How much of a tennis fanatic do you have to be to put yourself in the line of fire, however unlikely, for a badly paid job and no thanks?” tennis journalist Richard Evans wrote on Twitter after Djokovic’s default. “And tennis is trying to get rid of these dedicated line judges? So the game can afford to cut the umbilical cord to the [next generation]? Madness.”

Which brings us to the biggest problem with automated line calling: It would put hundreds of people out of work in the middle of what could be a prolonged recession. Line judges are professionals who travel the tour; in a normal year, 800 people would vie for 350 positions at the US Open.

They do a highly pressurized and largely thankless job, and they’re a close-knit fraternity who look out for each other on the road. As Pegula says, they’re also part of tennis’ culture, its combustible mix of human excellence and human error. Would replacing them with an invisible, omnipotent machine make the game run too smoothly, too quietly?

Jeff Ryan, who took over as tournament director at the ATP’s Winston-Salem Open earlier this year, doesn’t think so.

“Challenges, arguments create some drama,” Ryan says, “but they don’t make or break the show.”

Before his late-August tournament was postponed due to the pandemic, Ryan was given the option of using electronic line-calling by the ATP. It was a tempting proposition.

“I think it’s inevitable,” Ryan says, “and people will see it as logical, as the next step in trying to achieve perfection.”

For now, the cost of housing, feeding and paying a full crew of line officials isn’t much different from the cost of installing Hawk-Eye Live on five courts, at $25,000 per court. Both are “six-figure investments,” Ryan says, which is a significant chunk of money for a 250-level tournament like his. But that will likely change as other companies get into the electronic line-calling business, and the price of the technology comes down.

Perhaps more than cost, the determining factor in this contest between man and machine will be the simple knowledge that electronic line-calling exists, that it works, and that it improves officiating. From now on, every time a line official misses a call, a commentator will cry out for Hawk-Eye Live. It happened during the US Open men’s semifinals, when Daniil Medvedev briefly became unhinged after not being allowed to challenge a call that went against him.

“This will be the end of linespeople at the majors,” ESPN’s Patrick McEnroe quickly declared. “[The electronic system] gets the call right every time.”

So technophobes beware: The robots may be coming to the tennis court very soon. The question for some will be: Is the peace they offer worth the human cost? The answer, sooner or later, will probably be yes.

Week in Preview: Canadians lead in Sofia; Sabalenka top seed in Linz

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 23:41:00 +0000

The WTA returns in Linz, while the ATP stages its final 250 in Sofia. Here’s a look ahead at both draws.

You never know who or what you might see from one week to the next in 2020. On Monday, after nearly a month away, the women will return in Linz. On the men’s side, while top men get a week of rest between the ATP’s big, season-ending events in Paris and London, there’s still one last 250 for the road in Sofia. We look ahead at both draws.

Sofia Open

Sofia, Bulgaria

$500,000; ATP 250

Indoor hard court

Draw is here

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With the eight-man field at the ATP year-end championships set, Sofia will serve no greater purpose that to crown a champion for the week. Not that the players are complaining; after six months on the sidelines in 2020, they’ll take any chance they can get to compete for money and ranking points.

Denis Shapovalov, Felix Auger-Aliassime and Alex de Minaur lead a 28-player field. Shapovalov, the top seed, had a semi-breakthrough 2020, and nearly qualified for London for the first time. Can he finish strong and go into 2021 on a high note?

First-round match to watch: Jannik Sinner vs. Marton Fucsovics

Upper Austria Ladies Linz

Linz, Austria

$225,000; WTA International

Indoor hard court

Draw is here

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Nobody likes fall tennis quite like Aryna Sabalenka. Whether the tour is in China or Europe, she tends to find her A game when the Grand Slams are over. So it makes sense that she’s the top seed in Linz, followed by her doubles partner Elise Mertens, Dayana Yastremska, and Ekaterina Alexandrova.

First-round matches to watch: Sabalenka vs. Jasmine Paolini, Marta Kostyuk vs. Vera Zvonareva

Weekend Winners: Medvedev, Auger-Aliassime pick up trophies in Paris

Sun, 08 Nov 2020 20:19:00 +0000

“Oh my God, I don’t have my level, I don’t even have one final, I’m playing so bad, blah, blah, blah.”

That’s what Daniil Medvedev said he told his wife before the Paris ATP Masters 1000 began. “I was crying,” Medvedev said, before backtracking a little. “Well, not crying, but complaining.”

It’s true, the bloom seemed to have come off the Russian’s rose somewhat in 2020. After making six straight finals, winning two ATP Masters 1000s, and nearly winning the US Open in 2019, he had taken a step back, or several steps back, this season. Last year Medvedev never seemed to miss; this year he missed. Last year, once he got his teeth into a match, he never let go; this year, his level rose and fell unpredictably. Last year, he looked like he could be the heir to the Big 3; this year he looked mortal again.

In Paris, Medvedev threw the clock back to 2019. After catching a break when Kevin Anderson defaulted at 6-6 in their second-round match, Medvedev found his old, tricky, dogged, deceptive groove again. He beat Alex de Minaur in three sets, and Diego Schwartzman and Milos Raonic in straight sets. In the final, he ran away from Alexander Zverev 5-7, 6-4, 6-1, for his first title of 2020, and eighth of his career.

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“I was playing really good this tournament, especially the final,” Medvedev said, “After the first set I could give up, Sascha was serving well, but I raised my level higher and higher, started to put pressure on him and it worked, and his level dropped.”

In turning the match around, Medvedev reminded us of what elevates him, when he “has his level,” over a young player like Zverev. In short, Medvedev can create openings and win points without his first serve. Typically, the serve is the biggest key to a player’s game, but Medvedev began to turn this match around at the same time that his first-serve percentage was dropping—it finished at a mediocre 58 percent. He made up for it by winning 60 percent of his second-serve points, while Zverev won just 35.

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In general, Zverev looks to serve big and then sit back and rally. Medvedev, by contrast, looks to build points proactively, to construct the rally in such a way that he can finish it with a forehand. On Sunday, Medvedev spent a large portion of his time up in no-man’s land. From there, he could direct traffic with penetrating ground strokes, surprise drop shots, or the occasional, tentative foray to the net. Medvedev seems largely allergic to coming all the way forward, but the fact that he put himself in an offensive position so consistently is what mattered. It was a pleasure to see Medvedev weave his artfully strange web again, and to hear him at his most gregarious.

After the match, he talked about “crying” to his wife, gave his fantasy-football friends a shoutout during the trophy ceremony, and compared his career title haul to Zverev’s with nerdy specificity. “You’re a year younger than me, but you have 13 and I have eight,” he said.

Hovering over all of this, of course, were the recent abuse accusations made against Zverev (which he has denied). Many fans may have spent this week looking for reasons to feel good about the future of men’s tennis. Medvedev’s peak-level performance was one, but it was what happened just before the singles final that was the most heartening to me.

Felix Auger-Aliassime and Hubert Hurkacz had just finished making a surprise run to the doubles title in their second tournament together. The on-court interviewer in Bercy asked Auger-Aliassime to explain their success. Auger-Aliassime didn’t start by talking about how their games meshed or complimented each other. Instead, he said this: “Hubert is a really nice person, he has a really good heart. He gives everything out there and he has fun and he is always smiling—it’s a joy to play with him.”

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It struck me, not for the first time, that as much as we’ve seen Auger-Aliassime play over the last two years, fans haven’t had a chance to hear him nearly enough. I thought the same thing in August, when he beat Andy Murray in a night match at the US Open. Auger-Aliassime's interview afterward, when he talked about coming to see Murray at the Open as a kid and sitting up high in Arthur Ashe Stadium to watch him, was probably the first time millions of people had heard the young Canadian talk. As always, he was poised, thoughtful, and sincere; instead of arrogance, the 20-year-old has a natural gravitas. The more we get to hear Auger-Aliassime speak, and show who he is as a person as well as a player, the better off our sport will be.

Allegations against Zverev should be ATP's abuse policy wake-up call

Fri, 06 Nov 2020 21:09:00 +0000

Alexander Zverev beat Stan Wawrinka, 6-3, 7-6 (1), in the quarterfinals of the Paris Masters in Bercy on Friday. It was his 11th straight victory with new coach David Ferrer, and it set him up for a high-profile semifinal against Rafael Nadal on Saturday.

Left unsaid in that good on-court news, yet hanging in the air in Bercy nonetheless, is what has been happening with Zverev away from the court over the last few weeks. He recently found out that his ex-girlfriend Brenda Patea is pregnant with his child. And he has been accused by another ex, Olga Sharypova (familiarly known as Olya), of physically and emotionally abusing her during their 13-month relationship in 2018 and 2019

The accusations, which Zverev has denied, are serious. In a detailed article that appeared in Racquet Magazine yesterday, Sharypova told Ben Rothenberg that Zverev hit her head into a wall on one occasion; “took a pillow, and then sat on my face,” causing her to struggle to breathe, at the 2019 US Open; and punched her during a fight in Geneva. “It’s really hard to talk about this,” Sharypova told Rothenberg, “because it really was a hell.” In the case of the US Open incident, she has supporting accounts from friends, and contemporaneous text messages.

“I very much regret that she makes such statements,” Zverev responded in an Instagram post. “Because the accusations are simply not true.”

Sharypova says she doesn’t want to press criminal or civil charges; she wants “the truth,” and to help others in similar situations. For now, that leaves many of us not knowing what to think about an athlete we watch virtually every week of the season, and whose profile is sure to rise further in the near future. The next logical step would seem to be for the ATP to open an investigation, the way that U.S. sports leagues like the NBA or NFL do when one of their players faces similar allegations.

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But as Jon Wertheim pointed out in his Mailbag column for Sports Illustrated this week, the ATP doesn’t have a collectively bargained agreement concerning domestic-violence policies and protocols, as those leagues do. In May, Nikoloz Basilashvili was charged and released on bail in a domestic-violence case involving his ex-wife, but he returned to the tour in New York this summer after the lockdowns, and before his October court date. (Basilashvili has denied the accusations.)

An ATP spokesperson did point Rothenberg to a codicil in the tour rulebook that states that players have an obligation “to refrain from engaging in conduct contrary to the integrity of the game of tennis.” Wertheim believes an investigation by the ATP is merited.

“In a “read-the-room” kind of way,” he writes, “do you really want to ignore an alleged act of domestic violence, committed (allegedly) by a top player…during a tournament…in a tournament hotel?”

To put it another way, does the ATP want to meet these accusations with silence? The situation should be a wake-up call for the tour that it needs to put in place a set of policies covering abuse cases. It would be in the interests of everyone in this dual-gender sport, including its male players, not to continue to lag behind other leagues when it comes to reacting to abuse allegations; they may happen less frequently in tennis, but we’ve seen two cases among players in the Top 30 in 2020. If Zverev is innocent, as he says, an investigation might help him clear his name, or at the very least give his side of the story.

On court, Zverev seems to have blocked out the swirl of news surrounding him. He has found success with Ferrer immediately. He has followed his runner-up finish at the Open with two titles in Cologne, and he looks set to give Nadal a challenge in the semis in Bercy on Saturday. Which is all the more reason for the ATP not to let the silence that’s currently surrounding him become deafening.

In any other year, Humbert's win over Tsitsipas would've been a moment

Wed, 04 Nov 2020 20:06:00 +0000

When Ugo Humbert finally closed out his three-tiebreaker win over Stefanos Tsitsipas at the Rolex Paris Masters on Monday, he threw his racquet in the air and dramatically dropped to one knee, as if he couldn’t take another step and might need to be carried, James Brown-style, off the court.

Does Humbert’s reaction sound a little over the top for a second-round match? You might not say that if you watched it. The 22-year-old Frenchman had won the first set, and had led 6-3—triple match point—in the second-set tiebreaker, before losing five straight points. In the third set, he had led 3-1 before giving the break back. Humbert had been the better and braver player for the majority of the match, but it had taken him close to three hours, and a cramp or two at the end, to win it.

In any other year, Humbert’s well-earned victory and theatrical celebration would have been accompanied by a roof-raising roar from a packed audience at the AccorHotels Arena in the Bercy neighborhood of Paris. He would have soaked in the applause, and maybe shed a tear or two, as took his place at the center of the French tennis stage for the first time. Instead, there was nothing but silence from the acres of empty black seats around him.

Watching Humbert walk off the court in that same silence, I pictured great, emotional Bercy scenes from the past. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga edging out David Nalbandian for the title in 2008; Gael Monfils pushing Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer to third-set tiebreakers in 2009 and 2010, before losing; Michael Llodra’s thrilling, net-rushing run to the semis in 2010; Julien Benneteau’s win over Federer in 2009, when he walked away sobbing. Roland Garros is the sport’s signature event in Paris, of course, but Bercy feels as if it belongs to the country’s tennis faithful. With the players’ wives and kids and coaches lined up in the front row, the tournament has the cozy vibe of a family reunion mixed with an end-of-year holiday party. No Frenchman has reached the final since Tsonga in 2011, but hope always seems to spring eternal with the fans there.

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I’ve missed that vibe over the first three days of this year’s edition of Bercy, and I’ve missed seeing and hearing the crowd more than I did at the US Open and Roland Garros. Maybe that’s because Bercy belongs to everyday tennis fans in a way that the Grand Slams don’t. Maybe it’s because it feels as if the pandemic has burst our little traveling bubble. Maybe it’s because, with France back in lockdown, it’s getting harder to pretend we’re on a path to normalcy.

Still, there was plenty of French-tennis flair on display on Tuesday. As always, some of it was effective, and some wasn’t, but all of it was unique.

Richard Gasquet, 34, lost to Diego Schwartzman in straight sets. Along the way, though, the one-time prodigy gave us a few throwback backhand thrills, including a leaping return winner or two. Gasquet couldn’t match the younger Argentine’s energy or consistency, but he says he’ll be around for another year or two. Hopefully Reeshard will get a better send-off in Bercy when he does retire than he did today.

Next up was Pierre-Hugues Herbert, who showed off the latest iteration of his ever-more-complicated hair—call this one a double man-bun—in a loss to Milos Raonic. Herbert was out-gunned, but few players glide around the net, and drift back for overheads, as smoothly as this world-class doubles player does.

Humbert's killer shot—the forehand:

France did have a winner on Wednesday, over on the second court. That’s where Adrian Mannarino survived a three-setter with Yoshihito Nishioka. Mannarino is 32, but continues to plug along like an old pro should. After losing the final in Nur-Sultan, Kazakhstan on Sunday, he made the long flight to Paris. and has won two matches since. If Herbert’s flair is in his movement, Mannarino’s is in the easy way he maneuvers the ball from one corner to the other. His shots are compact to the point of nonchalance, but they stay frustratingly low and move through the court with deceptive speed.

Gasquet, Mannarino and Herbert are part of an aging Musketeer generation. Is Humbert ready to grab the torch from them? He’s roughly the same age as better-known Next Genners like Tsitsipas, Alexander Zverev and Daniil Medvedev, and he has begun to creep up on them. The rangy, skinny lefty from Metz—he’s 6’2 and 160 pounds—is ranked No. 34, but he has won two titles this year, in Auckland at the start of the season, and Antwerp last week.

With no crowd to cheer his win over Tsitsipas, it wasn’t as memorable as it should have been. What’s important and encouraging, though, is that after failing to close the deal in the second set, he showed a winner’s resilience by bouncing back to take the third.

Until now, France hadn’t had a horse in the Next Gen race. Let’s hope Humbert gives this tennis-loving nation one, and that he inspires more ecstasy and agony in Bercy in the future, when the crowds finally return. We all need something, or someone, to look forward to these days.

Week in Preview: Nadal returns to Paris where Rublev, Tsitsipas await

Sun, 01 Nov 2020 23:10:00 +0000

Rafael Nadal is the king of Roland Garros, but he has never won Paris’s other big event, in Bercy. Is this the year he adds it to his title list? We break down the draw at the Rolex Paris Masters.

The host country is in lockdown. There won’t be any fans in the seats. And two of this year’s three Grand Slam winners, Novak Djokovic and Dominic Thiem, won’t be there either. But Bercy is still an ATP Masters 1000 event, and it still has Nadal. Those are two things that tennis fans can celebrate, or at least enjoy, in 2020, right?

Here’s a look at the draw at the ATP’s next-to-last big tournament of the season, the Rolex Paris Masters.

First Quarter

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It has been feast or famine for Nadal in Paris over the course of his career. He has won the title 13 times at Roland Garros, but he has reached the final just once at the indoor event across town, and that was all the way back in 2007. With no Djokovic or Thiem in sight, this is probably the best chance Rafa will have to add Bercy to his list of Masters wins.

Nadal’s draw won’t hurt his chances. He’ll start against either Filip Krajinovic or Feliciano Lopez. Of the two, Krajinovic would likely be the more dangerous opponent; he reached the Bercy final in 2017 and has posted some strong results in 2020. The same goes for Nadal’s potential third-round opponent, Borna Coric.

First-round match to watch: Pablo Carreño Busta vs. new French hopeful Hugo Gaston

Semifinalist: Nadal

Second Quarter

Andrey Rublev and Alexander Zverev, the top two seeds in this section, both come to Paris with significant late-season momentum. Rublev just won his fifth title of the year in Vienna, and Zverev is coming off back-to-back tournament wins in Cologne. One of these two would seem to be destined to reach the semis this week.

Who might have something to say about that? Stan Wawrinka, Dan Evans and John Millman, who is coming off his first career title, in Nur-Sultan, are in this section.

First-round match to watch: Wawrinka vs. Evans. They played two weeks ago in St. Petersburg, and Wawrinka won 7-5 in the third set.

Semifinalist: Rublev

Third Quarter

While Rublev has been surging, his fellow Russian Daniil Medvedev has been struggling. Since reaching the semifinals at the US Open, the No. 3 seed is just 3-4. Worse, he could face the player who just beat him in Vienna, Kevin Anderson, in his opener in Paris.

If there’s a player who seems ready to take advantage of a Medvedev slip-up, it would be Diego Schwartzman. In his last three events—Rome, Roland Garros and Cologne—the Argentine has reached the final, the semis and the final, respectively. He’ll start against either Taylor Fritz of Richard Gasquet. Schwartzman is in position to qualify for the ATP’s year-end championships in London for the first time.

Also here: Vienna finalist Lorenzo Sonego. He’ll start against Alexander Bublik.

Semifinalist: Schwartzman

Fourth Quarter

Stefanos Tsitsipas and Matteo Berrettini headline the bottom section of the draw. Of the two, Tsitsipas has had the better 2020, and the better fall so far. He’ll start against either Ugo Humbert or Casper Ruud, while Berrettini could face Milos Raonic in the third round.

First-round match to watch: Felix Auger-Aliassime vs. Marin Cilic

Semifinalist: Tsitsipas

Semifinals: Nadal d. Rublev; Tsitsipas d. Schwartzman

Final: Nadal d. Tsitsipas