by Pete Bodo

Mornin'. Wow. The women's draw at Indian Wells has blown up even more quickly and spectacularly than I had anticipated. Kuznetsova and Henin both out? Hantuchova and Ivanovic (that's three Indian Wells titles right there, bucko, right down a desert Port-a-Potty) saddling up and headed for Miami?  What is this a sign from above that Bethanie Matek-Sands going to win her first Premier Mandatory, or is she already out, too? Say what you will about the quality of play, one thing about this tournament is that the it's producing some awfully good. . . quotes.

After Kuznetsova lost yesterday, she said: "The tennis ball is perfect. I am not perfect." There's a breathtaking degree of cut-to-the-chase insight in that one, folk; it's a nine-word analysis of the history of, oh, the last112 years in tennis. What a pleasure it is to have someone with the imagination and poetic streak of Kuzzie with us, even if she doesn't stay around that long these days.

If you read her post-match quotes you'll see she was as baffled by her poor play as you were, although I confess I smell a rat. Sure players have bad days, and women players often have bad days for biologically-related reasons that are never discussed (it goes against the grain of both good manners and our general social philosophy) but loom at the proverbial 800-pound gorilla in the room.

But with Kuzzie, I wouldn't assume anything. It's entirely conceivable that she spent the past two weeks smoking cigarettes and cutting a Russian-language hip-hop CD, and didn't bother acclimatizing to the desert and properties of the Indian Wells courts until her pre-match warm up yesterday. That's how she rolls. But that's pure speculation; perhaps she spent the last week immersed in two-a-days plus spinning-class and weight-room workouts, and simply came up blank. It happens.

After (finally!) securing a racket deal-and-clothes deal with Dunlop, Nikolay Davydenko was equally to the point when he said of his long-time struggle to get some kind of a deal with Prince (who make the racket he's played with for ages). "Prince give everything to (Maria) Sharapova and no money any more." Now that's some serious poetry, too, although it's more apt to appeal to an accounting major than your typical vegan undergraduate who has a tat quoting Janko Tipsarevic on the small of her back and still has a thing for the music of the Smiths.

While we're on Kolya: I assume that with his Dunlop deal, he's no longer obligated to wear that "Airness" kit that seemingly tried to draft on the names of Michael Jordan and Nike, and was created as some kind of "street" wear (there's that hip-hop thing again) by an enterprising Frenchman of African descent. That's fine, Davydenko is baggy jeans with his boxers showing never did it for me anyway. I wonder if Kolya has also hit Dunlop up for tires, for that's what the company does best. Somehow, I see him in a vintage 1970s Camaro - you know, that one with the huge Polish eagle on the hood.

And let's ponder what Mardy Fish said the other day, shortly before he played Novak Djokovic: "I feel like I can beat him, but I haven't."

I think every tennis player on earth, even your woebegotten 3.5 player who'll never have a serviceable backhand knows that feeling; I mean, knows it, as intimately as we any of us knows the face that greets us in the mirror in the morning. You think you can beat this or that guy, or girl, you're sure of it, in fact; but the moment you start hitting balls things somehow, for no explicable reason, get away from you.

Yet you still know it, and you carry on - not exactly shattered or even frustrated - game after game and in the end you're always the one left thinking, If only I'd gone to the backhand with that return in the tiebreaker. . . while the winner stands there with a poop-eating grin on his face, his work done, and routinely so, for the day.

How do you think Fish felt, after feeding Djokovic a bagel to level the match at a set apiece? Like his feelings about having a handle on the Djoker's game are justified, that's how. And the next thing he knew, Fish - who had played Djokovic in final in 2008 - is outta there, 6-2 in the third, and still looking for a way to beat the guy he feels he can beat, but hasn't. It's a tough life, tennis.

Well, as you all know Justine Henin also joined the march of the lemmings the other day. After spraying balls all over the court in a loss to Gisela Dulko in a 6-4 in-the-third comedy of errors, she admitted that she was a basket case out there, emotionally. Henin later said, of the difference between practicing and playing matches: "On the court it's much harder because you have an opponent and she wants the same thing as you want.  It's a real fight."

Duh!

Okay, if I can't get great, competitive tennis, give me great quotes. Actually, I might prefer great quotes even to great tennis, being a journalist, and unlike a W earned at a tournament, a great quote lasts forever.

Enjoy the tennis today, everyone!

By Jackie Roe, TW Social Director

On February 27th, close to 150 local tennis enthusiasts and people who have influenced tennis in the Mid-Atlantic region descended on the Army Navy Country Club in Arlington, VA. Wayne Bryan was in attendance to MC the live auction. He was great at capturing people’s attention and getting them to bid on all the items. Everyone was there to honor tennis players and others who have influenced tennis in the Mid-Atlantic region, including Stan Smith, Paul Goldstein, and Ken Brody.

Ken Brody is well known in the Mid-Atlantic region because he is the founder of the Tennis Center in College Park, Maryland (TCCP). Four of the U.S. boys that train at the TCCP are ranked in the top 20 in the world junior rankings, which is a wonderful accomplishment for a fairly new junior program. Mr. Brody spoke of his love for the sport, noting it didn't happen until 22 years ago. He said something along the lines of, when older people fall in love with tennis, they tend to become obsessed with it. That was something I could totally relate to because I didn’t fall in love with tennis until I was 20 years old and have been obsessed with it ever since!

That's all for now, TWibe. Again, I hope to see some of you on Twitter, and I'll be back in a few days with an IW report. Wish me luck!

by Pete Bodo

Alright, alright. Sorry to be AWOL for a spell there, but I had a lot going on here in the office and I wanted to clear the decks before we settle in to jaw about Indian Wells. I've got a post up at ESPN today on the unusual opportunity - or threat - Indian Wells represents for so many of the women. Basically, the event is on track to be a free-for-all, but a fairly tense one for some, including the defending champion Vera Zvonareva and a former Indian Wells champion (as well as former No. 1 and former French Open titlist), Ana Ivanovic. They meet in the third round, and can it really be true that if Ivanovic loses, her ranking heads south of the big Five-Oh?

Say it ain't so. Can you say, "tough draw"?

Everyone's parsed the draws by now, and the event is underway. But I'm still enjoying a recent pastime I discovered: perusing the qualifying draws. It's difficult to quantify the quality of any given qualifying draw; I suppose the statistically accurate way to do it would be to crunch the ranking numbers and determine the average ranking of the qualifiers. I prefer the more sexy if less reliable method - look through the draws and see who you recognize.

For example, are you aware that French Open champion Gaston Gaudio attempted to qualify, but was beaten in the first round? He lost to a wild-carded qualifier, Serbia's Filip Krajinovic. But let's remember that Filip is one of the the most highly touted young prospects at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy. Bad luck, Gaston - text Ana (you should only be so lucky as to have that number. . .).

Given Krajinovic's growing reputation, I was surprised to see that he was crushed, 6-1, 6-0 by the USA's Tim Smyczek, who thereby landed in the main draw. Smyczek lost a grand total of three games in his two qualifying matches. Is this a kid of special interest to we Americans?

And for those of you who have been wringing your hands, hoping for news of Vince "Vindawg" Spadea, he also showed up for qualifying and got his Kangol cap handed to him, 6-0 in the third, by Thiago Alves. Bjorn Phau (I wonder what happened to the rest of his last name?) was also in that third quarter of the qualifying draw, and he joined Alves as a qualifier.

I was bummed that Somdev Devvarman fell one match short in qualifying, losing to No.14 seed Stefan Koubek - a guy Devarrman might have faced in the third round of a Grand Slam event a few years ago, had Devarrman found a way to get himself in that position. We tend to forget how many of the players come and go as their results fluctuate. There's nothing like tennis to remind us of that old saw, Out of sight, out of mind. . . It's cruel, isn't it?

Bobby Reynolds qualified (he beat top-seeded Denis Istomin), but Robert Kendrick did not - he lost to Nick Lindahl, who then dropped a heartbreaker (6-4 in the third) to Ricardo Mello. I've got no beef with Mello being in the main draw of a Masters event, and he did beat Dick Norman, the world's oldest man, in the first round. Boy, I'd love to see Norman, who was the oldest guy on the tour as far back as 2006 (he's over forty, and that's no typo!), qualify for a singles main draw.

All of you Ramon Delgado fans will be glad to hear he qualified, as did Rainer Schuettler (this is by definition a dumb question, but what on earth was he doing in the qualifying?), while Donald Young won a round but then lost to Ilya Marchenko.

The women's qualifying draw had some interesting elements, too. If you told me two years ago that Michelle Larcher de Brito would be struggling to qualify for the main draw here, I would have been surprised. Ditto for Karolina Sprem. But let's hear it for Uzbekistan's Akgul Amanmuradova, who made it through, as did U.S. players Shenay Perry and Sloane Stephens. Michaella Krajicek, who I expect to see back on the main tour sometime soon, won a match but then fell short via a three-set loss to Petra Martic of Croatia.

And let's have a moment of silence for Tamarine Tanasugarn, who dropped just one game in her first match but then won only four as she was put out by Nuria Llagostera Vivies.

Don't worry, Tamarine, you'll get payback at Wimbledon, like you always do!

Feel free to comment on today and tomorrow's matches here, although I think Jackie-Oh will have a Deuce Club post for you later on. . .

by Bobby Chintapalli, TW Contributing Editor

For the first time in a long time, when we talk about women’s tennis at Indian Wells, it’s at least as much about those who are playing as those who aren’t.

Of course the absent ones, the Williams sisters, started the year even more dominantly than usual. Serena won the first Grand Slam of the year. Venus has shined as brightly, recently winning three titles in three countries over three weeks (if you count the Billie Jean King Cup exhibition). She has the best match win percentage of the top players with 93.3, and Serena’s not far behind with 90.9. Also MIA this year, because of a back injury, is the woman who spent much of last year at Number 1, Dinara Safina.

Still, we have good reason to be fired up about those who are playing, chiefly because they include the Belgians who are playing again. Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters have both returned after taking long sabbaticals originally thought to be full-on retirements. Then there’s Maria Sharapova, who came back last May after spending nearly a year recovering from shoulder issues. They're adding some heft to the folks who are left. We’re talking a dozen Grand Slam singles titles between them heft.

Their match win percentages aren’t shabby either. Let’s look more closely at this trio and the three other women with the year’s best match win percentages (out of Top 100 players who’ve played at least six main draw matches). The statistics are up to date as of  March 8 and come to us via the Sony Ericsson WTA Tour.

Kim Clijsters — 87.5% (won 7, lost 1)
Justine Henin — 83.3% (won 10, lost 2)
Maria Sharapova — 83.3% (won 5, lost 1)
Elena Dementieva — 82.4% (won 14, lost 3)
Victoria Azarenka — 78.6% (won 11, lost 3)
Vera Zvonareva — 78.6% (won 11, lost 3)

KIM CLIJSTERS (BEL)

*Titles: 1 (year), 36 (career)
*Possible opponents: Petkovic, Kleybanova, Kuznetsova, Jankovic/Pennetta/Peer

Where Indian Wells is concerned she doesn’t need absence to make her heart grow fonder: The last time she played, in 2005, she won here and went on to win Miami, the US Open Series, and the US Open. (She had earned more than $2.2 million by the end of that road trip.) What surely doesn’t give her a warm and tennis ball-fuzzy feeling is the inglorious way she was ushered out of the Australian Open this year by Nadia Petrova. Less than a year after she proved to the world that she can come back from retirement and win a Grand Slam, Clijsters will be looking to prove to herself that she can, at the very least, avoid a repeat of that shocking, bizarre loss to Petrova in Melbourne.

JUSTINE HENIN (BEL)

*Titles: 0 (year), 41 (career)
*Possible opponents: A. Radwanska, Bartoli/Lisicki, Dementieva

Comeback or not, petite or not, ready or not… she’s the player many expect to win this whole thing. Oddsmakers, in fact, are willing to put money on it – they give her best odds of winning (with Clijsters next). In 2004 Henin won the tournament. Can she win it again, thus going one step farther than she's gone at the two tournaments she's played since her comeback? While we wait for the answer, it will be fun to see how much more she’s Wimbledonized her game since the Australian Open.

MARIA SHARAPOVA (RUS)

*Titles: 1 (year), 21 (career)
*Possible opponents: Dokic, Zheng, Li, Wozniacki

This year she doesn’t have as many match wins as the others listed here, but she did win a title last month. Memphis isn’t Melbourne, but you have to think the title will boost her confidence and perhaps help her shrug off that surprising first-round Australian Open loss to a fellow Maria (Kirilenko). If she can make her way past some big hitters (possibly Jelena Dokic), China, and Caroline Wozniacki, who seems more beatable right now than she did last year, maybe Sharapova can make Indian Wells her house again (she won the tournament in 2006).

ELENA DEMENTIEVA (RUS)

*Titles: 2 (year), 16 (career)
*Possible opponents: Wozniak, Schiavone/Rezai, Henin

We all know her second-round loss at the year’s first Grand Slam wasn’t really a second-round loss. Dementieva started the year well, as she did in 2009. She’s one of just two players (Venus is the other) who have already won multiple singles titles in 2010. Her serve, once her glaring liability, continues to be reliable. Sure, she still tosses in a few double faults or 12 (like she did against Daniela Hantuchova in Sydney). But she also serves more aces (she served nine in the Paris final against Lucie Safarova) and serves faster (at the Australian Open she was tied with Nadia Petrova for fifth fastest serve.) To win here she’ll potentially have to beat Henin, but this is one of two tournaments where she’s beaten her before. This seems like a good place for Dementieva to strut her tennis stuff – it’s like a Grand Slam… but not.

*Titles: 0 (year), 3 (career)
*Possible opponents: Martinez Sanchez, Wickmayer, Stosur/Zvonareva/Ivanovic

She’s had some nice wins this year; at the Australian Open she won a 6-0 set in every match she won. Equally important she’s had only respectable losses; all three times she lost in the later stages to the eventual champion. She’s one spot away from the Top 5 for a reason. At Indian Wells she’s defending the second-most number of points of those listed here. If she wants to surpass her best showing, she’ll have to get to the final. Blocking her path: Yanina Wickmayer and Vera Zvonareva, to whom Azarenka lost the last two times she played here.

by Pete Bodo

Afternoon, folks. Things are easing up here at the office, and I look forward to focusing on the upcoming Masters 1000 combined event at Indian Wells. Bobby Chintapalli will be back by popular demand, probably tomorrow, with a women's preview.

Meanwhile, a remark left in the comments at a recent post on how Nick Bollettieri helped shape the contemporary game stuck in my mind and had me thinking a bit in the ensuing days. I think it was Aussiemarg who wrote the comment, in which she expressed her appreciation for the approach shot, which once was the second- or third-most important tool in the box of the serve-and-volley expert.

It occurs to me that if the serve-and-volley game has indeed gone belly up, at least until  more promoters make an (unforeseeable) commitment to faster surfaces, it's partly because the approach shot was already going the way of the carrier pigeon. There's certainly a chicken-or-egg riddle at the heart of this issue, but does anyone else share the opinion that the approach shot was one of the first casualties of the New World Game (the power baseline game, if you prefer)? And that the development only made serve-and-volley tennis that much less tenable?

Note here that serve-and-volley tennis is not synonymous with approach-and-volley tennis. If you're courageous (or crazy) enough to serve and charge the net, you'll be hitting fewer rather than more approach shots than if you play an all-court or even baseline game. To my way of thinking, the demise of the approach shot drove one of the largest of nails into the serve-and-volley game, because once the approach-and-volley game was no longer effective, an entire area of skill and strategy based on the use of the volley began to dry up.

Only a contrarian would suggest that a serve-and-volley player would survive on today's tour on a week-to-week basis. If it were possible, someone out there would be doing it - of that I'm convinced. And even if we all agree that serve-and-volley tennis is on life-support, there's no automatic linkage there with approach-and-volley tennis. If the latter strategy were more productive, we'd be seeing a lot more that, too. Maybe we should be seeing a lot more of it, because it isn't like the approach shot/volley combination has been proven insufficient (hail, there isn't even enough data to make that claim with any empirical evidence). It's just that the approach shot appears to have been swept into the dust bin of history, either for solid, game-based reasons, or as a matter of prejudice (in which case the trend might yet be reversed).

What happened, I think, is fairly simple. The new, muscular baseline ball bangers, with a load of help from the evolution in equipment, decided that the risk/reward equation of the approach shot was no longer favorable. The approach shot is a set-up shot, and it usually requires a conscious decision by a player to sacrifice pace and even power for placement, for which the reward is excellent court positioning to end the point with a volley. The problem is that in today's game, players just can't afford to hit a shot as basically prudent as the typical, pretty approach (I think especially of a John McEnroe or Stefan Edberg's  backhand slice). What passed for a textbook approach shot as few as 15 or 20 years ago is answered today by something like a resounding shout of: Get that crap out of here!  Ka-Boom!

Unless an approach shot is hit with the opponent in a hopeless position to begin with, today's versatile, make-power-from-anywhere players are apt to treat it with scorn. The shot is too. . . neutral, and therefore too much of an invitation for the player receiving it to take the offensive. You need a surface with very particular playing properties (low bounce and, preferably, medium to fast speed) to even think of hitting an approach shot that basically says: I'm betting that my volley can beat your passing shot.

Unless, of course, you feel that you can pressure your opponent into missing shots he's ordinarily expected to make. But that's a whole other story. . .

So in today's game, the approach is a defensive-offensive shot; it's intended to end the point on the deferred payment plan, but it's also hit (usually) with a measure of prudence - something for which there is increasingly little place in the contemporary game. The alternative to the approach shot is the purely offensive shot, and that's where the changing game has made the approach shot even less appealing. Where Rod Laver might have hit a certain backhand down the line with resolve but restraint, setting up his volley, Roger Federer pulls the trigger and blasts a monstrous winner. Where an Ilie Nastase once moved forward to hit a rolling forehand to the backhand corner of his opponent, daring him to come up with a good pass or lob, a Rafa Nadal today punishes the ball, going for the out-and-out winner. At worst, he settles for driving his opponent even further back off the baseline.

The player who first and still perhaps most conspicuously deleted the approach shot from his hard drive was Jim Courier, a Bollettieri protege. Granted, Courier's volley was less than a work of art. But more important, Courier's big, inside-out forehand was one indeed.

There's a popular expression in football: when you throw a forward pass, three things can happen, and two of them are bad (the only good one is a completed pass; an incomplete or interception represent failure). It's a little like that with the approach shot; you miss it (or don't hit it well enough) and you're toast; you make it but get passed, you're out of there. You make it and win the point with your volley, you've completed the task - unless, of course, you miss the volley. And your opponent has something to say about which result you get.

By contrast, you take that ball for which you're well set up and go for the killing shot and you're (at least in theory) working on a 50-50 proposition; and you have some cushion in there, because a fiercely hit ball that doesn't go out or produce a clean winner can be more effective than any calculated approach shot, and it sets you up for you next big forehand or backhand.

No matter how I add it up, the answer seems the same. The approach shot has outlived its usefulness. Only a renaissance of attacking tennis - which is different from serve-and-volley tennis - can make it relevant again. Pat Rafter was the master of the approach shot and we're not likely to see his likes again anytime soon, even if we wish we would. He paid dearly for basing his game on the approach (even moreso than on the serve-and-volley) at a time when the game was already in transition to its present state.

But as tennis is a game of motion, in motion, it will be interesting to see what happens next.