tennis

Messed up my timing this morning. I wanted to cover the women’s final but arrive at the BNP Paribas Open just as Marion Bartoli is closing out the second set at 6-2 to pull even with Caroline Wozniacki at one set each. Thanks for giving me a third set to work with Marion. Appreciate it.

Luckily Marion took her requisite bathroom visit which gives me a bit of time to settle in. Here’s what it looks like from my little hive above the court in the Media Center.

Marion is a funny duck. It’s not just the two hander off both sides and the Elena Dementieva corrective serve – the kind of mechanical, robotic serve you change to when the one you grew up with isn’t good enough for the pros. If you’ve served the same way for a long time, changing it is a big deal. Especially when you do it on the run – when you’re already playing on the tour. One way is to pare it down to it’s most basic constituents: arm straight back, then toss the ball, then scratch the back with the racket, then snap over the ball, one…after…the…other. And that’s how Marion serves.

But it’s not just that. I almost accidentally ran into her in the cafeteria yesterday. In that situation you each usually apologize and exchange weak smiles, but that persistent worried look on her face never changed for a second. When you interview her she has that same look. I thought maybe she didn’t like media responsibilities but no, it’s her general demeanor.

Maybe that’s the kind of attitude you need to beat the perpetually sunny Wozniacki.

The knock on the Woz is that she might not have enough offense to win a slam. She joins Jelena Jankovic and Dinara Safina as recent number ones who haven’t won a slam. Not a whole lot bothers Jelena but pretty much everything bothers Dinara and it didn’t help having Serena dissing you at every opportunity. Serena is having multiple problems of her own these days so Woz isn’t having to deal with that. The #2 breathing down her neck is Kim Clijsters and she likes everyone.

If you watched Maria Sharapova’s side of the net exclusively during her semifinal match against Woz, you couldn’t be blamed for thinking she won the match. She clobbered the ball, repeatedly. But she lost 6-1, 6-2. It’ll be harder for Marion because she’s smaller and her serve is a bit weaker.

Apparently Marion clobbered the ball herself in that second set and now you can see the toll it took. She hits a short shot early in the first game of the third set and Woz puts it away. Marion then comes to the net three times in the game. The first time was a surprise and it worked. The next two made me wonder if she was tired and trying to shorten the points. She goes down a break immediately.

Marion is down 0-2 on her next service game when she gets an ad point. The crowd cheers wildly. They’d love to see a tight match. This is the first time since 2005 there’s even been a third set in the women’s final here. She obliges the crowd in this game but continues to fade – she starts and ends her next service game with a double fault to go down 1-4.

Marion revives to break Woz in the next game but it’s temporary. With Marion serving at 3-5, she plays a point that shows you why the first words out of her mouth in the trophy ceremony explained her tears as “tears of tiredness.” Marion gets a high ball at the net and whacks it down the line. Unbelievably, Woz gets a racket on the ball then moves herself into position to hit another ball. Marion can’t control it and the point is over.

Wozniacki wins her first title here, 6-1, 2-6, 6-3, after losing last year’s final to Jankovic. With Clijsters shoulder bothering her, I think Woz’s slam will arrive pretty soon.

Just arrived at the BNP Paribas Open in the Southern California desert at Indian Wells. My rechargeable camera batteries won’t recharge so let me use my cellphone and my verbiage for an early morning tour of this very unique event.

The organizers take good care of the players, the media, and the spectators. Not only does a local restaurant grill your choice of meat and vegetable on the patio outside the player/media restaurant, the sunny garden eating area has potted plants on its picnic tables.

On the first practice court there’s a tall skinny player practicing crosscourt backhand slices ad infinitum. I’m pretty sure it’s Marin Cilic. If the athletic life looks glamorous from the outside, the grueling repetition is a good corrective for that image. At the moment, two tall skinny players are left in the draw – Ivo Karlovic and Juan Martin Del Potro. Karlovic missed the last six months of 2010 after surgery on his Achilles heel. Del Potro is finally doing well in a high profile event after wrist surgery and effectively missing all of 2010. Injury, surgery, and rehab – more correctives to that glamour thing.

On another practice court, Francesca Schiavone is foaming at the mouth and it’s still only 10am. No wonder she’s a champion. She grunts and struts along the baseline like it’s the finals and she’s already out of the tournament. A woman stands across the net from Schiavone and feeds her another ball before she barely finishes her service motion. It’s a way of mimicking a hard hitting opponent by feeding balls from a short court.

Schiavone is small but she’s got those muscular thighs you see on players like Dinara Safina and Kim Clijsters. I love the contrast between delicacy and muscularity in top athletes. Schiavone’s delicate wrist gently bounces the ball in preparation for her service motion. On the next shot, that same wrist snaps off a hard smack down the line.

On the Stadium 2 court, Ivan Ljubicic squats on the side of the court next to his hitting partner who also squats. Ljubicic then runs around the court a few times while Ljubicic’s coach Riccardo Piatti warms up the hitting partner with soft looping balls. I’m looking around the courts to find out which player is grunting and groaning through their practice session when I realize I’m listening to Piatti. Even coaches grunt now.

The Tennis Garden is covered with rows of green tents selling products geared to the tennis crowd. I stop in to talk to a guy selling memorabilia and, besides learning that there are such things as tennis trading cards, find out that business is markedly down this year. Probably an indication that that the continuing housing slump has settled into the psyche of the west coast. I myself have a house at the moment that’s upside down.

At least that house is still standing. The people I’m staying with have the television tuned nonstop to coverage of nuclear reactor problems following the earthquake and Tsunami in Japan. Both of them are hard of hearing so they don’t bother with the audio and we sit watching one horrific image after another. The images sink in deeper than the words. In the main stadium, Victoria Azarenka and Carolyn Wozniacki walk onto the court for their 11am match carrying a Japanese flag. The stadium observes a moment of silence before the players start their warmup.

Azarenka is down 0-2, 0-30, when she walks off the court. Ten minutes later the match resumes but only temporarily. Down 0-3, Azarenka walks off permanently with a hip injury. Wozniacki will now face either Maria Sharapova or Peng Shuai in the semifinals. Yes, Peng Shuai.

Oh, and Del Potro just got bumped up to the semifinals free of charge after Tommy Robredo drops out with a strained adductor muscle.

I’ll be back later today to cover more matches if anyone is still left standing. Stay tuned.

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It’s SRO time at the BNP Paribas Open here at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden. On this unseasonably cold day, people stand on the top row and others push through the crowd on the ground to get a glimpse of the action. A crane camera hovers overhead while another camera moves up and down the side of the court. And this is only the warmup.

Roger Federer’s warmup. He gently jogs around half the court and casually hits a few forehands and backhands as the crowd grows. It’s men’s semifinals day and we’ve got four slam winners in four semifinals slots and we are psyched.

I bet there’s a stat for that right? Last time Indian Wells had four slam winners in the semis. Last time a slam had four slam winners in the semis. Must have been a while ago because these are the only four players who’ve won a slam since 2005.

We start with Rafael Nadal and Juan Martin Del Potro. I’ll write about Federer and Novak Djokovic in my next post.

Del Potro is lucky this isn’t a slam. He’s reached #90 in the rankings after getting as high as #4 then missing almost all of 2010 after a wrist injury. Best of five sets on a fast court against Nadal can be torture. Nadal is playing his first event except for two Davis Cup matches since he injured his thigh at the Australian Open.

Del Potro gets out to a fast start winning the first three games then something strange happens. Rafa hits three lets in a row then a fault and by the time the fifth serve comes, Del Potro muffs it. Tired of waiting I guess. It breaks Del Potro’s rhythm but he manages to hold his next service game to go up 4-1.

Del Potro’s defense is impressive. He gets around the court so quickly and gracefully given his 6’6” (198cm) frame. He’s kind of like those 6’6”, 250 lb. (113kg), linebackers in US football who run the 40 yard dash under five seconds and jump out of the gym. Football has to keep changing it’s rules to prevent these fleet behemoths from killing someone. If the players keeps growing, maybe tennis will have to make an adjustment. Raise the net maybe? They do something similar in basketball. The women pro players have a smaller basketball than the men.

Unfortunately, I was marveling at Del Potro’s defense because he’s now playing too much of it. Rafa is starting to dictate points and when he gets a break point in the sixth game, he hits a short shot to bring Del Potro to the net then passes him to get back on serve at 4-3.

Del Potro beat Rafa the last three times they met, all on hard court. But that was before Rafa started hitting serves in the high 120s and learned to flatten out his forehand. At the post-match media session, Rafa added two more improvements: “my backhand is better” and “I am playing closer to the baseline.” Rafa breaks Del Potro with a good return of a 133mph (214kph) serve and goes up a break at 5-4. At this point it’s hard not to think that this set it toast for Del Potro.

Those US footballs players run the 40 yard dash in the Scouting Combine, an event that leads up to the annual NFL draft. Teams are looking for a number of things in a player – can he run fast, jump high, and lift tons of weight? Does he play his position well? And one more thing – is he a playmaker? Can he make a play when the team needs it most?

Rafa’s a playmaker. Maybe it’s the ace he hits to close out the first set 6-4. Or maybe it’s taking a game point away from Del Potro then hitting a gorgeous passing shot to go up a break in the second set – about which Del Potro said, “I made my best forehand, but he made a better passing shot.” Del Potro is more of a grinder – a slam winning grinder but nonetheless, a grinder. He pummels you till you go down rather than coming up with those signature shots that pull a match out of the fire.

After that break in the second set, Rafa holds and goes up 4-2 and I go off to lunch. We’re seeing some great points today but I can see the outcome already. Rafa beats Del Potro 6-4, 6-4, and is into the final.

Oh, the last time we had four slam winners at this event: 1995. The last slam with four slam winners in the semis: 2005. See you in a minute for Part II.

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Novak Djokovic walked into the media session after his win over Richard Gasquet at the BNP Paribas Open yesterday with a huge bag of ice wrapped around his left knee. When someone asked him if his knee was hurting, he said no, it was just a normal precautionary procedure. Today he walks onto the court for his match with Roger Federer with funky black tape wrapped around that knee. He’s written “Japan” in white letters on the black tape to support victims of the earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan. I sincerely hope he’s not developing a chronic knee problem. That’s becoming way too common for comfort.

This morning, someone in the media center asked a colleague if he thought Rafael Nadal could win 16 slams and catch up with Roger. The friend answered yes but by then Roger would probably have 18 or 19 slams. I’m not sure Roger will win even one more slam but his injury free career has been one of the more astounding parts of his game. Except for an ankle injury, his longest layoff came from a bout of mononucleosis.

I’ll be interested to see if the world of sports medicine can keep Rafa in the game long enough to match Roger. I also wonder if current tennis players will have the same physical problems retired baseball and basketball players suffer from. For sure that doesn’t include concussions, but structural problems can be severe. For example, moving a retired athlete’s bedroom downstairs when he reaches the grand old age of 45 because it’s too painful to walk up and down the stairs.

I doubt the ATP has health insurance for its players or a retirement health plan, though there is a pension fund. Forgive me for this line of thought but the US is currently in the middle of bargaining sessions between owners and players in both basketball and US football. Health care costs now essentially define labor relations in the US as some family paychecks go exclusively towards health insurance costs.

Enough of that. Let’s get started on the second slam semi of the day. At the moment things are moving along smoothly in the match between Rafa and Roger as they are on serve through four games. In the next game Roger survives one break point but gives another one away with a loose forehand. Roger then shorthops a rather defensive shot by Nole and it lands somewhere other than in the court to put Nole up a break at 3-2.

I guess Nole’s knee isn’t bothering him that much.

We’re seeing some vintage Roger today with a jump overhead and some beautiful volleys in the first set. I could watch his beautiful glide to the net all day long. But then I groan as he misses yet another shot that used to be automatic. Serving to stay in the set at 3-5, he faces a second break point when he gets Nole way out of position then totally misses an inside out forehand wide.

I’m about to start feeling bad for Roger when he breaks Nole in the third game of the second set. As Roger serves for the set at 5-3, Nole hits a forehand that barely reaches the net and then misses a not so difficult volley on set point. My head’s on a swivel looking for the trainer. Surely something’s wrong with Nole and he’s never shy about calling for the trainer.

Nothing is wrong. Nole breaks Roger to start the second set then holds. Roger is still Roger and he hits a stunning lob on the dead run in the fourth game and Nole double faults to give the break back. They’re now at 2-2 in the third set but that’s the end of closeness for the day. Roger doesn’t win another game and my tally of Roger’s missed opportunities grows. In the next game he fails to take advantage of an excellent first serve with another lose forehand.

Nole moves on to the final with a 6-3, 3-6, 6-2, victory and takes over Roger’s #2 spot in the rankings. I think the slam foursome is about to become a threesome.

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I left the Media Center at the BNP Paribas Open last night to go to dinner when I noticed something strange out of the corner of my eye: massage chairs. Whoa, massages? For who? For me. It turns out, and anyone else using the Media Center. I told you they take good care of us here.

Today I want to see why Novak Djokovic is 13-0 on the year going into his quarterfinal match with Richard Gasquet. I watched the beginning of the match as I walked past “the big screen on the green” in the middle of the Indian Wells Tennis Garden and noticed how flat Nole was hitting the ball. When he changed his racket a few years ago he was popping it up. Nole agrees. After the match he said:

I can flatten it out a little bit and take charge of the short balls …which maybe wasn’t the case in the last year or two.

I was surprised to find out that Gasquet was up 2-0 by the time I got to my seat.

Okay, I’m at my seat now and wondering what Gasquet is doing differently. Down a break in the third game, he serves and approaches then scoops up a short hop volley and wins the point. The next two points same thing – putaways at the net. He’s obviously making a concerted effort to come to the net.

Gasquet is one guy who hits as hard as Nole – just not consistently enough. He typically goes for too much which is an interesting mix since his is a much more reticent personality next to Nole’s party persona. Before his Australian Open final this year, Nole hired a band for his victory celebration. I’m pretty sure his opponent, Andy Murray, didn’t approach his match the same way.

I wonder, has any backward hat guy ever won a slam? What does a hat turned backward say? Does it suggest reticence or nonconformity or complexity? With Gasquet I think of reticence. Here is a guy who backs up on the service return. And once he backs up he keeps going – three or four feet behind the baseline for much of the match.

And complexity. Gasquet backs up then goes for winners from that backed up position. He undercuts his vast talent by making it hard on himself. After those putaways at the net in the third game, Gasquet starts going for those big winners I mentioned and loses his serve. Honestly, watching the first few games here, even though Gasquet got out fast, I’m not in the least concerned that Nole will win this match.

A backward hat person almost won a slam. Guillermo Coria won the first two sets in the 2004 French Open final against Gaston Gaudio then served twice for the championship in the fifth set but lost. He won a small clay court event the next year but that was it – no more titles. Maybe he should have turned his cap around.

Nole goes up a break and is now ahead 4-2. I told you I wasn’t worried. And I’m writing this in real time.

Down 2-5, Gasquet taps his racket a few times at the baseline as if trying figure out what to do next. He hits a funky short shot to get Nole out of rhythm and while it doesn’t work just yet – he loses the first set 2-6 – Nole is decidedly out of rhythm at the beginning of the second set and Gasquet goes up 3-0.

Wait a minute, Gasquet has stopped backing up on his return of serve! Soon after, though, I notice he returns to his retreating ways and Nole wins a service game to get to 1-3. And so it goes. Nole hits a few winners to get his focus back and Gasquet hits a dropshot as an afterthought on break point to put Nole back on serve. Gasquet manages to win two more games but it’s Nole going away at 6-2, 6-4. And I swear, after the match he was sounding a bit like Roger Federer.

Someone reminded Nole that he had a fast start in 2008 too – he won the Australian Open and two Masters Series events in the spring including Indian Wells. He asked Nole how he’d changed and this was the answer:

Right now I’m very clear in my mind what I need to do on the court, off the court, to prepare well and to give my maximum on court. And as well have time to enjoy with my friends, with my team, and just enjoy the off-court life.

That could have come straight from Roger’s mouth. He seldom tells you anything is amiss in his life. Life is good. His world is totally copacetic. That’s Nole’s state of mind at the moment.

Nole meets Roger in the semis tomorrow morning. If he beats him, which is a good bet, he’ll overtake him at #2 in the rankings. Nole spent some time at #2 last year before dropping back to #3 late in October. Maybe his stay will be more permanent this time.

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During my meanderings around the Indian Wells Tennis Garden this morning, I saw a huge camera crane sitting on the edge of the field where tennis players stretch and sometimes play soccer. As I walked closer to the camera crane I saw a small Spiderman figure suspended haphazardly from one arm of the crane.

I asked the crane’s keeper if the little Spiderman was a leftover casualty from the current $65 million Broadway show starring Spiderman. The show’s opening has been delayed six times because the choreography is too complex for the current technology. One human Spiderman fell out of an aerial stunt at thirty feet and plunged into the orchestra pit in midperformance.

Here at the BNP Paribas Open we have our own version of Spiderman: the Spidercam. Hopefully it will not fall out of the sky and land on the court. We certainly don’t need any more injuries. The quarterfinal match between Maria Sharapova and Peng Shuai should have been the third match of the day. Instead it’s the first match after Victoria Azarenka retired with a hip injury and Tommy Robredo withdrew with an adductor injury.

The Spidercam looks like a very large version of those old table microphones radio announcers once used. It’s attached by four cables – two to the north tower and two to south tower of the stadium court – and it swoops down to court level as the players enter and anywhere else in between as needed.

After all that work I put into introducing the Spidercam, it’s not swooping during the match between Sharapova and Peng. Maybe that’s because these two players don’t move around very much – at least not forward and back. Peng is a smaller version of Sharapova with a weaker – albeit more consistent – serve. Each player hammers the ball as hard as possible and hugs the baseline.

Peng seems a bit excited in the first set and overhits the ball while Sharapova is on fire and breezes through the set 6-2. Sharapova is rolling along in the second set just as Japanese tennis journalist Akatsuki Uchida and I are discussing serving problems in the women’s game. Wouldn’t you know it, Sharapova hits three double faults in one game and gives back a break to let Peng pull even in the second set at 2-2.

Sharapova had a serious shoulder problem and that partly explains her serving problems. But confidence – which is much of what the serve is about – is a problem in general in the women’s game. Ana Ivanovic is still recovering from winning the 2008 French Open. She hasn’t been past the fourth round in a major since. Dinara Safina reached three grand slam finals but hasn’t been past the fourth round in the last year and a half. She’s had injury problems too but confidence was a problem long before the injury.

Speaking of lack of diversity – I’m talking about an all around game by the way, not ethnicity – Sharapova gets a gimme at close range and puts it into the net to put Peng up 6-5. Now Sharapova has to battle her serve to stay in the set. She hits consecutive serves into the net – actually, rather low into the net which often belies hesitation. That double fault is followed by two forehand errors and Peng pulls even by winning the second set 7-5.

Confidence and diversity might benefit from a similar solution. I made the suggestion to Aki that women could improve their range of skills by playing more than one sport growing up. John McEnroe is trying this approach at his new tennis academy on Randall’s Island in New York.

On a volleyball court they’d learn to swing through the ball and improve their serve – let alone the benefits of jumping. On a soccer pitch they’d have no choice but to move forward and back. Hell, send them to a martial arts master. Not only would those kicks free up their hips and the punches strengthen their arms and shoulders, they’d also figure out how to fight. Put on some headgear and shin pads and let the sparring begin.

Better than that, teach them a Shaolin tiger form. Sharapova is certainly not a pussycat – I remember well the comments of her early coach Robert Landsdorp. When asked whether the women players were divas, he famously said that the bigger the bitches they are, the better they play. But we’re talking about developing confidence here and that’s not necessarily the same thing as being a, um, diva. Let a young girl run through a tiger form where she strikes and scratches and leaps about and watch her embody the spirit of the animal. An animal wouldn’t last five minutes in the wild if it was worried about what it looked like unless, maybe, it was a peacock.

With Sharapova serving at 2-3 in the third set, the photographer behind me suggests that Peng will go up 4-2 and I offer him $5 for the opposite side of that bet. (Please don’t let the WTA read this, they’ll kick me out for betting on tennis.) Peng does get a break point but Sharapova scrapes the sideline with a gorgeous backhand to get to deuce and wins the next two points. I didn’t collect, honest.

Sharapova breaks Peng in the next game then wins her serve to go up 5-3. She closes the game by running around her backhand and smacking a return winner and it’s over. Sharapova wins the match 6-2, 5-7, 6-3. She’s on her way to the semis for first time here since 2008. That should help her confidence.
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Okay let’s start this year off right on Tennis Diary and jump right in. I spent the first day of the new year at the Rose Bowl which, for non-American readers, is a quaint amateur college football game played in front of 94,000 people.

College sports in the U.S. command huge television contracts and 100,000 seat stadiums though the amateur designation is problematic. Remember when tennis was an amateur sport? Amateur in that case meant players were paid under the table. In the college football version, a father tried to sell his talented football playing son to a university for $180,000 last year.

We don’t have that in the tennis world today but we do have Wayne Odesnik. Odesnik was caught bringing vials of human growth hormone (HGH) into Australia this time last year and should have received a two year suspension. The International Tennis Federation reduced the suspension to one year thus allowing him to begin competing immediately.

The curt official announcement of the suspension reduction mentioned cooperation on Odesnik’s part. He gave information of some sort to the authorities and it had to be one of two possibilities. He gave up names of people who provide HGH to tennis players or he named tennis players who use HGH. Hell, it could have been both. But I doubt it.

In all the years that U.S. baseball has been dealing with steroid issues, very few people turned in other baseball players and only one of them was a fellow baseball player. Jose Canseco wrote a book naming baseball players who used steroids because he was angry that he’d been kicked out of baseball. And to make some money of course. If Odesnik did turn in other players he can expect a detached retina or two the next time he gets drawn to the net on a dropshot.

Odesnik should invest in a pair Oakley sunglasses to protect his eyes in either case. If he gave the names of HGH providers to authorities and those providers turn evidence on players to reduce their legal troubles, it’ll all fall back on Odesnik.

Instead of looking backward at last year I’m going to look forward. As I get older I find this a healthier approach to life. So what is the main trend this year? Like most other sports today the answer is rehab. No not drugs silly. Rehab from injuries.

Justine Henin says it’ll take months of play until she recovers properly from an elbow injury though for her that might be a good thing. In her first professional tour of duty, anger and hurt from a muddled childhood propelled her to seven slams with attitude. After she retired then returned she was too well adjusted to want to rip someone’s head off. Maybe an elbow injury is just the adversity she needs to get that attitude back.

Juan Martin Del Potro tried to come back at the end of last year after an eight month break for a wrist injury, but he lost both matches and shut it down. That injury was really unfortunate because he looked like he’d make the twosome of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal a threesome. We can only hope the injury was a one-time thing and not a result of his style of play else we’ll still be looking for someone new to fall in love with at the top of the men’s game.

Dinara Safina says she’s healthy after enduring a season full of painkillers for a stress fracture in her back. I’d never heard of a stress fracture in the back before and didn’t know what it meant. A vertebra actually fractures from the pressure put on the back and typically the fracture is in the lower back. Stress fractures happen slowly over time and that means Safina was playing in a way that put unmanageable pressure on her back. It’s that style thing I mentioned above. If she can regain her power game without having to change her style significantly she should be okay physically. Let’s not worry about that mental part at the moment.

Alright, tournaments are underway and one semi-tournament slash exhibition is already complete so hang around as we get ourselves underway.

I tuned into the Andy Murray – Stan Wawrinka match just as Wawrinka served and volleyed to put away the tiebreaker in the second set and pulled even at one set all in their third round match at the U.S. Open. Serve and volley is an aggressive move, especially at set point, and that was so appropriate, I thought to myself, considering that offense and defense have been on my mind in this Open.

For instance, why is it that Rafael Nadal can crush balls at Wimbledon but can’t get past the semifinals here? There’s an obvious answer. Roger Federer seems to be the only player who ever looks fresh at the U.S. Open. Rafa may not play a whole lot more tournaments than Roger but he’s got those tender knees and you can add at least two tournaments to his yearly total just by adjusting for all that running around he does on clay.

Then there’s offense defense. On clay, no problem. Rafa knows exactly what he needs to do. On grass there’s also no conflict. It’s offense from the get go. On the New York hard courts, though, which is it? What’s too offensive and what’s too defensive?

The first answer is ramp up your serve as high as possible. My grudging appreciation for Rafa’s grinding style continued to soar as he dumped in a 134mph(216kph) serve in his second round victory over Denis Istomin. That was impressive! Hard serving can be too offensive if your first serve percentage drops but Rafa still managed to get 65% of those in. Also impressive.

Istomin was the aggressor in that match however. He went for shots time after time and made a lot of them. He played the match of his life and still lost in straight sets, poor guy. There may be other players on tour who could have won that match, but none of them would have done it in straight sets. None of them has Rafa’s combination of fight and defense.

Rafa may win this thing next Sunday, especially with his new warp speed serve, but I’d love to see a bit more Istomin in him because then I’d guarantee it.

Murray is another guy who’s defensive but without the fight. Maybe fight isn’t the correct word because he’s an ubercompetitive guy. Let’s just call it focus. He broke Wawrinka to start out the third set then flew apart. He started grumbling at himself and challenged a ball that was three feet out inviting a few boos in the process.

He gave the break back and, in the next game, made an ill-advised approach on a crosscourt shot then timidly bunted a backhand right into Warinka’s wheelhouse. Offense/defense confusion. Andy’s main coach at the moment – except for his mum – is Alex Corretja, a former player who never got past the quarterfinals at a hard court slam and only reached the second round at Wimbledon. Maybe not the best aggression counselor.

I lost a match badly yesterday to a very good player. I emailed my coach and complained that I had trouble being aggressive because I get too emotional when I play tennis. He suggested the problem is not being too emotional but being too judgmental. Maybe my comment about wanting to jump of a cliff clued him in, not sure.

Anyway, Murray has the same problem. If his strategy isn’t disarming his opponent he turns a gun on himself and abandons his game. That’s particularly annoying when you consider that he’s got more game than 95% of the tour. I know he saw a sports psychologist in 2007 after injuring his wrist because he was concerned about injuring it again and maybe it’s time for another visit.

Or maybe he’s got some parental issues and needs to replace the coach he recently let go, Miles McLagan. I know Murray likes to do the tribal thing with his coaching staff but a solid figurehead might be useful when you’re slogging through those five set matches and the heat and the noise of New York.

Wawrinka won that third set and was up 5-3 in the fourth when Murray played a bit of cat and mouse by hitting a backhand overhead drop shot. Honestly, I don’t know what else to call it. He ran his racket softly across the ball and dropped it short in the service box. Wawrinka got to it then ran down a Murray lob, turned, and powered a perfect backhand down the line past Murray.

The game didn’t end there but the match was over. How better to demonstrate the point. Murray was fooling around and Wawrinka ended all the foolishness with a powerful statement.

One last comment about defense. After beating Andy Roddick in the second round, Janko Tipsarevic said that Roddick was playing too defensively. I’m gonna give Roddick a pass because I think he’s still suffering the energy drain of mononucleosis. Roddick reported that he’s had a mild case of mono for the past two months.

Roddick had no energy on his groundstrokes and those foot faults told me that he has slightly impaired balance. His front foot kept creeping forward in his windup and that shows some instability. Low energy will do that to you.

I’m tempted to blame Roddick’s mini-Serena meltdown after his first foot fault on mono too, except that Roddick has always been a very emotional guy. Roddick was pissed off because the lineswoman told him the wrong foot when he asked which foot touched the line.

Roddick asked the question to intimidate the lineswoman because his front foot would have been halfway into the court if the fault had been called on his back foot. You’d have to be suffering from dropsy to be that unaware. The problem is that the chair umpire responded by removing the lineswoman instead of warning Roddick to calm himself down or face a penalty.

Roddick is the cash cow of U.S. broadcasts so he was never going to be tossed but the chair umpire should have stood up for the lineswoman. He should have given Roddick a warning and advised him, in a friendly enough manner, to get over it.

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I’m not exactly sure how it is that Mardy Fish needed a wild card to get into Cincinnati after reaching three finals this year and winning two of them, but I’m pretty sure Roger Federer is not William Tell.

If you wander over to this video on youtube you’ll see the latest Gillette ad featuring the ever suave and sociable Roger. It’s a little reality based episode in which Roger appears to be taking a break from an ad shoot to show the director his own version of Tiger Woods’s trick shot.

Tiger’s trick shot consisted of bouncing a golf ball on his sand wedge a few times then flipping it up in the air and hitting a drive on the fly. Tiger is out of favor now so it’s Roger’s turn and Gillette has chosen an appropriate reference for the Swiss tennis player.

The director balances a bottle on his head and Roger hits a serve that sends the ball flying a la William Tell – the Swiss patriotic hero. In the 1300s Tell refused to bow to the hat of an invading Austrian tyrant and was forced to shoot an apple off the top of his son’s head with his crossbow or be executed along with his son. Tell eventually killed the tyrant and precipitated a rebellion that led to the Swiss Federation.

However, while Tiger’s shot was real, Roger’s is fake as you can see here (go to the 2:30 mark). That’s only one of the reasons I miss Tiger. I only watch golf when he plays and I knew I’d always see something amazing. Currently, though, he’s in a liminal state and we’ll have to wait until he passes through it before we’ll see amazing things again. I’m sure that’s a strange new word to most of you, at least it was to me.

Someone in a liminal state is going through a transition and Tiger is going through the huge transition of addiction recovery. There are many, many other transitions we go through and one of them is death – both big deaths such as the end of our lives and little deaths such as the end of a phase in our life.

When Mardy Fish faced knee surgery this time last year I’m pretty sure he was face to face with one of those “end of life phase” deaths. He was 27 years old and ranked #48 at the time. I’d say 27 years is about 60 in non-athlete years. The athlete has been cruising along making a living and doing okay then all of a sudden he has knee surgery and he starts calculating how many years he has left. At this point he can either start thinking about his next career or get his butt in gear.

Fish got his butt in gear. He asked his physiotherapist to move in with him, hired a cook, and made the most of his three month surgery recovery. He’s now 30lbs/14kg lighter and a lot more mobile. The specter of career mortality will do that to you.

That is why Fish had three finals and two titles this year and that is how we found Fish facing Roger in the final in Cincinnati today. Fish is never going to beat Roger without a big first serve percentage I said to myself as Fish served up a double fault in his second service game. While that’s probably true, maybe it’s a bit less true because Fish can now do marathons. That second service game lasted almost 14 minutes and featured two double faults and a missed putaway and Fish still managed to win it.

I always thought Fish was doomed to live out his career as a serial streaker because that’s what you get when you go for a winner on every other shot – streaky play. I was wrong. He was an overweight out of shape aggressive player. The streakiness is still there but now there’s foot speed to run down enough shots to ameliorate the streakiness with a few saves here and there. And that makes a big difference in matches where the point differential can be a few shots. And the first set turned on a few shots.

Roger is going through his own transition. He’s got his record 16 slams which takes some edge off the pursuit of greatness, and he just turned 29 himself. It showed in the first set tiebreaker. With Roger serving at 5-4 he got beaten by a Fish approach shot. While that’s not so bad, on the next shot Roger hit a weak shot into the net to give Fish a set point then Fish closed it out with an ace. Fish hung in there just as well in the second set, but in the second set tiebreaker Roger stepped up and went for shots and even a very fit Fish couldn’t catch up.

Fish played with the slightest bit of slop at 4-4 in the third set to lose his serve and Roger served out for the match. Don’t blame Fish too much or go overboard in praise of Roger. This was Fish’s sixth match of the week and his semifinal was a three setter with his good friend Andy Roddick. For Roger this was only his third complete match of the week after starting off with a bye followed by a retirement followed by a walkover

Fish needed a wild card here because he was #79 when Cincinnati announced the seedings, though he was #36 by the time the event rolled around. If Fish’s fantastic year continues he’ll have to defend all these points he’s racking up this year. If he plays Cincinnati next year he’ll have to reach the final or lose a lot of points. We’ll see what state he’s in when he has to deal with all of that and you can be sure I’ll be paying close attention.

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I’ve arrived at the beautiful campus of UCLA for the ATP Farmer’s Classic event. Novak Djokovic was supposed to join me here but he dropped out for personal reasons. That’s what you say when you change your mind about a lower level event. No medical condition required.

Luckily Andy Murray was looking to play and my home town event now has a bone fide top five player. This is Andy’s first trip to Los Angeles and he’s getting off easy. The highest projected temperature through Saturday is 81F/27C. I’m wearing thick black socks today and last night I considered throwing my thermal bean bag into the microwave to keep my toes toastie warm as I dropped off to sleep.

This is a 28 player event so Andy has a bye for the first round and won’t play until tomorrow. I have a few suggestions for the tourist. There’s the The Bunny Museum in Pasadena which has the largest (inanimate) bunny collection in the world and is open 365 day of the year as long as you call ahead since the museum is in a private home.

If that’s too tame Andy could always go to the Playboy Mansion and consort with live bunnies. Speaking of which, burlesque is making a comeback in a big way. The hottest burlesque star at the moment is Dita von Teese. You can see a classy G-rated tease for Perrier here According to my friend Deb, who is a rabid Dita fan, Dita lives in Los Angeles. I’m sure something could be arranged.

As for the tennis, I was hoping to see Mardy Fish this week because he’s reached the final in three of his last four events and won the last two, but he tweaked an ankle last week and dropped out. Fish apparently decided to clean up his act and stop eating pizza, fries, and cheeseburgers and generally pay close attention to when and what he eats. People don’t usually make such drastic changes for no reason and for Fish it was knee surgery last September.

Anyone my age can tell you extra weight is tough on knees, but the process catches up much faster to pro athletes. The pain we might experience in our fifties catches up to pro athletes towards the end of their careers which is the late twenties for most tennis players – Fish is 28. One piece of connective tissue stops sliding against another piece and stiffness and pain settle in. If you’d like it spelled out in cadaver-like detail, check out The Fuzz Speech by Gil Hedley courtesy of Lenny Parracino, tissue manipulator extraordinaire.

There’s another knee story this week. James Blake is playing Leonardo Mayer this afternoon and James had been slowly sliding off the ATP tour with knee pain. He’s currently ranked 117 after being in the top ten as recently as early last year.

While Fish seems to be grabbing onto tennis, James appeared to be letting go as recently as a month ago. After losing in the first round at Wimbledon this year, he mentioned retirement if his ailing knee didn’t improve. His advisors and doctors were telling him to take an anti-inflammatory but he’s always refused in the past because he thought it was bad for his health.

Maybe the specter of career mortality changed James’ mind because he finally agreed to dig into modern medicine and now his knee is healthy. He looked fast and mobile as he tore through Mayer 6-1, 6-4. The only exciting part was having Serena Williams in the house and, oh yes, that first set break when the speakers started blaring the Lou Reed song Walk on the Wild Side. Something about “he was a she” and “in the backroom she was everybody’s darlin’ but she never lost her head even when she was giving head…”

Do you think maybe the organizers forgot to tell the DJ that it’s Kids Day here at UCLA?

I remember James saying he doesn’t even take vitamins because he’s concerned about running afoul of the drug testing policy, so I asked him if he refused to take an anti-inflammatory for the same reason. No, it’s just the health nut thing. He’s also leery of taking painkillers because he wants to be able to feel his shoulder and his arm and his knee when he wrenches them.

That sound pretty intelligent to me but, hey, if the Veteran’s Administration now let’s its patients use medical marijuana, James should be able to dabble in drugs, right?

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