Monthly Archives: July 2006

Baastad, Gstaad and Newport: slim pickings

Clay court specialists are scurrying back to the clay as fast as possible. Two of the three tournaments this week, Baastad (Sweden) and Gstaad (Switzerland), are on clay. Newport (USA) is on grass. Three tournaments on two different continents, do you wonder why the ATP has trouble marketing itself when it’s spread all over the map on the same week? What if race car driver Michael Schumacher was racing in Indianaopolis while his competitor Fernando Alonso was racing through Monte Carlo? Formula One racing isn’t dumb enough to do that.

I can think of four players who have this serve and they’re all itches: Alex Bogdanovic (born in Serbia), Ivan Ljubicic (born in Bosnia), Mario Ancic and Ivanisevic (born in Croatia).

Rafael Nadal won the title in Baastad, Sweden, last year and had scheduled himself to play in this year’s tournament before he got to the Wimbledon final. That tells you what he thought about his chances at Wimbledon.

One morning when I was five years old I heard the school bells ring, which meant that I was late, so I started running as fast as I could to get there on time. I’d just been given a hand-me-down raincoat and the pockets were too small. I tripped, which was bad enough, but then I fell on my nose because I couldn’t get my hands out of my pockets. That could have been same day someone told me that God watches over the stupid. I still have the scar.

I mention this because I picked Nadal for Monte Carlo earlier this year, along with everyone else, then stupidly forgot to put him on my team. That meant he was available for Wimbledon because I still had four Nadal picks left. As you probably know by now, he got to the finals at Wimbledon and that allowed me to jump from the cellar of the tennisdiary subleague into the second spot. I also jumped two thousand places in the overall rankings.

Nadal, strangely enough, was my money player for the week since few other people picked him.

I’m tellin’ ya, when there are three small tournaments in one week winners are hard to pick because there are lots of players who have equally hopeless records for the year. Many times I’m picking someone based on a 1-0 head-to-head record or, more likely, 0-0. Pay attention to prize money: Gstaad will pay $74,197 to the winner, Baastad $55,742 and Newport $52,000.

Blake is playing Newport but I wouldn’t waste him on a $52,000 tournament.

Gaston Gaudio will defend his title in Gstaad and he’s a good bet because Ljubicic is his only competition. Interesting to note that Ljubicic said he played exclusively on clay up through his early teenage years. His game doesn’t look like it. He’s got that Goran Ivanisevic serve. I call it the rocking chair. You start by bending forward, sticking your butt out and rocking onto your back foot. You then step forward, bend over backwards and launch your body up at the ball.

I can think of four players who have this serve and they’re all itches: Alex Bogdanovic (born in Serbia), Ivan Ljubicic (born in Bosnia), Mario Ancic and Ivanisevic (born in Croatia). And those last three are huge servers. Must be something in the food.

I’m not sure I’d use Ljubicic here, though. I’d save him for the Madrid and Paris Masters and this year he could do well at the US Open. I would take Gaudio, Verdasco and Mathieu and pick a money player such as Wawrinka who made it to the final here last year and is playing at home.

I thought I’d used up all my clay court players but now I have another opportunity to pick Tommy Robredo and Nikolay Davydenko. Davydenko has made it to the quarterfinals of only two Masters Series events that were on fast surfaces and has never made it to the US Open quarterfinals so you might as well use him on clay. I have Berdych through to the semifinals at Baastad but I have no confidence in him. He could easily lose earlier and he injured his leg at a challenger after Roland Garros. Davydenko and Robredo are the only safe picks at Baastad.

Newport accompanies the yearly Tennis Hall of Fame induction ceremonies. Patrick Rafter, Gabriela Sabatini and Gianni Clerici – a tennis columnist and author – are being inducted this year. This will tell you how fast and far James Blake has been traveling: last year he was the number eight seed in Newport and Paul Goldstein was number seven. Blake is playing Newport but I wouldn’t waste him on a $52,000 tournament. He can do well in the Masters Series events, especially since they don’t play five setters till the final. Blake is currently 0-9 in five setters.

The player we’ve been watching here at tennisdiary, Benjamin Becker, is in the qualifying at Newport after getting to the second round at Wimbledon. Tennisdiary, along with photographer Michael Ferlan, is going to the Country Wide Classic in Los Angeles later this month so I’m hoping Bennie will be there and we can ask him about his Wimbledon experience.

Well, today is my birthday and the Newport draft is still not up – what’s their problem, don’t they know there are 11,000 fantasy league players desperately in need of it? – so I’m going off to my birthday party. You’ll have to look at the draw later and pick a few players from it. You should be able to find it here.

I’m going to write about the Federer-Nadal match tomorrow because it’s such a rich match that I want to take my time with it. Someone once told me that Greeks give gifts to their friends on their birthday instead of receiving them. I don’t know if that’s true and I’m not giving you gifts, but I will say “happy birthday” to all of you.


equal prize money for women: it’s the revenue, stupid

Do women players deserve equal pay at Wimbledon? It has little to do with deserving and even less with gender equality. In the world of corporate sports, if you draw a crowd then you get paid. Anna Kournikova was the biggest draw in tennis and she never won a tournament. Venus and Serena Williams were a huge draw because they were a good story: two sisters from Compton make it big in the white country club world of tennis. They were attractive, they had style, and they won majors. They were such a good draw that the US Open women’s final made it to prime time TV. Unlike Wimbledon, CBS didn’t say, “We won’t broadcast the women’s final because women don’t play best of five set matches.” A sport gets a TV contract if it can bring in viewers, it’s as simple as that.

Women last longer. Their life expectancy is higher and they’ve won co-ed ultramarathons – races longer than marathons. Do I need to add that they last longer in the bedroom?

And if a TV network can’t find a sport that brings in revenue, they’ll make one up. When CBS took the NBA away from ABC in the early seventies, the head of sports at ABC, Roone Arledge, created Superstars – made up competitions between professional athletes from different sports, and Battle of the Network Stars – competitions such as apple bobbing featuring TV celebrities, and scheduled them opposite the NBA broadcasts.

Speaking of five set matches, Sporting News Radio personality Dave Smith, a tennis fan, often asks why women don’t play five set matches. The answer to this question has two parts.

The highest priority for both the women’s and the men’s game is to reduce the schedule and give the players more than five weeks for an offseason. James Blake is on the ATP player’s council. He recently said that he doesn’t expect any changes next year but he expects progress in reducing the schedule the year after, 2008. I’m not hopeful. This year the French Open added a Sunday to its schedule so that it could get coverage over three weekends. What if other tournaments do that? A player would be playing in one final while the next tournament has already started.

Are women physically capable of playing five sets matches at majors? When you see Michelle Wie hit a ball 300 yards, the answer seems obvious. But women tennis players are breaking down at an alarming rate. The number of players who dropped out of the tournaments leading up to the US Open last year left those tournaments with exceptionally weak fields.

Women mature earlier. Jennifer Capriati won the French Open junior title when she was thirteen then Martina Hingis came along and won the same title when she was twelve. This is astonishing when you consider that they were competing with players eighteen and under. Capriati joined the tour just before her fourteenth birthday and Hingis joined just after her fourteenth birthday. Mary Pierce also joined the tour at age fourteen. The men typically make it to the main tour when they’re seventeen or eighteen. Hingis, Capriati and Pierce have all missed significant time due to injury. Hingis missed three years, Pierce missed most of one year and has missed most of this year, and Capriati is still missing with a shoulder injury.

Women last longer. Their life expectancy is higher and they’ve won co-ed ultramarathons – races longer than marathons. Do I need to add that they last longer in the bedroom? I didn’t think so. That should be a good reason to expect five set matches except that women are not as strong as men. Running around on cement courts for much of the year and repeatedly pounding a tennis ball leads to physical breakdown and injury. We won’t know how much is due to starting a career too early or playing too many matches each season unless we reduce the schedule. Even then it won’t be clear because there are tons of very young girls at tennis academies around the world pounding their body day after day so they can become the next Maria Sharapova.

If the WTA does succeed in reducing the schedule, I think it would be a good idea to have five set matches in women’s major finals. This could make the finals more uniformally competitive because it’s harder for one player to dominate for three straight sets than two. The men already do this in Masters Series events, they play best of three matches through the semifinals then play a best of five set match in the final.

But best of five set matches shouldn’t be a requirement for equal prize money. If Maria Sharapova draws a crowd, Wimbledon should bloody well pay her.

Wimbledon 2006: fantasy strategy and Baghdatis

Because I have no feel for the stock market I decided that I could make investment income by gambling on sports. I didn’t totally ignore research about investing in stocks because it is, after all, nothing more than a legal gambling operation. I read about a mock trading study where participants were given funny money and made hypothetical trades for existing stocks. The participants who made the most money had been in the Marines. That told me that discipline was a key to gambling. Develop a system that works and stay with it.

I was a bit surprised to see Baghdatis beat Sebastian Grosjean but I was shocked to see Baghdatis go up 5-0 over Lleyton Hewitt before Hewitt won his first game.

When I found out that I’d have to make hundreds of bets during a season to get better than random results, I gave up the idea. I decided to become a minor partner in a real estate partnership and go into the benign version of sports gambling known as fantasy sports even though the prize is paltry – three days at a fantasy tennis camp in Florida, airfare not included. Gimme a break. That is the prize for the most popular tennis fantasy league, ATP Fantasy Tennis, which is the one we play here at tennisdiary.

Fundamental to any tennis picking system is to go through the draw, first round to the final, and pick the winner of each match. Not an easy thing by the way. There are times when there are three tournaments in one week – a good indication of tennis’ problem at the moment, the best players seldom play each other because they’re scattered around the world. Since each team consists of eight players, it makes sense to pick the quarterfinalists. If there is more than one tournament, pick the players that will make the most money because teams are ranked by the players prize money.

The other thing I learned in my research is that you have to take risks. If your winning percentage is too high, say above 57 or 58%, then you’re not taking enough chances. You’re not taking advantage of bets that are riskier but would pay more.

One way to do that in fantasy tennis is to drop one of the quarterfinalists in your draw and substitute a money player – a player that few other fantasy players will pick but could go far in the draw. If you’d picked Marcos Baghdatis at Wimbledon, you would have added over $292,ooo to your team’s prize money because he is now in the semifinals. Not that I was smart enough to make this pick, mind you. I was a bit surprised to see Baghdatis beat Sebastian Grosjean but I was shocked to see Baghdatis go up 5-0 over Lleyton Hewitt before Hewitt won his first game. Hewitt managed to win the second set but Baghdatis took the last two sets for the 6-1, 5-7, 7-6(5), 6-2, victory.

Baghdatis was a good pick because he’s had conditioning and injury problems since his run to the final at the Australian Open earlier this year so few were expecting him to do well at Wimbledon. But he has a winning record against top-ten players and loves playing in front of large crowds in the big tournaments.

Roger Federer rolled over Mario Ancic, 6-4, 6-4, 6-4, and will now play Jonas Bjorkman in the semifinals. Would anyone have picked Bjorkman as their money player? He did get to the final at the grass tournament in Nottingham the week before Wimbledon, but he beat Seppi, Lopez, Vanek, and Calleri, not exactly household names. Not to mention the fact that he’s thirty four years old and has never gone past the quarters at Wimbledon before.

Go ahead and choose a money player but don’t be careless. It might have paid off here handsomely but it would probably get you in trouble over the course of a season.

More Streakers, Please: Women’s Quarterfinals

The women’s quarterfinal matches played themselves out today at Wimbledon, with the top four seeds making it through. Amelie Mauresmo, Kim Clijsters, Justine Henin-Hardenne and Maria Sharapova. Cause for jubilation in some quarters I suppose, but overall it felt rather ho-hum. Is it because I feel tired of seeing the same women get to the late rounds all the time? Roger and Rafa do the same, but I look forward more to their matches. I like their games and I like both guys. I can’t say that about the women in their performances today. They are a hard bunch to root for.

Amelie Mauresmo seems headed back into her mentally fragile state, and her game feels too capable of heading south at any moment in a match. Even though she did a lot of things right today in her match against Anastasia Myskina. Like serving and volleying and moving forward when she could. But doing that over a period of time successfully is still hard for her, so she dropped the middle set to Myskina before winning the match in three. She is hard to get behind right now, in spite of the Number One ranking.

Justine Henin-Hardenne has the most wonderful game on the women’s side, but she’s a hard pill to swallow in her personality, so she’s difficult to root for. But she still wins huge points from me for her focus. A Gemini who can focus can be a thing of beauty.

Kim Clijsters talks about retirement so much that it feels like she’s already halfway out the door, so, I’m already halfway out the door. Scratch her off the Deserving List.

And Maria Sharapova is just too much of a screaming banshee. Besides, she’s got that father in tow. Points off for that.

So, with aggravating personalities to go with rather uninspiring tennis, the matches today were just not that compelling. I found myself switching the channel to cheer the Italians in their effort to knock out the Germans in World Cup. In so doing I missed the highlight, apparently, of the Sharapova-Dementieva match. Thank God for the streaker. A noble Dutchman who danced and cartwheeled his way near Maria was promptly red-carded and hustled off the turf. It’s true what they say, tennis is an international thing now.

Ten years ago here at Wimbledon, Todd Martin and Malavai Washington got treated to a girl streaker rushing out before their match. I’ve noticed that men tend to look at these events. Women look away. Todd grinned broadly and Malavai offered her some sympathy moves. But today Maria and Elena appeared too much on their best behavior. There is so much earnestness in the women’s game now that sometimes it feels appalling. Elena made a little smile, but seemed not to really care. Maria looked away. Later in her press conference she said she didn’t want to know about “his details.” Darling, it’s the details that count, didn’t they tell you? Apparently not.

“Hey, you guys wanted some entertainment during a women’s match, you got some,” groused The Maria.

Unfortunately it was the only entertainment. Otherwise this match was a shriekfest in the audio department, and an eyesore in the visuals (that Dementieva serve again). For a moment or two John McEnroe sounded like he was going to burst into tears over that serve. Maybe it was that serve that has my teeth on edge. Part of me almost feels like Dementieva should be banned from tennis until she gets that serve going. It’s unfathomable how she could get so far in the game with that serve, and the fact that she has does not compliment the women’s field overall. Apparently she’s even been coached a bit by Richard Kracijek, who certainly knew a few things about serving well in his time. His verdict: it’s more mental than physical. Well, yeah. So, look forward to Dementieva getting (nearly) into another semifinal, or quarter, where all her solid ground game goes for naught. Because of that gruesome serve of hers. Has she tried hypnosis?

If there was anyone who played an interesting game out there today, it was the French qualifier, Severine Bremond. A sweet and lovely name for a 26-year-old who has a pretty big serve and drives a mean forehand. Her attitude is the right one for grass, she thinks in terms of moving forward. As a lowly qualifier though you have to expect reality to come crashing in, and JHH is too good a player to let her opponent really get her teeth into the match. But for a few moments there we saw Justine look almost puzzled. This was someone new for her, and Bremond had the sort of game to disrupt the Belgian at least for a while.

But Justine fought her off and finished it in two sets, 6-4, 6-4. I fully expect Henin-Hardenne to win her first Wimbledon this year. Probably her opponent will be Maria Sharapova. They are the two with the most desire, and the skill to translate that into sheer physical aggression.

Kim Clijsters should have been taken to three sets by her opponent Li Na, who was up 5-2 in the second set. But the Chinese girl could only match her most of the way, not all, and Clijsters overtook her in two sets. 6-4, 7-5.

Amelie Mauresmo did have to go three sets against Anastasia Myskina. During the first week we heard things like, “Mauresmo keeps moving easily and very quietly through the draw, taking care of business blah blah blah..” We seem to hear this about Mauresmo at a lot of tournaments. She pulverizes the early field. And then she gets into the later rounds and runs into people who can beat her in rather wilting fashion sometimes. I think Brad Gilbert has even changed his mind. His early prediction was for her, based on her style of play. But today he’s picking Sharapova and JHH to appear in the final.

So I would have to agree that Mauresmo’s chances do not appear that good to me now after all.

Tomorrow’s quarters for the men have a few ho-hummers too. I think Federer and Nadal will easily top Ancic and Nieminen. They had great runs, but they’re worn out. And it’s Roger and Rafa after all. No screw ups here.

Our marquee match on Wednesday should be Marcos Baghdatis against Lleyton Hewitt. I think Marcos will win through, but Hewitt will give it all he’s got. And yes, I would agree with Brad Gilbert saying that Baghdatis would fare better with his game than Hewitt against Nadal. But whether he is fresh enough is another story.

More and more it is looking, wonderfully, hopefully, like another Roger Nadal final.

And we probably won’t require a streaker for that one.

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Wimbledon 2006; American out of fashion

Maybe it’s becuase I read a New Yorker profile of the designer Balenciaga, he dressed the royalty of Europe during an era when an aristocratic women might require three outfits in a day, but I found myself thinking about fashion instead of tennis while I was watching Shenay Perry play Elena Dementieva in the fourth round at Wimbledon.

We knew that Andy Roddick’s ranking was going down, we knew that Andre Agassi was going to retire, we can assume that Lindsay Davenport is very close to the end, we’re not sure whether Taylor Dent will be able to play again, and who knows anything about Robby Ginepri.

I’m sure I’m in the minority here, especially among the male population, but I didn’t like the baby doll tennis dress trotted out earlier this year by Maria Sharapova. Besides the infantile look, it makes it hard for me to shop at Abercrombie and Fitch. The men’s clothes are way too big – baggy of course – and the women’s are too small. Seriously, a women’s large t-shirt looks like it belongs on stick-thin supermodel of the past, Twiggy. Besides, wouldn’t you want to look intimidating instead of childlike?

Shenay Perry had this part right. She was wearing shorts. Is there another sport where women wear dresses and skirts while they compete? But’s that’s about the only thing she had right. There was another reason I was thinking about fashion. My mind wandered because Perry was playing so awfully bad. She had the right idea, feed Dementieva slices and try to blunt one of the hardest hitters in the game. But she was a bit predictable with the slice and it kept landing short, fodder for the swift moving Dementieva. Dementieva didn’t have her usual high number of double faults but that’s only because the match was so short. Besides, she didn’t have to worry about holding serve, she broke Perry six times and won the match 6-2, 6-0.

Perry explained the loss by saying that she was nervous. After the match she said, “…being the last American, it is a little nerve wracking.” And that is the story. She was the only American to make it to the second week of Wimbledon. We knew that Andy Roddick’s ranking was going down, we knew that Andre Agassi was going to retire, we can assume that Lindsay Davenport is very close to the end, we’re not sure whether Taylor Dent will be able to play again, and who knows anything about Robby Ginepri.

But I don’t think anyone realized that the US wouldn’t have anyone in the quarterfinals for the first time since 1913. That tells you how bad it is.

James Blake should be able to stay in the top ten if he continues to improve. He worries me though. It’s not that he’s 0-9 in five set matches, it’s that he seems to have no idea what to do about it. I know why I lose close matches, all I have to do is take a look at my mind and it becomes pretty evident. Is he so out of touch?

There is a good young player the US can look to. Eighteen year old, six foot six, two hundred pound Sam Querrey recently won a challenger event, his first tournament as a pro. And he took a set off Blake in the second round at Indian Wells.

When I wrote about the controversy over foreign players in US college tennis earlier this year, German players have won the last three men’s Division I titles, I said that American players should welcome the competition. If these foreign players had been good enough to turn pro out of high school, that’s what they would have done. IMG sports agents would have snapped them up readily enough and clothing companies would have given them contracts.

While I was reading an article about the Sanchez-Casal Tennis Academy in Barcelona, the article mentioned that Andy Murray had trained there, I read about a British player at the academy who knew he wasn’t good enough to turn pro so his next plan was to get a tennis scholarship at an American college. If American college players can’t deal with that level of competition, American tennis won’t get any better.

Two of those German players, Benedikt Dorsch and Benjamin Becker, made it into the draw here at Wimbledon. Evidently they learned a lot of tennis at Baylor University. The US has good university coaches and excellent tennis academies, they have no excuse.

But maybe that’s not the problem. It’s not that the US is doing worse, it’s that every other country is doing much better.