Monthly Archives: November 2007

Some Thoughts on Baggy and Rafa

Join us for the Paris Masters final! We’ll be blogging live this Sunday, November 4th, 7:30am Los Angeles/10:30am New York/3:30pm London (remember to set your clock back one hour Saturday night if you live in the U.S.).

You can beat Rafael Nadal on fast courts but it’s not easy as Marcos Baghdatis found out in Paris today.

Rafael Nadal beat Marcos Baghdatis today in the semifinals at the Paris Masters, 6-4, 4-6, 6-3. (David Nalbandian continued his improbable indoor court success by beating Richard Gasquet, 6-2, 6-4, in the other semifinal).

In preparation for tomorrow morning’s live blogging broadcast of the Paris final – a format that is usually a chain of thoughts rather than a cohesive narrative – I’m going to lay out a chain of thoughts on today’s match between Rafa and Baggy.

How to Beat Rafa on Fast Courts

Mikhail Youzhny and Tomas Berdych can tell you exactly how to beat Rafa on a fast court: attack his forehand. People attack Rafa’s forehand because he has such a long wind up that it’s hard for him to prepare properly. On a clay court he patrols miles behind the baseline which gives him time to rev up his windmill topspin forehand. On fast courts, players like Youzhny and Berdych hit hard flat shots so the ball gets there too fast for Rafa to stay behind the baseline.

Having said that, it’s not easy to beat Rafa on a fast court.

Paris is Slow

If you look at the court speed rankings on tennisform.com, you’ll see that Paris is the fourth fastest court on tour, ten places in front of Madrid, averaged over the past ten years.

If you look at the court speed ranking for Paris on tennisinsight.com’s Tournaments page, you’ll see that Paris has slowed down over the past few years to the point where it is now slower than the court in Madrid.

Clearly the ATP has slowed the court down. I don’t know if the balls are different (the measurements above are based on the number of games played per set, not a physical measurement of the court) or they have physically slowed down the court. No doubt both. In either case, that makes it harder to beat Rafa.

Don’t underestimate the importance of speed. Rafa is 14-6 on indoor hard court for his career but only 8-8 on carpet which is usually faster. Baghdatis is the opposite: 6-6 on indoor hard court and 16-4 on carpet.

Rafa Never Wears Out

Even if you’re much better conditioned than Baggy, and most players are, you’ll get tired because Rafa runs everything down and he’s a master baseline player so he’ll run you all over the court.

This is a problem because you have to attack Rafa else he’ll control the point. That means you’ll make lots of errors going for big shots and the more tired you get, the more errors you’ll make.

Baggy got tired. He needed to win this match in two sets. At the end of the first set and beginning of the second, Baggy won eight out of nine games. He was sucking air by the fifth game in the second set and Rafe won six of the next seven games.

Baggy got a second wind at the end of the third set and the last game of the match was magnificent. Baggy had to have the break of serve to stay in the match and he was slamming the ball while Rafa was retrieving everything in sight. Baggy hit a beautiful touch volley but Rafa followed that up with a passing shot thread through the smallest of windows.

Rafa’s OCDness

Rafa has more than a touch of something known as an obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). He has to be the last one on the court for the coin toss, he has to place his water and sports drink bottles in exactly the same place. There’s also the wedgie diving, the sock pull, and the frequent towel dry off. At one point he was sitting in his chair and inspecting his towel to make sure he didn’t lay it across his knees in the wrong configuration. Later in the game I saw him do it again.

It’s obsessive but it’s a deep part of his game and it helps him weather adversity such as Baggy’s win streak without losing psychological momentum. Lanny Bassham is a well-known expert on the mental aspects of sports. He’s an Olympic gold medalist in rifle shooting and he helps professional golfers, among other athletes. He strongly suggests that you bathe yourself in rituals like Rafa’s because it’s important to occupy the mind.

Have you ever sat down and meditated on a candle or followed your breath? Your mind will take off in a million different directions by the time you bring it back to the candle or your breath. An unoccupied mind in the middle of a tennis match will go down the road of doom given the opportunity. Your opponent wins three or four games in a row? Your mind thinks you’re the worst tennis player even to walk the earth.

I suppose there are people whose mind always moves towards the positive but I have yet to meet them. For the rest of us, if we can keep our mind occupied with ritual and rehearsal – visualizing your serve or your next return for instance – we can keep our mind from harping on our insecurities and move forward in the match.

Baggy Postscript

If Baggy hadn’t gone awol for a month earlier this year – he lost in the first round in Dubai and two consecutive Masters Series events, Indian Wells and Miami – it would have been an excellent year for him. He might well have been on his way to Shanghai instead of Gasquet.

He’s been ranked as high as number eight but he’s seems unable to stay there. I won’t promise that he’ll get to Shanghai next year but I do think he’ll end up in the top ten.

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Federer Is Ordinary and Davydenko Is Crumbling

Will Roger Federer win the Australian Open and will Nikolay Davydenko ever get the ball into the service box?

Federer Looks Ordinary

I took a closer look at David Nalbandian’s win over Roger Federer in this week’s Paris Masters Series event. Nalbandian beat Federer yesterday to get to the quarterfinals.

Federer had lost the first set and had just been broken to go down 4-5 in the second when it hit me: Federer will not win the Australian Open next year.

A prediction on my part for sure and Federer actually broke Nalbandian in the next game to even the second set at 5-5. But Federer looked very ordinary. He couldn’t take control of the points consistently while Nalbandian was able to move Federer wide then hit winners to the open court again and again.

Nalbandian won the match in straight sets, 6-4, 7-6(3), and it was a rather routine win.

I don’t know what Nalbandian’s excuse is for playing so well considering that he hadn’t reached a semifinal in almost a year before he won Madrid two weeks ago. Evidently he was having some physical problems and couldn’t train properly.

I do know what Federer’s excuse is. This is his third tournament in a row and he doesn’t like doing that. He played Paris because Rafael Nadal is breathing down his neck. Nadal is into the semifinals in Paris and if Federer doesn’t do well in the year end championships in Shanghai, Nadal could be in position to take over the number one ranking early next year.

The surface at Shanghai is superfast so it’s unlikely that Nadal will do well there, but then it was unlikely he’d reach the semifinals in Paris. Luckily for Federer, Nalbandian will not be in Shanghai.

Who’ll beat Federer in Australia? At this point, Nalbandian and Novak Djokovic are the best candidates. Nalbandian just beat him twice in a row and Djokovic beat him in the final at the Montreal Masters which is an outdoor hard court event. Nadal reached the quarterfinals at this year’s Australian Open but his knees probably won’t hold up through a two week long hard court slam.

What do you think? Does Federer win the Australian? If not, who’ll beat him?

Davydenko Is Crumbling

The Nikolay Davydenko situation is getting ridiculous. Chair umpire Cedric Mourier warned him about his lack of effort while he was in the process of hitting ten double faults in his loss to Marcos Baghdatis in Paris yesterday. The ATP seems to be punishing Davydenko for his part in a suspicious match he played against Martin Vassallo-Arguello in August. There were irregular betting patterns on the match that made it look like the match was fixed. The ATP is still investigating the matter.

How else can you explain it but punishement? Last week the ATP fined Davydenko $2000 for lack of effort during a similar run of double faults. I understand how betting patterns can lead you to think that a match was fixed, but what’s the evidence here?

It looks to me like Davydenko is getting Guillermo Coria’s disease. He can’t get the ball into the service box. In Coria’s case the problem was a lack of confidence. I think Davydenko has finally succumbed to the pressure of constant scrutiny about the alleged fixed match. He gets asked about it at every tournament he attends and he’s not a guy who’s good with the media. He’s not smooth or well-spoken, he’s cranky if anything.

It would be surprising if it didn’t finally get to him. That’s immense pressure to face week after week. It’s not that I’m necessarily sympathetic. That match looked for all the world like a fixed match and until someone shows me an alternative explanation, I’ll be very suspicious.

But give the guy some resolution one of these days. That match was in August and he’s still twisting in the wind.

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Hingis Retires After Positive Test for Cocaine

Martina Hingis tested positive for cocaine and Roger Federer lost to David Nalbandian twice in a row. What is the world coming to?

A friend sent me an email invitation to an event at a local S&M parlor this weekend. I’m pretty vanilla so I didn’t accept the invitation but I was interested in the title of one of the workshops: Crack Addict. What’s crack got to do with S&M I wondered? Is that a new kind of kink I’ve never heard of before?

There are no doubt plenty of kinky acts I’ve never heard of but this one refers to whips. As in cracking a whip. Get it?

Crack is also connected to cocaine – it’s a diluted cocaine in the form of a rock – and I was even more surprised to hear it connected with Martina Hingis. I’m not naïve enough to think that rich athletes don’t try cocaine now and then and more power to them. I did enough acid and marijuana in my youth to get my fill, let others do it too. How else will they know what they’re missing?

Martina, however, tested positive for cocaine at Wimbledon and that’s bit of a problem because cocaine is a stimulant which makes it a banned substance. Her response? I didn’t do it.

Here we go again. In the famous words of Rafael Palmeiro who sat in front of a congressional hearing on steroids, pointed his finger and said:

I have never used steroids. Period. I don’t know how to say it any more clearly than that. Never.

Five months later he tested positive for the steroid stanozolol and suggested that the positive test had come from a liquid B-12 vitamin given him by a teammate. Later that season Palmeiro went home and he hasn’t played since.

Hingis is doing the retiring thing too and she’s denying that she ever used cocaine. This is her stated reason for retiring: “I do not want to have a fight with anti-doping authorities.” I can sympathize with that. I’ve written about the unfair balance of power held by anti-doping organizations over athletes and you have to wonder why it takes them four months to process a positive test.

But Martina, you can’t have it both ways. If you didn’t do cocaine, retiring sends a decidedly mixed message. The positive test result will stand if you don’t challenge it.

Does this taint Martina’s career? Not in the least. Party on girl, just be smarter about it. It’s not like cocaine is helpful in a tennis match. It’s a short lived high.

Martina’s return to tennis in 2006 after a three year layoff has been pretty cool. She’s done about what I expected. She got into the top ten, reached the quarterfinals at three slams, and won three titles. She can be proud of that.

Still, if she doesn’t fight the cocaine thing, she’ll go down as just one more big fat denier in a long line of deniers. And that’s really unfortunate because a huge part of Martina’s appeal was her unedited mouth. If she didn’t think much of an opponent’s game, she’d say so. If she was mad at the WTA, she’d say so.

And now she’s giving up because the case could drag on for years? Where’s your sense of outrage, Martina? It just doesn’t wash.

I’m hoping my co-writer Pat Davis will write one of her wonderful remembrances on the occasion of Martina’s retirement. How about it Pat?

Nalbandian Beats Federer Again

David Nalbandian beat Roger Federer again today in Paris. I don’t have time to write about it tonight but I’ll weigh in tomorrow.

I will say one thing. I expected Federer to lose early since he needs to get his rest for Shanghai – this is his third straight tournament – but I didn’t expect Nalbandian to keep rolling and how wrong I was.

Okay, I’ll say two things. Federer was beaten by Guillermo Canas in two consecutive tournaments earlier this year and now he’s been beaten twice by Nalbandian within three weeks. Federer’s hallmark is his ability to figure out an opponent’s game so we can assume the problem is not strategy. And as far as we know, he’s not losing brain cells.

That means Federer is not able to execute his strategy. It’s a very slight drop, he still won three slams this year, but it’s a clear indication of slippage in his game.

That brings us to today’s poll because Federer is also losing his grip on the number one ranking.

Pollster

The year end rankings for 2007 will have Federer as the number one player, Rafael Nadal as number two, and Novak Djokovic as number three. Here’s the question:

Exactly one year from today, who will be the number one ranked player in the ATP?
Roger Federer? Rafael Nadal? Novak Djokovic? None of the above?

Go to the poll on the right of the screen and to vote.

Tennis Diary TV Feature

Some of my favorite shows of all time are the Looney Tunes cartoons featuring Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner. The hapless coyote Wile E. repeatedly tries to trap the annoying little Road Runner for dinner and Road Runner repeatedly escapes, usually leaving Wile E. to suffer in a contraption of his own making that has backfired on him.

It’s all very simple, stupid, and hilarious. Just my style.

In that vein, I bring you this week’s Tennis Diary TV Feature: Tennis Funnies (If Tennis Funnies is not currently playing, click on Channel Guide and select it.)

It’s simple, sometimes crude, stupid, and really funny. Have a laugh. Why not? The world is falling apart.

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