Did Ana Ivanovic Win a Slam Too Early?

Ana Ivanovic won her first slam at the French Open this year but things haven’t gone so well since.

Jelena Jankovic has been called the weakest number one the WTA has ever had because she has a grand total of one slam final but she’ll end the year at number one. I remember Lindsay Davenport getting a lot of grief for ending the year at number one in 2004 because she didn’t get past the semifinals in a slam that year, and again in 2005 when she had two slam finals but, again, no slam.

Davenport can be excused because she already had three slams and an Olympic gold medal by 2004, but the problem will continue until the WTA changes the rankings system to reward wins over higher ranked players rather than rewarding the player who enters the most tournaments.

Davenport is a courtside commentator at the WTA championships in Doha this week – is that a tacit way of acknowledging her retirement? If so, it’s not surprising in the least that she’s doing it with such little fanfare. The discussion about JJ’s weak status as number one came up in the opening match between JJ and Ana Ivanovic and the way the match played out led me to wonder: Did Ana win a slam too early in her career?

Wouldn’t be the first time. Pete Sampras won a slam in his third year on tour and it was a watershed experience for him because he won the first one with no pressure. He got to another slam final two years later but by then the pressure had ramped up and he couldn’t deal with it. By the third year after his first slam, he’d finally worked out that, yes, he did want to win a slam and, yes, he was willing to have the target on his back that came with it.

Serena Williams won a slam in only her second year of playing them and it took her another two years before she could figure out how to do it again. Svetlana Kuznetsova won the US Open in her third year of playing slams and she hasn’t done it since. Davenport, by the way, won her first slam in her eighth year of playing slams.

Ana won her first slam at the French Open this summer – her fourth year of playing then. After that, her year fell apart and she didn’t reach a semifinal until the middle of last month as she dropped from number one to number four. The thumb injury seemed to affect her confidence and she wasn’t looking so good against JJ in Doha either.

Ana was 5-0 over JJ in the past two years but she lost her very first service game in the match and Jankovic was up 3-0 before Fernando Verdasco could turn his head. He was sitting in Ana’s box with her parents and wow, is he a handsome dude. That pairing would certainly turn out some dark haired beauties. Her first slam and now a boyfriend – that’s enough to throw your life into a tizzy.

Ana managed to break back in the middle of the set but she gave up her serve again and lost the first set 6-3. She looked out of sorts. More than a few times she looked over at her box with a look that was a mix of desperation and resignation. (More about that later.)

While Ana has been struggling, JJ has been rolling along. She won three tournaments this fall and she’s going through a rare patch without injuries of any kind. It’s worth noting that JJ is pretty good about playing with injuries – a good thing as she’s had many of them – while Ana’s confidence seemed to dented pretty good by her thumb injury. It’s also worth noting that JJ has two years on Ana and maturity is part of our theme today. It takes time to grow into fame and learn to manage the pressure of winning and Ana may be experiencing the growing pains that go along with it.

Ana lost her patience in the first game in the second set and it looked as if she still couldn’t find her rhythm. She lost the game to go down a break but she showed signs of life with JJ serving at 3-2. JJ hit a lazy serve and followed that up with a loopy backhand and Ana just crushed the ball down the line to pull even at deuce and won the game to get back on serve. But she gave the break right back and then broke down altogether.

While serving to stay in the match at 3-5, she pulled up in the middle of a point, bent over in discomfort, and called for the trainer. Her movement didn’t betray a muscular problem and it wasn’t muscular – she was having trouble breathing. The Olympic organizers in Beijing must love that after U.S. cyclists walked off the airplane wearing facemasks to avoid pollution.

Ana popped up off the chair after the timeout and finished off the game but JJ served out the match and the reason for those mournful looks towards her box and the breathing problems became apparent after she lost her second match (to Vera Zvonareva) and it was reported that she’s suffering from a flu bug.

A bad thumb, a flu bug, sagging confidence. It’s not been a kind year since Ana won the slam and she’s got finalist points to defend in the Australian Open only three weeks into next season. It could get worse before it gets better. To me, Ana is a young 21 years old and I fully expect her to get it together, but I also wouldn’t be surprised to see it take her another year or so to get her second slam.

I’m off to Brazil tomorrow for a week – I have a short film in the International Festival of Erotic Animation if you can believe that. I’ll check in as much as I can but, remember, you can create your own blog if you like and lay down your thoughts. Consider it.

Tsonga Wins a Free Trip to Shanghai

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and David Nalbandian met in the Masters Series final in Paris. The winner would go to the year end championships in Shanghai. The loser would go home.

People looked at Pete Sampras as a brilliant shotmaker and supreme big match player but a somewhat boring personality. I always thought shotmakers were emotional players, players who fed off the moment and only fully blossomed when the stakes were high. And they were, in my mind, the opposite of players such as, say, Sampras’ opponent Ivan Lendl who prepared for the moment as much as he fed off it. Lendl popped off to cardio conditioning classes when year round conditioning was a new idea for professional athletes and changed his home court surface to match the US open surface precisely.

Roger Federer threw me off too because he’s another brilliant shotmaker yet you hardly heard a peep out of him during a match, and while people called his domination boring more than they called his personality boring – he’s always been very good about doing media interviews and photo shoots, they did ask for more expressiveness on court.

Now that Marcos Baghdatis is on the shelf until he can figure out that being a professional athlete means putting in some time at the gym and doing a few forward bends now and then to avoid injury, we have the best candidate in some time that combines raw, in the moment shotmaking, with an electrical personality: Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. And this week at the Masters Series event in Paris, he’s come through in spades.

I’m not wild about Jo-Willie’s thumbs pointing at shoulders celebration that says “look at me, look at what I did” in a way that out-egos even the biggest prima donna in US football or world soccer, but I’m an old fuddy duddy about that. Younger fans seem to like such things. But Jo-Willie has it all: big serve, athleticism, speed, and big shots on big points, and this week he put it all together.

He started the week ranked number 13 and made his way to the Paris final despite never having reached a quarterfinal at a Masters Series event, and if he could beat his opponent in the final, David Nalbandian, he’d be in the year end championships, something few people expected.

If Nalbandian won the match, he’d be the one flying off to Shanghai for the championships and not many people expected that a few weeks ago either. Nalbandian was the guy who looked nervous at the beginning of the match. He hit a double fault to lose his first service game. Jo-Willie was a bit shaky but, unlike his earlier matches this week, he came out and blanketed the net early and held on to the break of serve to win the first set 6-3.

Jo-Willie blanketed the net behind seven aces in that first set and that was huge for him because he struggled this week when his first serve hasn’t been there. It’s not a Sampras-like serve but he won’t be able to beat an un-fatigued Novak Djkovic or a never-fatigued Rafael Nadal without it, he’s just not steady enough from the baseline.

Lucky for him the year end championships are indoors on a very slick surface and Nadal and Federer are ailing and Djkovic isn’t playing well. He might do very well at the year end championships but that would be misleading because he skipped the slower courts this year – both clay and hard court, so we don’t know how he’ll do through an entire season.

Serving at 3-4 in the second set, Jo-Willie hit and error and followed that up with a double fault and found himself down three break points. He hit four aces to pull himself through the game and that’s the marquee of top players like Sampras and Federer: their serve gets them out of trouble. But both of those players had power and consistency and Jo-Willie has only one of those skills at the moment, and it’s not consistency.

Which cost Jo-Willie the second set. He went down three set points while serving at 4-5 to stay in the second set after hitting a few balls out of the court. He hit another ball into the net to give Nalbandian the set, 6-4. Jo-Willie is inconsistent because he insists on pounding every ball as hard as he can and when it works it’s beautiful. Nalbandian couldn’t get his first serve in and Jo-Willie pounded away successfully enough to break Nalbandian early in the third set and go up 2-1.

If Jo-Willie could hang on to that break just long enough, he’d have an all expenses paid trip to Shanghai. And he did hang on, literally. Serving for the match, he hit a popup volley then served a double fault and found himself down three break points yet again. Nalbandian gave up the first break point when he couldn’t return a second serve, Jo-Willie then got away with another popup volley and followed that up with tremendous second serve to get back to deuce. Another ace and one more punishing forehand and he’d done it, he’d won his first Masters Series shield.

There was no “look at me” celebration, though, just tears and a hug for every member of his family. He’d have hugged every spectator if he could have, and I’d have given him a hug because I’ve been waiting, like all of us, for another shotmaking machine who can rise to the occasion. First, though, Jo-Willie will need a broader ground game and that’ll not only get him through the slower court seasons, but a few finesse shots might also take some pressure off his body and let him actually get through an entire season.

Halloween Hangover

A quick note explaining why I’m in recovery from Halloween and why you should join us tomorrow to look at the Paris final.

I’m supposed to write today but I haven’t been able to recover from Halloween. I went to the West Hollywood Halloween Street Party last night to see the show and a show it was – thousands of people, rolling DJ platforms, two stages, plenty of dressed up Sarah Palins (many, of course, in drag), a few John McCains, an entire band of medieval Samurai, and a neon superhero. Not sure I’d go again, though. It took an hour and a half to find a bus and just as it got close to my destination, some sadly drunk person threw up all over the bus.

Anyway, I’ll be writing tomorrow instead and that’s not so bad because I’ll cover the Paris final and whoever wins it gets the eighth and final place in the year end championships. In the semifinals today, David Nalbandian hung on to beat Nikolay Davydenko in three sets and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga just smashed James Blake.

I certainly didn’t expect Nalbandian to be anywhere close to a Shanghai appearance after his mixed results earlier this year even though he almost pulled it off late last year and ended up one ranking place out of the running. I hoped against hope that Tsonga would recover from his perennially injured status long enough to put a serious run of tournaments together and he has.

It’s not very often that the last match of the regular season means this much so join me tomorrow to look at what happened.

Whaddya think, Nalbandian or Tsonga?

Tsonga Grows Up in Paris

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga passed some important tests in his second and third round matches in Paris.

Damn, the guy is a shotmaker. In the third game of the match in the Paris Masters event between Radek Stepanek and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Stepanek hit a lazy forehand to the middle of the ad court and Tsonga ran around his backhand until he was standing smack dab in the middle of the doubles alley and hit an inside out forehand at such an angle that it landed in the corner of the opposite service box.

Stepanek is a funny hybrid player. He does everything well but nothing spectacularly. He serves enough aces to be a consistent serve and volleyer, he can be magical at the net – he’s the best doubles player among the singles player but maybe only because Roger Federer hardly ever plays doubles. And he’s willing to be the villain.

Mind games have gone out of fashion in the current version of the ATP tour except for some systemic tics like Rafael Nadal’s 30 second time outs between each point (you can page through a Nadal match quick and easy by clicking on the skip forward button on your DVR remote which skips ahead exactly 30 seconds) and Novak Djokovic’s incessant ball bouncing, but Stepanek has an entire range of annoyance tactics that rival his bag of strategic skills. Tsonga was serving at 1-2 in the first set when Stepanek spun a beautiful pirouette and hit a backhand volley winner then backpedaled the entire length of the court in appreciation of his marvelousness.

Stepanek is lucky he’s not a baseball player. If he hit a home run and pulled off that same behavior on a baseball field, the next time he came to plate he’d find a baseball lodged in his ear. I suppose Tsonga could direct a serve at Stepanek’s private parts, it has been done before though, I believe, not intentionally. Tsonga had his chance. He can be just as magical at the net but he let Stepanek take control of the net and found himself down set point in the first set after having lost his serve. Stepanek served and volleyed and did a showman’s leap when he hit a short hop volley off Tsonga’s return. If I were Tsonga, I’d have rocketed the ball right at Stepanek’s head being the hothead I am. Tsonga, not as hotheaded but maybe a slight bit annoyed at Stepanek’s show, overhit his approach shot and that was that, Stepanek had the first set 6-3.

Tsonga has never played Stepanek before and it was an important growing up moment for him. You can’t blast a trickster off the court because they’ll avoid getting into a groundstroke battle with you by taking away the net just as Stepanek did in this match. Any top player should be able to overpower Stepanek, but it takes skill and it was interesting to watch Tsonga try to figure it out.

Tsonga beat that other trickster, Fabrice Santoro, on a fast surface in Lyon last week but it took him three sets to do it and by the look of this match today, I’m guessing Stepanek could have beaten him on a slower outdoor court. As for Stepanek, let’s see how Tsonga figured him out.

Serving at 2-3 in the second set, Stepanek took another one of his little showman hops as he hit another cute shot at the net, but this time Tsonga hit a beautiful cross court approach shot for a winner and followed that up with a passing shot down the line to get his first break point. Not only did that get Tsonga’s home crowd going but it got Stepanek in trouble. On break point, Stepanek hit a fault then smashed the ball in anger to the consternation of Tsonga’s people. He followed that up with a double fault to lose his serve. You live by annoyance, you die by annoyance.

But Tsonga still hadn’t figured it out. Serving at 4-2 he saved two break points by outsteadying Stepanek – rule number one against the trickster: keep the ball in play – and taking over the net, but he still ended up giving the break back because he couldn’t handle Stepanek’s elegant junk. It looked like he’d finally figured it out when he gobbled up Stepanek’s slices and misdirections and pulled even by winning the second set 6-4, but he lost his serve again early in the third set because he didn’t get to the net and when he did, he wasn’t putting the ball away. He couldn’t quite decide when to smash the ball or not.

Tsonga is a rhythm player and an emotion player. Those passing shots gave him his rhythm and then, with Stepanek serving to stay in the match at 4-5, he found his emotion. He hit a shot down the line he thought was in because he couldn’t hear the out call over the roar of the crowd and by then it was too late to challenge. That got him mad and now he started going for his shots instead of fooling around and he came up with three great shots in a row to close out the match: a beautiful running passing shot, a high looping topspin lob that landed just inside the line, and a return that curled round the doubles alley and back into the court. He had the break on Stepanek and he had the match, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4.

Tsonga’s third round opponent, Novak Djokovic, is a different matter altogether. He WILL slug it out with you from the baseline and he has a better backhand than Tsonga. But he’s not as cute at the net and that is Tsonga’s advantage. Would Tsonga figure out how to use it?

Pretty much, yeah. Djokovic was serving at 2-2 in the first set when Tsonga hit a drop shot. He followed that up with a push volley that should have been a putaway volley, but he managed to win the point by picking off a lob volley and hitting in right at Djokovic to get a break point. Djokovic hit an error on an easy forehand to lose his serve and then it was time to ask: Can Djokovic get through an entire season and stay in top form? Or, more to the point, will Andy Murray overtake Djokovic before Djokovic can overtake Roger Federer?

Djokovic is in the top four and the other three players are trucking along and he’s not. Rafael Nadal, Federer, and Murray are still alive in Paris and each of them reached the semifinals in Madrid, while Djokovic lost to Tsonga in the Bangkok final then lost early in Madrid. You could say Djokovic did better last fall when he won the title in Vienna and reached the semifinals in Madrid.

Djokovic has three sterling titles this year: the Australian Open, and the Masters Series events in Rome and Indian Wells, but Murray has a slam final, two Masters Series events, and five titles altogether – the same number Djokovic had last year. So it’s not looking good for Djokovic if Murray can stay injury free.

Tsonga held onto his break to take the first set though it wasn’t easy, and he showed his Pete Sampras jump overhead early in the second set. Athleticism is all good and well but consistency is better as Tsonga lost his serve a few points later then completely fell apart in the second set. His thigh was bothering him – he took a medical time out at the end of the second set which he lost 6-1 – but he had only to look across the net to find someone who plays well despite injury, real or imagined.

And you could say Tsonga learned that lesson too. In Djokovic’s first service game in the third set, Tsonga lunged to return a wide serve then ran down a low shot to the other corner and batted the ball past Djokovic at the net for a break point. Then he outdid that on the next point by flicking a deep Djokovic volley crosscourt for the break.

In both of Tsonga’s matches he played a few magical points in very important situations to get the win. Before we get carried away, we should remember that while Djokovic has trouble staying strong the entire year, Tsonga barely plays half the year due to his multiple injuries. But we did see some important progress this past few days and I’m thrilled about that because I’m still looking forward to seeing that magic in many more slams to come.

Young Black Players in Paris and an Untimely Death

Why does France have so many good young black players? Italian player Federico Luzzi dies of leukemia at age 28.

France is one of the more successful countries when it comes to developing young black tennis players. Why is that? I can think of two reasons. Lack of competing sports: France has soccer, tennis, and basketball, but the U.S., for instance, has football and baseball on top of that and then, of course, there’s the expense – learning soccer and basketball is a whole lot cheaper than private tennis lessons. Lots of countries fit into that same category, though, and private tennis lessons are expensive everywhere, so what else explains it? The National Sports Institute, as it says on Josselin Ouanna‘s French language Wiki page, “identifies and integrates” young players and develops them.

Since I’m not good in French, I used a google translation of Ouanna’s Wiki page and the translation was rather amusing. It referred to the “blackteam” of Ouanna, Gael Monfils, and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga – three black French tennis players, and uses the following incredibly poetic phrasing to describe Ouanna’s current ranking of 173: “his body left to the quiet that allows it to integrate the 173rd place after his victory on 14 October 2008 to challenger tournament in Rennes.” I can almost hear Ouanna take a big breath, relax his shoulders, and lazily think to himself, “Aaaaah, thank heavens my body is now resting in ranking place number 173.”

Love his first name by the way, Josselin. Reminds me of Phedre’s consort Joscelin Verreuil in the wonderful historical fantasy trilogy, Kushiels’s Legacy. If you like sex, fantasy, and history, and who doesn’t, you’ll be entranced by these three books.

Ouanna and Monfils are both 6ft 4in (193cm) and Ouanna and Tsonga both go 200lb (90kg). I’m guessing the National Sports Institute doesn’t identify and integrate short kids.

Ouanna showed good touch around the net in his match with Robin Soderling today in Paris, and excuse me for typecasting, but Ouanna’s got that artistic thing we associate with the French and it’s not just his one-handed backhand. Maybe it was all the more noticeable because his Soderling is so dogged and stern in his personality and his tennis. Soderling serves the ball hard but it’s almost like he’s hitting against his body because there’s so little shoulder rotation. His forehand reminds me of Lleyton Hewitt: he brings the racket back way behind him and hits with a lot of arm. I’d like to send him to my sports trainer guy and familiarize him with the concept of the kinetic chain: the idea that strength is best served by all parts of the body working in sequence instead of isolating one’s arm, say, and using it to bludgeon the hell out of the ball.

Having said that, Soderling’s doggedness serves him well. As of Tuesday, he was ranked number 17 but he’s still in contention for a place in the year end championships. And though I discounted Tsonga when I first saw him at the French Open – I thought he was too slow which tells you how good I am at spotting talent – it doesn’t look like Ouanna has enough skills to force his game on anyone. He performed pretty well, losing by the not too bad score of 6-3, 6-4, but most of his success came from hanging in the point until his opponent made an error, and while there are plenty of retrievers at the top level, most of them have more power than Ouanna does.

I watched the Monfils – Juan Monaco match because I wanted to know what Roger Rasheed has that Monfils’ millions of other coaches didn’t have. Monfils changes coaches on a whim but Rasheed, Llleyton Hewitt’s former coach and now Monfils’ coach, has Monfils moving up the rankings while Monfils’ many other coaches couldn’t do anything with him. How do you get a player to focus, stop eating junk food, and probably hardest of all, play aggressive tennis when you’re style is fundamentally defensive?

Before I get to that though, I noticed that Monfils’ opponent in Paris, Juan Monaco, was wearing a black ribbon. I assume that’s in honor of Federico Luzzi, the 28 year old Italian player who died of Leukemia last week. Luzzi was ranked in the 400’s but he did make it into the top 100 at one point in his career.

I got to thinking about that because a dear friend of mine died in a car accident last month and when I try to play tennis, sometimes it’s just ridiculous. The ball bounces off the side of my racket and yesterday I caught a ball that was served to me even though it landed in the service box. I just can’t function properly and you can’t anticipate the path of grieving because it has a mind of its own.

I find it hard to imagine flying off the Paris and playing a top level event while grieving the loss of a friend. All of which is to say that covering tennis these past five years has given me a huge appreciation for the high level of tennis I see day after day in some pretty trying circumstances.

Looking at the beginning of Monfils’ match with Monaco, it didn’t look like Rasheed has done anything to make Monfils more aggressive. Monfils went down 3-0 to Monaco in the first set pretty quickly. In the next game, however, Monfils started off with three straight aces and followed that up by breaking Monaco, but not because he was aggressive, Monaco was the aggressor, but because he took advantage of Monaco’s aggression. Same thing on the first point in the next game – Monfils was now on serve at 2-3. Monaco had Monfils running corner to corner but when Monaco got to the net, he nicked a passing shot with his racket that was going long and Monfils won the point.

I gotta say that even though Monfils is defensive, he’s the most entertaining defensive player I’ve even seen. He had two break points on Monaco at 4-4 in the first set and Monaco started him off with a serve wide followed up with a backhand to the opposite corner, naturally. Monfils retrieved the ball with a lob and then returned Monaco’s overhead with a leaping ballet-like forehand that landed in the far corner of the court. As magical as that was, here’s the problem: he drove Monaco to the baseline then let him back into the point and Monaco finished it off with a forehand winner. That is Gael Monfils in full.

And maybe that’s enough. Monfils got the break on the next point then served out to take the first set by winning six of the last seven games. And after trading breaks at the beginning of the second set, Monfils broke again and won the match, 6-4, 6-3. All that and he’s ranked number 16 and climbing. Rasheed must be doing something right.

I didn’t stay on the match between Radek Stepanek and Marc Gicquel very long but I did catch a classic point between these two players who depend on their brains as much as their physical skills. Gicquel was serving at deuce at the beginning of the second set after Stepanek had won the first set. At one point in the rally, Gicquel and Stepanek hit nine straight crosscourt slices between them before Gicquel directed one of his slices down the line. After another yet another slicefest, Stepanek snuck into the net, scooped up a sliced passing shot down the line, and followed that up with backhand flick of a shot that went crosscourt at a wicked angle. Stepanek ran back to the baseline to pick up Gicquel’s response – a slice, of course – and tried to pass Gicquel who met the ball with his own wickedly angled drop shot that was so soft the ball just died on the green-colored court.

Keep in mind that this entire point took place on a fast indoor court. I don’t think there’s a statistical category for slices but if there were, this match would have challenged the world record for a fast court. Stepanek lost that second set but won the match, 6-4, 3-6, 6-4.

Before I end the day, I just want to look at Roger Federer for a minute. I’ve been wondering if his mono is turning into schizophrenia. Here is a selection of recent quotes from Rog:

That’s not what my life’s about anymore [rankings]. It’s about winning titles and that’s what I’m really excited about.

Often you’re on the tour and you go week by week and you’re like, `Oh my god, I’ve got quarter-final points to defend from last year’, but now when I come into a Grand Slam I don’t care if I have 1000 points to defend or 50.

I served well and played aggressively so I couldn’t ask for more today. It really hasn’t been too bad a year. Next year I want to get the No. 1 spot and maybe win a few more Masters Series events but otherwise I’ll be happy to stay at generally the same level.

I know we’ve been talking about this recently on Tennis Diary and maybe that’s because we don’t know what Roger’s going to do because he doesn’t know. Whaddya think? Will he try to get the number one ranking back or focus on those slams next year?