The US lost badly to Spain in Davis Cup as that slippery, slidy clay got in the way again.

These are not the words you want coming out of Rafael Nadal’s mouth at the end of a clinching rubber in the Davis Cup semifinals:

Today I played very well. I shocked myself with some of the winners I played, was near perfect tennis.

Nadal had just beaten Andy Roddick on red clay, 6-4, 6-0, 6-4, to give Spain an insurmountable 3-1 lead over the US in a bullring in Madrid. Rain delayed the start of the match and that made things worse because wet clay is slow, muddy clay which is a good antidote for a big server like Roddick. But it wasn’t supposed to come down to this match.

If the US wanted to beat Spain and get to the Davis Cup final for the second year in a row, Roddick had to beat David Ferrer, give Sam Querrey a chance to do the same thing, and hope that Mardy Fish and Mike Bryan could win the doubles rubber because no one was going to beat Nadal. Only one of those things happened and it wasn’t in singles as Spain beat the US 4-1.

It looked promising when Roddick went up two sets to one on Ferrer in the second rubber, but Roddick was making a lot of errors and, ultimately, if the road to a Davis Cup final goes through Spain or Russia on clay, Roddick can fight his heart out as he always does, but it’s too much to expect him to pick up two wins in that situation. It took Ferrer 3 hours and 17 minutes and 14 games in the fifth set, but he finally put Roddick away, 7-6(5), 2-6, 1-6, 6-4, 8-6.

While the US is still developing big serving hard court players like Roddick and Querrey, Spain and Argentina are developing good all round players. Nadal is a ridiculous 39-7 on hard court this year and Ferrer has reached the semifinals at the US Open – which is better than James Blake I might add. And this weekend, Juan Martin Del Potro saved Argentina’s butt by winning both his matches in Buenos Aires. Del Potro won four straight tournaments this summer, two on clay and two on hard court, and he reached the quarterfinals at the US Open. That’s what we call all round tennis.

I hear there are lots of clay courts in Florida but Roddick and Fish both learned their tennis in Florida and it didn’t help them. Querrey grew up in California about an hour away from my home. Now and then I see a broom pushed up against a chain link fence and a green clay court beyond it, but that’s about it.

I think the USTA should develop an exchange program with the Sanchez-Casal Academy in Spain for its promising junior players. The US can teach Spanish players to serve hard – Feliciano Lopez could have stayed home – and US players can learn to slide on clay. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that registration at the Sanchez-Casal Academy has been growing much faster than registration at Nick Bollettieri’s Academy in Florida for the past few years.

Luckily for Argentina, the Davis Cup final will be on their soil but which surface should they choose? According to my research – though it’s hard to believe – the two countries have only met twice in Davis Cup history, once in 2003 and one in 1926. Both ties were played on clay and Spain won them both.

Argentina should pick a fast indoor surface such as carpet like the US did in the final against Russia last year. The US would have picked an ice rink if they could have gotten away with it. David Nalbandian took both indoor Masters Series events in Paris and Madrid last year and Del Potro is passable indoors. Nadal’s worst results are on carpet and Ferrer has a losing record on the surface and, did I say this already?, no one is going to beat Nadal on clay.

Let me know what happens because I’m loading up my car and taking off in search of red clay courts in the area and it might take me a few months.

It’s time for the ATP Fantasy Tennis Season so check out our Fantasy Tennis Guide. You’ll find Fast Facts, Strategies, and Statistics to help you play the game.

Sign up and join our subleague! It’s called tennisdiary.com. We send weekly email updates to all subleague members before the submission deadline.

Pay attention! This week’s submission deadline is Sunday evening, September 21, 9pm (EST) in the U.S/Monday morning, September 22, 3am (CET) in Europe.

We have two tournaments in Asia this week in Bangkok and Beijing. The prize money is similar in both tournaments and we need eight players for our fantasy team so let’s pick the quarterfinalists in each event.

Bangkok draw (hard court, first prize: $94,000)

Beijing draw (indoor hard court, first prize: $85,000)

Sorry to be late with the Bangkok picks but time difference and weekend partying got in the way. Bangkok didn’t get its draw out until yesterday evening west coast time in the US, and by that time the party at my house had started and didn’t end until 3am. So here I am the morning after, surrounded by empty beer bottles and potato chip crumbs but, more or less, ready to go.

Novak Djokovic is the number one seed in Bangkok but most people have used him five times already this season and can’t use him again. If you can still use him, save him for one of the two remaining Masters Series events left on the schedule. Robin Soderling is a good second choice. He’s 10-3 on indoor hard court this year which ain’t bad at all.

Novak’s brother Marko is in the second quarter. Since he’s currently ranked 1728, I’m guessing his wild card came along with Novak’s appearance fee. Nicolas Mahut just won a challenger on indoor hard court and he reached the quarterfinals here last year, so he could beat Jarkko Nieminen. But Tomas Berdych is 3-0 over Nieminen lifetime and Berdych beat him in Canada this summer. Berdych also reached the semifinals here last year so he’s my pick.

In the third quarter, Marat Safin, Mischa Zverev, and Gael Monfils are eligible for our fantasy team and it’s tough to pick between them. Safin used to be a very good indoor hard court player but he’s not doing well this year. Monfils hasn’t won a match indoors since 2005 but he’s only played in four indoor events over that period. Zverev plays well indoors and he did reach the quarterfinals at Rotterdam as a qualifier this year, but most of his results indoors have been in challengers. I’m picking Zverev because he reached the quarterfinals here two years ago as a qualifier and he has a better record indoors this year.

Benjamin Becker reached the final here last year but he just lost in the first round in an indoor challenger. Fabrice Santoro’s best results indoors lately have been in challengers. Jurgen Melzer is having a good year – he’s reached three quarterfinals and a final, but he hasn’t gone past the second round indoors in the past year while Jo-Wilfried Tsonga had a quarterfinal and semifinal indoors last fall so I’m going with Tsonga.

It seems like only yesterday we were staying up all hours of the night to watch swimming and tennis and all sorts of other sports at the Beijing Olympics and here we are, back in Beijing again. This is a rare opportunity to compare performances on the same court only a few weeks apart.

The first person who pops up is Fernando Gonzalez and he’s in the third quarter of this draw. He won this event last year and he reached the final at the Olympics. Gonzalez beat Sam Querrey, the main competition in his quarter, in their only meeting but that doesn’t mean much because Querrey had just joined the tour. Both players reached the fourth round at the US Open but I’m picking Gonzalez because Querrey lost in the first round at the Olympics.

David Ferrer is the top seed and he has Tommy Robredo in his quarter. Robredo lost in the final here last year. This is actually a tough match to pick because Robredo has a losing record on hard court this year but he reached the fourth round at the US Open. Ferrer got to the third round at the US Open and both players lost in the first round at the Olympics. Ferrer beat Robredo in their only hard court meeting last year but I can only use Ferrer one more time so I’m saving him for Tokyo – which he won last year – or Paris. Robredo it is.

Yen-Hsun Lu is in the second quarter and he beat Andy Murray at the Olympics and made it to the third round. Murray was probably tired and we can’t pick Lu anyway because he wasn’t in the top 100 when the fantasy season started. Richard Gasquet has been all over the place this year. He barely has a winning record on clay and isn’t much better on hard court. He didn’t go to the Olympics and he lost in the first round at the US Open though his opponent, Tommy Haas, is a very tough player. Rainer Schuettler is here too but he’s never gone past the second round in five tried in Beijing and he’s only 3-7 on hard court this year.

This is tough luck for me because I’ve used up all my Gasquets so I’m going to have to pick Schuettler. Should you pick Gasquet if you have him? He could get to the final but he’s not likely to win this event because Gonzalez and Andy Roddick are in the bottom half and Robredo, who is in his half, beat him the last two times they met on hard court. Gasquet reached the final in Tokyo last year – which pays more than this event – and he reached the semifinals in the Masters event in Paris so I’d consider keeping him for an event where he can make more money.

Fernando Verdasco, Juan Carlos Ferrero, and Andy Roddick are in the bottom quarter. There’s lots of star power here for what is a low paying event in the fall schedule. I have one more Roddick left but should I use him? He hasn’t lost to Fernando Verdasco since 2005, he’s 4-0 over Juan Carlos Ferrero, and he just beat Gonzalez in straight sets at the US Open so he should get to the final. Curiously, he’s only 2-3 against Ferrer on hard court but he’s 8-0 over Robredo. He said he was going to play four events this fall but he seldom plays more than two so I’m getting my money while I can.

Picks

My picks are: Soderling, Berdych, Zverev, Tsonga, Robredo, Schuettler, Gonzalez, Roddick.

The US Davis Cup team isn’t looking like itself this weekend and an appreciation of David Foster Wallace.

That image above is the Roger Federer CrazySmiles Nike Pro Figure, created by Michael Lau for Nike. I found Roger, along with his broken racket, at Undefeated, a sneaker shop in the Silverlake section of Los Angeles. I tried to buy it and take it home with me but the very nice young man working there said the figure was probably worth a few thousand dollars. I like Roger but not that much. That price is not right but it’s not far off. The figures are going for $800 on eBay. It is a crazy smile, by the way. Almost demonic.

Roger is playing Davis Cup this weekend as is Rafael Nadal and it’s Nadal’s tie I want to look at because his Spanish Davis Cup team is hosting the US team in Madrid. The winner of this tie will play in the Davis Cup final and I’m not about to put any money on the US. And it’s not just because the matches will be played on slow red clay.

If things weren’t already bad enough in the US – top financial institutions are dropping like flies and tropical storms are bashing the Gulf Coast, the US Davis Cup team is undergoing an identity crisis. Honest, half the players have changed and this is a team that is usually chiseled in cement: Andy Roddick and James Blake play singles and Bob and Mike Bryan play doubles. It’s like clockwork.

But Blake is too tired to travel to Madrid and slide around on clay for hours at a time and I guess it’s believable considering his performance at the US Open. He only made it as far as the third round where he lost to his buddy Mardy Fish. I did wonder whether choosing Sam Querrey to take his place was a quiet suggestion that Querrey was the better clay court player, but when I looked it up, Blake ain’t so bad on clay. He has an 8-5 record this year with a quarterfinal at the Rome Masters.

Querrey beat Richard Gasquet on his way to the quarterfinals in Monte Carlo but Gasquet’s clay court record is worse than Blake’s this year if you can believe it. When a journalist asked Querrey how he could put a scare into Nadal, Querrey suggested making faces at him. It’s worth a try because Querrey will play the first singles match and Nadal is his opponent.

Roddick’s first opponent is David Ferrer and while Roddick is actually 4-1 on clay this year – he reached the semifinals in Rome before he had to retire, and he is the gutsiest Davis Cup player on the planet, he’s unlikely to beat Ferrer and very unlikely to beat Nadal. Roddick pushed Nadal to two tiebreakers and took one set off him in the 2004 Davis Cup final but that was before Nadal was unbeatable on clay.

Bob Bryan is back home rehabbing his sore left shoulder. He is the lefty, right? In his place, Mardy Fish is madly practicing those complex poaching or not poaching signals with Mike Bryan. One thing’s for sure, you can’t impugn the patriotism of today’s players. This is not the Davis Cup era of Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi who played when they felt like it. Fish is getting married on September 29th and here he is, off to Madrid to fill in for Bob Bryan at a moment’s notice.

There is one positive note. Madrid is at altitude and that means the ball will travel a bit faster because the air is thinner. That’ll help our big servers. But it probably won’t be enough.

David Foster Wallace End Notes

My favorite sports writing doesn’t come from sportswriters. David Halberstam won a Pulitzer Prize for his Vietnam War journalism but he also wrote a book about the Portland Trailblazers NBA team titled Breaks of the Game. Once you’ve read that book, you’ll understand the economics of modern sport franchises as well as the psychology of a professional athlete. And his biography, I guess you’d call it, of Bill Bellichick, is about as close as you’ll get to knowing anything about the taciturn curmudgeon who coaches the New England Patriots in his cutoff hoodie most Sundays. When Halberstam was killed in an automobile accident last year, he was on his way to an interview with Hall of Fame quarterback Y.A. Tittle.

Michael Lewis has written books about Wall Street and Silicon Valley but Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game is a masterful take on the New Idea. In this case, new ideas in baseball that dramatically changed the way fans watched the game and baseball teams evaluated players. I read that book three times to figure out what made Lewis such a great writer and I came up with plenty of reasons. The main one is storytelling and his book The Blind Side: Evolution of a Game, is a great story about a poor young black man named Michael Oher who is adopted by a rich white family in Tennessee. Oher is a freakishly talented football player who ends up playing college football for his adoptive family’s alma mater, and you’re left wondering how much that motivated the largesse of his new family.

My favorite tennis writer? That would be David Foster Wallace. We talked about his Federer piece in Play Magazine recently because some people thought Wallace made too much of Federer as the beautiful tennis player in contrast to Nadal as the workaday grinder. That’s quite possible but I loved the piece because Wallace is always over the top – the title of the piece is Federer as Religious Experience – and exceptional athletes are best celebrated by the grand writers of our time. Wallace was in the category.

But Wallace wrote about lesser athletes too and he was as over the top for the lower level tennis player as he was for every other subject he took on. Here’s the title of a piece he wrote for Esquire Magazine on Michael Joyce, former top 100 tennis player who is now Maria Sharapova’s coach: Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness. Never before, or since, has a tennis player toiling on the challenger circuit come to symbolize such heady existential issues.

I haven’t read it yet but Wallace also wrote a 25 page review of former tennis prodigy Tracy Austin’s memoir. No doubt Wallace’s review is ten times more fascinating than its subject. Wallace was a junior tennis player himself and the protagonist of his complex and hugely entertaining novel, Infinite Jest, was also a junior tennis player.

Wallace suffered from depression for many years and last Sunday he gave up the battle. He committed suicide. I can’t blame him. My dearest good friend William appears to be on the losing end of a similar battle and I have nothing but immense respect for both of them. I’m proud that they’ve led such productive lives under such difficult conditions. But I’m also, as a one memorial to Wallace suggested, infinitely sad.

Is it time for the WTA and ATP to become one? Nikolay Davydenko has been cleared on gambling charges but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fixed match.

The WTA + the ATP = WWT?

There are tennis matches this week despite my phase out last Sunday when I forgot to post fantasy tennis picks for the ATP tournament in Bucharest. Sorry about that. And I’m even more sheepish now because I’d picked Gilles Simon for the US Open so he rolled over to my fantasy team. That means I earned $90,000 when he defended his title in Bucharest today by beating Carlos Moya in straight sets. Anyway, I thought Davis Cup was this weekend but it’s not, instead we have the Federation Cup final between Russia and Spain.

Russia had won three of the last four Fed Cup titles and today makes it four out of five as Svetlana Kuznetsova beat Anabel Medina Garrigues. Kuznetsova and Russia’s other singles player Vera Zvonareva are, incredibly, the fourth and fifth best Russian players and they’re both in the top ten. You might be tempted to think that Russia chose Kuznetsova and Zvonareva because they’re better clay court players than higher ranked Elena Dementieva and Dinara Safina, but Dementieva is 14-4 on clay this year and Safina is even better at 14-3. At that rate, it’ll be 2015 before Russia loses a Fed Cup tie.

Davis Cup is next weekend and I don’t see why Fed Cup isn’t scheduled at the same time. Players need more than five days off after a slam and this brings up a bigger conversation: should the ATP and the WTA combine to become one organization? First of all, what would we call it? The Professional Tennis Association (PTA)? That’s a no if you live in the US because there’s a PTA in every school. It stands for Parent Teacher Association. Hmm, how about World Wide Tennis Association (WWTA)? Is that too close to World Wide Wrestling? Maybe, but what’s wrong with that? Let’s drop the A and go with World Wide Tennis (WWT)? If you’ve got a better suggestion, and I hope you do, leave it and I’ll post the best one.

The issue came up because Etienne de Villiers is out as the ATP CEO at the end of the year and some have suggested that Larry Scott, the CEO of the WTA, would be a good choice to take his place. I bet you can guess the first issue that popped into most players’ minds: prize money. When someone asked Ivan Ljubicic – who was recently voted onto the ATP Board of Directors as a player representative – what he thought about the possibility of the ATP and the WTA combining, he said, “Maybe, but there couldn’t be equal prize money.” When someone asked Jelena Jankovic the same question she said, “Maybe, but there would have to be equal prize money.”

By next year, prize money will be equal at ten events which are either combined events or events played in the same venue. For instance, men and women both play in Dubai but on different dates. Both organizations already have required minimum prize money for tournaments at the same level – the slams are at one level, Masters events at the next level, etc. If the combined organization – what did I call it, the WWT – required the same minimum prize money for men and women’s events at the same level, that would be a good start.

If there were fewer women’s events at that level or some of the women’s events didn’t pay as much as the most lucrative men’s events at the same level, I think the WTA should still combine with the ATP. The trend towards equal prize money is only going to continue and it’ll be more likely to continue with a combined organization because women will have equal power in that new organization.

And that, of course, is the problem. The men don’t want to give up their power or financial advantage. But both tours attract similar enough sponsors and combined events increase popularity in a sport that needs some help. It’s time for the first combined men’s and women’s professional organization among the big sports.

Davydenko Can Breathe Easy

The ATP has cleared Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo-Arguello of fixing a match they played in Sopot, Poland, in August 2007. It was a big deal because the irregular betting pattern in that match caused Befair.com, an online betting site, to void all bets on the match and that kicked off huge changes in the ATP’s handling of gambling issues. They now have an anti-fraud unit and several players have been suspended for gambling on matches.

But it doesn’t mean that the match wasn’t fixed. It means that the ATP couldn’t prove the match was fixed. The ATP couldn’t get access to the phone records of Davydenko’s brother or wife. Those records – from a German cellphone carrier – have now been destroyed, the New York Times reported today, in accordance with Germany’s data protection laws.

Without the phone records, the ATP can’t connect Davydenko or his camp to the gamblers on Befair who would have benefited from Davydenko losing the match. Those phone records may not have proven anything either but no one has come up with a better explanation for the highly irregular betting pattern on the match. Davydenko suggested that Russian speakers at the tournament may have overheard him talking about his injured toe to his wife or brother on court, but that doesn’t explain why his opponent already had enough money bet on him to make him the prohibitive favorite before the match had even started. And it’s extremely unlikely that two account holders would bet a combined $6 million dollars on Davydenko’s opponent because someone overheard a comment at the match. If that were the case, there’s be a whole lot of irregular betting patterns.

Davydenko wasn’t the only player to be exonerated, kind of. Last month, Roscoe Tanner had grand theft charges against him dropped after paying restitution for bouncing checks to buy two Toyota Highlanders from a dealership in Knoxville, Tennessee. This is the same guy that bounced a check for over $35,000 then spent two years in jail for failing to pay restitution payments thus violating probation. Tanner bought those cars for the daughters of his third wife and he has now added two more children to the his world of disappointment. Three other daughters are already too familiar with unpaid child support and courtroom visits with their father. By bouncing a check then paying court costs and the depreciation due to driving the cars off the lot, Tanner has avoided further legal problems.

I think both men got off easily.

Roger Federer and Serena Williams are US Open champions and two very different people.

I’m not really sure how he did it. Roger Federer lost to Gilles Simon, Ivo Karlovic, and James Blake in consecutive hard court events and yet here he is, US Open champion for the fifth straight year.

I know how Serena Williams did it. She won her US Open title with superior will. Roger and Serena are an interesting study in contrast. Federer depends on settling into his fluid game so he can just forget about it and focus on a strategy to beat the other guy. Serena has been known to take notes onto the court with reminders for her game. When it comes to strategy, she relies on overpowering her opponent as much as outthinking them.

And Roger did outthink Andy Murray. The most he’d say about his strategy was the following:

I realized coming in against him, chip and charging in the third set was going to be a good solution.

I’m pretty sure Murray has never seen that many slices in his entire life. The poor guy didn’t seem to know whether he was coming or going. To the net, that is. Though he didn’t elaborate beyond that when it came to strategy, Roger was outright sharing when it came to his state of mind:

You know, I lost quite a few matches I should have never lost, and they hurt.

And then there was this:

I actually beat some really good players in tough conditions, and the relief was enormous as I was progressing in the tournament.

and this:

Those are the reasons I had to four times show a lot of emotion at the very end [of his semifinal with Djokovic]. But it’s true that I am trying to push myself, you know, not to be actually more emotional, but to try to play well.

which clarifies the situation. I think. He’s not pushing himself to be more emotional, he’s using emotion to get himself to play better. By which, I take it, he means that he was so dominant in past years and his game was so automatic that he didn’t need to do anything but stay relaxed enough to hit his strokes well and carry out his game strategy.

And that brings up emotional contrasts between Roger and Serena. Roger depends on an easygoing existence with little or no controversy. I think he once called out Novak Djokovic for injury timeouts and he suffered through the death of his mentor Peter Carter early in his career, but no one on tour has a bad thing to say about him and life has been a bowl of cherries for the past five years except for a bout of mononucleosis and some unexpected losses this year. Those don’t qualify as controversy as much as physical hardship and, to some degree, the result of playing a high level of tennis for a long time.

Serena has had dealt with more controversy than any other current player I can think of except maybe her sister Venus. Their father Richard often makes absurd comments about race but the sisters have heard racist taunts from spectators. Serena was mercilessly booed when Venus pulled out a semifinal match against Serena at the last minute in the 2001 Indian Wells tournament. Two years later, her older sister Yetunde was shot and killed about a mile away from the courts in Compton where Serena and Venus played growing up.

The Williams family may have been complicit in what happened in Indian Wells but the other stuff is indicative of life as a black family in the US. You can only outrun your neighborhood so far in this country. And for all the stability of life in Switzerland that Roger works hard to maintain in his own life, Serena hasn’t even been able to limit herself to the life of a tennis player. Life is nothing if not complex for her. By the way, how’d you like to have to go through your sister to win your championship? Most people probably don’t even know that Roger has a sister.

Both Serena and Venus have their own lines of clothing though they studied at the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, not at the feet of Vogue editor Anna Wintour – friend of Roger. I’m not being catty here as much as pointing out that the celebrity thing is also complex. Oscar de la Renta came to Roger’s final but the sisters actually have their own lines of clothing.

Roger seems perfectly comfortable in the limelight as a famous tennis player but Serena actively pursues celebrity beyond the world of tennis. She’s appeared in movie and television roles and dated a Hollywood director for which she received endless grief from people like Chris Evert because, we keep telling her, tennis is a demanding parent. You can’t hope to be one of the best of all time without slavish devotion to the task. But that wasn’t the task she was devoted to and she doesn’t plan to change that as she explained last week:

There are some things I’m doing outside with ANERES [her clothing line] and I have meetings right after this tournament with ANERES. Those are going to be long and tedious, but that’s what I have to do. It’s the time of year I start looking at scripts again.

Roger and Serena are two very different personalities from different cultures and their careers have mirrored that difference. At this moment, though, they’re both in the same position at the top of the tennis world. Welcome back, both of you.