Rafael Nadal won the French Open today by beating Roger Federer 6-1, 6-3, 6-0. Can you believe it?

I came across an excerpt from Bjorn Borg’s 1980 autobiography, My Life and Game, on the Men’s Tennis Forum a few days ago. In one section, Borg explained his definition of percentage tennis:

My synonym for percentage tennis is patience. I want to hit one more ball in court than my rival. I want him to think I’m much more patient so he’ll make a mistake either in execution (racquet error) or in picking a low-percentage ripper for the lines.

It worked well enough to win six French Open titles, four of them consecutive. Rafael Nadal was going for his fourth consecutive French Open today and his opponent for the last three has been Roger Federer. I don’t know what Rafa’s odds were but you wouldn’t have made much money off him because he hasn’t dropped a set here and only one player, Novak Djokovic, pushed him to a tiebreaker.

You’d have made a bunch of money, though, if you’d bet that Roger would win a total of four games in the match because no one expected that. How could Rafa – who’s undefeated at the French Open – have possibly improved? This is how: he played slightly lower percentage tennis.

He didn’t stand way behind the baseline and he didn’t play patiently. No, he didn’t turn into James Blake or Dmitry Tursunov overnight and rip every ball in sight, but he did move closer to the baseline and he did flatten out some balls that he would have hit with topspin in the past. This is how he explained it after the match:

I play more inside the court…so I play more aggressive. Not the typical clay court style, for sure, but I play more aggressive than usually.

Roger was surely watching Rafa’s matches here so it’s surprising that he seemed so shell-shocked. Rafa was up 3-1 in the first set when he hit some flat backhands and broke Roger at love. Roger was already walking around with his head down – the official pose of the befuddled – and it didn’t improve as Rafa’s court positioning allowed him to hit passing shots before Roger had fully arrived at the net.

Roger recovered his state of mind briefly with a break to get to 1-2 in the second set – only the second game he’d won in the entire match. Three games later, he hit one of those extreme angled cross court backhands he used against Rafa earlier this year but Rafa calmly hit a winner off it and Roger tipped his head back in disbelief.

Roger was playing more aggressively himself and it was working as he held his serve twice in a row to get to 3-3 in the set, but his mental state was still in the doldrums. In the next game, Rafa hit a winner off a net cord – which you expect after all – and Roger looked like a bedraggled rag doll as his head drooped and he threw his arm down in frustration. He never really recovered and, unbelievably, he didn’t win another game.

Roger, baby, Rafa has been nearly impossibly to beat on clay the entire tournament so we didn’t expect you to beat him, but dropping your head and flailing away, that is too much to bear. Three all in the second set and you couldn’t win even one more game? Novak Djokovic put up a better fight than you did. And what’re you going to do at Wimbledon?

The match was so short the network was reduced to showing last year’s Wimbledon final and somewhere in the back of Roger’s mind he must be thinking: if Rafa is playing this much better on clay by being more aggressive, how good is he going to be on grass? And what do I have to do to keep up with him?

After the match he admitted that Rafa had improved:

He no longer plays short balls as he did in the past. You can no longer attack him on his forehand, as I could in the past. He is getting much more aggressive, and it’s becoming much more difficult.

Difficult isn’t the half of it. Rafa’s performance was masterful. But Roger was decidedly absent and we didn’t hear his usual “I’m getting close to beating Rafa on clay” because he isn’t. He’s as far away as he’s even been and it’s hard to see that changing.

It looked like Djokovic might be the one to move pass Rafa and Roger, especially with his hard court skills and Rafa’s problems on hard court, but Rafa isn’t done yet and a title at Wimbledon, which looks a whole lot more likely after today, might get him to number one first.

And what if Rafa improves on hard court? That’s a scary thought.

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The grass season is upon us but some people are still hanging onto clay. We have grass in Halle and London/Queen’s Club, and clay in Warsaw. Halle and Queen’s are both paying more prize money than Warsaw and they both have higher ranked players, so let’s pick three players each from Halle and Queen’s and two from Warsaw to make up our eight player team.

Halle (grass, first prize: $177692)
Queen’s (grass, first prize: $130,000)
Warsaw (clay, first prize: $104,231)

Because Halle and Queen’s attract the top players, the draw is more predictable than Warsaw, a smaller tournament with lower ranked players. Twice in the past five years, six seeded players have reached the quarterfinals at Queen’s and Halle averages between four and five seeded players in its quarterfinals.

Roger Federer has won the title in Halle four of the past five years (he withdrew last year) but you should obviously save him for Wimbledon and the U.S. Open. There are also four Masters events left to play so save him for one or two of those also..

Below Federer’s quarter, Mikhail Youzhny reached the quarterfinals here last year but his first opponent is Dmitry Tursunov who reached the semifinals in two of his grass events last year and beat Youzhny on carpet the only time they met. I’m going with Tursunov.

The next quarter is exceptionally tough to pick. Radek Stepanek is a good grass court player but he faces Tommy Haas in the first round. Haas is an even better grass court player but he’s been injured and Stepanek beat him three times last year. Philipp Kohlschreiber reached the semifinals here last year but Tomas Berdych is also in this quarter and won this tournament last, but he’s recovering from injury too. Stepanek is having the best year so I’m going with him.

James Blake should be able to get to the semifinals and I’m taking him because I can still use him for both summer Masters events, the U.S. Open, and Stockholm. He always does well at the smaller hard court summer events but a semifinal here pays as much as a final at any of those tournaments so I’m taking him here.

Rafael Nadal has reached the quarterfinals at Queen’s for the past two years but obviously you should save him for bigger tournaments. Is there someone in his quarter who can reach the semifinals or final? There’s no sure thing because Ivo Karlovic beat Fernando Gonzalez on grass here last year and those are the two best grass court players left.

Andy Roddick is in the next quarter and he’s won this title four of the last five years but should you use him here? Probably. You can still pick him for Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and one of the summers Masters events and that still leaves you one more event in the fall.

In David Nalbandian’s quarter I’m going to skip over Nalbandian and Richard Gasquet because Nalbandian has lost in the first round here both times he’s appeared and Gasquet has a few problems: the past few years he’s lost early in his first grass tournament of the year and he’s been suffering through a confidence crisis so let’s look at Mario Ancic and Nicolas Mahut instead. Ancic beat Mahut on carpet earlier this year so I’m going with Ancic.

Novak Djokovic is likely to win his quarter but you should save him for Wimbledon, one or two of the remaining Masters events, and the U.S. Open, so let’s see who’ll meet up with him in the quarterfinals. Marin Cilic reached the quarterfinals last year but hasn’t done much else and that leaves us with Lleyton Hewitt and Paul-Henri Mathieu. Hewitt has a much better record here but Mathieu’s game is improving and Hewitt has been struggling due to a long term hip injury so I’m going with Mathieu.

I’ve picked six players so I need two players from Warsaw to complete my team.

If there’s a clay court tournament somewhere in the world, Nikolay Davydenko is sure to be there and he’s in the draw at Warsaw. I used him for clay court Masters events so I’m saving him for the U.S. Open and Moscow. He’s won the title in Moscow three of the past four years and it pays a lot of money.

In the quarter below Davydenko, Gilles Simon has a winning record over everyone in his quarter except for Guillermo Canas – they’re even at 1-1. Canas has lost his last six matches on clay so I’m going with Simon.

Tommy Robredo is 4-0 over Albert Montanes on clay and beat him in Valencia this year so he’ll probably get out of the bottom quarter. If he meets Juan Monaco in the semifinals that’s a tough choice. Monaco beat Robredo in Kitzbuhel last year in their only meeting but Robredo has better results in the bigger events this year so I’m picking Robredo.

Picks

Here are my picks for this week: Tursunov, Stepanek, Blake, Roddick, Ancic, Mathieu, Simon, and Robredo.

Happy fantasies!

Gael Monfils feinted and jabbed and ran a few miles along the baseline on his way to a victory over David Ferrer in the French Open quarterfinals.

Gael Monfils, Gael Monfils, what can you say about the guy? The French tennis federation brought him along, then he jumped ship to the rival Lagardere Group, then he came to the U.S. and signed up to work with Tarik Benhabiles, then he went back to Lagardere. He’s like a kid in a candy store who can’t make up his mind. He leaps and splits and splays those arms and legs all over the court retrieving balls that should be out of reach. He celebrates wins with the moonwalk and the robot and good shots with equally boisterous outbursts of childlike glee, one of which ended up with an awkward landing and a badly sprained ankle and a trip off the court in a wheelchair. There he was a few weeks later looking just as good at an indoor Masters event.

One thing Monfils doesn’t do is play aggressive tennis and retrieving is not a recipe for success against David Ferrer – the human wall – especially in the quarterfinals at the French Open. Right? Monfils’ only consistently aggressive shot is his serve: the beanpole version of Andy Roddick’s power serve with the feet together and everything bending instead of stepping. And everything bends on this guy. I was never sure Monfils was designed for tennis. Not that he isn’t very good at it, mind you, and not that many other tennis players couldn’t play another sport, but Monfils, in particular, is the best example of what we call a pure athlete on the pro tennis tour.

That’s not necessarily a good thing, by the way. I’m currently reading Moneyball by Michael Lewis, a book about the way statistics have changed player evaluations in baseball. It used to be that baseball scouts looked for the best athlete – the five tool player: the guy who ran fast, thres the ball hard, fielded well, hit well and hit with power. The subject of the book is Billy Beane, a five tool player who had all the physical tool but didn’t have the proper mental makeup to play professional baseball.

Beane now chooses players for the Oakland Athletics, a major league baseball team, but if he’d been picking tennis players instead, he might have skipped over Monfils because maturity is a word that has seldom been attached to Monfils’ name. Luckily for tennis, players are not signed to teams and given a big signing bonus, they’re allowed to mature over time and they only get paid when they win matches.

Today Monfils was paid a lot. He beat Ferrer, 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-1, to reach the semifinals at the French Open. How did he do it?

Monfils started in with the rope-a-dope. If his fellow countryman Jo-Wilfried Tsonga can be compared to Muhammad Ali, then Monfils actually uses Ali’s tactics. Speaking of which, it’s hard not to think that Tsonga’s run to the Australian Open final didn’t light a fire under Monfils or, at the very least, arrive as a wakeup call.

Anyway, back to the rope-a-dope. Ferrer is a counterpuncher and Monfils didn’t give him anything to punch with so Ferrer had to be the aggressor and that didn’t work so well. Monfils had won the first set and was facing break points at 2-2 in the second set. They were on their third deuce and Ferrer was hitting the ball as hard as he could and running Monfils all over the place. Ferrer finally got to the net and Monfils calmly threaded a backhand down the line and past Ferrer for his second game point.

On the next point, Monfils served and volleyed and put the ball away easily. By now, though, Monfils appeared to be gassed as he lost his next two service games, and the set, and twice leaned over on his racket to prop himself up. Not the best signal to give your opponent and also one of the consequences of a defensive playing style because you end up running a whole lot more than your opponent.

Two errors and an ill-advised drop shot by Ferrer and Monfils was up a break immediately in the third set. Monfils took the gift and, well, continued on with his rope-a-dope. Ferrer couldn’t penetrate Monfils’ defense so he went for more on his shots and made errors, including a mishit and a drop shot into the net to give Monfils the third set.

I’d like to tell you that Monfils has turned a corner. That he’s finally listened to one of his many coaches when they suggest he play more aggressively. He did sneak into the net occasionally and finish off the point and he did turn some second serves into mincemeat but, honestly, I don’t see it. He doesn’t seem to make the connection between playing a grind it out, defensive style of game with a spindly body and a high occurrence of injuries. After today, he has even less reason to listen.

Instead, he frustrated Ferrer so badly that he had the poor guy imitating James Blake by going for smoke on every shot. And Ferrer did it badly. On break point in his first service game of the fourth set, he hit a forehand so hard it barely missed hitting a ballperson on the fly. Monfils took him completely out of his game. Ferrer managed to win only one game in the fifth set.

I will say one thing, Monfils is the most talented grinder in the world and if he can frustrate Ferrer, the number five player in the world, then he can also beat a whole lot of other players. What I saw today is the full commitment of Monfils to his uber-defensive tennis self, this is who he is so we should all just get over it.

And that probably means more of the same: the ongoing rollercoaster ride with the same cycle of injuries interspersed with brilliant play. We might even get the coaching rollercoaster: Monfils mentioned the word “argue” and “coach” in the same sentence three times in his postmatch media session today.

Whatever, strap me in, I’m ready for the ride.

How many coaches does it take to make a top tennis player these days?

I apologize in advance for focusing on the U.S. players so much this week. That will change pretty quickly in the coming rounds. And I did want to see how the hell Ivan Ljubicic beat up on Nikolay Davydenko but I’m going to look at the last standing U.S. player, Robby Ginepri, because of something he said in his postmatch media session.

After Ginepri won his third round match against Florent Serra today, someone asked him about his next opponent, Fernando Gonzalez, and this is what he said:

He obviously has a huge forehand and likes to run around the backhand. He’s had a lot of clay court experience, and luckily my coaching staff is going to have a pretty good report for me.

And there you have it. These days it’s not enough to have a physio and a coach and an agent, a “coaching staff” is necessary. Remember, Ginepri is currently ranked number 88 in the world and he has a coaching staff.

I suppose I can’t complain. I have a yoga teacher, a trainer, a chiropractor, a homeopathist, a tantra teacher (honest, I do), and, of course, a tennis coach, and I’m an intermediate hack who has on court temper problems. I suppose you could call them my staff but they are not on call and, for Ginepri too, it’s not like Jose Higueras is his exclusive coach. Higueras also coaches one Roger Federer and maybe a few other people.

What does this coaching staff do for Ginepri:

Yeah, just with the new coach, with Jose kind of working with Roger and another guy coming on, Diego [Moyano]. Just another voice to listen to, another person to get me going in the morning, to get me going in the afternoon, just any time of day.

The first thing that pops into my mind is the relationship between former Beach Boy Brian Wilson and his 24/7 therapist, Eugene Landy. In the 1970’s, Wilson’s family hired Landy to treat Wilson’s mental illness. Landy’s approach consisted of 24 hour supervision such as locking the refrigerator door to keep Wilson from eating too much and dousing him with water when he didn’t want to get out of bed in the morning.

New York Yankee baseball player Alex Rodriguez had two therapists at one time. It’s not easy being a professional athlete, especially if you play in New York. And I don’t mean to be hard on Robby. His problem is not his game, it’s his confidence level, and if a coaching staff can build up his confidence level by helping him with his game, then bless him, he’s made the right choice. I’m just wondering where it all might end.

Will furtive courtside coaching be replaced by the real thing so that coaches can surround their players with positive vibes at all times? Are full time chefs far behind? A traveling sports psychologist would be nice. I’m envisioning a traveling sports academy for each player on tour.

Andy Murray is the current model for “coaching by committee.” He has a team of fitness experts, a main coach in Miles Maclagan, and assorted other coaches as necessary.

And James Blake actually should get a coaching staff. Note that I’m not suggesting he change his longtime – very longtime – coach, Brian Barker. I’m suggesting that he get an advisor who can add just the teensiest bit of variety to his game so he doesn’t spend his postmatch media session saying “See, I told ya!” the next time he loses a match in which he uses some variety instead of just hammering the ball all the time.

Jim Courier had a coaching staff and Higueras was one of them.

Further back, Martina Navratilova is to blame. She’s the one who started the whole entourage thing. She had a nutritionist and a trainer and a coach at the height of her career. Her coach at one point, Renee Richards, a transgender woman who played on the WTA tour, told a friend that, believe it or not, she was the most normal person in the group.

Whatever Higueras and Moyano are doing, it’s working. Ginepri has made it to the top 30 twice in his career, the last time when he reached the semifinals of the U.S. Open in 2005. By this February, he was down to number 171 but he’s now climbing his way back up. He’s reached three semifinals on hard court this year and a quarterfinal at Poertschach on clay two weeks ago.

Psychologically Ginepri is an interesting guy. The ad images of him look like hunky steam room shots but this is a shy, quiet spoken guy who uses cool bravado to cover up his more gentle self. He’s the kind of player who needs a few wins to get on a streak but can, conversely, take a big dive if he gets a few losses instead. Once he gets into a dive, he appears to be going through the motions.

Right now he’s on one of those streaks and here he was, playing a match against a French opponent in front of a French crowd and he looked totally focused. When he was serving for the match he had to battle through three break points and a disastrous first match point – he failed to put away two overheads instead losing the point to an overhead by Serra. On the next match point, no problem, and then he celebrated in his low key, shy kind of way.

If Ginepri makes his third trip all to the way up the rankings, then Higueras is due a lot of credit. If Ginepri makes it there then slips back down again the next year, maybe he’ll need three coaches to get him back on track next time.

Serena and Venus Williams lost at the French Open today. One of those losses was surprising but the other was pretty shocking.

Serena Williams is the leading vote getter in our poll asking who will win the French Open this year. Curiously, Jelena Jankovic is second and Ana Ivanovic third. Didn’t Ana get to the final last year? Weren’t people watching? Now Serena is gone and so is her sister Venus.

Serena lost to Katarina Srebotnik. Srebotnik doesn’t have much of a serve and she doesn’t have enough power to play toe to toe with Serena, but she has an all court game and is also the number four ranked doubles player in the world. And she’s a very smart cookie.

When Serena did make her way to the net, Srebotnik hit behind her or passed her. Srebotnik purposely hit drop shots to get Serena moving forward because she knew that Serena’s footwork suffers on clay. After exchanging early breaks, Serena was serving at 3-3 when she sent Srebotnik scrambling with a huge forehand. Serena stumbled instead of sliding into Srebotnik’s response and that gave Srebotnik enough time to run around her forehand and unload a winner.

That’s a good example of the importance of footwork on the slippery stuff. Serena should have won that point and she should have won the match but she kept slipping up, so to speak. Serena lost that game to go down a break and in the next game, she got caught moving too slowly back to the baseline. Meanwhile, Srebotnik pulled off a fantastic lunge volley on a dipping ball that was tailing away from her – did I say that she’s the number four doubles player in the world? – and Serena got caught out of position on the baseline yet again to go down 3-5 in the set.

Can Serena win the French Open these days? When she won her French Open title in 2002, she played Mary Pierce and Jennifer Capriati in the quarterfinals and semifinals, and her sister Venus in the final. That was three rounds of power tennis players she plowed through but now it’s a different story. Since 2002, she’s lost to Justine Henin twice and last year, Henin knocked her out of the last three slams of the year. Henin is, uh, I mean, was, the quintessential all court player with just enough power to handle Serena.

But Justine’s not here anymore so who can compete with Serena, the only one left who’s actually won this tournament? Serena is 1-0 over Ivanovic though they’ve never played on clay and she’s 3-3 with Jankovic and they’ve never played on clay either. Serena is 5-2 over Maria Sharapova and 4-1 over Svetlana Kuznetsova with a win over both players in their only clay court match.

The answer is that only Serena can beat herself and she did a pretty good job of it today. I’m trying to figure out whether her footwork has worsened or whether she was just having a bad day. She’s bigger than she used to be and that does make it harder to change directions on slippery surfaces. She hasn’t gone past the quarterfinals here since 2003 and though she did win a clay court title in Charleston earlier this year, it was on that green stuff, not the red stuff, and it was her first clay title since her French Open title.

So yeah, I’m gonna say that Serena’s movement is worse on clay than it used to be and that doesn’t bode well for a title here.

Srebotnik was serving for the first set at 5-4 when, again, Serena had her on the run. Again she lost the point when she sent a crucial backhand volley long because she didn’t get her feet set. Srebotnik meanwhile was coming up with more great shots. She went almost to her knees to dig out a Serena forehand, and I don’t know if I’ve ever seen this before, she got off such a good shot from that position that she followed it to the net and finished the point off with a volley.

Serena’s footwork threw everything else off. She hit two easy volleys into the net and then hit a drop shot on break point that put her down 4-5 in the second set. Srebotnik won the match 6-4, 6-4, and Serena looked a bit shocked at the postmatch media session. She looked down at her lap in between questions and her voice faltered.

I think Serena’s got a pretty good shot at the hard court slam titles but time may be running out for the clay version.

I’d actually forgotten that Venus was here. She’s had health problems since last year – anemia is the closest explanation I’ve heard, and I thought she’d skipped Paris. She’s averaging about one tournament per month this year, though she did play Rome as a runup to the French Open, so we can hardly expect much out of her with that playing schedule.

And she’s only gone as far as the semifinals in one tournament, a Tier II event in Bangalore which was underpopulated because everyone else was taking a rest week before Indian Wells. Today, she went out to Flavia Pennetta, a clay court specialist who’s never been past the third round here and has never won a Tier I title. Third round is a bit early for Venus to go out but the only time she went past the quarterfinals was 2002 when she lost to her sister in the final.

The loss wasn’t surprising but Venus’ passiveness was. The match went well past 9 pm and Bud Collins, who was sitting courtside, said he was having trouble seeing. Venus had lost the first set 5-7 and was down a break in the second set but never said a word or shot a dirty look at the chair umpire. When both players returned to the court for Pennetta to serve at 4-3, the crowd cheered because they were surprised to find out that they’d see more tennis.

No word from Venus yet about her state of mind but she looked like she just wanted it all to be over.

Improbably enough, Robby Ginepri is the only U.S. player left in the draw after taking out Igor Andreev. Ginepri now shares a coach with Roger Federer in Jose Higueras. Federer can only hope that Higueras is as helpful to his clay court game as he has been to Ginepri’s.