Richard Gasquet looked like he’d rather be anywhere else but Rome, Roddick feasted on his good friend Mardy Fish, and stadiums save the day for U.S. tennis.

Here we are in Rome, the second Masters Series event on clay this year and the first of consecutive Masters events as we move on to Hamburg next week. Let’s set the scene in Rome. I can hear those crazy Italian police sirens in the background. To me they always sound like those Fisher pull toys I used to torture adults with when I was a child. I’d pull those damn things around all day an endless clatter.

Richard Gasquet’s shirt is so red that it’s bleeding on the screen and, as usual, he has his backward pointing white cap. How long do you think it’ll take Gasquet and Sebastien Grosjean and Benjamin Becker and all of those backward hat guys to grow out of the habit. Fashions change you know.

The stands in the tennis complex at the Foro Italico are all bright green and the on-court advertising is white lettering on the green background. Don’t really like the color scheme. Green looks rather loud as a background for the gorgeous red clay on the court. I do love to hear the score called out in Italian, though: trenta quindici – 30-15. Italian is one of the few languages which lovingly pronounce every letter in a word.

I haven’t seen Gasquet’s first round opponent – Luis Horna – play very much but he’s been around for a long time. Evidently his backhand is his weak side because he keeps trying to run around it and Gasquet keeps trying to attack it. Looking at Horna today, I wonder why he hasn’t done much better in his career but maybe that says more about his opponent than it does him.

Gasquet looked good at the beginning of the match and went up 3-2 without having lost a point on his serve. Horna keptpressuring Gasquet’s second serve and Gasquet finally caved in by losing his next service game with two straight double faults and it got worse from there on.

Gasquet isn’t dealing with pressure well these days. Davis Cup was a disaster for him after he decided to sit his ailing knee instead of playing Andy Roddick in the fourth and deciding rubber of the tie between the U.S. and France. Then he lost to Sam Querrey in Monte Carlo two weeks ago.

Maybe, two years from now, we’ll be looking back at all of the cruel things we said about Gasquet and marvel at his play as he turns out to be the guy who ends Roger Federer’s streak at Wimbledon. But right about now, his friend and countryman Jo-WilfriedTsonga looks like he’s just as likely to earn that distinction. You couldn’t mistake Tsonga for Gasquet on the court in any way shape or form. Hell, Tsonga looks excited just sitting in the stands watching Gasquet’s match with Horna whereas Gasquet looks like he was waiting for the next train to arrive.

Gasquet’s feet aren’t quite following his commands and he’s getting tripped up by routine plays such as a moonshot followed by a flat shot. Horna won the first set on a high looping second serve down the middle. Gasquet seems surprised by it and hit the ball into the net. Earth to Rishard.

It the second set it was worse. Gasquet lost his first service game easily then won his second service game but that was the last game he won. In his third service game, Gasquet and Horna got into a backhand crosscourt rally and Horna redirected the ball down the line with a rather weak and short slice. Gasquet got there but you could hear him frame the ball.

In the next game Gasquet framed another ball and the crowd turned on him. Wow, everyone is turning on Gasquet these days and how should he respond? If his knee is still bothering him then obviously he should go home for a rest. Even if it is a physical problem of some sort, it’s quickly turning into a psychological problem and that is turning into acting out on the court precisely by not acting at all. After the match he didn’t seem to know what the problem was:

I don’t know why I played so bad. Last week in training I felt fine and I was happy to come onto the court today. Sometimes in my career I’m really down. Today is one of those moments.

I suspect that he’s shining us on. No one could receive as much grief as he received from his fellow Davis Cup players, his Davis Cup captain, and even the head of the Davis Cup team and not be affected by it.

In the last game of the match, Gasquet served two double faults. The second one gave Horna match point. One point later the agony was over as the qualifier Horna moved on by the score of 6-4, 6-1.

What do you think Gasquet needs?

I had a lot of fun watching Roddick and Mardy Fish – two fast court players – slog it out on clay. Fish made very few accommodations for the clay. He hit the ball as hard and flat as he does every other surface. Roddick could hardly have hoped for a better opening match. This has to be one of the few times he has ever planned on winning a match by looping the ball back to his opponent and waiting for mistakes which is exactly what he did as he jumped out to a 2-0 lead.

If you think about it, Roddick is also lucky that the tour is going in its current direction. There’s one less clay court Masters event each year – if the ATP can settle it’s suit against Hamburg. On top of that, the new Masters event in Shanghai is on a hard court. Money talks because clearly tennis is more popular in Europe than it is in the U.S. – at least in terms of broadcast income – and here Europe losing a Masters events while the U.S. gets to keep all four of its hard court Masters events even though it’s breaching smaller tournaments left and right. The ATP just bought out the event in Las Vegas and sold it to South Africa. South Africa! Did I miss something, is tennis more popular in South Africa than the U.S.?

Indian Wells and Miami bring in a good three or four hundred thousand spectators a year and the broadcast problem is partially a case of overcrowding. In Europe, tennis is second to soccer in gambling income but in the U.S., tennis is far down the scale. Yes, gambling is a bonafide economic indicator.

Broadcast income is more important than ticket income but the U.S. has another advantage – tons of stadiums, both indoor and out, in which to stage a tennis tournament. France, for instance, has a few stadiums that work for such events but the U.S. has tons of them thanks to the popularity of basketball and college sports. Every big Division I school has a basketball arena that would qualify. And though it may be hard to fathom and says way too much about the U.S. subversion of education to the commercial world of sports, the University of Michigan football stadium – known appropriately as the Big House – can seat over 100,0000 screaming football fans.

So the tennis world is staying in the big stadiums in the U.S., leaving behind the smaller facilities in Monte Carlo – which is no longer a required event – and Hamburg, and branching out to the huge new stadiums in Asia. It’s all about the stadiums, don’t you know? If Roddick can hang around long enough, and it looks like he can, this turn of events should help him stay in the top five or six players in the world.

Roddick won the first set 6-2 in 22 minutes. Just over an hour later, Roddick had won his first match, 6-1, 6-4.

Just a quick note on the Federer watch. He says that he’s now 100% healthy and there were two signs in his match with Guillermo Canas that seem to bear him out. (1) The rhythm on his forehand has returned and the reason for that is (2) his movement is back. At one point in his relatively easy victory over Canas, he ran well into the ad court to get around his backhand and hit a curling shot down the line that skipped off the sideline and out of Canas’ reach. That takes some serious movement.

We even had a “did he really do that?” sighting. Canas hit a running forehand down the line and just as Federer was about to overrun the ball, he flicked a backhand dropshot from behind the baseline that dropped over the net oh so softly.

A a few points later, Federer hit a drop shot and Canas hit a pretty good lob to Federer’s backhand side. Federer swung at it and missed it then calmly glided back to the baseline and hit a forehand looper that landed on Canas’ baseline. Canas must have been a bit annoyed by now. He’d had two break points in the game and hit a good lob and here he was frantically running backwards to pick up a ball off the baseline tape. It was all too much and he hit the ball long to end the game.

Federer held serve then broke Canas to win the match, 6-3, 6-3.

On the fantasy tennis watch things are particularly grim. We can’t pick all the top players because we need them for later tournaments and, so far, Gasquet has joined two other second level players by crashing out in the first round. Paul-Henri Mathieu and Filippo Volandri are gone too. I’ll get into that more tomorrow.

We’re on week two of the Rafa watch. Can Rafael Nadal win four clay court tournaments in four weeks including three Masters Series events and then, two weeks later, win another Roland Garros? So far so good. In the Barcelona final he did lose his first set on clay this year but it didn’t stop him from beating David Ferrer 6-1, 4-6, 6-1.

There was nothing Ferrer could do about Rafa’s play in the first set and the score reflected that, but Ferrer got back into the match by going into attack mode in the second set and he broke Rafa right away. Ferrer was aiming for the lines to get Rafa out of position then trying to finish off the points at the net.

There’s a limit to this approach and our reader Pepe directed me to an excellent article by Cheryl Murray which discusses this very subject. The article is titled “What Monte Carlo’s final means” and it describes what happened to Roger Federer after he went up 4-0 in the second set of that final.

As Murray sees it, Roger caught Rafa off guard with his aggressiveness and, in fact, caught us all off guard. We’ve been asking him to attack for so long and here, finally, was our reward. Roger was dominating in the second set and was up 4-0 when Rafa started cashing in on his passing shots and it became clear that attacking the net would not work by itself. As Murray said:

As it turns out, the “winning strategy” did not supply what it promised – the win. Federer obviously sensed that a highly aggressive game against the Spaniard would not work for long, which is most likely why he had not tried it before Sunday.

In my post on Friday, I mentioned an ESPN column by Joel Drucker who suggested that Roger’s coach, Jose Higueras, would encourage Roger to hit a low lying slice off Rafa’s high ball to his backhand. I couldn’t remember seeing that slice in the Monte Carlo final and Pepe verified that Roger didn’t do it.

The slice makes sense, though. A slice makes it hard for Rafa to hit with pace and it could bring him to the net against his will – in other words draw him forward without the benefit of a good approach shot. Nadal is no slouch at the net but he certainly can’t control the match from there as well as he can from the baseline.

If an attacking game isn’t enough, then, how about a combo with the attacker, the angler, and the slice? Roger was hitting a sharply angled backhand cross court that was successfully pulling Nadal out of the court in Monte Carlo.

There are some difficulties with the combination. The more things Roger tries to do, the more errors he’ll make, and it’ll start to affect the rest of his game. For instance, maybe his serve will be less sharp because the more complex the game plan is, the harder it is to execute it. Roger would be trying to throw off Rafa’s game without throwing off his own game. Not easy.

Back to match at hand. Ferrer kept up his level of play and was serving at 4-3 in the second set when the tide looked like it would turn. Ferrer was up 40-0 and attacking like crazy but Rafa was getting everything back. Rafa finally managed to break Ferrer and get back on serve. Ferrer then broke Rafa one more time and served out to take the second set but that was it: Ferrer lost the first five games of the third set and only won one more game.

At the end of Murray’s article, she suggest that we owe Rafa an apology for thinking that all he has to do is hit a lot of big forehands and run down every ball to win a match, thus implying that he doesn’t think well enough to strategize his way through a match.

Rafa can decode his opponent’s game and make adjustments because clearly he had an answer for everything Roger threw at him in Monte Carlo. But I would say that his mental and physical strength are more important that his strategical skills. His focus and consistency are unparalleled and David Ferrer is the fifth ranked player in the world and a Spanish clay court player to boot and he could not keep up with Rafa. After expending all that energy to win the second set, he tired out.

The only way to beat Rafa is to shorten the points and Roger has the best chance of doing that. Either that or exhaust him before he gets to you and that’s just about what could happen by the time the last leg of this Rafa watch comes around, either in Hamburg or, possibly, at Roland Garros.

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This week’s submission deadline is Monday morning, May 5, 4am (EST) in the U.S./10am (CET) in Europe.

Juan Carlos Ferrero pulled out after I posted my picks last week so remember to take a quick look at the draw before the submission deadline to see if one of your players has dropped out. Phillipp Kohlschreiber also pulled out – he had the flu – and I was not happy about that. If a player drops out before his first match, it does not count as one of your five uses of that player.

This week we have the clay court Masters Series event in Rome. The first prize is a whopping $553,846. We need two players from each quarter to make up our eight player team so let’s go.

Rome draw

The U.S. players have arrived on the clay court Masters Series circuit in the person of James Blake and Andy Roddick this week and they’re messing things up a bit because it’s unlikely they’ll get far. Roddick is not a terrible clay court player – he got to the quarterfinals here in 2006 and the semifinals in 2002 – but he hasn’t done much on clay in a while so I’m saving him for Wimbledon, Toronto, Cincinnati, the U.S. Open, and Paris. Jo-Wilfired Tsonga is back from a knee injury but as far as I can tell, he’s never won a main draw clay court match. Simone Bolelli is in the semifinals at Munich but I’d still pick Gilles Simon over him, so Simon is my guy.

I don’t know what happened to randomness in this draw because the section below Roddick is packed. Tommy Robredo, Mario Ancic, and Nikolay Davydenko should all play each other within the first three rounds. First of all, can Ancic beat Davydenko here? Ancic is pretty good on clay but he hasn’t been past the third round in a clay event this year whereas Davydenko has a semifinal and a final. Davydenko has a 4-1 record over Robredo and beat him here last year so I’m going with Davydenko.

Blake’s section is tough to pick for the same reason Roddick’s was: there aren’t a lot of good players in it. We probably should choose between Carlos Moya, Filippo Volandri, and Fernando Verdasco, and they’re all having terrible years. Moya has lost in the first round here the last three years while Volandri got to the semifinals last year, so Volandri it is.

Obviously Rafael Nadal is the choice in his section and the European Masters events pay a whole lot more than the Masters events in the U.S., so pick him here.

Should I pick Roger Federer or not? It’s a tough decision because he looks like he can get to the final here but he’s much more likely to beat Nadal in Hamburg. He won the Hamburg title the past three years and that’s where he has his only victory over Nadal. For sure I’m using him at Roland Garros, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open, but what about either Toronto or Cincinnati and Paris? I’d be taking a chance if I save him for Paris because he could be injured or skip it, but he’s likely to win either Toronto or Cincinnati so I’m saving him till next week in Hamburg.

Instead of Federer I’ll settle for Paul-Henri Mathieu and hope he gets to the third round.

That’s the theme this week, by the way: patience. Don’t use all your top players up and jump out to a good standing in the fantasy game only to run out of players in the fall. Also, don’t use a player who could reach the quarterfinals in a Masters event now but win a Masters event later on. Remember, you can only use a player five times and that’s it.

David Ferrer should reach the quarterfinals. His record over Richard Gasquet is 3-0 and he beat Radek Stepanek twice last year. But I used him in Barcelona because he’ll get more money for his final in Barcelona than he will for a quarterfinal here and, besides, his record in Hamburg is much better than here. Instead, I’ll see how far Gasquet can go.

Novak Djokovic should be able to get to the quarterfinals but he’ll have to go through Fernando Gonzalez and David Nalbandian and possibly Nicolas Almagro to get to the semifinals. So I’m saving Djokovic for the remaining three slams and a Masters event or two on a faster court. Instead, I’ll see how far Juan Monaco can go.

If Fernandez and Nalbandian meet in the third round, that’s a tossup. Gonzalez is 10-0 on clay this year but his highest ranking opponent was number 21 and that match ended up being a walkover, so take the streak with a grain of salt. Nalbandian is 15-3 but his only big win was a victory over Tommy Robredo and he lost to Stanislaw Wawrinka this week. Almagro could beat either of them but he’s too inconsistent in big events for me to pick him. Nalbandian reached the final last year so I’m going with him.

My picks: Mathieu, Gasquet, Monaco, Nalbandian, Simon, Davydenko, Volandri, Nadal.

Happy fantasies!

ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers may not have a job come this time next year. What difference will that make?

The number one and two seeds look like they’ll meet in the final in Barcelona and Munich and I’ll finally see some footage of Barcelona tomorrow. We’re on the Rafa watch here: How long can Rafael Nadal go before he drops? Will he win Barcelona and Rome then drop at Hamburg? Will someone sneak up on him and drop him sooner? I’m less concerned about Roland Garros because it’s a two week event so he’ll get more rest and he has a week off between Hamburg and Roland Garros.

The shortened clay court season – which crams three Masters Series events into four weeks – might have an additional victim. ATP players are already angry with ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers for the clay court cram job but he’s also taken away a clay court Masters event. The ATP gave Shanghai a hard court 1000 event (the new name for Masters Series events as of next year) and demoted Hamburg to a 500 event. Not only that but Shanghai will take place after the U.S. Open so players will be forced to do the Asian swing whether they want to or not.

De Villiers’ contract is up at the end of the year and most of the top twenty players, including Rafa and Roger Federer, signed a letter to the ATP board of directors asking them to do a job search for de Villiers’ position. In other words, please find someone better.

I have two complaints about de Villiers and when I say de Villiers, I mean the ATP. The drastic changes in the ATP schedule were supposed to help players by reducing wear and tear on their bodies. Here is a quote from the ATP press release announcing the new 500 events for next year:

From 2009, the calendar changes to the ATP Tour will showcase the sport, ensure a healthier player schedule and offer a far more attractive proposition to broadcast and sponsor partners.

Reducing the number of required tournaments on clay – which is generally easier on players’ bodies (if the tournaments aren’t crammed too close together) – and increasing the number of required hard court events then putting that additional event in Asia, certainly does not “ensure a healthier player schedule.” It does just the opposite.

The other fault I would lay at de Villiers doorstep is the slow response to gambling problems. There was a long list of suspicious betting patterns on matches well before Nikolay Davydenko and Martin Vassallo-Arguello played what looked like a fixed match in August last year. The ATP should have had monitors following betting patterns on gambling sites long before that.

The players can push to replace de Villiers but he’s not the problem. He may have been too quick about some things – the round robin experiment might have worked if a bit more thought had gone into it and the rollout had been slower, and too slow on others – see gambling above, but the players were the ones who gave up their union and now they’re kinda screwed, so to speak.

The ATP started out in 1972 as the players’ union but in 1990 it started representing both the players and the tournaments. The current ATP Board of Directors has three player representatives and three tournament representatives. If Mr. de Villiers casts his vote with the tournament representatives, what are the players going to do, go on strike without a union leader?

The players do have some power in the process of choosing the CEO because de Villiers obviously doesn’t get to vote for himself. The three player representatives and the three tournament representatives have equal votes in the choice. That is no doubt why they sent the letter to the Board.

Enough politics. Let me throw a question or two at you. Another excellent tennis writer, Joel Drucker, has a good piece about Jose Higueras on the ESPN site. He suggests that Higueras is telling Roger Federer to hit a slice off Nadal’s high looping shot to his backhand instead of hitting a topspin backhand. The slice keeps the ball low which does two things: it makes it harder for Nadal to hit with pace and it brings Nadal further into the court which makes it harder for him to play defense.

I did see Federer hit a lot of sharply angled backhands cross court in his final with Nadal in Monte Carlo, and they were effective, but I don’t remember if many of them were slices, do you? Also, did Federer use slices to bring Nadal into the court?

I’ll be back with the fantasy picks for the Masters Event in Rome tomorrow and I’ll be waiting for your answers. Ta ta.

Some top U.S. players are going to the Olympics and some are not. Some top U.S. players are playing Fed Cup and Davis Cup and some are not.

When I woke up this morning and looked out the window, I saw a huge funnel of smoke rising in the sky. It looked like the Capitol Records building was on fire but, luckily, it wasn’t. A night club in the neighborhood of Hollywood and Vine was burning away. I’m used to grabbing up my computer, birth certificate, passport, and naturalization papers, and preparing to evacuate because I live in the Hollywood Hills and fire is a natural part of clearing the underbrush.

I take those naturalization papers in case there’s any question about my citizenship. I don’t want to be shipped backed to England or arrested by the Homeland Security Department for, oh, I don’t know, growing sprouts. Four years ago, an artist named Steve Kurtz had the misfortune of calling 911 because his wife was dying of heart failure. The paramedics who came to his house noticed that he had a home laboratory and called the FBI.

Kurtz is a professor of art at SUNY Buffalo and he had harmless bacteria in his Petri dishes which he uses in his art projects. He was detained by the Joint Terrorism Task Force and the Justice Department sought bioterrorism charges under the Patriot Act before settling on mail fraud charges related to purchasing the bacteria. Thankfully, all charges were dropped last week.

I bring this up because patriotism is a complex subject and that’s true in sports too as you can see with the Olympic torch protests. And U.S. tennis players have a complex, or could we say, sometimes convenient take on the subject themselves. I could summarize it like this:

1. Some top men aren’t going to the this summer’s Olympics.
2. The top women all want to go to the Olympics.
3. Some top women didn’t play Fed Cup last week.
4. The top men all play Davis Cup.

Andy Roddick and his good pal Mardy Fish announced that they will enter the ATP tournament in Washington instead of playing for the U.S. in Beijing this summer. Roddick wants to concentrate on winning the U.S. Open and I suppose he can be excused because he carries the Davis Cup team and I’m sure he sees this year as a golden opportunity (sorry for the reference) to try and take a slam considering his success so far and Federer’s vulnerability.

I don’t know what Fish’s excuse is but his withdrawal leaves the U.S. with the following team if it’s chosen by ranking: James Blake, Sam Querrey, Donald Young, and Bobby Reynolds. The Bryan Brothers will go as the doubles team so there’s a chance for a medal.

Serena and Venus Williams and Lindsay Davenport all want to go to the Olympics but Venus is still out with an undisclosed and, possibly, undiagnosed problem, and Serena is often injured. Serena and Venus won both the singles and doubles gold medals in 2000 between them and that’s something the women have that the men don’t: a strong Olympic tradition.

While tennis was an original sport when the Olympics started again in the 1896, it was dropped in 1924 and didn’t come back until 1988, so that’s only five Olympic competitions in our short memory banks. Steffi Graf won the gold medal in singles in 1988 to complete the golden slam – an incredible feat that consists of winning all four slams and the gold medal – but the U.S. women won the doubles gold and they won every gold medal in 1992, 1996 and 2000. That helps explain the enthusiasm of the U.S. women. They have a tradition to uphold and regain.

The men won a gold medal in singles in 1996 (Andre Agassi) and a gold medal in doubles in 1988. If you’re like me, you may have forgotten that Brad Gilbert won a bronze medal in 1988. Not bad but not like the women and certainly not close to the tradition of U.S. men winning Davis Cups. The top men don’t skip Davis Cup. Not only that but the lower ranked players turn up too and happily serve as hitting partners. There was Fish at the Davis Cup match against France earlier this month even though he wasn’t on the team.

Serena and Lindsay, however, refused to travel to the Fed Cup match in Moscow last week. Lindsay refused to go because Serena didn’t go and Lindsay didn’t want to play two singles matches. That’s understandable. Anything Lindsay does is a bonus because the U.S. wasn’t expecting her back from retirement anyway and her child-raising plans probably never included Moscow.

The problem with Fed Cup isn’t tradition. The U.S. has won 17 Fed Cups, ten more than the next country – Australia. The problem is that the U.S. doesn’t have those top women players they had in the past. Lindsay will play until she fades into motherhood. Serena will play when she’s not injured. We don’t know about Venus and next up in the rankings is – I had to look this up – Meghann Shaughnessy. How many H’s can you have in one name? I’m being unkind but you see the problem.

I’m not that concerned about the Olympics. I don’t watch the Olympics to watch tennis. I’m concerned about the fractured nature of the U.S. team spirit because I’m a sucker for national competitions and it does my heart good to see U.S. tennis players dancing around together. That might have to wait until the U.S. restocks its talent base and though that could take a long time, I can always watch the replay of the Davis Cup win last year.

By the way, I put up that Andy Roddick video even though it’s not directly related and even though the audio is not good because it’s a performance you shouldn’t miss.