The U.S. men actually looked like they belonged on the dirt in Paris for a change.<\/b><\/p>\n
I feel like I just stepped into the annual United States Dirtballer\u2019s Convention. Five of the U.S. men won their first round matches at the French Open in Paris. One of them, Wayne Odesnik<\/b>, actually won a second round match if you can believe that.<\/p>\n
U.S. tennis players don\u2019t typically have the mindset for grinding on dirt. Pete Sampras<\/b> preferred his points shorter which may explain why he only got as far as the semifinals here, which, if you think about it, was a surprisingly good result. Andre Agassi<\/b> won a title here but he wasn\u2019t a grinder, he was a dictator. He moved the ball around and his opponent had to run after it.<\/p>\n
Michael Chang<\/b> won a title here too but he wasn\u2019t a grinder as much as a trickster. I can still see John McEnroe<\/b> muttering loudly to himself as Chang sent lob after lob over Mac\u2019s outstretched racket. Then there were those underhand serves that knocked Ivan Lendl<\/b> out of the French Open on the way to Chang\u2019s 1989 title.<\/p>\n
Jim Courier<\/b>, now he was a grinder and he won two titles here. On the other hand, he also won two Australian Opens and reached a Wimbledon final before losing to Sampras, so he was an all-surface grinder.<\/p>\n
Okay, so the U.S. isn\u2019t immune to dirt but look who played well this year on clay: Andy Roddick<\/b> got to the semifinals in Rome before he retired with an injury that is keeping him home this week, and Sam Querrey<\/b> got to the quarterfinals at Monte Carlo. Querrey is one of those overfed, overtall U.S. players whose games are designed for concrete. Didn\u2019t Querrery hit ten straight aces past the far from slow James Blake<\/b> last year?<\/p>\n
John Isner<\/b> is even taller, almost Ivo Karlovic<\/b> tall, and here he was up two sets to none before losing to Juan Ignacio Chela<\/b> in five sets. I notice, by the way, that the French tennis federation is suppressing videos of the tournament uploaded to youtube. Wasn\u2019t it bad enough that they tried to stop gambling on the French Open, do they have to take away our viewing pleasure too?<\/p>\n
Vince Spadea<\/b> is the ultimate scrapper. His goal is to annoy the hell out of you and that\u2019s true off the court too. And I\u2019m not referring to his rapping. He wrote a book called Spadea crawled back from two sets down in the first round to even his match with Julien Benneteau<\/b> before losing in five sets. While he was at it, he got in the face of a few of Benneteau\u2019s home crowd spectators. Feisty and scrappy tend to go together. Spadea is a poser with all his rapping and styling but you know what, he\u2019s a poser who\u2019s grown on me over time because his intensity is real.<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know that he\u2019ll ever develop an entertainment gene or write anything close to an interesting rhyme, but the guy has spent most of the past 14 years in the top one hundred and that says a lot. In 1999 he got just inside the top 20 then dropped down to the 200\u2019s before climbing back to the top twenty in 2004. Can you think of anyone else who\u2019s done something like that besides Agassi? Spadea started dropping out of the top 100 this month. If this is the end, it\u2019s been a long and intense career.<\/p>\n U.S. player Donald Young<\/b> played U.S. player Robbie Ginepri<\/b> in the first round. Unless Young somehow managed to flip over the net and crash into Ginepri causing a double wipeout of epic proportions, a U.S. player was likely to win that match.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve always worried about Young because he hasn\u2019t grown with the rest of the crowd. He was 5ft 9in (175cm) while other U.S. players were sprouting to 6ft 6in (198cm) and higher. His profile says he\u2019s six feet tall but that\u2019s probably an exaggeration and he still looks like a spindly kid to me.<\/p>\n I love Young\u2019s aggressive net game but I just don\u2019t see him launching himself into his ground shots with as much forward directed force as I see with other players. Gustavo Kuerten<\/b>, who played his last ceremonial match here this week, was also spindly but he generated a lot power. Young could go far with his speed but the other players who have less power and lots of speed – Nikolay Davydenko<\/b> and David Ferrer<\/b> immediately jump to mind – have more physically imposing games than Young.<\/p>\n Bobby Reynolds<\/b> is Ginepri\u2019s roommate and he beat Frenchman Thierry Ascione<\/b> without annoying the crowd. Mardy Fish<\/b> took out Agustin Calleri<\/b> and that\u2019s pretty good considering that Calleri is an Argentinian dirtball specialist who reached the semifinals at Casablanca last week.<\/p>\n Blake is the last of the five players still alive and he has a pretty good shot at reaching the fourth round. He\u2019s lucky, though, because Odesnik gets Novak Djokovic<\/b> next and Ginepri gets Igor Andreev<\/b> so enjoy it while it lasts.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The U.S. men actually looked like they belonged on the dirt in Paris for a change. I feel like I just stepped into the annual United States Dirtballer\u2019s Convention. Five of the U.S. men won their first round matches at the French Open in Paris. One of them, Wayne Odesnik, actually won a second round […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-897","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=897"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/897\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=897"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=897"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=897"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}