Tonight we are in Montreal at Uniprix Stadium for the first round of the Rogers Masters Cup. It’s a weekday evening, the place is rocking and there are 11,000 people packed in here. Good stuff for tennis in North America.

This is the fourth men’s tournament in the US Open Series leading, naturally, to the US Open. The clay court players have finally arrived. Rafael Nadal will take on his fellow Majorcan Carlos Moya later in this round. French Open finalist Mariano Puerta is here along with Guillermo Coria and Gaston Gaudio. Roger Federer is still resting a foot injury.

We are going to watch Andy Roddick play Paul-Henri Mathieu of France. Roddick has been in the finals of this event for the last two years and won it in 2003 – when Brad Gilbert was still his coach. The courtside announcer tonight, Brad Gilbert, who should still be his coach, points out that the court is very fast. Strangely, given the supersonic speed of Roddick’s serve, Gilbert says that Roddick is not that comfortable on very fast courts because it’s harder for him to get to ground strokes.

I was never one of those people who thought that Tiger Woods should return to Butch Harmon. He left him for a good reason. If he didn’t smooth out his golf swing, he was concerned that he would re-injure his knee. Woods thinks big, he wants to break Nicklaus’ record of eighteen grand slams, and he can’t do that if he isn’t set up to play for the next twenty years.

Roddick seems to have two goals. One is to win a lot of majors. The other is to increase the popularity of tennis in the United States. Getting to the number one ranking and staying there is a good way to increase the popularity of tennis. Trying to be the number one ranked player and the P.R. department for U.S. tennis, that’s too much. Evidently Gilbert and Roddick’s father Jerry clashed over Roddick’s schedule. Gilbert felt that Roddick’s outside commitments interfered with his goal of getting to number one. I’d have to go with Gilbert on this one.

Roddick and Mathieu have never played before though they do have history. Mathieu was the number one ranked junior when both players were sixteen years old. Mathieu is ranked number 67 after missing much of last year with an injured wrist. I’m beginning think that wrist surgery is the provenance of two-handed backhanders. Jimmy Connors, Andre Agassi and Kim Clijsters all had wrist surgery. Do players with one-handed backhands ever need wrist surgery? If you can send me an example, I’ll give you a free subscription to the American Journal of Sports Medicine.

Gilbert felt that Roddick’s outside commitments interfered with his goal of getting to number one. I’d have to go with Gilbert on this one.

Roddick and Mathieu trade breaks in the first two games and stay on serve until Roddick serves at 5-6. There are two surprising things about this. The first is that Mathieu has fifteen winners to Roddick’s five. The second is that Mathieu has five aces to Roddicks’s two. Roddick may be tired from his title run at last week’s tournament in Washington, his conditioning has been suspect at times. And what about those outside commitments? But Mathieu is also helping himself by looking like Andre Agassi on service return, he’s getting them all back.

Roddick plays points loosely and loses the game and first set 5-7. Not only that, but in his first service game in the second set, he does it again. He doubles faults on break point to go down 0-2. Amazingly, Mathieu wins the next game with four straight aces! Who is this guy?

Normally the pressure of Roddick’s serve would push a much lower ranked player into errors. They know they have to win their service game because Roddick certainly won’t lose his. But that pressure is gone tonight and Mathieu keeps serving up aces and winners. Roddick gets two break points to get back on serve but he hits an error on the first one and Mathieu hits a 126mph service winner on the second. That’s the last chance Roddick gets.

Mathieu punctuates his dominance this evening with a top ten highlight in the sixth game. After Roddick returns and approaches, Mathieu hits a forehand down the line that Roddick barely gets over the net. Mathieu rushes in to get the short shot and hits it past Roddick’s backhand but Roddick manages to lunge at the ball and put up a lob volley. Mathieu turns his back and runs as fast as he can to the baseline, spins around and hits an inside out forehand that races past Roddick at the net.

This is one of the reasons that Mathieu has been inconsistent on the tour. He just went for a winner when he was in a totally defensive position. He’s up a set and a break, he doesn’t need to do that. Mathieu holds onto the break and wins the match, 7-5, 6-3.

Mathieu has just hit fourteen aces with 56% of his first serves in and won 82% of the points on his first serve. Is this an aberration or is this the start of Mathieu’s climb up the rankings? I looked at the statistics for the matches he won at Indian Wells and Miami, both hard court Masters events, earlier this year. He averaged six aces, 47% first serve percentage and won 74% of the points on his first serve. Mathieu is still alive after the third round at Montreal. Even if you take away the match with Roddick, he is averaging nine aces, 51% first serves in and 81% first service points won.

Mathieu has a new coach, Thierry Tulasne, as of three weeks ago. Monsieur Mathieu has not granted me an interview so I don’t know exactly what he’s done but it looks like his coach has encouraged him to take something off his first serve and move it around more.

By the way, at Indian Wells he was knocked out by Lleyton Hewitt, at Miami he lost to Agassi, at Monte Carlo it was Guillermo Coria, and in Estoril Moya beat him. No shame in that. Mathieu doesn’t look like a top ten player yet but this win doesn’t look like an aberration either.

I’m beginning to think that performance enhancing drugs (PED’s) should be a new category in sports columns and websites right after Nascar and just before rugby (is there a pro Quidditch league yet?).

Tennis is right there in the thick of PED culture. Argentine Guillermo Canas has just been suspended for two years after testing positive for the diuretic hydrochlorothiazide (HCT). He is the fourth Argentine to be supended for a drug violation. Juan Ignacio Chela, Guillermo Coria and Mariano Puerta all served suspension for banned PED’s.

Puerta was suspended the longest, nine months. That’s a long time but it’s nothing like two years. That’s a lifetime to a tennis player. Can you imagine if Rafael Palmeiro had received a two year suspension? End of career.

Canas received an automatic two year suspension because tennis adheres to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s guidelines, the same as those used in the Olympics.

If a two year suspension wasn’t bad enough, Canas also has to repay $276,070 in prize money and forfeit 525 singles and 95 doubles rankings points. How is this determined? Do they figure out how long the banned substance stayed in his body, calculate how much he won during that period then ask for the money back?

Mybe they should do that in baseball. Calculate how long the stanozolol stayed in Palmeiro’s body then go back and take away all of the hits he had during that period. By the way, you can see why the Major League Baseball union is fighting tooth and nail against being subject to the World Anti-Doping Agency’s policies.

Can you imagine if Rafael Palmeiro had received a two year suspension? End of career.

I am not convinced that steroids are bad for you. You can read more about that here. If it turns out that DHEA will extend my lifespan with few side effects and I find a doctor willing to give me a protocol for it, what right do I have to tell a ballplayer that he can’t use steroids under medical supervision? The bigger problem here is the decade or so of lies and the continuing lack of disclosure. The collective bargaining agreement between baseball and the players’ union has a confidentiality agreement. When a player tests positive, the test results are not released.

Tennis is smarter than baseball. As Harvey Araton pointed out in The New York Times this morning, if you go to the ATP website you can find all the information you want. Click on Press Room then Anti-Doping and you will see links to a list of banned substances and yearly testing reports. You can even print up your own anti-doping wallet card with a list of banned substances. There are at least nine categories and more than one hundred and twenty substances – including 18 _-homo-17ß-hydroxyestr-4-en-3-one and, yes, chlorothiazide.

If you click on Information, you get a list of every anti-doping decision, in English, Spanish and sometimes French, every player sanctioned and the substance they were sanctioned for. This is what we call full disclosure

A few years ago I read an article in the New Yorker about a military officer whose daughter died unexpectedly during a stay at a military hospital. The officer was convinced that medical personnel made a mistake and covered it up. He spent a number of years and all of his resources pursuing a legal decision in the matter. He was in the military, he knew that mistakes happen, but when you make one, the best way to diffuse the situtation is to fully disclose what happened.

No one has died here but if you want to make a situation much worse that it otherwise might be, screw up and then lie about it. Ask Richard Nixon and Bill Clinton about that.

At least it’s not as bad as the Mercedes Benz Cup last week. Only three seeds were left after the first round. Here at the Acura Classic we’re in the third round and we still have half of the top ten seeds playing. The number one seed, Lindsay Davenport, is injured and didn’t show up. Serena Williams and Davenport have both dropped out of next week’s JP Morgan Chase Open. I applaud the U.S. Open Series, the set of ten events leading up to the U.S. Open, but we shouldn’t be surprised that players drop out. It’s too much tennis in brutally hot weather. Maybe they should hold a few tournaments in Alaska, it is part of the United States you know. Or at least hang out in the Bay Area for a few more weeks. It’s freezing when the fog rolls in.

There are four players from France here and two of them are playing this evening. Mary Pierce is positively resurgent. She was the tear-filled runner up at the French Open and made it to the quarters at Wimbledon. She’s come a long way from the fourteen-year-old who turned pro, surely too early, then suffered through a split with her domineering father and a series of injuries that derailed her career for a few years. She is now a thirty-year-old with two majors and an almost regal bearing who seems very happy with her life and thrilled to be playing well on the tour.

That is when she’s not pissed off. Her opponent is Nathalie Dechy. On the first point of the match, Dechy hits a beautiful forehand return that lands on the sideline. Pierce is beside herself. She is sure the ball was out. I’ve had to create a new shorthand notation on my tennis chart, PPO, Pierce pissed off, because we will see it often this evening.

Dechy has great athleticism and solid strokes but Pierce has rocket-propelled shots, particularly her forehand. She gets so low to hit her groundstrokes that she looks like a Sumo wrestler stepping into the ring, minus a few hundred pounds. She also has a hard first serve. Dechy’s serve is serviceable. By comparing the two players, you can see one of the reasons that Dechy’s serve is weaker: she barely bends her knees. Everybody has their strengths and weaknesses, some of us more of the weaknesses, but I don’t understand how someone could practice so hard for so many years and still not figure out how to bend their knees. It’s like Vic Braden says, “Whaddya mean you can’t bend your knees, how do you manage to sit down for dinner every night?”

Dechy hasn’t beaten Pierce in three tries. If she wants to win tonight, she must avoid errors and pressure Pierce with strong service returns else Pierce’s power will dictate the match. Dechy’s plan works in the first game, she hits three good returns and breaks Pierce. Unfortunately she gives it right back with groundstroke errors.

After two more PPO’s and two more overrules by the chair umpire, both, interestingly, in Pierce’s favor, the players are even at 5-5. At one point the umpire shakes her head at a call. Hey, if the umpire has no confidence in the linespeople, the players certainly don’t.

Twice Dechy sets herself up for a winner and hits a swinging volley into the net giving rise to a huge collective groan from the crowd. The second volley would have given her a break point. Instead, Pierce is up 6-5 and Dechy has to serve to stay in the set. When Pierce is facing a break point, she serves hard and hits harder. Dechy doesn’t have a power serve and she doesn’t have a killer shot. At the very least she needs to move the serve around and play error free. In this game she can’t do either. She double faults, looks tentative on her other serves and loses the game at love to give Pierce the first set, 7-5.

She gets so low to hit her groundstrokes that she looks like a Sumo wrestler stepping into the ring, minus a few hundred pounds.

Dechy goes toe to toe with Pierce hitting the ball hard and running down most of Pierce’s arsenal. At one point Pierce approaches the net and Dechy hits a passing shot that Pierce barely gets over the net and onto the sideline. Dechy comes all the way from the opposite corner to hit a backhand down the line and past Pierce. But she keeps making critical errors. She gets broken at love to go down 1-3 after yet another errant overhead.

Dechy never gets the break back and the match ends the same way it started, with Pierce pissed off. She was halfway to the net to exchange pleasantries after hitting a match-ending ace when the serve was called out. Instead, Pierce pushes Dechy into a position where all she can do is hit an awkward lob over Pierce’s head. Pierce responds with a lob of her own that looks like it could jump over the Empire State Building. Dechy, again, dumps it into the net. Pierce wins 7-5, 6-3.

This is a Tier I event with $3.1 million in prize money. That’s a lot of money and there are fifty-six players here from twenty-six countries including Madagascar trying to get a piece of it. Eleven players, six of them seeded, are from Russia, but not one of them will make is as far as the semifinals. Instead, two of the four Japanese players and the one player from China will battle each other and Mary Pierce to get to the final.