Monthly Archives: August 2007

Bartoli is Out of Sorts in Los Angeles

Marion Bartoli loses early in Los Angeles and doesn’t feel so good about it.

It’s not just Marion Bartoli’s forehand and backhand that are funky – they’re both two-handed so which is which? – it’s the serve too. It’s a Rube Goldberg contraption with a funny wrist bend followed by toe tips and it stays that way. Honest, she puts both feet together, gets up on her toes and stays there. I’ve never seen that before and as I write this, she just served her second double fault in the first game of the first set here at the East West Bank Classic just south of Los Angeles.

Everything tells you that serve will never work and you wonder why no one ever corrected it until you learn that Bartoli’s father is her coach. I doubt he ever worked as a coach with the French Tennis Association.

On top of all that, Bartoli is a perpetual motion machine. When she’s serving she bounces, kicks and stutter steps between points and when she’s receiving, it’s bounce, bounce, forehand swing, backhand swing, another stutter step and only then does she turn back to the court to receive a serve from her impatient opponent.

Then there was this from a media session at Wimbledon after Bartoli had just beaten Justine Henin. She’d lost the first set 6-1 before coming back to win the match.

Q. 1-6 in the first set to the No. 1 player in the world. How did you come back?

MARION BARTOLI: Well, to tell you the truth, as I said on BBC a few minutes ago, I saw Pierce Brosnan in the crowd, which is one of my favorite actor[s]. I love his movies. I said to myself, it’s not possible I play so bad in front of him. Because he watch me and I play so bad it was unbelievable. So I try to feel it a bit more the ball, play more smartly. I saw he was cheering for me, so I said, Oh, maybe it’s good. I kept going and I won, so maybe a little bit for Pierce Brosnan.

Q. TV personalities like Cliff Richard in the earlier match, does it not distract you having celebrities in the crowd?

MARION BARTOLI: Well, I was focusing on Pierce Brosnan because he is so beautiful. I was just watching him. He was the only one.

Either she’s an instinctive, quirky player or she’s joking with us and she’s very funny. Right?

When I turned up at the open media session on Monday, I found neither. She’s a rather serious person with a monotone, almost deadpan delivery. She’s heartfelt, absolutely, and talks openly about herself but not at all what I expected.

About that that Wimbledon, by the way. Bartoli got all the way to the final by beating Henin before losing to Venus Williams and she’d reached the semifinals in the two previous grass tournaments she’d.

I couldn’t figure out how she’d done all that from looking at her game today. Her serve went over 100 mph (161 km/h) exactly once by my count and she had a few second serves in the seventies. She is French and the French burned up the grass this summer but those players had a volley while Bartoli has a swinging volley and that is, of course, two handed off both sides.

One thing she does have is an excellent return of serve and there’s not that much windup on either of her strokes – how could there be with two hands? – so her game is well suited to picking up those low skidding balls on grass.

Since Wimbledon, Bartoli’s road has been much tougher. She shot up from a ranking of 19 to 11 and that gave her a seed in all three of her tournaments since then. On the plus side, that gave her a bye in the first round. The problem is that her first match is her opponent’s second match and that’s why she played Maria Kirilenko – who’s currently ranked number 35 – today instead of some stiff in the 100’s or a qualifier.

Bartoli isn’t quirky or fidgety or a jokester and, like most every other player on the tour, she gets her confidence from winning a few matches and when she’s not winning, she finds something to blame.

Of course I was not as comfortable as on grass, for example, when I have ten victories in a row and I know what I’m doing out there. And you are changing cities every single week and the surface, even if it looks the same it’s not the same …and everything is changing. It’s not like on clay or on grass courts where it’s the same clay or the same grass every week. Here on hard court it’s not the same tournament.

She’s blaming the variation in hard court surfaces but that’s a complaint of someone who is out of sorts. She played in a different city every week when she played well on grass too. Luckily, her mother is turning up next week and that will make her feel better about herself:

Whereas Bartoli’s father is so indispensable that she refuses to play Fed Cup for France unless he can be on the coaching staff, her mother isn’t a tennis fan and doesn’t really get the significance of having reached a Wimbledon final. Her father introduced her to tennis when she was six years old and gave up his job as a doctor to coach her after she won the junior US Open title, while her mother, well, her mother just loves her. It works for them.

Bartoli and Kirilenko broke each other eight times in their match. Kirilenko won the first set in the tiebreaker and got a crucial break to go up 4-3 in the second set. When it counted, Kirilenko served well and won the match, 7-5(3), 6-3.

Bartoli will move on to Toronto with her mother and father and see if she can get herself back on track:

I will try to take my courage with the two hands and come back with the hard work and hopefully it will go my way next time.

I don’t know whether “taking courage with the two hands” is a French saying or a comment on her two-sided two-handedness – perhaps our reader Maria can fill me in – but either way I hope she gets herself sorted out.

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Hingis Compares Herself to Chavetadze

A conversation with Martina Hingis and which has more parity, the men’s game or the women’s game?

Hingis and Chakvetadze

I left the Acura Classic Saturday and stopped off at Legoland on the way home. I wandered through a Lego brick version of Las Vegas – a model of a model you could say – and sailed past a Lego brick model of the Taj Mahal. I’m sure I was the only single adult there and that’s too bad because there were lots of things I couldn’t do because I had no kid in tow. Anyone have a kid I can borrow?

The revelation at the Acura Classic was Anna Chakvetadze who outlasted Venus Williams in a knock-down, drag-out three set battle in the quarterfinals. People compare Chakvetadze to Martina Hingis and not just because they are the same height and weight. They both have cerebral games instead of power games.

Today is the first day of the East West Bank Classic just south of Los Angeles so I asked Hingis if the comparison was accurate:

She’s very smart around the court and she has good vision. You don’t see anything specific that she’s winning matches [with] so I definitely see some similarities.

This last statement is interesting because Hingis is describing both her game and Chakvetadze’s game. You don’t see anything specific such as a huge serve or a big backhand or blinding speed yet they both win a lot of matches and, in Hingis’ case, 43 titles and five slams.

They also have a negative similarity. Both of them have weak second serves. Chakvetadze hit a 64 mph(103 km/h) second serve against Venus but, being the smart cookie she is, it was an ace that sliced wide and out of Venus’ reach. Chakvetadze did have a few problems with nerves. She served six double faults after going up 5-2 in the first set. I asked Hingis if she suffered from nerves early in her career.

Obviously, everyone knows that my serve was never a weapon. It was good enough and I had a high percentage on my first serves just to get me into play and that’s the most important thing.

Will a high percentage of first serves and cerebral play get Chakvetadze five slams in today’s game? Let’s see how she does against the current power players who’ve won slams. She’s 1-2 against Venus, 0-2 against Svetlana Kuznetsova, and 1-5 against Maria Sharapova (and that win was a walkover). Chakvetadze is also 0-2 against Justine Henin and 0-3 against Amelie Mauresmo, two slightly less powerful slam winners.

By that measure, it doesn’t look so good for Chakvetadze so I’m not willing to project five slams any time soon. What do you think?

Politics and the WTA

This year I’ve been watching the WTA auction off the year-end championship. They recently signed a $42 million deal to send the championship to Doha starting next year for three years. Istanbul signed the same size deal to get it for the following three years.

I had planned to ask Hingis if she felt comfortable having such an important women’s event take place in Muslim countries but we never got that far because when I asked her if the players had much input into the decision, she didn’t even know the event was going to Turkey. Clearly they don’t have much input.

Someone asked her if she wanted to be more involved in WTA decisions and she said she tried to be influential after her return to the tour last year but it was like “knocking on the wall and you’re not getting through.”

She said that language is also a problem:

When we had the board meetings at the grand slams, half of the people don’t even understand what we talk about, then it’s very hard to have an influence.

The WTA now provides translation at the meetings – no doubt Russian is one of the languages offered – but you get the idea that Hingis is old-guard in more ways than one. The WTA was founded by the players but these days they’re too busy with their careers and entourages. They travel like separate satellites that touch down next to each other during a match but go their separate ways as soon as the match is over.

The result is that there is no cohesive player input into the WTA’s decisions and that’s too bad. Lindsay Davenport is returning to the tour this fall – she plans to play singles in Bali in September. The more old-guard the better I say, let’s get Martina some help.

Parity in the Men’s and Women’s Game

There were a number of lopsided victories in the later rounds at the Acura Classic in San Diego so I decided to compare last week’s men’s event in Washington with San Diego to see if there was more parity in the men’s or the women’s game.

This is not a scientific sample as it only includes two tournaments and it’s also highly unfair because Washington was rockin’ last week. All five sets in the men’s semifinals ended in tiebreakers. Not only that but John Isner became the first player in the Open Era to win five straight matches with a third set tiebreaker. Think the serve is important to his game? I think so.

This also means that the Washington courts were faster than San Diego because it’s easier to hold serve on a fast court and that means more tiebreakers. And the serve isn’t as important in the women’s game as it is the men’s but let’s look at the results anyway since I took the time to compile them.

Bagel sets (sets with a score of 6-0) are a good indicator of lopsidedness and there were ten bagel sets in San Diego – including one in the final – and only two in Washington. Three set matches, on the other hand, are a sign of competitiveness. There were 15 three set matches in San Diego while there were 22 in Washington.

It’s even worse if you consider that San Diego had a 56 player draw while Washington had 48 players. That means Washington had eight fewer matches to come up with its numbers.

I hereby declare, unscientifically, that there is more parity in the men’s game.

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ATP Fantasy Tennis Picks: Montreal

We’re deep into the ATP Fantasy Tennis Season so check out my 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.

The deadline for picking your team this week is Sunday, August 5, 10am EST, 4pm CET.

Rear View Mirror – a look at last week’s pick

I’ve still got a chance to win Sopot with Tommy Robredo. I predicted that Nikolay Davydenko would break out of his slump. He did get out of the first round for the first time in his last four tournaments but even I could not have predicted that he’d become embroiled in a gambling controversy.

Gamblers on the British online site Betfair.com laid $7 million on Davydenko to lose his match against Martin Vassallo-Arguello AFTER Davydenko had already won the first set 6-2. You can read more about it here.

I’m all the way up to number 18 in the standings due to good U.S. Open picks but this week things could go topsy turvy because we have the Masters Series event at Montreal and the first prize is $400,000. Masters Series events are second only to the slams in prize money.

Montreal (hard court, $400,000)

First the no-brainers: Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Nadal won this event in 2005 and he won the Masters hard court event in Indian Wells. Andy Roddick has also won this tournament and falls in to the category of no-brainer. We need eight players for our team, two from each quarter, so let’s see who the other five players will be.

Roger Federer’s Quarter

Andy Murray is the wild card because he hasn’t played since the middle of May when he hurt his wrist in Hamburg. It probably doesn’t matter because he’d meet Federer in the third round and that saves us a tough decision. Murray did beat Federer at Cincinnati last year but it’s hard to believe Murray’s in shape to do it again.

The top 23 players in the world are here and that’s why only Lleyton Hewitt, Juan Carlos Ferrero, James Blake or Tommy Robredo will make it to the quarterfinals. None of them has gone past the quarterfinals so we’re left with a tough decision because we need one more player from this quarter.

I’m going to forget about Blake because he’s had average hard court results this year. Robredo has been a bit more consistent than Ferrero and Hewitt on hard courts so I’m going with him.

Fernando Gonzalez’ Quarter

Mikhail Youzhny could easily lose to Hyung-Taik Lee so I’m picking Jarrko Nieminen as one of the players from this section. At least he got to the quarterfinals last year.

This is a crappy quarter because it’s full of clay court players and inconsistent players. Fernando Gonzalez is the only one who’s had good results here. He got to the semifinals last year but he’s had miserable hard court results except for the Australian Open and he lost in the first round two weeks ago in Los Angeles, of all places.

Haas is fighting against Radek Stepanek and Gonzalez to get to the quarterfinals and this is the toughest decision in the draw. Neither Haas nor Stepanek have good results here (clearly this is the theme this week) but Haas steps up in bigger tournaments so I’m dropping the inconsistent Gonzalez and playing wait and see on Stepanek.

Novak Djokovic’s Quarter

Roddick has to get past Tomas Berdych to get to the quarterfinals and Berdych beat Nadal here last year. But Roddick has played two hard court events already and he’s had a win and two finals here so I’m sticking with him.

Djokovic doesn’t have much competition in his section so he should meet Roddick in the quarterfinals.

Rafael Nadal’s Quarter

Richard Gasquet doesn’t have a lot of competition in his section either and he reached the final last year so he should be able to get to the quarterfinals and he has a good shot at beating Nadal. They played in a challenger back in 2003 for their only hard court meeting and Gasquet won it.

Mario Ancic is back after recovering from mononucleosis but this is his first tournament since February. The only person who could threaten Nadal before he gets to Gasquet is Guillermo Canas. Canas won this tournament but it was long ago in 2002.

Montreal draw

Picks

Here’s my team: Federer, Robredo, Nieminen, Haas, Roddick, Djokovic, Gasquet, and Nadal.

Happy fantasies!

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Check out our picks last week to see how we did: ATP Fantasy Tennis Picks: Sopot and Washington

Davydenko is the $7 Million Dollar Man

Gamblers bet $7 million against Nikolay Davydenko in a match at Sopot and that was after he’d won the first set.

I’m here at the Acura Classic watching Maria Sharapova annihilate Sania Mirza. This is the last year for the Acura Classic and the last Tier I tournament on the U.S. West Coast so I was a bit amused to learn that there is a gambling controversy in the ATP – the men’s side of the tour. Someone actually thinks tennis is popular enough to plunk down a whole lot of money on it.

Gamblers on Betfair.com, a British online gambling site, bet over $7 million dollars that Nikolay Davydenko would lose his second round match to Martin Vassallo-Arguello in Sopot, Poland. That’s not so unusual except that most of the bets were made after Davydenko won the first set 6-2. Davydenko ended up losing the second set and retired in the third set with a foot injury.

If you look closer the situation looks even more curious. Davydenko got to the semifinals at the French Open and he’s a top five player yet he’d lost in the first round in his previous three tournaments, all of them clay court events.

The ATP is not like the National Football League (NFL) where teams are required to disclose a player’s injury status. The NFL has such rules so other teams can prepare properly for an upcoming game. But those rules are also an unspoken nod to the huge gambling activity on NFL games. Gamblers would be extremely angry if the star quarterback turned up on the sideline after they’d waged a pretty penny.

However, there’s not much here. Davydenko also lost his first match at three consecutive clay court events last year: Valencia, Monte Carlo and Barcelona.

While we don’t know if Davydenko was injured during that time or not, we do know he’d play even if his foot was falling off. He’s notorious for playing the most tournaments of any of the top players. Last year the captain of the Russian Davis Cup team sat him down because he went all the way to China for a tournament after playing the U.S. Open and he was too exhausted to play when he arrived in Moscow.

I don’t think people suspect Davydenko of throwing the match for the same reason we don’t think NBA players throw games: they make too much money. Tim Donaghy, the NBA referee who is accused of influencing NBA games, made around $280,000 a year. Davydenko has made almost $1 million dollars already this year and over $6 million in his career.

It’s possible that he’s gambled away his fortune and his lenders are putting the squeeze on him. A mobster from Uzbekistan named Alimzhan Tokhtakhounov was accused of trying to fix ice skating events at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and Russian tennis players were known to hang out with him. But Davydenko moved to Germany when he was fifteen. His ATP profile says he moved back to Russia in 2004 but I understand that he continues to live in Germany and he’s trying to move to Austria because Germany would not give him residence.

Maybe the Germans uncovered a gambling habit, who knows? There are a lot of things we don’t know at the moment but there is one thing we do know. The world of sports benefits when gambling is legal and controlled. Internet gambling is legal in Britain and Betfair has an agreement with the ATP to report irregular betting activity. If sports gambling had been legal in the U.S., the NBA may have been unable to uncover Tim Donaghy’s activities earlier than it did.

In fact, Betfair got an award from the Queen of England for being an innovative enterprise. Can you image the President of the U.S. giving a gambling operation an award of any kind?

I’m in the process of getting an interview with a Betfair user who gambles on tennis. When I get more information, I’ll pass it along. Meanwhile, the ATP could help us all by acknowledging the influence of gambling and instituting rules requiring players to disclose injuries.

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Dog Day Afternoon: Kirilenko upsets Jankovic

Maria Kirilenko upsets Jelena Jankovic and earns a dog.

Kim Clijsters is now happily married and pregnant but last year she was here at the Acura Classic attending a puppy auction. She bid $11,000 for a black Labrador puppy then immediately gave it to a woman whose black Lab had recently died. I’m getting teary eyed just telling the story. I’m like that.

There’s another puppy auction today and Maria Kirilenko noticed the puppy as she was preparing for her match with Jelena Jankovic because she’s mad for a dog herself. In fact, she wants a Labrador Retriever puppy. Her coach is no dummy so he told her he’d get her a dog if she beat Jankovic.

Those psychological tricks work. Kirilenko pulled off the upset of the tournament by beating a slightly under the weather Jankovic, 6-2, 3-6, 7-5.

I was trying to rid my computer of a nasty virus when I noticed that Kirilenko had gone up 3-1 in the first set. I snatched up my notebook and rushed over to the stadium. Kirilenko fought through a bunch of deuces to hold her serve just as I got to the court and then she broke Jankovic again to win the first set easily.

Jankovic started to get hot in the fifth game of the second set and she broke Kirilenko twice to take the second set. At the time I thought the match was over. I figured Kirilenko was one of those lower ranked players who win one set off a top ten player then proceed to crumble.

Not only was I wrong, but now I’m scratching my head. Kirilenko was ranked number 21 this time last year and she’s got a top twenty game so what is she doing down at number 44? She’s got a hard, flat backhand, she’s an excellent defensive player and she actually attacks the net.

A member of the media dropped down a few rows and had a conversation with Richard Williams, Venus and Serena’s father and coach. Williams, by the way, had a dog day too. He took Venus’s puppy to the vet because the dog has an ear infection. Anyway, Williams said the women don’t know how to play the game today. When an opponent hits a short ball, they’re supposed to get their butt to the net.

Generally I’d agree with him but Kirilenko got to the net plenty. She broke Jankovic to go up 3-2 and kept up the pressure. As aggressive as Kirilenko was, though, there was a dichotomy in her game. She mishit an overhead early in the third set and from then on, she let Jankovic drive her back to the baseline by letting lobs bounce instead of taking them on the fly.

She let two lobs bounce on one point in the sixth game and she passed up another overhead in the next game and failed to take advantage of three break points. Jankovic broke her when she served for the set at 5-4 and I thought Kirilenko had lost her chance.

Jankovic has a cold which explains her slow start and could well explain the ending. After the match she said “I was struggling the whole match. The chances were there but I didn’t do the right things.” Kirilenko broke her in the next game then Jankovic missed a sitter at the net and Kirilenko finally had her upset.

Kirilenko has lost in the first round in nine tournaments this year. She’s not injured so I assume it’s a problem with confidence because it’s certainly not a problem with her game.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends network!Read about more Acura Classic action: Last Go Round for the Acura Classic. You can also read about the 2005 Acura Classic: Acura Classic Super Seniors Title