Before we launch into the tennis season, I have to get over my feelings about the Australian Open.

I’m almost ready to get on with the rest of the tennis season. TennisTV.com will crank up next week with online coverage of the women’s event in Paris and the men’s event in Rotterdam meaning that I can now say goodbye to TVAnts peer to peer pirated broadcasts which never worked anyway because I was too lazy to upload any footage of my own. That’s why it’s called peer to peer: you get back what you give.

Our writer Mike McIntyre will be in Dubai covering the women’s event this month when he’s not snowboarding down the indoor slopes at Dubai’s ski dome or, who knows, riding up a glass elevator to share a Turkish coffee with Dubai resident Roger Federer. We’re pretty excited about that, but first I’ve got some leftover feelings to spill.

Last Sunday Melbourne time wasn’t the first time Roger cried after the final at the Australian Open, but it was slightly different this time. They weren’t tears of joy on the shoulder of the legendary Rod Laver, they were tears of despair as his shot at the “greatest of all time” appears to be slipping away.

Give a slight nod to the new Plexicushion courts that were slow enough to produce one of the best clay court-like semifinals of all time between Rafael Nadal and Fernando Verdasco. Rafa’s epic 2005 final against Guillermo Coria in Rome was the longest match in that city’s history and it was 5 hours and 14 minutes long – yes, exactly the same length as the Rafa-Verdasco match. But no one will remember that.

Because first it was grass as Rafa snatched away Roger’s Wimbledon crown last year, and now hard court. One more slam title than Pete Sampras or not, it won’t matter, because Roger couldn’t consistently beat Rafa on either of his two favorite surfaces. I’m telling you, it may be killing Roger, but it’s killing me too and I couldn’t help being a bit snarky as Rafa fell to the court in victory.

When my lovable Arizona Cardinals lost the Super Bowl later that day, at least I could kick my inflatable referee punching bag across the room. All I could do about Roger losing was accuse Rafa of taking drugs. How does this guy do it? Steroids? HGH? EPO? How can he play a 5 hour and 14 minute semifinal, have one less day of rest, then watch as his opponent is the one who fades in the fifth set?

That doesn’t matter either because Rafa is slowly taking over the world tennis tour. Can he win the calendar slam? Oy, I hope not. Local sports shows are actually beginning to talk about tennis again because we now have a bona fide rivalry. We have five set matches between the two best players in the world and that’s what people want.

Oh, and personality. We want personality too. Rafa has it and Roger is finding it – even if it means overshadowing Rafa at the award ceremony. Martina Hingis completely disintegrated and walked off the court after losing the 1999 French Open final before the award ceremony even started, and Mary Pierce could barely speak through her tears after losing the 2005 French Open final. Lleyton Hewitt watched with cartoon-sized saucer eyes as Marcos Baghdatis walked off crying after their epic five set match in Melbourne last year.

Hewitt looked like he couldn’t quite believe it but that’s what we want. We want drama and we’re getting it and it’s not just Rafa and Roger. England was beside itself when Verdasco dropped Andy Murray in the fourth round in Melbourne and Novak Djokovic always has a bit of controversy following him around.

It ain’t Borg and McEnroe and Connors and Lendl, but it’s a whole lot better than we’ve had in a long time.

Dinara Safina played in her second slam final but she’s still not comfortable there.

So far I picked Juan Del Potro and Novak Djokovic over Roger Federer at the Australian Open, and last year I said that Serena Williams wouldn’t spend much more time at number one. I am guilty of grossly underestimating the inexhaustible ability of human beings to make and remake themselves – in short to change ceaselessly.

Take Fernando Verdasco. He’d been chugging along with a ranking in the 30’s and 40’s and sometimes the 20’s and a grand total of two titles since 2005, and all of a sudden he jumped up to number 11 last year. Then he came from behind to beat Argentinean Jose Acasuso in Argentina to clinch the Davis Cup for Spain. If that wasn’t enough to boost his confidence, for a short period in there, he was dating Ana Ivanovic. That would boost my confidence.

The end result of all that confidence building was a 5 hour 14 minute marathon Australian Open semifinal with Rafael Nadal which will go down as one of the historically great matches at the Aussie Open. Verdasco lost the match but only because he played a guy who will probably end up with the “mentally toughest player in history” award.

Having said that all that stuff about change, we don’t all start at the same place. As my yoga teacher says, we all have emotional presets. Some of us start life off at a disadvantage in relation to others. Maybe we had a demanding mother, or a moody talented older brother, and maybe the combination led us to be overly self-critical. This might describe Dinara Safina. For the past five or six years she’s been winning Tier II level and lower events and yelling at herself a lot. Then, last year, she won three Tier I events and reached a slam final at Roland Garros and she yelled at herself a whole lot less.

Dinara was ready to take the next step forward in her career in her second slam final against Serena on Saturday in Melbourne, and it didn’t work out so well. Dinara didn’t win a game until the second set and ended up losing to Serena, 6-0, 6-3, in under an hour. Serena was dominant and, as you can see here in Pat Davis’s post, when Serena gets this look on her face, get outta the way, it’s gonna get ugly. This is Serena’s 10th slam and it also puts her at the top of the list for female athletes in all sports for all time with over $23 million in career prize money. That ain’t bad.

I’m not concerned about Serena. At the rate she’s going, she might end up winning more than one slam this year for the first time since 2003. But what about Dinara? Will this set her back or is a second slam final a step forward?

She had an excuse coming in because her serve has been up and down all tournament. And she did run into a dominant player on a very good day. And this was a first for her in a way:

You know, it was first time for me to play not only for the Grand Slam, but it’s also for No. 1 spot. And I never been through this situation and she was already. So she was much more times in this situation. I would say she was much more experienced than I was today stepping on the court.

That response tells me that Dinara might need more opportunities than most to find her slam finals groove and it makes sense given her emotional preset. Amelie Mauresmo also had few emotional problems to overcome before winning her first slam. It’s difficult enough being one of the very few out lesbians on tour, but Amelie also had self-doubt issues. She won her first slam on her second try but it was also seven years between her first and second slam final. By the way, she played her first slam final against Martina Hingis in 1999, the same event at which Martina said, “She’s here with her girlfriend. She’s half a man.” Hingis knew exactly what she was doing when she came out with that nugget.

If Dinara takes that long, she really will have a problem because Maria Sharapova should turn up pretty soon, Ivanovic is likely to find herself at some point, and the Williams sisters are still winning slams. According to my yoga teacher, the only way to improve your emotional preset – and therefore vastly improve your life – is to have loving and caring relationships. For yoga students that includes your teacher. For a tennis player that includes your coach.

Dinara is on good terms with her coach and presumably with her parents too. Maybe she should see what she can do about that grouchy older brother of hers. Maybe that’ll speed up her path to her first slam.

Roger Federer go to the quarterfinals but he’s looking shaky and Richard Gasquet needs a few anatomy lessons.

As I was getting ready to go to bed last night I saw that Roger Federer was down two sets to none to Tomas Berdych in his fourth round match at the Australian Open. I was surprised to see Berdych’s name in that line score but not so surprised to see Roger there. Roger has already lost to Andy Murray twice this year and though he probably treated those events as tuneup time as he likes to ease into the season, he can’t have missed the psychological importance of losing his last two sets 6-2 to Murray who has now beaten him four straight times.

And here’s another four. This is only the fourth time Roger has come back from two sets down to win a match in his career, most likely because he didn’t often need to. Now he does. Roger broke Berdych at 5-4 in the third set to get one set back and normally, I would have gone to bed thinking he’d pull it out. It is Berdych after all. He’s been ranked as high as number nine but has reached a total of one slam quarterfinal his entire career. Now you can see why the ATP changed the way rankings are calculated to favor good results at big events.

Instead I slept restlessly but I needn’t have. Roger pulled out some magic and he was already up 3-1 in the fourth set when he hit a slice backhand sorta drop shot that left Berdych flat-footed. Those were the days weren’t they? You knew you’d see something magnificent in every match. That slice/dropshot was part of the problem, however, because Roger was down two sets because he was spraying his hard core offensive shots all over the place, and he got back into the match partially because Berdych made errors on critical points. And then, at 4-2 in the fourth set, Berdych tweaked his already injured left leg and he spent the rest of the match trying to end points as soon as possible.

That worked better than it should have. Roger needed a bunch of aces to hold serve and win the fourth set when he should have been running Berdych’s shots down. Roger looked more like his old self in the fifth set but I’m telling you, I’d put a few hundred bucks on Juan Martin Del Potro beating Roger in the next round, and I’d wager $500 on Novak Djokovic in the round after that if I’m wrong about Del Potro. I believe online gambling is illegal in the US else I’d ask for takers.

As soon as I saw the Chileans in the crowd explode with pleasure after Fernando Gonzalez hit a hard shot down the line at the beginning of the third set tiebreaker, I knew Richard Gasquet was in trouble. Gasquet had won the first two sets of the third round match but he’s been here before, and the situation goes to the heart, so to speak, of Gasquet’s career at the moment: he’s searching for his lion heart and Dorothy is nowhere to be seen.

In April of last year, Gasquet bagged out of a Davis Cup match against Andy Roddick even though France desperately needed him and it got worse from there. He seemed to have forgotten the reason he plays tennis. After failing to win a match in Rome or Hamburg, he took off a month to find it. He changed coaches and headed into the grass season with a renewed sense of purpose and the same root problem. He got up two sets on Murray at Wimbledon then lost the third set tiebreaker, lost the fourth set 6-2, and lost the match.

The root problem is clear: failure to show courage when the game calls for it. And is it a cultural problem or a systemic problem? Has Gasquet been playing tennis on the strength of others’ expectations rather than his own burning desire? Have those expectations crippled him at big moments? Or is he a very talented tennis player who just doesn’t have the mental fortitude to consistently reach the later rounds of a slam?

Gonzo thought he’d won the third set tiebreaker 7-5, but the linesperson made a late out call on a Gonzo volley and there was no Hawkeye on Margaret Court Arena to review the call. Someone, of course, yelled out right in the middle of Gasquet’s service motion but he managed to get a match point. Could he close it out?

No, but he made a beautiful volley for a winner to get to 10-10 and he and Gonzalez put on a better fight than you’ll see on HBO pay per view boxing any day. Gonzalez took the last two points of the tiebreaker to win it 12-10 and Gasquet lost the fourth set 6-2 – look familiar?, but this was a knockdown drag out fight of the highest order. Both players limped through the fifth set on troublesome toes and both players were grandstanding for their people. Gasquet actually did a victory dance when he got two break points at 4-4 in the fifth set, but Gonzo put in three good serves to get to 5-4 and put the Chileans into momentary heaven.

Gasquet had done something wonderful by this time. He’d earned the respect of the Chileans. They still yelled crazy for their guy but they were respectfully quiet for the points and Gasquet had whipped up the naturally more reticent French crowd to a respectable level of competitive craziness.

Gasquet got a break point at 7-7 – there’s no fifth set tiebreaker here – but Gonzo attacked the net to save it, and on the next point he uncorked a fabulous passing shot that left Gasquet with a rueful smile on his face. Gonzo was up 10-9 when he lunged for a winner off a Gasquet serve wide to get a match point. Gasquet came back with a hammer forehand winner just inside the line and then let out a piercing scream of relief. Gonzo finally caught on that Gasquet was living at the net – 99 approaches for the match and that’s no typo – and hit a lob for his second match point then finally put an end to this magnificent match.

A flare went off in the middle of the Chileans and it looked like the aftermath of an Israel air strike for a while there. Red smoke filled the arena. How the hell did they get a flare inside? Jeez, don’t they have security checks down there? Do I have to start taking a gas mask to tennis matches now?

Nobody who saw this match could say that Gasquet doesn’t have a big heart but maybe that’s not what he’s looking for. If a lion heart gives you courage, what body part is it that gives you eminent domain – the unshakable feeling that the match is yours for the taking? I think it’s somewhere up there in our noggin. Maybe scientists will find an area of the brain called eminent domain.

Until that time, Gasquet should be conducting his own research into the subject.

Honestly, I missed seeing Marion Bartoli take out Jelena Jankovic by the shocking score of 6-1, 6-4. What the hell happened? Someone, please, check in. And speaking of misses, despite my prediction that Jelena Dokic would not return to the upper echelon of the sport, she rolled into the quarterfinals with a three set victory over Alisa Kleybanova. Hmmmph.

Jelena Dokic is one a great run at the Australian Open. Is it too late for her to get back to the top?

We’ve had precious few upsets at this year’s Australian Open and no big ones yet, so, to my mind, Jelena Dokic is the story here so far. Sadly, it’s an old story. Abusive parents are as old as time and, I would submit, a subject of public discussion only in the past half century. Okay, it’s there in the bible, but I mean public discussion leading to corrective policies

In the tennis world it’s mostly women players who have the abusive parent syndrome and that’s because they develop quicker than men physically to the point that a 14 year old professional is not at all uncommon. It’s harder to control a strapping 17 year old male athlete. Jennifer Capriati and Mary Pierce joined the tour at age 14 and they both managed to recover from their family drama in time to win two slams. Dokic I’m not so sure about.

In 2000, the WTA suspended her disturbed father, Damir, for drunken and violent behavior in the players’ lounge at Wimbledon. After Dokic dropped her father and hired a new coach, Damir accused the new coach of kidnapping her. In 2006, he claimed that he was going to kidnap Dokic and bring her back from Australia to Serbia, the family’s home country. At the same time, he said he’d even thought about killing an Australian as revenge for the country brainwashing his daughter.

Amidst all this, Dokic understandably fell apart. After her first round win here over Tamira Paszek – her first victory in a grand slam since 2003 and remember, people, she was once ranked number four in the world – she covered an entire pain cycle of family issues that are unique only in that athletes are in the unenviable position of having to work through these family matters well enough to resume their career before their bodies give out. Here’s what she said:

I went through hell and back. I battled severe depression for about two years. Didn’t play for months at a time and was really seriously thinking about not playing. It was a tough time in my life. I had a lot to go through, a lot of family issues. I don’t talk to my father, I haven’t for years. I talk to my Mom, we are mending that relationship. It’s really a miracle for me. It’s real emotional to win today. [For] what I had to go through, it’s really great to have this win and I don’t think a lot of people know what it means to me.

Dokic took out top twenty player Anna Chakvetadze in the second round and that was surprising because you’d think there might have been an emotional letdown after the first round. But then she took out number 12 ranked Carolyn Wozniacki in the third round and now she’s starting to look like the player who beat number one ranked Martina Hingis in the first round at Wimbledon in 1999 – a huge, huge upset at the time.

It looks like Dokic has just jumped out of nowhere but she played a full season last year and ended up with a 35-10 record. Having said that, she only beat three players in the top 100 and those victories were all in the first tournament of the year. She didn’t beat a top 100 player the rest of the season. So, has she run out of time?

If the question is: Has Dokic run out of time to reach the upper echelons of the sport and return to the number four ranking and get to a semifinal or two at a slam, I’d have to edge towards saying yes, she’s run out of time. It may seem like I’m being a spoilsport, but in that complex world of inner confidence, she’s lost a very valuable commodity: collective momentum. When a young player comes along and knocks off top players and rises up the rankings, fans around the world sit in awe and expectation. You can feel it in the crowd, in the media, in the tennis blogs, and in the player’s home tennis association which can be crucial in providing support to help young players develop. As Dokic said in an interview in October 2008:

I feel like I am starting from zero. You lose everything that you had before. The only thing you have to go on is experience. You lose the confidence and the match play and everything, so you really are starting from zero.

When you lose all that and you lose, or purposely remove yourself from, your family’s support, it’s a lonely world out there. Mary Pierce suffered with an abusive father and I can imagine it helped immensely that her brother David coached her for many years. One of Dokic’s great regrets is the lost contact with her younger brother. Patty Schnyder’s parents hired a cult expert to extract her from a cultish relationship with her coach and she ended up marrying the cult expert. At least it was an upgrade. The point is that the support has to come from somewhere if you’re going to compete in such a high pressure profession.

If the question is: Has Dokic run out of time to have a professional tennis career, say a ranking in the mid 100s over the next few years, I’d say no. Looking at her play now, I think she can be a solid player and she’s only 25 years old so she’s got four or five years left.

It’s just that I can’t see a third round run at a slam happening with any regularity. The yearly grind is long and hard enough and then you have to rise to the occasion in the upper level tournaments and once again in the slams. Unaccountably, Dokic took off last September and most of October and only played one more event the rest of the year though there was no report of injury.

I think she’s in for a lot more ups and downs, the kind that mark most careers, especially mid-level careers. And a mid-level career would be a huge victory in itself. It’s just that it could have been so much more.

Carla Suarez Navarro took out Venus Williams at the Australian Open. David Nalbandian is long gone too and is there any better player who didn’t won a slam?

I fell in love with Carla Suarez Navarro at the French Open last year when she got to the quarterfinals in her first appearance in a slam main draw as a qualifier. She got that baby face and I love baby faced assassins. She’s baby sized too at only 5ft 4in (1.62m), and most people not named Justine Henin would have been intimidated by 6ft 1in (1.85m) Venus Williams but it didn’t seem to bother Carla and now Venus is out of the Australian Open.

After Carla hit some crucial shots at the beginning of the third set she turned to her box and did half a fist pump then got back to work. Still, she managed to find herself serving just to stay in the match at 5-2 in that third set. She got through that game then found herself down a match point in her next service game. She kicked in a first serve which threw Venus off, but Venus messed up two more returns. I know Venus was anxious because she was hitting everything long and she hit a double fault. Baby Carla was the cool one tonight, not the veteran.

As much as I love Carla, she hasn’t done much outside clay court events and that’s a testament to how slow the courts are here. Oddsmakers had Venus and Serena as favorites, but I crossed Venus off as soon as I saw Andy Roddick getting into protracted rallies. The Aussies got rid of the Rebound Ace courts but now they have a surface that doesn’t do much justice to their hard serving younger players.

Carla borrowed her backhand from Ivan Ljubicic who made news on a few fronts this week. First of all he played in the best match of the tournament so far, a four setter with Jo-Wilfried Tsonga that was tighter than – as Vic the Brick, a Fox Sports announcer, often says – an Aretha Franklin jumpsuit. Did you hear her bring it at Obama’s inauguration? And check out that hat, who could not love you Aretha?

The first three sets were tight anyway: 6-7 (4/7), 7-6 (10/8), 7-6 (8/7). Ljubicic tired out in the fourth one and maybe that’s because this has been a busy week for him. There was a raucous player meeting before the tournament began and Ljubicic was in the thick of it because he’s a player representative on the board of directors.

Guillermo Canas in particular was mad because the new tour structure gives the higher ranked players a bigger share of the prize money. The higher prize money was the buyoff for getting top players to accept higher penalties for missing required events. Players are mad that Ljubicic allowed this to happen on his watch. Canas probably also wasn’t happy with Ljubicic for saying that players who served drug suspensions should not be awarded wild cards right after Canas came off a two year drug suspension. Canas is still very mad about that suspension and he expressed it by getting up and walking out of the meeting when Stuart Miller, the ITF’s drug guy, got up to speak.

Ljubicic resigned from the Board of Directors after his first round win here under that tired old excuse of wanting to spend more time with his family. I wish someone would just come out and tell the truth now and then. I’m actually glad to see that the SEC – the U.S. agency that oversees the stock market – is investigating Apple CEO Steven Jobs to see whether he made misleading statements about his health. I was just about to buy one of those aluminum Mac Book Pros and I want to know if the guy’s gonna be around or not.

Anyway, if I was Ivan I would have thrown some crap back at the players. He’s been working as a representative of the players for a long time and if they want to complain, they should get more more involved rather than walk out. Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, and Novak Djokovic did the right thing: they got themselves elected to the player’s council. Ivan deserves better treatment.

I’ve been watching Yen-Hsun Lu out of the corner of my eye for the past few years. He took out Andy Murray at the Olympics last year but that was probably Murray’s fault for not being prepared for the conditions. Lu popped up again for another big victory, this time taking out David Nalbandian in the second round here and I wondered if I should, similarly, blame Nalbandian for the loss.

It’s not like Nalbandian doesn’t have his rhythm yet. For sure, Argentina’s Davis Cup loss must have been tough to swallow and Nalbandian got into it with Juan Martin Del Potro in the Davis Cup locker room for playing too much tennis in the fall season instead of saving himself for Davis Cup – Del Potro pulled out with an injury after losing his first Davis Cup match. But Nalbandian took the title in Sydney last week so he looked like his head was back on straight. On the other hand, I was a bit shocked to realize that he hasn’t reached the quarterfinals at a slam since 2006

That’s all about conditioning. Running around on indoor fast courts playing short points suits him fine, but Nalbandian’s not up for those best of five outdoor matches in the searing heat. So I will blame him. I got excited at the end of 2007 when he won the Masters events in Madrid and Paris, but I think it’s now more or less official, Nalbandian goes on the list of the best players never to win a slam.

Who else is on the list? Let me think.

Todd Martin was the first player who came to my mind. He reached two slam finals and four semifinals and that’s not bad. Marcelo Rios did Martin one better by getting to number one in the rankings – Martin reached number four – and Rios may have been cheated out of his slam. Petr Korda beat him in the 1998 Australian Open final then tested positive for steroids at Wimbledon that year. However, Rios had no slam semifinals, just the one final, so Martin would win that pairing if we were doing bracketology.

Nalbandian looks to be just a hair behind Martin with one final and four semifinals but he edges closer when you consider that he has a year-end championship and Martin doesn’t. Alex Corretja might come next though his two finals and one semifinal were all at the French Open. He does have a year-end championship though. I’m sure there are many more. Help me out here. Who else am I forgetting from 1997 forward?

It makes you marvel at those who have won a slam doesn’t it, and even more for those with lots of them.