Today we have a guest column from Sean Bugg. I ran across his buggblog and really enjoyed it. Sean is a freelance writer, car reviewer, book addict, amateur tennis player and part-time caterer. He’s also co-publisher of Metro Weekly, Washington, DC’s gay and lesbian newsmagazine, if that wasn’t enough. His language is a bit more salty than MVN likes so I’ve inserted some **’s where appropriate. Sit back and enjoy.

I’ve had a couple of non-tennis-oriented readers ask me what the big deal was with Andy Roddick’s behavior in his match against Kei Nishikori that I complained about earlier this week. Without some sort of context — either experience seeing Roddick’s a**hole act in operation or knowledge of the spoken and unspoken rules of on-court tennis behavior — the “just stick me with it next time” thing doesn’t translate well, I suppose.

Jon Wertheim at Sport Illustrated takes on the exact subject in response to a reader who notes, rightly: “Bad news for Andy Roddick if he has to resort to blatant intimidation to win a match over an 18-year-old newcomer.” Wertheim, who I think generally maintains a great balance in criticizing players’ stupid behavior while defending them from unrealistic expectations, doesn’t completely agree about the Nishikori incident — “I’m not sure this episode rises to the level of ‘felony trash talk'” — he does go on to flat-out state that Roddick has morphed from a tennis golden boy into an abrasive a**hole.

The dirty secret in men’s tennis is that the guy has been fairly insufferable lately.

This isn’t just from the grumps in the media. This has been noticed by everyone from ATP personnel to former Grand Slam champs to current players. And this diminishing reputation has nothing to do with match results or a stagnating game. It’s all about disposition.

I haven’t hidden my fondness for Roddick over the years. But it’s probably about time he got called on his you-know-what. And heeding Roddick’s advice to Nishikori, we’re going to stick him with it: I cringed as Roddick dressed down Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and winced as he sucked down champagne and blew off the Portland, Ore., kids seeking autographs at the Davis Cup, and bristled at this laughable, Connors-ian me-against-the-world routine.

But he completely lost me in Australia. Roddick’s tirade against the umpire — some poor guy with kids watching at home — was not only low-rent, but also played to every Ugly American stereotype. Roddick played the role of posturing bully frat boy, even when he didn’t have right on his side.

The Tsonga match Wertheim mentions was from the 2007 Australian Open, and marks the point where I pretty much gave up on Roddick. It was an appalling display on Roddick’s part, and it just made it all the sweeter this year when Roddick went out early and Tsonga made the final. And this year’s behavior by Roddick was demonstrably worse, as Wertheim points out.

This is disappointing on two levels. First, as Wertheim labors to explain, Roddick has done a lot of good during his career. He launched a worthwhile foundation, he devotes his time to charity (including annual appearances playing tennis with Elton John for his AIDS foundation), and generally has used his wealth and fame in positive ways that many athletes — hell, most people period — can’t be bothered with.

Second, in the ever-more-distant past he provided an engaging and entertaining face to American men’s tennis. He brought an aw-shucks, corn-fed, Midwestern attitude to a sport that too often gets caught up in its own stuffiness (in the U.S., at least). And in an age when the American presence in tennis has become increasingly less relevant by the day, he was one of the bright lights who could help motivate and bring attention to the game.

Now, however, he’s fully bought into the boorish, combative and self-centered attitude that so often made Jimmy Connors a narcissistic blight on the tennis court. I actually think Roddick’s descent into a miasma of machismo began during his tutelage with Brad Gilbert, but Connors bears responsibility for bringing it into full flower. Many seem to believe that Roddick’s attitude is born from his frustration with being blocked by Federer from winning Grand Slams — problem is, it’s not Federer who’s been stopping him over the past year. From known young stars such as Richard Gasquet to unknowns who flare into greatness for one Slam match, Roddick keeps aiming for the Master but getting his hat handed to him by also-rans (or, in the case of Gasquet, potential future masters). It’s hard not to suspect that those losses, combined with Coach Connors, have totally stoked Roddick’s inner boor.

I’ll admit, I’m a bit of an outlier on this issue at times because I have such disdain for Connors, et al. I don’t believe trash talking, a**hole behavior belongs on the court. Competitiveness, yes. Loud cursing? You fucking bet. I don’t think I could make it through a match without at some point saying, “You stupid son of a bitch.” But I’m always saying that to myself — if I were saying it to my opponent, I would deserve to have my ass kicked from here to sundown.

Perhaps, as Wertheim speculates, Roddick’s current behavior is a phase that he’ll pass through before he turns into the second coming of American tennis’s other reborn hero, Andre Agassi. I truly hope he does. I’ve always thought Roddick took too many hits for his “unimaginative” game — accomplishing what he has so far proves he has something special in both his strokes and his head. Too bad he’s chosen to obscure that by becoming a petty, brutish oaf.

Dubai is raging and everyone is wondering what’s happening with Federer and we’ll get back to that, but I wanted to post this guest commentary on my column about Monica Seles. Michael Klarner, who lives in Germany, is our writer and he has a background in history as well as an appreciation for tennis history. I think you’ll enjoy his comments. You can also see his unique video diary here.

My thoughts broke out of me because one finds all these speculations about the rivalry of Graf and Seles so often… What would have been if….

It’s nice to speculate but it’s amazing that these people very often think so statistically. They kind of freeze the three years when Seles dominated and project these circumstances towards an imagined future. This way, Seles becomes a pure ideal projection. But in my experience that’s not how real life goes.

I am really passionate about tennis as a sport. I also started my passion with being a fan of some specific players. Then my perspective shifted towards tennis in a historical perspective… towards a longer perspective – besides the passion for the current moment. My interest shifted also towards all these great players we never saw playing (such as Suzanne Lenglen, Helen Wills Moody and many others) who were also considered as being the greatest ever (in their period).

I am a historian by profession and a historian learns that we have to understand specific phenomena of a specific period by the framing conditions. It’s difficult to compare and to speculate because there are always so many additional factors.

In the case of the Seles-adoration, very often all the other factors are excluded – even if these factors are so obvious! For example, Seles had some great periods in her second career but she was injured almost permanently. I remember that some tennis experts predicted very early that Seles’ double handed game could result in a lot of injuries and physical burn out. Why? They argued that the double-double handed player always had to go one additional step on both sides of the court. This worked well with Graf because Graf could not make the game fast on her backhand side. But it was a disadvantage with other players playing the same style but one handed.

In my opinion, this was also one of the reasons why Seles did not play that successfully on the young hard hitters. These players were strong on both sides and they had to go one step less in order to cover the court.
People are so quick in stating this or that player would have been the best ever. They see them playing a specific moment and they are passionate about what these players brought to the game. I was always asking myself: How can they do this if they never saw the great champions of the past? Most of them even don’t even know their names. So I asked myself: how can someone compare players of distinct periods by only counting what they won, by comparing only statistics?

If one reads the reports about the time when Suzanne Lenglen and Helen Wills Moody met, one will discover one of the greatest rivalries in sports history!

Moreover, I don’t like the fact that people forget so easily how dominant Graf had been from 1988-1991. Nina writes in her column that Seles dominated as Federer did today. But Graf did even more so! I remember when Graf came up, she broke into the circuit like an orca. The other players were afraid of Graf’s forehand and journalists counted her dominance by the minutes she needed to win a match. In 1988 and 1989, Graf lost only three and two matches all year. Not to mention, she won a Golden Slam – and lost only two sets in 4 Majors.

Not only Seles but also Graf revolutionized the game. If one has a look at the Wimbledon matches between Navratilova and Graf in 1988 (look on youtube), one will see a quality which we don’t see even today. At this time, Graf hit an amazing topspin backhand – because she had to! She went to the net – because she had to!

In the longer perspective, we find the real interesting and dramatic things: how rivalries change the players and their way of playing. How great champions are challenged and forced to adapt. The best example is the competition between Evert and Navratilova. Both say that this rivalry forced them to reach new levels of their game.

I personally think that this is the saddest part of the Seles-Graf story. As Pam Shriver put it: the public lost the rivalry of a period. And neither player was forced to improve and to reach the best that they would have been able to give to the game.

I believe that the all-time-greatest players (Seles is one of them) would have been able to succeed in all periods and under all possible conditions because they had the talent and the willpower to adapt their game to each possible challenge.

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

I picked the winner in Acapulco – Nicolas Almagro – and one other semifinalist. One day I’ll learn to trust in David Nalbandian. He reached the final and he’s now back in the top ten. I got exactly one semifinalist in Zagreb because the winner was a qualifier and a lucky loser at that – someone named Sergiy Stakhovsky, and only two seeded players reached the quarterfinals. I got only one semifinalist in Memphis too because Robin Soderling beat Andy Roddick and will meet Steve Darcis in the final.

License plate seen on a midnight blue VW Bug in mid-morning traffic just north of Hollywood, California:

I’m Not Suffering From My Addiction To Rafael Nadal, I’m Loving Every Minute Of It!!!

I gave the thumbs up to the Rafa-besotted driver and she returned it.

Dubai (outdoors, hard court)

Rafael Nadal is playing in Dubai this week and so are eight of the top ten players because this is by far the richest tournament outside of the Masters and the slams.

That would explain Roger Federer’s horrible luck. He faces 12th ranked Andy Murray in the first round. I’m not a good enough stats person to figure when two such highly ranked players met in the first round, but I’m betting it’s a very rare occurrence. Murray is turning into a regular Nikolay Davydenko: so far this year he’s won two tournaments and gone out in the first round in two tournaments. He beat Federer two years ago in Cincinnati but Federer had just won the Canadian Masters and was playing back to back Masters. This time Federer’s had a month off so he should have the edge, but it’s not much of an edge.

David Ferrer gets Tommy Haas in the first round but Haas has been playing poorly since he returned from his latest shoulder problem. Gael Monfils is making his first appearance of 2008 and his first opponent is Tomas Berdych. Berdych had never gone past the second round here and though he should beat Monfils, he could go down to Tipsarevic so I’m giving this quarter to Ferru.

Novak Djokovic has returned after a sickness break. Mikhail Youzhny is smack dab in the middle of his quarter, though, and Youzhny could be big trouble because he beat Djokovic twice last year, he’s 2-1 over Richar Gasquet – the other seed in this quarter, and he reached the final and two semifinals in the last four years. I’m picking Youzhny.

I don’t know what to make of Nadal. He lost to Andreas Seppi in the second round at Rotterdam and lost to Youzhny easily in the Chennai final, though that followed a marathon with Carlos Moya. But he beat Andy Roddick – the other seed in his quarter – in Indian Wells last year so I’m picking him to get to the semis and no further.

Dubai Draw

Semifinals: Federer, Ferrer, Youzhny, Nadal
Final: Federer, Youzhny
Winner: Federer

Las Vegas (outdoor, hard court)

Because this is The Tennis Channel Open, tennis lovers in the U.S. will get every day, all day coverage of this tournament on The Tennis Channel and no coverage of Dubai. It’s not a bad tournament here in Las Vegas – Fernando Gonzalez, Lleyton Hewitt and Marcos Baghdatis are here – but most people in the U.S. would rather be watching Dubai, don’t you think?

Robin Soderling is here too and he’s tearing things up since he returned from a six month injury to his wrist. He’s in the Memphis final this week and he reached the Rotterdam final last week. What does it all mean?

Gonzalez is having an average year on hard court and the question is: can he beat Michael Llodra? Llodra had two titles already this year – one on hard court – so no, I don’t think Gonzalez can beat him.

Soderling and Baghdatis are in the next quarter and Soderling beat Baghdatis in Rotterdam, but I’m picking Baghdatis because this is Soderling’s fourth straight tournament and I think he’ll tire.

Thomas Johansson is Guillermo Canas’s main competition in the next quarter because there are two clay court players here. Canas should be able to beat him easily.

Lleyton Hewitt’s quarter is tricky because Sam Querrey and Sebastien Grosjean are there. Hewitt won this tournament last year and reached the final the year before so I’m picking him. I’m ignoring Hewitt’s first round opponent, Marat Safin, until he shows me something.

Semifinals: Llodra, Baghdatis, Canas, Hewitt
Final: Baghdatis, Hewitt
Winner: Hewitt

Las Vegas Draw

Welcome to the first of a new and upcoming feature on MVN: Quick Hits

MVN is getting ready to roll out a new sitewide design and one of the new features is Quick Hits: posts containing short, undeveloped thoughts for your interest and commentary. I’m going to jump the gun here and post Quick Hits before the redesign kicks in.

There is an article in the New York Times today about table tennis player Wang Chen. Chen emigrated from China and will play play table tennis for the U.S. this summer at the Olympic Games in Beijing. When she was a first grader in China, she was chosen to train at a national sports training center because she managed to land three table tennis balls in a small basket.

For a first grader that’s pretty good but it’s hardly the sophisticated culling process I would expect. What, no fast twitch muscle tests or adult growth projections? No review of parental athletic genes? No DNA tests? I’m being a bit sarcastic but my point is that youngsters are plucked out of school and sent off to training centers by age 9 based on rather arbitrary criteria to be professional athletes. In Wang’s case, she was training eight hours a day by the time she was 11 years old.

Keep in mind that most Chinese families are allowed one child only so these kids are removed from their one-child families to become, literally, arms for the great country of China. I assume Chinese tennis players follow a similar path.

That feels like a pretty tough life to me. What do you think?

The Acapulco draw isn’t up yet and I have to prepare for my Oscars party. Vanity Fair canceled its usual after-Oscars bash in solidarity with the writer’s strike and I live in Hollywood so I’m having the party instead. I invited Cate Blanchett and Ellen Page. No word on whether they’ll turn up or not.

I’ll do Acapulco and look at the women’s event in Qatar on Monday.

Welcome to the U.S. hard court/European indoor hard court/South American clay court swing of the ATP season. There appear to be three distinct tours playing out in different parts of the world. How are we supposed to build up excitement when players are strung out all over the world – well, not strung out, oh you know what I mean.

Television executives aren’t feeling it either; the coverage is sparse to nonexistent. You could have watched San Jose last week for $39.95 on top of your $60 cable bill and that’s a subject I’ll look at in the future because tournaments are increasingly using the internet to generate income with their own pay-per-view policies. Anyway, enough ranting, let’s get started.

Zagreb (indoor carpet)

Last week’s event in Rotterdam was so topsy turvy that no seeded player reached the quarterfinals. Most distressing of all? Rafael Nadal lost to Andreas Seppi in the second round because, he said, he lost focus. No idea what David Ferrer’s excuse was.

Rotterdam had 8 players in the top 20, Zagreb has no players in the top 20. The top players are all resting up for Dubai and the big money.

I’m desperately looking for someone in the top half of this draw who can beat Ivan Ljubicic because his game has been going downhill and I don’t think he’ll win a tournament this year. Thank heavens Mario Ancic is here. Andreas Seppi was the guy who beat Nadal last week and he beat Ljubicic indoors in Vienna last year but this is indoor carpet, not hard court, and that means the court is fast and slick which is well suited to Ivan’s serve, about the only part of his game that’s still firing.

Ivo Karlovic is in the bottom half of the draw and he could meet Michael Llodra in the second round. Llodra just beat Karlovic in Rotterdam and he beat him here last year so I have to go with Llodra in that matchup.

If Llodra has to meet up with Janko Tipsarevic he’s in trouble because he’s lost to him three straight time but I don’t think that’ll be a problem. I say Mischa Zverev beats Tipsarevic because Zverev took out Ferrer and Philipp Kohlschreiber last week.

Guillermo Garcia-Lopez is in Fabrice Santoro’s quarter and Garcia-Lopez did get to the semis this week in San Jose but he didn’t beat anyone notable to get there so I say Santoro gets to his second semifinal of the year.

Zagreb Draw

Semifinals: Ljubicic, Ancic, Santoro, Llodra
Finalists: Ancic, Llodra
Winner: Ancic

Memphis (indoor hard)

I picked the finalists in San Jose last week so that ain’t bad. This week has pretty much the same players – five of the top eight seeds are the same – so I should be alright.

Andy Roddick is here because he skips Dubai to rest up for Indian Wells. The problem is that Robin Soderling is waiting for him in the quarterfinals. Soderling has been eating up the ATP since he returned from a wrist injury – he’s in the Rotterdam final – and he was in the final here two years ago, but Roddick has been in the finals twice and also won the title once so I’m going with Roddick again.

Marat Safin is down off the mountain but I don’t think that will mean much. Radek Stepanek is in the San Jose final and the only competition in his quarter is Thomas Johansson. For some reason, Stepanek’s record in the North America is excellent so I’m going with Stepanek again. Boring I know but it’s not my fault. Tell the ATP to shrink its schedule if you want to see more excitement.

I don’t know what’s happening with Tommy Haas. He injured his shoulder recently and he’s looked bad since he came back. His first round opponent, Diego Hartfield, beat him in Delray Beach two weeks ago and John Isner beat him last week. Haas hasn’t been serving well so I’m going to assume that he has a lingering problem and say that Isner comes out of this quarter.

James Blake is a strange case. After reaching the final in 2002, he hasn’t been past the second round since. But there’s no one for him to lose to in his quarter except maybe Sam Querrery, so I’m going to advance him.

Memphis Draw

Semifinals: Roddick, Stepanek, Isner, Blake
Final: Roddick, Blake
Winner: Roddick