If I were to write my own six word autobiography it might look like this: “Honest, I’ll eventually get it right.” What about tennis professionals? What would theirs look like? Instead of exactly six words, we’ll allow six words or less.
Maria Sharapova is finally developing a net game or, maybe it’s safer to say, her allergy to the net has improved much as I can now drink milk without, well, you don’t want to know. Still, her game is power so I nominate the following for her career autobiography: “If I could hit it harder…” The obvious unsaid ending is “I would” but we’re only allowed six words.
Roger Federer’s might be “Fly like a butterfly sting like a bee” which is more than six words and is completely stolen from Muhammad Ali, so how about this: “Most dominant except for Tiger.”
Pete Sampras, poor guy, he gets so much grief for his charisma shortcomings so we could go with this: “Everything was boring but my game,” but I prefer, “Will throw up for a win.”
Martina Hingis has now retired to her horses and her boyfriends, but when she was playing, there was no smarter player out there and that little grin of hers let you know that she knew it. Therefore I give you: “The cerebral assassin strikes again.”
In this month’s issue of Tennis View, a new lifestyle magazine by Teresa Thompson, Teresa asks James Blake to complete the following sentence: “I wish journalists would stop asking me…” I’ll let you guess his answer but I will offer you this as his six word tennis autobiography: “Stop asking me about my goals.”
When Daniela Hantuchova turns her back to her opponent at the beginning of each point to psyche herself up, I always assume she’s singing the refrain from the Pointer Sisters song, Yes We Can Can. I imagine her singing, repeatedly: “Yes I can can, can can.”
Many six word autobiographies could describe Ana Kournikova and most of them would focus on her many assets, but here is one that highlights her assets without directly mentioning them: “Who needs titles to be famous?”
Lastly let’s tackle one of the best ever, Chris Evert. She was a conservative little miss in her earlier years. That changed over time as only it could if you were thrown into a locker room with rabble rousers Martina Navratilova and Billie Jean King, but one thing that never changed was her dominant will. I offer this with all due reverence: “Less than perfect, don’t be ridiculous!”
As you can see, this kind of thing is not exactly my forte so help me out here in two ways:
1. Give us your autobiography in six words or less.
2. Give us an autobiography in six words or less for your favorite and least favorite player.
Best set of autobiographies gets a copy of the book, Not Quite What I Was Planning. For real.
My sixtieth birthday is coming up next year and I’m planning a birthday party at Kalani Oceanside Retreat in Hawaii. Why not, it’s a huge birthday. Anyway, I’m flying out a band from New York called Paprika and I have one request: I wanna close out the evening by jumping onstage and belting out Lola – the Kinks’ 1970 tranny anthem – with the fantastic musicians in the band.
I can see it now. The breeze off the ocean will float over the beautiful gray-blue Hawaiian evening as everyone chants Lola’s beautiful name and the girls in the band put down their instruments and pick up their drums, come down off the stage and circle the delirious crowd and we dance the night away. Perfection.
Ray Davies wrote Lola and he also sings it. A few weeks ago he was walking around his old haunts in New York with a writer from The New Yorker when he passed the Tip Top shoe store. It turns out that he used to buy his stage shoes there and he bought girls shoes. He bought the largest size he could find from a line of shoes put out by one Chrissie Evert. Yes, that Chrissie Evert.
Let’s finish up this week’s picks and previews for Acapulco and hopefully I’ll get to Maria Sharapova on Wednesday.
I did pick one finalist and one semifinalist in Buenos Aires last week, otherwise everything is a total bloody mess and the week has barely started. Aj, would you please write the picks next week, you seem to know what’s going on. As you correctly predicted, Michael Llodra has withdrawn from Zagreb.
Not only that, but Fabrice Santoro retired against Olivier Rochus in Zagreb with an elbow problem and in Memphis, John Isner has already lost and James Blake pulled out with a knee injury of some sort. That’s three of my picks down and it’s only Monday. Oh, and Tommy Haas looks like his shoulder is o.k. and he eats Memphis up when he’s healthy.
Acapulco (clay)
It looks like they packed up last week’s tournament in Buenos Aires and shipped it here. David Nalbandianand Potito Starace sit in the first quarter along with two other players who were also in the top quarter at Buenos Aires. Unless Nalbandian is tired from taking the title at Buenos Aires, he should meet Starace in the quarterfinals again.
Unlike last week, I think Starace wins this because the match was close and Nalbandian struggled a few times in Buenos Aires.
Carlos Moya jumped over Juan Monaco in the rankings so Monaco is anchoring the second quarter with Juan Ignacio Chela. Chela won this tournament last year and got to the finals the year before. Agustin Calleri should be his second round opponent and Chela beat him here last year so Chela should get to the quarterfinals.
I’m picking Chela over Monaco because Monaco has a 1-3 record at this tournament and Chela has beaten him the last two times they’ve met.
Igor Andreev lost his first round match to Alberto Montanes. Montanes had a pretty good year on clay last year but he’s 0-4 against Jose Acasuso who’s in his quarter. If Acasuso can’t take out Guillermo Canas, Montanes is 0-2 against Canas.
Canas hasn’t played on clay this year and Acasuso got to the final last week so I’m putting Acasuso in the semifinals.
The bottom quarter is pretty strong. Nicolas Almagro, Filippo Volandri, and Moya are here. Almagro has a slightly better record than Volandri here and he’s beaten Moya in their last two matches so he’s the final semifinalist.
After my Oscars party last night (did you see the Wii tennis game break out in the middle of the Oscars broadcast by the way?) I was pretty exhausted so I sat bleary eyed flipping back and forth between ESPN News and ESPN SportsCenter. Pathetic I know but I’m a sports junkie. Anyway, ESPN was using bracketology to determine the most dominant athlete during ESPN’s era (1979 to the present) and they’d whittled the field down to Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. At that point, one of the sportscasters dismissed Roger Federer because Woods has to play the entire field.
This always pisses me off. It’s clearly not as important as the Serbia-Kosovo question but I get mad that non-tennis educated sportscasters bring up this tired and unsupportable argument for dismissing Roger.
Most golf tournaments use medal play which means that the lowest score wins and those who survive the cut are still standing on the last day of the tournament. Therefore, the argument goes, Tiger is playing against the entire field. Tennis tournaments are single elimination so only two players are left standing on the last day and the champion only has to win his way through his part of the draw.
In response to the argument, I offer you the following question:
If the four golf majors were match play (single elimination) instead of medal play, would Tiger have reached the final day in ten straight majors?
That’s how many consecutive slam finals Federer reached and I’m pretty confident the answer is no, Tiger would not have reached the final day in ten straight majors. One day of bad putts and errant drives and he’d be done.
Both of these unbelievable athletes will likely surpass the record holder in their sport for major wins by the time their careers have ended. I’ll give Woods the slight edge because he’s won all four majors and Roger has yet to win the French Open though Tiger doesn’t have to skate around on clay and he doesn’t have 150mph (240kmh) serves whizzing past his ear. And if Tiger wins all four majors in the same year, he clearly gets the “most dominant” designation because it doesn’t look like Federer will pull that off.
Just don’t give me this “Woods has to play the entire field” crap, okay?
Nick Bollettieri has trained a lot of tennis champions. More and more, those champions are non-U.S. players. Is he hurting U.S. tennis?
Kei Nishikori, a Japanese tennis player, had just evened the match and taken the second set from U.S. player James Blake in the final of the ATP event in Delray Beach last Sunday. Here was a perfect opportunity for the home crowd to stomp and yell and lift Blake’s spirits in preparation for the decisive third set.
Nishikori faltered a bit at the beginning of the third set giving the crowd another opportunity to get behind their man but they wouldn’t do it. There is no nicer guy than James Blake. He’s good looking, well-educated, well-read and he has a terrific story – he suffered through a broken neck and the death of his father from cancer to return to the tour and make it into the top ten. What more could you ask for?
The crowd must have been fans of The Prince of Tennis (see above), an animated television show in Japan about a high school tennis team. Think of that, Japan can support an animation series about a high school tennis team despite the fact that Nishikori’s title was the first singles title for a male Japanese player in 16 years and the U.S. can’t even cheer for one of its top ten players. Jeez!
Nishikori is 18 years old. He has trained at The Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy for the past three years and he’s not alone. Players from over 70 countries have trained at Bollettieri’s place and that includes Maria Sharapova, Tommy Haas, Xavier Malisse, Jelena Jankovic, and Nicole Vaidisova.
All this has our reader Sakhi asking the following questions: Can we blame Bollettieri’s Global Village for some of the xenophobic comments she hears on the local tennis courts in the U.S.? Can we blame Bollettieri for the diminishing popularity of tennis in the U.S.?
The answer to both questions is that Bollettieri gets a bit of the blame but not most of it.
The parade of Eastern European women players has decreased my interest in the WTA. There were 14 Eastern European players in the 32 player draw at the Pattaya Open two weeks ago and six of those were Russian. I recognized about half of them.
Anna Kournikova started it all and, yes, she moved from Russia to Bollettieri’s as a child as did Sharapova. After the breakup of the Soviet Union in the early 1990’s, times were hard in Eastern Europe as the socialist state fell and left everyone to fend for themselves. Kournikova moved to the U.S., made millions of dollars, and became a huge star all without ever winning one lousy singles title. On top of that, she now lives with Enrique Iglesias. How much better could it get?
You don’t think Yuri Sharapov was following in Kournikova’s footsteps when he traveled from Siberia to Florida with little Maria when she was 7 years old? Absolutely he was.
I do have a stereotype or two in my head for Eastern European players: tall, blond Siberian ice maidens who’ll do anything to win except travel to the net – implying artlessness. But that’s part James Bond (From Russia with Love) mixed with a bit of Sharapova and a touch of Cold War propaganda thrown in. I remember watching Walter Cronkite on the evening news then going to bed sure that I would never see another day because the U.S.S.R. was going to drop the bomb in the middle of the night. That was before I knew what propaganda was.
I know my stereotypes are stupid and I don’t pay them much mind. They are not a major source of any xenophobia I might have. My xenophobia comes from becoming a minority less than one generation after immigrating to the U.S. myself. My family came here to find a better life and we found it. I now live in California. As of the year 2000, Caucasians made up less than 50% of California’s population. By the year 2050, projections put the Hispanic population at twice that of the Caucasian population.
I’m Caucasian and I’m afraid of becoming a minority. This is how it plays out in the immigration world. I see it where I live in Los Angeles all the time. Older immigrants complain that newer immigrants put them out of work by offering services at lower prices. We all want to freeze the country when we get here forgetting that every generation of immigrants before us had to go through the same cycle of fighting to stay ahead. That’s a pretty good definition of capitalism.
Bollettieri is only doing what everyone else does. Look at college tennis. Five of the last six years, the men’s NCAA champion was a foreign player. The sixth player was an immigrant. The U.S. is the only country in the world that gives athletes a college education for playing on a tennis team.
There have been some NCAA rule changes to help out U.S. players. The NCAA created a maximum age for accepting a scholarship because foreign players were turning pro for a few years then taking scholarships at an advanced age. Twenty-four year old foreign sophomores were beating up on 19 year old U.S. sophomores and that wasn’t fair.
But it’s not like the U.S. to close its borders. It’s the land of opportunity.
This week the ATP event in San Jose has Andy Roddick, James Blake and a bunch of scrubs. The tournament in Rotterdam has five top ten players and five more in the top twenty. Last year the U.S. lost the Tier I WTA tournament in San Diego. The U.S. is losing tournaments and audience. Is Bolletterie to blame?
Except for Roddick and Blake and what’s left of the Williams Sisters and Lindsay Davenport, it doesn’t look good for U.S. tennis stars. Bollettieri will train anyone. That’s not his fault.
First of all, there’s too much competition for tennis players. Professional football, baseball and basketball have always been more popular and now we have the X Games. Any athlete can find an X Game to match their skills whether it’s flipping a motorcycle or doing a 360 on a skateboard or getting big air on a snowmobile. If that doesn’t get the attention of a U.S. youngster, I’m sure there are more than a few video games lying around the house.
Baseball and basketball have a lot of foreign players yet it hasn’t affected their popularity. A Chinese basketball player, however, was trained in China, and a Dominican baseball player learned the game in the Dominican Republic. That’s often not true for a tennis player.
Sharapova may have been born in Russia but she played Fed Cup for Russia for the first time this year and only then so she can qualify for the Olympics. And she didn’t play a match in Russia until 2005. On top of that, she is quintessentially American. She is now pitching story ideas to television producers and she doesn’t just have endorsement deals; in her Sony Ericsson deal, she is also a “consultant with the company’s design team”.
It’s not like Russians aren’t entrepreneurial but design consultation and pitches to television producers and an apartment in Los Angeles? Come on, she’s an American.
Except that she’s not. She’s a global tennis player from Bollettieri’s Global Tennis Village. We don’t know whether to cheer for her or not. And for that, we can blame Bollettieri.