Author Archives: nrota

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.

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Last Go Round for the Acura Classic

The Acura classic will disappear from the U.S. after this year. Enjoy it while you can.

I’m at the Acura Classic for the first time. And the last time. The only WTA Tier One tournament on the tennis-mad West Coast has been sold back to the tour and may pop up somewhere else in the world.

It doesn’t look too good on the East Coast either. Charleston is no longer a required event and Amelia Island is getting downgraded to a B-Plus which will make it equivalent to a Tier III event. Matt Cronin of TennisReporters.net is the dean of journalists who cover the WTA. He doesn’t think Charleston and Amelia Island can survive more than a year or two because they’ll be selling a tournament that used to attract many of the top ten players and now they’ll be lucky to get a few players from the top twenty. What if the Los Angeles Dodgers dropped down to a triple AAA team? How many advertisers do you think they’d keep?

I’m staying at a local motel which means there’s a television screen staring at me when I wake up. I turned it on this morning and found myself watching Field of Dreams for the hundredth time. I wish it was as easy as building a tennis court in the middle of Iowa and summoning up the ghosts of Alice Marble, Althea Gibson and a few of their friends to get long snaking lines of vehicles headed towards tennis tournaments in the U.S.

Maybe we could go to Boston and kidnap Bud Collins instead of Terence Mann – the James Earl Jones character in the movie. I hear Bud has some time on his hands these days. Bud would be brave enough to walk out into the corn field with the ghosts of tennis past and find out what made tennis exciting.

But I’m not hearing any voices telling me what to do and no one would listen to Bud or me. Tournaments will continue to flow to the the new markets of Asia and Eastern Europe.

As sad as all of this is, I might as well enjoy the tournament while I can and that’s pretty easy. I’m at the beautiful La Costa Resort and Spa just north of San Diego. I can feel the sea breeze flow over me as I sip a cup of Starbucks on the veranda outside the media center. The veranda looks out over one of two 18-hole professional grade golf courses and I can stop in at Deepak Chopra’s clinic if my chakras need tuning. My second chakra is a bit out of whack, I can feel it. I think I’ll head over there later.

Venus Williams, Maria Sharapova and Martina Hingis are here and it’s just like old times. If you’d been here in 2001, you could have seen a doubles semifinal featuring Hingis and Anna Kournikova on one side of the net and Jennifer Capriati and Arantxa Sanchez Vicario on the other. You can bet no one left after the singles match that night. Thanks to Bill Simons of Inside Tennis for remembering that.

Venus beat Virginia Razzano easily today and after the match she said, “I think I’m playing actually better than Wimbledon.” WTA players should be afraid when they hear that. Very afraid.

Sharapova’s shoulder isn’t perfect yet but she didn’t have much trouble with Tamarine Tanasugarn either. Sharapova came out for the second set long before the chair umpire called time and bounced the ball impatiently while her opponent finished a bathroom break. She wanted to get the match over with.

I don’t know why she’s rushing so much, we’re in no hurry. We want to stretch this week out and push the skimpy U.S. tennis future to the back of our minds for as long as we can.

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Monte Carlo, Madrid and Musical Chairs

Madrid will replace Hamburg, Shanghai will replace Madrid, and Monte Carlo will be left out.

I assume everyone here knows the game musical chairs. If not, just think of it like this: someone starts up the music and a bunch of people walk around a collection of chairs. As soon as the music stops, everyone has to find a chair to sit on. Problem is, there’s one less chair than there are people so someone ends up on the floor.

In the musical chairs game that comprises the 2009 ATP schedule, Monte Carlo found a chair but could still end up on their butt.

When the ATP settled its suit with Monte Carlo last week, they allowed it to keep its Masters Series designation – Masters 1000 as it will be called – but removed it as a required tournament.

Madrid will move from the fall indoor season to the spring clay court season. This is important because the sneak-peek 2009 calendar I’ve seen puts Madrid into Hamburg’s slot and since Monte Carlo is no longer a required event, people like Roger Federer will probably play Rome, skip a week then play Madrid, then rest one week before playing Roland Garros.

Rafael Nadal usually plays Monte Carlo, Barcelona and Rome before resting up for Roland Garros. This year he played Hamburg too and lost because he was tired. Nadal will surely play Barcelona and Madrid as he is a Spanish player and that means he will likely skip Monte Carlo because that will be one tournament too many.

A lot of other Spanish players will do the same thing and clearly the hard court players won’t waste their time in Monte Carlo if they don’t have too. No one cares about the hard court players but the Kings of Clay come from Spain so Monte Carlo will be left with a bunch of second tier players trying to make Masters Series money.

By they way, completing our game of musical chairs, Shanghai will get a new Masters 1000 event and take over for Madrid. That means we now have eight required Masters 1000 events instead of nine and that was the point.

Here they are: Indian Wells, Miami, Rome, Madrid, Canada, Cincinnati, Shanghai, Paris.

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ATP Fantasy Tennis Picks: Sopot and Washington

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 submission changed from Monday to Sunday this week because Washington starts on Sunday. Be sure to get your teams in by 11am EST and 5pm CET on Sunday.

Ask any U.S. tourist who went to Europe this summer, an expresso costs a whole lot more in U.S. dollars this year. Why should a tennis fantasy player care about this? Earlier this year, the ATP fantasy game stated all prize money as if the U.S. dollar and the Euro were equivalent. Now they’ve changed that and the European tournaments are worth a whole lot more. Go to my list of tournaments ranked by prize money. Notice that the cheapest European tournaments have now jumped over the U.S., Indian and Asian tournaments and the Masters Series events in Madrid and Paris jumped over $120,000 in first prize money!

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

Juan Monaco is in the final at Kitzbuhel and that’s big money. Andy Roddick is in the semifinals at Indianapolis and my other pick, Dmitry Tursunov, is in the other semifinal against Sam Querrey who beat James Blake to get there. I got nothing left at Umag but there isn’t much left. How could I have known that Viktor Troicki and Andrei Pavel would get to the semifinals?

There are only two tournaments this week and the prize money is similar so let’s see if we can pick the four semifinalists from each tournament since we need eight players for our fantasy team.

SOPOT (clay, $81,637)

Gaston Gaudio hasn’t given up playing tennis yet. He actually entered the qualifying here. Steve Darcis is lurking in the qualies too. He’s the guy who took the title at Amersfoort last week despite a ranking of 297.

Even though Nikolay Davydenko has lost in the first round three weeks in a row and he’ll meet the aforementioned Pavel in the second round and he lost his only previous match to Nicolas Almagro – his probable quarterfinal opponent, I’m picking Davydenko because I think he’s due to break out. He won this tournament last year and I think he can get to the semifinals.

Florian Mayer got to the final here last year and he’s beaten Juan Ignacio Chela the last two times they’ve met so I’m going with him.

Igor Andreev should beat Potito Starace if they get to the quarterfinals but we can’t pick Andreev because his ranking was below 100 when the fantasy season started.

Tommy Robredo isn’t much better than Davydenko, he lost in the first round two of the last three weeks. But he got to the quarterfinals this week and his probable quarterfinal opponent, Agustin Calleri, has been too inconsistent so I’m getting as much out of Robredo as I can.

Sopot draw

WASHINGTON (hard court, $74,250)

Roddick will win his quarter of the draw but you need to save him for the hard court Masters and the U.S. Open. I would go with Hyung-Taik Lee and see if Radek Stepanek can pick off Roddick. Could happen, he beat James Blake last week.

I’m picking Arnaud Clement over Ivo Karlovic in their quarter because Karlovic is up and down and Clement won this tournament last year.

I have no idea who to pick in Marat Safin and Mardy Fish’s draw except that it won’t be Fish. He doesn’t appear to be fully recovered from his knee injury and he hurt his other knee last week. Safin is confounding and inconsistent but he reached the quarterfinals last week and the semifinals here last year so I’ll go with him. I’d love to pick Gael Monfils but he’s even more confounding.

Tommy Haas is back and he’s the question of the week: do you pick him here or save him for the remaining slams and Masters events? He’s done well in Canada and Cincinnati but not since 2004. He got to the quarterfinals at the U.S. Open and semifinals in Paris last year, so save him for the Open and a few fall indoor tournaments but feel free to use him here and hope that he doesn’t pull another muscle. Also be aware that he lost his only match against probable second round opponent Alejandro Falla.

Washington draw

Picks

Here’s my team: Davydenko, Starace, Mayer, Robredo, Lee, Clement, Safin and Haas.

Happy fantasies!

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ET Makes a Deal with Monte Carlo

Monte Carlo is still a Masters Series event and the tennis calendar is still too long.

Etienne de Villiers (known here as ET) is the CEO of the ATP. ET has been given the job of reducing the tennis calendar but not enough power to do it, in fact, everyone is working against him.

Tournament directors don’t want their tournaments reduced in stature or removed from the calendar.

The organizers of the tournament in Monte Carlo had filed an anti-trust suit against the ATP in the U.S. state of Delaware. Yesterday, Monte Carlo and the ATP announced that they have settled the suit. ET made a deal with the organizers of Monte Carlo. They can keep their Masters Series designation but their tournament is no longer a required event.

Right now that may not make much difference because the top clay courts players will still play Monte Carlo and many hard court players found a reason not to go already. James Blake and Andy Roddick skipped it this year. But if Monte Carlo was a target for demotion now, nothing about the tournament has changed so it could be a target for demotion in the future.

Clay court players don’t want to lose clay events, especially Masters Series events which hand out lots of points and big prize money.

Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal screamed when ET announced that Monte Carlo and Hamburg would be demoted from their Masters Series status in 2009. ET flew to Monte Carlo this year to explain his decision to Roger and Rafa. He took 24 lbs. of documents with him – as he said in a recent Tennis Magazine article: “I weighed the fricking thing” – to show the market research which led him to choose Monte Carlo and Hamburg for demotion.

It probably wouldn’t take 24 lbs. of documents to figure out that Hamburg is cold and gray and neither Hamburg not Monte Carlo can compete with other Masters Series events that have higher attendance and make a lot more money.

They also can’t compete with a city like Shanghai which gets the newest Masters Series event starting in 2009. China is an emerging tennis market whereas Monte Carlo is tapped out.

It’s not as bad as watching the Tour de France disintegrate in front of our eyes – the race leader, Michael Rasmussen was sent home because he skipped out of competition drug tests. But the Tour de France is making progress because the anti-drug forces in cycling are finally winning the war, the player’s just haven’t gotten the message yet.

There is no progress on the ATP calendar. In the proposed 2009 calendar, the year-end championship will start on November 23rd. This year, the championship will start on November 11th.

That’s not progress, it’s regression.