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The French Move Ahead of the U.S. at Wimbledon

Join us for the men’s Wimbledon final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, July 8th at 6am PST/9am EST/2pm BST. Join in by writing comments and we’ll respond in real time.

The Men

Richard Gasquet had come back from two sets down and had his third chance to push his match against Andy Roddick to a fifth set. After exchanging a few ground strokes Gasquet unleashed a backhand down the line and let out an escalating cry of dominance as the ball landed out of Roddick’s reach.

Gasquet turned to his box and punched his fist and so we had the exclamation mark announcing the arrival of the latest member of the current crowd of young ATP players. Gasquet had officially transformed himself from an inconsistent and fragile player into a confident young man.

At the beginning of Wimbledon, youngsters Andy Murray, Tomas Berdych, and Gasquet had yet to reach the quarterfinal of a slam. Murray didn’t show up because his wrist had not healed and Berdych joined Gasquet in the quarterfinals today but lost in straight sets to Rafael Nadal.

After getting up 7-6 in the fifth set, Gasquet got two match points on Roddick’s serve – two chances to close out the match. Roddick’s coach, Jimmy Connors, leaned forward with a worried look on his face. Gasquet hit a shot at Roddick’s feet and Roddick volleyed it into the net. The U.S. had just watched its Wimbledon future passed by the present. Roddick was the U.S.’s best shot to win Wimbledon and Wimbledon was Roddick’s best shot at a second slam.

The youngsters move better than Roddick and their all-court games trump his big serve and forehand. It’s not likely to get easier for Roddick and Murray has already beaten him here. James Blake could win the U.S. Open or the Australian Open if he gathers himself mentally. We know Blake has never won a match from two sets down as Gasquet did today because Blake has never won a five set match. Blake is also 27 years old to Gasquet’s 21, but there’s always hope.

There was an even better match on the same court and it was a meeting between the two most advanced members of the youngsters: Marcos Baghdatis and Novak Djokovic. At first it looked like this match might mirror the classic match between Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi at the 2001 U.S. Open. Sampras won that four set match which featured four tiebreakers with neither player losing his serve.

The first three sets were decided by tiebreakers with Djokovic winning the first two and Baghdatis the third. It would go five sets. Baghdatis had the trainer out to look at his arm and Djokovic had his back massaged before Djokovic finally pulled it out, 7-6, 7-6, 6-7, 4-6, 7-5. Could it be? Is another rivalry forming on the ATP tour? Aaaaah, sighs of relief all round. The future for U.S. men might not look good but the tour is in good hands.

Djokovic gets Nadal in the semifinals for his reward and Gasquet gets Federer who had a much less exciting four set win over Juan Carlos Ferrero.

The Women

Over on the women’s side, another French player made a huge breakthrough and unlike Gasquet – we were expecting him to stand up one of these days – Marion Bartoli shocked us. Until two weeks ago, she’d never been past the quarterfinals at a Tier I or Tier II event let alone a slam, and now she’s in a final and she did it by beating Justine Henin.

You have to think that Henin ran out of gas because she has the game to play on fast surfaces. She reached the final in six of the last seven slams and won just two of them. It’s a testament to her mental strength that she got that far because she still battles a virus that affects her immune system. I have the same virus she does and a few others to boot. The minute I overwork myself, I come down with something or other. Playing two slams within a month of each other cannot help her situation.

We won’t know until tomorrow whether France will pass the U.S. women because that’s when Bartoli will meet Venus Williams in the women’s final. We do know, however, that the future is even bleaker for the U.S. women than the men.

Look at it like this: there have been 40 slams in the last ten years and U.S. women have won half of them. Fourteen of those slams were won by Venus and Serena Williams, the other winners have now retired, and there’s no one coming up behind them. For as long as Venus and Serena want to play, however, the U.S. is in good shape and if one sister goes down, the other will pick up the pieces.

Serena went out to Henin in the quarterfinals after injuring her calf and thumb in a dramatic fourth round win over Daniela Hantuchova. Venus took up the slack by putting a fourth round whomping on Maria Sharapova reminiscent of Serena’s two victories over Sharapova earlier this year. Serena lost just three games in each of those matches, Venus lost only four.

No, Sharapova doesn’t have a Williams sisters’ complex, she has a strategical problem. Sharapova’s entourage told us she would develop a better all-court game as she matured but it hasn’t happened yet. You can’t hit the Williams sisters off the court and Sharapova doesn’t move as well as some of the younger players.

Unlike Roddick, Sharapova’s competition isn’t quite as strong except for the sisters. Do you really think Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic will win more majors than Sharapova? If so, leave a comment and back it up. Come on, jump in here.

See you bright and early Sunday morning when Pat and I will be live blogging the men’s final.

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Mauresmo Goes Home, Serena Should Go Home, and the Rain Continues

Join us for the men’s Wimbledon final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, July 8th at 6am PST/9am EST/2pm BST. Join in by writing comments and we’ll respond in real time.

Serena has a big heart, Amelie doesn’t, and don’t make fun of Rafa

Serena and Venus Williams are on opposite sides of the draw here at Wimbledon. If they both end up in the final, NBC will be delirious but the sisters will not. They’ve never had a good match against each other because they don’t like to play each other.

That’s one of the few pressures they don’t relish. There’s one more: the pressure of being the only U.S. women likely to do well in a slam with no promising U.S. players behind them.

Serena couldn’t take time off from tennis to recover from her sister’s death and various injuries without hearing that she was wasting her talent. She was also subject to repeated comments about her big booty. Neither sister will be able to amble towards the latter part of her career at her own pace because U.S. fans have no other women players to obsess over.

Pete Sampras was allowed to wallow around for his last two years of his career and win nothing, absolutely nothing, until he finally took the 2002 U.S. Open and left us for good. That was o.k. because Andre Agassi was still around and Andy Roddick was making his way into the top ten. Agassi was allowed to limp through his last years with tea and sympathy because by then the U.S. had James Blake to supplement Roddick.

Serena has ping ponged back and forth between injury and strong slam performances to the exasperation of desperate fans. Her third round match with Daniela Hantuchova was more of the same. She strained a calf muscle and the pain brought her to tears. The rain came along and gave her enough time to get ice and massage for the calf but she could hardly move.

That didn’t stop her from winning the match and afterwards she explained what motivated her:

Q. Were you irritated when she[Hantuchova] hit the dropshot in the fourth game?

SERENA WILLIAMS: That pretty much set it off for me. After that, I was so motivated to win. I was like, you know what, I’m going to do this. You know, I’m going to die trying.
You know, I just — I don’t know why that particularly made me so upset, but it was just like, you know what, this is it. I’m not going down today. I mean, no. There’s no way.

It reminds me of the 1995 five set final between Pete Sampras and Jim Courier at the Australian Open. Sampras’ coach Tim Gullikson had been diagnosed with a brain tumor and he’d recently suffered a third stroke. In the fifth set, a fan called out for Sampras to win the match for his coach and that was it, all the grief and sadness that had built up over Gullikson’s illness flowed out of Sampras in sobs.

Courier yelled across the net to his good friend, “Are you all right, Pete? We can do this tomorrow, you know.” It annoyed Sampras and woke him up. “I think once he said that, I thought he was giving me a hard time,” he said later.

Sampras immediately served two aces, won the fifth set, and went on to take the Australian Open title.

Serena and Pete have hearts as big as the world. Serena’s father expressed it in his own unique way: “She’s a young Mike Tyson. She feel like a pit bulldog…” Her father also said that Serena should go home because she now had a tear in her calf.

Amelie Mauresmo is going home. She lost her fourth round match to Nicole Vaidisova. Mauresmo was up a break in the first set when Vaidisova started coming to the net despite the fact that it’s not her favorite place in the world. It energized Vaidisova’s game and her confidence to the point that her serve – that had not been working well – started popping.

James Blake should take note. He failed to change his strategy against Juan Carlos Ferrero when Ferrero started taking over their third round match and now he’s on his way home too.

Mauresmo lost that first set in a tiebreaker but fought back to take the second set. In the third set she was down a break at 1-4 when she hit two double faults. The serve on the second point was actually good but she was too discouraged to challenge it. She followed that up with a forehand drop shot that cried uncle and it was all over.

Before Amelie won her first slam I said she’d win her first slam and that would be such a great accomplishment that one would suffice. I was almost right. The first one didn’t count because Justine Henin gave it to her by retiring at the 2006 Australian Open. Mauremso beat Justine for real in Wimbledon the same year and now it looks like that was enough.

Mauresmo gets to a certain place – in her match with Vaidisova that meant winning the second set and evening the match – then she says that’s enough. I’m done. That doesn’t get you a high ranking on the heart monitor.

It’ll be interesting to see where Rafael Nadal rates in the heart department. We know he has the most mental toughness but is that the same thing?

In their third round match – yes they’re still in the third round – Robin Soderling made fun of Nadal by pulling on his pants to mock Nadal’s habit of giving himself a wedgie in his long playing preparation routine. Soderling had already annoyed Nadal by stopping Nadal’s serve to get a new racket and Nadal got him back by sarcastically holding up the new tennis ball in his hand to belatedly indicate new balls.

That would be more than enough to turn Serena and Pete Sampras into your worst enemy and it was enough to push Nadal past Soderling when their match resumed, but is it enough to propel him to the final?

When Tomas Berdych played Nadal in Madrid last year, Berdych motioned to the crowd and told them to be quiet after Nadal’s homies applauded his errors. Nadal lost the match in straight sets and lectured Berdych about his manners when they met at the net. Rafa, you’re supposed to decapitate him with the ball, not lecture him. That’s not ferocity.

Maybe Nadal is too nice. Maybe he should adopt some of Serena’s attitude. When a reporter asked Serena how she’d feel if she were Hantuchova and had just lost a match to someone who could barely move, this was her answer:

If she was Serena Williams, I wouldn’t feel that bad (smiling).

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James Blake the Confidence Man

Join us for the men’s Wimbledon final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, July 8th at 6am PST/9am EST/2pm BST. Join in by writing comments and we’ll respond in real time.

Is James Blake in denial about having confidence problems? Depends how you look at it.

After James Blake won his second round match at Wimbledon, a journalist told him that Patrick McEnroe called him a confidence player – in other words, a player who needs a few wins before his confidence starts to build in a tournament. Blake agreed with the assessment:

I hope Patrick’s right, that everyone needs to watch out when I do get some confidence. That’s the way I always feel.

He also talked about confidence problems when he was young:

… as a young player, I wasn’t consistent. I would lose a match, lose confidence immediately. That could spiral in[to] three, four, five losses in a row. Now I don’t let that happen. I don’t let the dips in confidence happen.

Blake has transformed himself from an average player with model goods looks into a top ten player. Along the way, he’s shown a propensity to get easily discouraged. It happened in his next match – he lost in the third round to Juan Carlos Ferrero – and it’s fair to ask whether Blake is in denial about having dips in confidence.

Ferrero discouraged Blake by winning the second set without losing a point on his serve. Still, it was only the second set and Blake had already won the first set. You’ve heard it a million times before but here it is again: Blake has never won a five set match, he’s 0-9.

In any match, it’s entirely possible that your opponent will enter the “zone” and experience a temporary period of perfection. It seldom lasts the entire match and it almost never happens throughout a best of five match. It if does happen, it’s imperative that you try something to nudge your opponent out of his perfection. Mix up your strokes, come to the net. Hell, stand halfway between the baseline and service line on the return if you have to. It’s been done before.

While Ferrero was getting 85% of his first serves in, Blake didn’t change anything. He stood in the same place and played the same way. And when he gets discouraged, he starts speeding up his play and hitting the ball as hard as he can therefore producing more errors. I recognize this behavior: “Oh yeah, I’ll show you. You won’t beat me because I’ll beat myself.”

Is that not a dip in confidence?

Eventually Blake got his feet moving and those hard hits were staying in the court. After losing the third set, he played Ferrero even in the fourth set and got to the tiebreaker. At 4-5 in the tiebreaker, Blake hit an easy volley into the net and Ferrero took the match, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-6(4).

You could say that Blake’s approach improved his play. He got mad and got even, at least in the fourth set. And it is an improvement over his performance here last year. After going up two sets to one on Max Mirnyi in the third round, he proceeded to win exactly one game in the last two sets.

Blake lost in the third round again but having a smaller meltdown this year than last year counts as progress. You could also see it as an improvement in confidence.

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Wimbledon 29 years back

Join us for the men’s Wimbledon final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, July 8th at 6am PST/9am EST/2pm BST. Join in by writing comments and we’ll respond in real time.

Except for Tatiana Golovin’s red knickers and another national disappointment for the British – Tim Henman lost to Feliciano Lopez in the second round, Wimbledon hasn’t picked up a personality or thrown out any really delicious stories yet, so I’m taking a one day trip 29 years back.

I’m reading a book titled Inside Tennis by Peter Bodo with photography by June Harrison. It covers the entire 1978 season of professional tennis. Let’s look at the book’s coverage of Wimbledon that year.

There’s plenty of luminous writing in the book. No one captures the psychological makeup that separates the best players from the lowly-ranked masses quite as well as Bodo. Other writers describe players, Bodo describes the human condition. Here’s an example of what I mean:

But the game held out its customary promises: the promise of success against all odds, the promise that hope could prevail over reason, the promise that for a blessed two- or three-hour span, a man could recapture all that eluded him through years of struggle.

Couple that with this comment by John Newcombe:

You can find out anything you want to know about a person by putting him on Centre Court at Wimbledon. It has a lot to do with your breaking point…

And now you understand the true measure of the value of sports: it tells you what you’re made of, taffy or steel.

Here’s what Wimbledon looked like in 1978.

There were numbers:

Two hundred twenty officials work the matches. Eighty-five students are recruited from a nearby technical school to serve as ball boys. …The armed services provide close to two hundred volunteers who serve as stewards and ushers. The Fire Brigade contributes well over fifty volunteers. The tournament uses up twelve hundred dozen Slazenger balls…

That last number was the excuse that Wimbledon officials used when Tim Henman wandered into a Wimbledon office a few years ago and found containers of unpressurized tennis balls earmarked for the tournament. They’d taken all of the balls out of their cans because it was easier than opening them during the tournament, so they said.

Tim was gobsmacked as the British say. An unpressurized ball will be less lively making it harder for serve and volleyers like Henman to win here. This is the first difference we see between then and now. Wimbledon wasn’t worried about finding enough people to open hundreds of cans of tennis balls during the tournament, they wanted to slow the game down to make the surface more equitable and they’ve more than succeeded.

There was rain. It was heavy enough to wipe out an entire day of matches for the first time in eight years. This year is marginally better but in two years, finally, there will be a roof over Centre Court.

There was another national disappointment. John Lloyd never got past the third round at Wimbledon. In 1978 he went out in the first round. See above for this year’s disappointment.

There was discrimination. Teddy Tinling was a fashion designer who created elaborate tennis dresses for the top players in the 50’s, 60’s and 70’s. The book suggests that players such as Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova wore Tinling’s clothing because the world of apparel endorsements wasn’t yet ready for lesbians. That situation is marginally better today. Out lesbian Amelie Mauresmo has no problem but Marina Navratilova never grabbed endorsement opportunities appropriate to her status and her career lasted a long time.

There were exceptional women players. Billie Jean, Martina, and Chris Evert were in the women’s draw. That’s three of the top five women of all time (Steffi Graf and Margaret court being the other two). Today we have the promise of Maria Sharapova and the ongoing career of Justine Henin. A definite downgrade from 1978.

By the way, Navratilova showed her considerable sense of humor when her state of mind was questioned:

Reporter: How do you keep your head together?

Navratilova: I stick it between the door and the frame in the locker room.

That’s almost as good as this one which I think I also read in a Bodo book:

Reporter: Are you still a lesbian?

Navratilova: Are you still the alternative?

There was a rivalry for the ages. Britain did have one good hope in this tournament. Virginia Wade won the title the previous year, a magical feat as it was the hundredth anniversary of Wimbledon, but Evert beat her in the semifinals. Navratilova beat an ailing Evonne Goolagong in the other semifinal setting up the first meeting in a slam final for one of the biggest rivalries in sports history: Evert and Navratilova.

Navratilova beat Evert for her first slam title and first of nine Wimbledons. Interesting to note that Navratilova’s opponent when she won her first 13 slams was a U.S. player and this brings up a huge difference between then and now. Today there is exactly one U.S. woman in the top thirty and this year, for the first time in the open era, only three U.S. men got past the first round at Wimbledon.

There were exceptional male players. Jimmy Connors and Bjorn Borg met in the Wimbledon final in 1978. Thankfully we have the same thing today. Federer could meet Nadal in the final. Connors has the career record for most ATP singles titles, one of the few records Federer hasn’t yet snatched away. Connors lost the final easily and Borg won his third of five consecutive Wimbledons.

Five is also the the number of consecutive Wimbledons Federer hopes to match this year.

Check out our new myspace page and add us to your friends networkSee also:
Wimbledon Joins the Hard Court Season
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Wimbledon Joins the Hard Court Season

Join us for the men’s Wimbledon final! We’ll be blogging live on Sunday, July 8th at 6am PST/9am EST/2pm BST. Join in by writing comments and we’ll respond in real time.

Wimbledon used to symbolize the end of the grass court season but now it’s playing more like the opening of the summer hard court season.

Every year I look forward to Wimbledon so I can settle in and watch a bit of serve and volley. It’s beautiful to watch because serve and volley players are acrobatic and graceful. Players move backward and forward and side to side. Tennis flows over the entire court in a constant ballet of movement.

In a parallel universe, maybe. Tim Henman may serve and volley and Nicolas Mahut would serve and volley too if he hadn’t lost in the first round, but if you look at the grass courts, the only place they’re worn down is along the baseline.

Instead of serve and volley I’m seeing a lot of kick serves and they’re bouncing high. Listen to this from Henman: “Kick serve now works on grass. You can get a lot of sideways movement on it.” And Roger Federer: “You can use the kick too these days, because of the slower conditions…”

So much for my prediction that Rafael Nadal will fail to reproduce his 2006 run to the final. At this rate, the conditions suit him fine.

What’s slowing things down? Let’s start with the ball. Todd Woodbridge has won nine Wimbledon doubles titles dating back to 1993. He always saved one ball from each final. When he compares today’s balls with his mementos, the current version is clearly bigger and fuzzier.

You can’t hit a bigger ball as hard and a fuzzier ball grabs more. Trying grabbing onto a hairless dog. You can’t do it, your hands slide off. Yes, there are such things as hairless dogs. Anyway, grabbiness is important because it allows players to put spin on the ball.

Then there’s the court. Tennis-X reported this quote from an International Herald Tribune article by Richard Evans: “Moss was removed from underneath the grass to make the ball bounce higher – right into the hitting zone of clay-court masters.”

The higher the ball bounces, the worse it is for serve and volleyers. If the ball stays up it’s easier to track it down and a player at the net becomes target practice for all those clay court defensive specialists.

The organizers of Wimbledon slowed the courts down because everyone got tired of seeing three stroke rallies and one-dimensional tennis. But when Rafael Nadal gets to a final, hasn’t it gone too far to other way? Now we’re seeing defensive specialists reach later rounds of Wimbledon.

What hurt Britain’s past hero, Henman, might help their future hero, Andy Murray. Power is not his game and at this rate, the conditions might turn out to be perfect for his mix of intelligence and defense.

Personally, I’d rather see one month of purely offensive tennis. Players are much better returners these days – that’s one reason why Roddick has only one title this year – so we don’t have to worry so much about one dimensional tennis. It’s slightly insulting if you think about it because Wimbledon is slowing the courts down so players can catch up to the big hitters.

There’s no need and if they keep going, they’ll look more like the opening of the summer hard court season that the closing of the grass court season.

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