Author Archives: nrota

What is wrong with Baghdatis, Safin, Gonzo, et al.

A number of top players have miserable results this year. What’s the problem?

I considered going on at length here about the killings at Virginia Tech. I was shocked and scared. Had any of my 18 nieces and nephews, 47 great-nieces and nephews, or 22 grand-nieces and nephews wandered near Blacksburg? Most of them live in southeast Virginia.

Would the U.S. finally ban private ownership of handguns? Would that make any difference? There are a number of very complex issues to work out; least of all unraveling an American psyche that leads to frequent incidents of people killing everyone in sight because they happen to be angry.

It’s just too much to talk about at the moment so while we all try to work it out, I find myself doing the same thing I did after 9/11: reading each and every biography of the fallen and moving on to the sports pages soon thereafter.

This week we have a Masters Series tournament so I can watch matches all day long. It’s one of the few weeks we can see most of the top players in one place and I have to say, a number of them are looking decidedly raggedy and out of sorts.

After losing the final in Marseille earlier this year, Marcos Baghdatis flew all the way to Dubai then on to Indian Wells and finally ended up in Miami. A lot of good it did him; he lost in the first round at each tournament.

He did stop off in Cyprus to lead his country past Finland in Davis Cup but this week he lost his first match again. It hasn’t been a terrible year for Bagdatis – he won a title in Zagreb and he doesn’t have many points to defend between now and the grass court season since he’s a middling clay court player – but there is a disturbing pattern emerging.

Baghdatis plays by emotion and feel rather than analysis and that’s a problem because there will be times – and lately there’ve been a number of them – when his game is off and then what does he do? It’s like a baseball pitcher who doesn’t have his good stuff but still finds a way to win by outsmarting hitters. Baghdatis doesn’t have another way to win.

Take his match here with Max Mirnyi. Mirnyi came to the net all day long and Baghdatis didn’t do anything about it. He didn’t get to the net first to take it away from Mirnyi and he didn’t lob to keep Mirnyi back. Basic tennis strategy. Mirnyi hadn’t won a singles match since the Australian Open and he’s hardly a clay court maven and yet he beat Baghdatis in straight sets.

We used to call David Nalbandian Mr. Semifinals for a reason but he hasn’t won more than three matches in a tournament this entire year. And he retired during his third round match against Philipp Kohlschreiber with a back injury. He’s not moving well so either his body is wearing out or his interest is flagging.

Marat Safin got to the semifinals at Las Vegas but that’s a piddly little tournament and other than that he hasn’t done much. Since he returned from a knee injury early last year, he’s reached exactly one final.

It’s not like he doesn’t try. At 8-8 in the second set tiebreaker of his match with Kristof Vliegen, he threw himself at a passing shot and left himself sprawled and twisted in the red dirt with his right arm pinned underneath him. He’d won the first set easily, barely lost the second and got an early break in the third but he still managed to fritter away the match and lose.

The one place he’s excelled is Davis Cup. Russia won the cup on his racket last year and he won the decisive match over France this year to send Russia to the semis. That ATP final he reached was in Moscow and both those Davis Cup ties were in Moscow. Maybe he’s tired of all this ATP stuff and just wants to go home.

Fernando Gonzalez looks disorganized. He hasn’t gone beyond a quarterfinal since his final appearance at the Australian Open and he melts down more often that he plays well.

In the twelve step community – groups such as alcoholics anonymous for instance – people know that a relapse can be a necessary part of recovery. You will fall off the wagon because that’s one way you’ll remember why you gave up that life in the first place.

I’m not suggesting that Gonzalez is a recovering alcoholic but he is a recovering whacker. He used to whack everything as hard as he could before he added subtlety and strategy to his game. He’s going through a relapse at the moment but instead of accepting it as an opportunity to refine the changes he’s already made, he’s getting mad at himself and making inappropriate shots.

Gonzalez lost to Igor Andreev in the second round. I’ve been expecting Andreev to make his way back up the ladder after returning from a knee injury. Players who miss time due to injury get a protected ranking they can use for their first eight main draw events after their return. When Andreev injured his knee he was ranked number 27 and he was number 100 when he returned. He’s now down to 235.

He should have played challengers when he returned instead of jumping right into main draw events. Guillermo Canas tore up the challenger circuit after he completed his suspension for performance enhancing drugs. He, of course, did not get a protected ranking since he wasn’t injured and it may have been better for him. Martin Verkerk has a protected ranking after being off the tour for two and a half years with a shoulder injury. He played terribly in three challengers then jumped into main draw events where he has yet to win a match.

By the way, see what might happen if the women synchronized their schedules with the ATP and played all of the Masters Series events with the men. I’d be watching men and women this week. The ATP and the WTA are adding two combined events: Madrid and Beijing. It would be a good idea to add even more. The top six draws on the calendar are the slams, Indian Wells and Miami – all combined events.

And here’s an item from the Bad Transcription Department. Look at this exchange after Julien Benneteau beat Monte Carlo resident Benjamin Balleret in the first round:

Q. What does Balleret need to do become to Top 100?

JULIEN BENNETEAU: … I saw he was a rooster in Bangkok. He passed around. He plays well. …

I don’t think he meant to call him a rooster. I believe the word was “loser” as in lucky loser. Balleret lost in qualifying in Bangkok but got into the main draw as a lucky loser and beat Alexander Waske. No idea what “He passed around” means. Any clues anyone?

Don Imus, Rappers and Dave Chapelle

Don Imus should not have been fired and rappers should be getting a bit more love.

Excuse me if I slip away from tennis for a day. The Monte Carlo Masters starts on Monday so we’ll have plenty of tennis next week. I’ll also do a preview of Monte Carlo tomorrow.

It’s been a wild week for American discourse on ‘isms. As for racism and sexism, Don Imus managed to invoke both by calling the Rutgers women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos.”

On Wednesday, sports columnist Jason Whitlock wrote a piece in the Kansas City Star subtitled: “Instead of wasting time on irrelevant shock jock, black leaders need to be fighting a growing gangster culture.” On Thursday, two black leaders, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, met with Imus’ employer: CBS. By the end of Thursday, Imus had been fired.

Micheal Ray Richardson was fired from his job as coach of the Albany Patroons in the CBA basketball league after saying that he had “big-time Jew lawyers” and “in this country the Jews are running it.” Richardson played basketball in Israel. His second wife and their child are Jewish. I seem to remember that Jesse Jackson had a few problems with anti-semitism. When he was running for President in 1994, he called Jews “Hymies” and New York “Hymietown.”

Whitlock himself was fired from ESPN for calling ESPN basketball writer Scoop Jackson a clown and also criticizing Mike Lupica. No ‘isms there but Whitlock still thought the firing was unjust.

By Friday morning, Whitlock was all over the sports talk shows. Dave Smith on Sporting News Radio was particularly happy with this paragraph from Whitlock’s column:

While we’re fixated on a bad joke cracked by an irrelevant, bad shock jock, I’m sure at least one of the marvelous young women on the Rutgers basketball team is somewhere snapping her fingers to the beat of 50 Cent’s or Snoop Dogg’s or Young Jeezy’s latest ode glorifying nappy-headed pimps and hos.

Smith was happy because he’s been asking the same question for forever: “Why is it that blacks can use the N word but whites can’t?” In this case, why is it o.k. for rappers to call black women hos but not Don Imus? Or, as Whitlock also said in the column:

Dave Chappelle was offered $50 million to make racially insensitive jokes about black and white people on TV. He was hailed as a genius.

Don Imus has been insulting people for almost thirty years and a lot of people have been listening to him. He’s in the National Broadcaster’s Hall of Fame. He’s been walking the tight rope between being shocking enough to compete with Howard Stern but not so shocking as to get fired and finally, he fell off. It was bound to happen because the landscape is constantly shifting. Rappers can trash black women and Dave Chappelle can trash both black and white people, but Don Imus can’t.

Do I agree with Whitlock? Mostly. I’m not in favor of firing someone after they’ve been on the job for twenty years or so because it’s unlikely that they all of a sudden did something different than they’ve already been doing. Suspend them then explain the new rules and make them toe the line. If they don’t, then fire them.

I also agree that there is a dearth of black leaders and those that exist have been ineffective in stopping the war on drugs which has left so many of the black community in jail. But Whitlock excoriates rappers and I think that’s shortsighted. Whitlock is a good sports columnist but I would not hire him as the music critic for the New Yorker or the Village Voice.

Rappers have filled some of the void of black leaders and they’ve carried out their jobs as artists. From Public Enemy and Grandmaster Flash forward, rap has been a voice of protest and a strong voice of cultural identity. If rap is rooted in jail culture, that’s because so many young black man are in jail or, if not, many of their friends are.

Imus lost his job because the black community has finally had enough of the negative stereotypes aimed at them by white people and members of their own community. Rappers have done their job by reflecting the culture around them and they’ve done it well enough that they might have finally fomented a big enough outcry to bring about some change.

I cringe when I hear bitch and ho on the radio. I did not appreciate Lauren Hill’s rap, “so why you imitatin’ Al Capone/I be Nina Simone and defecating on your microphone.” It’s definitely time for that and many other things to change. If they do change, though, rappers deserve some of the credit.

2007 Houston and Valencia: Whither U.S. Clay?

Picks for this week’s tournaments in Houston and Valencia

This is the official start of the clay court season, the cluster of tournaments leading up to the French Open at the end of May. Clay court specialists have been at it for a while but they will now be joined by players who are allergic to clay; namely, U.S. players.

All the more unfortunate, then, that the U.S. will probably lose its only ATP clay court event. The tournament in Houston started in 1969 and ends this year. If the ATP doesn’t replace it with another clay court tournament, that’s it, there are no more. On the WTA side, Amelia Island ends this year leaving Charleston as the only clay court event on U.S. soil.

Now that Andre Agassi is gone, it’ll be a long time before another U.S. player wins the French Open, let alone one of the Masters Series clay events, especially if this allergy to the red stuff continues.

HOUSTON (outdoor clay)

Watch out for Luis Horna, James Blake’s first round opponent. He’s 9-2 on clay this year and I have him into the second round because Blake usually starts slow on clay. Also watch out for Nicolas Devilder who plays Tommy Haas in the first round. He hasn’t played a lot of ATP level tournaments but he’s 96-63 on clay overall for his carrer.

Mardy Fish and Jurgen Melzer should meet in the quarterfinals. Fish beat Melzer in the final here last year but that was the only ATP level clay event Fish played last year so I’m going with Melzer.

If Andy Roddick and Tommy Haas meet in the semis it doesn’t look good for Roddick; Haas has beaten him all four times they’ve met on clay. That’s if Roddick makes it here. He still hasn’t completely recovered from a strained hamstring.

What is Argentine Juan Monaco doing in Houston? Why isn’t he in Valencia where he can speak Spanish? Probably the same reason Luis Horna and Ruben Ramirez-Hidalgo are here: it looks easier to pick up rankings points off the fast court U.S. players than those clay court specialists over there in Valencia. Last year Monaco lost in the first round to Fish but I have him all the way to the final where he could meet Tommy Haas. If he does, I think he beats him.

Picks
Quarterfinals: Roddick, Michael Russell, Haas, Sebastien Grosjean, Melzer, Fish, Monaco.
Semifinals: Roddick, Haas, Melzer, Monaco.
Final: Haas, Monaco.
Winner: Monaco.

VALENCIA (outdoor clay)

Oscar Hernandez has played 312 tournaments in the last five years – the vast majority in challengers and qualifiers. All but eight of those tournaments were on clay. You can bet he’s not playing in a U.S. tournament any time soon. His probable opponent in the second round, Igor Andreev, should beat him.

Gilles Simon beat Fernando Verdasco in the semifinals here last year but that lookes like an aberration. Verdasco should knock Simon out in the quarterfinals this time around.

David Ferrer and Fernando Verdasco are closely matched on clay. When a match is too close to call I would normally pick the hometown player – Ferrer lives in Valencia – but he lost in the first round last year. I’m picking him anyway because he’s 17-7 on the year and Verdasco has a losing record.

Nicolas Almagro has beaten Juan Carlos Ferrero both times they’ve met so I have him facing Ferrer in the final. Then again, Ferrer has beaten Almagro both times they’ve met so Ferrer could get his second title of the year.

Picks
Quarterfinals: Ferrer, Evegeny Korolev, Verdasco, Simon, Andreev, Almagro, Florian Mayer, Ferrero.
Semifinals: Ferrer, Verdasco, Almagro, Ferrero.
Final: Ferrer, Almagro.
Winner: Ferrer.

The WTA Roadmap Reins In Players

The WTA’s new plan makes a lot of things better and some worse.

The WTA has a problem. Top ten players are dropping out of tournaments at a rate we’ve never seen before. Sometimes they drop out due to valid injury and sometimes they drop out because they don’t want to play. Last year Maria Sharapova withdrew from Montreal at the last minute and this year Justine Henin played Dubai and Doha and skipped Indian Wells. Amelie Mauresmo always skips Indian Wells.

The number of injuries has genuinely increased but players have also become bigger than the game. Sharapova is the biggest draw in the WTA. If she decides to pull out of a tournament at the last minute, there’s no one to stop her. And it’s not just in tennis.

Basketball player Kobe Bryant threatened to jump to the cross town Los Angeles Clippers if the Los Angeles Lakers didn’t get rid of Shaquille O’Neal. The Lakers traded O’Neal.

High school players have become bigger than the college programs that recruit them. O.J. Mayo is the best high school basketball player in the U.S. An acquaintance of Mayo’s waltzed into USC coach Tim Floyd’s office and asked him if he’d like to have Mayo on his team next year. Floyd was suspicious since he’d never spoken to Mayo so he asked for Mayo’s cellphone number. He was informed that Mayo does not give out his cellphone number. Sounds like a scene from a mafia movie: “Have I got a deal for you. But don’t call us, we’ll call you.” USC, of course, is welcoming Mayo even if it’s entirely on the kid’s terms.

How is the WTA reining in the players? The WTA is giving a little and wants a lot in return.

The plan is called Roadmap 2010 and here’s what it gives the players:

  • Reduction in the total number of tournaments required from 13 down to 10.
  • Increase in prize money of 30% to approximately $72 million.
  • Rankings based on the best 16 tournaments instead of 17.
  • Increase in the off season from 7 weeks to 9 weeks.

“Look,” the WTA is saying, “we’ll help you reduce injuries by lowering the total tournaments required and shortening the season and we’ll sweeten the deal financially if you play more of the top tournaments, but, in return, you have to cooperate with our new tournament calendar and we’ll penalize you heavily if you don’t.”

That new calendar will have twenty premium events and remaining lower level events. Four of the premium events, Indian Wells, Miami, Beijing and Madrid (a new event), are required, everyone must play them. If a player skips one of the required tournaments without a valid medical excuse, she’ll be suspended from the next two premium events.

If Justine Henin had skipped Doha this year without a certifiable medical condition, she would have been suspended from Indian Wells and Miami. Not that Henin doesn’t have legions of medical excuses, mind you, and therein lies a problem.

Serena and Venus Williams have not played Indian Wells since 2001when Serena was booed mercilessly in the title game. Venus had pulled out of the sisters’ semifinal minutes before the match and the crowd was mad because it looked like the sisters decided they didn’t want to play each other – another version of players being bigger than the game.

Serena and Venus are never going to play Indian Wells again. The sisters will produce medical evidence of injury and skip Doha, the tournament before Indian Wells, so it doesn’t look like they’re doing it intentionally, then they’ll play Miami. The main effect of the penalties will be to keep players from dropping out at the last minute and leaving tournament directors in the lurch.

How will the WTA herd the players towards the big tournaments? By penalizing lower level tournaments for having too many top players. And this part is controversial, particularly in the U.S.

According to a memo from the US Tennis Association (USTA) to the WTA obtained by Peter Bodo and discussed here, all but the top tier premium tournaments will be limited to either 2 of the top 6 or 3 of the top 13 players. If a tournament wants to add an additional player, it could be required to increase its prize money by $800,000.

None of the U.S. tournaments has the money to apply for top tier premium status and they certainly don’t have $800,000 sitting around. The US tennis association is unhappy because the US Open Series will suffer if its tournaments can’t attract enough top players. That means the US Open could suffer because the whole point of the Open Series is to build momentum for the Open.

I’m happy the WTA is increasing the off season and threatening mayhem if players don’t turn up at important tournaments, we’ve screamed enough about that here, but the US Open Series works so don’t mess with it. And $800,000 is a ridiculous amount of money to request for one player. Otherwise, carry on.

ATP’s Brave New World

John Newcombe in top hat and stockings? More importantly, there are momentous changes ahead for the ATP.

While I was rooting around the internet trying to make sense of the upcoming changes to the structure of the ATP , I came across a 1997 article about the Monte Carlo tennis tournament by the esteemed New York Times writer, Christopher Clarey. There were two very interesting pieces of information in the article.

It seems that tennis players used to appear in amateur stage productions while they played in Monte Carlo. In 1969, for instance, Pancho Segura appeared as Tarzan. No surprise there, but in the same production Fred Stolle appeared as Shirley Temple and John Newcombe as Marlene Dietrich. I have to wonder if those players might well have been more welcoming to an openly gay player since they were already comfortable cross-dressing. And wow, would I love to see a youtube clip of John Newcombe in a top hat and stockings singing Falling in Love Again.

In 1997 it seems that the ATP was debating whether to drop Monte Carlo from the Super 9 – a series of nine tournaments that was the precursor to the Masters Series. The European players were apparently so unhappy about the possibility of losing the event that they formed their own player organization.

Monte Carlo survived that debate but it doesn’t appear that it will survive the current changes. And the European players are very angry yet again because Europe will likely lose two Masters Series events – Monte Carlo and Hamburg – while North America will hold on to all four of its events.

And it’s not just the European players, it’s also the clay court players because that’s two less clay court Masters Series events. The ATP is reducing the number of Masters Series events from nine to eight. Shanghai will get the new event in return for losing the Tennis Masters Cup – the year end championship – which is moving back to Europe. The surface for Shanghai has not yet been announced but all previous Asian tournaments have been hard court.

Rafael Nadal must be exceptionally pissed and I don’t blame him. As for me personally, it’s bad enough that Americans are in such disrepute worldwide at the moment, I don’t want the tennis world mad at me too. There are reports that the Madrid Masters will move to the spring and become a clay court event and that might make Rafael feel a bit better but that still means one less clay court Masters.

I haven’t heard much from the Monte Carlo organizers but Hamburg isn’t going down without a fight. Bloomberg.com reports that Hamburg has filed a suit against the ATP in U.S. District Court in Wilmington, Delaware. They accuse the ATP of taking “control of the supply of men’s professional tennis players and of men’s professional tennis tournaments. It has done so to establish a favored class of tournaments, in which the ATP has a significant proprietary interest, while relegating all of the ATP’s other member tournaments to a disfavored status.”

True, they have, but that’s what the ATP is supposed to do. They created the Super 9 series and they can take it away. This is not an easy problem. If you take away one of the U.S. Masters events, it shouldn’t be Indian Wells or Miami. In 2007, Indian Wells was the first tournament outside of a slam to go over 300,000 in attendance and Miami wasn’t far behind. If you eliminate Montreal/Toronto or Cincinnati, you weaken the U.S. Open Series.

I was one of the few humans in the tennis world who supported round robin tournaments. I did it because I didn’t think Etienne De Villiers, the ATP CEO, had the clout to eliminate tournaments and round robins were the next best answer. Evidently he has enough clout to downgrade the status of two tournaments that are more than one hundred years old – Hamburg and Monte Carlo – but the better solution might be to reduce the total number of tournaments and shorten the season if he’s concerned about injuries and no shows.

The problem is that injuries and no shows are only part of the reason for the changes. Asia is paying huge money to host tournaments in Dubai, Doha and Shanghai. De Villiers is taking a Masters away from Europe and giving it to Asia to follow the global market. The ATP is following the money but Europe hosts the highest number of ATP events because it has the most tennis fans. What’s good for the pocketbook might not be best for tennis in the long run.

Larry Scott is the CEO of the WTA and he does have enough clout. He has shortened the season. I’ll talk about momentous changes to the WTA in my next column.