Which player will Donald Young look like when he finds his game? Serbian player Dusan Vemic is like no one else you’ve ever seen.<\/b><\/p>\n
Donald Young<\/b> turned 19 a week ago and believe it or not, this is his fourth year on tour. He\u2019s a young 19. After he lost his second round match to Marc Gicquel<\/b> at the Countrywide Classic this afternoon, he looked like a teenager slumped in his chair with disappointment. Half of him wanted to answer our questions and the other half wanted to get the hell out of there.<\/p>\n
So, I ask myself, When he does grow up, which player will he turn into? My best guess is Radek Stepanek<\/b>. Without the gamesmanship and complaining and unnecessary injury timeouts, of course, but with the stylish all court game and net play. While gamesmanship is annoying, it does express a strong desire to win and that part I don\u2019t know about in Young\u2019s case. I\u2019d say that Stepanek\u2019s career high number 8 ranking is probably a bit higher than Young is likely to reach.<\/p>\n
Gicquel is a more polished version of Young. Young disagreed that their game was similar when I suggested it to him after the match, but he was willing to concede a few things they shared and I think it\u2019s a fair assessment of his game:<\/p>\n
He runs a lot of balls down, he gets a lot of balls back, he makes you play different shots, and he can hit his forehand, he can step up and hit it. He has all the strokes. I wouldn\u2019t say we\u2019re alike but we have all the strokes and can do a lot of stuff.<\/i><\/p>\n
I\u2019m guessing that \u201call the strokes\u201d carried Young to the number one ranking in juniors because most teenagers are still developing the strokes he already had. In the pros he has two problems: lack of power and immaturity. I\u2019ve only seen Young play a few times but I\u2019ve never seen him hit harder than his opponent. The word \u201cwhack\u201d doesn\u2019t come to mind when he hits the ball, it sounds more like \u201cthock.\u201d<\/p>\n
Young may not be able to do anything about that but he\u2019s definitely got game, it\u2019s just that it might take him a bit longer than most to learn how to use it. He’s not just standing at the baseline whacking the ball to the corners and he\u2019s had to adjust his expectations a few times. That\u2019s the burden of being a child prodigy: expectations have to be adjusted with each new passage in life. What starts out as a life of unlimited possibilities slowly becomes a series of concrete results which seldom match expectations.<\/p>\n
Young seems emotionally solid enough to have crossed that bridge. He\u2019s happy to be earning a whole lot more money than the college graduate he would have been if he hadn\u2019t turned pro and there\u2019s something to that. He\u2019s earned $168,000 so far this year and that\u2019s with a best result of one quarterfinal.<\/p>\n
Emotionally he\u2019s okay so what about his game? Like most young players, Young knows what he needs to do but he can\u2019t quite do it. He lost the first set and was even at 3-3 in the second set when Gicquel was called for a foot fault. Gicquel was furious. He complained to the chair umpire (\u201cOnly in the USA\u201d he said twice, meaning patriotism played a part on the foot fault call because Young is a US player) and generally fell apart. Young knew Gicquel was out of whack and he knew enough to take the game to him, but when he got to the net and had the easy put-away volley for the service break, he hit the ball into the bottom of the net. The line judge had given him a gift and he couldn\u2019t take advantage of it.<\/p>\n
Then, like most young players, Young lost his focus and couldn\u2019t recover. He lost his serve then Gicquel served out the match to win it, 6-3, 6-3.<\/p>\n
John McEnroe<\/b> and Jim Courier<\/b> sat still for a media session late afternoon – I\u2019ll get to that tomorrow \u2013 and then I went out to watch Andy Roddick<\/b>\u2019s match. I wasn\u2019t interested in Roddick except maybe to see if his shoulder is holding up – it is. I wanted to see Dusan Vemic<\/b> and he is something everyone should see.<\/p>\n
I\u2019d only been out there a few minutes when Vemic hit a 135mph serve. A few points later he hit a forehand slice which is a cross between a drop shot and a squash shot. I\u2019d barely gotten over his physical appearance with the black socks, white shoes, wraparound silver Oakleys, ponytail and beard, when he slipped and fell into a full split then jumped up as if nothing had happened. I\u2019ve never seen that before on the men\u2019s tour!<\/p>\n
Vemic is tall, moves lightly, and he\u2019s got those goggles. He\u2019s a mixed up tennis player with a huge serve and funky drops shots and lobs. Tipsarevic is the next model up which still comes with the goggles. And then there are the top three.<\/p>\n
Think of it like this: Vemic is Serbian tennis player Beta version 1.0. Tipsarevic is Beta 2.0. Djokovic<\/b>, Ivanovic<\/b>, and Jankovic<\/b> are the release versions and their release was timed to coincide with the Olympics. All along we\u2019ve been thinking that Russia and China have been building the perfect Olympic athlete and it was Serbia who was doing it and right under out eyes.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve detected a few glitches. The Vemic model goes through an abbreviated practice service motion before it serves as if some incomplete code had been left in the program, and the Djokovic model gets into programming loops now and then. It bounces the ball endlessly before it serves.<\/p>\n
All in all I give the release version 4.5 stars.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Which player will Donald Young look like when he finds his game? Serbian player Dusan Vemic is like no one else you’ve ever seen. Donald Young turned 19 a week ago and believe it or not, this is his fourth year on tour. He\u2019s a young 19. After he lost his second round match to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-932","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=932"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/932\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=932"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=932"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=932"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}