While storms tore up the South, the Northeast got its first taste of autumn this weekend, with bright sunshine and cooler temps. This is sports weather first and foremost—college football weather, NFL weather, pennant-race weather. This year it was even golf weather, as the PGA’s stars were all over my television set playing something called the President’s Cup, a contest that, like most things in golf, pitted freedom-loving Americans against the rest of the universe.
So how was tennis taking advantage of the weather, and its triumphant U.S. Open of two weeks ago? By scattering to the four corners of the world, naturally, and staging matches in ill-lit caverns in Slovakia, Belgium, and China. Here’s all you need to know to understand why tennis stands no chance against golf in the U.S. these days: The President’s Cup, while a contrivance, was shown on NBC and featured Tiger Woods and Jack Nicklaus; the semifinals of the Davis Cup, a truly international event, were on the Tennis Channel and showcased Dominik Hrbaty and Ivan Ljubicic.
Still, for a tennis fan with access to TTC and a TiVo-like device, it wasn’t a bad showcase. There was Ljubicic’s continuing heroism (he’s now 9-0 in Davis Cup this year), a controversial five-set win by Andy Roddick, and the usual heightened intensity of the event. In what other tournament would you see a player—namely David Nalbandian—do a hurdler-style, arm-pumping run from the baseline, jump the net, and launch himself into his coach’s arms after going up two sets to one?
The weekend’s action began on a hideous orange-and-green court in Bratislava, where Slovak journeyman Karol Beck cruised past Argentine Top Tenner Guillermo Coria. The surface was slick, the balls sounded like gunshots coming off the players’ racquets, and the crowd—beefy guys with mustaches—stomped on their metal bleachers incessantly. It all spelled trouble for Coria, who was passive from start to finish, and whose double-fault problem—a combination of a shoulder injury and a Kournikova-like loss of confidence—has grown even bigger since it did him in at the Open.
While Coria was clearly giving his all, you have to wonder if his sojourn to Beijing for the China Open last week (whatever could have convinced him to fly around the world for a non-Masters Series event, do you think?) was exactly the right preparation for the semifinals of Davis Cup. The magnitude of the day also seemed to get to the prickly little man. After going up 40-love in one game, he yelled “Vamos,” threw a ball to the ground as hard as he could, and began to stalk to the sideline as if he had won the game. When he realized his mistake, Coria quickly pointed at a towel near his chair and asked a ball boy to get it, as if that had been what he was after all along. Pretty fast thinking.
That night, the Cup moved down the road to Split, Croatia, and an arena that looked fitted out for the 1950 Republican National Convention, with red-drape bunting everywhere. In the opener, Nikolay Davydenko put on a clinic in all-court tennis, beating the human rain delay known as Mario Ancic in four sets. At times, it looked like Davydenko was literally running circles around him. What is it about the Russian men and their forehands? Davydenko, Marat Safin, and Dmitry Tursunov all hit theirs with the same perfectly balanced setup and backswing.
Saturday took us to Beijing and the semifinals of the women’s China Open. Now you may have heard that tennis is “exploding” in the country, but you wouldn’t have know it from the number of people in the stands at most of the men’s matches in Beijing last week. But this was something different, a battle between two blond Russian Marias, Sharapova and Kirilenko, and the stands were full.
The Marias are carbon copies, from their ponytails to their eye-level visors to their regal little struts. Kirilenko has always been an aficionado’s favorite, an undersized girl with great hands and mental toughness who has never generated enough power to hang with the best players. But she stuck with Sharapova shot for shot, counter-punching well and showing more variety than her famous opponent.
As the second set began, Sharapova was rattled and missing routine shots. Maybe seeing her mirror image on the other side of the net threw her off; up to that point I hadn’t seen her show any signs that a previous injury to her pec muscle was bothering her. At 1-2, her father, Yuri, began doing a vehement version of baseball’s “safe” signal to his daughter. Sharapova, now looking bothered by the injury, walked to the sideline, had the trainer called, and defaulted. The crowd, who watched Venus Williams retire with an injury earlier in the week, was not pleased. Still, it was a nice win for Kirilenko, who followed it up the next day by winning the title. Let’s see if this puts her on track for bigger things.
On Sunday it was back to Davis Cup, and while Hrbaty and Ljubicic lifted their underdog countries into the Cup final for the first time, U.S. fans got their own taste of drama. Andy Roddick and Olivier Rochus slogged through five sets and almost five hours on red clay before their match was decided by a bizarre and horrendous call on a break point for Roddick in the fifth. That’s when a line judge got out of her seat to tell the umpire that she had called an overhead by Rochus out, when it clearly had been in. For some reason, the umpire, who had done a good job all afternoon, changed the call without even looking at the mark. Captain Patrick McEnroe later said that he and Roddick didn’t see the ball land, which is um, sort of, um, plausible, maybe.
Either way, you have to applaud Roddick for bouncing back from his U.S. Open debacle and winning after being obviously exhausted from the fourth set on. The 5-foot-5 Rochus showed a lot this weekend as well, ripping his little big backhand into the corners and coming one call away from perhaps sending the tie to a decisive fifth match. As we say: only in Davis Cup.
As a bonus, fans got their longest exposure yet to Brad Gilbert as a color commentator. He gave us his usual mix of malapropism (“he’s fustrated!”; “Oliver” Rochus), insightful strategic and statistical thinking, and bonehead predictions. Brad was the first to notice that Roddick was looking tired, but as the third set began he also said that he saw an easy 6-1 set for his former student. Seconds later, Roddick dumped a drop shot in the bottom of the net, was broken, and eventually struggled to win the set in a tiebreaker.
Finally, there was another major, though untelevised, team tennis event Saturday: the men’s tennis alumni match at Swarthmore College. Coach Mike Mullan, ex-hippie and Cal-Berkeley player in the 60s, has been there for 25 years. Every two or three years his old players, myself included, return to face the current varsity team and roast Mike at dinner about the time he ran out of gas on the Pennsylvania turnpike or flushed the keys to the van down the toilet. It’s always a great event, the only reunion I try to make.
As evidence of that fact, I got out of bed at 5:45 on a Saturday morning to catch a train to Philly. Seconds after I bought my ticket at Penn Station, there was an announcement that all trains had been suspended due to a power failure in New Jersey. This left me stranded with a hundred-odd anti-war protesters on their way to Washington, D.C. (including Jessica Lange, strangely enough). And that’s where I stayed for the next three hours, as the marchers—a feeble bunch, I have to say—paraded in a circle sporadically chanting, “Fund Amtrak, not war!” When I finally quit waiting and walked up from the dungeon that is Penn Station, I came out into bright sun and a cool breeze—perfect weather for any sport, including tennis, particularly on a college campus. Hope you guys enjoyed it.