It’s that time of year again: the fall, season of burnout, injuries, cash, complaints, ennui, empty seats, outlandish trophies, thudding serves, murky arenas, and opportunistic second-tier champions. It’s tennis’ annual descent into decadence, and it doesn’t mean much to the game’s history. But with the right ironical and open-minded attitude, fall ball can be pretty fun to watch. The pressure is off for fan and player alike.
The problem so far is that we haven’t gotten to watch much of it. That will change in the coming days, when Beijing and Shanghai start to go live, but for today I’m left perusing the web for newsworthy scraps of the sport. Here’s some of what I found.
1. Serena is No. 1 again
This, of course, is long overdue. It’s lonely at the top, they say—how are we to know for sure?—and that’s been doubly true in tennis over the years. It takes a certain degree of calm self-assurance to like it there. John McEnroe struggled with it during his first go-round, after he’d finally vanquished Borg. Andre Agassi was too jumpy and doubtful to remain there for long—he had to go away and retake it. Pete Sampras, Roger Federer, Steffi Graf, they were to the ranking born. Dinara Safina may have had the most miserable tenure of anyone. For her, it wasn’t just the pressure, it was the lack of legitimacy. Maybe now she’ll stop hearing the questions and begin to thrive again away from the spotlight. I’d say the worst loser in this is the ranking itself.
Part of what the system is, as most serious fans know, is an incentive that the tour holds out to get players to play its events; it's weighted, probably too heavily as we can now see, toward participation. A an even more practical and boring level, the rankings are nothing more than a system that tournaments can use to seed players. But the rankings aren’t just cynical or practical. In the view of the vast majority of fans and players, they really are supposed to tell us who the best tennis player in the world is. It’s not her fault, and Serena could have been more gracious about the whole thing, but Safina’s run, more than any I can remember since Yevgeny Kafelnikov took over the No. 1 spot in the 90s and promptly lost six straight matches, made us feel like fools for believing that the rankings tell us anything at all.
2. Signs of Autumn
James Martin, editor of Tennis Magazine, and I talked recently about the telltale signs of fall. There was the weather, yes, and the leaves, and the sounds of football on television—welcome to me, grating to him. And then there were the headlines that began to crop up on the AP feed on Tennis.com. His example was, “Mathieu, Kohlschreiber to meet in Metz semifinals.” I came back with, “Monaco defeats Cuevas to reach Bucharest semifinals.”
Today I can add one more: “Tsonga, Gasquet, Gulbis advance at Japan Open.” Like birds making their yearly trip south, the Grand Slam also-rans of 2009 are flying far and wide in search of a fall feast.
- A Tweet in the Wilderness
Do you tweet? Do you receive tweets? Do you have any idea what I'm talking about? I receive them, though for the most part I’ve been underwhelmed with what we can learn about a human being in 140 characters or less. Did you know that Robin Soderling “doesn’t like to travel”? What I hope is that Twitter becomes famous as the outlet for all the thumb-twiddling ephemera in people’s lives, and that by comparison the lowly blog begins to resemble something like writing. To do that, of course, the blog will have to earn itself a new name first, one that doesn’t call up the image of an especially dull piece of wood, or a stopped drainpipe.
There is one glorious exception among the tennis Twitterers, as Mr. Martin points out here, and his name is Sam Querrey. If you’ve lost your sense of wonder about life, you might just recapture it by following this exceptionally American young man. Sam doesn’t tend to stray too far from his couch, but who does? I’ll start you with one characteristically Zen-like example of his tweeting work: “I just had the best haircut off all time.”
- Woz That?
Wait, now Caroline Wozniacki is going diva on us? That was fast. Here she is talking about her opening-round loss in Beijing: “I really needed every hour of rest to get over [a] virus and get ready for my first match, but the WTA or the tournament director did not seem to care at all.”
This statement would be easier to understand if it came during a press conference, when she was asked about her illness. But she made it on her own website. Not that it matters all that much either way. Maybe this is the surest sign that it's fall for tennis fans: We’re reading Caroline Wozniacki’s website.
- Saying Something about Maria (So Far)
How should we assess Maria Sharapova’s comeback, now that she’s out of the final Premier event of 2009, in Beijing? There have been disappointments—her early losses at Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, most obviously. There have been triumphs, like her title last week in Japan and final-round appearance in Toronto. And there has been at least one stunning success, her run of three-set wins at the French Open. Otherwise, Sharapova has fought inconsistency, double-faults, insecurity about her shoulder and her serve, and an ill-advised move from a visor to a headband. But it’s been good to have her back. While she didn’t have the meteoric rise of Kim Clijsters, Sharapova has been as professional and serious as always—unlike Clijsters’, her comeback has been realistic—and made it clear she’ll be part of the reinvigorated WTA conversation in 2010.
6. Not So Challenging Times
Paul Kedrosky wrote this op-ed in theNY Times last month, calling for more replay challenges from the pros. He thinks they have more to gain from the system, and that the fear of looking bad when they're wrong is what’s holding them back. He also says that they should make some challenges “recreationally,” or just for the hell of it. But don’t they already do this? And Kedrosky may be right from a percentage perspective—the men are actually pretty good at getting calls overturned—but I’ve always felt like the players challenge virtually every call that could potentially be changed. (Being able to illegally go to your entourage helps.) If they started to challenge more, we might see them begin to run out of them.
!Lh 7. Don’t Cross Rusty
Have you been following the Lleyton Hewitt-Bernie Tomic-JC Ferrero soap opera? It's simultaneously the most pointless, convoluted, and hilarious tennis story of the year. Get the latest here. My favorite part, which may not be mentioned in that article, is when Hewitt, after asking Tomic to practice at Wimbledon, is told by one of the kid’s people that he’s been rejected because he’s “not good enough.” Hewitt then proceeds to hit some balls with someone else, but can’t concentrate because he keeps thinking about what the kid said and just gets “madder and madder about it.”
- Sounds of Autumn
Let me leave the tennis court for the moment—I’m pretty much tapped out as far as the pro game goes right now—and turn my attention to a momentous event along a different line. After months of fruitless searching, I've found a new piece of music that I like. By “like,” I mean I've found something that I need to listen to every spare second for a period of at least two weeks. It never quite fails: Just when I think I’ve reached the end of my musical rope, something always hits me out of the blue.
This time it happened at a local Tex-Mex place. It’s nothing special food-wise, but I’ve gotten to know two of the bartenders—one is always good for a talk about college football, the other is always good for a talk about obscure rock and roll. This is my definition of a fine-dining establishment. Anyway, the rock guy and I got onto one of the eternal subjects of music obsessives everywhere: unsung, acid-damaged geniuses with cult followings. I mentioned the name Skip Spence, a 1960s San Francisco drug casualty who came up with one well-regarded solo record, but who was at his best when he played in the band Moby Grape.
The first thing that happened was that the bartender said, “Who’s Moby Grape?” After absorbing the shock of this blow by draining my margarita on the spot, I told him, as urgently as I could, that he must run to the nearest record store now—forget his job, just quit—and acquire, by any means necessary, a copy of that band’s only album.
The second thing that happened was that the bartender decided against taking my advice. Instead he mentioned the name Arthur Russell. I’d known of Russell as a downtown electronic music guru who had died in the 80s. But apparently he also happened to be a timeless country singer/songwriter, which is evident on a new collection, Love is Overtaking Me, that hasn’t left my CD player this week.
There has even been a bonus listen to this discovery. “Arthur Russell” comes right after “Arthur Conley” on my IPod artists list. Seeing his name has inspired me to revisit Conley’s one notable song, the immortal “Sweet Soul Music,” a corny and exciting anthem that has one of my favorite opening lines: “Do you like good music?”
Watch Conley lip-synch it here. It’s poor poor poor man’s Otis Redding, and I can't think of a better song.
9. Getting Madder
After three years, I’m finally caught up on the show of the moment—everyone is right, Gossip Girl just gets better and better. Just kidding (sort of). I’m talking about Mad Men, of course. Watching the show, it’s easy to look back and think of our era as perfectly enlightened compared to the early 60s. But that’s just what most folks must have thought about themselves back then, even as the men went off to Yale and Princeton (both were all-boys until 1968) and women went off to secretary’s colleges. What will seem utterly bizarre about us to Americans in 2050? The only thing I can come up with is the struggle for gay marriage. Is my imagination lacking, or is it just that difficult for us to see beyond the social boundaries of the moment?
10. Fall Baller
As I said, pro tennis at this time of year is about booming serves echoing around dark and silent indoor arenas. But it’s a different story in the U.S. college game in the Northeast. At Swarthmore College in the late-80s and early-90s, “fall ball” was blustery, stupid fun, a brief foray into the wind and cold that didn’t count toward the end of season Division III rankings, which were determined at the NCAA championships in the spring.
We spent our fall practice time, under the campus’s waving tall trees and within earshot of keg parties at a nearby dorm, trying to peg our doubles opponents with the ball. When we were ahead in a game, we liked to think up new, profanely insulting terms for the word “love.” When we played practice doubles matches, we worked hard at stealing our opponents’ poaching signals, which we would then announce matter-of-factly to our partner just as our opponent was tossing the ball to serve. Sometimes we went too far: On one occasion, after my partner said “he’s going” to me as I was setting up to return, the opposing net man took a ball out of his pocket and drilled him in the gut with it.
The quintessential fall match of my college career took place, as it should have, against a player from Haverford in a tournament that was played at Swarthmore. The two schools were hated rivals, or as hated as two tiny, leafy liberal arts colleges without football teams can be. We dominated in tennis in those days, to the point where no one from our school had lost a match to a Haverford player in something like nine years. This made the pressure not to be the unlucky guy who broke the streak absurdly immense—I can remember losing a single game to a player at Haverford and feeling like I was going to throw up.
My first taste of this mock-rivalry came in the fall of my freshman year, when our one senior, Vivek, played Haverford’s best player. Vivek was a leader, a fellow music lover, and the team’s resident character. He coined my favorite term for someone who plays great in practice but folds in matches: “3:30 All American” (3:30 was when we practiced in the fall). He’s also the reason I titled my personal columns on this site “Playing Ball.” When our coach asked us to fill out schedule cards for the semester, so he’d know when we were available to practice, Vivek listed his classes in tiny script at the bottom and then wrote, in huge letters, over the rest of the card: “Playing ball.”
V was an accomplished player, but on this day he couldn’t even get his serve to the net, let alone into it or over it. Everyone on our team watched, disbelieving, as the match went deep into a third set. When V looked up at us, our coach reflexively hung his head, never exactly a confidence-boosting gesture. Up match point, the streak seemingly over, Haverford’s player had a sitter at the net. The ball bounced and hung in the air forever. This gave Vivek, who was at the baseline, time to fake one way and then the other before his opponent could swing. It was all too much for the Haverfordian, who hammered the ball into the middle of the net. He was finished. Vivek came back to win. Our coach looked up from the ground. We stood with our fists up in the cold wind.
Later that fall or maybe the next year, Vivek came up to me at a party and put his hand on my shoulder. You can learn something about a person when they’ve had a couple of beers. Some people want to kill you (really, they do), some people want to lecture you, some people want to talk about themselves. Vivek wanted to point out the things he liked about you. He walked up to me that night and said, “Tigs, I like . . . ” he paused, searching for the word, “I really like . . . your worldview, man.”
Who says tennis doesn’t mean anything in the fall?