No, I’m still here, still at my desk, still leaning back in an ergonomically dangerous posture, still staring at my computer and clicking the mouse—how, exactly, did this become the primary activity of humanity?—and still marveling at Marat Safin’s backhand. I’ll miss that the most when the big guy calls it quits. Wait, now he’s serving—I guess I’ll miss that shot, too, even though he’s just used it to double fault while trying to close out the first set against Nicolas Lapentti.
Such pure and uncluttered technique was Safin's blessing and his curse. How could anyone live up to all that potential? Wait—he’s just started screaming in a rage so profound and inner-directed it almost sounds suicidal. Some of you might miss that; I’d say half of the standing-room crowds that the Russian draws everywhere he plays are hoping to see him lose it. I’ll try to remember Marat instead as an example of just how good tennis can look and sound—there’s never been a better practice player—rather than the symbol of futility that he has become. And I’ll try to forget the way he lost the first set to Lapentti today. Safin ignored the first rule of returning a drop shot: keep the ball in front of you. At 6-6 in the tiebreaker, he scrambled forward for a short ball and, rather than pushing it down the line in front of him, he flicked it crosscourt, right to to Lapentti, and left the rest of the court wide open. I’ll also try to forget that he broke another fundamental rule—never lob over a net man when you’re inside the baseline—when he was up 5-2 in the third and at deuce. Safin's ill-conceived slice lob drifted wide, he lost the game, and . . .
Wait, as I'm writing this, Safin has just been broken for 6-5 in the third set. On break point, he missed a first serve, then stepped back and pounded the ball he had been carrying in his pocket out of the arena. Of course, when he asked the ball boy for another one so he could hit his second serve, the kid didn’t have one, which delayed his second ball even more—talk about Marat being Marat. After he lost that game, Safin, naturally enough, took his racquet and hurled it against the base of his chair on the sidelines, where it snapped clean in half at the handle. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a stick break quite that way. Then, as if all this wasn’t enough, he went down 40-0 in the next game, triple match point, before coming all the way back to break and send the match to a decisive tiebreaker. There, naturally, Safin saved two match points, one with an ace, before double-faulting at 6-6. Finally, with darkness encroaching, he lost 8-6. I guess I will miss the Safin persona, as well as the game. Who else could give us all that in the course of three hours?
As appropriate as it may be, “outta here,” is not a reference to Safin, either. As you baseball fans may have guessed, it alludes to the passing this week of the Voice, Harry Kalas, the play-by-play announcer for the Philadelphia Phillies since 1971 and the soundtrack of summer in Pennsylvania. “That ball is outta here,” was his catchphrase to describe a home run. It became the words he used as he left a bar—“I am outta here!”—and even when he toasted friends at their weddings—“You’re bachelorhood is outta here!” All of Philly is mourning its most beloved citizen. I’ll pay tribute to Kalas later here, but first, some tennis.
- This week has been my first experience with the Tennis Channel in HD, on a flat-screen TV. You get more—there’s more sunlight on the clay and in the air, more color in the stands, and more court on the screen. So much more court that you can see where the clay ends on the sidelines. My square box TV doesn't extend that far wide, which gives you the illusion that there's no end to the clay, that the court is eternally there and may have even been put down in Monte Carlo by the tennis gods a century ago. On the flat-screen, the surface looks like a red carpet that’s been rolled out on top of a stage for the week.
- You don’t just get more of everything with HD, you get more with clay—more of the players, that is. Did you know that Safin owned that little sidespinning drop shot he used so effectively this week, or that Berdych, if the rally lasts long enough, can begin to look like a robot when he hits the ball? Did you recall what a pleasure it can be, whether he’s winning them or not, to watch David Nalbandian construct a point and move around a court?
On hard surfaces, Andy Murray’s recent risk-averse style had begun to look dull and overly safe. On clay, where a wider variety of shots is required, it looks brilliantly subtle: a slice down the line, then a routine crosscourt forehand, then a forehand with a little more air under it down the line to push the pother guy back, then, just when you don’t expect it, a ground stroke that wrong-foots his opponent without flirting too dangerously with the sideline. Murray is going to get better on clay, and it will be a pleasure to see him bring his particular skills to the surface. It should bring out the best in him.
- Four times I’ve set out to watch Gilles Simon closely and write about his game. Four times he’s lost before I had the chance. That can’t be a good sign for his continued Top 10 status.
- A two-set match, even if it’s close and the quality of play is high, has no dramatic arc. Four or five sets can seem unnecessary. A best-of-three set match that goes the distance is ideal. I know that because I sat down last night and saw that Berdych, hardly my favorite guy to watch, and the tremendously named journeyman Fabio Fognini were playing. Normally I’d head elsewhere or hit the fast-forward button, but they were starting a third set, so kept it right there. I’m glad I did. Fognini, despite the trademark nonchalant Italian strut between points, is a pretty fun guy to watch on clay. I like the abbreviated forehand, and like all Italians, he has a great feel with the racquet—they all seem to just graze the ball back over the net.
- Speaking of Italians, let me take a break from tennis to mention a movie I saw this weekend, Gomorrah. It’s set in the slums of Naples—no touristy historic buildings enter the camera’s view; it could just as well take place in L.A. or Southeast Asia—where the Mafia has spread its tentacles into every corner of existence. The movie rotates between five characters who are all caught up with the mob in one way or another and can’t escape. There’s a ruthless fatalism to each of their stories, but it’s saved from its own grimness by the beauty of the shots. The camera lingers over the faces of the main characters the way an Old Master lingered over a portrait subject. As in any good movie or TV show, everything you need to know is in the face.
- During Key Biscayne I talked about the pleasure of watching a match online, with the sound on and the full array of cameras working, but with an an empty announcer’s booth. I watched Safin vs. Lleyton Hewitt in this way in Monte Carlo and noticed something I hadn’t noticed in Miami. The tendency of the announcer is to focus on each player individually; left to its own devices, my mind saw the match for what it really is, a relationship, friendly but adversarial, between two people for a couple of hours. It was the match itself I followed, rather than what one player or the other was doing right or wrong. My only complaint was that I was forced to look at Hewitt’s multi-green Yonex outfit, certain to be one of the fashion faux pas of the season. What I wasn’t complaining about was the Monte Carlo cameramen’s uncanny ability to find every single good-looking woman in the audience during in the span of a changeover. (Only the camera guys in Rome are more dedicated to that particular craft.) There’s nothing the commentators need to add to that.
- Was I right in Indian Wells when I wondered if Nadal had tweaked his forehand? In his first-round Tuesday, it looked to me like he had abbreviated it further. He was starting it out at his side, with the racquet face parallel to the court.
- As for Roger Federer, neither marriage, impending fatherhood, or the onset of another clay campaig affected him in his own first-rounder. He looked the same as always as far as I could tell, and hit some nice defensive backhands while I was watching. It’s a shot he’ll need. Thursday we’ll see a rare matchup between Federer and his fellow Olympic gold medalist Stan Wawrinka. Federer is 2-0 against his voodoo buddy, but they haven’t face each other since 2006. I’ll take Federer.
- My clay season didn’t officially begin in Monte Carlo. This weekend I got a chance to see Jelena Jankovic win her first tournament of the season, on dirt in Marbella. This is a good thing; I want her playing well. But I would only give JJ’s performance a qualified thumb’s up. She won with defense, even more so than she has in the past, and she relied on the inconsistency of her opponent, the occasionally brilliant—when she gets it right, she really gets it right, and vice-versa—Carla Suarez Navarro. Jankovic’s gets were supurb, but she has work to do in putting together offensive points. She has some time.
- As I mentioned at the top, Phillies’ broadcaster Harry Kalas died Monday at 73, after 38 years with the team. He was found passed out in the commentator’s booth before a game in Washington, D.C. If you don’t know him from the Phils, you may know him as the God-like voice of the gridiron through his work for NFL Films.
Kalas was famous for owning the Voice, an effortlessly booming set of pipes weathered by booze and cigarettes and shot through with character. His signature calls were, “Long drive, way back, that ball is outta here. Home run, Michael Jack Schmidt”—think of how Pat Summerall would say “James Scott Connors” after Jimbo hit a big shot at the Open—and “Swing and a miss, he struck him out.” In the clip below, the Voice says those very words as the Phillies win the 2008 World Series. The guy to his right making a silent buffoon of himself is his longtime booth partner, Chris Wheeler. I can’t say anything, though, that’s pretty much what I was doing at that moment.
While he always had the Voice, what was best about Harry was the way he chose to use it. In past summers in PA, if you flipped around the dial, you'd know you were watching the Phils without having to look at the screen. You’d know you found the right channel because of the silence; there would be whole minutes of it even as the game was going on. Kalas and his late booth mate Richie Ashburn were notable for what they didn’t need to say during a broadcast. They were baseball’s version of the BBC's old Wimbledon announcer, Dan Maskell—they let the game speak for itself.
Now the team has lost its most distinctive element, one that we had thought would always be there. It doesn’t help that, like a lot of young announcers, the new Phils guys are a mix of the nondescript and the awful. What happened to the Voices of old? Are the young guys too squeaky clean these days to have any character in their pipes? When the Phils came to San Francisco, one of the city’s famous Irish pubs kept a seat open for Kalas every night in case he walked in. I guess he usually did.
The memories are all over the Philadelphia Inquirer’s website. I’ll add mine here:
Like all baseball announcers, who are hired by the teams, Kalas actively rooted for the Phillies and wore their World Series rings on his fingers. But my best memory of listening to him came when he rooted for an opposing player. It was 1978 and Pete Rose was threatening Joe DiMaggio’s “unbreakable” record of 56 straight games with at least one hit—it was fun to watch the uptight Clipper squirm in the stands as the scuzzy Charlie Hustle dared to challenge his sacred achievement. Rose had hit in about 40 straight games when his team, the Reds, came to Philly.
In one of those games, it appeared that his streak was going to end. Rose didn’t have a hit going into the 9th inning, and he wasn’t due up. I went to bed and turned on the clock radio in the dark to listen to the end. Like everyone else not named Joltin’ Joe, I wanted Rose to keep going, even if it was at the expense of the Phillies. The Reds kept their 9th inning alive just long enough to give Pete one more chance. Kalas, excitement ringing through his words, made the incredulous call as Rose—with his mix of comical passion, deceptive intelligence, and well-timed chutzpah, he was baseball’s Rafael Nadal—laid a bunt down the third-base line. As Kalas boomed out his description of the play—the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt grabbed the ball and fired it to first as Rose barreled down the line—my head shot off the pillow and I put my face as close as I could get it to the radio. Rose was safe; the streak lived. You could hear the admiration somewhere deep in Kalas’ voice. I was about an inch from the radio, eyes bugged out.
When something good happens at the ballpark, you stand up to show your appreciation. When something exciting happens in a game and you see it on TV, you might lean forward so you can focus in on it more closely. These are at least reasonably logical reactions. But what could I have gained from being closer to the radio? What drove me to react like that? What else? It was the Voice.