NEW YORK—Maybe it’s the day off that Wimbledon, in a last, futile bow to the spiritual, schedules for its middle Sunday, but I think I’ve been programmed to need a few hours of rest at the mid-point of a Grand Slam. With that in mind, I skipped the hour-long subway ride and avoided the National Tennis Center yesterday. Of course, I still had work to do, a feature for Tennis magazine, and I still watched plenty of tennis, more, likely, than I would have if I’d actually been on the grounds. Watching CBS and the Tennis Channel move from one court to the next, I kept thinking of a reporter’s comment about what it was like to cover a presidential convention live and in person. “How can I know what’s going on,” he wondered, “when I can’t see it on TV?”
The Open, more than the other majors, is a made-for-TV event. It invented the night session, and created the much-despised Super Saturday because the USTA had gone over-budget in building the Tennis Center in 1978, and basically had to sell itself to CBS to make up the cost.
So here, along with the usual grab bag of Grounds Pass observations, is a quick report from a day of televised tennis.
—It used to be that you knew exactly what you were going to get from CBS. They would begin with the first American on Ashe or Armstrong and stay with that American’s match until it was over. Now there’s a willingness to jump. Yesterday, the staid old network threw caution to the wind by cutting away from the closing games of Rafael Nadal’s match with David Nalbandian so we could see, presumably, the end of Shuai Peng and Flavia Pennetta. Instead, Pennetta puked and the match went to a tiebreaker. But credit CBS for sticking it out and showing that breaker, which ended in a crazy, six-straight-point comeback by the Italian. It all worked out, luckily, for CBS, because Nadal blew his own final service game and gave the network a chance to show the last three games of his match anyway. Whether it was skill or luck, it made for 15 minutes of high-wire tennis broadcasting.
—A day of tennis watching is also, by necessity, a day spent with John McEnroe, who now moves from CBS to ESPN and onto the Tennis Channel over the course of the two weeks. He has his positives and negatives. He has a great voice, in my opinion, but he doesn’t bring the insight into today’s players that a younger announcer would. Still, his longterm perspective did yield one interesting observation. McEnroe noticed that both Juan Martin del Potro and John Isner were letting their opponents get away with extremely weak second serves. To me, it was another reason why Novak Djokovic has had the season he’s had. He does a lot more with his returns than most of today's players.
—Worst commercial: Geico’s ads have always tried too hard and been grating at best, but their new one—parents on a budget eating their kids’ fish as sushi?—is, for lack of a better word, the stupidest yet.
—Second worst commercial: Coors’ Light’s “bar exam.” Beer ads by definition push the concept of American male idiocy—it's the last entitlement we have left—but this one finally goes too far. Look, we’re lazy, we get it; but we haven’t had our brains removed yet.
—I like Ted Robinson better as an announcer when he’s away from McEnroe—he’s more his own man—but I did get that old homey feeling when the two teamed up to do the thrilling tiebreaker between Sam Stosur and Maria Kirilenko last night on the Tennis Channel. But it was the announcer who took over for them in the third set, Martina Navratilova, who had the best comment on Kirilenko. She said that the undersized but stylish and technically sound Russian would have thrived back in the 1970s.
Aside: Am I wrong, but Kirilenko didn’t always shriek like she does now, did she? It seems particularly unfortunate to hear her do it.
Good Andy Roddick, bad Andy Roddick; The two just can’t get away from each other. Last week Roddick sounded a defensive, if correct, note when he criticized his critics in the tennis analyst business. Yesterday he sounded a more appealingly appreciative note when he said to the fans in Arthur Ashe Stadium: “Man, I had a blast. You come out here and you hear people cheering for you. Thank you. You made it fun for me.”
Of all of today’s players, Roddick is the closest to the guys from the 70s I wrote about in my book—no wonder he wants to return to those circus days. Like them, Roddick is a good guy with a bad side that you can’t ignore or write off. And like them, it makes him less admirable, but more memorable.
Draw thoughts:
Every round this year, we hear of someone who could trouble Djokovic, another potentially “tricky” opponent. Every round, he gets through them with very little trouble. Today’s version is Alexandr Dolgopolov. He's tricky, but is there any reason to expect a diferent result?
Donald Young is the flavor of the moment, but John Isner seems like the more dangerous American at the moment.
Can Gilles Muller do anything against Rafael Nadal? They played a closer-than-the-scores-indicated match at Wimbledon this year.
On the women’s side, one of these four players will be a finalist: Kerber, Pennetta, Stosur, or Zvonareva. I’m always surprised to remember that Stosur has Zvonareva’s number—she’s beaten her seven times in a row. I was impressed with Stosur’s calm determination in that third set against Kirilenko.
On the other side of the draw, this is a chance for Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova to take another step forward. She plays the woman who stopped her in Paris, Francesca Schiavone.
And wouldn’t it be just like Svetlana Kuznetsova, after a lost season, to do something big at the U.S. Open? She plays Wozniacki next.