NEW YORK—As it does each year, the New York weather has turned just as the U.S. Open has made its own turn into a second week. Dry, sunny heat gave way to hazy humidity, which has now given way to the final phase of the cycle, rain—enough rain to cancel Tuesday's play.
This is a drag for players, paying fans, and the international media at their desks in the press center. For a resident New Yorker, though, a little rain doesn’t hurt too much. Hey, I get to go to the office. I get to pick up my hate mail. I get to distract myself by scanning, over and over, a list of indecipherable tweets.
To distract myself from all of that important business, here’s a rainy day Grounds Pass, from Manhattan rather than Queens.
I watched Mardy Fish’s summer of promise end yesterday while writing a post, so I can’t give you a true five-set assessment of what went wrong for him. But I did see enough to believe, for a long period of time, that he was going to beat Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. Fish was clutch in the second-set tiebreaker, and in cruise control through the third. I thought he would win, he probably thought he would win, his wife seemed to think he would win, the crowd thought he would win, and even Tsonga might have believed that Fish was going to beat him. Then Fish played a poor game right when he shouldn’t have, at 4-4 in the fourth. He missed a volley, lost his first serve, and suddenly the match was out of his control and in Tsonga’s.
In the fifth set, Fish had physical troubles, but from a psychological standpoint he also didn’t seem ready for the moment, the moment that he must have been waiting for and knew would come. He had the crowd behind him and the match laid out in front of him. But he didn’t grab it. Late in the fourth set and early in the fifth, when the verdict was being read, Fish walked with a look of uncertainty rather than determination. And that’s how he played.
It’s been a year of learning the hard way for Caroline Wozniacki, on court and in the press room. First, in Australia, she scripted her own presser, to tepid reviews. Then she was caught making up a story about being attacked by an animal in a Melbourne park. At Wimbledon, she showed up for Novak Djokovic’s pre-tournament presser and, doing her version of a journalist, asked intentionally inane questions. In recent weeks, she’s hired a “mystery” coach whose name she won’t reveal. Now, at the U.S. Open, she has done a little mock rendition of Rafael Nadal’s famous cramping routine.
While they're a little weird, a little immature, and mostly harmless on their own, these hijinks and gimmicks as a whole will eventually look like part of the growing-up-in-public process for Wozniacki—a time she'll probably want to forget. Like Martina Hingis, she’s the good player who wants to be popular, too, or at least noticed. I'm hoping, and guessing, that she won’t try so hard to be next year.
Roddick Redux. I wrote yesterday that Andy Roddick had exhibited his traditional bad guy-good-guy dichotomy over the last two weeks. First he called out tennis analysts (harshly, but not incorrectly); then he went out of his way to show his appreciation for the fans in Ashe Stadium. But was that appreciation as spontaneous as I first thought it was? I wondered when I saw good-guy Roddick tell Justin Gimelstob on the Tennis Channel that he rarely ever thought about his victory at the Open in 2003, and what he loved most about coming back each year was seeing all the little people who make the tournament run.
Put this together with his fan appreciation day, and it began to have the ring of a make-good, a conscious reminder that Andy is humble at heart. At the same time, though, we also know that Roddick really does have an on-going friendship with one of those little people at Wimbledon, the London driver he hires for the fortnight each year. After his crushing loss in the 2009 final, Roddick saw his driver and told him to "give me a hug." So I end where I began, with good/bad Andy Roddick, tilting, slowly, eventually, toward the good.
The U.S. Open is the one time of year when tennis gets the attention of our national newspapers, the Times and USA Today. It’s great, on the one hand, to see tennis in the news and talked about by a mass readership. The downside is that this news doesn’t sound a whole lot like news for those of us who follow the sport all year.
I wrote about this two-week phenomenom at Wimbledon, where the same topics—slow grass, shunting the women to the side courts, Nadal’s plodding pace, the shrieks of the WTA—are brought up again each year. Then, when the fortnight is over, they’re forgotten for the next 50 weeks and nothing is done about them. Which means we hear all about them again the following summer.
The same thing has happened at this year’s U.S. Open. The rash of injuries and illnesses through the first week inspired speculation in both papers that the season is too long. It is too long, as most of us know, but once the Open ends and the players take their bruised bodies off to Spain and Israel and Tashkent, the majority of American newspaper readers won’t hear about it again for 12 months.
You can say the same for Donald Young at this year’s Open. Even Bill Walton, the basketball player/broadcaster/motormouth, says that DY is “breathing new life” into American tennis. I’ll believe it when Young starts to win early round matches in 250-level ATP events from week to week; that’s hardly the mountaintop, but it's something he’s never done before. The trouble is, whatever happens to Young after the Open, most people in this country won't know about it.
Draw thoughts:
Sam Stosur-Vera Zvonareva should be fun. Sam has her number, but Vera has won sets off her in their last two matches. One of them is probably going to the final.
DY-Murray? I’m liking Murray, in this match, and to reach the final. He lost to Young in March, which means above all that he won’t want to do it again, and his escape from Robin Haase last week—as well as Murray’s unprecedented leap of celebration—may have him in the right positive, nothing-to-lose mindset going forward.
Federer-Tsonga: This is the showdown of the quarters, and it’s a toss-up in my mind. Federer would obviously be mortified to lose to Jo three straight times in one summer, and he certainly looked sharp against Monaco last night. But revenge hasn’t always been his specialty.
Are the courts playing more slowly this year? Federer thinks so; Djokovic doesn’t; I think, from my own observation, that they are. The USTA says they're the same as ever.
Even if officials can find no measurable difference in speed from previous years, the players may still instinctively feel it. Ivan Lendl told me that each year, the day after the surface crew had finished laying down the courts at Flushing Meadows, he would have them come and do it exactly the same way at his private court in Connecticut. Lendl said that if you waited a week or a month, they wouldn’t be able to remember or reproduce the exact mix of sand and other ingredients that they used in New York. No two courts are created equal, but Lendl did what he could. He also reached eight straight Open finals.
As I've been writing, play has been cancelled for both day and night. To fill the time, I offer a little of the music, some of it in a New York groove, that has been on my IPod this year on the way to and from Flushing.
Download 1-10 Kicked Out - Kicked In
Download 19 Peep-Hole
Download 5-18 I'll Be Your Mirror (Live)
14 Marianne (It's You)
Download 06 Trash