Just a Little (More) Patience

Tennis has officially slid across the pond to Europe, but if you’re a fan of the U.S. game, the one-week American clay season that just ended is worth a second look before its red-and-green dust has settled. That’s because on Sunday, Jack Sock won his maiden ATP singles title on red dirt in Houston, and Madison Keys nearly won her second career WTA title on the green stuff in Charleston. Together, these two young players gave us a glimpse of what’s promising in U.S. tennis at the moment, and what work still needs to be done. They also showed how tough it can be to live up to this country’s illustrious, and intimidating, history in the sport.

Keys, 20, and Sock, 22, are the nation’s youthful hopes of the moment, and each of them brought the American style of the moment to Houston and Charleston. The U.S. has always specialized in serving, and it holds true for these two: Sock and Keys both bring the heat. In the all-baseline era, though, the emphasis has shifted somewhat; now the forehand plays an equal role in almost every top player's attack. Keys and Sock are no slouches in that department, either. In fact, they hit their forehands as hard as anyone else on their respective tours.

While Sock rode his 100-plus-m.p.h. forehand to victory, Keys slugged the shot just as viciously in defeat. This was a rejuvenating week for the Floridian, whose form over the last two months had dipped considerably from its Australian Open heights. Granted, Keys didn’t beat anyone in the Top 50 in Charleston, but she did take care of her lower-ranked opponents the way a player with major-title aspirations should. In her first four rounds, Keys didn’t lose a set.

She was even better in the final. After losing the first set to Angelique Kerber, Keys took control of the match from the former Top Tenner and eventually led 4-1 in the third, before losing 7-5. Keys was the aggressor throughout, and she worked her forehand into a mighty groove as the afternoon progressed. Perhaps only Kerber, the closest thing to a brick wall in tennis today, could have returned those forehands.

All credit to Kerber and her everything-but-the-kitchen-sink athleticism, though: She did return Keys’ blasts, and even found a way to surprise her and take the initiative with her own forehand. “She completely lifted her level,” Keys said. To me, the third-set turnaround was less about the American’s descent than it was the German’s ascent. Madison seemed, through her disappointment, to see it that way as well.

“Coming off tough losses at Indian Wells and Miami,” Keys said, “I’m happy I kept a great attitude this week, and I was just fighting as hard as I could today. I could have gone either way after the first set, but I dug deep and still put myself in a position to win.”

Attitude was what it was all about for Keys and her team in Charleston. Her on-site coach, Lisa Raymond, emphasized it repeatedly in her sideline visits. And Keys said that her full-time coaches, Jon Leach and Lindsay Davenport, who were home in California, told her, “All we care about is your attitude and how you’re trying to play the game. If you’re doing that, then win or lose, we’re happy.”

Keys can get negative. “I’m not the best at hiding my emotions,” she said last week. And she admitted that, much like her countrywoman Sloane Stephens two years ago, the burden of trying to be the savior of the American game can be a lot to bear.

“The expectation from other people kind of gets on me,” Keys confessed after the final. “But it’s more the internal expectation of, you know, I was playing really good tennis in Australia and I wanted to see that again.”

Does the pressure of expectations weigh more heavily on U.S. players these days? On the women’s side, Stephens and now Keys have talked about it. On the men’s side, John Isner and Mardy Fish both struggled when they became their nation’s standard-bearer and top-ranked player. On neither tour has anyone, aside from 33-year-old Serena Williams, managed to stay near the top for long.

Still, while the first part of Keys’ answer above was worrisome, the second part, about her “internal expectations,” was heartening. For her, the pressure comes from within, and that’s the way it should be.

In the end, I thought Keys lost this match for two reasons, each of which is fixable.

(1) While she brought the pace on her ground strokes, she didn’t create the angles, placements, and spins needed to move Kerber out of position often enough. Getting more shape in her shots and variety in their selection seems like the next logical step in Keys’ progression.

(2) As ESPN commentator Pam Shriver noted during the second set, and Raymond mentioned during her changeover visits, the more patient Keys was in rallies, the longer she stayed in them before pulling the trigger, the more successful she was. It was left to Kerber to show Keys the ultimate value of this kind of patience. She was willing to rally for as long as it took, and it paid off.

As it happened, another commentator, Jimmy Arias, made a similar comment about patience—or the lack thereof among U.S. players—during Sock’s two-tiebreaker win over Sam Querrey in Houston. Over the course of a couple of games, Sock gunned a risky forehand into the tape while sliding to his left, and Querrey went for broke on a backhand from five feet behind the baseline and missed it well wide. Arias compared these two shots to the baseline style of a player like Andy Murray. Where Sock and Querrey pulled the trigger down the line, Murray would have been willing to hit an extra crosscourt shot—or 10 of them—and wait for something better.

You could expand on Arias’s comment by saying that men’s tennis now is all about having the patience to hit that extra crosscourt rally ball (or 10 extra crosscourt rally balls)—Murray, Novak Djokovic, and Rafael Nadal all have it, and we can see where it has taken them.

The comment also echoes a traditional philosophical difference in how the game is taught: U.S. players, it was once said, learn to go for winners, while European players learn not to make errors. It hardly seems to be coincidence that the last U.S. man to win a Grand Slam and spend most of his career in the Top 10, Andy Roddick, was a mix of both. He had the monster serve, but he was also a steady baseliner who was willing to hit the extra rally ball.

In general, U.S. tennis is about im-patience—about playing quickly and hitting huge. Sock fits that mold; at times, it looks as if he just wants to get off the court as soon as possible, win or lose. For the moment, his hyper style is working for him. After undergoing surgery for a torn pelvis muscle at the start of the year, Sock says he used his downtime to get in better shape.

“I put in a lot of hard work before I came back,” Sock said on Sunday. “I had almost nine weeks in a row off the court in the gym getting my body ready to come back. To come [to Houston] and win is a very incredible feeling, and I’m going to savor it for a while.”

In Houston, Sock upset No. 2 seed Roberto Bautista Agut and No. 3 seed Kevin Anderson in straight sets. He’s up to No. 36 in the rankings, and he’ll be someone to watch in the coming weeks on clay, which he says is his favorite surface.

U.S. players have careened up and down the rankings in recent years. We’ll see if Sock and Keys, who may have the biggest weapons of all of them, are here to stay. Hopefully they'll learn to have a little more patience, and hopefully we will, too.