You may not have heard much about the Nicolas Kiefer vs. Sebastian Grosjean Australian Open throwdown yesterday. After all, this was a match for tennis nuts and aficionados, not a media carnival. You won’t find a cleaner striker of the ball, or a player with more touch, than Kiefer, the enigmatic German - nor a more versatile, multi-talented, electric player than Grosjean.
The only flaw either of these guys has is an inability to win Big: Each of them has been to the quarters - or better - at Grand Slams. Kiefer, to my mind, doesn’t have the clarity and personal heft of a Grand Slam winner; he’s too tightly wound and locked up in himself. As my German colleague, freelancer Doris Henkel suggested, “Nicholas is always either too arrogant or too afraid of the other guy. He swings between those extremes.”
Kiefer also was thrown for a loop by Big Star Syndrome. In a way, you could almost feel for the guy. Early in his career, he was hailed as the next Boris Becker. Unfortunately, he believed the hype. A former coach of Kiefer's also told me that when Nicolas did break out (in 1999 he finished No. 6), he got sidetracked and knocked off mission by BSS: (What do you mean the penthouse suite isn’t available? Do you people know who I am???????)
Kiefer does everything well, but has no go-to weapon – the players who can win Grand Slams with that profile are few and far between (Mats Wilander, one of the all- time great guys, comes to mind).
Grosjean isn’t blessed with a weapon, either. But he has Hingis-like court sense, a marvelous arsenal, and excellent quickness. He’s like a magician, but he sometimes gets carried away by the process to the detriment of the result. The rap on him has been that he’s never wanted to do the hard work and embrace the discipline required to win majors.
Anyway, these two guys put on an amazing, 4:48 hour exhibition of probing, counter-punching and precise, inventive shotmaking – it was truly a player’s match. Unfortunately, it ended in tears.
Trailing 40-30 but 6-5 up in the fifth, Kiefer tossed his racket high in the air as Grosjean shanked an easy putaway into the net. The racquet eventually fell on Grosjean’s side of the court. Grosjean immediately protested to the unsympathetic umpire, then insisted on summoning Grand Slam supervisor Mike Morrissey – all to no avail. Morrissey refused to give the point to Grosjean, or to force the men to play a let. If you want all the gory details, try here.
I’m rekindling this controversy here because one of the amazing things about the brouhaha was the way Morrissey didn’t - or couldn’t – solve the dispute in the most obvious and reasonable way: by looking at the instant replay, which was being flashed on every television screen in the arena, over and over, as Grosjean and Morrissey locked horns.
So what is it going to take for tennis to wake up and realize that we entered a new age, technology-wise, about, oh, 10 years ago?
Given the flow of play that led to Kiefer’s racquet toss, I think it was humanly impossible for any official, no matter how alert, to have a supportable opinion of just when the racquet flew, Grosjean missed, etc. etc. It was a spontaneous thing that happened so fast that nobody could be expected to have an opinion on exactly what happened, and when.
On the other hand, the replay made it absurdly easy to see exactly what happened, and come to the conclusion that the point should have been replayed (that was the near universal opinion afterwards).
Ultimately, the point was not decisive – Grosjean held serve. But the incident reminded me of that awful, match-altering call in the Kim Clijsters vs. Justine Henin-Hardenne Australian Open final of a few years ago.
The details don’t matter now – the important part is that a bad call was made (against Clijsters), and, because of replay technology, pretty much everybody in the world could see it - except for the three people who had the most at stake: Clijsters, Henin-Hardenne and the chair umpire.
I’m not a technology freak. But you just can’t justify sticking with a system that produces decisions that are immediately and conclusively proven wrong – and then ignore that evidence. That’s an untenable position. It would have taken Morrissey all of 15 seconds to review the play on tape and then make the correct call - in favor of Grosjean.
Beyond that, Kiefer showed his true colors by refusing to do the right thing – surrender the point or offer to play a let, knowing that action was, if not necessarily premeditated, then stupid and inadvertently unsportsmanlike. Here’s how he justified himself in the presser afterwards:
So, Nick-o, if it wasn’t a “nice” thing to do, why exactly didn’t you just say, “Sorry Seb, I got carried away. Your point.”
Kiefer has been the most fined player at this tournament (to the tune of $5,000-plus), for everything from visible obscenity to taking too much time between points. He protested in the pressed that he and Grosjean were “friends”, but when the comment was passed on to the dejected French player, he deadpanned: “’Friend’ is a big word. . .”
Bottom line: most of the guys on the tour think Kiefer is a jerk. Let that cook for a while.