Leaving a Mark

For the last few years I’ve watched the French Open from the grounds at Roland Garros. This time, with my fellow Tennis.com writer Pete Bodo doing the honors in Paris, I’ll see the tournament through the filter of the television and the Internet back in New York. That doesn’t sound quite the same, and it isn’t. But it’s also not as limiting as it once was. These days, if you don’t want to stick with the Serena Williams blowout on NBC, or the John Isner death march on the Tennis Channel, you have other options online.

Still, it wasn’t easy keeping up with the events of this opening Monday, which included a four-hour French opera in Chatrier; a stern challenge to Rafael Nadal; a player snapping a photo of a ball mark in Lenglen; and, most stunning of all, a good run of play by American men and women. Here’s a Day 1 notebook from back home.

Branded

“Today was close to the match of Soderling.” That was Rafael Nadal’s post-match assessment of his often-tense four-set win over 59th-ranked Daniel Brands of Germany today. And that’s also how it looked. Brands, who at 6’5” is two inches taller than Soderling, played a similar game to the one the Swede used to upset Rafa here four years ago. It revolved around the same two unsubtle but effective shots: A hammer-throw serve, followed up by a bludgeoned forehand.

As with Soderling in 2009, when you see someone have success against Nadal on clay, you wonder why it can’t be done more often. The game plan isn’t all that complicated: See ball, try to pound ball for winner. And for short periods, the execution doesn’t look all that difficult, either. With Nadal standing many feet behind the baseline to return serve, Brands was free move forward and hit the ball from inside the baseline, high in his forehand strike zone.

“For short periods”: That’s the key. Few players have been able to make this seemingly simple attack work for very long. Partly, that’s because the player, forced to go for a clean winner on virtually every shot, begins to miss. And partly that’s because Nadal adjusts; as the second set progressed, he began to hit his returns deeper, and he saved his best one, a backhand pass down the line for a winner, for set point.

Nadal said he thought he controlled his nerves well on Monday, but the fact is that he was nervous—he hit some very tight, and uncharacteristically bad, shots in the first two sets. But what makes Nadal different from most—and different from his countryman David Ferrer specifically—is his ability to ignore those nerves and play boldly when he must. He did that, especially with his forehand, in the second-set tiebreaker today, and again when he served for the third set.

Rafa will play Martin Klizan of Slovakia next. Klizan, who has never played Nadal, is not a slouch. He’s ranked No. 35 and beat Jo-Wilfried Tsonga at the U.S. Open last year. And the fact that he's left-handed may force Nadal to go away from his favorite patterns.

Chatter Boxes

Alternating between U.S. channels on TV and European channels on the Internet allows for an easy comparison between British and American commentators. More noticeable than anything else is the amount of talking that’s done on each side of the Atlantic. The Euros are much more willing to go silent and let the points and players and images do the heavy lifting, while the Americans rush to fill any sonic void. I’ll always prefer the quieter style, which gives the players a chance to create their own rhythm and atmosphere, without the infusion of extra hot air. For some reason, U.S. commentators are either encouraged, or feel a compulsive need, to give us as much information as possible about every player, whether it’s relevant or interesting or not. Did you know that Tomas Berdych is fifth on tour in serve-return winning percentage so far this season? Now, if you watched his loss to Gael Monfils on NBC today, you do.

That said, I do like Darren Cahill and Brad Gilbert, both of whom are ex-players and sometime coaches, on ESPN. Gilbert lightens the mood, yet keeps the enthusiasm high. Three decades spent traveling the tour and the globe hasn’t dampened his love for the sport (and for knee-jerk predictions), or made his way of speaking and thinking any less cheerfully American. On Monday, I got a kick out of BG’s references to “Uncle Toni”—calling him “Toni Nadal” isn’t as much fun—and his description of Daniel Brands’ coaches, who were barking at Brands in what Gilbert called, “that German accent.”

But it was Cahill who came up with the best observation of the day. He pointed out how Nadal moves after he hits a serve. Rather than waiting to see where the ball goes, like most of us do, Rafa immediately begins moving, with rapid-fire tiny steps, to his right, to give himself a better chance at a forehand. I don’t think I had noticed that before.

To Hawk-Eye or Not to Hawk-Eye

That is increasingly the question on clay. Cahill and Gilbert debated it on Monday after a few close calls—not surprisingly, Cahill was against it, while Gilbert was for it. Elsewhere, Sergiy Stakhovsky decided to bring his own version of the replay system to the court when, not for the first time, he photographed a mark on what he thought was a bad call that had gone against him.

Should we bring the replay system to clay? I honestly don’t know. There are what I think of as the pros and cons of making the change:

Pros: Chair umpires can choose the wrong ball mark. By the end of a set, there can be marks very close to each other, and an umpire can also be influenced by the player on that side of the court, who will often indicate what he thinks is the correct spot. Francesca Schiavone was robbed of a point in the 2011 French Open final when the umpire picked the wrong mark (Schiavone lost the match), and this year Rafael Nadal lost a point in Madrid when an umpire couldn’t find a mark on a ball that had been nearly a foot out. Why should fans, who can see a Hawk-Eye replay, have a better idea of whether a ball was in or out than the people on the court?

Cons: Hawk-Eye isn’t 100 percent accurate; there’s a three-millimeter margin of error. A mark, in this sense, is a purer line-calling aid, even though it has to be interpreted by the human eye. The bigger problem is that bringing in Hawk-Eye doesn’t mean that ball marks are suddenly going to vanish. There will inevitably be discrepancies between the machine and the mark. This will cause arguments on court, and could undermine trust in Hawk-Eye on other surfaces. As Cahill says, the line-calling system on clay isn’t broken, so why try to fix it?

I will say only this for now: What we don’t need is an army of players taking their own photos of ball marks that allegedly prove them right.