Mice, Men and Juan Monaco

Howdy. Hope you all had a great three-day weekend. I've enjoyed Lisa McDermott's posts for Memphis, and there will be more coming. I'm doing another ESPN live chat tomorrow, so please drop by (details here when they're posted). I'm off on a family vacation next week, but more about that tomorrow in our OT post.

I was interested to read your comments and the news reports about the way the SAP Open in San Jose made its surface much faster this year, which partly explains why Ivo Karlovic made the final (he lost to the defending champ, Andy Murray). The theory was that San Jose quickened up the carpet in order to give Andy Roddick an edge. The faster surface inarguably benefited Roddick, but as the final round result once against demonstrated, the best laid plans of mice and men often go awry.

And this is particularly useful to keep in mind when you're talking about the surfaces on which tennis is played. There isn't a more complicated, counter-intuitive, nuance-ridden issue than the intersection of surface speed and playing style.

Let's start at the beginning: For every action, there is a reaction. So if a fast court helps Andy Roddick hit more aces (and I'm just using him as a very conspicuous example) it also takes away some reaction time when he's returning -  as well as giving any given opponent more service oomph and options as well. This means that if a player serves much better than he returns, the advantage to his serve may be more wiped out by his increased disadvantage as returner. And if a server like Roddick, who's a good but not great returner, is having an off day, or even if he just gets unlucky at the wrong time in a match, he's in deep doo-doo.

So San Jose changed the surface so that Roddick could win, and Murray beat Karlovic in the final. Now that's tennis at its best. I  like what San Jose did because I like variety in tennis. I have no problem with having a few tournaments every year in which a Karlovic - or, to embrace the other extreme, a Juan Monaco - can shine. Besides, nothing -but nothing - is more boring than aimless rally tennis of the kind that so often happens on clay, or slow hard courts. Last year (or was it in 2005?) I floated a "modest proposal" (you've gotta know your Swift as well as your Steinbeck if you want to stay with the pace car at TW!) suggesting clay-court events ought to borrow a page from college basketball and have the equivalent of a "possession arrow." That is, when a rally hits, say, 20 strokes, blow a whistle and award the point to one or the other player on an alternating basis.

This line of reasoning may strike some of you as "anti-clay" or "anti-rally." It most certainly is the latter. The rally is the equivalent of descriptive prose. A little of it goes a long way, but the real heart of good writing is narrative drive (sometimes, the two are beautifully interwoven, and narrative drive doesn't mean mindless, meaningless and improbable action a la serial prose mangler, Dan Brown). So it is with tennis. Great matches are purposeful matches, not contests to determine which guy (or woman) can win half-a-dozen more rallies than the other.

Suspicious of this analysis, are you? It's interesting, just the other day in a planning meeting at Tennis we got to talking about the role lack of training on clay may have in the ongoing decline of the U.S. game. The conventional wisdom suggests that playing on clay will create more "complete" players, whose game will travel from surface-to-surface more effectively. The conventional wisdom suggests that if you learn the game on clay, you will be a real factor on the increasingly important European clay-court circuit. One contingent that buys into the conventional wisdom is especially vocal about clay being the ultimate key to player development. I believe the Aussie division of that contingent recently persuaded Tennis Australia that clay should be the basic surface on which players are developed.

I think the conventional logic has many, many holes in it, and that the great, determining factor in player development is individual skill and proclivity. It simply towers over everything else. I don't know how much quantifiable evidence really exists suggesting that developing a game on clay creates better all-around players, although it certainly has created some. Let me give you exhibit A: Michael Chang, Tomas Muster, Sergei Bruguera, Rafael Nadal, Albert Costa, Gaston Gaudio, Gustavo Kuerten - all French Open champions who won no major but Roland Garros. Now contrast them with the titans of the game: among them Bjorn Borg, Roger Federer, Andre Agassi, Jim Courier, Ivan Lendl, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, Jimmy Connors, Mats Wilander, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras.

Sure, some of the latter group learned the game on clay, but that's just the point: their individual skills - including the all-important mental ones - transcended both the advantages - and pitfalls - of learning the game on clay. Perhaps they transcended the clay-based sensibility. Now consider this: Keurten, one of the better among the one-trick clay ponies, developed his game on courts that were closer to outdoor asphalt than clay. And one of the most frequently cited reasons for the success of the group known as the Spanish Armada is the fact that they spent a lot of time training as youngsters on hard courts.

I don't know, it just seems to me the major crop harvested when you make sweeping generalizations about surface is asterisks, qualifications, and footnotes. I'm pretty sure that early training on clay is probably better for a child's body (but even there, I'm unaware of any data suggesting a correlation between career longevity and preferred surface). By the same token, a heavy dose of early training on clay also appears conducive to creating the dreaded "clay-court specialist" (Alberto Berasetegui, anyone?). But isn't that, too, an issue that may be linked just as if not more closely to individual style and natural, personal inclinations?

Or let me put it this way: if Federer and Bruguera both "grew up" on clay, and if doing so has universal, baseline up-side, how the hail did they end up playing such radically different games, and achieve such spectacularly different results?

One thing you can say with some certainly is that many, many players who do awfully well on clay don't do jack on anything else - and vica versa. So perhaps developing your game on clay has far greater disadvantages than the conventional wisdom suggests, which some players manage to overcome. Whose record would you rather have, McEnroe's or Muster's? The more I think about this, the more it seems that emphasizing development on clay makes far less sense than including training on clay in a larger, style-based approach - keeping in mind that style at some level is a gloriously singular, individualistic and unpredictable matter. This suggests that maybe the best thing to do is find a youngster's most natural game, and develop him or her on the surface most likely to develop his strengths.

Let's look one more surface-related issue. If fast court, serve-based tennis is such an affront to the game, why does Wimbledon have - by a good bit - a more reliable, seemingly accurate roll of champions?  It has fewer "One Slam Wonder" champions than any other event with the possible exception of the U.S. Open (the next "fastest" of the majors). The number of guys who have won Roland Garros but don't even show up on the Wimbledon radar is amazing; yet how many of the  multiple Wimbledon champions have comparably lousy RG numbers? The bottom line here seems to be that great players are great on every surface (so there's no beef, right?), while Roland Garros routinely produces champions who were bred on clay but consistently fall short of greatness. So why, in some quarters, is developing the game on clay, or being a great clay-court player considered so important?

I recently argued here that the serve should play a major role in tennis, and any surface that overly devalues it diminishes rather than enhances the game. For our purposes here I'd add that if the value of the serve were too great, I wouldn't feel that way at all. But it isn't. That's the beauty of the serve and the genius of the game. The serve functions as tennis's conversation starter. A poor serve or a surface that neutralizes the value of a good serve is the equivalent of starting a conversation with, Gee, what do you think of this weather? instead of, So tell me, what would be the title of your biography?