In a continuing effort to cover all the bases for you at this year’s U.S. Open, I decided to spend the middle Saturday doing some in-depth analysis of how the tournament looks on my television. There were two very good reasons for this: I needed a break from the trip to Queens (I’ll be back out there for the rest of the tournament), and I was playing tennis today.
Regarding the second event, it took place at the opposite end of the tennis spectrum from the well-appointed National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows. I played in a dark and disused indoor bubble on the outskirts of Brooklyn. My partner and I were forced inside by early rain, but by the time we started hitting, the sun was back out and shining happily. We both wished it would start raining again.
Not surprisingly, the club’s 10 unswept courts were deserted. The three Russian guys working at the front desk were deep into a backgammon game. We felt honored that they said hello. I looked to see if the Open was on the flat-screen TV in the lounge, but it was showing what I guessed was Jurassic Park II. On the way to the courts, we walked past the one piece of signage in the club, a dented cardboard poster of Roger Federer from what looked like 2004. It was an ad for Wilson’s NCode line of racquets, which has since been phased out in favor of KFactor.
It was tropically humid in the bubble. There were no paper cups on site, so I went old school and drank water out of the tennis-ball can I’d just opened. I have to say, that plastic taste brought back good memories. After all of these various indignities, my partner John and I went out and played one of our best sets against each other, with lots of side-to-side rallies and points ended by winners. From the start of the warm-up, I felt like I couldn’t miss a serve if I tried, and I kept that feeling through the set. The serve is just like that: You either have it or you don’t, and there’s not much you can do about it. This isn’t true for any other shot, and I suppose that’s because players know they two chances to get it in. If we only got one serve, would we begin to develop a more effective—forcing but consistent—version of this all-important stroke?
The high-quality play was due in part to the indoor setting; something about the controlled atmosphere, no matter how dismal, makes hitting the sweet spot just a little easier. I think it’s the loud, echoed pop the ball makes when it comes off the racquet that gives me more confidence in my strokes—I sound like I’m playing better indoors. But there was another factor in today’s match. A KFactor—this summer I had been using the 95-inch version of Wilson’s signature stick, but I’d broken a string the last time I’d played and had pulled an old favorite, the slightly smaller and heavier 90-inch KFactor, out of my bag.
The 90-inch KFactor is the racquet that Roger Federer uses. Tennis.com recently ran a column counseling Federer to switch to the 95-inch head to give him a little more string to work with and possibly cut down on the shank mishits that come with his flicky, on the rise ground strokes. From my experience today, I would tell Rog to stick with the stick he’s got.
Federer and I play in a very, very similar vein—by which I mean, we both put topspin on the ball. I can’t speak for him, but I think the 90 is the superior racquet. It’s a little deader, which is a good thing: You can feel the ball off the strings better, and it allows you to generate pace while it takes care of control. Unlike with the 95, the ball rarely sails on me from the baseline. Like Federer, I’m a longtime Wilson consumer. My favorite racquet is still the 85-inch Pro Staff from the mid-80s that Pete Sampras popularized; Federer used Sampras’ ProStaff during his early years on tour. In one of his cockier moments after he became No. 1, Federer smiled and said that he had once played with Sampras’ racquet, but now Sampras—who wields a KFactor these days—played with his.
The 90 is an acquired taste. You’ve got to do the work. But it gives a solid thwack to my serve and overhead; I can swing out on topspin forehands; and it puts some stick behind my defensive shots. It’s a little tough to handle around the net, but by the end of the set I was hitting my approach shots with enough confident abandon that it didn’t matter.
It all started and ended with the serve, proof again, if anyone needed it, of the overwhelming importance of the stroke. I never faced a break point or felt that I could be broken. But because of that, I was a little too loose on my opponent’s service games. I tried to break, of course, but I couldn’t summon much urgency and ended up winning the set in a tiebreaker. Who does this attitude remind you of? I may have been playing with the racquet of Roger Federer, but today, in the least likely place imaginable, I got an hour-long taste of what it was like to feel like Pete Sampras. It feels good.
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Open TV review soon