by Pete Bodo
Yesterday, I spent a pleasant afternoon at the qualifying event for the US Open. Call me perverse, but this event has become one of my favorites of the year. That you can just walk in, free, is quite amazing in this day and age (even though that tends not to be an issue for a pro freeloader like me).
And with many of the concessions open and an army of electricians and other workmen tinkering with everything from the Jumbotron in the food court to the makeship ESPN open-air studio, there's a gratifying sense of both activity and an exciting undercurrent of imminence. You know something big and maybe even special is going to be happening here soon. It's a little like being on an elaborate set during a movie shoot. That's the background against which all the grunting and grinding takes place, and the cries of anguish or joy (sometimes alternating from the same larynx) pierce the thick, moist August air.
It can be be brutal out in the midday sun in Queens at this time of year, but the upside is that by around 4 pm, the light is turning molten and the sun no longer bores through your shirt or hat. As the day deepens, a pleasant softness descends on the United States Tennis Association Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, known here mostly as the acronym of acronyms, the USTABJKNTC. Late in the day, the colors that were bleached out by the harsh sunlight just hours earlier are fully saturated and everyone on site catches a second wind and feels more comfortable idling away the day, watching tennis of the highest quality.
Qualifying attracts an interesting group of fans, starting with the real tennis aficionados. Half a dozen people said "Hi" and introduced themselves as TennisWorld readers while I walked around, and none of them were familiar to me as comment posters. I also bumped into a few more familiar and/or involved people of the Twibe, including Susan Kim (with her husband, Alex) and - this will bring a smile to many of your lips - Snoo Foo.
My main order of business was watching Nicole Vaidisova play Yung-Jan Chan, of Taipei. I don't want to write too much about this one, because I'm working on something substantial relating to Vaidisova for Tennismagazine, but I'll say this much: Vaidisova, who lost the first set because she played an atrocious tiebreaker, won the second set, and promptly fell behind 0-4 in the third, reminded me of a Partner B in a fairly common domestic situation that works like this:
Partner A asks a simple question in a normal, clear voice.
Partner B replies, "What?"
Partner A says (or in the case of most happily married couples, merely thinks): What, "What?", are you deaf? You're a million mile away!
In this match, Chan was asking the questions and Vaidisova was answering, What?" You can get away with that on the sofa or the seat of the truck, but it doesn't usually work out too well for the spacey one on a tennis court. Vaidisova's four-game blackout cost her the match; you can't play winning tennis, even in a qualifying event, when mentally a million miles away and in most cases don't even know that's where you are.
I know from experience that this kind of thing happens to many serious recreational players, too, usually from sheer overplaying. It's a form of mental burn-out, which can be but isn't necessarily curable. The only reason you don't see it more often on the pro tour is because nobody in the grip of it lasts long enough for you to see it happening. I think this is, partly, what happened to Marcelo Rios, as well as to Bjorn Borg, who was in the grip of the "What?" monster during his brief, aborted comeback (some of you will remember that he was actually whistling to himself during some matches). And let's not forget Marat Safin, who's been asking, "What?" for a long time now.
Anyway, after Vaidisova lost, I took a little tour of the grounds - where fewer than half of the 64 matches scheduled for the day had been played. Free entry ensures a diverse crowd, an odd mixture of dedicated students of the game in their age-softened polo shirts and scuffed tennis shoes, teen-agers who may or may not care much about tennis, but like ogling their attractive and only slightly-older if considerably more accomplishwed peers, local coaches with their prized students, and young families. If you have any doubt about whether or not players can (instead of merely "want to") play with people wandering about all around them, including in the bleachers, you ought to see them block out the distractions during qualifying.
During the Chang-Vaidisova tiebreaker, for example, a somewhat unkept but respectable woman strolled in, right along the little fence alongside the sideline. There was a kid of about 10 with her. The woman plopped down and the kid leaned against the fence, nose over the edge, just behind the Chang's chair. "Tommy," the mother suddenly asked. "Where's Jack?"
The kid turned and shrugged, like maybe it wasn't such a bad thing that his pain-in-the-butt kid brother had gotten lost somewhere between the Willets Point subway stop and Court 4 at the USTABJKNTC.
Panicked, the mother jumped to her feet, grabbed Tommy, and went off to find Jack.
Neither player seemed to notice.
The emblem of qualifying is the backwards-worn baseball cap (is there a better symbol for the gritty, borderline desperate nature of the enterprise?), and the sound track is grunt. The aspiring main-draw players seem to need to grunt for the same reason as most successful pros: the grunt is both a signal of self-affirmation and a declaration of effort. The qualifying players grunt extra-loud because they, by definition, are the ones most achingly in need of self-affirmation. As statements go, a grunt is an easier one to make than is a cross-court backhand pass at game-point down. At times, I wanted to grab one of these kids by the scruff of the neck and, marshaling my most authoritative tone, exclaim: Roger Federer don't grunt!
But there's another, more attractive sound, at qualifying. It's the almost painful Splat! of a tennis ball being absolutely, positively crushed. Now, that's music to our ears, right? And I'm not talking about the pleasant pock! (I think John McPhee described it as the sound of champagne corks popping, and I can't do better than that) of a ball hit nicely, right on the sweet spot. I'm talking about the big, fierce, perfectly timed cut that wipes the smiley-face off your typical happily traveling tennis ball and leaves the poor little thing so caved in that the rubber skin inside the ball comes perilously close to touching itself across the inside diameter of the ball.
Now that's tennis, folks: Splat! Perfection. Any Questions?
Here and there throughout the grounds you can often see a qualifier doing some oddball exercise under the watchful eye of an inevitably grave-looking coach. I saw one girl doing kind of a chicken-dance (the one made famous by the San Francisco 49ers defensive back, Merton Hanks - YouTube, anyone?), and another doing a painful-looking torso-twisting exercise. I suspect coaches make up half this stuff, just because they reckon it at least looks different and cutting edge in a sports-science way. As we all know, in tennis perception is reality, so if you believe your coach is some kind of genius, chances are you'll also be able to make that forehand go Splat!
One player who might know whereof I speak is Zuzana Kucova, a young Slovak who notched up a win over Alexandra Panova, 6-4 in the third. I happened to stop by Court 14 in my wanderings, and stood just behind Kucova's coach, who was seated in the corner of the aluminum bleachers closest to the north baseline, His protege was down a set, but fighting gamely; in fact, the two baseliners seemed to me so evenly matched that I could easily imagine a third-set tiebreaker ending 10,234/10,232 - or with a priest rushing on the court to adminster last rites to both girls before the match was decided.
Kucova's coach kept up a running commentary through most of the points when his charge was nearby: Yeah, use her speed. . . Watch the ball. . . Get her out of balance . . . I don't know if this kind of thing qualifies as coaching, or merely cheerleading; the line between the two is more blurred than either the bureaucrats or anti-coaching advocates are likely to admit.
Besides, what could possibly be more unnerving and/or distracting for a player than having a coach shouting or signaling instructions during the flow of play. Oh, I know it's been done; and often, small adjustments can make a huge difference (as when Pete Sampras's former coach, the late Tim Gullikson, simply told Pete to take a lefty's serve from four or five feet further over to the backhand side. That's why guys like Gullikson get the big money.). But coaching can often confuse as much as it clarifies, and if you're still skeptical, figure out how many pearls of wisdom you've plucked up off the hard court during one of those telecasts featuring that absurd WTA on-court coaching experiment?
At one point, Kucova won a point and walked toward her coach.
"Breathe, breathe," he called in a hoarse stage whisper.
The hefty little blonde immediately began to inhale and exhale, like a flight attendant demonstrating the use of the oxygen mask. Then she turned away from her coach and stopped breathing again. Well, almost. She had enough air to bang her way to the second round of qualifying, anyway.
!81490692 I also went to check out Jerzy Janowicz, a Polish youth who's said to be the "next Ivo Karlovic." For those of you who may not know, the current Ivo Karlovic is the 6-10 (2.08m) Croatian whose gigantic serve puts the fear of Godot in one and all. John Lloyd, the the former player, husband of Chris Evert, and British broadcaster, was ducking out of the bleachers just as I arrived. "What are you doing here," I asked.
"Davis Cup," replied Lloyd, who captains the UK squad. "We have Poland next. I wanted to see this kid."
"What do you think?"
"He's got amazing power, he really is like Karlovic. That serve is quite the weapon. But he's. . . raw. Very raw. He was down 5-6 in the first set and serving to stay in it and he missed his first serve six consecutive times. But when his first goes in, it's dangerous."
I watched Janowicz for a bit and liked what I saw, if not for entirely aesthetic or technical reasons. The kid is lean as a whippet, loose-limbed, and he's got a sharp, wolf-like face. When he hit a double-fault, he bellowed deeply, as befitting a goliath. You could hear his guttaral complaint five courts distant. His expression ranged from surly to annoyed, and I liked the way he sometimes just stepped up to the line and let 'er go, as if to say, Here you go, let's see what you can do with this one!
Janowicz's opponent, a nice Italian player named Andrea Stoppini, fought the good fight but he went down, three-in-the-third. This Janowicz is going to be fun to watch in the years to come. The powderkegs always are.
My last stop for the day was to check out Xavier Malisse, who was in a knock-down, drag-out with the no. 2 seed, Argentina's Horacio Zeballos. Malisse lost the first set, 5-7, and it was tight in the second when it got there. I had trouble watching, though, because of the get-up Malisse was wearing. He still has that samurai topknot, but his shorts and shirt were black, with conspicous chartreuse trim snaked all over it. And the shirt was embroidered (or something) above his left breast with glittering silver sequins in a shape something like a claw. The trim seemed quite a distraction, coruscating and sparkling, but Zeballos made no complaint. He just kept hammering those backhands and forehands, broke Malisse's will, and won an easy third set, 6-1.
Sometimes, there's nothing even a samurai in sequins can do if you can make the ball go splat!