State of the Provinces

By TW Contributing Editor, Ed McGrogan

A capacity crowd packed Centre Court on Tuesday evening to watch Canada's last hope, Frank Dancevic, try to upset the world No. 3, Novak Djokovic.  The environment was especially lively for a second round match, but Canadian tennis pros are rarely showcased in a big tournament, so this was a special occasion.

The Canadian Open (Rogers Cup) is the third oldest men's tournament in the world, after Wimbledon and the U.S. Open.  But since the event truly went "open" in 1970, only three Canucks have ever reached the quarterfinals, and none has advanced farther.  Dancevic is one of them, doing so last year in Montreal.

Frank (the Tank, as was chanted by some fans) played about as well as he could have early on, matching Djokovic’s renowned shot making with effective blasts of his own.  Dancevic played confidently and fearlessly, and for the first eight games of the match, I saw no discernable difference between the two.  The only thing Frank could have improved upon was his choice of colours – wear some more red!

Still, besting a Grand Slam champion is a tough ask, as Dancevic discovered against Rafael Nadal last year.  When players of this caliber find an opening, the point, and likely the match, is over.  That's what happened Tuesday night, as Djokovic broke Dancevic three times, including in the final game of the match.  Djokovic himself had just been broken in the prior game, but he quickly returned the favor.  The last Canadian was eliminated from the Canadian Open.

Even in defeat, this was an inspiring performance from Dancevic.  But little else is inspiring about Canadian tennis.  The landscape is bleak - Dancevic is the only player ranked in the Top 100, and his closest countrymen, Frederic Niemeyer and Peter Polansky, languish in the 201-300 category.  Neither impressed me much this week: Niemeyer has huge serves but not much else, and Polansky, though still a young project, seemed content to loop groundstrokes back without much purpose behind them.  Their well-rounded opponents, Tommy Robredo and Jesse Levine (respectively), had a field day with them in the first round.

After all the smoke had cleared, something didn’t click.  This tournament has such a rich history and a very dedicated, knowledgeable fan base.  Where are the homegrown players to complement them?  I asked Dancevic after his match.

“Well, I think that Canadian tennis was struggling a little bit in the last, you know, five to ten or so years.  We’ve got a whole new development restructured.  In the last couple years we got a new president.  Michael Downey came in a few years back.  He’s really brought in some experts in from all over and made an awesome structure for junior tennis.

I think that moving on in the future we’re going to see a lot more Top 100 players.  It’s a little disappointing that I’m the only one now, but I think in the near future we’re going to have quite a few more.”

Frank’s mention of a “whole new development” seemed to confirm a suspicion I had: At the professional level, the tennis culture in Canada may not be a very intense one.  Consider that Niemeyer now has a miserable 1-11 record in matches here – but is still receiving annual wild cards.  Weren’t there any better options available?

Frederic, a Montreal native, was asked about the pressures of playing in front of the home crowd.  His response didn't strike me as very forceful:

“Not really pressure.  I don’t feel the pressure, I just – yeah, of course maybe I want to do better.  Yeah, so it’s a little pressure.  But also it’s such – I’m away all the time during the year, and then I play a tournament in my hometown and it’s fun and it’s kind of – I feel that sometime I enjoy the tournament too much that just focusing on it.”

When the bar isn’t set high from the inside, expectations from fans on the outside are low as well.  It's a vicious cycle.  Polansky commented on this after his loss to Levine:

“There’s not too much pressure playing in this tournament.  It’s a really big event so there’s not too much – they don’t expect you to win the tournament or sometimes even get past the first round.”

In all fairness, Polansky and Niemeyer are playing with house money, since they are rarely entered in tournaments of this stature.  But their words revealed plenty to me.  It seems that for some time now, professional tennis has grown stagnant up north.  Last week, Aleksandra Wosniak became the first Canadian to win a WTA title in 20 years; the last male winner was Greg Rusedski in 1995, back when he played for the maple leaf.

But maybe Canadian tennis is at a crossroads, as Dancevic suggests.  I hope so, because Canada has the facilities and the fans to support and grow the game.  All it takes is one player, like Mike Weir in golf, to change the perception of the sport - and possibly make it thrive.  In this sport-mad country, that could spell great things for Tennis Canada.

[Is Dancevic that player?  I don’t think so.  He hits similar to Robredo, and I think that’s his ceiling.  But even that may be optimistic.  Asad Raza hit it on the head, as he often does: “I just think Dancevic doesn't have a big enough weapon to differentiate himself from the other top fifty guys.”]

I watched the Dancevic/Djokovic match with Mike McIntyre, a Guelph native who blogs on protennisfan.com in his spare time (he works in insurance by day – sounds like someone I know). We got talking about the plight of Canadian tennis when he gave me this gem. Maybe the simplest answer is the best one of all:

“Up here, it’s hockey twelve months a year.  Parents try to live the dream and get their kids into the NHL.  They don’t have time in the summer for a second sport.”