Is commentating on tennis more difficult than it sounds? From the sportswriter's point of view, all a TV announcer is asked to do is watch a match and say what comes to mind. No need to pick and choose and revise thoughts. No need to fit them into sentences that make sense one after the other. No need to come to some kind of conclusion that no one in the world has ever thought before. The writer must craft while the commentator is free to spout.
But there’s a trade-off involved, and it’s one that most of us ink-stained scribblers can live with. If we put in more mental labor to get our jobs done, the announcer is forced to live with having the first thing that comes to his mind travel out to millions of television screens and be heard in millions of living rooms. As a writer who has made a few off-the-cuff podcast pronouncements in recent months, I can say that this is not easy, or, to my mind, particularly satisfying. In the millisecond you’re given to come up with a full-scale analysis of a player or an upcoming match, your mind, after plucking a thought out of mid-air and careening forward from there, will often end up fitting that thought inside a cliché that you’ve heard a thousand times in the past—there’s no chance to rewrite what you said or think more deeply. Even worse, you may be forced to cave in and say something so limp it wasn’t even worth mentioning in the first place. No one would ever be bothered to write “Murray is looking good." But to my frustration, that’s the kind of thing I hear coming out of my mouth.
Like me, when they’re pressed for time, ESPN’s Australian Open commentators fall back on the tried and true, on the stock tennis phrase. If you tuned into any of the network’s marathon broadcasts from Melbourne over the last eight days, you've undoubtedly heard a few. You may have watched so much tennis that you tune it out when Brad Gilbert or Mary Joe Fernandez says that "the serve is going to be key." Or you may cover your ears and start screaming. But just because something is a cliché doesn’t mean it isn’t true. How many of these observations are valid? As someone who watched a lot of tennis this weekend and played a little of it as well, I'll do my best to find out.
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“He wants to win it right here."
Chris Fowler spoke these words during the final game of the fourth-round match between Andy Roddick and Fernando Gonzalez. His point was that Roddick was trying hard to break Gonzo’s serve rather than saving his energy to finish it on his own serve.
From my perspective as a rec player, this comment is absurdly obvious. Anyone who has ever played a match just wants to get it over with at the first possible moment; no one would ever choose to win it later. Even when you’re far ahead, the specter of your opponent winning a game or two and gaining momentum always looms in a tennis player’s head.
The next day I watched as Nikolay Davydenko went up 5-2 in the fifth set on Fernando Verdasco, then lost three quick points in a row on Verdasco’s serve. Brad Gilbert correctly said that the Russian was saving his energy so he could close it out on his own serve. At the pro level, anyway, Fowler’s remark was not as pointless as I first thought. Few of us weekend warriors are skilled or confident enough to take a game off and still feel secure that we can hold our serves to finish a match. But ATP pros, who hold with far more regularity than we do, can take the calculated risk that their serve will give them the decisive edge, and that they shouldn’t waste their energy trying to do something as difficult as breaking their opponent.
“I’d like to see player X be more aggressive.”
To a commentator, this is the tennis player’s cure-all: If at first you don’t succeed, go on the attack. How many times has a pro been advised to become less aggressive? I think I can count them on one hand.
You can understand why. The No. 1 players in the world on both tours, Roger Federer and Serena Williams, play attacking tennis. And matches at the highest level of the sport are typically won be the more proactive player, the person who can dictate the rallies. Then again, the No. 2 men’s player, Rafael Nadal, is a defensive specialist, as is No. 5 Andy Murray. Caroline Wozniacki reached the final of the U.S. Open on the strength of her consistency and retrieving skills.
By “attacking,” the commentator also means coming to the net more often, which is nice in theory, as long as the player can hit a volley. Until he improves around the net, though, I’d still say Novak Djokovic, who is trying to get up there more these days, has a better shot of winning from the baseline. As a long-term goal, it’s a valid point. It’s a crime that Andy Murray hasn’t figured out a way to use his talents around the net, and Verdasco will always be held back by the fact that he’s uncomfortable finishing points up there. But over the course of a tournament or even a season, it seems more reasonable to advise a player to focus on executing the game they play best, even if it means hitting moonballs from 20 feet behind the baseline. Change is best when it’s subtle, and when it fits into a player’s established style. Rafael Nadal normally stands 12 feet behind the baseline to return serve; against Ivo Karlovic he varied his position and often stood back half that distance. He won in four and never let Dr. Ace into a tiebreaker.
“It’s going to come down to who wants it more.”
These were the words of Gilbert late in the match between Davydenko and Verdasco. It sounds like a stone-cold cliché on the surface, but there was a context to it. The two players had just traded ugly service breaks, and Gilbert had commented that there was no rhythm to the match. His point was that neither guy was in good form, so it was going to be a battle of will rather than skill.
Fair enough, except for one thing: How do you measure and compare the desire of two players? Yes, there are moments when a player wants a match more than the other guy. This happens most often in appearance-fee-laden events, or late in the season, maybe when one guy has clinched a spot in the year-end championships and the other guy is fighting to get in. But in a fourth-round match at a Slam, between two guys who have never won one before? It’s safe to say they both wanted it enough to give everything they had to win it.
Desire itself isn’t the point. What matters is how it manifests itself—how does a player control it, direct it? Does he use his desire, or does he let it use him and overwhelm him?
“Player X has nothing to lose.”
This was said of James Blake in the run-up to his match with Juan Martin del Potro. And it was true at the start: Blake could swing away against the higher-seeded player and know he wasn't expected to win. But it was only true until Blake grabbed a lead—then he would have something he could lose. Sure enough, he went up two sets to one and ended up losing in five.
In that sense, the player with nothing to lose is really just a player who is hoping to have a lot to lose at some point. If the underdog earns a lead, there's more pressure on him to hold it and close out the upset than there is on a higher-ranked player who's trying to close out a routine win. The phrase "nothing to lose" needs to be retired. There’s always something to lose in a tennis match.
“That double fault was caused by his opponent’s strong return.”
This would seem to be logical, and maybe it does happen like this at the pro level. But in the 30 years I’ve played, I’ve never double-faulted because I was worried that my opponent would blast his return by me. If anything, this knowledge has forced me to sharpen my second serve. Many double-faults are caused not by a server swinging too hard or going for too much, but by a server not swinging hard enough to bring the ball down into the court with topspin. The pros may react differently, but I hit my best second serves when I’m aiming into corners and trying to put a lot of bite on my kick. When I double fault, it’s because I’m nervous about the score, about getting broken; I get tentative and try to guide the ball in.
“I know it’s not his game, but Verdasco can be successful slicing the ball down the middle to Davydenko.”
This was Gilbert, and he was right on about Davydenko’s weakness—the Russian is better when he has an angle to work with and is running side to side. Verdasco seemed to hear BG in the booth, because he began floating soft backhand slices down the middle, the opposite of his usual blast-or-be-blasted style. The tactic succeeded in bothering Davydenko and messing with his rhythm.
But tennis also has a law of unintended consequences, and it held true in the fifth set here. That’s when both Cliff Drysdale (“Lord Drysdale” in his booth partner’s words) and Gilbert both noted that Davydenko had found a winning formula by moving forward. How had the baseliner managed to do this? In part because Verdasco had drawn him forward with those floating slices.
“Almagro looks so much more composed than Tsonga.”
This was the conclusion of both Drysdale and Darren Cahill in the fifth set of the classic spectacle of shot-making between the Spaniard and the Frenchman. Both announcers thought this boded well for Almagro, because he wasn’t as agitated as Tsonga. But I had the opposite feeling. It seemed to me that Almagro, the lower-ranked player and the guy who had trailed throughout the match, wasn’t as desperate to win as his opponent, and that this would hurt him. Like Almagro yesterday, I can play well when I’m relaxed and have no expectations. But if I feel like I must win a match, I may be more erratic and agitated, but I’m also more likely to find a way to beat the other guy—it may not be pretty, but desperation does get the job done. It worked for Tsonga.
“That’s nice to see.”
This was Cahill describing the smiles that Tsonga and Almagro shared as their match wound to its rousing conclusion. Almagro had hit a dipping pass that Tsonga had blindly picked off his shoe-tops and dumped over the net for a perfect—and lucky—drop volley winner. Almagro flashed a “you gotta be kidding me” grin without directly looking at Tsonga. The Frenchman smiled as well, also without looking directly at his opponent. Then both of them turned toward each other. Almagro’s “You gotta be kidding me” grin met Tsonga’s “You’re right, I gotta be kidding you” grin. High-pressure Grand Slam match or not, they almost broke out laughing. It was a moment of the slyest bonhomie.
There was no arguing with the commentator on this one. That was nice to see.