Howdy. It was a rainy weekend in game-rich Andes, where little son Luke and I mostly hunkered down with Thomas the Tank Engine DVDs. On Saturday morning, we watched a few big tom turkeys strut and gobble in the hay meadow right below the house despite the rain. They’re enormous birds; they look like Thanksgiving Day floats, the way they kind of bob around in front of the hens they hope to impress (it’s mating season), all blown-up with their tails fanned out. The head of a gobbling Tom is bright blue and white, in stark contrast to its vivid red wattles. There’s something outrageous – and outrageously prehistoric – about these birds.
I also took Luke for his weekly swim lesson at the local college, in nearby Delhi (part of the SUNY system). I met a guy there, Andres. He’s Peruvian, and he works at the local dairy plant where a lot of the milk produced in our area gets processed into other products, like cheese. Turns out Andres is a total tennis freak (something I’m not accustomed in my redneck world) – gets The Tennis Channel and all! I love it when I meet tennis nuts who are not out of the urban-suburban-country club scene; it helps validate the sport in my eyes.
BTW, one of my great regrets is that I never tried to take Samuel Beckett, the Noble Prize winning playwright (Waiting for Godot)and novelist out to Roland Garros during the last years of his life, when he was confined to a Parisian nursing home. He apparently loved watching tennis from Roland Garros on the TV. I figure that was because the absurdist in him responded well to watching two grinders play one of those endless French Open matches: Jose Higueras vs. Guillermo Vilas? Felix Mantilla vs. Tomas Muster? Sergi Burguera vs. Anyone?
Remember that famous repetition out of, what was it, Krapp’s Last Tape (I need somebody smart to help me here), I can’t go on. I must go on. I can’t go on. I will go on. . .
Anyway, Andres has two kids, Mateo and Diego, who were swimming with Luke. They’re going to come over for a tractor ride and hot dogs and then maybe Andres and I can catch a little of the Italian Open – or whatever else is on at the time – on the Tennis Channel (which I now get, even in the country!).
So I needed to decompress and clear my head, get away from the game a little. Now that I’m back my first order of business is to hat tip TennisWorld Spiritual Advisor Miguel “Mikey” Seabra for upping the ante on his offer of free tickets to the Estoril tournament, which takes place next week – see the post below, “Estoril.”
In the comments, you may have read, Mikey has expanded his original, already generous offer. Get this:
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Driving my car on my way home, I was thinking of adding something extra to the contest -- to put a premium on the quality of your contributions. I'm going out on a limb here (because my idea will require confirmation from the organization), but I'm stepping forward to say that if one of the foreign fans -- that means, non-portuguese -- among the winners is willing to pay for the traveling and actually come here out of passion for the game, I'll make it doubly worth it. I'm talking about a TennisWorld VIP package that would include tickets for more days and backstage access (eventually press conferences, players lounge, VIP lounge). I'll discuss the matter with Pete and the Estoril Open organizers. Keep on posting those +5/-5 lists!
Also, the first one to tell me who's the guy (a seasoned tour pro) serving in the photo (the one accompanying the Estoril post) will get a special prize. But you have to participate in the contest and post that list...
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I have one word for you non-Portugese TW readers: Priceline.com!
Beyond that, the two big stories those weekend were Rafael Nadal’s win over The Mighty Fed and the Fed Cup (I’m doing a separate post on FC tomorrow).
I can’t imagine anyone was surprised by Nadal’s big win in what is officially the kick-off event of the glorious, European, clay-court season. I have to admit that I play devil’s advocate a little at this time of year; I kind of enjoy bashing the clay-court game, I’m not even sure why. Wait, I do know why. The passion of the dirt aficionados bugs me; they’re surface KADs.
Nowadays, though, the clay game is played at an extremely high level; the ultra-defensive, negative tennis brought to its apotheosis by Bruguera just won’t do the trick – not when you’ve got fleet, aggressive baseliners like Nadal, or versatile ones like Federer, afoot. Oh, there are still meaningless rallying contests of the kind only a Beckett could love (and plenty of them, in all honesty), but the guys who go deep in the events tend to have fetching games (think Carlos Moya, Gaston Gaudio, even doperboy Guillermo Coria).
We have a lot of red ground to cover before I travel to Roland Garros, with one potentially huge accomplishment in the offing: Nadal breaking Vilas’s all-time clay-court winning streak of 53 matches (Bjorn Borg is No. 2 on that list, with 46; Nadal presently is at 42). This would be an extraordinary achievement, given the difference in the way the game is played today. BTW, Bud Collins’s Modern Encyclopedia of tennis has the clay winning streak at 57; I presume Bud counted an exhibition in the tally, and I'll email him to clear this up.
Vilas has pretty much been a buddy of mine for a long time (I don’t go to AC/DC concerts in central Florida with just anyone!), but it’s a measure of how different the game was that he could build a clay-court streak that even Borg – who lost just twomatches at Roland Garros in his entire career – couldn’t surpass.
Vilas came up with a tennis-on-clay model that held up incredibly well very recently, relying on just three components: triathlete-grade fitness, consistency, and topspin. For most of his career, that was good enough - right out of the gate – to keep him from losing on clay to the majority of players in any given draw. This was the guy Guillermo Coria was named after, for gosh sakes.
By contrast, it’s inaccurate to cast Nadal as a grinder, a la Vilas or Muster. He’ll grind if you think you can beat him at grinding, and he’ll grind you into the grind – er, ground – in the process. But that’s not really where his heart lies. He doesn’t want to arm wrestle, he wants to trade punches. He doesn’t want to outlast you, he wants to knock you out. He'll do it any way you like (this is like a choice of death by hanging or by lethal injection) - it's your choice.
This may sound like an insult to the old guard, but I don't think it is. Times change, and so does the game.
The big difference, I suppose, is the triumph of something I used to call the New World Game style of tennis.
One of the most dramatic and impactful turns in tennis has been standardization - globalization, if you will. Kids all over the world pretty much learning to play a similar, one-size fits all game: big forehand, open stance, approach shots that are winning placements rather than attempts to get in position to play a volley, and disciplined return games (the facet of stroke production where the enlarged racquet faces and exotic racquet materials have been most helpful).
The funny - and encouraging - thing is that Nadal isn’t really out of that mold; he’s far more of a traditional clay-courter, if not exactly a grinder. But the New World Game style should be effective against him – at least effective enough to ensure that he would come nowhere near shattering the Borg or Vilas marks. But here he is.
Nadal's record-in-the-making is an extraordinary rub; a feat parallel in degree-of-difficulty to completing a calendar year Grand Slam, now that each major employs a different surface (the last time a male player recorded a Grand Slam, three of the majors were played on grass).
Maybe it isn’t Borg and Vilas the guy is thinking about, but Chris Evert. She won 125 straight on clay, including 24 tournaments.
Take a deep breath, Rafael.