The Most Useful Talent

For a long time I wondered why I liked watching tennis on clay so much, and why it looked so different, so much more flowing, than it does on hard courts. Finally a friend clued me in: “I think it’s the sliding.” Oh right, the sliding. That was it. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I’ve read that all art forms aspire to musicality; to lose themselves in the flow. So it must be with tennis. Its players expand their palette when they walk onto clay—the drop, the lob, the angled volley, we’ve seen plenty of all of them already this week in Monte Carlo. These days, it seems more natural for players to find themselves at the net, at least temporarily, on clay than it does on hard courts. Here you get some help from the court: You can slide forward to pick up a drop shot, and then slide back to the baseline to reach the lob that comes after it.

What else have we seen in the early going from the Principality? A few thoughts from days 1 through 3.

Clay Isn't Big Man Territory Yet
The surfaces play more similarly than they once did, right? Don’t tell that to Milos Raonic, world No. 24 and tentative next big thing. He went out in the first round to Albert Montanes, a 30-year-old dirt devil from Spain currently ranked No. 71. Raonic isn’t quite ready to follow in the oversize, clay-stained footsteps of his fellow giant John Isner just yet.

Watching the match, I wondered if Raonic would eventually meet the lofty expectations for him—Richard Evans has him winning Wimbledon within three years—and what it would take to get him there. He’s only 21; in the past, the “only” in that sentence would have been replaced by “already,” but as Isner and Fish and Ferrer and Schiavone and Stosur and others have shown, tennis is no longer a game for the extremely young. Prodigies and their coaches don’t panic with each defeat the way they once did.

So what was Raonic doing wrong on Monday? Thinking about Isner, it seemed to me that Raonic was almost too proficient with his ground strokes. Isner knows he can’t hang in rallies for long, so he goes for broke as soon as he can; Raonic, by contrast, was OK with trying to work the point. Except that it didn’t work against Montanes.

Is Brilliance a Bad Thing?
This question came to mind when I thought about three other talented young players who have had their struggles: Grigor Dimitrov, who lost in the qualies in Monte Carlo; Bernard Tomic, who Aussie Davis Cup captain Pat Rafter said this week had backslid again; and Alexandr Dolgopolov, the it’s-always-an-adventure Ukrainian who showed signs of stability in running away with the third set against Tomic today.

Tomic and Dolgopolov have qualities of original genius, and Dimitrov is as smooth as they come. But are original talents useful ones? For every player touched by genius who reaches No. 1—I’d put John McEnroe and Roger Federer in that category—there are plenty who never get close, perhaps because it comes too easily to them.

Perhaps, also, it's because genius doesn’t get you all that much. Think about Andy Murray, another player gifted by the Hands Gods. The ever-sober Murray can do virtually anything with the ball, but he mostly chooses to play it straight and solid. Every so often, though, he’ll relax enough to do a little showing off. Up 5-0 in the first set against Viktor Troicki on Monday, Murray hit a forehand at an extreme angle, and with an extreme amount of topspin, that crossed the net and immediately dove to the court—it was a circus shot, and something I’d never seen before. Pleased with his success, Murray tried it again on the next ball, put it in the net, and yelled at himself. He must know that geniuses look cool, but you can’t count on them.

Old Sports
Julien Benneteau and Philip Kohlschreiber: When I saw them this week, I thought the same thing: They look older. They are older, of course: the Frenchman is 30, the German 28, and they’ve both been doing the tour grind for more than a decade.

I bring them up not because of their play, but because they provided two tiny but memorable moments of sportsmanship in their matches. In the second set of his win over Marcel Granollers, Benneteau hit a drop volley that sat up. Granollers, with nowhere else to go, hit the ball right at him. It missed Benneteau but landed in, and the two walked back to their respective baselines. The camera stayed with Benneteau, so you didn’t see Granollers' apology. All you saw was Benneteau’s reaction. He held his hand up and nodded, as if to say, “No need to apologize.” Why did that routine exhibition of manners make me feel better than anything else in the match?

The same thing happened at the end of Kohlschreiber’s first-round win over Guillaume Rufin. Match point down, Rufin hit a ball that appeared to land just wide. It was called out. Kohlschreiber walked over to check the mark. As he got closer, a pained look crossed his face. Had it been in after all? No, it had been out, but he felt bad having to confirm that fact to the French qualifier.

Staying Hungry
“Stay hungry, stay humble,” was how Mary Carillo once summed up the tennis, and life, advice that Toni Nadal gives to his nephew Rafael. It’s worked well. Today, Nadal made his 2012 debut at Monte Carlo, a tournament he’s won the last seven years. Toni was where he’s been for all of those years, in the front row at the end of one sideline.

What, rationally, could Rafa have to prove, to himself or anyone there, after all of those wins? Plenty. Everything. Watching him—this year in a peach shirt—you might have thought he was still trying to break through for title number one. He played with the same look of concerned concentration, the same nervous energy contained by a semi-superstitious attention to ritual, the same earnest looks of encouragement shared with Toni, the same temporary jitters when trying to serve out a set, the same spring in his step after winning a point and slowed-down tempo after losing one, and, when he needed them, the same dive-bomb passing shots hit on the full, clay-scattering slide. Otherwise, it was a pretty routine win.

Hunger: The most useful talent of all.