* !Picby Pete Bodo*
Pity the American tennis player. He rarely gets to celebrate the Fourth of July at home, owing to this little tournament called Wimbledon. But his reward for enduring those well-intentioned but generally feeble attempts to replicate a typical Independence Day barbecue and fireworks display—gallantly mounted by sympathetic and terribly nice British acquaintances—is coming home to a couple of sweet little tennis tournaments.
These are events that the Rafael Nadals and Roger Federers of this world routinely ignore, much to the chagrin of, well, nobody. These tournaments are homespun, demonstrating that you can have a pretty good time on a hot summer day indolently watching a couple of guys who aren't members of a "Big Anything" battle out in a tiebreaker. The best of these U.S. events is underway now in Atlanta, and it's something like the deferred Fourth of July party for Wimbledon-eligible warriors.
Almost every American player of note is entered, from Brian Baker (who returned from a European trip that can only be called magical to fizzle out like a wet firework against Igor Kunitsyn, in a first-round match that ended at 1:21 a.m. on Tuesday morning) to Donald Young (who has already been beaten by a wonderfully competitive American prospect fresh from college, Steve Johnson), to Jack Sock and Michael Russell and all the usual suspects: Ryan Harrison, Mardy Fish, John Isner, and Andy Roddick.
Sure, the BB&T Atlanta Open just an ATP 250, and some of the cozy appeal of the Racquet Club of the South (the former site) has been lost in the transition to a new, downtown venue at Atlantic Station (as the ATP's droll promo declared, "Honk if you like tennis!"). But hey, there's a Publix and Dillard's nearby, as well as a Coca-Cola Swelter Stopper concession.
Okay, the very name of the tournament suggests a lack of grandeur, but then the sister tournament now underway in Europe—and it's an ATP 500 at that—is the Bet-at-Home German Tennis Championships. Yikes. Oh, how far the mighty hath fallen, at least in Hamburg.
It's a sign of our flagging domestic tennis fortunes that the U.S. Open was once the de facto American championships as well as a Grand Slam event. Not anymore, not with the likes of Novak Djokovic, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Federer and Nadal destined to gather like sharks at a feeding frenzy near Flushing Bay in a few weeks' time. Here's my idea: Let's designate the BB&T Atlanta Open the national championships for American players and call it good. I mean, all the U.S. lads are present, and one of them is likely to win the whole shebang unless a Xavier Malisse or Kei Nishikori has anything to say about it. And isn't Nishikori a lifer at the IMG Nick Bollettieri tennis academy in Bradenton, Fla., anyway?
This is an especially relevant line of inquiry now, and not just because of its implications for the American tennis pecking order. The field for next week's event in Los Angeles has been gutted because the best Americans will be heading for London to prepare for the Olympics. I did wonder if it's a wise decison on the parts of Roddick, Isner, Harrison, and Young to play a hard-court event between closely spaced grass-court assignments in London, but there's only so much a guy will give up in order to compete under the national colors for a gold medal. And I noticed that Harrison is actually (still) entered in L.A. next week. That tournament butts right up against the Olympics.
That may not be the wisest move, but hey, what red, white, and blue American boy wants to miss another Fourth of July party?