Tags:
Journalism of Courage
It was not a day of compelling men’s matches at the U.S. Open on Monday but it has been a year of resurgence for the men at Flushing Meadows, and not simply because the women’s tournament has been short on star power.
It has been a season-long trend at the Grand Slam events. Pete Sampras may be gone for good, yet Andre Agassi is improbably still in place and in power at age 33. And after two seasons of chasing after their potential, Agassi’s most obvious successors have spent the year confirming their talent.
Juan Carlos Ferrero, the 23-year-old Spaniard widely considered the best clay-court player in the world, proved it by winning the French Open. Roger Federer, the 22-year-old Swiss widely considered the most talented all-court player in the world, won his first major title at Wimbledon, and in grand style. Andy Roddick, the 21-year-old who is rightly considered the most talented American, has reached the semifinals at the Australian Open and at Wimbledon and won his last 15 matches on hardcourts this summer.
Though men’s tennis has been increasingly linked with men’s golf in recent years — in that a little-known player is capable of posing a threat to the stars on any given week — the emerging pecking order emerged intact from the first week of the Open for a change.
Agassi, Ferrero and Federer, winners of the year’s first three Grand Slams, are all still in contention. So is Roddick, who leads the season-long points race, and so is Lleyton Hewitt, the former U.S. Open and Wimbledon champion, who has slipped to No. 6 in the world from No. 1 but should not yet be in definitive decline at age 22.
The fourth round is an appealing, cross-generational, cross-cultural mix. The remaining 16 players represent every continent except Antarctica. And though there are, for a change, no teenage prodigies in the mix, there is still a 12-year gap between the 21-year-olds Roddick, Guillermo Coria and David Nalbandian and Agassi and Martin.
In terms of collective drawing power, they are still far removed from the era of Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe, or the era of Sampras, Agassi, Jim Courier, Michael Chang and Boris Becker, but at least these men are heading in the right direction. They cut across borders, and they are playing compelling, attractive tennis across a greater range of styles than casual fans realize.
‘‘When I hear from people that men’s tennis is boring, it’s clear to me that they cannot be talking about the tennis’’, Patrick McEnroe, the U.S. Davis Cup team captain, said in a recent interview. ‘‘The quality of what we’re seeing out there is tremendous.’’
There is no question that the men’s game has become a power game — a trend pushed along by racket and string technology — but it has not become one-dimensional. Serving and volleying may be a fading art, but Taylor Dent has still managed to reach the fourth round doing it regularly, and net play is in the midst of a minor revival.
‘‘Nothing goes backward’’, said the veteran coach Jose Higueras, who has worked with Courier, Martin, Sampras and Carlos Moya. ‘‘It seems that for a few years the game was a little bit standardised for my taste, everybody playing the same style. And now it seems that it’s picking up again, where people are using their serves better, coming forward a little more.’’
The often excellent matches in Week 1 here confirmed this, and they did so without providing the sort of major upsets that are usually required to generate first-week superlatives. (For the first time in 22 years at the Open, the top eight seeded men all reached the Round of 16.)
‘‘I think this Open has been awesome, so many five-setters and so many in the end where somebody comes up and wins it instead of loses it’’, said Thomas Bjorkman, who needed five sets to beat Ramon Delgado of Paraguay in the second round and Karol Kucera of Slovakia in the third round.
‘‘I think the quality of the tennis has been really good this year in general. It’s been coming back again, and I think here at the Open, it’s perfect because you have the medium-paced court in combination with a fast ball, and that’s a good balance.’’
But what makes the spectacle work is the combination of a medium-paced court with a fast ball and fast athletes. Anybody who watched James Blake’s victory over Sargis Sargsian in the second round and his loss to Federer in the third reaped the benefits. Speed is the antidote to the power game, and both those matches, in particular, were filled with extended, high-velocity rallies. But they were hardly the exception.
‘‘The top players in all eras were probably very good athletes’’, Higueras said. ‘‘But now the average top-100 or even top-200 player in the world is a really good tennis player and a good athlete.’’ (The New York Times)
