Time again to bellyflop into the commenters’ pool. After this one, I think I may go to the owners here and suggest a name change for our website, from Tennis.com to Your Favorite Player Makes More Excuses Than My Favorite Player! (.com)
Actually, looking back, it was pretty civil here for such a drama-filled Grand Slam final weekend. Thanks for reading and writing, even in what may have been the early morning hours for many of you.
My only gripe with the comentators is Rafa's uncle. Stop calling him uncle Toni! Every time McEnroe or Gilbert calls him uncle Toni, it makes me sick. What is he, the world's uncle. It's Nadal's coach. My girlfriend knows nothing of tennis and the first thing she said was, why do the keep calling him uncle.—Jamie S
This is funny in part because I’ve never thought of that before—I guess I do think of him as the "world's uncle." Was it Mary Carillo who popularized the “Uncle” in Uncle Toni? In those early days of Rafa, the fact that he was coached by his uncle was seen by some as kind of a joke. Turned out he was a pretty good coach. Having read Rafa’s autobiography, the relationshiop reminds me of what Pete Sampras said about his early coach, Pete Fischer: “He tried to put his brain in me.” Toni comes across as a pain in the butt, but it’s also clear that Nadal wouldn’t be the competitor he is if it hadn’t been for him. Too late now, though: He’ll always be Uncle Toni to us. It fits with the homegrown Rafa legend.
Steve I have been reflecting more on this final You and I are big Borg fans.D. You know halfway through the match my mind turned to Borg who I still believe to this very day is the Fittest Tennis Athlete I ever saw to play the game and even now other players havent come close in terms of his fitness. I know we cant compare era's and of course with todays new power head racquets and all.It got me thinking how Borg would have fared in the match against either opponent.Okay maybe I need to move on from my Idol Borg Its funny how that thought appeared in my head halway through the match Still miss Borg to this day.—Aussiemarg
There’s something about Bjorn, isn’t there? And it’s not just you who hangs on to him, Aussiemarg, or the image of him. When I was managing editor at Tennis magazine here in the States, we used to joke that we had to get our “obligatory black-and-white shot of Borg from the 70s” into each issue. We even thought about calling it that—"Obligatory Retro Shot of Bjorn Borg." Whatever else was in the magazine, people always gravitated to the long-haired Borg photo, no matter how small we ran it. He still signifies “tennis” to a lot of people.
I enjoyed the analysis and reaction, since I didn't see any of the match. But one facet of Steve's analysis troubles me - the repetition of tennis' conventional wisdom that serving second in a set puts you at a disadvantage. It truly doesn't.
Observe that Djokovic had four chances in this match to win on the next game: three by breaking (games 8, 10 and 12) and one by serving out the match (game 9). He eventually did break for the match, but you have to believe that a player's chance of holding (or breaking) changes once you get to a "sudden death" situation to believe the CW. The way the CW works goes like this: suppose two players, A and B, hold serve, on average, 80% of the time. They reach 4-4 in a final set (no TB), then A serves first, B second, and so on. If their "hold probability" doesn't change, simple math shows that A is no more likely than B to win. If you don't like math, just note that the situation is symmetrical. If A holds, B has an 80% chance of holding: if A is broken, same 80% chance. Each two games that are played, there's a 16% chance A wins (80% hold, 20% break), a 16% chance B wins (20% break, 80% hold) and a 68% chance the score will be 5 all (64% chance both hold, 4% chance both break).
Ah, but suppose A holds, there's a changeover, and B walks to the line, with the commentators breathlessly hugging themselves as "B has to serve to say in the match!" Surely, B's in trouble, right? Wrong. There's no evidence that player's hold frequency changes AT ALL at this stage of a match. Psychologically speaking, maybe B is invigorated by his or her closeness to the edge, and gets a 90% hold probability by his or her steeliness. Or maybe A can almost taste it, and starts overcooking returns.
In other words, unless you can demonstrate that being one game away from defeat differentially changes players' serving/holding ability by making it worse, there's no advantage to serving first.
None. Zilch. Nada. Bupkiss.—Andrew Burton
You forgot Zip, Zero, No Dice, and Not So Much. Point taken, it’s hardly a guarantee of anything. But I do think most players would rather be serving first in a no-tiebreaker fifth set. It can also help stop your opponent’s momentum coming out of a fourth set, as Federer did to Djokovic by hanging on to serve at the end of the fourth at last year’s U.S. Open. Almost worked for him, anyway.
I want your opinion on this. Is it not time to prepare faster courts? I personally think so. I admire both players and the effort they put in. But, this is ridiculous - six hours - more than a baseball game. If it continues like this, tennis is not going to attract general public.—SA
Yes, as special as this final was, we don’t want six hours—or five, or four—to become the norm for a tennis match. It isn’t just the courts, though; the players often bring up the weight of the balls as having a big effect on play.
It’s also not like the surfaces are getting slower everyday, as some people seem to think. Wimbledon’s grass has been the same since 2001; players have been talking about Key Biscayne playing like clay since at least 2005; the Aussie Open’s previous surface, Rebound Ace, was a similar pace to the Plexicushion they use now, and it was installed in 1988. Many fans hold out Federer as an example of an attacking player who can’t win on today’s courts, but he’s been winning on them his whole career, including five trips to the French Open final.
Still, you’re right, we do need more variety—Exhibit A is the Paris Indoors, which were a fine showcase for fast-court tennis in 2010. Then they slowed them down. I would say the indoor season would be the right place to make an effort at speeding courts up and seeing if it has an effect.
I still maintain the same point in regards to people not giving Nadal any credit (see Bodo's article on this match).
If Nadal was a journeyman or just ranked within the top 30 in the world then you could bring in all the left handed, surface speed, Fed's head stuff.
However, when the guy has won ten slams been consistently at the top of the game for years and has a winning h2h against all of his main rivals, including Djoko. Then he can't just be branded Fed's 'bogey man', the lefty he can't deal with blah blah blah.
Nadal is too godd a player to chalk all his victories down to Fed underperforming.—DJB
I’ve been trying to make that point for a long time, that Nadal has something to do with his wins over Federer. But as the years have gone by, it’s become more undeniable, at least to me, that Federer also misses shots against Nadal that he doesn’t miss against anyone else. There’s the Rafa spin, the Rafa speed, the Rafa confidence against him—all of that is real. But there’s also Federer pressing and forgetting his game plan.
It would seem totally inexplicable, if Nadal didn’t do the same thing against Djokovic the next night. After playing so well versus Federer, he made routine errors at crucial moments of the first, second, and fifth sets against Djokovic. Maybe we’re wrong to call tennis an individual sport; it’s more of a relational sport, between you and your particular opponent.