It’s been a while since I emptied the mailbox. After the days in Indian Wells, it’s stuffed to overflowing, and mostly not with hate letters this time. Maybe the Southern California sun put us all in a better mood.
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Steve,?Since you got hired at Tennis Magazine, how often have you seen or heard from Reshma?—Master Ace
This is in reference to the story I wrote a little whole ago about how I get my current job. First, thanks to everyone who commented positively on it. It’s nice to know I can depart from forehands and backhands now and then and still have people reading.
As for Reshma, yes, in the way of our small world, she later became friends with a woman that I worked with at Tennis, and we saw got together a number of times. I could never repay her for getting me out of Yorkville, though. She now lives in Amherst, Mass., with her husband and daughter.
As for my boss at the book store, we passed each other once on 34th St. a few years later. We both noticed the other, and quickly looked away.
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A similar fate had me moving from Brooklyn to Long Island and taking a part-time job in the local library for a year. I have some seriously fond memories and bizarre stories from that time. Checking books in and out, getting to know the locals (and scoring union benefits!) I still sometimes secretly harbor fantasies of becoming a librarian. Do you do the same about owning a bookstore?—Michele
It’s funny but there is a part of me that misses opening the store in the morning and having nothing to do but read, listen to music, and stand outside and watch the street life go by. You don’t feel this way at the time, and I would never wish for this life, but there’s something romantic about looking back on the days when you were struggling. Is it a fallacy, or is there some real beauty in them? Is there an essential element of life that can only be found in failure? If so, it’s a very foreign concept to Americans.
I made $19,000 a year at that job, but, aside from going to better restaurants, I’m not sure I live a whole lot better now than I did then. My books were free.
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Andy Murray is certainly a very competent volleyer - from well inside the service line. But unfortunately, the way the singles game is played today does not afford a player many opportunities to make a half volley or low shoe-string volley from at or just inside the service line, which one often must play with aplomb in doubles. So, it doesn't surprise me that he dumped many of those in the net.—Slice N Dice
What was interesting to me was that Murray was very good at the touch volleys and half-volleys that he hit within rallies at the net, but very bad at hitting a serve, running forward, and making a first volley. That specific play seems to be a lost art.
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Murray isn't one of the big four - Soderling is. And his results suggest he deserves it, so why is Murray always put above him? Is it the influence of the British media?—Corrie
No, I forgot Soderling was ranked No. 4. Leaving aside the all-powerful British tennis media and their vicious campaign to make the world believe that Robin Soderling is not in the Big 4, and leaving aside his horrible post-Melbourne slump, Murray has had the better career to this point.
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I find Dolgo fascinating to watch. You never know what he's going to do next. I remember watching him for the first time against Murray in the AO quarterfinals. At times he seemed to just go away mentally and I thought that Murray had the match in hand. Then he would somehow reappear and start blasting brilliant shots all over the place. His shot selection can range from godawful to genius.
If this talented young man wants to continue to progress in the sport, then he needs to work on his mental focus and improve the shot selection and stop being self-indulgent at times. Just because you love a shot, doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one.—Mindy
He’s an interesting case. It seems to take more effort for him to get his game up to its top level than it does other players, to get everything clicking. When he goes bad, he goes really bad, as he did in one set I watched from one of the South American clay events last month. I wonder what the future will be, not for Dolgo, but for those of us who are his fans? Just as he swings between the uncanny and the awful, I can imagine swinging between excitement at the possibilites implied in his game, and eternal frustration when those implications aren’t followed through on.
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I like how the deranged Raonic-bots failed to acknowledge the fact that Ryan was not serving well at all either.—Leo
Wow, this is the surest sign yet of how far Milos Raonic has come in the last three months. He already has fans that can be described as “deranged Raonic-bots.” Haven’t met any myself—yet—but I’ll be on the lookout for these frightening zombie-like figures at the next tournament I attend.
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i´ve always laughed about the weight stats..dont put too much into them-is´s not like the atp makes them step on stage at the beginning of every season..which is to say:i´ll bet you any amount of money that federer is nowhere near 188lbs..more like 178lbs.nadal on the other hand might actually be at around that clip..take my word for it..until someone shows me a scale with roger standing on it (and not holding a 10lb dumbbell in his hand)that displays a figure above 180lbs i wont believe it.—deshawn
It’s true: Federer and Nadal are always the same weight. Couple them with Sampras and you would think that all you had to do be a Hall-of-Famer is make yourself 6-foot-1 and 188 pounds. I can remember Monica Seles being listed as 99 pounds for much much longer than she was 99 pounds.
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I will say one things about consistency though. And I am not talking about match in match out consistency, but, rather, shot is shot out, consistency. And I think Rafa always had the upper hand there. But one thing I have noticed, over the last couple of years, is that Rafa is making more errors...more UFEs than he used to. In the past, that door was always slammed, firmly in an opponent's face, making it very difficult to even get into a match against Rafa and still more difficult to climb back up once down. Rafa gave NOTHING away. I always marveled at that. Over the last 18 mos, or so, very slowly, more UFEs have been creeping into Rafa's game. The door is more often opened just a crack. This may well be due to the fact that, as I believe he has said himself, Rafa is going for more, attempting to end the points earlier. But, and even though he is winning a ton, I think players are going to be more and more able to slip through some of those cracks.—CL
Whatever the case may be with Nadal at the moment. I’ve always thought that one of the unacknowledged effects of aging in tennis players is a slow but inevitable reduction in consistency. I think it’s part of why Lleyton Hewitt stopped challenging for majors: His game was about getting the back more than his opponents, and like everything else, your ability to do that erodes with age. You're not quite as quick to the ball every single time, you don’t see it quite as perfectly, you’re a little less patient and, consciously or unconsciously, a little less willing to kill yourself to win. I haven’t found many people who agree with me on this; we’ll see what happens with Nadal.
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Oy, Jackson, all tennis fans see players in their dreams, or DAY DREAMS for the literal-minded. Ditto basketball fans, soccer fans, baseball fans, what have you. Fans play and replay (and imagine) points and matches in their heads endlessly. And only very special players make it to the day dream level. Roscoe Tanner, for instance – NOT—Raymond
Au contraire, mon frère. I can remember having nightmares about Scoe’s serve as a kid when contemplating my favorite player, Bjorn Borg, having to face it yet again at the U.S. Open.
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tignor! always enjoy your articles cuz you appreciate the djoker + alot of writers don’t—someone
Whoa, you scared me there when you yelled my name. I had a flashback to a drill instructor at Julian Krinsky’s tennis camp in the 80s yelling that same word when I wasn’t running hard enough for him. Good times on those hot days there. You’d have five juniors and one amiably sadistic pro making us drop and give him 20 after every miss. The whole thing would dissolve into mass laughter by the end of the hour; the harder it was, the more fun it became. Practice isn’t all bad, now that I think about.
And I do appreciate Djokovic. Is he under-sung and his game under-poeticized by the press in general? I have to think that would change if he keeps going like he's going. His style is too sleek not to be enjoyed and praised. The poetry was first monopolized by Federer, then Nadal muscled in to get his share. There hasn't been much extra purple prose to go around.
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"defeat, rather than victory, is the “true” of the world."
well phrased. And - Isn't this what makes Victory so worth celebrating?—Kristin
Ah, I had never thought of it quite like that. Thank you.
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I suppose that we should be happy that tennis gets any coverage in the LA Times at all, but it seems that Dwyre could do better in communicating the overall experience of a So Cal tournament with 350,000 attendees and covering the American and. particularly, Californian players--Young, Querrey, Harrison, etc. in a way that the AP or Reuters don't do. ?After my comments to him I am glad, but a bit embarrassed, that he is so well-regarded as a tennis journalist. I feel like I told Jim Murray or Red Smith that they don't know how to cover baseball.—Gerry
Well, no, Dwyre is not the Red Barber of tennis, exactly. But I think he does a solid job for a general sports guy. I mainly appreciate that, unlike some of his contemporaries, like Lupica and Feinstein, he still obviously respects and likes tennis. It's not easy to do the overall experience thing in the space he has, while also not ignoring the big story of the day.
Covering a sporting event really makes so much more sense in a blog-website format, doesn't it? You can do infinitely more.
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Recently I was outside doing some yard work and one of the neighbors had a radio out and tuned to a local station. It struck me that that's a sound you don't hear anymore, but which was a regular part of my childhood. It seemed that any time you were outside someone nearby would have a radio going. The Walkman and iPod have put an end to that (and I guess that's not a bad thing).—low.4.0.player
First, I like the modesty and specificity of your handle, low 4.0 player. And it makes sense: I never would have believed that your opinions could have come from a high 4.0 player—that would have been preposterous.
Anyway, what I remember best about the radio as a kid was the sound of Phillies games over them. Swatting away Pennsylvania gnats—a feature of my youth that has also, thankfully, vanished—I listened to long baseball games in the evening. All of the action happened in the announcer’s voice, and my imagination. It helped that the announcer was the late, great Harry Kalas.
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Someday Steve, after many, many beers, is going to tell us what he really thinks of us.—Cotton Jack
I love everybody here. (Now to crack open that first beer of the day.)
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Have a good weekend. I'll be back Monday with some early notes on Key Biscayne. I'm looking forward to seeing it from my couch, and not having to take a prop plane to get to the living room.