!Picby Pete Bodo
While I've been focusing on pearls of wisdom dropped from the lips of the winners, I'm happy to make an exception when it's warranted. You saw that defending champion Li Na bit the dust the other day. She was in no mood to analyze her utter collapse against qualifier Yaroslava Shvedova of Kazakhstan in the fourth round. "After the first set you only won two games," a reporter noted. "You say 'this is tennis,' but that is quite unusual in tennis. Could you tell us what happened?"
When another reporter asked Li if her sudden popularity and the media/publicity commitments she subsequently incurred when she won this tournament last year were "a factor" in the loss, or her preparation for the tournament, she cited her excellent results lately on clay before adding:
—Unlike Li, David Ferrer has played great tennis. But he's approaching the barriers where he customarily stumbles at Slams. A reporter asked if, given his age (30) and experience, he feels more pressure to do well each time he makes another quarterfinal?
Ferrer is a real straight shooter. Or he usually is. After he finished his fourth-round win over Marcel Granollers, he scrawled a little more than a hasty autograph on the lens of the courtside cameraman. When asked what he wrote, he replied:
"Like Rafa?" someone asked—
—No. 4 seed Andy Murray had more trouble with the French crowd than with his fourth-round opponent, Richard Gasquet. The native son hammered Murray in the first set, 6-1, but then performed his usual dance of the dying swan, as the Scot swept the next three sets. When he was asked about whether or not he enjoyed playing in the "hostile atmosphere," Murray answered:
And how about those words he exchanged with Gasquet, after Murray chided the Frenchman for requesting that the chair umpire check the mark on a shot that had been called against him? Gasquet was unhappy about that, especially when Murray also dismissively circled the mark with his racquet. Why did he do that?
—Here is this tournament's entry into the "shortest and least revealing" press conference derby. The winner is Kaia Kanepi:
Q. My question is regarding your next opponent. Do you think you can beat Maria (Sharapova) now?
Q. But you are difficult for her, right?
Q. What do you think of her as a player and as a special character on the tour?
Q. And as a person and special character?
That was it, the whole enchilada. Those wonderful ASAP girls, Julie Rabe and Linda Chrisetensen, deserve to get off easy like that more often.
—After his big win over Janko Tipsarevic, Nicolas Almagro referred to "changes in his life" that have made him a better player. Naturally, he was asked just what those changes were, and his reply was somewhat surprising, and pretty touching.
—Usually, when a player suffers a career-threatening injury that keeps him or her out of action so long that her ranking goes through the floor, the saga of her return to the main tour are filled with tales of depressing hotel rooms, loneliness, and inadequate facilities at the minor league events where she rebuilt her ranking.
!PicYaroslava Shvedova, who was a quarterfinalist at Roland Garros in 2010, went through all that. She suffered a torn meniscus in her knee at the 2011 Australian Open, and stayed there for surgery. Her knee bothered her in the ensuing months and she took many losses. Her coach quit on her. It was tough sledding, and early this year, she went to Mexico and knocked around there for weeks, playing four events, two of which were lowly ITF tournaments. When a reporter asked how hard it was for a former Top 30 player to play those events, what the "experience" was like, she had a surprising answer:
—Rafael Nadal crushed Juan Monaco, one of his best friends, in the fourth round, 6-2, 6-0, 6-0. It was hard to tell afterward who was hurt more, Rafa or "Pico." For this is what Nadal said:
"Afterwards" a few beers or tequila shots is what I'm thinking. . .
—And lastly, when Maria Sharapova was asked who determines her game plan for matches, her father Yuri; her coach, Thomas Hogstedt; or Maria herself, she replied with refreshing candor.
—That's all for today, folks!