Sorry for the day’s delay. I was at a birthday party for my dad deep in the hills of Pennsyltucky. You may have heard of the town—Williamsport, quaint birthplace of Little League (or as we say in Central PA, “Leddle Lig”). Did you know that the town’s quiet streets are now home to real live gangs who are shooting each other? I’ll be waiting for ESPN’s feature on that when they broadcast the LL World Series this year.
Before I got on the bus, I did have time to catch two matches from the women’s J & S Cup in Warsaw. Watching the semifinal between Kim Clijsters and Elena Dementieva was a little disturbing. This was a match-up I had seen way back at the 2000 WTA Championships, when the event was called the Chase and held in Madison Square Garden. Now there are always long-running rivalries in tennis, but seeing these two go at it yet again made me realize how few new top players the WTA has produced this decade. The only reliable Top 5 woman to emerge since the 1990s is Maria Sharapova. That’s one player in six years, with no sure-shot girls on the horizon. This isn’t a new phenomenon for the women—Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova went uncontested at No. 1 and 2 for far too long—but it is an unprecedented dry spell that often gives the WTA a numbing sameness.
There has been one sign of life this year, in the form of Svetlana Kuznetsova, another Russian teen who may be ready to take her place at the top of the sport. She beat Sharapova for the title in Key Biscayne in March and faced Clijsters in the final in Warsaw. It was an OK match, though if you want to see what I mean by “sameness,” this would have been the place to go. Both players are stocky, thick-legged children of athlete couples—Kuznetsova’s parents are cyclists, Clijsters’ mom was a gymnast, her dad a soccer player. Like other super-athlete kids—think Rafael Nadal and Gael Monfils—these two women play a bruisingly physical style. Their sweeping two-handed backhands are carbon copies, they hit their topspin forehands with power in any direction, and they’re both terrific scramblers—Sveta can even hold her own with Kim in the splits department (though I didn’t see Clijsters try any of them Sunday; has she finally decided they’re too dangerous?).
They also have slightly flawed and funky games. Clijsters can’t seem to put her service toss in the right spot, but she’s athlete enough to adjust on the fly. Kuznetsova has a potent forehand, but it isn’t a smooth one; its whip is also the source of its inconsistency. That was the difference between them in Warsaw. Kuznetsova just missed more forehands in crucial situations and lost 7-5, 6-2. Clijsters is now 5-1 against Kuznetsova, but if they played in a Grand Slam final, I’d give it even odds. Kuznetsova is consistently inconsistent, but her nerves don’t hurt her in big situations (she won her only major, the U.S. Open, a year before Clijsters did). There’s no better player week in, week out than Clijsters, but she has a habit of going off—completely—at the wrong moment. Even yesterday, after going up 4-1 and two breaks in the second, she hit her shakiest forehand of the match to give back one of the breaks. Still, Clijsters is looking strong going into the French Open, despite clay no longer being her surface of choice. I picked her to win there at the beginning of the year, and I’ll stick with it. (After all, there are no surprises among the women these days, right?)
If there's one player who she'll struggle with on clay, it's Justine Henin-Hardenne, who beat her easily in the French final a few years ago, and who generally owns her countrywoman in big events. Otherwise, Clijsters matches up well with everyone—I like her chances against the other player who's been hot lately, Nadia Petrova. I suppose if there's a question mark, it's her focus. Clijsters just announced that she's engaged, and she's been strangely up-and-down this year. I had thought that once she won her first Slam, at the U.S. Open last fall, she would take over No. 1. But some injuries, a middling performance against Martina Hingis at the Australian Open (a match she won despite herself), and an indifferent Nasdaq-100 have followed (she seemed irritated by having to play there despite an injury). No sign of any of those problems Sunday—Clijsters looked fully motivated.
There were two other developments last week that I should note. One is Kristof Vliegen’s final-round appearance, in Munich. The Belgian is a big guy (6-foot-4) and has been around for a while (he’ll be 24 next month), but he’s smooth and has a lot of variety—he’d be a nice addition to the higher echelons of the game, if he can sustain it. The other is Dmitry Tursunov’s blog from Estoril, posted at atptennis.com. It really was funny, though comparisons to Gordon Forbes, the best player-writer ever (maybe the best tennis writer, period), seem a bit premature. Let’s hope Tursunov comes back; in the meantime, try to dig up Forbes “A Handful of Summers” about the tour in the 1950s and 60s (it’s available on Amazon). I know firsthand how much people like that book. Last year, I did a short appreciation of Roy Emerson in TENNIS Magazine as part of our 40 Greatest Players of the last 40 Years list. I ended it with a quote from Forbes’ book about Emerson. Every person I talked to about that write-up said something like, “I loved the last part.” No one seemed to recall that they were Forbes’ words. I usually chose not to remind them.