Feats, and Retreats, of Clay

You never know for sure with architecture, but it seems unlikely that Ion Tiriac’s pricey, icy Caja Magica will age as gracefully, or find itself as beloved, as its fellow clay havens in Monte Carlo and Rome. The Madrid Masters deserves credit for ambition and forward thinking with its facility, but a concrete-heavy, neo-Brutalist design is a hard sell for a tradition-bound sport. Six years in, Madrid seems to have reached its “it is what it is” phase, and that may be as good as it gets for the Magic Box.

The high altitude is now a given. The tournament’s blue period, from 2012, is a bittersweet memory. The florescent balls that were once promised never made it out of the can. And early reports this year indicate that the (red) clay has begun to settle in more evenly than it has in the past.The Vampyric One needs to think up a new disruption quickly, or people may actually start to like his event.

One of the disruptions that has stuck in Madrid is the schedule. Tiriac has always wanted to run a two-week tournament, but so far he has had to make do with nine days. As I write this, the event is well underway, and a couple of big names—including Tiriac’s fellow Romanian Simona Halep—have already dropped off the marquee. In fact, the woman who knocked Halep out, Alizé Cornet, has already been knocked out herself. The earlier a tournament starts, unfortunately, the earlier the upsets can begin.

Here are a few first-day notes from Madrid, and from the weekend events that overlapped it.

Late in the first set of her loss to Cornet, Halep called Darren Cahill, her designated coach for the day, onto the court for a pep talk. Cahill assured Halep that she shouldn’t be afraid to let her shots rip when she had the chance. Her ability to generate pace and change direction are, after all, two advantages that she has over the Frenchwoman.

Halep tried it in the next game, and through the rest of the set, and had some success. But she also missed some balls I don’t think she would normally miss. It makes sense to go big when the shot presents itself; you can call those, as Cahill did, “good misses.” But on a few occasions Halep also tried to hit hard when the shot didn’t present itself. She tried to fight pace with more pace and ended up drilling the ball out.

Just when she was looking like a possible rival for Serena Williams this spring, Halep has now taken two straight surprise defeats. Caroline Wozniacki outlasted her in Stuttgart, and Cornet outplayed her in the important moments in Madrid, where she was a finalist in 2014. Neither loss was a shock, exactly, but the defeat to Cornet showed that Halep will always have to walk a fine line between aggression and margin of error. She’s listed at 5’6”, though that number seems a little high; either way, belting people off the court, with her serve or her ground strokes, is never going to be natural or easy for her, the way it is for Petra Kvitova or Serena when they’re going well.

The same thing was true of Serena’s last true rival, Justine Henin. Roughly the same size as Halep, Henin always did what she could to press the issue, and she made it work to the tune of seven Grand Slam titles and a 4-3 record against Williams at the majors. Simona is no Justine as of yet, and it’s unfair to compare the two. But as far as potential rivals for Serena go, there’s nowhere else for the expectations to land at the moment but on her shoulders.

Last Monday, I mentioned that Nick Kyrgios had a strange opportunity in Estoril. In a case of reverse development, the Australian teenager had reached two Grand Slam quarterfinals, but had yet to win a match at a plain old 250 event. Check that goal off the list: Kyrgios won four matches on his way to the final this weekend, and bumped his ranking up to 11 spots to No. 35. And he did it on a surface, clay, where he hasn’t yet excelled, and which requires patience rather than the blistering power for which Kyrgios is known.

All in all, his runner-up finish was a highly professional effort from a kid who can seem, at times, to be as much about the style as he is the substance. Kyrgios’ only misstep came when, seconds after his defeat, he threw his racquet bag on his back and started to walk off the court—not so fast, Nick, there’s this thing called a trophy ceremony you get to attend.

We’ve heard a lot about how Kyrgios’ “star” quality makes him “good for the game.” I think there’s some truth to that, even if I don’t love his antics that supposedly make him a star. As a fan, I don’t need to hear him chatter after every point, question every close call, or get slapped with code violations, as he did in Estoril; I doubt his opponents need to hear those things, either. What I do like is to see Kyrgios swing the racquet. From his serve to his forehand to his backhand, he has an electric charge in his arm that signals youthful abandon. That’s always good for the game.

Andy Murray will be 28 in a couple of weeks; it’s about time he got around to winning a tournament on clay, isn’t it? Murray pulled off the belated feat Monday with a three-set win over Philipp Kohlschreiber in Munich. The weekend was a veritable orgy of tennis for the Scot: He played two singles and a doubles match on Saturday.

What does this mean for Murray’s clay-court season going forward? His hat, and his Lederhosen, are now in the ring for Paris, where he was a semifinalist last year. But it’s hard to say anything more than that. He might be more confident in Madrid, but he also might be gassed. So let’s just say that Murray has alway had a game that can work on clay, and that, after 10 years of trying, he finally made it work in Munich.

Something similar could be said for Victoria Azarenka. Like Murray, Vika has won just one clay-court tournament in her career, in Marbella in 2011. Like Murray, she has been a semifinalist at the French Open. And like Murray, she has always seemed to have a game that can succeed on dirt. Azarenka showed some of that game in her straight-set win over Venus Williams on Sunday in Madrid. The next month would seem to be an opportunity for Vika to do more winning on clay. It’s about time for her to start getting seeded and avoiding the likes of Venus in her openers. And the likes of Serena in her third-rounders, which is what she might face on Wednesday. Maybe it’s a stroke of luck for Azarenka: They say the best time to catch Serena is early, right?