Five days of staring at a computer, one painful comeuppance, one never-ending shoulder injury, one cruise down Knob Creek, the usual amount of darkness and doubt—it wasn’t a week to remember.
There were bright spots, if I think hard enough. I spotted a dusty Volvo with California plates and a half-torn but seemingly original bumper sticker that read, “Kennedy ’80”—that's Democratic defeatism at its finest. And “The Shield.” This is one cheesy, addictive show. I spent a sunny Easter morning with the shades drawn watching four straight episodes on DVD.
Which, if you’re still reading, brings us to Sunday afternoon’s tennis lineup. More to the point, it brings us to Sunday afternoon’s Tennis Channel lineup. What was going on there? Not only were the listings on my TV wrong, they were mixed up on the website as well. I tuned in twice to see the singles final and both times got the doubles final, which was won by whozit and what’s-his-name. (I know, I know, they’re great players, dubs is awesome, etc.) The third time I checked I got a biomercial for Jim “Mattress Mack” McIngvale, the tournament director at the U.S. Clay Courts in Houston. He’s also a local furniture salesman who must have seen “Raising Arizona” as a young man and decided to mold himself after the Trey Wilson character, Nathan Arizona. (Grandiosity aside, Mack is one of the biggest supporters of tennis in the U.S.)
So I started on ESPN2 with the women. They were in the second week of their U.S. clay-court tour, at the Family Circle Cup in Charleston. This was always a major event when it was in Hilton Head—the Family Circle offered the first $100,000 WTA winner’s check, in 1973—but that was at a time when the tours were ascendant and the Grand Slams were seen as retrograde. Now, of course, the Slams rule the sport, and both tours have withered. The WTA calls this a Tier I event, but where were the Tier I players? Lindsay, Amelie, Maria, Kim, Venus, Serena, and even Martina all passed for various reasons. It looked like Justine Henin-Hardenne, who had never lost here, would run the table. In the semifinals, though, Patty Schnyder got her forehand to kick up off the high-bouncing Har-Tru and sent Henin-Hardenne packing for the first time in her career. That set up an aficionados-only final between Schnyder and Nadia Petrova.
It was a curious match, as Schnyder’s often are. The Swiss No. 1 (until Martina Hingis catches her) is pretty much the reverse of every other WTA player. First, she’s a lefty, the only one in the Top 25. Second, she has a high-loop backswing on her forehand, which she hits with heavier topspin than any other woman. Third, like her compatriots Hingis and Roger Federer, Schnyder uses lots of variety and touch and moves the ball to every corner of the court.
Petrova, by contrast, is meat-and-potatoes WTA. She’s a Russian who hits a hard and relatively flat ball, particularly on the backhand side. But her game is smoother and more natural than her fellow Russians, other than perhaps Svetlana Kuznetsova. Best of all is Petrova’s serve, one of the heavier deliveries among the women. It’s all been adding up for her of late. She won her third career title last week in Amelia Island.
Petrova’s hot streak continued through the first set yesterday. The pace of her shots and the bounce of the court forced Schnyder to hit late and long. At the start of the second, though, after only 40 minutes of play, Petrova hit some kind of physical wall. Exhausted, she began to drop to her knees after points, and she called the trainer on changeovers. At one stage, she walked toward the umpire as if she were going to call it a day, but decided to get a towel instead.
To force Petrova to run, Schnyder began to use her excellent drop shot more than she usually does. The Swiss even committed the sin of trying her drops from behind the baseline. The fact that she won many of those points should tell any rec player that looking to a pro as an instructional model is not always the best way to go—simply put, they do things you can’t do.
But Schnyder did violate one important rule of any sport. She went to the well too often. Determined to keep the ailing Petrova moving, she dropped and dropped and dropped. It didn’t work, and the Russian, with the help of a 10-minute “heat break” between the second and third sets—is 90 degrees really hot enough to warrant one of those?—regained her form and won easily. With that, Petrova moved into the Top 5 for the first time, and the WTA may have found itself a legitimate dark horse for the French Open.
Late in the evening, I finally got a look at the men’s singles final in Houston. The matchup was a bit of a shocker: Mardy Fish vs. Jurgen Melzer. These are two of the ATP’s bigger goofs. Melzer is a creative player who hits one of the game’s most unlikely shots, a jumping two-handed drop shot, from anywhere on the court. He’s also been known to blow leads, and he did it again yesterday. Fish, a former Top 25 players now ranked in the 200s, is a sort of prankster little brother to Andy Roddick. Yesterday, with his untouched, dude-your-roots-are-showing hairdo, shorts that were falling off his waist, and quarter-cut socks, he looked ready for an early morning practice session, not a final. But the guy is blessed with a big serve, a powerful forehand, and a reliable backhand. It was enough to beat an inconsistent Melzer.
Fish was even better during his celebration. He fell on his back, tried unsuccessfully to jump into the stands to hug his coach, and eventually plopped into his chair on the sidelines, where a ball boy was standing right behind him. Without turning around, Fish stuck his hand out to his side, palm up—“give me five.” Right on cue, the boy’s hand darted out and touched Fish’s for a split-second. A quick, cool congrats from one kid to another.
Finally, while I didn’t see the match, a player I’ve always enjoyed watching, Spain’s Nicolas Almagro, finally won something, in Valencia. This is a little guy with huge ground strokes and a cocky attitude. He also happens to take huge risks that rarely pay off. We’ll see where he goes from here. Whatever he does, I doubt that he’ll ever fulfill my early predictions for him. Two years ago, I wrote somewhere that Almagro “may have more talent than his fellow Spanish teenager, Rafael Nadal.” Talk about a bad week.