Can live tennis make you woozy after a while? You wouldn’t think so, but that’s what watching it to does to me—more so than watching baseball or football or basketball. Tennis requires you to concentrate on hundreds of individual points and moments per match with little respite. Everything counts. Have you ever turned to a baseball game after seeing tennis on TV? It’s like the universe just went into slow motion. I always wonder for a few seconds how baseball could possibly be the more popular sport, while tennis gets tagged as boring. Then I remember: Team sports don’t have to be in any way exciting, as long as the home club wins. Must be nice.
By the weekend, I couldn’t move my head back and forth anymore, so I skipped the trip to Queens yesterday and played some ball myself. I thought all that time spent with those smooth swings and perfect contact points at Flushing would give me a temporary boost, but those days seem to be over—I played horribly. Maybe I’m too old for new tricks. I can remember watching Boris Becker win Wimbledon in 1985, going straight to the courts, and putting his deep knee bend into my own service motion in about 15 minutes. It’s still there today.
I played with my friend Don, who had spent the last week in a “tennis utopia,” as he called it, watching the Open day and night. He mentioned something that had also struck me while watching the James Blake and Stefan Koubek throwdown—and that’s the right term—on Saturday night. Don thought that at the Open, all the perfectly struck balls that the men rifle into the corners can become “mind-numbing”—in other words, the tennis may be too good to be interesting. The guys hit so many clean winners, you forget how difficult they are to pull off and how much practice went into every one of them. This was true at times for Blake-Koubek (though it was an entertaining match overall). From a hitting standpoint, the tennis was outrageous. Winners came from anywhere and went anywhere, and the athleticism of both guys was off the charts. Koubek matched Blake with his speed and explosiveness, which isn’t easy to do.
This was modern men’s tennis par excellence, which means it was simultaneously awe-inspiring and, yes, mind-numbing. The best players are skilled enough to put the ball past their opponents at will, with disdain, and without spending much time setting up the points. Why shouldn’t they go for it? It’s a style encouraged by the surface at Flushing, which is now the fastest at any of the Slams—our favorite dirt-baller, Rafael Nadal, has transitioned to Wimbledon’s grass much more smoothly than he has to the DecoTurf here. The Open produces swift, low-trajectory tennis that can look like nothing more than a series of surface-to-surface missiles being shot back and forth. (When the guys wear the same clothes, as Blake and Koubek did, it can also look disturbingly like a video game—“X-Box tennis,” let’s call it.) While the USTA denies anything calculated, it’s a surface that suits today’s top American men, Blake and Andy Roddick. The problem is, it also suits the ultimate modern player, Roger Federer, who has let loose with some of his most spectacular surface-to-surface missiles here in recent years.
All of which makes the departure of Tim Henman and the semi-swansong of Fabrice Santoro at this year’s Open that much more poignant. They were two straggling, lonely, beleaguered vestiges of non-power tennis, of non-Western grips, of craft and placement over athleticism. Henman was unfortunately right when he said that his final Slam loss was appropriate because it came to a guy, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, who is the prototype of the modern player. As anyone who saw Tsonga’s haphazard blast-and-spray game against Nadal yesterday can attest, that does not necessarily bode well for the future of the sport.
But we can’t judge tennis by its run-of-the-mill players. The notorious golden era of Borg-Mac-Connors-Evert-Martina was also the era of a whole lot of dull, tasteless serve-and-volleyers who no one remembers. If Stefan Koubek and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga were reaching Slam finals, then yes, we would have a lot to worry about. Fortunately, the sport still requires more of its champions, and it continues to produce men and women who rise above the run of the mill with styles worth watching. Yesterday, two of them, a woman in the midst of her second act as an aspiring champ, and a man in the midst of his first, showed that modern tennis can inspire awe without also numbing the mind.
The woman, of course, is Venus Williams. She’s thinner, more raw-boned, seemingly longer than ever these days. which is appropriate: At Wimbledon and here, we’ve seen the essence of Venus, a refined version of the original.
Authentic Venus spent Sunday afternoon making the No. 5-ranked woman in the world vanish—by the end, the much-photographed Ana Ivanovic barely registered. After a shaky opening service game, Venus brought a fierce, fast, proactive attack down on the young Serb’s head. She was quicker than her opponent not only on defense, but on offense as well, moving inside the baseline for routine rally shots and taking them as early as possible with a flying open-stance forehand. This robbed Ivanovic of time; she was a step slow to everything and her big-loop forehand was rushed as a result. In the last few games, she looked utterly lost and didn’t know which way to move for the ball. Williams now faces Jelena Jankovc, who has looked pedestrian in her three-set wins so far. She’s beaten Williams the last three times they’ve played, but she’ll have to lift her game considerably to do it again.
A couple hours later, after Justine Henin had made her own opponent, Dinara Safina, disappear, the most anticipated men’s match of the day began. It ended approximately five minutes later, when Novak Djokovic and Juan-Martin Del Potro came to the changeover with the Serb already up 3-0. It wasn’t just the lead; it was the way Djokovic had gone about getting it. After laying back and rallying for nearly five hours against Radek Stepanek on Thursday, he came out like a completely different player last night. He took the action straight to the Argentine up-and-comer, hitting for the corners more than is normal for him, and making everything. The 6-foot-5 Del Potro had rolled through the tournament to this point, and Djokovic knew he couldn’t let him stand in the center and control the points; no matter how talented they are, big guys lose their effectiveness when they’re on the run.
This was the explosive Djokovic rather than the patient one we saw against Stepanek. The kid has more than one way to win, which immediately separates him from most other modern-day missile throwers. But his strokes also look better while he’s throwing them. Djokovic does it with old-fashioned closed stances, full shoulder turns, and extended follow-throughs—with polish. It’s textbook tennis. It doesn’t shock you or awe you really, but it doesn’t numb the mind either.