MELBOURNE—The final Grounds Pass of this year’s Aussie Open is being written on what feels like, through the early hours at least, the hottest day of the last two weeks. There’s a chance of rain tonight as well, which could mean our first roof-closing.
I had a preview of where I’m heading in a couple of days at my local café this morning. From a table across the room I began to hear something I hadn’t heard for a while, something I’d forgotten, something out of the distant past: Adults using the word “like” in the middle of sentences. “It was just, like, so ridiculous what happened to her.” Americans! Am I ready to go back?
Links: *The Age*; *Herald-Sun*
Predictions are Like . . . Something Or Other: Everybody’s Got One
All that’s left for the papers are the prognostications. Most prominent is Rod Laver’s in the Herald–Sun. He surprises me by taking Rafael Nadal over Novak Djokovic. After reading him, I’m still not exactly sure what his reasons are.
“Assuming both players are close to 100 percent as they can be,” the Rocket writes, “I think Nadal is playing a little better. Having said that, the only advantage I give to Nadal is that he is fresher, or should be.”
See, Rocket, the prediction game, trickier than it looks, isn't it?
I’m surprised to see Laver go against recent history. I’m equally surprised that four of the six Herald-Sun sportswriters who were polled also went with Nadal. I think at this point you have to take Djokovic over Rafa until proven otherwise. As one of the two HS writers to pick the Djoker, Jon Ralph, puts it, “He just finds a way to beat the left-hander.”
As for those who make their livings doing this kind of thing, they’re going with Nole: $1.65 to $2.30 for Nadal. According to the money, Djokovic in four is the most likely outcome. A little surprising to me is that Djokovic winning a fifth set is deemed more likely than Nadal winning a fifth. If it goes the distance, I think I would take Rafa.
Nadal himself seemed to have taken a lesson from Novak's last five-set victim, Andy Murray. Rafa said yesterday, in his Rafa way, that Djokovic's ability to go from exhausted to awesome in two hours time was "funny, no?" and that it was, "difficult to imagine he has these problems." He also gave Murray the best piece of advice I've heard: Essentially, you can't play a fourth set like he did against Nole and expect to win a Grand Slam.
With a Whimper Rather Than a Shriek
Elsewhere in the Herald-Sun, Jon Ralph remarks on the serially disappointing nature of the women’s finals here. “Might as well come out with it,” he writes, “the Australian Open women’s final is becoming one of the great anti-climaxes in sport.”
“Four times in the past seven years a finalist has won three games or fewer—Dinara Safina in 2009, Justine Henin in 2006, and Sharapova in 2007.”
According to Ralph, fans who bought their pricey tickets, “got an 88-minute procession where the loudest cheers were for hecklers from the crowd and video referral decisions.”
Also noticeable were empty rows of those pricey seats around the top of the arena.
He’s Up, He’s Down, He’s Up, He’s . . .
Today it's Age columnist Tim Lane’s turn to decide which direction the world No. 3 is heading. Lane takes the mythic route: “Roger Federer, certainly, has become a Job-like figure—endowed with great gifts, admired and praised but later teased and wounded by the Gods.”
I guess that's one way of looking at this stage of Federer’s career. In his prime, he was untouchable; everything he did turned to gold, or at least a Grand Slam win. Now, at 30, when he needs a break, he can’t catch one.
Lane is surprised that someone of Federer’s stature seems determined to keep at it well past 30, but eventually concludes: “Who are we to argue?” He cites three recent greats who “defied calls to give it away when things got tough” and “ultimately came out ahead.” Two are cricketers, Tendulkar and Ponting, and one is another tennis player, Andre Agassi.
The Sport of Wrath?
Tennis and myth is the subject of another Age column, by Michael Coulter. He writes about the phenomenon of the tennis tantrum, and how the equivalent of normal aggressive behavior in team sports is blown up to gigantic proportions in tennis.
“Unlike, say, football, everything that is said or done on the court is captured by the cameras,” Coulter writes. “There are no whispered sledges or sneak kidney punches at the bottom of the pack. There is no outlet for anger in tennis except for a good hard tirade.”
Coulter goes on to invoke Dante and the concept of wrath. This is the sin of false righteousness—overreation, essentially—and one that tennis players routinely commit against officials, in part because they have nowhere else to direct their anger.
In the end, for these reasons, Coulter thinks there’s no stopping the tantrum, and there’s no stopping our guilty pleasure in watching them, over and over:
“The great Marcos Baghdatis Racquet Massacre of 2012 has been shown roughly every 15 minutes for the past two weeks, while Channel 7 concocted a mini-documentary out of Snub-gate, when dastardly Czech Tomas Berdych refused to shake the hand of his opponent.”
Odd, and End
—What’s the secret to getting to the top of the men’s game? Never, ever, follow your serve to the net. As the Herald-Sun notes, “Djokovic has won 664 points for the tournament, with just two of them from serve-volleying. Nadal has won 681 points for the tournament, with only four of them from serve-volleying.” I’m not sure if that counts points returning serve, which would obviously make serve-and-volley impossible. Either way, these guys hang around the baseline a lot. Djokovic even apologized to Rod Laver himself for it after his match with Andy Murray.
—The juniors took over center court yesterday. First, 15-year-old Taylor Townsend of the U.S. won the girls, then Aussie Luke Saville, a loser in the final here last year, edged his Canadian opponent in the boys’ final.
Townsend teared up during her trophy speech. Saville . . . went in another direction. After thanking the sponsors and the ball kids like a 20-year veteran, the deep-voiced Saville wound up to this rousing finish: “It feels a s*load better than last year!”
Upon hearing those moving words, the trophy presenter hurried back to the mike and said, quietly, “Um, well done, Luke.”
I doubt Rafa or Nole will be able to—or have any desire to—match Saville’s speech-making skills tonight, but enjoy the men’s final anyway, wherever you are and whatever time it may be. I'll leave you with a clip of what might be the closest historical parallel to the match we're about to see. At the Aussie Open in 1975, Jimmy Connors was coming off a three-Slam season, while John Newcombe was a former No. 1 on the slight decline. He hadn't gotten a chance to play Jimbo at Wimbledon or the U.S. Open the year before, but he had his revenge in this one. The venue, the surface, the clothes, the style of the play, and the players' demeanors are miles apart from what we see now, but the situation is similar.
You can watch the conclusion of that match here; unfortunately, that video can't be embedded. So here's a clip of one fairly amazing rally from it. (I"m not sure what Jimbo is doing at the start, but if you weren't a fan of his "antics," you might want to avert your eyes for the first five seconds.)