NEW YORK—We’ve made safely it through the first week at the Open and into September (boo). We've also arrived at the big payoff: The first day of coverage on CBS. The network has been given everything it could ask for—Roger Federer, Serena Williams, Andy Murray, James Blake, Sam Querrey, and even young American Jack Sock to kick things off. The schedule went so well that CBS threw Tennis Channel a bone by letting it have the Sloane Stephens-Ana Ivanovic third-rounder tonight. For those of you on the grounds, the match of the day might be Blake vs. Milos Raonic. My eyes popped when I saw that one scheduled for the tiny Grandstand. I’d think twice about sitting in the front row.
If the 2011 version of the tournament is our standard, it’s been a calm Open thus far. Only Andy Roddick’s retirement ambush has upset the hopper thus far. That’s mainly because of the weather, of course. Little rain has brought a welcome lack of complaints about roofs, tarps, slippery courts, cracked courts, scheduling nightmares, American conspiracies, and the other questionable-to-boneheaded decisions that always come with bad weather.
Instead, we’ve been talking depth of competition. Two opposing trends have developed along these lines:
1. Night-match blowouts: The evening sessions over the first week seem to get less competitive every year in New York. Venus-Kerber aside, it’s been worse than ever in 2012—a 6-4 set counts as gripping stuff. The week was capped perfectly with a Friday night that featured a lost and lonely Bernard Tomic, and a hopelessly overmatched Jie Zheng. That’s not exactly a good value for your night ticket; fans were back on the trains into Manhattan in a hurry last night.
We know the men’s side is top heavy, and the 32-seed system exacerbates that. It may have even help get it started. The rise of today’s ATP ruling class came not long after the majors went from 16 to 32 seeds a decade ago. The Open made the move, and got the other Slams to come along, under aggressive new tournament director Arlen Kantarian. He wanted more assurance that the tournament could deliver the game’s stars to CBS on the first weekend. That mission, as we can see from today’s lineup, has been accomplished. But for this year at least, the event’s tradition of night-match electricity has been sacrificed. For example: If there had been 16 seeds at this year’s Open, we could have seen Federer or Djokovic play Simon, Nishikori, Wawrinka, Haas, Fish, Roddick or others of their ilk in the first round; Serena could have played Clijsters. These aren’t exactly upset alerts, but they would have kept people tuned in longer in the evenings.
2. Five-set comebacks: On the other hand, there have been plenty of nail-biters elsewhere. In matches not involving the elite, anything can still happen in the early rounds. There have been 10 comebacks from two sets down by the men so far. Better fitness and increased depth of skill may explain this, or it could be an anomaly. But it has inspired this question from a few in the press room: Do these comebacks hurt the argument, put forward by some of late, that the Slams should go to best-of-three?
The answer is no. Best-of-three and best-and-five are different competitions, that’s all. You know what you’re getting into from the start of each, and it changes the way you play. But these comebacks do show that best-of-five can bring its own expansive, epic sort of drama, if you’re patient.