Tennis rolls on, into its fourth or fifth or sixth new mini-season of the year. Thankfully for some of us, the chatter that surrounds it continues to flow as well. The annual “bloodletting,” as Pete Bodo aptly called it, over the length of the schedule seems to be finished for the moment, so now we’ve moved on to . . . Novak Djokovic in a mask, Victoria Azarenka making like a peacock, Andy Murray pulling out of Basel with what Sky Sports delicately termed a “buttock” injury, and Sorana Cirstea appaearing on Romania’s version of Dancing with the Stars. The latter, according to our friend Kamakshi Tandon, is a sign that the WTA's off-season is now officially too long.
There’s more where that came from. Here’s a look around at what tennis’s chattering class is going on about as 2011 winds down.
At SI.com, Bruce Jenkins makes the point that, judging from tennis history, it’s premature to say that Roger Federer or Serena Williams will be, or even should be, in decline. He points to past lions and lionesses in winter like Bill Tilden, Pancho Gonzalez, Billie Jean King, and Rod Laver. The latter geezer went out and won a calendar-year Grand Slam at the weathered age of 31 (he also had tennis elbow for some of it—but that’s obviously when men were still men and Aussies were still Aussies).
Of course, it hasn’t been that way for a while now, which Jenkins admits when he points out that Agassi was the last man to win a major as an over-30, way back in 2003 in Melbourne. What’s weird at the moment is that even as the game has aged and its teen prodigies have failed to replenish it, it hasn’t gotten appreciately older, either. Yes, we’ve had one-offs from near-30s like Sam Stosur and Li Na, but we haven’t yet seen an established champion extend his or her prime well past that Rubicon—Federer hasn't won a Slam in nearly two years. This, as Jenkins writes, makes the next season or two in the lives of Roger and Serena intriguing. Can they bring the mature champ back to tennis? Whatever history may say, it's hard to see them doing it many more times.
What I found most interesting in the article was a quote from former doubles champ and genuine Aussie Mark Woodforde. He puts the inevitable decline down less to physical issues than to psychological ones. “How you mentally recover,” he says, is a huge factor. “Believe it or not, your ability to weather the storm becomes unstable. You become more irritated, on and off the court, dealing with situations. I reckon you also become more nervous in matches when the big moments arrive.”
This kind of runs against the whole idea of experience helping a player in the clutch—Woodforde, who is echoing something Martina Navratilova and others have said, believes that your mind declines right along with your body, and what experience really teaches you is all the things that can go horribly wrong.
OK, that was not an upbeat beginning. On a slighter lighter note over ESPN.com, Greg Garber got five questions in with Petra Kvitova during Istanbul.
When Kvitova is asked about what her goals were at the start of the season, a season in which she’s gone from No. 34 to No. 2, she sounds suitably amazed at herself. “I didn’t imagine that in the beginning of the year,” she says.
Then she continues: “No, really? No. 1 in the world?” It sounds as if she's asking herself how it possibly could have happened.
Garber also asks Kvitova about Caroline Wozniacki. The diplomat in her answers, “We are very good friends.”
In the same question, Garber asks her what it felt like to beat her good friend.
The competitor in her doesn't hesitate: “Great!”
It’s been said recently that Kvitova is “painfully shy.” From my own observation, I don’t think that’s true. I think she’s still growing as a personality and as a player. As she tells Garber, “I need to work on a lot of things. . . . I’m a little bit older and have been through a few seasons.”
Continuing with Kvitova, the future-of-tennis bandwagon I recently mentioned, which had filled up after she won Wimbledon and emptied out by the time she limped out of the U.S. Open a first-round loser, is filling up fast once again. Coach and academy owner Patrick Mouratoglou, writing on Yahoo’s tennis blog, made the leap by stating that her Istanbul win was a “sign of the future.”
At our own site, Doug Perry made the case for women’s doubles as the “best kept secret in sports.” Unlike today’s singles play, dubs forces players, as former Slam champ Rosie Casals tells Perry, “to understand the sport in its entirety.”
The one thing doubles lacks is the one thing that the majority of fans want to look at: stars. But Perry is right; if you want to see all the possibilities of the sport of tennis on display, a women’s tennis match may be your best bet.
Leave it to TMZ to find Serena Williams in her “panic room.” That’s where the gossip site said she retreated to last week when it appeared that an intruder was on the grounds of her home. It turned out that it was really a drug tester doing a random drop-by. On a serious note, the good news is that she was being tested without knowing about it first; the potentially bad news, according to TMZ, is that “It’s unclear whether Serena eventually submitted to a pee test.”
Back over where we began, at SI.com, Jon Wertheim fields perhaps his 10,000th question about women and grunting by rightly dismissing WTA chief Stacey Allaster’s argument that the men also do it. “It’s simply disingenuous to compare, say, Victoria Azarenka to Rafael Nadal,” Wertheim writes.
The length of Azarenka’s “grunt”—it’s really closer to a peacock’s “whoooooo”—is what he's referring to. While Azarenka claims she can’t play without making this noise, its length is unrelated to any physical effort that comes with it. At times in the Istanbul final she would abruptly cut it short as soon as her serve went into the net.
You also have to wonder: Can extended grunting or whooing or shrieking actually hurt a player? It's more thing that they have to time.
Finally, in case anyone caught the first part of this story but missed the second, the ITF’s Tennis Integrity Unit issued a statement denouncing the “black list” of players allegedly suspected of match-fixing that had popped up on a Swedish website, and which contained a stunning number of names.
Too stunning, it turned out. “The so-called blacklist of players is not from the TIU or any other official body,” the Integrity Unit’s Mark Harrison said.