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by Pete Bodo
Howdy, everyone. I'm a little late to the party today, but I didn't want to knock Mike and Bob Bryan off the perch they've occupied on the home page since late last night, after I had a quick visit with a very tired Mike a few hours after the Bryans' superb achievement. Let's show a little respect, right?
These days, though, I'm leaning toward making brief comments on random news items. It's a good conversation starter and page refresher for those times when there's no red meat to toss out there. Let's see how this goes; maybe it will become the regular daily feature that serves as your forum for broad-ranging discussion. But the News of the Day will probably appear under a different, relevant headline each day.
Otherwise, a new or casual visitor to Tennis.com might look at the home page and assume I'm beating a dead horse when he sees four consecutive headlines that read: News of the Day (it's the same as our Crisis Center problem). Anyway, let me know what you think of this format.
—Lindsay* Davenport was triumphant in her return to the court, bagging the Bank of the West Classic (Stanford) doubles title with Liezel Huber. Is there a player out there who better personifies the old adage,Living well is the best revenge?*
Lindsay's name may not appear among those of the women at the very top of the Grand Slam champions list. Closet romantics and demanding aficionados may wag their heads in dismay over her sub-par and sometimes downright puzzling performances in the late stages at many majors, but she was so consistently good that she bagged the year-end No. 1 ranking for four different years and carved out a life so well-balanced that you can envy it without feeling guilty.
Lindsay was the first WTA player to surpass $22 million in prize-money, and you can't begrudge her a penny of it. One of the great things about tennis is that you earn every penny you make, because the money is there for anyone to take. But you'd never know how wealthy she is because she's so well grounded. Lindsay was a prodigy, but managed to lead that mythic "normal" life, despite struggling with low self-esteem and image-related anxieties early in her career. She's happily married to former All-American tennis player Jon Leach), with whom she has a young son and daughter, Jagger and Lauren. And at age 34 she emerges from retirement to win the doubles at Stanford.
I mean, just how good can life get?
—Darren Cahill will not become the full-time coach of Andy Murray. You know what? Neither will many other people. But unlike the rest of the I Will Not Be Andy Murray's Coach crowd, including you and me, Cahill has a way of getting into the news by not coaching people, in an industry where it usually works the other way around. He was also the guy who will not coach Roger Federer.
Kudos to Cahill, formerly Andre Agassi's coach, for keeping his name in the mix with all these top players; it's great for his image and reputation as a tennis insider, which are obvious assets in his role as an ESPN broadcaster. Darren Cahill, Isn't he the guy who turned down Federer and Murray? Must be one hail of a coach to walk away from that kind of opportunity! I like Darren and think he brings a lot to the table, but the next time I hear about him and coaching I'd rather it was because he's said "yes" rather than "no" to someone.
—Brace yourself for another round of Jelena Dokic comeback stories. This weekend, she won the Bucharest Challenger title, her second victory at that level in successive weeks. Do we really need another go-round, with all the bells and whistles—the complicated citizenship issues, the stuff about her cell-phone smashing, baked salmon-trashing, lying-down-in-the-road-in-England dad, and how much damage he caused her?
For my part, I never felt that Dokic was so huge a talent. At her best, she competed well, but was built on a platform that was quickly becoming dated (average size and strength, consistent ground strokes, a cool head, youthful energy and ambition, and a let's-just-start-the-rally serve). But the upheavals of maturity combined with celebrity seemed too much for the blinkered prodigy to bear. I'm not sure she ever saw very far past the end of her nose, which is a basic requirement for success. The demands, inconsistencies and trials of real life caught up to her and acted like an acid on her career. It's a familiar story, writ largest in our minds by Jennifer Capriati **(who had more talent).
So good luck to Jelena. She will always win tennis matches—more tennis matches than 99.9 percent of the men and women who can imagine nothing better than playing matches until the day they keel over. But I don't see her causing a sensation at big tournaments ever again.
!103191955 —Is Juan Carlos Ferrero the Jose Luis Clerc of our time? Some fine players have an odd way of vanishing into the woodwork of our minds and perhaps more importantly, the woodwork of their own. Such was the case with Clerc, who had the misfortune to emerge as a top player at a time when the game in his home nation was utterly dominated by Guillermo Vilas. Clerc reached as high as No. 4 in the world, won 25 titles, and he was a two-time semifinalist at the French Open. But he seemed resigned to the fact that he could never become the top dog in his homeland, and that dispiriting conviction may have helped him settle—perhaps too easily and quickly—into the role of contender rather than repeat champion.
Ferrero hit No. 1 in September of 2003, after two and a half solid years of Top 5 level play, but just a few months before Rafael Nadalbegan his swift and closely-watched rise to the top of the game. And Ferrero reacted by melting away. Granted, Clerc was in the unenviable position of following in Vilas's footsteps, while Ferrero was the one leaving the prints for Nadal to trail.
But that only makes Ferrero's decline more poignant. Ferrero was the toast of Spain when he won Roland Garros in 2003 (he was runner-up at the U.S. Open that year as well), but Nadal soon stole his thunder. Since then, Ferrero has been about as invisible as a former No. 1 and Grand Slam champion can get. I wonder if he'd rather it be that way, since Nadal is clearly the main man in Spanish tennis, or if he feels that the fickle world that once lionized him has moved on, and distanced itself from him. It must be weird for him, kind of like living in a vacuum.
On Sunday in Umag, Ferrero won his third title of the year. That's two titles more than Novak Djokovic and Andy "the guy Darren Cahill will not be coaching" Murray have won this season, combined.