Reading the Readers: Surprising Edition

"I like your Reading the Readers columns, why don't you do them more often?"

"Well, I'd like to, but that would mean I'd actually have to . . . "

Oh, hey, how are you? You shouldn't sneak up on people like that. Anyway, we were just talking about you. It's time, for the first time since before the U.S. Open, to open up the mailbag. I've talked about doing these on a weekly or bi-weekly basis in the past, but it hasn't happened. So I'm going to try again.

The worst thing abut Tennis Channel:?The crawl at the bottom of my tv screen - Relentless, way too big/wide, intrusive, giving scores away as I am catching up via encore.—Mrs. Tennis

Agreed. Giving away scores is bad, but worse is keeping the thing going non-stop. Couldn’t it pop up every 10 minutes, inform us of all those things we already know, and pop back down and out of our lives? Finding out who won the WTA’s popularity award is interesting once, maybe twice, but not seventeen-hundred times.

Benneteau would have been speaking to the fluently bilingual TTebbutt in his native French, not in English. "Paradoxalement" would be a fairly common expression in his own language.—Stephanie Myles

You never know what’s going to generate comments. I wrote a thousand words on Paris the other day, and the only thing anyone noted was my joking mention of Julien Benneteau’s use of “grotesque” and “paradoxically.”

As you said, Stephanie, Benneteau did the interview in French, and it was translated by our friend Tom Tebbutt. That’s what I meant when I said that those two words may have been “found in translation.” Probably should have made that clearer.

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I watched a lot of Dolgopolov's matches at this year's U.S. Open, and wondered afterward was he top 10, maybe top-five material. But with his results the past few weeks, I'm wondering if the other players on tour have figured him out.—Van

This brings up an interesting question: Can an opponent figure you out before you’ve figured yourself out? Dolgopolov was dizzyingly and disappointingly up and down all year. To me, having watched his many crests and dips from Melbourne on, he exemplifies just how long the tennis season is, and how tough it is to keep any momentum going for long. His year felt like a career. He doesn't seem built, psychologically, for the long haul, but he'll always be someone to watch for his graceful unpredictability alone.

It's not so much what was writen in the article as what was not. There was no outright codemnation of what went on at Penn State. There was no critisism on Paterno's lack of action. Even in Steve's comment posted above, there was no hint of doubt that maybe doing a reminiscent piece about Penn State at this exact moment was not a very wise decision after all. There are many people who chose to write about Penn State the past couple of days but none tried to be romantic about it (see Jane Leavy's piece on the Grantland). It's not that I'm agree with Steve. I'm just really dissapointed.—Maria

This is in reference to my column about Penn State last week. I didn’t think there was much I could add on the condemnation front when it came to the situation. What I felt I could add was a personal element, since I spent so much time there as a kid, and a tennis element, since I was coached by the university’s tennis coach. I acknowledge the corruption of college athletics and Joe Paterno's complicity in this horror story, but I also thought it was useful at that moment to remember that for every bad actor there are 1,000, 10,000, 100,000 good people involved in college sports, that they still exist in State College, and that one of them is part of our sport.

I actually didn't get the impression that the article was excusing Paterno's actions or giving him a current hero status. On the contrary, I appreciated it as a reminder that a community's ethos (and in this case, a community that is devastated by its leader's inhumanity) isn't defined by one person, no matter much the community previously idolized him.—Suge

Another surprise, which has happened to me before: Sometimes someone else shows you what you meant at a broader level in a story, without you quite being able to articulate it yourself. It’s the upside of criticism, I guess.

Is this a tennis website or what?—Larry

This was also in reference to the Penn State piece. Yes, this is tennis.com, but this is my own column on tennis.com. I write about whatever I want, and there’s no point in telling me to keep it to any specific subject, even tennis.

Glad that you took this "luck" element into this. There is indeed luck involved when crucial shot lands on the line or just outside. Djoker had luck wit him when That Shot landed in. Federer was lucky when JoWilly did not find the line. Who knows how the third set would have evolved. Certainly it would have brought bad memories to Fed because Tsonga has come from behind to win Fed before. ?Tennis history is written and rewritten by inches and millimeters.—Harry

On second look, I never used the word “luck” in the article, which was about Federer’s win over Tsonga on Sunday. What I did say was that Djokovic, on his famous return of serve at the Open, hit the ball in, while Tsonga, at break point in the second set in Bercy, hit it out. What I was trying to point out is that the fate of a tennis player, and how we think of that player, can be little more than a matter of inches. An inch one way and Federer is “surging”; an inch the other way and Federer is “aging.”

There is never a time to bring out the asterisk because most are not willing to do it for everyone - only their favs. Want to asterisk the FO 2009? Well, we can do the same thing to Nadal's only USO win, can't we?—Alexis

The asterisk in sports: Who came up with this concept? As far as I know, it was a grouchy old baseball official who didn’t like that Roger Maris surpassed Babe Ruth’s hallowed 60 home runs in 1961, and had an asterisk put on it—in the record book—because Maris had needed more games than Ruth to get there.

There are no asterisks in tennis's record books. In the lists of Grand Slam winners, every title is as good as the one that comes before it and the one that comes after it. We should shelve the idea when we talk about the game as well.

the difficulty of "showing up" - "just" showing up - consistently is underrated; Fed's ability to do so all these years is often partly explained (and in some sense almost explainedaway) by discussing the advantages of his fluid playing style, good fortune, etc, etc - and of course there is something to all of that (though, as others have pointed out, people do tend to gloss over any physical issues he's struggled with over the years) - but he has shown a toughness and endurance, both physical and mental, that few (if any) of the current (or maybe even past?) top players have seemed able to match over the long term.—Isis

The difficulty in showing up is indeed hard for a non-player to understand. The pressure of expectations is the greatest pressure, and that’s why Federer’s semifinal streak at the majors is his most astonishing record in my eyes.

As far as Federer in general, it seems that we’re always talking about how he's underrated in one way or another. We’ve heard that his defense is underrated, his serve is underrated, his net game is underrated, his toughness is underrated. And they are underrated—except, in my opinion, his defense, which he’s gotten plenty of credit for and is obviously amazing.

I’d chalk this up to Federer’s smoothness, which obscures the difficulty of what he’s doing, except that the same thing happens with Rafael Nadal. His overt fighting spirit and physicality obscure his competitive smarts and good hands. It’s hard to find flaws at these guys' level, and when you praise one thing in their games, you ignore something else.

The exception on the Nadal side is his backhand. In my opinion, what’s underrated about that shot is how much of a weakness it was against Djokovic this year. The difference in their backhands was the biggest difference in their matches.

Fernando gives kudos to the Tignor for a good piece both in substance and in writing style. Fernando knew you could do it.—Fernando

The Tignor thanks Fernando for believing in him.