This last bit is, of course, tied in to the two paragraphs above it. It seemed to me that Murray too often failed to build on a big win because he was going into his next match with a fitness deficit – not an entirely physical one, to be sure, but the physical and emotional are symbiotically related. A lot has been made of the potentially lethal results that might follow a download of Brad’s brain into as original and versatile a receptacle as Murray’s tennis body (strokes and all); it would be the equivalent of teaching a math prodigy addition and subtraction, to provide him with a platform for launching his genius.
But Gilbert’s most immediate short-term value, in addition to getting Angular Andy squared away with a little backward baseball cap-grade swagger, will spring from that mortifyingly vain but athletically potent Muscle Beach gestalt that drives so much of the contemporary California's approach to sports: get fit, then get fitter, and let the guns do the talking, a la Rafael Nadal (rumors that Jet Boy is really the son of a formerly incarcerated Orange County body builder are being checked out as I write this).
To that end, check out Eleanor Preston’s piece from Scotland’s most recent Sunday Herald. If tennis isn’t all about strokes, strokes aren’t all about grips and backswing heights, either.
Still, Gilbert’s straightforward choice to emphasize fitness is as risky as it is interesting. That other Murray Kool-Aid Drinker, John McEnroe (whose style couldn’t be more dissimilar, despite the degree to which he and Murray share a felicitous and preternatural sense of court space and coverage), never did set foot in a gym.
Sure, he played in a different era. But somehow the approach to the game, woven like a carpet in a player’s conscious as well as subterranean mind, has an ultimate bearing on the game. Use different threads, and you end up with a rug portraying not a unicorn surrounded by handmaidens in pointy caps, but a portrait in primary colors of Beavis and Butthead.
Which, of course, could be a good thing.
A more appropriate comparison, though, might be Murray and that enigmatic and supremely original player, Miloslav Mecir, the Big Cat. For my money, he’s still the most interesting player I’ve ever seen. I mean, who does a guy get through an entire match without ever looking like he’s had to run?
Mecir had a way of just appearing where the ball was, like a projected hologram, racquet back, ready to produce a swing so slow and leisurely that it seemed like you could read War and Peace between the time he took back the stick and then made contact with the ball. Murray has an ample measure of that in his game. And bear in mind that Milo “Real Men Don’t Run” Mecir was no workout hound, either. Which may help explain why he retired with a blown out back.
Actually, this comparison seems so valid that I think I must have read it in the Comments section - in which case, hat tip to whomever first made it.
As for the other Andy, Roddick, it sure seems like all that blinkered X’s and O’s stuff about guys learning how to read his serve and his lousy backhand and his awful transition game has been put on the back burner for now. I’m hoping it reached critical mass, pocked the landscape with its tiny puff of smoke, and dissipated. You can credit that, at least partly, to the influence of Jimmy Connors, as Jim Courier told my pal Dale Robertson of the Houston Chronicle in this piece.
All in all, more proof that you’re only as pretty as you feel - or, in the case of some players, as pretty as you feel with a little help from your Significant Other, your coach.
And here’s a parting scoop for all of you who are hoping, as am I, that a few new native-born Americans will pop out of the tennis pipeline to do well in the U.S. Open:
Sam Querrey, who won two singles titles in his first three events as a pro, and who’s jumped from No. 756 to No. 177 in the rankings this year, just signed a multi-year deal with Prince. He’s switching sticks from the Prince Diablo to the O-3 Hybrid Tour. This sounds a little like he’s trading in an amphibious troop carrier for a green vehicle powered by fingernail clippings, but Prince insists that over 50 per cent of the pros who have play-tested the new Prince 0-3 technology have embraced and benefited from it.
Querrey had a good win in New Haven yesterday, taking out Spain’s tough Alberto Martin. And he's got a wild card into the U.S. Open. Good luck, Sam.
I’ll be attending the U.S. Open draw tomorrow between excavating myself from internet hell. Stay tuned.
