Hello, friends. Pete has kindly offered me the chance to pontificate here at Tennisworld from time to time. Lucky us! Anyway, with Wimbledon in full swing(ing volley), I was thinking about that guy Andre Agassi. Has it only been a year since he played his last match in SW19, going out in a changing-of-the-guard defeat to one Rafael Nadal?
Yessirree, Bob. Andre already seems firmly part of the sport's past, his career not even eleven months in the books. But he'll be remembered for Wimbledon epics such as his semifinal showdowns with Pat Rafter, his five-set final against Ivanisevic, and even his 2003 fourth-rounder against Mark "Love Machine" Philippoussis, where Professor 'Dre faced down 46 aces before losing in his last real chance for a title.
One thing all these matches share is a quality that Agassi couldn't help but produce in matches against grass-court specialists: contrast. That is, these matches provided the spectacle of a net-rusher dueling with a baseliner, forward motion against lateral scurrying, short points versus long, jabs countered by uppercuts. In photography, the term contrast ratio refers to the amount of difference between the darkest darks and lightest lights in a picture. Tennis thrives on contrast ratio.
The familiar litany of great rivalries makes this clear: Evert-Navratilova, Borg-Mac, Agassi-Sampras. Contrast ratio is the reason why Moya-Henman and Karlovic-Santoro are the two fans' fans first round matches. They both feature players taking opposite routes to the same goal (or at least, so we thought until Moya turned into a formidable volleyer). Such strategic contrasts have grown rare because most everyone now plays a version of Agassi's game. (Hence the love for walking contrast provider Dr. Ieeeevo.)
Our great rivalry today, Roger-Rafa, is a many-fronted campaign between two different styles: one player is patient but offensive, the other defensive but aggressive. But it's a civil war between combatants who belong to the same baselining nation, or should I say, federal government. There is contrast, to be sure, but not nearly as much contrast ratio as, say, Lendl-Becker or Chang-Edberg. The flatlining of serve and volley, of course, is the biggest reason for the decline in match-ups of opposites.
There is an ongoing debate about the reasons for this here at TW, and we have a faction, much wiser than I, that argues that the primary cause is that junior players no longer learn how to split step and volley, only how to whip western forehands all day. Others hold that new racquet and string technology has made coming in behind every serve foolhardy and impossible to sustain. For my part, I think it's some of both: while the Bollettieri-ization of tennis has turned out a lot of counterintuitively giant, hard-serving baseliners (read: Marat Safin), it's simply a fact that with modern frames and strings you can hit passes from positions that were unthinkable twenty years ago: exhibit A is Nadal's two-handed crosscourt flick off balls that are a foot behind him. That shot has never been hit before young Rafa, and I'm not sure it was possible before the age of AeroDrive and Luxilon.
Of course, there are other kinds of contrasts besides strategic. For one thing, there's the hot/cool temperamental contrast, which groups Borg, Lendl, Evert, Graf, Sampras, and Federer against McEnroe, Connors, Becker, Agassi, Serena, Sharapova and Nadal. Note that this contrast cuts across all the playing styles, but is just as capable of producing excitement in a rivalry. And let's not forget fashion.
This year we have an intra-Nike struggle for hem-length supremacy: the Fed's pants (sorry, trousers) versus the newly unveiled shorts of Ralph Nadle, as Brad Gilbert has rechristened him. Which brings us to a final contrast: that between the players and Wimbledon itself. If the macro-story of the Open Era has been the rebellious populists usurping power from a genteel and aristocratic elite, Wimbledon has always been the natural place for that narrative to play out, the palace of the palace coup. Its continuing image of traditionalism, you might say, is important to the sport because it provides the setting, the background, the negative white space against which the players rebel, conform, stand out.
Even in this, of course, we have less of a ratio: Wimbledon is nowhere near as stodgy as it was and the players nowhere near as obnoxiously bratty. Maybe that's one contrast that works better today, in shades of gray.
-- R. Stonada
