It was a fairly slow week on the pro tours, so I’ll start with a little historical digression.
For TENNIS’ 40th anniversary, we’ve been selecting the 40 greatest players of the last four decades. Whenever anyone tries this sort of thing, they inevitably hear the phrase, “you can’t compare eras.” That point was driven home to me this week while I was reading Frank Deford’s “Big Bill Tilden,” a classic biography that had been sitting untouched on a shelf in my office for years.
The highlight of the opening pages is an anecdote about Richard Norris Williams, a wealthy Philadelphian, U.S. tennis champion, survivor of the Titanic, and hero of Tilden’s. Williams epitomized the game’s gentlemanly, upper-class origins. He played for the joy of hitting spectacular shots—he aimed for the lines with each ball—and never gave a thought to whether he won or lost. Tennis was just a game, after all. In 1926, Williams was the U.S. Davis Cup captain on a team that included Tilden. In the Cup final in Paris, Tilden was playing René Lacoste in the concluding tie when he looked to the sidelines for his coach. Williams was nowhere to be seen. It turned out that he had been asked to be a fourth in a pick-up doubles match somewhere else on the grounds. Hey, why sit and watch a Davis Cup final between two of the greatest players in history when you can hack around yourself?
Unfortunately, the night that I read about Williams, I had to play a match for TENNIS in the New York City corporate league, where we do battle each week with pathologically competitive investment bankers. My opponent was a good player but inconsistent, and I might have beaten him by grinding away from the baseline. But Deford’s description of Williams’ go-for-broke style sounded so good I found myself gunning for the lines—and losing.
OK, on to the pro game. Like I said, it was a fairly slow week, which in tennis means that four events were played. The men were in Japan and France, the women in Japan and Germany. Youth served on both tours, as rookie Gael Monfils reached the final in Metz (he lost to Ivan Ljubicic) and four teenage girls contested the semifinals in Japan: Nicole Vaidisova, Tatiana Golovin, Maria Kirilenko, and Sania Mirza (Vaidisova won the event when Golovin retired in the final).
The biggest tournament of the week, and the one I watched, was the women’s Porsche Grand Prix in Filderstadt, Germany. It’s a prestigious event—Martina Navratilova won it six times, Tracy Austin and Martina Hingis four each—and this year’s draw featured four world No. 1 players. After Justine Henin-Hardenne was ousted early and Kim Clijsters lost to Elena Dementieva for the first time in seven meetings, the semifinals shaped up like this: defending champion Lindsay Davenport vs. a mildly surprising Daniela Hantuchova, and Dementieva vs. Amelie Mauresmo.
This was indoor tennis in its most extreme form, with a slick court, booming acoustics, and bleachers right on top of the players. Typically, tennis is divided into three games: clay, grass, and hard. But the indoor version of the sport is just as unique. There’s no sun in your eyes, no wind to move the ball around, no airplanes buzzing overhead. Players who rely on a strong north-south game uncomplicated by spins, angles, or variety are typically rewarded when they go indoors. In other words, it’s tailor-made for Lindsay Davenport, a woman who learned the game in the similarly ideal conditions of Southern California.
In the semis, Davenport had everything going against Hantuchova. She won with her first-strike ability, hitting big serves and bigger returns. Not that Hanutchova played poorly—after falling apart two years ago, the Slovak has built her game back up with stronger ground strokes and the tremendous hands that make her such a good doubles player. She was rarely pushed off the baseline by Davenport. The problem was, that by trying to go toe to toe, she never changed the pace. Just an occasional slice or heavy topspin stroke might have been enough to throw Davenport off. But it was strictly bang-bang (i.e., indoor) tennis.
The other semi featured two of the game’s legendary head cases, Mauresmo and Dementieva. The second set was a disaster, as they broke each other eight straight times before Mauresmo held to win the match. The flaky Frenchwoman picked up where she left off the next day, losing the first set to Davenport in a hurry, 6-2. Her problems began with her Western forehand grip, which caused her shots to sit up in the middle of the court, not the place you want them to be against a hot-hitting Davenport.
A brief flash of brilliance from Mauresmo in the second was quickly extinguished by more of Davenport’s big serves and returns, both of which she pounded right down the middle of the court with relentless single-mindedness. Lindsay, who showed none of her usual annoyance with having to actually play tennis today, avoided the mental lapses she has become known for this year and won her 50th title in 86 finals. That puts her 9th on the all-time list, three titles behind Monica Seles.
Davenport is perhaps the quietest all-time great player since Margaret Court, a similarly shy, gawky, but overpowering woman. When she won yesterday, she indulged in the briefest of fist pumps. No twirls, no jumps, just a nice smile that we don’t see often enough. But shyness aside, Davenport may be the most influential woman player of her generation. You can see her roundhouse two-hander and flat, penetrating forehand in dozens of today’s best young players, from Anastasia Myskina to Anna-Lena Groenefeld to Ana Ivanovic to Maria Sharapova. If only Davenport had been willing to show us a little more than those great strokes once in a while.