Welcome to summer. You spend the weekend driving and dropping your kid off at camp (thank the gods for MapQuest!), or bobbing around on a sailboat on some body of water where there’s no Wi-Fi cell service, and when you get home you check to see the tennis results.
Meusburger? Karlovic? Delbonis? Fognini? ATP, WTA, WTF?
That’s what you get for abandoning your post before the TV or computer in the weeks following three of the four majors (the exception is the French Open, because Wimbledon takes place shortly after it ends). The tournaments that follow those three majors cough up some new and unfamiliar names, because the top players tend to be on sabbatical for up to a month or six weeks. I’ve always found that sudden dramatic break from the Big Stories and Big Players refreshing. It’s always entertaining to watch the mice at play while the cat is away.
Except this year the cat hasn’t been away all that much, and that was especially true last week. You have to wonder if we aren’t seeing some sort of trend emerging here. Serena Williams and Roger Federer both played minor tour events very soon after Wimbledon. And remember that Rafael Nadal made good use of the secondary events after the Australian Open (which he skipped) to rehab his knees and recover his competitive mojo.
Williams did what she was supposed to do; she crushed the competition and won on the red clay of Bastad on Sunday. But Federer, who decided to re-open his relationship with the ATP 500 in Hamburg, toted his new, powerful racquet to Germany and he was . . . eliminated in the semifinals by Federico Delbonis?
Yep. Delbonis is one of that class of player whom, if you watch a highlight reel, you find yourself wondering, “Where has this guy been, and why is he ranked just No. 65?”