The Unintended 3

Well, we might as well call this Part 3 of an agreeable and illuminating discussion that began with my post, The Parisian Slide, and continued through Clay:The New Grass? Some comments that went up right around closing time, from Ryan, Todd and in Charge, and others made me realize that our discussion of the nature of clay-court tennis really wasn't finished.

So let's pick up where we left off, after I voice this caveat:

Some people react to an analysis/criticism of the clay-court game a little more defensively than is necessary, because it strikes them as a slight of their favorite surface, or favorite player. I just hope everybody remembers that the discussion takes a place on a pretty high plane. Guys who win or even go deep at Roland Garros and get to quarters or semis on grass or hard courts are great players, period. But there are great players and. . . great players. Sure, we can focus on what everyone does best and call it good. It's not like I enjoy focusing on the negative. What I like to focus on is the distinctions and differences, and finding an answer to why some men or women win eight majors, and others win just two. A guy who wins two majors is a great player, but not as great a one as a guy who wins eight. It's why they play the game.

In the course of helping Pete Sampras write his forthcoming autobiography, A Champion's Mind, we talked a lot about Roland Garros. I think some of that material will be fresh and interesting to all of you, so I'm not giving it away here. What I'll say, though, is that at the end of the discussion and analysis, Pete kind of smiled, shrugged, and said, "We can talk about it until we're blue in the face, but the bottom line is that maybe I just wasn't good enough on clay to win the French Open."

The mark seems especially poignant today, in the wake of Rafael Nadal's win over Roger Federer in the Monte Carlo final. Maybe Roger Federer just isn't good enough to beat Rafael Nadal on clay, although we'll add: unless Nadal is off his game. Steve Tignor and I were talking about that just this morning. The Mighty Fed's fans might have a hard time conceding that this might be true, but it seems to me that the hunt for the magic bullet has been pretty futile, and it's beginning to sound repetitious. But check out some of the remarks made yesterday by Michael Stich on the Federer-Nadal rivalry (I quoted them at my ESPN blog today).

One of the reasons that Nadal can dominate Federer on clay, and one of the most powerful rebuttals to Stich, is that Nadal is a great mover. Hence, he's able to offset some of the versatility, ball control, and rhythm-breaking strategies that Federer needs to employ against him. Which brings us to what Ryan wrote in a late-afternoon post on Saturday:

I'm going to open this up talking about three former players some of you may not even have heard of: the Australian former pro, John Alexander, my good friend, the smooth Hungarian player, Balazs Taroczy, and Juan Balcells.

Alexander, an Aussie, was heralded as the "next" John Newcombe because he was tall, strong, and played the "big game" (serve and volley) at a time when it was still the dominant and most productive style. Big "JA" never survived the fourth round at Wimbledon, but he won two of his career seven titles at Louisville and North Conway, on clay. The reason? Alexander was powerful but slow; the clay gave him a little more time to set up his shots and therefore play more aggressively. On days when his unforced error count was low, his wingspan and power were important, productive assests. But they could never make him a better mover; that's one thing that doesn't change, even when you're in the zone.

Taroczy was one of the least able movers on the tour during his heyday, yet he won 13 titles, all of them on clay (or certainly the vast majority; the records are somewhat murky). He won Hilversum six times, a unique achievement in and of itself and, yes, there apparently was something in the water. He also upset Jimmy Connors on clay at Indianapolis (when it was the US Clay Court Championships, and everybody played it).

By any stretch, Balazs was a "clay-court expert" ("specialist" if you insist), and it was because he had rock-solid groundstrokes, including a gorgeous, clean, one-handed  backhand (either sliced or driven). He was a force at Roland Garros, losing to Bjorn Borg in back-to-back years, including once in the quarters. But at the US Open and Wimbledon, he reached the fourth round exactly once. He just didn't move well enough to keep up with the pace on faster courts. We used to laugh and joke about it.

Balcells was a Spanish player who won one career title: Bucharest (on clay). I mention him partly  because he was one of the most interesting players I've ever seen. Despite his heritage, Juan was a "pure" serve-and-volley player with great hands and touch, but clay remained his best surface. So here was a guy who ought to have enjoyed the best of both worlds, a grounding in clay, an inclination and strokes suitable for rushing the net. But if memory serves, he didn't move well enough, and his best hard court results were similar to his best efforts on clay.

Okay. I'll be the first to admit that there are mold-breaking players and oddities in career results (six Hilversum titles?). Also, any Top 50 pro can catch fire for a week or two and win on. . .anything. But Alexander and Taroczy are good examples of the way the slowness of red clay can benefit less athletic players. I'm going to go to another comment now before I get into greater specifics, this one from Todd and in Charge.

Actually, if you connect the dots you can easily see exactly what I think, and I think it taps into what I've written above. And here I'll borrow and twist a phrase from former US President Bill Clinton and First Laddie in waiting: It's the groundstrokes, stupid!

Let's pause and look at the National Football League. Can a team win its division, or even the Super Bowl, without a great quarterback, a great running back, or great quartet of receivers? Of course it can; a team can win big with a defense capable of shutting down all opponents' offensive weapons (or something as simple as a muddy [clay-like?] field, as comment poster Robin aptly noted). And consistent, steady ground strokes are tennis's equivalent of a great defense.

This begs the question: does a player needs to be a great mover to have a great ground game? I don't think so. Most top pros are "fast" enough to get to the majority of the forehands and backhands hit by an opponent; in fact, many players with great ground strokes can hide their relatively poor movement because they can control points - just think of Monica Seles - with their groundstrokes. This is the hole card of the clay-court expert.

Of course, a lot of CCEs are great movers - Coria is a fine example. And nobody said that just because a guy has trouble adapting his game to faster courts, it automatically means he's a poor mover (Alberto Berasategui is a good example of a guy who moved well but had other, insurmountable liabilities). Loopy strokes, playing from too defensive a posture, from too far back from the court, things like that also can keep a lethal clay-court player who moves well  - a Sergi Bruguera - out of the mix on other surfaces most of the time. But the combination of reliable groundstrokes and the fitness to run east-west all day will produce plenty of wins on clay - and pose more problems for opponents on clay than on any other surface.

The first and still greatest example of a player who won almost exclusively by defense, by playing great east-west tennis and, as an NFL analyst might say, "great tackling", was Guillermo Vilas. He put up his first big win on grass, beating Ilie Nastase in the 1974 Masters final, and while he won two Australian Open titles on grass, he did it at a time when many top players didn't play; he is first win, in 1978, was over John Marks (0 career titles), and he defended successfully against John Sadri (2 career titles). But under the tutelage of his Svengali-like coach, Ion Tiriac, Vilas decided to become the quintessential clay-court grinder. It simply suited his athletic balance sheet to do so, because he was more of a bull than a deer, and saddled with a weak serve despite being lefty. He won one Roland Garros title (1977) title and was runner-up on three other occasions.

Vilas consciously "made" himself into a clay-courter, in a way that it's impossible to imagine a clay-courter making himself into a dominant fast court player (Bjorn Borg was both, partly because of his movement, which is also why he was Vilas's nemesis). This suggests that on clay, Vilas was able to compensate for  the shortcomings that prevented him from winning more fast-court events with his fitness and groundstrokes. But the key thing here is that Vilas didn't just end up doing "well" on clay -  we aren't talking about a Costa or even a Coria here - he became a Hall-of-Famer and the Open-era's third best player on clay. And more power to him for picking his battles and overcoming some formidable natural obstacles.

Tomas Muster is another good case study. To his credit, Muster never gave up on hard court events, although he has the distinction of being a former No. 1 who did not win a single match at Wimbledon - not in his career (he only entered the event four times). Muster had the heart of a lion; he rebounded from a seemingly career-ending knee injury (a courtesy car backed into him) to dominate on clay and ultimately earn the no. 1 ranking. He won a couple of hard court titles (including Miami and Dubai), but he stands alongside Vilas as a master of the east-west game. Both of them invited opponents to get into rallies, and played in such a way that they were inevitable.

Neither Vilas nor Muster could be called a great mover, and you can throw two-time Roland Garros champion Jim Courier into that company as well. Courier wasn't really about east-west tennis, his approach rested on a determination to get into position to dictate with his explosive forehand, from inside the court, which he did with outstanding success. Courier moved better than it might have appeared, and that was made clear by his two triumphs on Australian hard courts.

The bottom line is that these are three former no. 1s (Vilas was, arguably, no. 1 in 1977, but that was before the official computer rankings went on-line. I voted for him in a major poll that year and heard about it from Borg fans). They're undisputed clay-court titans. But only Courier equaled his French Open results on another surface. And that means that the skills that worked so well on clay either didn't travel well, or some other factor kicked in, to block the grander ambitions of Muster and Vilas. Their mastery of the east-west game is a tribute to specific gifts, but their inability to export a more deadly version of the game to other surfaces is a comment on relatively poor movement, manifested as a lack of quickness, weakness in the transition from defense to offense, bad footwork going north to south, or all of the above.

The clay court honor roll is inscribed with plenty of players who were great movers, but some of the biggest names were not. I can't help but think that means something.