Your reaction to the opening days of Doha may have depended on whether the camera was focused on the court, or whether it was panning the stands. Sparse and muffled crowds at important tournaments, particularly the early rounds of important tournaments, has been a theme of fall tennis for many years. But I don’t want to belabor that fact in Doha, because the drama of the matches so far this week hasn't been hurt by the lack of energy in the audiences. And this would have been true even if the bleachers had been filled with crickets (though that might have been disturbing to the players). But when Venus and Serena Williams play to a third-set tiebreaker at a season-ending championship in front of a few dozen scattered humans, you know that the event isn’t living up to its potential.
That’s a topic for another week (next week, perhaps). For the moment, I’ll reserve my questions and answers for the matches themselves. If they haven’t been beautiful to watch, they have certainly lived to their dramatic potential.
It’s safe to say that never have there been so few witnesses to a match between the Williams sisters. And while it won’t be remembered for the quality of its play—though Venus and Serena rose to the occasion late in the third set—it was a worthy addition to the Williams canon. What I noticed most, and it was something I hadn’t seen in a while, was Serena’s ambivalence. She lost the first set and started the second by belting a couple of balls as hard as she could. It looked like she might be on the verge of cashing it in mentally, which must be a temptation when your sister could use a win to help her chances of defending a title. But fortunately or not for Serena, those belted balls happened to go in. She won that game and recovered her composure from there. But there was still hesitation and unhappiness in Serena’s demeanor.
When we talk about the Williamses’ matches, we usually talk about how hard it must be to have to beat your sister. I'd guess that it’s more complicated, and that those complications lead to wild swings in the quality of the tennis from each woman. You love your sister, you want the best for your sister, but when you get out on the court you also want to beat your sister. Subconsciously, you may even want to beat her more than anyone else in the world, the way siblings often do. Through the third set of yesterday’s match, I felt like I could see Serena negotiating those emotions. She played well and kept her emotions in check all the way to 5-4. But when she served for it, she fell apart and played her worst game of the match. She gave Venus chances and then used her serve to take them back. At the end, she let her relief and happiness out after a crucial backhand winner. Serena had beaten her sister, and her own tangle of conflicting feelings. Best of all, it was over.
She’s young, she’s blonde, she wears Stella McCartney, she just reached her first Grand Slam final and cracked the Top 5, and she may or may not have hooked up with Fernando Verdasco already. What is the ceiling for the so-far unassuming Wozniacki? Is she due for a serious reality check when Justine and Kim come back full time next year?
Watching her slog through two long, winding and surprising matches in Doha—she snuck through in three against Azarenka after losing the first set 6-1, then fought off cramps that had dropped to the court to beat Zvonareva—I’ve been struck by a few things:
Wozniacki’s first serve looks stronger, especially the wide one. Unlike many of her peers, she shows you when she’s enjoying it out there—i.e., she smiles. She’s got great feel on her crosscourt forehand. She’s comfortable settling into a pocket well behind the baseline, but doesn’t move forward or take advantage of winning situations instinctively. She reminds me at times of Martina Hingis, another eastern European transplanted to Western Europe, without the cockiness or the creativity. Like Andy Murray, she gives her opponents room either to hang themselves or to find their games; as we’ve seen so far with Murray, that hasn’t been a recipe for winning majors. More important for fans, though, Wozniacki is a gamer, maybe even to a fault. She played her first match hobbled by a hamstring injury. In her second match, serving for it at 5-4 in the third, she looked finished when leg cramps had her writhing on the court. She got up, served with a tear coming down her face, lost a 31-stroke rally, and still won the game and the match.
Wozniacki will struggle against the more explosive Justine, Kim, Venus, and Serena, but she has the persistence and consistency to beat everyone else on a regular basis—there’s plenty of room for a non-head case in the WTA. She doesn’t have the edge or self-regard of a diva who can bring new fans to the game. But that should only make her more appealing to those of us who watch every day. We know we’ll get her best.
Thinking about the up and downs of Azarenka’s season, the early peaks and later plateaus, the first thing that comes to mind is that the length of the schedule makes it tough for anyone to be good all year—there are just so many different phases, places and surfaces to negotiate. The second thing is that it’s tough for Victoria Azarenka in particular to be good all year. She can open up the court and put a rally in the palm of her hand, but just when you think she’s ready to finish it, the ball may fly haphazardly off her strings for no discernible reason. If you could put Azarenka together with Wozniacki, you’d have the next No. 1. Azarenka can hit through the court, but she doesn’t have the feel of her fellow up and comer. And while she’s fiercer and angrier than Wozniacki, the Dane may be tougher mentally—hanging in there is pretty much what she does for a living.
When the two of them played this week, I mentioned to a colleague that I thought Azarenka was doing a good job of controlling of those fierce emotions, which can get the better of her. Right at that moment, she took a ball and drilled into the stands, incurring a warning for ball abuse. A couple minutes later, she broke her racquet on the court, incurring a point penalty that put her down 5-6 in the third set. On the changeover, she looked at the chair umpire, picked up her racquet, and began slamming it into the court, as if to say, “You want to see racquet abuse, I’ll give you racquet abuse.”
Azarenka should have more upside than Wozniacki; she can make more happen on the court. But sometimes her hands and strings turn to stone—the ball kerrangs off her frame. And while Azarenka’s intensity drives her, it also doubles back and undermines her. Against Wozniacki, she stayed calm and let her mistakes go, until she just couldn’t let them go anymore—the anger is always there. As fans, when Azarenka goes out on court, we know we’ll get her best. The question is whether her best may be too much.
- Is the No. 1 ranking cursed?
The two women who have spent the most time there in 2009 are Dinara Safina and Jelena Jankovic. Look where they are now. Safina has already staggered out of Doha, injured in part because she wanted to stay No. 1, while Jankovic showed up with less than her best after a long season trying to defend the points that got her to No. 1 in the first place. No wonder the current No. 1, Serena Williams, has never seemed all that interested in staying up there. It doesn’t seem to do good things for you or your game.
In theory, we shouldn’t have these problems next year. Henin and Clijsters will be back, and Serena will start the season in the top spot. Still, the WTA needs to examine its system and how it weights events. While you can’t control Serena’s results in smaller tournaments—it would be nice if she had won at least one tour event this year—but it’s not like she only plays the majors. Right now, being No. 1 means something on the men’s side, but not on the women’s, at least not anything good. Holding that spot should mean, at the most basic level, that you’ve played the best at the biggest events. It shouldn’t mean that you’ve been the best at supporting the tour. At the very least, it shouldn’t be a cruel joke on its holder.
Let’s leave Doha for more scandalous places. You know by now that Andre Agassi has admitted doing crystal meth, and that his dad is nuts (the first item is news, the second not so much). These are my reactions to Agassi’s admissions:
—We will likely never hear another player excuse a positive drug test by saying he accidentally drank from someone else’s glass (listening, Mariano Puerta?). If a player says this, I hope no one believes him.
—Guns, crystal meth, mullets. Who says tennis is a country club sport? Agassi’s story is pure red-state America.
—He secretly hated tennis. I wasn't driven into the game by a maniacal parent, but I’ve played just enough to know that hating tennis isn't all that uncommon. By the time I was done with the sport after college, I couldn’t bear even to look at my racquet. I imagine a burger flipper at McDonald's feels the same way about his spatula at the end of the week.
Now I go to Indian Wells every year and watch the pros practice under the bright desert sun in the morning. What could be a better line of work, an innocent observer might ask. For me, though, when I see them get out there, get the feet moving, get up on their toes, get the racquet back early, try to get the blood and sweat flowing, hit their three or four shots over and over and over (and over), I feel pain. The moral of Andre? This sport can give you a lot, but it's work, often unhappy work, and it can make you do crazy things from time to time.