Do we watch sports for the quality of play that’s on display? The obsession in the U.S. with college and even high school athletics makes it clear that the answer is no. When it comes to team games, we watch to see the people who represent our school or city try to win, period. Why else would anyone sit through nine innings of baseball or spend 90 minutes following a soccer ball as it’s being kicked around a field? But tennis, a game played by individuals who don’t pretend to represent anyone but themselves, is held to a higher standard. In the absence of an immediate rooting interest, quality of play can become the primary reason to watch. Unfortunately, the patience required to do that virtually guarantees that tennis will never appeal to the team-sports-loving population at large.
So why am I beginning my countdown of the 10 most memorable matches of 2009 with Melanie Oudin’s upset of Maria Sharapova at the U.S. Open? The number we remember most from this fourth-rounder is Sharapova’s 21 double faults, a stat that would be enough to turn most matches into an unsightly mess. I’m choosing it, yes, because I’m an American, and we haven’t had a lot of new women to cheer in recent years. I’m also choosing it because it happened in the city where I live, where I could see and hear its effect on fans of the game around me. But mostly I’m choosing it because it’s an example of why tennis, more than any team sport, is the perfect vehicle to deliver a feel-good drama. Let’s take a look at the final chapter of this one, in the form of the 10-minute clip above.
—You may not like to watch or listen to Maria Sharapova, but she served a purpose on this day. She was cast in the role of the haughty, frowning, 6-foot-tall, mega-sponsored, visored villain from Russia; putting her on the opposite side of the net from the Little Georgia Peach That Could was as close as sports gets to the Cold War days of old. So much so that there’s a clip elsewhere on YouTube comparing the whole thing, in bizarre detail, to Rocky IV, with Sharapova in the role of Drago. I'll let you find it yourselves if you wish.
—Sharapova is the far more experienced player, but she’s the one who comes up with the wrong answer in a tight situation. At 4-5 and 5-5 in the third set, you can choke by getting tentative, but you can also choke by going for too much too fast. Sharapova’s trouble is the latter. She forces the action at all costs, and the final cost is the match. I’ve always thought of her as having an underrated tennis IQ, but this was not her finest hour. It’s amazing how much of the sport is derived from from your serve—if you don’t have confidence in that, it’s hard to build it anywhere else. Maria’s double faults not only lose her points, they infect the rest of her strokes. Look at the backhand she hits to start the final game. You rarely see the semi-robotic Sharapova mis-time and shank a ball that badly.
—An oddity of Sharapova’s game: When she misses a first serve badly, there’s a good chance she’ll go on to double fault. It almost makes it seem like she has no control over the stroke from one point to the next. It goes haywire every so often, and there’s nothing she can do about it.
—Great shot of Sharapova’s coach, Michael Joyce, shaking his head in frustration. Sometimes the coach’s emotional wall of stone must crack.
—What's the best thing about Oudin? Her feet. I’ve written before about watching Jennifer Capriati’s footwork on a practice court at the Open years ago. Seeing the hundreds of steps she took every minute, I knew then and there why I had never become a pro or even come close to becoming a pro. I could hit a decent forehand, but I couldn't do that. Oudin can.
—John McEnroe says it best here: “Thank god there’s a tiebreaker.”
—The other thing that makes the 17-year-old Oudin appear to be a special player is the way she hits with more pace, without pulling the trigger completely, even as she’s trying to close out the match for the second time. Considering the pressure, it’s pretty astounding that she was able to maintain that always-precarious balance between assertiveness and margin for error. Oudin has struggled since the Open—she’s 1-4 total, and she looked like she was stuck in mud during the Fed Cup final on red clay in Italy. The expectations are high coming into 2010, but she’s strong where she needs to be, in the feet and the head. On the final point against Sharapova, she hit what might have been her best serve of the match, got right on top of a tricky short return, and made the percentage play by going crosscourt.
—My favorite Oudin quote from the Open came after her eventual loss to Caroline Wozniacki. She was asked what had surprised her the most about her run.
“I never thought that I’d play Maria Sharapova on Arthur Ashe Stadium at the US Open this year. Definitely did not see that coming. So that whole match, just getting to play her and beating her, I’ve never met her before, so shaking her hand after the match was the first time I met her.” Oudin was the winner, but she was still star struck by the woman she’d just beaten.
—Like I said earlier in this post, what makes this match deserving of a spot on the Most Memorable list is that it exemplifies why tennis at its best is the most dramatic and elemental of sports. Baseball has the game-winning home run, basketball has the buzzer beater, golf has the visual drama of the ball dropping into the cup and out of sight. But tennis trumps them by reducing everything to the most visceral aspects of a game: The individual struggle, with her opponent and herself, and the contrasting emotions of winning and losing. This is only intensified by television, which invades the space of the players—we forget that it isn’t normal to see someone that close up all the time; fans who are actually at the match have a much more distanced and less personal perspective. When I see Oudin’s berserk happiness meet Sharapova’s stocial embarrassment at the net, I wonder: Is there a bigger gamble in sports than playing a tennis match? You risk your whole self when you walk out there.
