Just read this week's SI Mailbag , which contains one of the best ideas I've encountered in a long time. Wertheim suggests that instead of playing out dead rubbers in Davis Cup (that is, matches that no longer have meaning once the outcome of a tie is decided), the players take part in a "mixed doubles" match, with players from each nation playing alongside their counterparts, as in Marat Safin and Andy Roddick vs. James Blake and Michael Youzhny. This is a terrific concept in a number of ways, starting with the signal it sends regarding international good will. Most importantly, it keeps the "official" singles records more credible, given the way players from the winning side, particularly the big stars, tend to merely go through the motions in dead rubbers.
On another front, there were some eyebrow-raising results yesterday, the three foremost of which were curiously apt candidates for the Most Unsurprising Surprise of the Day award. Let's start with the Kremlin Cup, where No. 3 seed Svetlana Kuznetsova's got just a handful of games off Vera Zvonareva. The Kooze is in the midst of a great fall season (two titles), but how often have we seen the top Russians go to pieces from the pressure they feel to perform in Moscow, in what amounts to the unofficial Russian national championships?
Here's the curious thing about the state of Russian tennis: the nation is producing top players by the bushel basket, but it has a paucity of domestic tournaments in which they can strut their stuff. Contrast the U.S.: How many opportunities do Andy Roddick, James Blake, Serena Williams et al have to consolidate their confidence and hone their games under the adoring gaze of fellow nationals?
Once again, this demonstrates the absurdity of the Old Boy/Girl Network ATP and WTA Tour calendars. The game of tennis is in constant flux, but nations with emerging talent - and emerging markets for tennis - can't even seize the advantage of having homegrown stars to kick start tennis awareness because tournaments are godfathered forever and the calendar has no more room. The Kremlin Cup was the brainchild of (mostly) the late founder of TennisWeek, Gene Scott, who was way, way out in front of the pack when it came to recognizing that Russian tennis was approaching critical mass in the early 1990s, but nobody appears to have picked up the baton, and it's partially because trying to shoehorn another event onto the calendar looms as an excercise in futility.
Something must be done about this.
Some of you already noted in Comments that Stanislas Wawrinka tagged Novak Djokovic yesterday in Vienna. This is hardly surprising, given that the Joker is still basically a rookie making rookie mistakes - like losing focus because he's still basking in the glory of a big win at Metz (And hold those "Yeah, buts. . ."; at this stage, they're all big wins that make a callow kid - and this may be the definitive raw youth - feel like he's Mr. Top Gun).
Besides that, Wawrinka isn't giving up much to Djokovic when it comes to class. Last year at about this time, I half-expected Wawrinka to be roughly where the Joker is positioned: as one among a handful of volatile talents, about to go ka-boom!
The big news, of course, was Joachim Johansson's upset of Rafael Nadal in Stockholm. I was amazed at the way some people have thrown around the "T" word following this match. Let's remember that this is the notorious "indoor" season, that twilight zone in the calendar when the top players are fatigued, surfaces favor big hitters, and indoor arenas and night matches wipe out the brightest eyes and leave them glazed with a thousand-yard stare - a condition that has both emotional and physiological repercussions. Is there a player out there who's less suited to cavernous, artificially-lit arenas and wintry resonances than Nadal?
Beyond that, Johannson is a Swede playing before a home crowd, his fresh off a long, injury-induced rest period, and he served up 17 aces (in two sets) - starting the match with a quad ace display. Sounds to me like Jet Boy put up a stiff fight, to boot - he wiped out two set points and gained the shelter of the tiebreaker, albeit to no avail. Given the quality of the talent in the game today, I'm predicting an indoor men's season awash in upsets; look for big servers and go-for-broke baseliners to feed like a pack of wolves on what amounts to the scraps of the season - sorry, Bercy!
Lastly, I'm finding Marat Safin's blog tedious, but a pretty good example of leading a horse to vodka without being able to make him drink. Still, there's always something to abstract from the excercise - in this case, the amount of caffeine it takes to get a top pro in his home town to get through, in Paul Westerberg's immortal words - a long day of nothing much at all.
I understand that this is a tournament week for Safin, that he's trying to enjoy himself at home, and that we're at the tail end of a long year. But the feeling I get is that big boy Marat's day's kind of run together in the carnival of purposelessness that even an Austin slacker might envy. In other posts, albeit not for some time, I've made the point (usually in discussions centering on a pro's typical work load and the related, injury issue) that tennis players by and large can't hold a candle to other athletes when it comes to fitness and training. In a curious way, Safin's blog accurately represents exactly what I mean. Lesson: take even the most reluctant of writers, shove a pen (or Nicola Arzani) in front of him, and somehow one truth or another always squirms out, from one place or another, intentionally or not, much like the air out of an otherwise undetectable hole in a rubber inner-tube when you inflate it and shove it in tank of water.
Working on my Tiriac post today and doing some Tennis editing chores for the rest of the day. Meanwhile, tomorrow: special Talkback edition, and the full treatment on Tiriac, a seminal figure of the Open era.