Top Spin Blog » Archived Essays

Battle of the Generations and the Sexes

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 23:42:24 +0000

All my life I have been playing tennis and reading Tennis Magazine, so it was a thrill two years ago when Peter Bodo published an essay I wrote about searching for Bill Tilden’s grave in the U.S. Open issue. Earlier this year I happened to play Anna Mamalat, a 15-year-old girl with a professional world ranking, and wrote an essay it. Bodo posted it this weekend on his very popular Tennis World blog on the magazine’s web site this weekend. He also gave kind mention to my tennis novel Red Dirt, a work in search of a home with the help of literary agent Scott Miller, vice president at Trident Media Group.

http://tennisworld.typepad.com/tennisworld/2010/12/sam.html

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Fast Cars and Fast Serves: ATP and NASCAR

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sun, 21 Nov 2010 19:10:09 +0000

Even though Andy Roddick once pondered how someone could spend four hours watching cars make left turns, the ATP tour and NASCAR have a lot more in common than you might think. For starters, the season-ending pinnacle events in both solo sports take place at the same time — The Sprint Cup finale is today, and it’s the starting date for the Barclays ATP World Tour Finals. Both seasons have short breaks, kicking off new seasons in only a few months with major events — the Australian Open in January and the Daytona 500 in February. Often during the season, tennis will be on ESPN2 with racing simultaneously on ESPN. Both are victimized by rain delays. High speeds are posted on the scoreboards, with 140 mph serves common, and race cars shoot around the track at a similar pace, sometimes reaching 200 mph or more. Rackets and cars get mangled. Many of the players date or marry models, or women who very well should be. Both have been dominated in recent years by a few men — Jimmie Johnson on the track, Federer and now Nadal on the court. I could go on.

The most obvious difference is attendance — NASCAR crowds are huge, often more than 100,000, (140,000 at the Homestead, Fla., today), compared to about 50,000 at the U.S. Open facility on its busiest day (although Flushing Meadows can feel like there are 100,000-plus on site.) European NASCAR drivers are as rare as corn dogs at a country club. Tennis in person doesn’t require earplugs. And come to think of it, I’ve never seen anyone passed out drunk in a muddy parking lot before a tennis match or heard Lynyrd Skynyrd blaring from a pickup truck.

I’m sure you can think of more. Please post your own observations on tennis and NASCAR in the comments field here.

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Tennis in the Gloaming at Green Valley

Joe Samuel Starnes — Fri, 01 Oct 2010 13:57:06 +0000

Tuesday night my buddy Anthony and I had planned one last match outdoors before the days get too short and the weather too cold and play moves under the inflatable bubble that covers four of the nine courts at Green Valley Tennis Club in Haddon Township, N.J. My mother-in-law was in town to babysit, and I relished the rare night out for tennis while my wife was teaching, a night I’m usually changing diapers, hunting for clean pacifiers, and trying to rock our young one to sleep. The bubble was already up and rain earlier in the day caused me to expect that we would have to play indoors, but late afternoon the skies cleared up and we punched in on Court 7, starting about 5:45 p.m., most certainly my last evening outdoor tennis for the year. As usual, our games were long, deuce-ad, deuce-ad, and the first set, even though 6-3 in my favor, took a while, at least an hour. By this time the sunset sky through the trees at the end of the courts showed fiery red and orange, like a canvas by one of the Hudson River School painters.

We started the second and played another long while to 2-2, at which point we decided to play a tiebreaker. He almost skunked me, winning 7-1 after I played a courageous (okay, lucky that the angry swipe I took went in) point. Darkness by this point was coming down hard, but we agreed to play a 10-point supertiebreaker in place of the third set. We moved from Court 7 to Court 5, optimistically hopeful that the easternmost court would provide just a little more light. He started out strong and the twilight reminded me of the Scottish word I learned from the marvelous short story, “In the Gloaming” by Alice Elliott Dark, a fantastic writer and teacher I was lucky enough to learn from in grad school at Rutgers-Newark. I also thought of some early lines in The Catcher in the Rye where Holden recalls throwing a football on the lawn: “It was just before dinner and it was getting pretty dark out, but we kept chucking the ball around anyway. It kept getting darker and darker, and we could hardly see the ball any more, but we didn’t want to stop doing what we were doing.”

I felt the same, not wanting to stop, to not lose the last rays of light and the last of warm weather allowing outdoor tennis. Down 8-5, by this time near pitch dark, I mounted a comeback, and somehow held off a few match points to come back and win the tiebreaker 13-11. On match point I hit a solid serve that he couldn’t see at all. I hadn’t beaten Anthony in a while, and even though I had to enlist darkness to do it, it felt good. I would have been content losing too, however, happy to be able to steal a last few moments of summer-like evening a few days shy of October. Besides, Tuesday night is Taco Night at the Tap Room, the bar/restaurant next door to the club, and the outdoor deck was open, the tacos $2 each, and a bucket with five Mexican beers only $10. Anthony and I and several other players sat under a tree on the deck and ate and drank and told tennis stories. It’s a memory that will sustain me through the rapidly approaching days when the sun sets before I leave work, when ice begins forming on the morning windshields, and the outdoor nets go into winter storage.

Green Valley Tennis Club, Sept. 28, 2010

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From the French Open to Philadelphia: Tennis and Red Brick Dust

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sat, 29 May 2010 12:41:10 +0000

I’ve been updating this blog more infrequently than I’d like over the past few months, in part because of a new job but also due to the distraction of a major renovation of our row house in Philadelphia. I didn’t think this project — tearing down and rebuilding the brick three-story front of a 103-year-old row home — had anything in common with the French Open until I began thinking about the “terre battue,” the surface of the courts at Roland Garros. (Terre battue’s translation is “beaten earth or ground.”) Of what does the red clay in Paris consist? Crushed red brick. What have we had all over our street and in the front rooms of our house for the past month? Busted red bricks, and more than a century of dust.

The good news is that the work is almost complete – a few finishing touches, and it will be done. The TV is back in place, and those matches on the red clay of Paris are beaming into our living room once again. And although it was a total coincidence, the new bricks have a very similar orange color to the red clay of European tennis courts. It must have been my subconscious at work when we selected the brick.

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A Nod to Jimmy C — Courier, that is…Two-Time French Open Champ

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sun, 23 May 2010 12:32:06 +0000

Jim Courier often does not get his due when American tennis players are discussed, but he is the only one to win two French Opens (‘91, ‘92) since pros started playing Grand Slams 42 years ago. And he is one of only three Americans in history to win the tournament twice (the others being Frank Parker ‘48, ‘49 and Tony Trabert ‘54, ‘55).

Courier played at the same time Sampras was on the way to winning 14 slams and Andre Agassi fashioned mullet hairpieces and wore flashy clothes and often played brilliantly, so he was overshadowed and outglitzed. But he won something twice that McEnroe, Connors and Sampras never won even once.

Courier continues to battle on the Champions tour, and has a lot to say on his blog about this year’s French Open. He also is the best of the young former players turned commentators I’ve heard, and I hope he’ll end up in the booth more often in the future. And I hope that the American tennis establishment will remember and make a big deal of recognizing Courier next year on the 20th anniversary of his first French Open championship.

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The Red Dirt of the Mediterranean Spring

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sat, 01 May 2010 15:27:38 +0000

On mornings the past few weeks before work I’ve flipped on the Tennis Channel with breakfast, watching the ATP matches on red clay from Monte Carlo, Barcelona and this past week Rome, perhaps the best time of year for the tennis tour as long as you don’t mind that there aren’t any American competitors deep in the draw. (Although John Isner and Sam Querrey beat the great Roger Federer and Yves Allegro in doubles in Rome yesterday; they took my advice and hit the ball to Allegro.)

Soon the tour will move on to Madrid and then onto Paris, like some modern day Hemingway trail of tennis battled across red dirt courts. I can’t help thinking I’ve lived my life all wrong, watching this from a Philadelphia rowhouse, having to leave for work when the matches are just getting interesting. Next life I’m going to learn Spanish and Italian and finagle some sort of job related to pro tennis, or maybe reincarnation will come with a better backhand. Or maybe, just maybe, a novel about tennis I recently finished, entitled Red Dirt, will sell and I’ll get invited over there — and could even afford to go.

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Around the Net Post — The Hole-in-One of Tennis

Joe Samuel Starnes — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:25:30 +0000

Let me set the scene for you: Weekly doubles match, indoors, Court 3, under a bubble covering four clay courts. In the very first game I was struggling to hold serve when Anthony Pozzi, a good friend and lefty opponent possessing a devastating drop-overhead volley (yes, it doesn’t seem possible but it is — a dropper from the overhead position), hit an overhead backhand parallel to the net, bound for Court 4, an almost sure putaway. But after a long winter of doubles against him, I anticipated this move and sprinted diagonally toward the space between the net posts of the two courts, my eyes wide and wild with the distinct possibility of hitting a forehand winner around the net … Of course, I’m not Roger Federer, not even close. I missed the shot, running smack into the Court 4 net post, scraping up my right hand and bruising my left thigh, not to mention getting tangled in the netting separating the two courts. They broke my serve, and we went on to lose the match. I am certain if I had nailed the ball around the net posts that we would have gone on to win. At least I didn’t hurt myself seriously — James Blake broke his neck in 2004 in a net-post collision.

This foolish attempt of mine was another failed moment in a lifelong effort to hit a ball around the net post, the rare shot that is equivalent to golf’s elusive hole-in-one. I did it once in practice in high school, but that was a long time ago, and not during a match. I almost hit one in a 4.5 USTA league doubles match a few years ago, aided by the fact that the net on the adjacent court was down, providing ample space, but I still missed the shot. According to Patrick McEnroe’s commentary in this fantastic compilation video of Federer’s around the net post shots, an ATP player might hit a shot around the next post six times in their career. Me, I’ll be happy with one … Most likely, however, I’ll settle for none.

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Gambling and Pro Tennis — The Human Dog Track of the Future

Joe Samuel Starnes — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 15:01:00 +0000

I doubt most readers of this blog have been to an American dog track, where greyhounds run a frantic loop chasing an electronic rabbit that scoots along the rail. In Sarasota, Fla., the announcer starts each race with a fevered, “Here comes lucky!” the dogs take off, and hundreds if not thousands of fans hold their tickets and cheer and yell and then most tear them in half and curse.

I worry that professional tennis may soon become the dog tracks of the future, where gambling on the sport is the driving source of revenue. I also worry that it will become as crooked as boxing is known to be, and that many of the matches are corrupted by players willing to hit enough bad shots to lose when they could have won. I think it will be any day now when tennis suffers a match-fixing scandal of the highest order, similar to baseball’s famed Shoeless Joe Jackson/Chicago Black Sox fix of the 1919 World Series or college basketball’s 1951 point-shaving scheme.

I know I sound alarmist here, but two things have prompted me to say this. The first is the solicitations I’ve received for my blog. I do not get tremendous traffic, seeing just shy of 10,000 unique visitors in 2009, but in spite of that, I have been contacted three or four times recently by web sites who compliment me on the quality of the writing, and then ask for a link exchange with a site that purports to be a tennis blog or news page. One even offered to pay me. When I visit their pages, I find they are simply betting sites, and are hosted in spots all over the globe, including New Zealand the Czech Republic. The bets offered don’t include simply Grand Slams or ATP events, but the opportunity to gamble on Challenger events in places like Lexington, Ky., or Biloxi, Miss., where players well out of the top 100 compete. How hard do you think it might be to get a player who has never earned more than $100,000 in one year (and remember, that’s before their expenses of traveling, training, etc.), to throw a match for a bag of cash? All you need is one desperate player.

The second is, that in spite of the obvious risk of match fixing, gambling gets the endorsement of some of the cornerstone organizations in the game. The Australian Open is even sponsored by a London-based gambling web site, a recent report in The New York Times said. Not only are they a sponsor, the more money bet, the more money the Australian Open makes, as the article by Joe Drape reported: ”[The gambling site I refuse to name here] pays Tennis Australia a share of revenue from wagers on matches during the tournament. ‘“We’re not opposed to gambling,” said Steve Ayles, a spokesman for the Australian Open. “It is part of our Australian culture and it is widely accepted.”’

Tennis organizations have created a lofty sounding “Tennis Integrity Unit,” and a study found 45 matches that caused suspicions. But in the biggest suspected case, Nikolai Davydenko was cleared, despite that “the ATP acknowledged that its investigators were unable to review the phone records of Davydenko’s wife and brother, which were first withheld and then destroyed” the Times reported. We clearly can’t expect much investigative savvy from an organization that believed Andre Agassi’s excuse for testing positive for crystal meth was that he sipped a friend’s drink, or Richard Gasquet’s recent claim that he didn’t do cocaine, he only kissed a woman who had been, causing him to test positive. The ATP is predisposed to believing the falling down drunk who runs his car into a telphone pole and claims, “I only had two beers.”

Even with crack investigative work, I don’t know if match fixing can really be stopped. I love following tennis and other sports because of the unscripted nature of it, of the possibility that anybody, even someone ranked 900 in the world could beat a favorite, as unlikely as that might be. But with the growth of gambling, I will wonder. Was the upset I saw real, or did the favorite just need the money? With the multinational flavor of tennis, tracking the exchange of currencies across the globe and through many tongues is almost impossible.

I don’t know what can be done, if anything, to stop it. But tennis organizations, especially prestigious Grand Slam events like the Australian Open, need to eschew any connection to gambling. But in Australia, much like the bets on a dog race, a portion of the bets made go the house. And the house always wins, and the dogs always lose.

In this case, tennis fans, the dogs are us.

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James! — Blake Falls in Yet Another Heartbreaker

Joe Samuel Starnes — Wed, 20 Jan 2010 14:12:49 +0000

I feel like I’ve been watching James Blake lose tough matches all of my life, from the five-set defeat to Lleyton Hewitt in the 2001 U.S. Open to the brilliant fifth-set tiebreaker agaisnt Agassi in 2005 to his defeat to Fernando Gonzalez in Bejing that cost him an 2008 Olympic medal to early this morning in Australia against Del Potro. I flipped on the TV shortly after 5 a.m. this morning to see him go up 7-6 in the fifth. James! I yelled, ecstatic, happy to see him pushing the big Argentine, and believing he could win. But Del Potro hung tough and the next James! out of my mouth was the more familiar, the “Oh no, why did you do that?” way of saying it, the way you might question a close relative about a choice you find dubious. In the final games, Blake hit some brilliant winners, but made a few more mistakes, and Del Potro got the better of him and broke him at 8-all, and then served it out. Another five-set loss for Blake, who at the age of 30 has seen his ranking fall all the way to 45, needed this one more than ever. It could have been a huge boost for him to move back up the rankings.

Blake is now 4-13 in five set matches over his career. I do remember him winning a key four-set match in the Davis Cup 2007 final against Mikhail Youzhny that helped to seal the championship for the U.S., and the next spring he came back from match points against him to beat Paul Henri-Mathieu in five sets in the U.S. – Franch Davis Cup 2008 quarterfinal. He has won some big wons, just not in the Grand Slams. Also, more importantly, Blake has been a gentlemen in the losses, and today hugged Del Potro and congratulated him after the match. While it’s painful, there’s certainly no shame in losing in five sets at this level against the No. 4 seed, nine years your junior. Good effort, James. I’ll be pulling for you in that next fifth set.

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An Unlikely American in Australian Open: Hopes for a Great Hurrah for Michael Russell

Joe Samuel Starnes — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 22:41:51 +0000

I’ll never forget watching Michael Russell against then No. 1 Gustavo Kuerten in the fourth round of the 2001 French Open. Russell, a qualifer then ranked 122 in the world, won the first two sets and was up 5-2, and held a match point but couldn’t close it out. He lost in five sets, and Kuerten went on to win his second French Open, defending his championship from the previous year. I wonder how Russell’s career would have been different if he had won one more point, and moved into the quarters.

Russell, who turned 32 on Jan. 5, has held an ATP ranking since 1995, mostly out of the top 100, and often far below. He has been as high as 60 in the world, reaching that mark in 2007. He recently climbed back into the top 100, and stands at 90, although he was 79 in October after winning a challenger event. He has a tough draw, going up against No. 4 Juan Martin Del Potro on the first day of the Aussie Open. (On a side note, U.S. Davis Cup Patrick McEnroe should consider giving him a shot against Serbia in March on the clay there — it’s his best surface, and without Roddick and Blake, the U.S. goes into Serbia very thin.)

Journeyman is a term often used for players like Russell, meaning they’ve traveled the world but have never been able to crack the top ranks of the game. I’m sure you’ll heard it bandied about if his match get much air time (It probably will, since he’s playing Del Potro — they are the third match on the Hisense Arena on day one). But the determination of a player like Russell who has fought 17 years on the tour should not be under-appreciated. No media ever covers these guys, but they continue fighting into their thirties. Russell, by the way, has outlasted Kuerten, who retired in 2007.

I keep hoping for a Rocky-like character to emerge from American tennis, and tonight, I’m pulling for Mike. (Check out his Facebook page if you want to cheer him on.)

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