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It has been a good year for Topspin Blog, with more than 10,000 readers in 2010 despite my lack of regular postings at times.  Thanks for reading, and keep coming back.  Next year looks promising for American tennis, especially the Davis Cup team, so see you in 2011!

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 [...]

I should have slept in.  After yesterday’s fantastic doubles comeback by the French,  I woke up early, expecting the Monfils-Djokovic match to be a battle.   Instead Monfils made a mess of things.  Michael Llodra did no better against Victor Troicki in the second match, very uneventful for the rare 2-2 matchup in a final.  The [...]

Forget football and its ex-dogfighting bankrupt heroes and laptop stealing corrupt college “students.”  The best sporting event this weekend is the Davis Cup final between France and Serbia, tied after Friday at 1-1.  Djokovic and Monfils, first up on Sunday, promises to be a humdinger, with the country that wins Saturday’s doubles going for the [...]

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 [...]

Jimmy C — Courier, that is — became the new U.S. Davis Cup Captain today.   He’s a great choice, an underrated and often forgotten player from the era that produced Sampras and Agassi.   With two French Open championships under his belt, he might even deserve some playing time on red clay come March when the [...]

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 [...]

In a performance perhaps not equaled since Pete Sampras led the U.S. over Russia in the 1995 Davis Cup, Mardy Fish put all three wins on the board in Colombia this weekend, saving the American team the humiliation of relegation to the second tier in 2011.  Both of his singles wins came in five sets, [...]

If there was a much coverage of the actual Davis Cup matches as there is complaining about the format, the event would be as popular as the Grand Slams are now.  Instead, we get John McEnroe or whoever else has the microphone or the column space endlessly lamenting the ridiculous schedule and the format.  But [...]

I’m glad to see Rafa beat his Borgitis, but I still think Bjorn was one cool cat.