January 30th, 2012
The Czabe opened his show last week asking why tennis is such a terrible fit for sports-talk radio. He had a bunch of possible answers: niche sport, no enough relevant statistical information for discussions, etc. I wasn’t fully satisfied by any of them, but I agree 100% with his general thesis: Tennis is death on the radio. Even when there’s something relevant to talk about and both the host and the audience know what they’re talking about. It just doesn’t work.
But the flip side of that oddity is that tennis is a fantastic literary subject and it makes for really, really great long-form writing. Like this wonderful Brian Phillips essay on the Nadal-Djokovich final.
1 commentU.S. Open Prelude
August 29th, 2011
Reeves Wiedeman has a great Grantland profile on Ryan Harrison. (He’s this year’s Donald “Future of American Tennis” Young.) It’s full of all the usual tennis ridiculousness. Here, for instance, is Ryan’s dad, a minor professional player who acts as his kid’s coach:
Harrison was spending 30 hours a week on the court, often waking at 6 a.m. to hit 5,000 tennis balls a day. He was homeschooled — Susie, his mom, was a high school teacher — while Pat, who had a brief professional career, handled the coaching duties. “I actually still am his main coach,” Pat told me recently. “I’m still the guy he calls when there’s six rain delays at Wimbledon. Ryan knows there’s nobody in the world that knows the game better than I do.”
Nobody? In the whole world? Not one single guy out there, anywhere, who knows the game of tennis better than Pat Harrison?
Now I don’t know Pat Harrison, so maybe he really is the smartest tennis mind on the planet.
But probably not.
0 commentsThe Donald Gets in a Brawl
April 25th, 2011
No, the other one–Donald Young. It seems he and Patrick McEnroe–who only gets by because the USTA is run like USA Dance–are having a Twitter fight. McEnroe decided that the USTA’s at-large bid to the French Open would go to the winner of a small tournament. Donald Young–who, up until about three years ago was The Future of American Tennis–believes that he should have been given the bid because, well, he was once The Future of American Tennis.
Without choosing sides in this fight, boy, Donald Young was awesome back in his prime. Movement is the most under-appreciated weapon in tennis. “Moving well” sounds so stupidly simple, but it combines a bunch of different elements: speed, acceleration, the ability to change direction, and, most importantly, the vision to put yourself in the right spot with the most economy of effort.
The great movers look like they’re gliding on glass. Young didn’t move like Richard Gasquet, but he was close.
Best mover of all time: Federer, by a mile. You can credit his 16 Slams to the forehand and the serve and the shotmaking. But his really amazing achievement–the 23 consecutive Slam semis–goes to the movement. Even when his shotmaking was having an off-day, the movement was always there. Federer could smother even top 10 players with his footwork.
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