A Time And A Place

So, um, that was awkward.

Don't get me wrong - I think Hit for Haiti is awesome. This one was definitely not the pure distilled radness that was the first one, but hey, it got it done. It made the big monies for charity and the crowd had fun times. And I think just about everyone reckons Navratilova, Graf and Davenport could make some pretty sweet comebacks. Navratilova especially. She has got it going on.

And then we had the dudes. And it started out well - I mean, hello, it had Tennis's Greatest Bromance out there with Roger and Rafa, and there's obviously bromances between Roger and Sampras and Agassi as well...

...but it is pretty obvious, no matter how many 'I love you, man's get thrown around, that there is some unfinished business between Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras. There is a whole lot of anger and bitterness and it's pretty clear that they just don't like each other much, end of story. Which is fine. They have every right not to like each other.

But Hit for Haiti was not the place to start making caustic remarks at each others' expense. It was pretty clear that Roger and Rafa found it really awkward, and the crowd found it awkward, and hell, everyone that watched it must have seen it was awkward.

The money still got raised and it's not going to make a difference in that sense, but dudes, time and a place. Hit for Haiti - not that place. I don't think it was ever going to be as awesome as the first one - you just couldn't fake that joyful spontaneity - but at least the players there just got into it and had a blast. Roger and Rafa kept those grins plastered on their faces throughout the whole Andre/Pete exchange, but there was no blast being had there.

C'mon, Pete. C'mon Andre. This is weird to say, considering the dudes you were playing with/against are younger than you, but grow up. Roger and Rafa are exemplary for the sport. Pete and Andre... great humanitarians, both of them, obviously... but this was not the right time for dirty laundry.

Musings on Entitlement

For the second year running, tennis has apparently been named Australia's favourite sport. Considering the amount of television time given to tennis in Australia (not much, unless it's the Australian Open), which is a country which pretty much reveres sport as a religious experience, then I find this a bit doubtful. Typically, Australian interest in a sport gets greater when we have some big heroes in it, and we're not doing so well at the moment. Considering one of the favourite questions asked by commentators is, 'will Lleyton Hewitt ever win another Slam? We reckon he can!' ...yeah, I'll leave you to ponder on the realism of that.

But then I started thinking about the whole Tiger Woods scandal - on which I have no opinion, by the way - and then I staretd thinking about scandal in sport in general, and something struck me. We have precious, precious little scandal in tennis. I mean, sure, in recent times we've had the whole Agassi palaver, but scandals in tennis are few and far between. It's practically a scandal that Andy Murray broke up with his girlfriend, and that was amicable on all sides.

You only have to look at domestic sport in Australia to know that all sports are not the same. Football players are the worst here - every second week it seems like another rugby league player (or occasionally an AFL player) does something scandalous. The amount of women that have been beaten by football players here because the players felt like they had a right to do so - well, it's a whole other rant, but it's a lot, and it's not good. Being a sporting hero creates a sense of entitlement, I think - a sense that they deserve more than the regular people - and from there, we get scandals like these.

But tennis? Not so much. Even the Agassi scandal didn't play out that way - he certainly acted on privilege when he got the ATP to hush the crystal meth thing up, but the taking of the drugs was more sheer stupidity than anything else. I haven't done a huge survey of scandal in sport or anything, but just looking at the Australian case, it does seem to me to be about entitlement.

So why - as far as we know - does tennis not foster this sense of entitlement?

I'd like to write it off to good leadership from the top - the Federer and Nadal effect - but I don't think that's it. I think they're certainly a good example and a good influence, but this relative lack of scandal in tennis has been going on for a while. There are examples of tennis players who did clearly feel entitled to something more - I feel like I should throw the McEnroe name into the ring here - but in comparison to other sports, it's very minor.

So here's a question. What is tennis doing right? (And I hope it's just not hushing up the scandals better!)

Hotel California

Svetlana Kuznetsova and Venus Williams are locked at 4-all in the final set as I write this, in what looks like a really awesome match. Serena's already qualified for the finals, I would imagine, by virtue of her perfect score - I'm pretty sure Venus can't qualify, having taken two losses, but Sveta is still in the running if she wins this one. So I have my pom poms out and I'm cheering for her. In other Doha results, Serena beat Elena and Caro beat Zvonareva (surely Caro will qualify from this group?)

Now. Let's talk boys.

Specifically let's go YAAAAAAAAAAAY! Marat Safin is in the quarter finals of St Petersburg.

Sure, he made it there courtesy of Igor Andreev's retirement, but a quarter is a quarter and it is not to be sneezed at. I'm not even going to say that it would be nice if Marat won the tournament, because that goes without saying. All I'm going to say is GO MARAT! - I want to see some crazy Safin brilliance before this career is through.

Speaking of people on the verge of retirement, it was nice to see Dominik Hrbaty playing in Vienna. He lost today to Jurgen Melzer, but he did win a match before that, so good on him. He's always fun to watch (and, may I remind you, he and his partner Dominika Cibulkova won the Hopman Cup this year, so he's still got some game) and it'll be sad when he is no longer a part of our great sport.

Though tennis is a bit like Hotel California - you can check out but you never leave. Even after your retirement, everyone still cares about what you did and what you're doing now... as evidenced by the Agassi crystal meth scandal, which I haven't talked about yet, but I will, when I work out what I want to say.

So yes. Hrbaty. Safin. Yay. Basically.

And Venus just totally beat Sveta. Sigh. So what happens if Sveta beats Dementieva? Everyone except Serena will have taken one win and two losses. Who qualifies then?


Today's Results

Sony Ericsson Championships (Doha)

Caroline Wozniacki def. Vera Zvonareva, 6-0 6-7 (3-7) 6-4
Serena Williams def. Elena Dementieva, 6-2 6-4
Venus Williams def. Svetlana Kuznetsova, 6-2 6-7 (3-7) 6-4


St Petersburg Open (St Petersburg)

Denis Istomin def. Mikhail Youzhny, 6-2 2-1 retired
Marat Safin def. Igor Andreev, 6-3 0-1 retired
Igor Kunitsyn def. Michail Elgin, 6-2 6-3
Sergiy Stakhovsky def. Andrey Kuznetsov, 6-1 6-4


Bank Austria Tennis Trophy (Vienna)

Marin Cilic def. Daniel Brands, 7-6 (9-7) 6-4
Gael Monfils def. Jan Hajek, 6-1 2-6 6-4
Feliciano Lopez def. Daniel Koellerer, 6-3 6-3
Jurgen Melzer def. Dominik Hrbaty, 6-4 7-5
Janko Tipsarevic def. Michael Berrer, 7-6 (7-3) 6-1


Grand Prix de Tennis de Lyon (Lyon)

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga def. Olivier Rochus, 6-3 6-2
Gilles Simon def. David Guez, 6-1 6-2
Ivan Ljubicic def. Nicolas Kiefer, 6-3 3-6 6-3
Michael Llodra def. Juan Monaco, 6-3 6-4
Marc Gicquel def. Paul-Henri Mathieu, 6-4 6-0
Arnaud Clement def. Benjamin Becker, 6-4 6-3

The Last American Hero?

I was reading through Tennis Australia's little Off the Court article that they put out every week (it was very short - clearly they aren't the only ones struggling for something to write about!) and something struck me. There was a story about John McEnroe thinking about retiring from Blackrock after losing so badly in London, and then a story about Pete Sampras saying that there are dark times for American tennis ahead.

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These guys are two of the major figureheads of the US tennis pantheon, yeah? And they are so incredibly different. McEnroe is all racquet-smashing and fire and temper and swearing, whereas Sampras is more gentleman-like -not quite to the epic standards of Federer, but still. He could be accused of being boring sometimes. And yet they're both still beloved - and, I might venture to say, probably disliked by equal amounts of people.

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And now we come to the point - what does US tennis have now?

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Andy Roddick, who probably drew more attention from his engagement to Brooklyn Decker than from his tennis this year, and James Blake, who was a bit of a non-event this year, apart from at the Olympics. Then I suppose there's Fish and Querrey and all that crew, but there is no real American tennis god right now, no McEnroe, no Connors, no Sampras, no Agassi. I guess Australia isn't the only place seemingly in a tennis recession. And Sampras seems to think there are dark times ahead for America - no one coming up, no one coming through. (I still pray at the altar of Tomic for the sake of Australian tennis every day. Go Bernard - though not with your little temper tantrums, please.)

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Tennis is almost wholly European at the moment. Look at the top - a Spanish guy, a Swiss guy, a Serbian guy, a British guy. Europe's got the monopoly on the top. Not that I'm complaining - there's nothing wrong with it. But how on earth did we go so quickly from a USA-USA duopoly in Agassi and Sampras to a Hispano-Suisse one?

Blast From The Past

It hasn't been a good week for the legends of the sport - and I'm not talking Federer and Nadal, our current legends, here. No, we're going old school. Tennis is clearly fraught with drama, even from beyond the proverbial grave.

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First, Boris Becker gets dumped by text message. I thought this was pretty hilarious, to tell the truth. Tennis Australia does this piece every week called 'Off The Court' - here's a paragraph from their article on the Becker incident:

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'Becker has led a tortured personal life in recent decades, divorcing from the mother of his two sons, Barbara Feltus, in 2001. He later gained playboy notoriety after fathering a child, now eight, with a Russian model, after a tryst in a London restaurant broom closet.'

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Can you tell me that he doesn't deserve to get dumped by text message? He seems like a bit of a tool, really. Maybe this is some kind of grand karmic revenge. Ha ha ha. That's pretty much all I have to say on the matter.

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And then Jimmy Connors goes and gets arrested at a basketball game. Guess he took his break up (presumably not by text message) with Andy Roddick pretty hard, returning to his old badarse ways after a brief stint as a respectable coach type. John McEnroe got sent off the court in a seniors match a while back for being a dickhead - guess Connors couldn't stand to be beaten and had to one-up him.

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It kind of makes you wonder - what will today's tennis heroes be like in twenty years? I would bet you any money that Roger and Rafa will be tennis statesmen in the model of Laver and Agassi, the classy guys: still making the sport proud, quiet family types, some endorsements, light commentary duties. (Can you imagine Rafa the commentator? Hilarious!) Djokovic, on the other hand, will still be trying to seduce Paraguayan javelin throwers and Slovakian singers, and will probably be getting dumped by text message for his troubles...