Last year I chose to skip the US Open tennis qualifying, which I enjoy quite a bit, in order to go to Eurocon and see Dublin after the 2014 World Science Fiction Convention. It was nice to be back after a year's absence.
Some changes since two years ago. It's the first time since the JABberwocky offices moved to Manhattan, so popping into the office for a few minutes now meant walking into Manhattan, visiting for a few minutes from 9-10am, and then taking the subway out to the tennis. The mileage isn't much different, adding up the walk to the office, to the subway, and from the subway to the tennis, than if I just walked to the tennis, but it felt like I was walking way less.
It's also the first time I got to see the qualifying with use of the new improved Courts 4/5/6 that opened last year, all of which offer excellent elevated seating on both ends. Court 5 has a little shade in front of the TV booth, though it wasn't hot enough this year for shade options to dictate my court choices.
And it's the first year I went to qualifying since they "enhanced" the security measures. Because a bag check of a small bag wasn't enough. Starting the first day with a bag check, a metal detector and a wanding wasn't enjoyable. I adjusted a little the next days by using a small bag to put everything from my pockets into the large bag. But on the whole, I'd rather have fewer guns and fewer metal detectors in the US than more of each. And come Monday, with the arrival of 25,000 people for the main event, the line to get in and go through the security screening will itself be a soft target.
Finally, the older I get the slower my metabolism, the less my appetite. I used to pack a lunch and then eat a full dinner after, and get an ice cream bar, and the Lemon Ice King and etc. etc. Now I have to lighten the sweets load and have a lighter lunch in order to have a full dinner. And I still feel like I'm overeating. Of course, I also need to hydrate. The weather topped out at 90 degrees on Tuesday, warmer than predicted, and I had to refill my two water bottles often. The other days, put in my 40oz at the start of the day and didn't need to visit the water fountains much afterward.
The first round of the qualifying is often not very scintillating. A lot of bad players, a lot of one-sided matches or dull matches. And this year, Tuesday was pretty bad even by the standards of bad first round matches. In fact, looking over the results the only thing to come of the day was noticing Elias Ymer, a 19-year old from Sweden, on Court 5, while I was watching a match on Court 6, who looked better than what I was watching.
Wednesday's schedule was a feast of riches. Alexander Zverev, who had some good results over the summer right after the deadline for automatic entry into the Open, was playing. Veteran players like Jurgen Melzer and Nicolas Almagro were on the schedule. I started the day watching a young Japanese player Yoshihito Nishioka playing Indonesia's Yuki Bhambri. Good match. Marked Nishioka as a player to watch.
That match was chosen because it was the #23 seed I'd never heard of vs. another player I'd never heard of, which is often my way of choosing first round matches. But for my next, I did opt to watch Nicolas Almagro, who's been in the top 10, playing Igor Sijsling, who's been in the top 55. Almagro won, but not too easily. The match went into a first set tie-break. But history aside, Almagro, who just turned 30 a week ago, didn't look like a slam dunk to beat the best qualifiers.
I stayed on Court 6 for the next match, which featured a Russian veteran, Alexander Kudryavtsev, against a 19-year old Chilean, Nicolas Jarry. The match was a demolition derby; Kudryavtsev won the first set in just 18 minutes, which might be the fastest set of men's tennis I've ever seen, and the second 6-4 set was just 34 minutes. But even though Jarry lost, it didn't seem to be a skill issue. Rather, Jarry was just spraying shots all over the place, seeming 100% overwhelmed by the moment even though he's done qualifying for the last two grand slams. If he could get his head in the game... Tuesday I could barely bare to watch the winners. Wednesday even the losers were interesting.
Alexander Zverev, the 18-year old German, is a major up-and-comer. In 2015, he's won matches in around 10 ATP tour events, reaching the quarter-finals at DC's Citi Open, the semis at the Swedish Open, and the quarters in Marseilles and the round of 64 in Miami, the last two even before his 18th birthday. How all that didn't collect points enough for him to be in the automatic entry for the US Open, I don't know, but seeing his name in the qualifying draw reminded me of ten years ago, when Andy Murray had a break-through summer a little too late to avoid US Open qualifying.
I was expecting Zverev to march through the qualifying like I remembered Andy Murray doing, and there was every sign of that in his first match as he took only 50 minutes to beat Horacio Zeballos. But his second match on Thursday was a dog-fight against another German, Nils Langer. Zverev showed quite a bit of temper, arguing about line calls consistently. On one occasion, he screamed quite loudly that a ball could not possibly have been out even though he was at the diagonally furthest end of the court from where the call was made and couldn't possibly have seen it. As there were many Germans watching this match between two of them, I was able to get translation for another call. The first part I didn't really need a translator because you know what's being said: "the ball was out." The second part, however... when his opponent refused to acknowledge that the ball was out, Zverev said "maybe where you come from in the South," referring to the different regions of Germany the two players were from. Zverev lost the second set in a tie-break in 68 minutes and then went down a break in the third set, but apparently his opponent's physical fortitude was less resilient than Zverev's complaining. Nils Langer just sort of drifted away in the latter half of the third set, and practically gave Zverev the match. On Friday, I had to settle for standing at the back of the seats in Court 13 to watch the last half of another dog fight with Ivan Dodig, a Croatian veteran, now 30. A tight tie-break ended a 72-minute first set, and then the second set was tight as well, ending anti-climactically when Dodig lost focus in the final game and double-faulted to end the 128-minute two-set match. It's as rare for a set to go 72 minutes as it is to go 16. But ultimately, Zverev prevailed, and advances to the main draw. Whatever player, whatever ranking, you don't want to find him as your first round opponent. This kid is going places.
Turning back the clock to Wednesday... After sitting in-between two stultifying matches on the backwater Courts 14 and 15, I heard the announcement of a new match getting underway on Court 11, and drifted over to watch Marcos Giron, a 22-year old NCAA champion, against Alejandro Gonzalez from Columbia, a few years older and one of the seeds in the qualifying with a rank in the low 100s. Very entertaining match. Gonzalez won, but not easily. Giron looked good, but he kept putting books short and into the middle of the court allowing Gonzalez to then all too often take control of the points. If Giron could do that a little less often, he has potential. Again, better losers on Wednesday than winners on Tuesday. And Gonzalez ended up winning his next two matches to qualify. In fact, his match on Friday ended around a minute after Zverev's on the next court over, but the press of humanity watching the two matches was so vast that I could barely turn around to try and peek over anyone's head to see it.
Zverev, Ymer and Nishioka were my three main follows for the qualifying tournament, and for better or worse, something interesting happened -- they all won all three of their matches. Better, because it means I found good players to follow. Worse, because sometimes when the player you really like in Round 1 loses in the later rounds you've found someone even better to watch later on.
Court 17 gets the marquees matches in the qualifying, but it has no "open" seating, so unless you get to the court before the start of the match you can be stuck waiting for several minutes in a dank enclosure below the court to gain admittance. Hence, there were some other players that maybe I could have seen, like Wimbledon boys champ Tommy Paul, whom I missed because I didn't have feel like dealing with Court 17 and never had good timing to go there for the start of a new match. I did see the final few points of the qualifying match for Andrey Rublev, a 17-year old Russian who looks like a live wire, potent and promising.
Looking at the main draw...
Tommy Paul has a match against the 25th seed Andreas Seppi, whom I saw years ago in qualifying. I don't consider Seppi to be any kind of world-beater, and on a good day with crowd support, Tommy Paul could win this. It has the looks of a Grandstand Court match.
Elias Ymer is blessed. He's going to play the 75th ranked Diego Schwartzman, which is a winnable match.
Alejandro Gonzalez may be even luckier. He has the 98th-ranked Filip Krajinovic to play. This is about as close to a qualifier-qualifier match as you can get in the first round of the main draw without actually getting it.
Andrey Rublev less lucky. He has Top 20 player Kevin Anderson of South Africa in the first round.
Luckiest? I might have to give that to Yoshihito Nishioka, who has one of those qualifier-qualifer matches in the first round, and goes up against Paul-Henri Mathieu. This 33-year old Frenchmen got as high as #12 in the world in 2008, but that's a very long time ago. Nishioka has some clear disadvantages in height and experience, but I wouldn't be complaining to have this first round match.
Not so lucky. Alexander Zverev. After the joys of playing a second-tier countryman in the qualifying he goes up against Philip Kohlschreiber, the top-ranked German and #29 seed.
Not entirely a surprise that Nicolas Almagro couldn't make it through the qualifying. He lost in the 2nd round, and doesn't have a chance even to be a "lucky loser," a loser in the final round of qualifying who is randomly drawn to fill any spots that open up in the next few days from last-minute withdrawals.
I'm reasonably certain I'll be enjoying some of the players I saw this year on my TV set in the years to come. Which I can't always say.
Food:
On two days, I got both a mint chocolate chip and vanilla chocolate chip from the Lemon Ice King of Corona. I got a meatball hero from Pat LaFreida stand at the Open. Too long in the warmer, so the ricotta cheese was a cold coating on top of the meatballs. Served warm on a busier day, it might be OK. I ate at Pho Banc, a Vietnamese restaurant in Elmhust that was excellent, and which I will return to. At Mustang Thakali Kitchen, a Nepalese/Tibetan in Jackson Heights, that was very good. And at De Mole, my standby for Mexican in Sunnyside. One Cherry Garcia bar from Ben & Jerry's. Some heirloom tomatoes and apples that I brown-bagged.
Showing posts with label tennis. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tennis. Show all posts
Saturday, August 29, 2015
Monday, August 26, 2013
Surprise!
So the US Open has announced that the gates are going to open a half hour earlier.
Why?
Because, per my last post, their useless extra security procedures are almost certainly leading to much more than the "slight delays" predicted in the press release.
So much wasted money, so much wasted time, so much waste and stupidity in order to add absolutely nothing other than wasted money and wasted time to a procedure in which every bag was already opened and inspected on the way in to the tennis center.
Why?
Because, per my last post, their useless extra security procedures are almost certainly leading to much more than the "slight delays" predicted in the press release.
So much wasted money, so much wasted time, so much waste and stupidity in order to add absolutely nothing other than wasted money and wasted time to a procedure in which every bag was already opened and inspected on the way in to the tennis center.
Sunday, August 25, 2013
Serving Out of Turn - US Open Edition
It's a really busy week, and I have started work on some detailed blog post about my annual (or as annual as I can make it) trek to the qualifying rounds for the US Open tennis tournament which begins on Monday.
However, since I'm not sure when I will finish those posts, I am going to jump the gun and offer now, before the tournament starts, some thoughts on how the 2013 Men's Qualifier crop might fare. I'll be a little broad, looking at some players I've seen in years past as well as the ones who made it in this year.
And right at the top half of the draw, we have Ricardas Berankis from Lithuania, who made it into the main draw this year but played disappointingly in the qualifying last year, playing Novak Djokovic, the #1 men's tennis player. Um, if Berankis wins, that would qualify as an upset.
Donald Young had to make it through the qualifying this year. He has had a long career that might be as interesting for things off the court as on. It's hard to believe he's only 24 because he's been talked about in US tennis as a prodigy for close to ten years, and he had a decent year in 2012 rising to top 40, but then 2013 has been abysmal. His relationship with the US Tennis Association over the years has been charged and awkward, with disagreements about coaching tactics. I've been hearing about him so long that I've perhaps become a little too hard on the idea that he will ever amount to anything. But on Friday, there were lines of people waiting to get in to the absolutely packed Court 11, one of the biggest typically used for qualifying rounds. He has a winnable first round match, against Martin Klizan from Serbia, who is also 24 and currently in the Top 50, but nobody's idea currently of a major threat. If he wins that, he has a potentially winnable 2nd round match. But he could face Andy Murray in the third round.
Moving down a bit, we've got James Blake from the US playing qualifier Ivo Karlovic. Blake was one of the top players in the US, is 33, is struggling to come back after injury and decline in the rankings, has to be playing now for real love of the game. He'll be a clear favorite of the crowd. But it's hard to root against Karlovic, who is 34, also struggling to come back after a lot of injuries, and has been in the top 10. Karlovic is 6'8" and was one of the first really big tall giant types to come into the men's game. He has a huge serve. But he's never had a truly great game outside of his ability to serve. How do you pick this one?
Marcos Baghdatis, whom I discovered in the qualifying many years ago when he beat Jeff Salzenstein on Court 7 in a match I wanted Salzenstein to win, goes up against a 2013 qualifier, Go Soeda. I have to think Baghdatis will win, though the US Open has been his worst grand slam, never even into the 3rd round in spite of being a finalist, semi-finalist, and into the 4th round at the other three grand slams.
Also hanging around in the top half is Denis Kudla, whom I saw last year and believe has potential. He has a winnable match against a Czech ranked #78.
There are only five qualifiers of 16 in the top half, though I've been going to the qualifying long enough that there are plenty of players, beginning with Andy Murray, whom I've watched in the qualifying in prior years.
Which means there are 11 qualifiers, plus a lucky loser, hanging out in the bottom half.
There is one Q/Q match, where two qualifiers are playing against one another. The heavy-serving Albano Olivetti of France, whom I saw, certainly has a shot against fellow Frenchman Stephane Robert. The winner will most likely face Richard Gasquet, the #8 seed and a fellow Frenchman and another player I've seen in qualifying, watching him get disqualified from a match for hitting a lines judge with his ball or racket (memory; the details fade with time!).
Phillip Petzschner has a definite chance against an up-and-coming American, Jack Sock, and most likely faces Jerzy Janowicz in the 2nd round. Janowicz is the #14 seed, and a player I spotted in qualifying three years ago and predicted good things for. He made his major breakthrough last fall. So I like Janowicz, but I still don't think of him as a sure bet to win any/every given match he plays. Should he be upset by another qualifier, Argentine Maximo Gonzalez, in the first round, then either Sock or Petzschner has quite the opportunity for advancement in this year's Open.
Nick Kyrgios, an Australian of Greek ancestry, and very highly touted, gets to face #4 seed David Ferrer. I can't really see Ferrer losing that match.
Frank Dancevic has an opportunity. The 26-year-old Dutchman Robin Haase is ranked in the 60s, peaked in the 30s. Dancevic peaked in the 60s and is currently ranked in the 150s and is three years older. I'll be pulling for Dancevic personally, just because I first spotted him in the qualifying years ago, and I have kind of a soft spot.
Way down at the bottom half of the draw...
Ryan Harrison, whom I've seen play with guts, heart, skill, passion, in the qualifying in years past, has shown other sides of his personality elsewhere. Tantrums, petulance, etc. He also has the absolute worst luck of any player I have ever followed. He manages to draw Top 10 players as opponents in early rounds of even the most obscure tournaments way more than chance would have it. So, of course, he gets to play Rafael Nadal in the first round. All I can say, if Harrison pulls the upset, is that I'd say it's less unlikely than whomever it is Nadal lost to in Wimbledon.
Interestingly enough, Nadal can run through the entire section of his draw taking out players I've liked in qualifying over the years. Harrison in the first round. Then Canadian Vasek Pospisil, who had a breakthrough in this year's major men's tournament in Canada and will I hope prove to be "for real' outside of his home soil, and then possibly Rhyne Williams, who got a main draw wildcard this year but last year came through the qualifying, upsetting none other than Vasek Pospisil in the first round. Won't that make for a strange year, if they have a rematch in this year's 3rd round.
So of the qualifiers I saw in 2013, I'd say that Phillip Petzschner and Alberto Olivetti have the best chance of making it to the 3rd round.
I should fill this post with wonderful links to all of the earlier posts I've done dating back to 2008 that talk about some of these players, but I just don't have the hours in the day.
But this here -- yes, HERE, is a link to all of my posts that have a Tennis label, and you can scroll down quickly enough to check for my insights from years past.
I've seen at least 30 of the players in this year's main draw playing in qualifying.
Tuesday, November 6, 2012
The After Sandy
So it's been an interesting last ten days or so!
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
For the first ten years of JABberwocky, I worked alone in my apartment, it's never given me cabin fever the way being forced to stay in my apartment by weather does. It's not just a recent thing with Irene last year or Sandy this year, I remember an MLK day many years ago when there was an ice storm sort of thing and the sidewalks were too dangerous. But Sandy might have been the worst of it, in part because of the subway flooding. All the years I was working alone, I would go to the Post Office because I had to do it, I could stop at the library to read the paper, I did my own messenger work for a good chunk of that time and could go out laden with manuscripts and enjoy some fresh air and exercise. But with Sandy, the office was closed last Monday and Tuesday, the subways weren't running, it was hard to do much of anything social, and there wasn't any choice. And I had power! Many of my Scrabble friends especially live in the part of Manhattan that didn't have power for days.
I am so glad the NYC Marathon was cancelled. Mayor Bloomberg has always had this weak spot for sports, for the football stadium on the west side of Manhattan, or his Olympics bid, now this, he's lost most of those battles. Currently, there are plans to expand the Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows Park, which have some community opposition, but which don't look to take too much more parkland, and also plans to build a soccer stadium in the park, which would take up lots of parkland. And would be in the "Fountain of the Planets" area, part of the grand design of the park for the 1964 Worlds Fair. I'd rather the city find the money to restore that area of the park and to restore a little more of the public grandeur. Sometimes people join me for the qualifying at the US Open, if they haven't been to Flushing Meadows before I'll take them around the park, and it's so much "that used to be, this used to be" and not near enough of what actually is. One of the world's richest cities should do better. I don't think it's just that I'm biased in favor of tennis. Having spent a lot of time in the park before the expansion of the tennis center in the 1990s, I didn't perceive that the tennis was taking away a lot of high value area in the park, the soccer stadium would be. When I walk people around the park, I've always pointed to where the soccer stadium would be as "shameful the way the city has let this fall to rot," deciding it can only be saved by covering it with a soccer stadium isn't right.
On tennis, Jerzy Janowicz continued his amazing run at the Paris ATP Masters, winning a semi-final match convincingly against Gilles Simon, currently ranked #20 and as high as #6. Five wins in a week against top 20 players. The run ended in the final against David Ferrer, top 5, who heretofore had the most victories in ATP Masters 1000 events without actually winning one. Ferrer's a short player, it was funny watching the trophy presentation because Janowicz is tall, a foot higher at least, and he's quietly become one of the best players in the game outside the big 4 without getting much attention. Janowicz moved up to #26 in the world, over 40 notches higher, going from nobody to somebody, from qualifying every week to making every tournament by direct draw and guaranteeing himself a seed in the Australian Open.
Comic books. DC is filling "5th Wednesday" months with Annuals and other non New-52 books, it keeps the New 52 on schedule without leaving holes. The last time we had a 5th Monday week the Annuals weren't very good. This week I picked up a Batgirl Annual and a Swamp Thing Annual that were both quite good, and an Action Annual that was solid. Steve Niles has a new horror story Lot 13 with a first issue out from DC that was a little like a Zebra genre horror novel from 25 or 30 years ago but with some nice art and on balance pleasant. First of 5 issues, I look forward to the rest. I didn't like the last in the 8-issue New Deadwardians Vertigo mini-series quite as much as the series as a whole, and I'm not liking the final issues of the current American Vampire arc as much as the first, but still, both were solid enough.
And now I want to get on my soapbox a bit.
I could talk a lot more about my personal experiences during Sandy Week, but I came off a lot better than most, JABberwocky didn't do so badly, for the most part I was just coming away with memories for the memory bank, of walking across the 59th St. Bridge with thousands of people instead of dozens, or watching dozens of cars lined up for gas.
Instead, I'm going to talk about human irrationality as viewed thru the prism of Sandy and 9/11.
The two events can't be directly compared, in part because you can't easily compare thousands of lives lost in 9/11 with the far-flung economic damages from Sandy and other weather events. But we can safely say the events are in their different ways catastrophic.
So why did 9/11 inspire so much action, while a decade of ever-increasing natural threats like Sandy doesn't seem to get much to happen?
If you read my blog regularly, you know I've gone one at some of the things we tolerate in the name of stopping a terrorist event. Enduring patdowns at baseball games, and rules that allow us to bring in factory-sealed water bottles but not an empty water bottle (i.e., a factory-sealed water bottle that we dump out the moment we pass thru the turnstile) to fill at a water fountain. "Heightened security" at office buildings full of people that no terrorist cares about, showing photo IDs or even having drivers licenses scanned to gain admittance (what does building management do with your scanned license?), though happily very few of the buildings have magnetomers, so as long as we have photo ID we can go as postal as we want once inside. All the BS at TSA checkpoints, the layers of reactive-to-the-last-threat security. And the things I rant about are the tip of a vast and mostly hidden security apparatus (link goes to a major Washington Post series) that has huge costs, not just in actual money but in time and in loss of liberty. My point here isn't that all of these things are bad (random bag checks on subways, I think strike a good balance and are worthwhile), but to say that we definitely do a lot, and a lot of that not rationally.
As to extreme climate events?
Well, even if I limit myself only to things that deal solely with the extreme climate events themselves and not with underlying causes, we don't do very much. Forget about if it's rational or irrational, it's not done. It was often very easy for railroads and for highways to follow river valleys, so there are lots of railroad lines like the Metro North Hudson Line commuter rail here in New York, parts of the Amtrak line between St. Louis and Kansas City that are very close to water, all over, which are more and more likely to be damaged as sea level rises, which is currently happening. We're not talking about that at all. We've done very little in New York City to add "baby gates" in the subways that might keep the water from coming downstairs. It would make lots of sense to bury power lines in DC which is getting walloped with lots of damaging stores, and fewer than 35% of the electric customers would want to see a dollar a month added to their bill to help pay for it.
What gives?
For one security silliness does gives an immediate sense of benefit, right or wrong but it does, so we don't ask what they actually protecting against, the odds of that bad thing happening, or multiply out the little costs to our time and to our wallet of all of these things. And we rarely pay directly. It's buried in the rent or the price of a baseball ticket or a 9/11 security fee hidden in the fine print of the airline receipt. Small but visible benefit, invisible damage to our wallet, often small time cost that we never think to multiply out. Even small things to deal with climate events will have larger visible costs. We don't actually know every dime our government spends on our homeland security apparatus which is hidden away in black areas of the budget, but if we spend money on sea walls in New York like those in the Thames which protect London or the tidal barriers which were built 50 years ago near Providence RI, those are large public expenses. And after we spend that money, we don't visually see the result, people in Providence don't have a way to visualize the return on investment from spending a lot of money fifty years ago. It's like this with a lot of infrastructure.
Second, we have a political system that reacts to money, and which is designed to protect streams of money more than one-time floods. An example: you give a private company a contract to run a prison, the private company makes a profit, it can use some of that profit to invest back into the political system via campaign contributions and ads in the right places to keep that profit. It's the same with cable companies and health insurance companies and defense contractors and virtually any other business that relies on getting us or the government to give little bits of money on an ongoing basis (and just to mention, there are also people who get government benefits, but food stamps don't supply a lot of profit that you can invest back into the system in order to keep getting food stamps). Some of our money, some of the government's money, goes to guarantee the need for us to keep paying that money. The constructions trades and construction unions also lobby for infrastructure money, but there isn't quite as much spare cash splashing around because a lot of those things are one-time. If you want to leverage the money the construction trades and construction unions have, it usually can't be for infrastructure being built as as long-term public good, but rather needs to be tied to something like the Keystone Pipeline. There, the construction people get business, which leads to a steady flow of oil flowing through the pipeline, so the oil industry is happy to spend money to talk up the (likely inflated) number of construction jobs from the Pipeline, creating a nice resonant echo chamber.
And finally, human beings just aren't very good at evaluating risks.
Which makes it very difficult to do things the way Dr. Spock might logically have us do them. There are way too many areas where we evaluate risk feebly. And since government is us, all joined together...
So what do we have?
The NY Times reports there are many prominent office buildings that are closed for weeks or months in lower Manhattan as a result of flooding. I'm sure over the past ten years that these buildings have, as a rule, spent very generously on lobby security, which has kept all of them safe from terrorist plots. And all that money might better have been spent on something else.
I'm not all that optimistic that Sandy will change very much. The buildings will reopen, and every day the people in them will feel very secure because they have a turnstile in the lobby, and each one of those days Sandy will fall a little further into the past. And we don't have politicians these days of any stripe that want to fiercely advocate for the idea of government as a public good that sometimes needs to step in and do things -- great things, sometimes -- that we can't do ourselves.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
Jerzy Shore
So back in 2010 I spoke quite excitedly about a young Polish tennis player, Jerzy Janowicz, whom I'd watched in the US Open qualifying. "Too good for me" to be able to count on him being in qualifying for very long.
And then in 2011, I was left baffled, as he was again in the qualifying and looked really not that good.
Did he just have an off day in 2011? Or was 2011 the normal, and 2010 the match of his life.
Today we found out the answer. Janowicz was just good enough in 2012 to escape the qualifying at the US Open, and he came into qualifying for this week's ATP Masters 1000 event in Paris, one of the top tier tournies right below the Grand Slams in ranking points, ranked in the high 60s. And he beat Dmitry Tursunov, once ranked in the top 20, and Florent Serra, once ranked in the top 40, to qualify. Then he beat the #19 ranked Philipp Kohlschreiber. Then he beat the #16 ranked (and 13th seed) Marin Cilic. And now he's just finished beating Andy Murray, the guy who won the gold in the Olympics and the US Open and is currently ranked #3 in the world. And he did this after losing a tight first set, then having to prevail in a 2nd set tiebreaker. Well, maybe he's just had the best week of tennis in his life, this could in fact be the best week of tennis in his life beating #19, #16 and #3, and he could still have a nice tennis career for a very long time and wind up in the top 20. And if that's "all" he does, I can look at my blog post from 2010 and say I knew him when...
It also sets him apart from a player like Ryan Harrison, who has suffered from a lot of tough draws where he always seems to have a top-ranked player in the first or second round. But Harrison never seems to beat any of them. He takes a set here or there, he always looks nice, I don't even want to say if it's Janowicz or Harrison who is actually the better player, but right now today you've got to put money on the guy who just beat #19, #16 and #3 in quick succession, over the guy who occasionally takes a set from #3. Harrison is an American, so I hope he can pick up his game that extra little bit, but today, I'm hugely excited by Jerzy Janowicz's run.
And then in 2011, I was left baffled, as he was again in the qualifying and looked really not that good.
Did he just have an off day in 2011? Or was 2011 the normal, and 2010 the match of his life.
Today we found out the answer. Janowicz was just good enough in 2012 to escape the qualifying at the US Open, and he came into qualifying for this week's ATP Masters 1000 event in Paris, one of the top tier tournies right below the Grand Slams in ranking points, ranked in the high 60s. And he beat Dmitry Tursunov, once ranked in the top 20, and Florent Serra, once ranked in the top 40, to qualify. Then he beat the #19 ranked Philipp Kohlschreiber. Then he beat the #16 ranked (and 13th seed) Marin Cilic. And now he's just finished beating Andy Murray, the guy who won the gold in the Olympics and the US Open and is currently ranked #3 in the world. And he did this after losing a tight first set, then having to prevail in a 2nd set tiebreaker. Well, maybe he's just had the best week of tennis in his life, this could in fact be the best week of tennis in his life beating #19, #16 and #3, and he could still have a nice tennis career for a very long time and wind up in the top 20. And if that's "all" he does, I can look at my blog post from 2010 and say I knew him when...
It also sets him apart from a player like Ryan Harrison, who has suffered from a lot of tough draws where he always seems to have a top-ranked player in the first or second round. But Harrison never seems to beat any of them. He takes a set here or there, he always looks nice, I don't even want to say if it's Janowicz or Harrison who is actually the better player, but right now today you've got to put money on the guy who just beat #19, #16 and #3 in quick succession, over the guy who occasionally takes a set from #3. Harrison is an American, so I hope he can pick up his game that extra little bit, but today, I'm hugely excited by Jerzy Janowicz's run.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Tennis, Anyone - 2012 Version
This wasn't the best year I've had at the US Open. As an example, in 2010 I enjoyed seeing:
Bernard Tomic, an Australian with a good run or two at the Australian Open who maybe isn't the next big thing but is still a solid and reckonable player
Ryan Harrison, a definitely up-and-coming American who's had too many bad draws, constantly facing top players in early rounds and not yet beating them, thus not as many ranking points as if he had a few easier early round opponents, but definitely going places
Jerzy Janowicz, a Polish player who had a really good Wimbledon this year
Ricardas Berankis, a Lithuanian who advanced to the final of the DC tournament this summer, helped since the field was weakened because of the Olympics, but still if you can get to the final of an ATP mens tournament that ain't chopped liver.
So this year I thought I was really lucky that Berankis had his breakthrough to late to get into the US Open automatic entry, so I could watch his coronation in the qualifying like I did with Andy Murray the year he was stuck qualifying for the final time. No such luck. I watched Berankis struggle in the first two rounds of the qualifying this year and then lose to a fairly unheralded American. Really entertaining match, but it was an awful week for a player who is still very young and should have done better.
It was that kind of year. I saw six matches on Tuesday for the first day of the first round, and some of the matches I'd forgotten by today. The highlight: Rhyne Williams, a 21-year-old American who was a good college player and had a good summer on the European minor league tennis circuit, upset Vasek Pospisil, a Canadian player who looked wonderful in 2011 and carries expectation and was the #7 seed in the qualifying. It wasn't even close, really. In fact, Williams went on to win his next two matches without breaking a sweat. If the home town crowds can help him along... I also caught my first glimpse of James Duckworth, a 20-year old Australian who may have promise.
Day 2 was maybe a little better. I caught a glimpse of Hiroki Moriya, a 21-year old from Japan who looked worth following. Hard to say what's up, his 2nd and 3rd round matches were both long drawn-out endless deuces and long rally affairs that suggest neither he nor his opponents could force a winning shot into the equation, but he did end up prevailing in both to qualify. I saw only a smidgen of Guido Andreozzi, a 21-year-old Argentine, but he showed me something in that little bit of viewing.
Day 3 was an odd kind of day, Brady McReynolds, the newest member of the JABberwocky team who is handling foreign rights, came out for the afternoon. So we left the tennis center for a little bit so I could give a walking tour of Flushing Meadows Park, we popped in to Armstrong and the Grandstand to eat while watching a smidgen of practice, he was doing the video recording thing with his phone of Andy Murray. But before Brady arrived, I saw James Duckworth and Bobby Reynolds play a hugely entertaining match on Court 17. Duckworth, 20 and solid and with an all court game, was probably the better player, but Bobby Reynolds had a huge and vocal rooting section even by the standards of the home-town crowd for an American, and I do think that made the difference when Duckworth was broken to lose this really tight 3-set match. Hugely entertaining.
On Day 4, I wanted to watch the #1 seed in the qualifying, Dutchman Igor Sijsling. Enh. He won, but not all that impressively. Ahead of that, I watched Jimmy Wang from Taiwan and Romanian Marius Copil in a long and tight three-setter on the same court. Like with Moriya's matches a little bit because the players couldn't always find winners. Wang won and qualified, but it wouldn't surprise me if Copil sticks around if he can find that little something extra in his game. The Sijsling match at least was boring and quick, so I was able to see the last half of the 2:30+ affair with Berankis and Tim Smyczek. With Berankis losing, maybe crowd helped a little but you could hear more vocal cheering from a few courts over for Bobby Reynolds than for US player Smyczek.
The weather was solid, just a little bit of rain that delayed play for an hour on Wednesday, and then a little hotter on Friday, the first day I really needed to visit the water fountains after each set. I stopped going to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, for some reason the ices just didn't seem as wonderful as in my recollection and I didn't feel I needed to add the (not much) time to go back the last couple of days. I did stop in on Thursday in Manhattan for the grand opening of the Whole Foods on 57th St. and 2nd Ave., which is the 133rd Whole Foods that I have visited. I was glad to add one on Opening Day but honestly it was too crowded to really enjoy. It's a very small store, maybe not much smaller than the first Manhattan store in Chelsea but that store was built without a cafe which this one has, which is nice that you can sit and eat but also means the actual selling space is really tightly designed. I finally went to Donovan's Pub for what some places rate as one of NYC's best burgers. It was OK. And tried a Thai restaurant in that section of Elmhurst that is filled with Asian ethnic eateries that really I should have eaten at more of.
Still and all, even on an off year, the 4 days of qualifying are among the more satisfying of the 365 I get during a year.
Looking ahead...
Igor Sijsling might not be all that good, but the draw is on his side. His first round opponent is Daniel Gimeno-Traver, who is currently ranked #102 for singles, i.e., lower than a player like Berankis who had his good week too late to count for the US Open. That's a very winnable match. If he wins, no matter what happens in the 2nd round Sijsling is assured of a nice check and at least 70 ranking points for the qualifying (25) and making the 2nd round (45). And against either Kevin Anderson of South Africa or top 10 player David Ferrer, Sijsling doesn't get to round #3.
Rhyne Williams does not have the luck of the draw. He gets to play Andy Roddick in the first round. Roddick is having a bad year, who knows if he has another good year in him. The good news for Rhyne Williams is that he probably gets to play a night match in Arthur Ashe Stadium, this seems like the kind of perfect early round match-up for Arthur Ashe. But as surprised as I was to see Rhyne Williams beat Vasek Pospisil in round 1 of the qualifying would be way more to see him beating Roddick at the US Open.
Marcos Baghdatis has had some career highlights since I first saw him in the Open qualifying something like 8 years ago but has faded a lot. This seems a more likely opportunity for a German qualifier Matthias Bachinger. Upset, yes, shocking if it happens no.
Hiroki Moriya against Ivan Dodig? Winnable for the qualifier. Jimmy Wang against hard-serving Ivo Karlovic isn't winnable.
Bobby Reynolds and Tim Smyczek may get to play on the Grandstand, but they get to play one another. The PTB at the US Open are (a) glad that one of them is guaranteed of being in the 2nd round (b) not glad to have two vaguely marquees players facing off in the first round. On the other hand, they will get either the Argentine qualifier Andreozzi or Japan's #17 Kei Nishikori in the 2nd round, even if they get the #17 player in the world, playing at the US Open with a home town crowd pulling big time, I would give one of those Americans a fighting chance for the 3rd round, and could even see a winnable 3rd round match looking further down the draw.
The good news on having WorldCon on the traditional Labor Day weekend instead of August is that it means I can go to the qualifying, the bad news is I can't watch much of the Open during WorldCon, and this year I have other travel both sides of WorldCon. But it's always fun to see how it plays out.
And just to say, if you like tennis, the qualifying is free and open to the public, and you can do worse than schedule a trip to NYC to watch some good free tennis !!
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
The Noon Report
So on the tennis-related front, the #6 seed Robin Soderling withdrew from the US Open with an undisclosed illness, and his spot in the draw was taken as a "lucky loser" by Rogerio Dutra Da Silva. This would appear to be good news for Soderling's opponent, qualifer Louk Sorensen from Ireland, who goes from playing a top 10 player in his first round match to playing essentially another qualifying round match. However, Sorensen lost the first set 6-0 and has just taken a game to start the 2nd set, he couldn't be doing any worse against Soderling. Sorensen looked pleasant enough in the qualifying, but Da Silva is clearly the better player of these two. That said, I would expect the match will tighten up a little. It's a great opportunity for either player since the second round match will be winnable at least. The 3rd round match with Isner or Baghdatis less so, but one of these players has a good shot to be in the 3rd round of the Open.
And Vasek Pospisil is just demolishing Lukas Rosol, that match is at 6-1, 5-1, the first set took all of 19 minutes and the second set will likely be under 25 as well.
To interrupt this tennis post with some actual business news, we are told via publisherslunch.com that Waterstone's in the UK is ending the "3 for 2" book promos that have been a fixture of UK bookselling for years and years. Here in the office, Eddie's first reaction is that this is an awful decision being made by the new owners, since this has been such a fixture of the trade. I'm not so sure. I've found UK bookselling to be generally in a very boring state in recent years, with the plethora of endless 3-for-2 tables all stocking all the same books at all the same stores to just be deathly dull In any event doing the same thing for years and years can get boring and should sometimes be changed for the sake of it. But then again, if they'll just be replacing endless tables of 3-for-2 with endless boring same-everywhere tables of books being promoted in some different way, it ends up making no real difference. I guess we'll see how it shakes out.
For those not so good at math a 3-for-2 discount is the same as Buy 1-Get 1 50% Off promo that we've had on a lot of trade paperbacks in the US, and which in fact Borders might have imported as a variation from their UK stores.
As I typed those last two paragraphs, Pospisil took the 2nd set 6-2 and Sorensen and Da Silva are on serve after three games of their second set.
And here is a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Malek Jaziri, the Tunisian qualifier who is facing top-rated American Mardy Fish in a 2nd round match tomorrow.
And Vasek Pospisil is just demolishing Lukas Rosol, that match is at 6-1, 5-1, the first set took all of 19 minutes and the second set will likely be under 25 as well.
To interrupt this tennis post with some actual business news, we are told via publisherslunch.com that Waterstone's in the UK is ending the "3 for 2" book promos that have been a fixture of UK bookselling for years and years. Here in the office, Eddie's first reaction is that this is an awful decision being made by the new owners, since this has been such a fixture of the trade. I'm not so sure. I've found UK bookselling to be generally in a very boring state in recent years, with the plethora of endless 3-for-2 tables all stocking all the same books at all the same stores to just be deathly dull In any event doing the same thing for years and years can get boring and should sometimes be changed for the sake of it. But then again, if they'll just be replacing endless tables of 3-for-2 with endless boring same-everywhere tables of books being promoted in some different way, it ends up making no real difference. I guess we'll see how it shakes out.
For those not so good at math a 3-for-2 discount is the same as Buy 1-Get 1 50% Off promo that we've had on a lot of trade paperbacks in the US, and which in fact Borders might have imported as a variation from their UK stores.
As I typed those last two paragraphs, Pospisil took the 2nd set 6-2 and Sorensen and Da Silva are on serve after three games of their second set.
And here is a post from the NY Times Straight Sets blog about Malek Jaziri, the Tunisian qualifier who is facing top-rated American Mardy Fish in a 2nd round match tomorrow.
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
I, Oracle
So I think I did OK in judging the chances of the US Open qualifiers to play on Day One. Jaziri won his first round match, which I'd suggested could happen if didn't outright say would. All the other qualifiers to play on Day One lost, most in straight sets, none huge surprises. I did give De Veigy a chance of beating Tommy Hass, he didn't but he took a set and it was a competitive match.
Alas for Jaziri, his next round opponent will be Mardy Fish, the highest ranked American player who has been on fire this summer. So Jaziri had best be prepared for enjoying the moment of playing on Arthur Ashe Stadium, because that's likely to be the best part of the day.
The NY Times tells me I watched history being made when I saw Louk Sorensen qualify. The two Irish qualifiers this year may be the first ever players from Ireland to play in the main draw of the US Open.
Alas for Jaziri, his next round opponent will be Mardy Fish, the highest ranked American player who has been on fire this summer. So Jaziri had best be prepared for enjoying the moment of playing on Arthur Ashe Stadium, because that's likely to be the best part of the day.
The NY Times tells me I watched history being made when I saw Louk Sorensen qualify. The two Irish qualifiers this year may be the first ever players from Ireland to play in the main draw of the US Open.
Sunday, August 28, 2011
Looking Ahead
So the qualifying has concluded, and the draw has been filled out. Let's look selectively at what the qualifiers face in the days ahead...
The "top half" of the draw, the one with main #1 seed Novak Djokovic, got 10 qualifiers into it.
Romain Jouan and Augustin Gensse have both drawn seeded top 32 main draw players and are not likely to advance to the second round.
American qualifier Michael Yani has a first round match against a young Australian, Bernard Tomic, who made a strong run at the Australian Open this year and is considered to be a real up-and-comer. However, he's often a bit up-and-down, and plays a game that's based as much on taking his opponents out of their rhythm as on having a great rhythm of his own. Michael Yani doesn't have a particular rhythm, he's just happy to be in the main draw of a grand slam. Tomic should win, but it's not unthinkable that Yani will.
Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy has drawn Tommy Haas. Haas was a top 10 player, as high as #2 in the world in fact, but he's 33, he's struggled to come back from a lot of injuries in recent years. This isn't a bad draw, you've got to think, if you're de Veigy.
Sergei Bubka has an excellent draw. His opponent is Andreas Haider-Mauder, an Austrian who was in the qualifying a year ago, and is ranked in the 70s. He's not that good a player, and Bubka can win this match.
Marsel Ilhan and Frank Dancevic are lucky, they got a Q-Q match, i.e., two qualifying players getting to play one another in the first round, which is a guaranteed opportunity for one to get into the 2nd round. And the two players are just two years apart in age. But Dancevic, he's a player I followed in the qualifying for a year or two, he had his one big year in 2008 when he made it to the finals of a summer tournament and had a winnable match against Marat Safin a round or two into the US Open that he lost mostly because of lack of experience in Grand Slam situations. I feel he's 26 but on the wrong side of the career arc. Ilhan is only a year or two younger, but my instinctive feel is that he's still climbing. My money would be on Ilhan, won't complain if I'm wrong. This is a Court 14 match at 11AM in the morning.
Go Soeda of Japan faces top 40 player Kevin Anderson, who's currently playing the best tennis of his career.
Malek Jaziri has drawn Dutch player Thiemo De Bakker, who is top 50 but doesn't have the kind of name to inspire fear in anyone. This is Court 8 at 1PM, and could be a match. Or maybe I'm being a little bit of an optimist.
Flipping to the "bottom half" of the draw, Ireland's Louk Sorensen has top 10 player Robin Soderling, advantage Soderling.
Joao Souza of Brazil has Robby Ginepri from the US, and that's a match the qualifier can win.
Pospisil, he has a match that he can definitely win, against a Czech player Lukas Rosol who is currently ranked in the 60s. Rosol's rank is based entirely on a few good challenger tournaments where he beats qualifying level players, which Pospisil is distancing himself from, and a good run at this year's French Open. I'm a Pospisil fan, and expect he'll have a 2nd round match against the #25 seed.
Jesse Huta Galung has drawn James Blake. This match should go Blake's way.
Jean-Rene Lisnard has a match against Olivier Rochus, whom I've seen in the qualifying. This could go either way.
Robert Farah against Nicholas Mahut -- edge, Mahut.
Lucas Lacko got into the main draw as a "Lucky Loser," chosen by lots as a seeded but defeated qualifier to replace a late withdrawal from the tournaments. Odds are one or two other players will end withdrawing before their first match.
Not counting players I saw in qualifying this year only, there are close to 20 players in this year's US Open whom I've seen in qualies over the years.
The "top half" of the draw, the one with main #1 seed Novak Djokovic, got 10 qualifiers into it.
Romain Jouan and Augustin Gensse have both drawn seeded top 32 main draw players and are not likely to advance to the second round.
American qualifier Michael Yani has a first round match against a young Australian, Bernard Tomic, who made a strong run at the Australian Open this year and is considered to be a real up-and-comer. However, he's often a bit up-and-down, and plays a game that's based as much on taking his opponents out of their rhythm as on having a great rhythm of his own. Michael Yani doesn't have a particular rhythm, he's just happy to be in the main draw of a grand slam. Tomic should win, but it's not unthinkable that Yani will.
Jonathan Dasnieres de Veigy has drawn Tommy Haas. Haas was a top 10 player, as high as #2 in the world in fact, but he's 33, he's struggled to come back from a lot of injuries in recent years. This isn't a bad draw, you've got to think, if you're de Veigy.
Sergei Bubka has an excellent draw. His opponent is Andreas Haider-Mauder, an Austrian who was in the qualifying a year ago, and is ranked in the 70s. He's not that good a player, and Bubka can win this match.
Marsel Ilhan and Frank Dancevic are lucky, they got a Q-Q match, i.e., two qualifying players getting to play one another in the first round, which is a guaranteed opportunity for one to get into the 2nd round. And the two players are just two years apart in age. But Dancevic, he's a player I followed in the qualifying for a year or two, he had his one big year in 2008 when he made it to the finals of a summer tournament and had a winnable match against Marat Safin a round or two into the US Open that he lost mostly because of lack of experience in Grand Slam situations. I feel he's 26 but on the wrong side of the career arc. Ilhan is only a year or two younger, but my instinctive feel is that he's still climbing. My money would be on Ilhan, won't complain if I'm wrong. This is a Court 14 match at 11AM in the morning.
Go Soeda of Japan faces top 40 player Kevin Anderson, who's currently playing the best tennis of his career.
Malek Jaziri has drawn Dutch player Thiemo De Bakker, who is top 50 but doesn't have the kind of name to inspire fear in anyone. This is Court 8 at 1PM, and could be a match. Or maybe I'm being a little bit of an optimist.
Flipping to the "bottom half" of the draw, Ireland's Louk Sorensen has top 10 player Robin Soderling, advantage Soderling.
Joao Souza of Brazil has Robby Ginepri from the US, and that's a match the qualifier can win.
Pospisil, he has a match that he can definitely win, against a Czech player Lukas Rosol who is currently ranked in the 60s. Rosol's rank is based entirely on a few good challenger tournaments where he beats qualifying level players, which Pospisil is distancing himself from, and a good run at this year's French Open. I'm a Pospisil fan, and expect he'll have a 2nd round match against the #25 seed.
Jesse Huta Galung has drawn James Blake. This match should go Blake's way.
Jean-Rene Lisnard has a match against Olivier Rochus, whom I've seen in the qualifying. This could go either way.
Robert Farah against Nicholas Mahut -- edge, Mahut.
Lucas Lacko got into the main draw as a "Lucky Loser," chosen by lots as a seeded but defeated qualifier to replace a late withdrawal from the tournaments. Odds are one or two other players will end withdrawing before their first match.
Not counting players I saw in qualifying this year only, there are close to 20 players in this year's US Open whom I've seen in qualies over the years.
Friday, August 26, 2011
Tennis Anyone, IV
And to close...
The second set of the Pospisil match was anything but routine. It was one of the longest sets of tennis I've ever seen, 68 minutes for a 12 game set, vs. 41 minutes for the13 game tiebreak set Pospisil had with Guccione two days before. There was an epic game early on with Brezak struggling hard to hold serve. Pospisil, whose serve can be so strong, was having games go to 0-40 or 0-30 against and then struggling to fight back into it. Finally, at the very tail end, Pospisil managed to get a break and win the match. It was good tennis!
And as long as our 2nd set is, the Meffert/Farah match on the next court just keeps dragging on and on and on, but you get the sense that's a match that's interesting solely because it endures, not because either play is especially interesting. If neither player has the weapons and tools to really end a point, the points can go on. And on.
Next stop was over to Court 11 to find Dennis Kudla playing Romain Jouan, both of whom we'd seen previously, in a 3rd round qualifying match. This was decent enough tennis, but a rung or three below the highest level. Kudla is 19 -- and just -- and has been a Juniors finalist and a hitting partner for the US Davis Cup, and the good news for American tennis fans is that he looks good on the court, saw that when I saw him when earlier in the week and saw that again today. But holding one's own is nowhere the same as winning, and he just didn't have the oomph or the firepower of the 25 year-old French journeyman he was playing against, who won in two fairly quick and fairly routine sets.
During the first part of the match, I was standing atop the stands at Court 11 and looking down on Court 14, where the #3 qualifying see Marcel Ilhan was playing Lucas Lacko. Ilhan was looking pretty good as he took that in two fairly easy sets.
I was also able to watch people erecting the Citizen side above the south video board in the new stadium that is going by the rather prosaic name of Court 17. I wonder how many years that name holds. In any case, the world will know that Citizen is an official sponsor and official timepiece of the US Open.
I then wanted to see the 3rd round match for Vasek Pospisil, but this had been put on to one of Court 14 with limited bleacher seating, and one side of that was unusable because of the setting sun. Too crowded to find a good perch. I ended up drifting back to Court 8 to watch the Brazilian Rogerio Dutra Da Silva, whom I said yesterday I might want to watch more of, playing his 3rd round match against Sergei Bubka from Ukraine. This is decent, but it's lacking something. I'm pulling for Da Silva, who goes down in the first set, comes down to take the second, then goes down a break in the third. Sometimes you go in rooting for one player and end up a fan of another, as on Day One when I found myself going for Middelkoop over Janowicz, but there's nothing about Bubka that makes me enthuse about his winning over the player I'm rooting for. Toward the very end of the match there's a ball on the sideline I'm sitting on that's reasonably close and is called in. Everyone else near me thinks the ball is out, I'm not so sure myself, and then it has to be not that the call was wrong but that it was grotesquely wrong, that the ball was six inches out, way out. Which just isn't the case. The call's against Da Silva, it's the difference between being at 30-30 and maybe having an opportunity to break back or being 15-40 and staring death in the face, and the crowd's reaction only serves to make Da Silva just a little bit more certain he's getting the royal screw-over. It's the kind of call that makes you wish they had Hawkeye to allow challenges on every single court, so the player can make his challenge and get an answer and kind of get over things instead of stewing in the feelings of injustice. In any event, Da Silva ended up losing.
That match complete, I drifted back to Court 14, where the sun had now gone down far enough that the other bleachers could be sat in, and I found an open seat on the front row toward the start of a third set between Pospisil and a 24 year old Slovenian Grega Zemlja, who was the #8 seed in the qualifying.
What a way to end the tournament!
It was an incredibly tight third set, ended up going 75 minutes which is about as long a set as you can get. Sitting where I was, in the twilight, you could actually see the spin on the balls, and there was a lot of it. The players were both trying to get their shots as low over the net as they could get away with, so it looked as if every ball was in danger of being hit into the net. I was rooting pretty strongly for Pospisil, so it was disappointing when he went down a break fairly early in the third set, and wasn't getting a break back. You start looking at the scoreline, and realize time's starting to run out. But Pospisil did manage to eke out one break and go back on serve, and we headed into a deciding tiebreak. And I can't remember the last time I've been so caught up in a game of tennis I've been watching in person. Pospisil gets a mini-break, Zemlja gets it back, every single shot by both players especially sitting right at court level looks like it's going to go into the net. Every single shot. Except most of them somehow manage to motor their way over and sink toward the ground for a hard pickup of a really really low ball at the other end of the court. And so much, so much, at stake. And finally, Pospisil prevails. Phew!
It was a great day of tennis. In the third round of qualifying even the bad matches are played at a higher and overall more competitive level than in the earlier rounds, which in part explains why the tennis is just about as long in duration with 54 matches on the schedule as the first two days with 64, or one extra per court.
Often I'll savor the moment and linger on the grounds after the final point of the qualifying, today with Irene on the way I hastened ASAP out of the tennis center so I could hit the Lemon Ice King (strawberry banana) and then subway into Manhattan to Midtown Comics to get the Wednesday arrivals. Then I looked for a copy of The Onion, and headed up to the Borders at Penn Plaza and picked up half a dozen client books to refill shelves now that they were 50% off, and then treated myself to a fancy dinner at Keen's Steakhouse. I knew I wouldn't even have the choice of getting into Manhattan again until Monday...
1:05 PM
Pospisil looks awfully good taking first set 6-1
12:30 PM
Underway! Charles-Antoine Brezac vs Vasek Pospisil, reenacting the French Canadian wars!!
12:05 PM
The slow moving women's match on Court 8 has hardly progressed. I am now sitting between 8 + 9 watching Robert Farah (Columbia) and Dominik Meffert ( Germany) on 9 while waiting for 8 to end. Gensse won the Court 16 match.
11:50 AM
Sorensen won routinely, late break in first set and after a trade of breaks at the start of the second by two breaks 6-2. Next match I want to see is on Court 8, but there is time to watch the finish of a match on Court 16 between Portugal's Joao Sousa and France's Augustine Gensse. On serve 4-4 in 3rd set. While I watch the match I can listen to a test of the sound system on the new stadium on the site fo Courts 17 and 18 and also watch installation of the Citizen sign atop the north end video board in the new stadium.
10:35 AM
Around six hours of sleep. Took subway home and didn't have to wait long for train, did walk back this ,owning since I wad up in time. Hot and muggy so I did change my original plan to skip the Lemon Ice King. Cost around six or seven minutes but the mint chip was more satisfying than the handful of minutes of tennis would have been.
I decided to go the Grandstand court which is scheduled for two matches today. It is so intimate you can reach out ant give noogies to lines judges, and a rare treat to have it in use for qualifying. During the main tournament those front row seats are claimed like the land rush in Far and Away.
We are on serve 3-2 Portugal's Gastao Elias serving to Ireland's Louk Sorensen.
.
The second set of the Pospisil match was anything but routine. It was one of the longest sets of tennis I've ever seen, 68 minutes for a 12 game set, vs. 41 minutes for the13 game tiebreak set Pospisil had with Guccione two days before. There was an epic game early on with Brezak struggling hard to hold serve. Pospisil, whose serve can be so strong, was having games go to 0-40 or 0-30 against and then struggling to fight back into it. Finally, at the very tail end, Pospisil managed to get a break and win the match. It was good tennis!
And as long as our 2nd set is, the Meffert/Farah match on the next court just keeps dragging on and on and on, but you get the sense that's a match that's interesting solely because it endures, not because either play is especially interesting. If neither player has the weapons and tools to really end a point, the points can go on. And on.
Next stop was over to Court 11 to find Dennis Kudla playing Romain Jouan, both of whom we'd seen previously, in a 3rd round qualifying match. This was decent enough tennis, but a rung or three below the highest level. Kudla is 19 -- and just -- and has been a Juniors finalist and a hitting partner for the US Davis Cup, and the good news for American tennis fans is that he looks good on the court, saw that when I saw him when earlier in the week and saw that again today. But holding one's own is nowhere the same as winning, and he just didn't have the oomph or the firepower of the 25 year-old French journeyman he was playing against, who won in two fairly quick and fairly routine sets.
During the first part of the match, I was standing atop the stands at Court 11 and looking down on Court 14, where the #3 qualifying see Marcel Ilhan was playing Lucas Lacko. Ilhan was looking pretty good as he took that in two fairly easy sets.
I was also able to watch people erecting the Citizen side above the south video board in the new stadium that is going by the rather prosaic name of Court 17. I wonder how many years that name holds. In any case, the world will know that Citizen is an official sponsor and official timepiece of the US Open.
I then wanted to see the 3rd round match for Vasek Pospisil, but this had been put on to one of Court 14 with limited bleacher seating, and one side of that was unusable because of the setting sun. Too crowded to find a good perch. I ended up drifting back to Court 8 to watch the Brazilian Rogerio Dutra Da Silva, whom I said yesterday I might want to watch more of, playing his 3rd round match against Sergei Bubka from Ukraine. This is decent, but it's lacking something. I'm pulling for Da Silva, who goes down in the first set, comes down to take the second, then goes down a break in the third. Sometimes you go in rooting for one player and end up a fan of another, as on Day One when I found myself going for Middelkoop over Janowicz, but there's nothing about Bubka that makes me enthuse about his winning over the player I'm rooting for. Toward the very end of the match there's a ball on the sideline I'm sitting on that's reasonably close and is called in. Everyone else near me thinks the ball is out, I'm not so sure myself, and then it has to be not that the call was wrong but that it was grotesquely wrong, that the ball was six inches out, way out. Which just isn't the case. The call's against Da Silva, it's the difference between being at 30-30 and maybe having an opportunity to break back or being 15-40 and staring death in the face, and the crowd's reaction only serves to make Da Silva just a little bit more certain he's getting the royal screw-over. It's the kind of call that makes you wish they had Hawkeye to allow challenges on every single court, so the player can make his challenge and get an answer and kind of get over things instead of stewing in the feelings of injustice. In any event, Da Silva ended up losing.
That match complete, I drifted back to Court 14, where the sun had now gone down far enough that the other bleachers could be sat in, and I found an open seat on the front row toward the start of a third set between Pospisil and a 24 year old Slovenian Grega Zemlja, who was the #8 seed in the qualifying.
What a way to end the tournament!
It was an incredibly tight third set, ended up going 75 minutes which is about as long a set as you can get. Sitting where I was, in the twilight, you could actually see the spin on the balls, and there was a lot of it. The players were both trying to get their shots as low over the net as they could get away with, so it looked as if every ball was in danger of being hit into the net. I was rooting pretty strongly for Pospisil, so it was disappointing when he went down a break fairly early in the third set, and wasn't getting a break back. You start looking at the scoreline, and realize time's starting to run out. But Pospisil did manage to eke out one break and go back on serve, and we headed into a deciding tiebreak. And I can't remember the last time I've been so caught up in a game of tennis I've been watching in person. Pospisil gets a mini-break, Zemlja gets it back, every single shot by both players especially sitting right at court level looks like it's going to go into the net. Every single shot. Except most of them somehow manage to motor their way over and sink toward the ground for a hard pickup of a really really low ball at the other end of the court. And so much, so much, at stake. And finally, Pospisil prevails. Phew!
It was a great day of tennis. In the third round of qualifying even the bad matches are played at a higher and overall more competitive level than in the earlier rounds, which in part explains why the tennis is just about as long in duration with 54 matches on the schedule as the first two days with 64, or one extra per court.
Often I'll savor the moment and linger on the grounds after the final point of the qualifying, today with Irene on the way I hastened ASAP out of the tennis center so I could hit the Lemon Ice King (strawberry banana) and then subway into Manhattan to Midtown Comics to get the Wednesday arrivals. Then I looked for a copy of The Onion, and headed up to the Borders at Penn Plaza and picked up half a dozen client books to refill shelves now that they were 50% off, and then treated myself to a fancy dinner at Keen's Steakhouse. I knew I wouldn't even have the choice of getting into Manhattan again until Monday...
1:05 PM
Pospisil looks awfully good taking first set 6-1
12:30 PM
Underway! Charles-Antoine Brezac vs Vasek Pospisil, reenacting the French Canadian wars!!
12:05 PM
The slow moving women's match on Court 8 has hardly progressed. I am now sitting between 8 + 9 watching Robert Farah (Columbia) and Dominik Meffert ( Germany) on 9 while waiting for 8 to end. Gensse won the Court 16 match.
11:50 AM
Sorensen won routinely, late break in first set and after a trade of breaks at the start of the second by two breaks 6-2. Next match I want to see is on Court 8, but there is time to watch the finish of a match on Court 16 between Portugal's Joao Sousa and France's Augustine Gensse. On serve 4-4 in 3rd set. While I watch the match I can listen to a test of the sound system on the new stadium on the site fo Courts 17 and 18 and also watch installation of the Citizen sign atop the north end video board in the new stadium.
10:35 AM
Around six hours of sleep. Took subway home and didn't have to wait long for train, did walk back this ,owning since I wad up in time. Hot and muggy so I did change my original plan to skip the Lemon Ice King. Cost around six or seven minutes but the mint chip was more satisfying than the handful of minutes of tennis would have been.
I decided to go the Grandstand court which is scheduled for two matches today. It is so intimate you can reach out ant give noogies to lines judges, and a rare treat to have it in use for qualifying. During the main tournament those front row seats are claimed like the land rush in Far and Away.
We are on serve 3-2 Portugal's Gastao Elias serving to Ireland's Louk Sorensen.
.
Thursday, August 25, 2011
Tennis Anyone 33 1/3
To Finish
Well, what a delightful final full match of the day. Donskoy won the first set 6-1, blink of an eye, thought we were headed for a rout. But somehow midway thru the second set Dennis Kudla finds another gear, and it's like the ball coming at him is as big as a pumpkin. He breaks Donskoy, rather to my surprise. Then Kudla starts grunting, as if that will find him another gear still. Grunting or not, he wins the second set 6-3. The third set sees each player break once and goes into a tiebreak, Kudla goes down a mini-break, comes back, takes the tie-break 7-5 and the match. This was very high quality tennis. There weren't many winners, the match statistics say there were only 11 of them between the two players. But there weren't a lot of errors, either, I'm not even sure I can trust the count which is only 1 of them for the whole match, except that it's hard to think of too many. There were balls that missed, but it does seem that almost all of them were off of really good shots by the other guy that weren't easy to get back. Very high quality. The difference in the match looks to be the differential on first and second serve, Donskoy was 70% getting the point on his first serve but only 43% on his second serve. Kudla was more consistent in that metric. Even though this match went to Kudla, I do expect we may see more from Donskoy, who is just 21 and talented. Kudla just turned 19, and is showing some signs of making a breakthrough this summer. Qualifying for the Open could easily lift him 200 spots in the rankings.
There was one match unfinished, so I watched the final games of a 23 year old Croat beating a 34 year old Italian. Not great stuff, probably could have skipped, but having waited out a six hour rain delay why not see some more tennis...
The answer is that play begins in 8:30, I've got to get to bed!
But it will be a very full day, as speculated earlier the plan for Friday is to have 22 remaining 2nd round matches, 21 3rd round matches with the Thursday winners, and then to trot out the 22 winners to play their 3rd round matches as well, two matches on the day, to be sure of having the qualifying done in time. Tour rules require a half hour between matches, and even the top players in the world sometimes have to do two in one day when rain backs things up badly at a tournament. The qualifiers can do it Friday. It's unfair in equal measure to all of them, at least, none of the morning winners Friday will end up facing someone who won Thursday and has the benefit of a night's rest.
10:40 PM
Musical entertainment! Sound check/practice from Arthur Ashe blasting over grounds. Just what tennis players want during big match at 10:30 at night.
10:15 PM
Lacko won the first set in a tiebreak. He is too one dimensional in his game to pose a real threat to anyone, baseline only. That set ended just a few points into the start of the Court 11 match between Dennis Kudla (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia) which I shall stick with, I think. Fewer than 30 unattached spectators, maybe 10 or 12 more coaches/family members. Kudla just made an incredible leap to get his racket on a high smash bounce that nobody ever tries for, I was shocked to see a racket in front of me at my perch in the endzone seats. There is a reason no one goes for those, his shot went up 30 feet and backwards. But I admired the effort. Donskoy is quickly up two breaks, doubt this will be a long match. A few others started around the same time, if any of those are the three tight tiebreak sets which this likely not could be tennis until 12:30-1:00 AM.
9:10 PM
The matches on 15 + 16 ended within a few minutes of one another. Jaziri won his 6-2 in the 3rd set. This made me happy; I think Jaziri is fun to watch. I was watching right next to his coach who wad taking notes in Arabic, and either cheering on his player in Arabic or "get them in" in English. Ryderstedt offered his congratulations as he left the court. I wasn't as caught up in the other match which Bozoljac won 6-3 in the 2nd set, but I would probably take any of these 4 players over the ones on Courts 7 + 16.
Wandering one walkway over I watched the final games of a match between Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil and Adrian Menendez-Maceiras from Spain. Both were very big grunters and both seemed to my eyes to have especially powerful groundstrokes, Da Silva especially. He is the #5 seed, and won the match in straight sets. Maybe try and catch more of him tomorrow.
After grazing the buffet, I have settled back at Court 15 to watch Marius Copil (Romania) vs Lukas Lacko (Slovak Rep.)I think Lacko is the younger and with more main draw results, in any event are on serve and 15-15 Copil serving 2-2 in the first.
7:50 PM
Court 15 Serbia's Ilija Bozoljac wins first set tiebreak 6-1 over Germany's Andreas Beck
Court 16 Jaziri takes 2nd set, we go to a third
Will hang out between the two courts!
7:40 PM
The plan now is to get in 3 matches on each court, including the Grandstand which is used during the qualifying only in emergencies. That will be 42 matches out of 64 scheduled. Tomorrow play will start an hour early. With rain scheduled to arrive at some point on Saturday I don't know if they plan to have some players do both 2nd and 3rd round matches tomorrow or hope to get in 11 3rd round matches Saturday. The ballperson crews are down one since the youngest can't work overtime which is a problem when all courts need to go long into the evening.
7:33 PM
Back at Court 15 for Jaziri vs Swede Michael Ryderstedt. Jaziri lost the first set 6-2 but up a break in 2nd. Both of these players seem peppier than the others I have been watching.
7:30 PM
Middelkoop won in a 2nd set tiebreak. Not sure how good he really is, but at least good enough to march rou first two rounds here.
Walked over a few paces to Court 11 where Klahn had gone up a break and watched final two games of that match. Hard to believe Ebden is the person who won a 6-0 set yesterday. No game at all today. Klahn was serving very well, and had slightly better places groundstrokes, but not very compelling. Ome court next to the Vioka rooting section, at another found myself standing next to Dennis Kudla's coach. Kudos plays Evgeny Donskoy later.
7:15 PM
Ebden was broken and lost the first set 6-4. The lackluster second set saw both players broken with Ebden taking in a tiebreak. I was bored, after wandering a bit I am settled between Courts 15 and 16 watching the end of 2nd set of Matwe Middelkoop's match against Italy's Matteo Viola while Malek Jaziri plays on the next Court over.
5:20 PM
The match I am now once again watching play having resumed aroun 5:13, is the second round match for American Bradley Klahn and the rising Australian Matthew Ebden. It was scheduled for Court 11, which is one of the largest used for qualifying and thus has priority for drying. Players are just sitting down on the adjacent Court 12, which will resume play some 20 minutes after us, and dryers are still going on Court 16. It is 2-2,and Ebden is facing a break point.
5:08 PM
Since it may be a late night, eating on the grounds. The lamb haandi from Indian stand isn't bad. Have rad 150 pages of Benjamin Tate's Well of Sorrows, and a few issues of Variety.
5:05 PM
Sun has shine a bit, some courts near to dry, and teams of ballpersons are heading out to their assigned courts. May yet be some tennis today!
11:55 AM
Players back to locker room, I am under the overhang on the Grandstand Court near the ball person perch, Andy Murray just left the court after an aborted practice session. Rain really coming down now.
11:15 AM
Grim news, forecast for an afternoon thundershower but there are already a few drops of rain. With Irene coming our way this weekend it might be a challenge to finish the final two rounds of qualifying.
More Grim News: there are mo soap dispensers in the men's restrooms at Court 7 and Court 11. Can someone call the CDC or NYC Dept of Health or something and get that fixed muy pronto.
Grimmer News: A brief rain shower right at start of first match. Iffy day weather wise.
More Grimmer News: When they updated the schedule on the web site as the evening progressed they never updated the printable PDF version which has endless TBD on the later matches, not even "winner of this vs winner of that," just TBD vs TBD. With the weather we should be so lucky as to get to those matches today.
Well, what a delightful final full match of the day. Donskoy won the first set 6-1, blink of an eye, thought we were headed for a rout. But somehow midway thru the second set Dennis Kudla finds another gear, and it's like the ball coming at him is as big as a pumpkin. He breaks Donskoy, rather to my surprise. Then Kudla starts grunting, as if that will find him another gear still. Grunting or not, he wins the second set 6-3. The third set sees each player break once and goes into a tiebreak, Kudla goes down a mini-break, comes back, takes the tie-break 7-5 and the match. This was very high quality tennis. There weren't many winners, the match statistics say there were only 11 of them between the two players. But there weren't a lot of errors, either, I'm not even sure I can trust the count which is only 1 of them for the whole match, except that it's hard to think of too many. There were balls that missed, but it does seem that almost all of them were off of really good shots by the other guy that weren't easy to get back. Very high quality. The difference in the match looks to be the differential on first and second serve, Donskoy was 70% getting the point on his first serve but only 43% on his second serve. Kudla was more consistent in that metric. Even though this match went to Kudla, I do expect we may see more from Donskoy, who is just 21 and talented. Kudla just turned 19, and is showing some signs of making a breakthrough this summer. Qualifying for the Open could easily lift him 200 spots in the rankings.
There was one match unfinished, so I watched the final games of a 23 year old Croat beating a 34 year old Italian. Not great stuff, probably could have skipped, but having waited out a six hour rain delay why not see some more tennis...
The answer is that play begins in 8:30, I've got to get to bed!
But it will be a very full day, as speculated earlier the plan for Friday is to have 22 remaining 2nd round matches, 21 3rd round matches with the Thursday winners, and then to trot out the 22 winners to play their 3rd round matches as well, two matches on the day, to be sure of having the qualifying done in time. Tour rules require a half hour between matches, and even the top players in the world sometimes have to do two in one day when rain backs things up badly at a tournament. The qualifiers can do it Friday. It's unfair in equal measure to all of them, at least, none of the morning winners Friday will end up facing someone who won Thursday and has the benefit of a night's rest.
10:40 PM
Musical entertainment! Sound check/practice from Arthur Ashe blasting over grounds. Just what tennis players want during big match at 10:30 at night.
10:15 PM
Lacko won the first set in a tiebreak. He is too one dimensional in his game to pose a real threat to anyone, baseline only. That set ended just a few points into the start of the Court 11 match between Dennis Kudla (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia) which I shall stick with, I think. Fewer than 30 unattached spectators, maybe 10 or 12 more coaches/family members. Kudla just made an incredible leap to get his racket on a high smash bounce that nobody ever tries for, I was shocked to see a racket in front of me at my perch in the endzone seats. There is a reason no one goes for those, his shot went up 30 feet and backwards. But I admired the effort. Donskoy is quickly up two breaks, doubt this will be a long match. A few others started around the same time, if any of those are the three tight tiebreak sets which this likely not could be tennis until 12:30-1:00 AM.
9:10 PM
The matches on 15 + 16 ended within a few minutes of one another. Jaziri won his 6-2 in the 3rd set. This made me happy; I think Jaziri is fun to watch. I was watching right next to his coach who wad taking notes in Arabic, and either cheering on his player in Arabic or "get them in" in English. Ryderstedt offered his congratulations as he left the court. I wasn't as caught up in the other match which Bozoljac won 6-3 in the 2nd set, but I would probably take any of these 4 players over the ones on Courts 7 + 16.
Wandering one walkway over I watched the final games of a match between Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil and Adrian Menendez-Maceiras from Spain. Both were very big grunters and both seemed to my eyes to have especially powerful groundstrokes, Da Silva especially. He is the #5 seed, and won the match in straight sets. Maybe try and catch more of him tomorrow.
After grazing the buffet, I have settled back at Court 15 to watch Marius Copil (Romania) vs Lukas Lacko (Slovak Rep.)I think Lacko is the younger and with more main draw results, in any event are on serve and 15-15 Copil serving 2-2 in the first.
7:50 PM
Court 15 Serbia's Ilija Bozoljac wins first set tiebreak 6-1 over Germany's Andreas Beck
Court 16 Jaziri takes 2nd set, we go to a third
Will hang out between the two courts!
7:40 PM
The plan now is to get in 3 matches on each court, including the Grandstand which is used during the qualifying only in emergencies. That will be 42 matches out of 64 scheduled. Tomorrow play will start an hour early. With rain scheduled to arrive at some point on Saturday I don't know if they plan to have some players do both 2nd and 3rd round matches tomorrow or hope to get in 11 3rd round matches Saturday. The ballperson crews are down one since the youngest can't work overtime which is a problem when all courts need to go long into the evening.
7:33 PM
Back at Court 15 for Jaziri vs Swede Michael Ryderstedt. Jaziri lost the first set 6-2 but up a break in 2nd. Both of these players seem peppier than the others I have been watching.
7:30 PM
Middelkoop won in a 2nd set tiebreak. Not sure how good he really is, but at least good enough to march rou first two rounds here.
Walked over a few paces to Court 11 where Klahn had gone up a break and watched final two games of that match. Hard to believe Ebden is the person who won a 6-0 set yesterday. No game at all today. Klahn was serving very well, and had slightly better places groundstrokes, but not very compelling. Ome court next to the Vioka rooting section, at another found myself standing next to Dennis Kudla's coach. Kudos plays Evgeny Donskoy later.
7:15 PM
Ebden was broken and lost the first set 6-4. The lackluster second set saw both players broken with Ebden taking in a tiebreak. I was bored, after wandering a bit I am settled between Courts 15 and 16 watching the end of 2nd set of Matwe Middelkoop's match against Italy's Matteo Viola while Malek Jaziri plays on the next Court over.
5:20 PM
The match I am now once again watching play having resumed aroun 5:13, is the second round match for American Bradley Klahn and the rising Australian Matthew Ebden. It was scheduled for Court 11, which is one of the largest used for qualifying and thus has priority for drying. Players are just sitting down on the adjacent Court 12, which will resume play some 20 minutes after us, and dryers are still going on Court 16. It is 2-2,and Ebden is facing a break point.
5:08 PM
Since it may be a late night, eating on the grounds. The lamb haandi from Indian stand isn't bad. Have rad 150 pages of Benjamin Tate's Well of Sorrows, and a few issues of Variety.
5:05 PM
Sun has shine a bit, some courts near to dry, and teams of ballpersons are heading out to their assigned courts. May yet be some tennis today!
11:55 AM
Players back to locker room, I am under the overhang on the Grandstand Court near the ball person perch, Andy Murray just left the court after an aborted practice session. Rain really coming down now.
11:15 AM
Grim news, forecast for an afternoon thundershower but there are already a few drops of rain. With Irene coming our way this weekend it might be a challenge to finish the final two rounds of qualifying.
More Grim News: there are mo soap dispensers in the men's restrooms at Court 7 and Court 11. Can someone call the CDC or NYC Dept of Health or something and get that fixed muy pronto.
Grimmer News: A brief rain shower right at start of first match. Iffy day weather wise.
More Grimmer News: When they updated the schedule on the web site as the evening progressed they never updated the printable PDF version which has endless TBD on the later matches, not even "winner of this vs winner of that," just TBD vs TBD. With the weather we should be so lucky as to get to those matches today.
Wednesday, August 24, 2011
Tennis Anyone, The Second
To Close
Michon loses to Ram in a tight first set and a not so tight second. Not many weapons. Piña colada ice, Thai dinner.
8:50
Michon is sinister! I mean, a lefty!! Playing a lot to Ram's backhand and trying to construct points. On serve 4-3 in first set.
7:30 PM
Settling in for last full match of day. Could have watched Ricardo Hocevar and Carsten Ball on Court 6, but just didn't find either player all that exciting. So Court 13 has whenever seats, and I know nothing about the French player Axel Michon, who contends against American Rajeev Ram. So the match might be awful, but will have thrill of the new. Did watch a couple games of the Ashleigh Bart match whole waiting for this one to start.
6:50 PM
Shocker! Guccione is up 40-0 serving for a tiebreak at 5-6. And he loses. Five straight points to Pospisil. One is a winning lob off of a net cord, the kind of thing you can't teach that's about instinct and reaction and quick hands. The final point of the match is a double fault by Guccione, which is the srangest of ways to end a match that's been almost all about big booming serves.
6:40 PM
Gootch Guile. Serving at 4-5 Guccione starts to come to the net as often as he cans. This earns him two break points in the 5-5 service game, but Pospisil shows some poise and serves his way out. Another tiebreak moments away...
6:15 PM
Second game second set, Guccione faced two break points and four deuces, but Pospisil couldn't convert. On serve 2-1, but these three games have taken an entire 15 minutes!
6:00 PM
Pospisil wins in a tiebreak 7-5 to take the set 7-6. The latter half of the set had a little more danger with 40-30 games but no deuces or break points. Pospisil clearly has the better ground strokes than Guccione and with his own potent serve is a definite threat and likely to move up quickly. That said, lots of people in the men's game have really strong serves, he hasn't made much of a dent on Guccione's and may be up a set but hardly has this match in hand. The first set flew by in under 45 minutes, a set that goes to a tiebreak will often be an hour long affair, sometimes more, 45 minutes shows how quick these points and games have been.
5:35 PM
different kind of dull, both players have great serves, would be great if there was a radar gun here, neither doing much on the return games, so holding serve 4-3 no break points hardly any rallies.
5:15 PM
So I have no interest in seeing Australian Chris Guccione who has been around a bit without making an impression, but his young Cacadian opponent Vasek Pospisil is supposed to be an up and comer. He had some wins over the summer in main draw, and is the #20 seed in the qualifying.
5:00 PM
Match on Court 10 dull, watching a bit on Court 5 while I wait for things to get underway on Court 6. This is Ireland's Lpuk Sorensen against Spain's Arnau Brugues- Davi. Sorensen won first set in tiebreak. On serve early in 2nd.
4:55
big wooden boxes containing the ESPN "Steve Set," which has magically appeared since yesterday on a platform next to Arthur Ashe stadium entrance.
4:10
what a letdown, the third set went down 6-1 in about as much time as doing my post about the match.
Hard to know when Canadian up and comer Vasek Pospisil will start on Court 6, so I am on Court 10 for the start of Charles-Antoine Brezac (France) vs Daniel Kosakowski (US). If good watch all of it then Australian 15-year old Ashleigh Barty, who is recommended to me by Australian writer Joel Shepherd, will follow. If I don't like this match, will check Court 6 after first set.
3:55 PM
Capdeville now up two breaks. Epic is fizzling in its third act.
Thing I hate most about iPad is that it wants to turn every its into an it's.
3:40 PM
Finally have my epic!
Naso wonmy second match pretty handily, but in a high quality way. In the key games in the second set, both players were winning points with good clean winners.
There was only one choice of match after, which wad the Chilean journeyman Paul Capdeville in warmups on Court 13. Capdeville has been around forever and rarely above the ranks of qualifiers. But at least it was Court 13 with the nice endzone seating, and playing an Israeli, Amir Weintraub, so an opportunity to exorcise Jewish guilt.
It's been a lot of good tennis from both sides. Weintraub went upan early break, frustrating Capdeville, who is the #2 seed and expects to advance But Weintraub couldn't hold on and then played an amazingly sloppy game to cough up the set 6-4 to Capdeville.
At 2-2 in the second set it was Capdeville who got sloppy, but Weintraub then wnetdown 0-40 on his own serve game, came back to deuce, but ultimately lost the game and we stayed even into a tiebreak. Weintraub there had at least three match points at 6-2 orr 6-3, lost them all, but this time recovered to take the breaker 9-7.
So now we are in a third set, but Weintraub again lost focus getting instantly broken in the first game of the final set. Ultimately focus or lack thereof is the difference in the match. Multiple long rallies have ended with a complete mishit by Weintraub, ten or twelve at least. He has had consistent trouble allowing himself to hold an advantage. I do not know if Capdeville is actually better, but he has vast reservoirs of match experience and can take this when its being offered.
1PM
First match ended with a 6-0 second set, ended so early the only choice of next match was next door on Court 5 where another match went by real quick. So I am watching two Italians, Gianluca Naso and Thomas Fabbiano, in a match that looks like an instant replay. Naso had two breaks to take first set 6-2 though it seems it should be closer. Lots of long rallies and good tennis, just that one player is ending up on the winning side way more consistently. One thing for sure, I haven't chosen any great epic matches so far!
11:47 AM
Ilhan has just taken first set 6-2. High quality, both players look good, Ilhan does look 6-2 better.
11:45 AM
is the man two rows back helping, raring or evaluating the ballpersons?
11:25 AM
I got a watermelon ice from the Lemon Ice King onmy way out. Nothing exciting at the Barnes & Noble. Typically mediocre service at Unos, adding ten to twenty minutes to the meal, but the food was what I wanted.
The weather yesterday was about as perfect as you could want for tennis. Around 78, low humidity, gorgeous. Can't remember when I have visited a water fountain less. Today is a few degrees higher and definitely more humid but still comfy, tomorrow more heat and humidity and a chance of a thunderstorm.
Rarely are the first round qualifying matches great tennis, and yestefay was no exception. But none of the matches were actually dull.
Today was a mint chip morning.
I am settled in on Court 4 watching #3 seed Marsel Ilhan from Turkey against Poland's Marcin Gawron. Looks like some high quality tennis, albeit with a strong chance for trading breaks of serve in the opening games... Yep, traded as I post.
Michon loses to Ram in a tight first set and a not so tight second. Not many weapons. Piña colada ice, Thai dinner.
8:50
Michon is sinister! I mean, a lefty!! Playing a lot to Ram's backhand and trying to construct points. On serve 4-3 in first set.
7:30 PM
Settling in for last full match of day. Could have watched Ricardo Hocevar and Carsten Ball on Court 6, but just didn't find either player all that exciting. So Court 13 has whenever seats, and I know nothing about the French player Axel Michon, who contends against American Rajeev Ram. So the match might be awful, but will have thrill of the new. Did watch a couple games of the Ashleigh Bart match whole waiting for this one to start.
6:50 PM
Shocker! Guccione is up 40-0 serving for a tiebreak at 5-6. And he loses. Five straight points to Pospisil. One is a winning lob off of a net cord, the kind of thing you can't teach that's about instinct and reaction and quick hands. The final point of the match is a double fault by Guccione, which is the srangest of ways to end a match that's been almost all about big booming serves.
6:40 PM
Gootch Guile. Serving at 4-5 Guccione starts to come to the net as often as he cans. This earns him two break points in the 5-5 service game, but Pospisil shows some poise and serves his way out. Another tiebreak moments away...
6:15 PM
Second game second set, Guccione faced two break points and four deuces, but Pospisil couldn't convert. On serve 2-1, but these three games have taken an entire 15 minutes!
6:00 PM
Pospisil wins in a tiebreak 7-5 to take the set 7-6. The latter half of the set had a little more danger with 40-30 games but no deuces or break points. Pospisil clearly has the better ground strokes than Guccione and with his own potent serve is a definite threat and likely to move up quickly. That said, lots of people in the men's game have really strong serves, he hasn't made much of a dent on Guccione's and may be up a set but hardly has this match in hand. The first set flew by in under 45 minutes, a set that goes to a tiebreak will often be an hour long affair, sometimes more, 45 minutes shows how quick these points and games have been.
5:35 PM
different kind of dull, both players have great serves, would be great if there was a radar gun here, neither doing much on the return games, so holding serve 4-3 no break points hardly any rallies.
5:15 PM
So I have no interest in seeing Australian Chris Guccione who has been around a bit without making an impression, but his young Cacadian opponent Vasek Pospisil is supposed to be an up and comer. He had some wins over the summer in main draw, and is the #20 seed in the qualifying.
5:00 PM
Match on Court 10 dull, watching a bit on Court 5 while I wait for things to get underway on Court 6. This is Ireland's Lpuk Sorensen against Spain's Arnau Brugues- Davi. Sorensen won first set in tiebreak. On serve early in 2nd.
4:55
big wooden boxes containing the ESPN "Steve Set," which has magically appeared since yesterday on a platform next to Arthur Ashe stadium entrance.
4:10
what a letdown, the third set went down 6-1 in about as much time as doing my post about the match.
Hard to know when Canadian up and comer Vasek Pospisil will start on Court 6, so I am on Court 10 for the start of Charles-Antoine Brezac (France) vs Daniel Kosakowski (US). If good watch all of it then Australian 15-year old Ashleigh Barty, who is recommended to me by Australian writer Joel Shepherd, will follow. If I don't like this match, will check Court 6 after first set.
3:55 PM
Capdeville now up two breaks. Epic is fizzling in its third act.
Thing I hate most about iPad is that it wants to turn every its into an it's.
3:40 PM
Finally have my epic!
Naso wonmy second match pretty handily, but in a high quality way. In the key games in the second set, both players were winning points with good clean winners.
There was only one choice of match after, which wad the Chilean journeyman Paul Capdeville in warmups on Court 13. Capdeville has been around forever and rarely above the ranks of qualifiers. But at least it was Court 13 with the nice endzone seating, and playing an Israeli, Amir Weintraub, so an opportunity to exorcise Jewish guilt.
It's been a lot of good tennis from both sides. Weintraub went upan early break, frustrating Capdeville, who is the #2 seed and expects to advance But Weintraub couldn't hold on and then played an amazingly sloppy game to cough up the set 6-4 to Capdeville.
At 2-2 in the second set it was Capdeville who got sloppy, but Weintraub then wnetdown 0-40 on his own serve game, came back to deuce, but ultimately lost the game and we stayed even into a tiebreak. Weintraub there had at least three match points at 6-2 orr 6-3, lost them all, but this time recovered to take the breaker 9-7.
So now we are in a third set, but Weintraub again lost focus getting instantly broken in the first game of the final set. Ultimately focus or lack thereof is the difference in the match. Multiple long rallies have ended with a complete mishit by Weintraub, ten or twelve at least. He has had consistent trouble allowing himself to hold an advantage. I do not know if Capdeville is actually better, but he has vast reservoirs of match experience and can take this when its being offered.
1PM
First match ended with a 6-0 second set, ended so early the only choice of next match was next door on Court 5 where another match went by real quick. So I am watching two Italians, Gianluca Naso and Thomas Fabbiano, in a match that looks like an instant replay. Naso had two breaks to take first set 6-2 though it seems it should be closer. Lots of long rallies and good tennis, just that one player is ending up on the winning side way more consistently. One thing for sure, I haven't chosen any great epic matches so far!
11:47 AM
Ilhan has just taken first set 6-2. High quality, both players look good, Ilhan does look 6-2 better.
11:45 AM
is the man two rows back helping, raring or evaluating the ballpersons?
11:25 AM
I got a watermelon ice from the Lemon Ice King onmy way out. Nothing exciting at the Barnes & Noble. Typically mediocre service at Unos, adding ten to twenty minutes to the meal, but the food was what I wanted.
The weather yesterday was about as perfect as you could want for tennis. Around 78, low humidity, gorgeous. Can't remember when I have visited a water fountain less. Today is a few degrees higher and definitely more humid but still comfy, tomorrow more heat and humidity and a chance of a thunderstorm.
Rarely are the first round qualifying matches great tennis, and yestefay was no exception. But none of the matches were actually dull.
Today was a mint chip morning.
I am settled in on Court 4 watching #3 seed Marsel Ilhan from Turkey against Poland's Marcin Gawron. Looks like some high quality tennis, albeit with a strong chance for trading breaks of serve in the opening games... Yep, traded as I post.
Tuesday, August 23, 2011
Tennis, Anyone, Day 1
& to close...
Romboli lost the second set 6-1 as well. Odd thing is, I think the match was closer than the score line in this case. It's just that Romboli was making a lot of errors, some inexplicable and some because Jaziri was hitting a very low ball a lot of times that wasn't easy to pick up and get back over net going the other way, but fewer errors it at least would have been a much tighter match.
After that, I watched another American who, Blake Strode, playing against a Serb, Nikola Ciric, in the last act of the second set. I chose this match over another men's match that was midway through because Court 13 has elevated endzone seating that gives a great view of the match, and I'd gone through the day without seeing anything on one of those three courts. Strode won, 6-3 and then in a tiebreak. I'm not surprised Stode is still struggling through the qualies in his mid-20s, however.
Looking at the far court, he seemed awfully spindly for a tennis player. When he came to the near court, I could see that the thigh muscles weren't that much smaller if any than everyone else you see with pro tennis player physique, but the ankles are like toothpicks. One of them was taped up. I doubt he can hold up to the rigors of the tour without really strengthening the ankles quite a bit.
No more men's matches, I watched half a set of one women's match, could have watched more of another final match still going at 8:55, but decided I'd push off. Once upon a time bookstores were open to 11PM, now the B&N in Forest Hills is one of many that don't stay open that late, and if I was going to get over to it and then enjoy an Unos dinner in Forest Hills, couldn't stay. This was probably a good call. Checking the score now I see that the match which hadn't yet finished set #2 went into a 3rd set, which went 72 minutes. So, yes, I would have been at the tennis center til after 10pm and gotten a medal for staying the entire day, but I think the viewing experience would have been torturous.
7:38 PM
Next door on court 6 we had just in its first game Fernando Romboli of Brazil against Tunisian Malik Jaziri, so that's where I am now. Both players seem solid and energetic, but after losing the first set 6-1 Romboli has gone to regroup on a bathroom break.
7:35 PM
The match of the day for me was 4th up on Court 8, featuring Jerzy Janowicz from Poland, the #18 seed and a player I'd watched and enjoyed last year. Very young, good serve, decent ground strokes, not yet fully formed but you think can grow into a better game. He didn't qualify last year but came close, he's had a few main draw matches over the year since. I roamed the grounds and kept an eye on the women's match preceding on the court, glad it didn't go to a third set.
Well, his opponent was a Dutchman, Matwe Middelkoop, and by the end of the match my allegiances had shifted.
Janowicz played one abysmal game in the first set, double faulting at least twice, and lost the set 6-3.
The second set was hard fought, tight, went to a close tiebreak that Janowicz pulled out 7-5.
But over the two sets I wasn't seeing any spark, any sign he was doing anything better this year than last. Which isn't what you want to see in a player this young. Middelkoop wasn't playing great, but he was playing a solid, calm, controlled game, good and relaxed court presence and no mistakes.
Janowicz went down a break early in the third set and the outcome seemed clear. Hadn't had even a break point against Middelkoop that I could recall. Janowicz knew it. He started gently dropping his racket three times on a trip down the baseline.
Final score 6-3 7-6 (5) 6-2 Middelkoop.
Maybe just a bad day at the office for Janowicz, tennis players can have the match of their lives and they can have the anti-match. But I have to entertain the prospect that Janowicz may be a journeyman in training instead of a rising young star. Neither player, I think, does well against a Richard Berankis or an Evgeny Donskoy no matter how close the rankings of the day might look.
5:48 PM
Chair umpire Carlos Ramos has just taken the next seat over from me watching on Court 8!
4:45 PM
Gael Monfils doing pushups after a practice session on Grandstand.
4:20 PM
2nd set was a tad more competitive than the first, Ebden won 6-3 with ine break, but not as competitive seeming as that score might suggest. Hanging out at Court 6now, watching the highly regarded Lithuanian and #12 seed Richard Berankis closing out Spaniard Guillermo Alcaide. I came in start of second set, first went to Berankis 6-2, and the 2nd set may be the same. I was right on the Fratangelo match, 2nd set was also a 6-2 win for Wolmarans.
3:35 PM
Ebden match is a demolition derby, he gave Lemke a bagel (6-0) in the first set. Not much fun to watch, thou you can tell Ebden is good hard to tell how good when so little opposition on offer.
3:30 PM
So it wasn't kids shaking the stands. I didn't notice so much but the Richmond earthquake was felt at the tennis center. Begemann won a pointing to the Ebden match, Ebden up a break in first set.
3:10 PM
Wolmarans won first set 6-2, up a break in second. As a rule I watch full matches but have left that behind to see #14 seed from Australia, Matthew Ebden, playing James Lemke, another Aussie. While I wait for that on Court 15 taking a quick look in on Court 14 where Michael Venus from New Zealand is probably about to lose to Andre Begemann from Germany. Did I watch Begemann last year? As to Fratangelo, he isn't bad but Wolmarans is simply better, at net and on serve and I felt pretty safe leaving Court 7 that no miracles were in store.
2:15 PM
The match on Court 12 ended 6-2 Jouan in a game where all the points were decided on unforced errors, I.e., people making mistakes instead of great shots. Matsukevich had four of those errors to get broken. Basically, not very good tennis. Match time around an hour or so, Da Silva would beat either. Delic on Court 7 is around 30, now plays as a Bosnian instead of an American. His opponent from Russia is the 24th seed and in his very early 20s. Final set was a bust, Delic's game collapsed leading him to a ball abuse warning and I believe a point penalty for racket abuse. I was rooting for Donskoy, shall we say, hard to judge his game when his opponent's was going so far south. The first set was won by Delic in a tiebreak with at least four breaks of serve along the way. Final score 6-7 6-4 6-2. I am staying at court 7 to watch another young American, Bjorn Fratangelo, against Fritz Wolmarans from South Africa.
1:45 pm
settling in for final set of Amer Delic (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia).
1:10 Matsukevich complaining to chair ump, likely since there is now even louder work being done by the "Chase Center" sign atop the nearby indoor tennis center.
12:55 PM
Jouan has the first set 6-2, but in a way I feel Matsukevich has been dictating the play with his errors, and that if he plays tighter it is still anyone's match. Court 12 is adjacent to the new small show court and there is a man two feet away drilling in concrete to make for a convivial tennis playing atmosphere. When I arrived at this court I was next to Jack Sock, an up and coming US player with a wild card into the main draw.
12:40 PM
I am on Cort 12 now, watching Russian Denis Matsukevich against Romain Jouan from France. Chose this because it was still in the first game when I was looking for a new match, so counts as a full. Jouan is up an early break 3-0 in first set.
12:35
Da Silva won in a tight 8-6 2nd set tiebreak. Good match.
11:50
Next page in the paper of man next to me is a USTASHI Line Evaluation Form. Isn't "evaluate" more a synonym for "rate" than for "help?". First set tonDa Silva 6-4. On serve in second, Da Silva just came to net, now 2-2 in 2nd set.
11:36 AM
Da Silva to serve for set. Man next to me in stands making notes tells me he isn't rating the lines people, he is "helping" them. I must remember that nice euphemism.
11:25 AM
The US Open is allowing iPads, so I can blog during the tennis day!
Though I niw live a mile further from the Tennis Center, Google Maps found me the quickest route to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, which makes up for it. Large vanilla chip.
On the grounds, a small new show court is now where courts 17 and 18 once were. The video boards on the grounds are working from day one instead of being tested, which will make it easier to check matches in progress as the day progresses. Armstrong and the Grandstand are open for people to watch practices from day one as wel.
I am on Court 6, watching the #5 men's seed Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil against Clement Raix, from France. Raix just double faulted to go down a break on the first set. I like that he is coming into net now and again However, in the early going Da Silva is clearly the better player and serving quite quite well, maybe even half a dozen aces in the first six games.
Romboli lost the second set 6-1 as well. Odd thing is, I think the match was closer than the score line in this case. It's just that Romboli was making a lot of errors, some inexplicable and some because Jaziri was hitting a very low ball a lot of times that wasn't easy to pick up and get back over net going the other way, but fewer errors it at least would have been a much tighter match.
After that, I watched another American who, Blake Strode, playing against a Serb, Nikola Ciric, in the last act of the second set. I chose this match over another men's match that was midway through because Court 13 has elevated endzone seating that gives a great view of the match, and I'd gone through the day without seeing anything on one of those three courts. Strode won, 6-3 and then in a tiebreak. I'm not surprised Stode is still struggling through the qualies in his mid-20s, however.
Looking at the far court, he seemed awfully spindly for a tennis player. When he came to the near court, I could see that the thigh muscles weren't that much smaller if any than everyone else you see with pro tennis player physique, but the ankles are like toothpicks. One of them was taped up. I doubt he can hold up to the rigors of the tour without really strengthening the ankles quite a bit.
No more men's matches, I watched half a set of one women's match, could have watched more of another final match still going at 8:55, but decided I'd push off. Once upon a time bookstores were open to 11PM, now the B&N in Forest Hills is one of many that don't stay open that late, and if I was going to get over to it and then enjoy an Unos dinner in Forest Hills, couldn't stay. This was probably a good call. Checking the score now I see that the match which hadn't yet finished set #2 went into a 3rd set, which went 72 minutes. So, yes, I would have been at the tennis center til after 10pm and gotten a medal for staying the entire day, but I think the viewing experience would have been torturous.
7:38 PM
Next door on court 6 we had just in its first game Fernando Romboli of Brazil against Tunisian Malik Jaziri, so that's where I am now. Both players seem solid and energetic, but after losing the first set 6-1 Romboli has gone to regroup on a bathroom break.
7:35 PM
The match of the day for me was 4th up on Court 8, featuring Jerzy Janowicz from Poland, the #18 seed and a player I'd watched and enjoyed last year. Very young, good serve, decent ground strokes, not yet fully formed but you think can grow into a better game. He didn't qualify last year but came close, he's had a few main draw matches over the year since. I roamed the grounds and kept an eye on the women's match preceding on the court, glad it didn't go to a third set.
Well, his opponent was a Dutchman, Matwe Middelkoop, and by the end of the match my allegiances had shifted.
Janowicz played one abysmal game in the first set, double faulting at least twice, and lost the set 6-3.
The second set was hard fought, tight, went to a close tiebreak that Janowicz pulled out 7-5.
But over the two sets I wasn't seeing any spark, any sign he was doing anything better this year than last. Which isn't what you want to see in a player this young. Middelkoop wasn't playing great, but he was playing a solid, calm, controlled game, good and relaxed court presence and no mistakes.
Janowicz went down a break early in the third set and the outcome seemed clear. Hadn't had even a break point against Middelkoop that I could recall. Janowicz knew it. He started gently dropping his racket three times on a trip down the baseline.
Final score 6-3 7-6 (5) 6-2 Middelkoop.
Maybe just a bad day at the office for Janowicz, tennis players can have the match of their lives and they can have the anti-match. But I have to entertain the prospect that Janowicz may be a journeyman in training instead of a rising young star. Neither player, I think, does well against a Richard Berankis or an Evgeny Donskoy no matter how close the rankings of the day might look.
5:48 PM
Chair umpire Carlos Ramos has just taken the next seat over from me watching on Court 8!
4:45 PM
Gael Monfils doing pushups after a practice session on Grandstand.
4:20 PM
2nd set was a tad more competitive than the first, Ebden won 6-3 with ine break, but not as competitive seeming as that score might suggest. Hanging out at Court 6now, watching the highly regarded Lithuanian and #12 seed Richard Berankis closing out Spaniard Guillermo Alcaide. I came in start of second set, first went to Berankis 6-2, and the 2nd set may be the same. I was right on the Fratangelo match, 2nd set was also a 6-2 win for Wolmarans.
3:35 PM
Ebden match is a demolition derby, he gave Lemke a bagel (6-0) in the first set. Not much fun to watch, thou you can tell Ebden is good hard to tell how good when so little opposition on offer.
3:30 PM
So it wasn't kids shaking the stands. I didn't notice so much but the Richmond earthquake was felt at the tennis center. Begemann won a pointing to the Ebden match, Ebden up a break in first set.
3:10 PM
Wolmarans won first set 6-2, up a break in second. As a rule I watch full matches but have left that behind to see #14 seed from Australia, Matthew Ebden, playing James Lemke, another Aussie. While I wait for that on Court 15 taking a quick look in on Court 14 where Michael Venus from New Zealand is probably about to lose to Andre Begemann from Germany. Did I watch Begemann last year? As to Fratangelo, he isn't bad but Wolmarans is simply better, at net and on serve and I felt pretty safe leaving Court 7 that no miracles were in store.
2:15 PM
The match on Court 12 ended 6-2 Jouan in a game where all the points were decided on unforced errors, I.e., people making mistakes instead of great shots. Matsukevich had four of those errors to get broken. Basically, not very good tennis. Match time around an hour or so, Da Silva would beat either. Delic on Court 7 is around 30, now plays as a Bosnian instead of an American. His opponent from Russia is the 24th seed and in his very early 20s. Final set was a bust, Delic's game collapsed leading him to a ball abuse warning and I believe a point penalty for racket abuse. I was rooting for Donskoy, shall we say, hard to judge his game when his opponent's was going so far south. The first set was won by Delic in a tiebreak with at least four breaks of serve along the way. Final score 6-7 6-4 6-2. I am staying at court 7 to watch another young American, Bjorn Fratangelo, against Fritz Wolmarans from South Africa.
1:45 pm
settling in for final set of Amer Delic (US) and Evgeny Donskoy (Russia).
1:10 Matsukevich complaining to chair ump, likely since there is now even louder work being done by the "Chase Center" sign atop the nearby indoor tennis center.
12:55 PM
Jouan has the first set 6-2, but in a way I feel Matsukevich has been dictating the play with his errors, and that if he plays tighter it is still anyone's match. Court 12 is adjacent to the new small show court and there is a man two feet away drilling in concrete to make for a convivial tennis playing atmosphere. When I arrived at this court I was next to Jack Sock, an up and coming US player with a wild card into the main draw.
12:40 PM
I am on Cort 12 now, watching Russian Denis Matsukevich against Romain Jouan from France. Chose this because it was still in the first game when I was looking for a new match, so counts as a full. Jouan is up an early break 3-0 in first set.
12:35
Da Silva won in a tight 8-6 2nd set tiebreak. Good match.
11:50
Next page in the paper of man next to me is a USTASHI Line Evaluation Form. Isn't "evaluate" more a synonym for "rate" than for "help?". First set tonDa Silva 6-4. On serve in second, Da Silva just came to net, now 2-2 in 2nd set.
11:36 AM
Da Silva to serve for set. Man next to me in stands making notes tells me he isn't rating the lines people, he is "helping" them. I must remember that nice euphemism.
11:25 AM
The US Open is allowing iPads, so I can blog during the tennis day!
Though I niw live a mile further from the Tennis Center, Google Maps found me the quickest route to the Lemon Ice King of Corona, which makes up for it. Large vanilla chip.
On the grounds, a small new show court is now where courts 17 and 18 once were. The video boards on the grounds are working from day one instead of being tested, which will make it easier to check matches in progress as the day progresses. Armstrong and the Grandstand are open for people to watch practices from day one as wel.
I am on Court 6, watching the #5 men's seed Rogerio Dutra Da Silva from Brazil against Clement Raix, from France. Raix just double faulted to go down a break on the first set. I like that he is coming into net now and again However, in the early going Da Silva is clearly the better player and serving quite quite well, maybe even half a dozen aces in the first six games.
Sunday, December 5, 2010
The Sporting Scene
So as we all gear up for the excitement of this evening's Bowl Selection Special...
No, the BCS isn't fair, it's rigged against schools that are out of the major BCS conferences, and having a college football playoff will not save the system. As I posted at the start of the year, college football fans and pundits will still argue over which 8 teams make the playoff, because there's no way the supporters of the #9 team won't think it's really #6. And there's no guarantee the best team will win every game, some player will get injured in practice or be suspended for violating team rules. Let's just settle for the idea that college football will never, should never, have a truly declared "champion" and the world will survive. The other scenario that works for me is that college football can institute a playoff the same year that my mother declares which of her children is her one and true favorite.
Also on the tube today is the final of the 2010 Davis Cup. Tennis purists in the US deeply bemoan the fact that this championship doesn't get more love and attention from Americans. It's so big in the rest of the world, why not here? If they'll just change the calendar! That will make it relevant.
But here's the problem with Davis Cup. The final match of the year that will determine if the Cup is won by Serbia or France --
-- oops, that's kind of the actual real problem any conversation has to start with, is that chauvinists in the US don't so much care about sporting events that are being won by Serbians or Frenchmen, or are as likely to be expatriate Serbs who care, but not if it's won by an American --
but we'll leave that whole issue aside because even chauvinist Americans recognize greatness and at least to some extent the half-serious casual American tennis fan will care about Wimbledon or the US Open even if an American isn't involved so long as the player is an acknowledged top player in the game like Federer or Nadal, the problem with Davis Cup is that this year's championship match is being contested by Viktor Troicki, a Serbian whose current world rank is #30, and the 23rd ranked Frenchman Michael Llodra. Now, I don't want to belittle the accomplishments of being ranked in the top 30 in tennis. That make you a pretty darned good tennis player. But at the same time, as deep as men's tennis can be there's still a pretty big gap between being the top 5, the top 10, and the top 30. There's a reason why the year-end champion's tournament for the ATP men's tour ended up being contested by Nadal and Federer, which is that the top players in the world are actually better and kind of significantly so than the rest of them. They don't win every week (please see note on "best team not guaranteed to win college football playoff" above) but they win way more often than not for a reason.
And how many people are going to get jazzed up over a sporting competition that ends up being determined by players or teams that are determinedly off of the top level? We can argue if the best teams make the Stanley Cup finals or the World Series, but to a greater or lesser degree the regular season does weed out the worst teams from making the playoffs, even in hockey you don't make the cut by being below the 50th percentile. A better team may lose to an inferior team in any given round of playoffs, but the odds of the lesser team winning multiple rounds define why we call those "Cinderella stories" that have interest on their own. None of these sporting championships we really care about consistently end up coming down to the tennis equivalent of #23 vs #30.
Sorry, Patrick McEnroe and Jim Courier and John McEnroe, but you're never going to go very far advocating American enthusiasm for Davis Cup when it means people have to be up at 10AM EST on a Sunday morning to watch #23 vs #30. Or even worse, at 7AM on a Saturday morning when the final match ends up being in the doubles. It doesn't even matter that people have to adjust to watching a scoreboard on the TV set that says "Srb-Fra" instead of Troicki-Llodra because we have to uphold the idea that it's two countries playing instead of two tennis players.
No, the BCS isn't fair, it's rigged against schools that are out of the major BCS conferences, and having a college football playoff will not save the system. As I posted at the start of the year, college football fans and pundits will still argue over which 8 teams make the playoff, because there's no way the supporters of the #9 team won't think it's really #6. And there's no guarantee the best team will win every game, some player will get injured in practice or be suspended for violating team rules. Let's just settle for the idea that college football will never, should never, have a truly declared "champion" and the world will survive. The other scenario that works for me is that college football can institute a playoff the same year that my mother declares which of her children is her one and true favorite.
Also on the tube today is the final of the 2010 Davis Cup. Tennis purists in the US deeply bemoan the fact that this championship doesn't get more love and attention from Americans. It's so big in the rest of the world, why not here? If they'll just change the calendar! That will make it relevant.
But here's the problem with Davis Cup. The final match of the year that will determine if the Cup is won by Serbia or France --
-- oops, that's kind of the actual real problem any conversation has to start with, is that chauvinists in the US don't so much care about sporting events that are being won by Serbians or Frenchmen, or are as likely to be expatriate Serbs who care, but not if it's won by an American --
but we'll leave that whole issue aside because even chauvinist Americans recognize greatness and at least to some extent the half-serious casual American tennis fan will care about Wimbledon or the US Open even if an American isn't involved so long as the player is an acknowledged top player in the game like Federer or Nadal, the problem with Davis Cup is that this year's championship match is being contested by Viktor Troicki, a Serbian whose current world rank is #30, and the 23rd ranked Frenchman Michael Llodra. Now, I don't want to belittle the accomplishments of being ranked in the top 30 in tennis. That make you a pretty darned good tennis player. But at the same time, as deep as men's tennis can be there's still a pretty big gap between being the top 5, the top 10, and the top 30. There's a reason why the year-end champion's tournament for the ATP men's tour ended up being contested by Nadal and Federer, which is that the top players in the world are actually better and kind of significantly so than the rest of them. They don't win every week (please see note on "best team not guaranteed to win college football playoff" above) but they win way more often than not for a reason.
And how many people are going to get jazzed up over a sporting competition that ends up being determined by players or teams that are determinedly off of the top level? We can argue if the best teams make the Stanley Cup finals or the World Series, but to a greater or lesser degree the regular season does weed out the worst teams from making the playoffs, even in hockey you don't make the cut by being below the 50th percentile. A better team may lose to an inferior team in any given round of playoffs, but the odds of the lesser team winning multiple rounds define why we call those "Cinderella stories" that have interest on their own. None of these sporting championships we really care about consistently end up coming down to the tennis equivalent of #23 vs #30.
Sorry, Patrick McEnroe and Jim Courier and John McEnroe, but you're never going to go very far advocating American enthusiasm for Davis Cup when it means people have to be up at 10AM EST on a Sunday morning to watch #23 vs #30. Or even worse, at 7AM on a Saturday morning when the final match ends up being in the doubles. It doesn't even matter that people have to adjust to watching a scoreboard on the TV set that says "Srb-Fra" instead of Troicki-Llodra because we have to uphold the idea that it's two countries playing instead of two tennis players.
Monday, November 15, 2010
homeland humor
So there's this ad by Lindor, the people that make those wonderful little truffle balls that you can buy at the Borders checkouts, or with a $2.50 coupon in the latest Costco coupon book. You've got that Roger Federer guy going through airport security, and the people at the x-ray machine see that his carry-on is full of balls. "Hey, look at this, he's a tennis player" says blue-uniformed TSA person #1 to TSA person #2. Then they open the bag and see that it isn't tennis balls, but rather a big full of those delightful little Lindor truffle balls, while Roger Federer says "Swiss tennis player." Because it's swiss chocolate, get it. And then the TSA people say they're going to have to confiscate the bag, and Roger says "you've got to be kidding me," and the commercial ends with a freeze frame shot of the two TSA people looking very very serious about needing to confiscate that bag.
I find this funny. I don't find much to laugh about at airport security, but I find this funny.
And then tonight I audited the first 15 or 20 minutes of Due Date. Where Robert Downey Jr. has his carry-on switched with one of Zach Galifianakis' that has marijuana paraphernalia and such, and Downey has a dialogue with the TSA guard that's full of the two talking past one another. And then he's on the plane and he starts lecturing Galifianakis on how he shouldn't use words like terrorist and bomb and ends up being shot at by an air marshal with a rubber bullet, tossed off the plane, put on the no fly list. And after not really laughing once, or smiling, or even grinning even the teeny-tiniest bit, even beseeching the gods of comedy to explain why anyone thinks the "driver pulling away when someone tries to open door of car" gag is supposed to be remotely funny, I decided I'd rather get to Whole Foods and buy some dinner before they closed and get home than stay around in the theatre to midnight or so watching a not very funny movie.
So why is this? Why am I willing to enjoy one comic look at the insanity we call airport security while the other leaves me absolutely cold? Is it because I like Lindor truffle balls more than Zach Galifianakis? Because the one is so clearly unreal and exaggerated that I can view it from a distance while the other seems all too real? Because Roger Federer is a better comic actor than Zach Galifianakis?
I find this funny. I don't find much to laugh about at airport security, but I find this funny.
And then tonight I audited the first 15 or 20 minutes of Due Date. Where Robert Downey Jr. has his carry-on switched with one of Zach Galifianakis' that has marijuana paraphernalia and such, and Downey has a dialogue with the TSA guard that's full of the two talking past one another. And then he's on the plane and he starts lecturing Galifianakis on how he shouldn't use words like terrorist and bomb and ends up being shot at by an air marshal with a rubber bullet, tossed off the plane, put on the no fly list. And after not really laughing once, or smiling, or even grinning even the teeny-tiniest bit, even beseeching the gods of comedy to explain why anyone thinks the "driver pulling away when someone tries to open door of car" gag is supposed to be remotely funny, I decided I'd rather get to Whole Foods and buy some dinner before they closed and get home than stay around in the theatre to midnight or so watching a not very funny movie.
So why is this? Why am I willing to enjoy one comic look at the insanity we call airport security while the other leaves me absolutely cold? Is it because I like Lindor truffle balls more than Zach Galifianakis? Because the one is so clearly unreal and exaggerated that I can view it from a distance while the other seems all too real? Because Roger Federer is a better comic actor than Zach Galifianakis?
Thursday, September 2, 2010
quick Ryan Harrison link
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/02/sports/tennis/02harrison.html?ref=todayspaper
I don't think it was such a big upset, but now, can he make it to Nadal...
I don't think it was such a big upset, but now, can he make it to Nadal...
qualifying wrap
The main draw
To summarize the quallies a little... the second day of quallies ended up being ended by rain just like the first, but more frustratingly. In this case skies were actually starting to clear, but just enough rain spat down that it would have been necessary to dry the courts ins read of just drying the lines for play to resume, and in the quallies you don't do that after dark like you might on a show court during the main draw with 20,000 tickets sold. I could see a star or two as I walked to the Lemon Ice King of Corona. While I got one full day of good weather on Thursday, Friday I got to the tourney two hours late missing a first match because I had to leave my desk clean of some things with a long trip starting the next morning. Because of the rain, play extended into a fifth day, I could not do the same because of my trip, so I missed following some people into their third round matches. Nor did I stay until the final point was played on Friday
It was a good year for my viewing. Jerzy Janowicz, Bernard Tomic, Ricardas Berankis and Ryan Harrison are at least four players whom I am happy to say I saw in person. We will check back in a year or two on that.
I am typing this on an airplane at 8am EDT on the second day of the US Open. I could have checked the first day scores before getting on the plane but did not. By the time I get caught up with the world after landing in Australia the second day of play will be complete.
Luck has its place in this as in all things. The overall tournament draw is done during the qualifying, with 16 "q" balls. After the qualifying names are drawn to attach a qualifier to each Many years there will be at least one q-q first round match where two qualifiers play one another, guaranteeing at least one of them a second round berth. No such luck this hear, all 16 mens qualifiers could be gone after the first round. Adreas Haider-Maurer had the worst luck, drawing the #5 seed Robin Soderling and has essentially no chance of advancing. Ryan Harrison has go face the #15 seed Ivan Ljubicic and could put up a stiff fight. If Harrison can make it past Ljubicic he could make it as far as Rafael Nadal in the round of sixteen based on his draw in the next rounds. And if he can do that his ranking would rise so quickly... The talented Lithuanian Berankis has the best draw, maybe, facing an American wild card entrant Ryan Sweeting. He can win that easy. The boring French player Marc Gicquel also has a decent first round match against Thiemo de Bakker.
So we shall see...
(I am posting this a little later, and will update on how my above prognostications proved out...)
The Open continues to have a reasonable security policy as post 9-11 things go, which I can't say of a lot of other places. Which I appreciate.
And I do love going. I hated to leave. WorldCon is in Reno next year, whatever the dates I won't go, so I can look forward to being back in a year for e entirety, based on my current known knowns.
And the Lemon Ice King of Corona really is good!!
To summarize the quallies a little... the second day of quallies ended up being ended by rain just like the first, but more frustratingly. In this case skies were actually starting to clear, but just enough rain spat down that it would have been necessary to dry the courts ins read of just drying the lines for play to resume, and in the quallies you don't do that after dark like you might on a show court during the main draw with 20,000 tickets sold. I could see a star or two as I walked to the Lemon Ice King of Corona. While I got one full day of good weather on Thursday, Friday I got to the tourney two hours late missing a first match because I had to leave my desk clean of some things with a long trip starting the next morning. Because of the rain, play extended into a fifth day, I could not do the same because of my trip, so I missed following some people into their third round matches. Nor did I stay until the final point was played on Friday
It was a good year for my viewing. Jerzy Janowicz, Bernard Tomic, Ricardas Berankis and Ryan Harrison are at least four players whom I am happy to say I saw in person. We will check back in a year or two on that.
I am typing this on an airplane at 8am EDT on the second day of the US Open. I could have checked the first day scores before getting on the plane but did not. By the time I get caught up with the world after landing in Australia the second day of play will be complete.
Luck has its place in this as in all things. The overall tournament draw is done during the qualifying, with 16 "q" balls. After the qualifying names are drawn to attach a qualifier to each Many years there will be at least one q-q first round match where two qualifiers play one another, guaranteeing at least one of them a second round berth. No such luck this hear, all 16 mens qualifiers could be gone after the first round. Adreas Haider-Maurer had the worst luck, drawing the #5 seed Robin Soderling and has essentially no chance of advancing. Ryan Harrison has go face the #15 seed Ivan Ljubicic and could put up a stiff fight. If Harrison can make it past Ljubicic he could make it as far as Rafael Nadal in the round of sixteen based on his draw in the next rounds. And if he can do that his ranking would rise so quickly... The talented Lithuanian Berankis has the best draw, maybe, facing an American wild card entrant Ryan Sweeting. He can win that easy. The boring French player Marc Gicquel also has a decent first round match against Thiemo de Bakker.
So we shall see...
(I am posting this a little later, and will update on how my above prognostications proved out...)
The Open continues to have a reasonable security policy as post 9-11 things go, which I can't say of a lot of other places. Which I appreciate.
And I do love going. I hated to leave. WorldCon is in Reno next year, whatever the dates I won't go, so I can look forward to being back in a year for e entirety, based on my current known knowns.
And the Lemon Ice King of Corona really is good!!
Wednesday, September 1, 2010
the Ryan Harrison story
On my first post about this year's Open qualifying, I had asked if Ryan Harrison could actually play, which is never always eager to determine in a first round match. I would have that question answered before the week was out, totally and for sure.
Harrison's second round match was against Rui Machado, one of those perennial qualifiers, now mid 20s in age, playing some of the best tennis of his life with a ranking in the very low 100s. He's one good tournament, one run to the quarters or semis in a main tour tournament, away from at least being able to enter the main draw at the four majors, as Wimbledon and the US, French and Australian grand slam tournaments are known, without qualifying. And sometimes, if you can do that and get a lucky draw and have a good week, you can make it to the third or fourth round at one or two and be set for a whole year of main draw appearances. A great player, no. But no shoo-in for a Ryan Harison, who's 18 and 100 spots lower in the rankings and still not much tested at the pro level. To put it another way, the ability to start to at least beat the Rui Machados of the world is one of those tests that a lot of next great hopes never end up passing.
What we learn in the first two sets today is that Harrison can at least play at this level, that he may be #200-something today but that there's nothing to keep him from being at least 150 spots higher. Lots of good tennis, the first two sets are split, these guys are evenly matched and fun to watch. Half or more of the people in the qualifying are not fun to watch on any level.
But then we learn that Harrison is not ready to contend at this level.
Even though it's a cool evening with little to tax a player as far as the conditions go, Harrison calls for the trainer a few games into the third set. We haven't noticed it, but he's starting to cramp, and cramp bad, and now we can't help but notice. He is grimacing in pain. He's doing that "hit bad leg with racket" thing that players do. No way should this be happening tonight if a player is ready for prime time.
But we now learn that Harrjson wants this win, wants it bad, wants it with every fiber of his being.
Cramping is usually felt worse on the serve. If you can start to run you can keep running, but you can't push off. So since Harrison absolutely cannot serve, be starts serving underhand like a Joshua Bilmes at summer camp. He actually wins a game or two like this, there are even signs that he is starting to play through the cramps, which can sometimes happen in the same way that someone does win the lottery. But then he runs all out toward the net to get a ball back, a shot which nobody -- nobody -- in his condition would bother trying to make, and now he has to stop short because he'll run full speed into the fence. Not good. Why no player in his condition would go for that ball, because now he's totally done for, hobbling back to get ready to receive the next point and getting a time violation warning in the process because he isn't ready to play.
And somehow, he goes on.
One rather surprising twist: it's a perfect night to play tennis and now Machado is starting to cramp and calls for the trainer. Not as bad as Harrison, but Machado is now serving with his arms alone, no real push-off with his legs, so he can't fully capitalize on Harrison's injury.
And here, we can see that Harrison has better, more powerful strokes than his opponent. Times like this, players try to shorten points by going for winners earlier in the point, as hard in the point as early in the point as you can find any kind of chance to do it. And Harrison can do this sooner and harder. He might be the more hobbled of the players, but he has more heart and more talent and manages to break serve and take the final set and move on to round 3.
This was, for me, like watching the famous Pete Sampras match where he won while throwing up between points. An incredible, dramatic evening.
This was on the second day of play, when rain delayed the start of play for almost 6 hours. It is possible this put the preparation for both players out of whack, which led eventually to their cramping after two hours of fiercely contested play.
Day three, Harrison has to come back and play. He is none the worse for wear. We hear him saying something like "this is a great set I'm playing" toward the end of the first set. He is being sarcastic, as he is behind and losing a set we know and he knows he should win against a player he knows he should beat. Which he does, he plays a little crisper, and takes the next two sets fairly easily to advance to the main draw.
Harrison's second round match was against Rui Machado, one of those perennial qualifiers, now mid 20s in age, playing some of the best tennis of his life with a ranking in the very low 100s. He's one good tournament, one run to the quarters or semis in a main tour tournament, away from at least being able to enter the main draw at the four majors, as Wimbledon and the US, French and Australian grand slam tournaments are known, without qualifying. And sometimes, if you can do that and get a lucky draw and have a good week, you can make it to the third or fourth round at one or two and be set for a whole year of main draw appearances. A great player, no. But no shoo-in for a Ryan Harison, who's 18 and 100 spots lower in the rankings and still not much tested at the pro level. To put it another way, the ability to start to at least beat the Rui Machados of the world is one of those tests that a lot of next great hopes never end up passing.
What we learn in the first two sets today is that Harrison can at least play at this level, that he may be #200-something today but that there's nothing to keep him from being at least 150 spots higher. Lots of good tennis, the first two sets are split, these guys are evenly matched and fun to watch. Half or more of the people in the qualifying are not fun to watch on any level.
But then we learn that Harrison is not ready to contend at this level.
Even though it's a cool evening with little to tax a player as far as the conditions go, Harrison calls for the trainer a few games into the third set. We haven't noticed it, but he's starting to cramp, and cramp bad, and now we can't help but notice. He is grimacing in pain. He's doing that "hit bad leg with racket" thing that players do. No way should this be happening tonight if a player is ready for prime time.
But we now learn that Harrjson wants this win, wants it bad, wants it with every fiber of his being.
Cramping is usually felt worse on the serve. If you can start to run you can keep running, but you can't push off. So since Harrison absolutely cannot serve, be starts serving underhand like a Joshua Bilmes at summer camp. He actually wins a game or two like this, there are even signs that he is starting to play through the cramps, which can sometimes happen in the same way that someone does win the lottery. But then he runs all out toward the net to get a ball back, a shot which nobody -- nobody -- in his condition would bother trying to make, and now he has to stop short because he'll run full speed into the fence. Not good. Why no player in his condition would go for that ball, because now he's totally done for, hobbling back to get ready to receive the next point and getting a time violation warning in the process because he isn't ready to play.
And somehow, he goes on.
One rather surprising twist: it's a perfect night to play tennis and now Machado is starting to cramp and calls for the trainer. Not as bad as Harrison, but Machado is now serving with his arms alone, no real push-off with his legs, so he can't fully capitalize on Harrison's injury.
And here, we can see that Harrison has better, more powerful strokes than his opponent. Times like this, players try to shorten points by going for winners earlier in the point, as hard in the point as early in the point as you can find any kind of chance to do it. And Harrison can do this sooner and harder. He might be the more hobbled of the players, but he has more heart and more talent and manages to break serve and take the final set and move on to round 3.
This was, for me, like watching the famous Pete Sampras match where he won while throwing up between points. An incredible, dramatic evening.
This was on the second day of play, when rain delayed the start of play for almost 6 hours. It is possible this put the preparation for both players out of whack, which led eventually to their cramping after two hours of fiercely contested play.
Day three, Harrison has to come back and play. He is none the worse for wear. We hear him saying something like "this is a great set I'm playing" toward the end of the first set. He is being sarcastic, as he is behind and losing a set we know and he knows he should win against a player he knows he should beat. Which he does, he plays a little crisper, and takes the next two sets fairly easily to advance to the main draw.
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