Strong pitching beats strong batting, right, but then why
do the Yankees need Mark Teixeria in the lineup next to A-Rod and a
few other big bats, when they have C.C., winningest pitcher in
baseball.
This topic went around and around forever at Murphy’s
saloon on Third Avenue, but it falls flat in Washington, where we
do not see a lot of strong pitching except when the Phillies are in
town and we have lost sight of what strong hitting means since the
local geniuses let Adam Dunn go. Which is okay, no one expects a
reincarnation of John McGraw to run any sort of team in Washington,
which is a strange, bizarre, woebegone city where sports are
concerned, and I do not expect to get any good answers as to why
this is so, now nor later.
Though if you want to know, the simplest answer is that
Washington is a strange, bizarre, woebegone place all around and
you can count on folks here wrecking whatever they set out to do
and then creating a commission to fix it and instead making it even
worse.
However, if pitching beats batting — except that with the
Yankees you have the special circumstance that they are big
sluggers too, it never hurts — then in tennis, which is a
different kind of sport admittedly, you can say that a shrewd game
of motion and variety beats the power-from-the-baseline
game.
At the Legg Mason aka Washington Tennis Classic on 16th
Street yesterday this axiom was given a textbook demonstration in
the match involving Kolya Davydenko, whose slight build belies iron
muscles and some of the fastest feet on the pro tour and who
vaguely reminds you with his pale blond hair and his fair skin and
intense eyes of Ivan Karamazov, although I will take that back
because who wants that kind of burden on anybody and say instead he
makes you think of your typical scheming thinking intense
Russian (which proves Ukraine, at least the part where he
was born, is a mere geographical expression).
Off court he can be pleasant, funny, sociable, but on
court his eyes are like a shark’s, seriously, like Vladimir
Putin’s, the Russian vozhd. No Mister Nice Guy. He hits.
With power. To the corner. To the other corner. To the baseline.
And again. He wears you down. And he hits fast, because his feet
are moving all the time and he is fast. Strong batting
beats strong pitching, this guy does not do anything but
swing.
And in the first set, in this by far the most interesting
match played so far at this Legg Mason Tournament that does not
seem to be attended by a lot of Washingtonians, judging from the
license plates in the parking lots, he showed what this means. He
kept his opponent off balance not by tactics but by sheer power.
You are receiving these bullets again and again way in the back of
the court and they are coming so fast you cannot advance from the
baseline and try to gain the initiative, and Kolya takes the first
set without sweating, though actually that is not true: it was
humid, with rain on the way — there was in fact a brief rain delay
in the first set — and it was making everyone perspire, though not
in that warm and comfortable and definitive way that it did last
week when there was a real heat wave, the kind that, in the days
before air conditioning, made Washington function. Because those
who could take the heat took care of the Republic’s business while
those who could not — who did not have the character — stayed
home or fled North.
Against this all-offense-batting-beats-pitching style a
young Australian — young is relative in tennis, Davydenko is only
30 — Matthew Ebden, was trying to find his all-court defensive
offense, and he could not. And then he could. Down 1-5, he began
serving aces and mixing his tactics where previously he had been
unable to do anything but return baseline mortar for baseline
mortar, eventually losing the point. Because with Kolya, if you hit
deep, he returns deep, and like the great baseline men of yore,
Borg, Lacoste, he will return longer than you will return.
Eventually you will not. In addition to which, he saw clearly, as
everyone else did — the Grandstand court was packed on both sides
because everyone knew this was it, we were finally going to see
some really high level competitive tennis after two days of so-so
play, he saw clearly that something was wrong with Ebden’s
backhand. Matt Ebden usually has it, there is nothing wrong with
his backhand, or any other hand. He is just as fast as Kolya, or
faster, and normally, as a rule, cannot be fazed. But Kolya was
finding his backhand and it was fazing him.
He came un-fazed fast enough at 1-5 to save face but not
the set, but you might say the new, winning approach — he was
returning everything and forcing Kolya to the net with McEnroe-like
drop shots followed by the most breathtaking passing shots down the
line, some kind of Joe Namath his arm made you think of — went on
until he was up 5-4 in the second set, controlling everything.
Classic: the no-break set through nine games and now for the break.
But it did not happen.
The all-court chess player — actually, Matt is physically
bigger, more athletic-looking than Kolya — was at the moment when
you break serve and gain the set. Keeping up this strategy, he
would have cruised into the third set and onward. But — well, you
can read about it.
Offense beats defense, batting over pitching? You wonder.
Watching Nikolay Davydenko, who for ten years has been consistently
near the top but not quite there, you wonder about aggressive play.
Accused of tanking, and then cleared, in the wake of a betting
scandal in 2007, Davydenko is the kind of player who never sees a
tournament he does not like. Consistently reaching the middle range
— quarters, semis — he can do quite well for himself, high ATP
rank, plenty cash. To do this you have to be consistent, like a
slugger. Strike out quite a lot, as much as you want, so long as
the big hits keep coming.
Everyone thought Matthew had found his zone and was at
least going to force a decisive third set, because he was doing
everything right: winning service games on aces, drawing Davydenko
to the net with graceful drop slices followed by graceful passes,
cutting down Kolya’s speed by hitting so deep most of his long
shots seemed to be hitting the baseline.
If you keep slugging, even C.C. will eventually yield some
hits and some runs. This was the best match of the tournament so
far, and it was fine that it could be played and finished before
the rain returned for good. It was more important, because it
showed that tennis is still being practiced by thinking players who
try radically different strategies against one another and, doing
so, make the game evolve, than the controversies — from the past
— over banned substances and the subsidiary controversies over
what should be said about same.
An American named Wayne Odesnik was given a long
suspension last year for showing up in Australia with banned
substances in his suitcase. Some tennis men spoke harsh words,
suggesting he should be banned permanently, but he was back in the
circuit here as a qualifier, and got as far as the first round. He
makes good moves that surprise his opponents from time to time, but
he has not got the consistency of either the slugger or the
tactician, at least not yet.
Well, he did not disgrace himself and, if he can keep up
the good work, he will advance into deeper rounds in forthcoming
tournaments. So why bring up the past? Why not talk about
Davydenko-Ebden and the strategy of the game and how to win and the
meaning of it all. Because it is sexier to talk about drugs? Drugs
have been around a long time; they were discussed intelligently in
Michael Mewshaw’s '80s classic, Short Circuit, about the
formative years of the modern professional tour (i.e., since the
1967 beginning of the Open era).
But do drugs really matter? If someone wants to kill
himself, it is between him and his family and his God. And the law.
It is a criminal issue, if you are involved in illicit drugs. But
is it an issue for the sport, as such? Whose concern is it if Babe
Ruth ate lots of hot dogs and Joe DiMaggio sipped coffee before
games? Or that Pancho Gonzales had a horrible diet and smoked
heavily? You go up against all kinds of players, some follow this
regimen, some follow that one. You take them as they are and you
beat them or are beaten by them. Finally what matters is how they
played the game, not what they ingested before the game. Matt had
Kolya 5-4, but when he had a chance to break him he sent balls
flying over the line in a way that was downright surprising. It is
how you play the point and keep your nerve. Whether the stake is a
set of tennis or the annual budget of the United States.
I was glad it rained. That was selfish of me, it causes
all kinds of distress and disappoints the fans who came to see the
late games. They have terrific drying machines at the Rock Creek
Tennis Center. Of course they are not much good if the rain keeps
coming. We needed it, after the July dryness. But I was glad I had
an excuse to leave. You do not often see matches like the one
between Kolya Davydenko and Matt Ebden. But I am sure they will
show us more.
