WASHINGTON — No qualifiers reached the end of Washington’s
traditional August tennis tournament, but unseeded Radek Stepanek*,
from Monte Carlo, took on top-seed Gael Monfils of Trelex,
Switzerland, with a bold game plan based on the concept that if you
keep him moving he will miss.
Monfils, who made it to the final at the Legg Mason
Classic here on Washington’s 16th St., N.W. courts, otherwise known
as the Rock Creek Tennis Center, following a dramatic win in the
third set tiebreak over John Isner in the early hours of this same
Sunday, was favored, but so were all players Stepanek faced after
the early rounds. Superior strategy and an uncanny ability to
maintain a wide range of tactics won the day.
By definition unusual, such upset by an underdog can be
explained in part by the last-minute withdrawal of players who
would have made the draw tougher, notably the Americans Andy
Roddick and Mardy Fish. There was also the climate argument: an
exceptionally warm heat wave even by Washington’s summer standards
gave way to an exceptionally humid weekend, with serial
thunderstorms causing interruptions and delays. The pro-tennis
equivalent of double headers took its toll; and Monfils himself
appeared to think it affected him more than his opponent, though of
course they were up against the same conditions: he allowed as how
he could not find his rhythm against a competitor constantly
varying his shots.
This was practically the same conclusion reached by
Stepanek’s victim in the semi-final, the young American Donald
Young, who was routed after a nice run that included a win against
the seventh-seeded Marcos Baghdatis. “He took me out of my game,”
Young said, and it is true that with his baseball cap on the wrong
way in the interview room, he seemed eerily out of it.
Stepanek consistently found tactical openings against his
stronger-hitting opponents, including Igor Kunitsyn and Fernando
Verdasco, refusing to let superior pounding or, certainly in
Monfils’ case, flashy athleticism intimidate him.
Notwithstanding their addresses, this year’s finalists at
the tournament, made famous by such American champions as Jimmy
Connors, Arthur Ashe, Michael Chang, and Andre Agassi, as well as
Andy Roddick in the past decade, are neither Swiss nor Monegasque.
No doubt they have found nice places to call home in the temperate
and cozy environments of the French and Swiss Rivieras, but their
choices also point to an economic issue that affects professional
sports and, by extension, incentives to do well.
Note that Stepanek, considered a veteran and an old man
because at 32 he was the oldest at this event (Jimmy Connors won it
at 36), is neither an excuse-maker nor a complainer, not that he is
particularly gracious or generous in his praise of others, either:
he is cold and fair, with just a touch of your typical Czech irony.
He has been around the block a few times, a member of the
supporting cast of hungry central and eastern Europeans who,
inspired by Ivan Lendl and Martina Navratilova, saw tennis as ray
of sunshine in the bleak environment of what their rulers used to
call “real socialism.”
“You know the [Communist-era] Polish joke,” a fan from
Sofia (attending GWU), said to me in the bleachers during one of
the rain delays, “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. In
some ways tennis represented the exact opposite: you are alone out
there, it is the individualistic sport par excellence, even more
than swimming for example, where the team spirit is always very
present. You work hard and they pay you well.”
Stepanek himself has done well, about seven million
dollars in prize money — we still count in dollars — over the
years, with probably half a million this year depending on how well
he does at the U.S. Open and later end-of-season events. Monfils,
who is only 24, has won well over five million already and is on
track for three quarters of a million this year, which may or may
not explain why he left his native Paris for Switzerland, a low-tax
country.
The relation between the competitive incentive and tax
rates is a theme which Boris Johnson
discussed in his Telegraph column during this year’s
tournament at Wimbledon. The former newspaperman and
Spectator editor, London’s mayor is a low-tax conservative
and native of New York. Mr. Tyrrell and I have suggested he
consider running for president on the Republican ticket, as he
might represent an elegant fusion of the upper-crust country club
Republicans whose traditional leadership is sorely missed, and the
faith in the liberating and vitalizing energy of the free market
represented by the Thatcher and Reagan legacies. However, we are
still awaiting the review by Prof. J. Rabkin of constitutional
issues involved in a Johnson run.
BE THAT AS IT MAY, the question of what motivates
professional athletes is interestingly brought out in the recent
history of this sport. It has been, if not dominated, at least
carried, on both the women’s and men’s tours, largely by athletes
from low-tax ex-communist bloc countries who are in a hurry to make
it, or “tax expatriates” to such places as Switzerland or Monte
Carlo. But is this theory sound? If hunger drives ambition, where
are the Nigerians, the Moroccans, the Mexicans, the
Dominicans?
For that matter, where are the Americans? Are our tax
rates too high, or is it something else? In the view of any number
of Washington tennis teachers, for example Mr. Harry Miller, who
coached young players for many years in the Washington, D.C. area,
there is plenty of hungry talent in the region, and surely across
the country, but it is in the nature of our sports culture to
neglect long-term development in favor of spectacular champions who
will draw big crowds to big events.
It is also not impossible that the adults who are supposed
to be helping mentor and guide young people are more interested in
their own little advantages than in their charges’. This certainly
fits into the state of our education establishment more generally:
for all the talk about “putting children first” and getting
“excellent” teachers into the classrooms, it is by now painfully
evident that the “reform” movement in education has been more a
matter of putting people like Michelle Rhee and Arne Duncan first
than about doing anything to save public education.
There are strong and well-funded tennis-oriented
institutions in Washington and the surrounding suburbs. For
instance, the Washington Tennis and Education Foundation, based at
the Rock Creek Tennis Center where the Legg Mason Classic takes
place, runs programs designed to help failing students catch up on
their school work. Tennis serves as an organizing,
discipline-teaching principle. The Center is planning a major
expansion, with a new facility in the southeast part of
town.
There it will be close to another educational institution,
the Southeast Tennis and Learning Center, which the mighty Williams
sisters, Serena and Venus, have promoted. While such institutions
surely do a world of good, legitimate questions may be raised on
why they do not do even more. Or more exactly: why, if they — and
similar organizations elsewhere — create a foundation on which
children and teenagers learn the meaning of scholastic and athletic
discipline and perseverance, does there not seem to be any
long-term follow-up? Who picks up the kids who do well at the
Southeast Center? Who moves them to the next level?
It is very well for Mayor Vincent Gray to show up at the
Classic and hand out a few awards and boast about how well
everything is for “our kids,” but why is he putting cronies on the
city payroll complete with SUV’s and other perks? What are they
doing that can be more important than tennis-and-academic
scholarships? Why do the people mismanaging public schools getting
high salaries while the staff on the ground at the Southeast
Center, the men and women actually in touch with the kids they are
trying desperately to keep in school and on the courts and off the
streets, are making do with barely more than volunteer
stipends?
How we tax, how we educate, how we set priorities — you
cannot extrapolate from professional sports, which after all are
only that, sports. It is difficult not to see in the poor state of
American tennis, however, a reflection of a much larger, deeper,
and graver malady in American society. By all evidence, we are not
creating and nurturing and maintaining the conditions that make
citizens and champions, patriots and devoted parents:
adults.
*Photograph by Katherine Ruddy
