Roger Federer dominated the Madrid Open, the Mutua de Madrid,
like an Old Pro (even though he is 30), adapting to everything
every opponent threw at him and never losing his tactical finesse.
He ended with a flawless performance against a powerful hitter,
Tomas Berdych, who had good grounds to hope this might be his time,
with momentum going into the final and with a respectable record
(three wins in five meetings) against the best player of his time.
In tennis, as in most things , it cannot be your day every day, and
for a player like Berdych, who is one of these champions who is
superb but whose stars have put him in a generation that includes
several others just a bit more superb — he is currently ranked
No.7 and is half a foot taller than the tall Swiss genius — there
is the inevitable hope as play begins, even as 99 percent of the
mind is focused on the immediate point, that this will be your day
and the other fellow’s was yesterday.
Interestingly, it was rather the same on the ladies’ side, with
the other best-of-her-time, Serena Williams, going into the final
after a week of giving demonstrations on how to play anybody
against a power hitter (like herself) who has been having a
terrific run so far, Victoria Azarenka, who is No. 1 in the WTA and
was on a roll after demolishing another fine player, if a screamer,
the tall and Porsche-driving Maria Sharapova. I cannot certify that
she drives a Porsche, but she did win one, indeed by beating Miss
Azarenka at the Porsche Grand Prix in Stuttgart a couple of weeks
ago. She won money too, which she is likely to enjoy, but also some
of it she will plow into her business ventures.
Amateur sports are fine and they may represent a certain kind of
moral fitness. This is an Olympic year, which is one very good
reason why it is fortunate the host-city re-elected one of the
era’s major tennis writers and players, Boris Johnson, to its
mayoralty, over his notorious — or famous, if you are on the left
of the British left — opponent, ex-two term mayor Ken Livingstone,
who is not a sporting man, in any sense of the term.
Olympic years bring out controversies about amateurism v.
professionalism in sports. One may doubt if anyone really
understands the distinction. The national and international sport
federations do not help matters by allowing Federer and Williams to
compete in the Olympic tennis events, but if you are a sprinter,
Hermes (aka Mercury) help you if you are spotted — photographed —
guzzling Poland Spring water or Naked cranberry juice while wearing
your gold medal, or even your silver or bronze.
If you are Federer or Williams, this is not your problem; yours
is but to play and win. The same goes for the basketball and
baseball players who are selected. The argument for making these
Olympic sports has never been persuasive, but that is neither here
nor there. Now for some, the erasing of the boundaries between
amateurs and pros is a welcome step toward candor and honesty. They
consider that amateurism was, in its heyday — arbitrarily, we may
date this from the inception of the modern Olympics (Baron
Coubertin, 1890s, Baden Powell and all that sort of thing) to the
end-of-amateurs-only Olympics with the replacement of college
basketball players with pros in the 1990s — a sham. It was, they
claim, dishonest. Men like Avery Brundage and Juan Antonio
Samaranch were phonies who behaved like Moses toward players they
could lord it over (Americans, typically) while looking the other
way at the professional amateurs produced by the communistic
regimes of eastern Europe and Cuba, plus these same were
responsible for introducing body-altering drugs into sports.
Hypocrisy is the homage paid by vice to virtue, and as in other
20th century phoniness, such as Wilsonian democracy-promotion
(though with less terrible consequences), sports shamateurism, as
it was called, provided a criterion, a moral compass. What we now
have is money.
What we now have is Ion Tiriac, a rich Romanian. The former
champion hockey player who had a brilliant career in tennis at the
beginning of the Open era (late 1960s) became a hugely successful
entrepreneur and, in a life-phase not unfamiliar to sports fans in
our country, decided he wanted to have an active part of his old
sport. In football you buy a team, like Mr. Snyder, the Redskins
owner. In tennis you can invest in a player, hoping to get him into
the hands eventually of a sports management agency like
International Management Group founded by Mark McCormack, or you
can invest in a tournament, such as the Mutua Madrid, which is what
Mr. T. did.
He is shrewd, a not uncommon character trait among
Transylvanians, and he recognized the potential payoff of investing
in a Spanish tournament. The Mutua Madrid is a Masters 1000
category, not peanuts for money and ranking points. Tennis is still
booming in Spain, which is likely to remain a dominant power in the
sport for at least another decade as young players emulate the
mighty Rafael Nadal. Andy Murray, the mighty Scot champion, praises
Spain’s tennis program for the way it pushes its young players
instead of coddling them, as the British tennis federation does
(according to Murray), undercutting their competitive drive. I will
have to check with Mayor Johnson on that, as he has given some
thought to the tax regimes in different countries and what this
does to the competitive choices players make. Of course, this
depends on him inviting me to his box at Wimbledon this year, and
without falling into pessimism I have to admit he may have other
matters on his mind — such as managing the fantastic bonanza the
Olympics represents for London even while keeping a dedicated line
open at all times to the constabulary in charge of security — and
Mr. Tyrrell, with his
new book out
(highly recommended summer reading, if I may depart from amateurism
for a moment), is not going to have time to put in a few calls to
his friend — whom he and I both tried to draft for the Republican
presidential nomination, the mayor being a New York native — and
mention my case. So much for the boss’s clout, but then this is
London we are talking about, not Chicago.
So anyway, Spanish tennis and all that. Mr. T., having bought
into the Madrid tournament, whose previous inconvenience was the
altitude of the old Castillian capital, added to the difficulties
by redesigning the clay on which it is played. He chose blue, for
its telegenic qualities. The theory is that you can see the ball
better against the blue background if you are watching on TV.
Players do not watch on TV, and they never complained about not
being able to see the ball against the traditional red clay.
Moreover, you could imagine changing the color of the balls instead
of the surface, if you wanted something to make it easier for the
TV audiences, not that this was ever an issue during previous clay
court seasons. But what you gonna do, he’s got the dough.
Many observers pointed out that the color, as such, was not that
big a deal anyway, and many hard-court season tournaments are
played on blue surfaces. What the athletes complained about,
however, no sooner had they tried out the courts at Madrid’s
futuristic Caja Majica, was the texture: apparently, something
happens when the crushed stone we call clay is oxidized to make the
dye stick, and it creates a material that is simultaneously
slippery and uneven. Serena Williams asserted she felt she was
skating; the mighty Serb champion, Novak Djokovic, said he felt he
needed cleats and ought to be training with Chuck Norris, who sadly
will not be SecDef because Gov. Huckabee is making big bucks on TV
and is not running for president, which he cannot complain about
since he, too, made the big bucks on TV, at the cost of his amateur
status in martial arts.
Roger Federer maintained his characteristic reserve and did not
say much about the courts, but his old rival and friend, Rafa
Nadal, who from time to time has wished out loud that Federer would
be more vocal about issues of concern to the players, saw red
before even trying out the blue, after which he went ballistic. He
did not like them, he said at first, because he is a man of habit
and tradition (which is true; he even lines up his drinks at court
side in the same way every time), and it does not make sense to
change a tradition like this just a fortnight before the
culmination of the clay season at the French
Internationaux, which are played at Paris’ Roland Garros
stadium.
The great Nadal, who has been the dominant clay court player for
several years, and who was just coming off winning the Monte Carlo
tournament against his 2011 nemesis the great Djokovic (everyone’s
nemesis, actually), did okay for a match or two but fell apart in
third round match against his friend and compatriot Fernando
Verdasco, who came from behind, 2-5, in the last set to finally win
one against the master. It took something out of him, though,
because Berdych then proceeded to dispatch Verdasco easily in the
quarters, even as Federer was giving a lesson to another Spaniard,
David Ferrer. Meanwhile Djokovic was getting it from his countryman
Janko Tipsarevic. Which is where we came in, more or less.
The top Spaniard and the top Serb both said they would snub the
Madrid event next year if the courts did not revert to normal, and
Mr. T. allowed as how there were some kinks there that had to be
fixed, and he took full responsibility. That was sporting of him.
He did mention that conditions were the same for everybody, which
is the kind of thing amateurs used to say when they went through a
tough patch.
