The rain was expected after the muggy air and the downpours of
the Labor Day weekend, one of which held up John Isner’s
unfortunate match against Philipp Kohlschreiber, and the schedule
was upset but the show goes on, the show never stops. This is New
York City, the city that never sleeps.
Tricky things, these rain delays, the umpires and officials must
decide how to juggle the program as fairly as possible. They made a
call that must have pleased Maria Sharapova, the tall slender
Florida beauty (by way of Siberia) whose season has been fine with
a victory in the French Open that long had eluded her. Stopping the
match, they stopped the momentum of the Corsican fireball, Marion
Bartoli, who is having a good tournament and, in fact, played the
last great singles match the other day, unless somebody intervenes,
on the grand old Grandstand court, beating the charming but
athletically mercurial Czech wonder Petra Kvitova in three. Miss
Kvitova is the kind of player who is either all there or not there
at all and unfortunately for her, after the first set she seemed
out to lunch. It is too bad about the Grandstand, too, though, but
the city never sleeps and creative destruction is the iron law of
our promised city. There is a $500 million renovation-expansion of
the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center underway and surely
they know what they are doing.
So Marion and Maria will finish their business tomorrow and
right now at Arthur Ashe Stadium, the mighty, mentally liberated
Andy Roddick, freed of all burdens by his announced retirement, is
knocking out the giant of the pampas, excuse me the giant of
Tandil, the mighty Juan Martin del Potro, whose booming serves and
whiplash forehands terrorize all comers.
Except Andy Roddick. Andy Roddick is the revelation of this U.S.
Open. At 2-5 with Delpo serving, he very nearly breaks for the set
with some accurate baseline play, but not quite. Serving for the
set, he hits a service winner to Delpo’s forehand, follows it with
one to his backhand, gives him a point with an out of bounds lob,
pushes him to the baseline, but misses a couple of baseline winners
that give the Argentine the break.
And more. Delpo works his way back into the match, and when the
returning rain causes another delay at nine o’clock, Roddick is 2-0
in the tiebreak. It ain’t over till it’s over.
Ferrer-Gasquet is over, the Spaniard having got far enough into
match (two sets to love and leading in the third set) to wrap it up
during the respite from the rain. One thing tennis teaches is that
you cannot fret about what you cannot control. Accept the
conditions as you find them.
Viktoria Azarenka, who is from a geographic expression called
Belorus and has a mean forehand, eked out a desperate win against
the defending champion Samantha Stosur, the last standing
Australian after Lleyton Hewitt’s exit due to David Ferrer, the
very man who is now fated to meet Janko Tipsarevic or Philipp
Kohlschreiber, when their match resumes and concludes, probably on
Wednesday. Richard Gasquet cannot complain. He played fine tennis.
Ferrer’s relentless tenacity got the better of him, but so did
Ferrer’s finesse, which grew as the match progressed.
Ferrer is a player who seems stimulated by having his back to
the war. I lost count of number of times he came back from 0-40 to
win a game. Although he grunts from time to time, it is nothing
like the shrieking you hear from Miss Azarenka’s side, which
frankly are distracting. Someone pointed out to me that distracting
is the least of it; after all, a lot of things are distracting,
including the jolting realization that you forgot to feed the cat.
The thing is, this observer pointed out, these young champions are
taught to make full use of all their senses in making judgments –
critical ones – on where the ball is and where it will be in the
next split second.
The shriek, which seems to be a specialty of the post-communist
states’ tennis educational programs, impedes the other player’s
ability to hear how the ball is hit and the direction of its likely
trajectory. At this level, believe me, this can be critical. There
is a movement among tennis pros to gradually phase out shrieking by
instructing young players against making tactical use of their
vocal chords.
On the subject of tennis education, the well-known tennis
commentator, broadcaster, and writer Bud Collins, whose books are
essential references for whomever would know the history of this
sport, observes from his observation post at the U.S. Open that one
advantage the mighty Spaniards have these days is that their small
geographic space allows their young players to be constantly within
proximity of one another and thus have very high levels of
competitive training from an early age. They mostly grow up in
southern Spain and along the Mediterranean coast. Their parents are
frequently teachers, often former athletes of distinction. The
young players do not have to leave home at an early age to play
tennis with good instructors and very strong peers.
This is well worth pondering. The USTA puts quite a bit of money
into tennis development, but it is spread over various project –
building public courts; after-school programs to encourage kids to
stay in school (tutoring plus tennis instruction). This is surely
worth doing, considering the wasteland the federals and the unions
have made of public education, but let us not get off point.
The point Mr. Collins was making, I think, is that to form
champions in the U.S., you have to take kids at an early age out of
family and community and put them in intensive situations, such as
tennis academies, from which supposedly at age 14 or 15 they
emerge, or may emerge, as contenders. But at what cost? Whereas in
a place like Spain, due to geography and various other factors, the
kids can stay at home and still benefit from extremely competitive
tennis. In short, their lives remain more normal.
Surely this is so, and surely too, as Bud Collins would agree,
the question is more complicated than this. What can be said is
that we have here still another example of how we are losing a
natural and sensible grasp of what education is and how it
implicates parents, teachers, public authorities, and whoever else
shapes the world in which children learn and grow.
It is altogether likely that if young players reached for a
volume of Aristotle or sat down to compose a sonnet to their
sweetheart during a rain delay, they would be better off and maybe
even better at tennis. To be this way, they would probably not have
been playing tennis “since age 2,” as the cliché has it. Tennis is
difficult to master, it requires much patience, instruction,
practice; but this does not mean a human being with an athletic
disposition and good health cannot get the rudiments and then the
higher skills in his teens and be perfectly competitive by their
end with someone who has been playing “since age 2.” To think about
this is to think about the state of American education and, in an
election year, it may be better not to.
