Sports Then and Now

5'10" Kei Nishikori counters his lack of heft with some clever shot selection.

It’s not news that men’s tennis these days is hardly hospitable to those under six feet in height. While the women’s tour has a player, Justine Henin, who shows that tenacity when combined with one-in-a-billion racket acceleration can make a female of average height a Grand Slam champion, the men’s tour offers no parallels.

In another era, a guy like Kei Nishikori might have had a lot of success ahead of him. The 20-year-old Japan native and current resident of Florida’s skills have been evident ever since he won the Delay Beach title in 2008, outfoxing the huge-hitting James Blake through his speed and his taste for angles and drop shots.

He revealed an arsenal including many of the tools found in the game’s undersized greats of the past, like Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, namely their court sense, placement, and court coverage.

In the last 20 years though, the men’s game has had only one champion shorter than 5’11”, and that was Gaston Gaudio, who won the 2004 Roland Garros in one of the more improbable conclusions a major has seen. The players most similar to Nishikori in style, Chilean Marcelo Rios and Argentina’s Guillermo Coria, both had opportunities to win slams but couldn’t quite break through. Read the rest of this entry →

France's Avarane Rezai defeats Venus Williams the final at Madrid.

The ladies prepare to do battle on the red clay of Stade Roland Garros as the 2010 French Open begins on Sunday. Questions abound concerning which players are fit to play––fully recovered from injuries mentally and physically.

Further which top players are peaking at just the right moment? Who will ride the wave and find herself standing on Court Philippe-Chatrier for the final match on June 5th.

The Power Rankings will give a clue as to which players are on top of their games at just the right time––to help us see who has the right stuff to make it through to the French Open finals.

The draw will be out soon––until then, here are the latest Power Rankings for the ladies.

Read the rest of this entry →

Gustavo Kuerten's breakout performance was at the 1997 French Open.

For better or worse, the men’s tennis world lives in times of unprecedented order.

Even when there are surprises, like Rafael Nadal losing early in last year’s Roland Garros, the standard of normality was quickly picked up by Roger Federer, who has reached every Grand Slam semi since Wimbledon 2003.

This order definitely has its advantages, as Federer, Nadal, del Potro and Andy Roddick have given us some classic finals in the past few years, as opposed to watching one of the game’s greats crush a Chris Lewis or Rainer Schuettler-esque underdog in less time than it should take the players to warm up.

We may have forgotten, though, how refreshing a surprise can be.

The hottest players going into the 1997 RG were Mr. Ball Control himself, Marcelo Rios, and new flagship of the Spanish Armada Alex Corretja. The pair had faced off in two of the Masters events leading up to the game’s only clay major, with Rios easily winning the Monte Carlo final, but Corretja reversing that result in Rome. Read the rest of this entry →

Who would have thought it would be a year to the day before the tennis world saw another Rafael Nadal vs. Roger Federer face-off? And who could have predicted that it would, as it was 12 months ago, be in the final of the last clay Masters of the year, in Madrid?

The balance of power as they entered the home straight this year has, though, looked a little different.

2009 began with Nadal as world No. 1, winner of the Australian Slam, and dominant through the clay season. But by the time he reached Madrid, his months without a break had wreaked havoc with his knees and he was soon forced off the tour to recuperate.

This year, he was short of his best form in Melbourne. But with the clay came the Rafa of old. He won every tournament he entered, and this time he paced himself so that he looked, if anything, stronger and fitter with each passing week.

So the Nadal in Madrid 2010 was a stronger animal than the one Federer dominated in 2009, while the Federer on the other side of the net was only just getting into his stride following a month off the tour with illness.

Add in the extra factors of Andre Agassi’s Masters record, and the imminent French Open title to fight over, and this was destined to be a great occasion. It saw Nadal avenge his loss of 2009, and take the outright record for Masters titles: 18. And he is still just 23.

Looking beyond the Rafa-and-Roger showdown, the Spanish armada once more laid down its marker, as it has done throughout the spring.

Three of the four finalists in Madrid were Spanish, as were six of the last 16. And that’s without their fourth man Juan Carlos Ferrero and their fifth Tommy Robredo, both missing with injury.

So, not surprisingly, Federer is the only non-Spaniard in the top five this week. Who’ll give me odds against the Spanish reign continuing in Paris? I thought not. Read the rest of this entry →

Tennis Super Heroes Ride Again...

At the end of this European clay court season, we stare headlong into the promise of another blockbuster slam––the French Open 2010.

The drama of the upcoming event played at historic Stade Roland Garros has long been anticipated in the hearts and minds of tennis aficionados across the globe.

Secretly for each rabid fan, the favorite of choice has already been crowned champion.

The hit and miss performances of many players who normally claim the starring roles in these renowned tennis epics, however, continued to cause doubt.

One after another broad-based tennis pundit pondered this apparent anomaly unfolding in 2010. Their questions peppered all media outlets.

First and foremost is the quandary of which superhero tennis star will ultimately claim the leading role in Paris?

The company has yet to post the cast of characters and who might be filling them. The question of who will emerge as the champion fills the vast arena of speculation…

Read the rest of this entry →

Rumors of Roger Federer’s demise in tennis have peppered the media since the early days of 2008. For that was when he failed to reach his first Grand Slam final in almost three years.

It was the Australian Open, and he fell short—in the semifinals. He would go on to win just four games in the French Open final, would lose his Wimbledon crown, and would not win a Masters title throughout the entire year.

It mattered not that he was recovering from the debilitating effects of glandular fever during the early months of that year, nor that he struggled with a back injury in the latter stages. Nor, indeed, that he had made the finals of three out of the year’s four Slams.

There was, for a brief moment, a little back-tracking when Federer won the title at Flushing Meadows for a record fifth consecutive time, before the muttering started up at his failure to pass the Round Robin phase of the World Tour Finals.

Just a month into 2009, and the clouds settled over the Federer story again. It was not so much his failure to win the first Slam of the year but that he lost it, in a long, tough final, to Rafael Nadal.

If the clay-court supremo could take the Australian title, on the surface always considered to favor the Swiss, this really did mark the handing over of the baton to the younger man, a transition to a new order.

 Read the rest of this entry →