THANK YOU CITI OPEN: JOHN HARRIS

I picked up my press pass at the Citi Open yesterday, and as always, I just couldn't resist the opportunity to get a sneak preview of the players that will make this the place to be for any self-respecting tennis enthusiast in the Washington, DC area over the next 10 days.  The joy of coming to this tournament, for me, is as much in watching the players practice, as it is watching the matches, which can go so quickly if one of the two combattants fails to play his part.  Sure enough, having ambled over to the Grandstand court, I encountered Caroline Wozniacki working out with her father, who like Richard Williams before him, has overcome the paucity of any true tennis pedigree of his own, to turn his daughter into one of the best players in the world.  Among other things, he had her working on pattern play, service return and first strike shot placement, and the old "hit the can" with your serve routine - only the can this time was a white towel (she hit it once, by the way).  Kind of makes you wonder what the "professional" coaches are doing, but I digress.

Following their workout, the court was taken over by Daniel Evans, his coach, and the coach-less Grigor Dimitrov.  Now this was fun to watch:  as an admirer and exponent of the 1-handed backhand, here I had two of the most aesthetically appealing in the game to watch.  Evans, having just come off being manhandled by one Roger Federer at Wimbledon in the 3rd round, actually appeared to be a little off his game, by my count committing about 3 times as many unforced errors as his partner for the day.  What struck me about their hit, which became fairly intense within the first 10 minutes, was the difference between talent and technique, and what the combination of the two allows a player to do that is beyond one who clearly has one but is relatively lacking in the other.

Evans has, by all accounts, exceptional hand-eye coordination and very good hands - he's very talented.  He can do things with a racquet that is beyond your average hacker...including professional hackers.  And from time to time, he can go nuclear with that forehand of his, in a way that makes the racquet look more like a frying pan as his hands come through the point of contact.  But it comes at a cost, when the timing required to pull this off escapes him, he is as likely to hit the back fence as the baseline.  More often than not, if you train your eye on his follow through, rather than the ball, you can see that he's hitting off his back foot.  Dimitrov, on the other hand, hits every forehand in front of his body with good weight transfer from the back foot to the front.  He stays down on the stroke, which allows him to hit with more spin, net clearance, and depth - hence the relatively low frequency of unforced errors.  They went through the standard warm-up cycle, and finished playing a 7-point tie break that Dimitrov won ironically hitting two aces wide in the ad court, after missing that serve in the warm up about 7 times in a row.  I guess practice really does make perfect.

It's worth mentioning that while Evans exited stage left with his coach after an hour, Dimitrov played another hour with another player (whose name escapes me and Leon Vessels) who does not appear to be in the tournament, but seems to be a popular hitting partner at this venue.  Last year I saw him hitting with a number of players, men and women, and this year, after sparring with Dimitrov, he moved to the stadium to hit with a WTA player, and ironically was asked by observing children for autographs, while they ignored his ignominious partner.  Dimitrov, toiling in anonymity, seemed to enjoy himself, as he always does when on the court, belied the presumed depression one might expect from a player whose star has fallen so far in the last couple of years. After a meteoric rise to the top 10 in 2014, coming within a rat's ass of making the O2, and playing a Wimbledon semi-final, this year he found himself unseeded and vanquished in the 3rd round by 2-time NCAA champion American Steve Johnson.  I find Dimitrov's committment and pure joy at being on the court to be a good sign that my prediction, that he will win a major at some point in his career, to still be well within his reach.

During the practice with Evans, Dimitrov noted that the kick serve in the North end of the Grandstand court bites a hell of a lot more than the other courts, and according to him, did him no favors last year when he lost to Johnson following two rain delays and two court changes.  The high American('s) twist serve to the single handed backhand was more than he could handle, and if he meets the Trojan man this year, on that court, he will have to figure out a way to neutralize that serve as a weapon, lest he meet the same fate.

I also had a chance to watch Alexander Zverev hit with Gael Monfils on the stadium court, where I was really impressed by the liquid power of the spindly German (by way of Russia) - a last minute wild-card entrant into the field after being dumped out of a home tournament in Hamburg.  There's just no substitute for being able to inject pace into the rally at any given moment, and I observed the rhythm in their rallies to be decidedly in his favor by something like a 2-3 margin (two counts for his shot to reach Monfils, 3 counts for those of the Frenchman to reach him).  Monfils was more frequently the player hitting late in their exchanges, which will do nothing to turnaround what has been a less than inspiring 2016 for him.

As usual, it's impossible to know whether he will be more focused on thrilling the crowd than winning, but I plan to make a special visit to his first match.  However, if I were a betting man, I'd put my money on Zverev to go further in the tournament and/or win it all, if he can overcome the fatigue he must be feeling having played two warm up tournaments before Wimbledon, making the quarterfinal before getting it handed to him by absent the number 1 seed here at the Citi Open Thomas Berdych and then a warm-down event in his native Germany on clay.

Finally, I watched a practice with Irina Falconi, her second in succession, having been (wo)manhandled in a practice set by Francoise Abanda (the Canadian siren with gams like a daddy-long legs, who's been given a wild-card into the qualifying tournament) against American Christina McHale.  McHale, the New Jersey native who waddles around the court like a long-legged penguin, but hits one of the easiest and cleanest forehands in the women's tour, is a dark-horse to go deep here as well.  Her modern forehand, produced with the racquet head remaining on the right side of her profile, generating torque and deceptive acceleration as it catches up with her hands at the point of contact, is not the best athlete in the draw, but following her very competitive encounter with Serena Williams at SW19, appears to be playing well, fit as a fiddle and ready to win her first WTA title just as her compatriot Sloane Stephens did here last year.

As I watched these two going through their paces, an older gentleman quietly ambled over in my direction and asked, as though soliciting a secret, if McHale was the woman who did so well against Serena Williams at Wimbledon this year.  I confirmed as much, and this initiated a conversation about tennis in general that surprised me in so more ways that one.  He noted that a girl on the far court looked about 12 years old, and remarked how young the players were able to start today, and how different it was versus past eras, because of the equipment.  He asked me how long I'd been coming to the tournament, and I proudly told him 30+ years, to which he replied that he'd been there since the beginning.

Since the beginning?  The 1969 beginning?

It turned out the gentleman was none other than the John Harris, who co-founded the tournament with Donald Dell (and Steve Potts) all those years ago.  Honestly, my knees buckled.  I couldn't help myself, and asked him a series of questions that he patiently answered.  The best match he'd ever seen?  The consolation match in 1971 between a 19-year old Jimmy Connors and a 20-year old Eddie Dibbs, which he said almost nobody saw, but was better than the final between Ken Rosewall and Marty Riessen.  Rosewall, at the time of his victory in 1971, was the reigning US Open champion, having defeated Tony Roche at Forest Hills the year before. But he didn't defend his title due to the growing conflict between the WCT and the ILTF, which centered around the struggle for control over the conditions of who entered the tournament and who didn't.  Despite the Cold War at the dawn of the open era, he was free to take the title in DC, rather routinely, over his veteran American opponent.

All this was news to me.

And to the question of why the surface of clay was chosen for this tournament, preceding the US Open (which at the time was played on grass) Harris explained that in those days, the summer US circuit consisted of actually two sub-circuits. The clay court series in places like Cincinnatti, Indianapolis and Chicago, that they wanted to be a part of to facilitate a better field of players.  Once the summer US clay court season had concluded, the focus moved on to grass, with tournaments in Newport, Boston and finally culimnating at Forest Hills.  In fact, the brief interlude of the US Open switching to clay from 1975 to 1977 had essentially spelled the deathknell of the summer US grass court season, which had been in place for some 85 years, before all the tournaments in the US transitioned to hard courts.

He said that he had been a collegiate and amateur player himself, but that he had never been able to effectively compete against Donald Dell, who was himself a 3-time all American at Yale, and NCAA finalist in 1959.  He said that as good as Dell was, Arthur Ashe was on another level as a player, something that is frequently forgotten about the man...a testament to the exceptional human being that he was, and humanitarian that he became.  

Speaking further about Ashe, who along with Harris and Dell had years before cooked up the notion of an integrated tournament in the nation's Capitol, Harris sat on the Men's Professional Tennis Council representing the US tournaments, alongside him as he represented the players, when he first heard of the Williams sisters.  Harris, with great humility, admitted to me that he didn't think the girls had a chance, not because of their ability (which was obvious) but because their father had prevented them from playing the standard US junior tennis circuit.  After proclaiming as much to Ashe, Ashe himself (who died 6 years before Serena won the US Open in 1999) predicted that both of them would be world champions and would be the first of many from the black American community if the USTA played their cards right.  Sadly it hasn't, which Harris admitted had never been the intention of the WTEF, which owns and operates the Citi Open, and donates nearly every penny to local education, and not necessarily the development of tennis champions.

Speaking of the Williams sisters, Harris told me a story of how he had stayed down the hall from the same hotel as the Williams sisters in 1998 in Australia.  He knew then that the Williams' parents were special because the mother, Oracene, would get up at 7:00am every morning to do the laundry. Why?  Because Venus didn't have any sponsors that would provide her with new clothes to wear before every match; so the depth of humility and commitment was evident. One can understand their persistent skepticism of the tennis establishment, given that in 1998 they still couldn't find a single clothing sponsor that could be bothered to throw some free clothes in the direction of a 17-year old girl who had already reached #22 in the world and had made the final at Sydney a week before one of the 4 biggest tournaments in the world.

How things have changed since.

It was an honor and a pleasure to make the acquaintance of a man who, unwittingly, is one of the reasons that I fell in love with tennis.  This tournament was the first time I'd seen tennis played in person by professionals, and ever since has been my Mecca for 33 years, the place I come to fall in love with the game all over again, and will continue to as long as air fills my lungs.

For this, and for so much more I say, thank you John Harris.

ADDENDUM:  Dimitrov's hitting partner, and the man whose autograph had been sought by those kids watching hit in the stadium court was Leon Vessels, whose history with the Citi Open is as curious as it is inspiring.  

WIMBLEDON 2015 - CLOSE BUT NO CIGAR

So, what did we learn from the final this year?  Not much, to be honest.  Actually, the result this year, is really the result we should have had last year, where Federer was down a break and (miraculously) found a way to tie the match at two sets a piece.  But this year there was no respite from either Djokovic's improved serve and his ever-present return, which neutralized his opponent's greatest strength yet again.  There's been a little talk this year in the blogosphere about what is the key to success on grass, and I've always been of the opinion that the return is far more important.

If you needed any more evidence of that, just take a look at the way Djokovic broke the serve of Federer as frequently as he needed to, and how much trouble Federer had doing the same.  Both of them have been strong in the serve throughout the tournament, Federer even longer, losing one service game out of the previous 96, before the final, and then proceeded to be broken 4 times today.  So while it may seem that the serve is the key success factor, it was clear that with all of the failed break point opportunities on one side, and the successful ones on the other, and who wound up winning the title, it's clear that the key was the return.

The interesting thing is that while Federer appears to continue to be the best player in the world on grass (with one glaring exception) it is Djokovic's viability that I begin to question - after all, how long can he expect to remain as nimble and pliable as he is now?  How long can we expect lightning quick responses with impeccable hand-eye coordination, the stretching out of points over and over again, and the impenetrable wall of defense that he's putting up these days?  With the exception of his outlier Wimbledon title in 2012, Federer hasn't really won a major for 5 years, and before that he held three at a time and had made the last 7 major finals in a row - that was after making 10 finals in a row before that.  Nadal was at the peak of his powers in 2010 and again in 2013, after taking 6 months off - since then, he's won a single major and hasn't made it past the quarterfinal round in his last 3.

So we come to Djokovic, and he appears to be at the peak of his powers, having made 14 major finals in the last 5 years, winning 8 of them, it would appear he is well on his way to the end of the rainbow, but it remains to be seen if there is a pot of gold, or leprechaun waiting for him.  The end comes quickly, for those who choose it, and those who do not, and it's hard to imagine him doing much better than he's doing now, but not hard to imagine him doing much, much worse.

On the women's side, Wimbledon has confirmed the one thing that we've all known - Serena Williams is far and away, the best player in the world, and it remains to be seen if she will anoint herself the greatest player in the history of the game.  But there is something that hasn't been brought to light, out of either deference or political correctness, that bears discussion:  is the state of the women's game the equal of the men's game?  And if not, does the palpable absence of reverence for her accomplishments result from one of the "isms" she is wont to claim, or simply an acknowledgement of the paucity of quality that surrounds her?

Gone are the great competitors, with games that had the capacity to challenge her on a regular basis (including her sister's) and left behind is a litany of weak clones with all the aesthetic appeal of her game, and absolutely none of her capacity.  I don't usually subscribe to the weak era argument, but watching one paltry substitute after another play exactly the same way, only much much worse, for the last 3 years, has begun to make me wonder.  In a quote often ascribed to Albert Einstein that, "...madness is defined as doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting a different result."  If so, women's professional tennis is a mad, mad world, indeed.

But on the men's side, the result of the final, was exactly what we should have expected from last year - with only the first and second set results reversed.  According to Chris Evert, Federer did what he did last year with a bad back, and as such, with his ruthless dismissal of Andy Murray, there was an expectation that he would be able to get a different result this year.  But as it turned out, the one who played better than last year was Djokovic, and the result was equally more in line with where they are in their match up.

Federer still depends heavily on the quality of his serve, and although it had been firing on all cylinders for the past 12 matches, in this one, the quality of Djokovic's return forced him just beyond his comfort zone, and whereas he was broken just once in 12 matches, he was broken 4 times in this one.  One can question whether it was the chicken or the egg (did his serve falter or was it caused to falter by the quality of the return), but these are largely academic questions.  As it stands, without his serve affording him 1-2 free points per game, the remainder of his arsenal is insufficient to trouble the best player in the world on his worst surface, where he now has 3 Wimbledon titles to his name, and has never lost a final.

This tournament had the potential to mean a lot of things to a lot of people - Nishikori petered out early with an injury, Dimitrov lost to an inspired Gasquet (with the loss looking better and better as he progressed through the draw), Raonic looked right at home on what should the best surface for his serve, and then promptly lost to the first person who could return it with any level of consistency.  Gasquet looked like he would finally fulfill the potential of his talents, lauded on the covers of French magazines since he was 9 years old, but he too ran into the juggernaut that his Djokovic and was largely ineffective.  His last victim, Stan Wawrinka, was on the verge of entering the pantheon of great players in world tennis, but he, perhaps prophetically, confirmed before the fact, that he is not at the level of those that precede him in prestige and success.

Murray was playing some of the best tennis of his career at Queens and then at Wimbledon, but even the totality of British support for him couldn't overturn the advantage that Federer has over him when it counts.  It wasn't to be for him, nor his conqueror.  And finally, Nick Kyrigos impressed us with the breadth of his personality, and the shallowness of his game, but in the end, he failed to leave much more of an impression than that of a petulant manchild with more bark than bite.  Only time will tell if he can become something more than an Australian Monfils, and finally deliver to that country the major champion it so desperately seeks.

Tangentially, the one area that did surprise me was the extent to which ESPN took advantage of the considerable knowledge and analytical skills of Jason Goodall, who along with Robbie Koenig, is part of the internet's most insightful analyst team in the game, and has been for the last 10 years.  But with the advent of hawkeye technology and statistics, to supplement his propensity to analyze the only thing that matters in tennis - the technical - Goodall put to shame the perfunctory pseudo-psychological drivel that normally passes for analysis in the studio.  All the talk about pressure and confidence and belief sounds more like the expression of their own perceptions of what they felt as players, but brings us no closer to the answers to the question that we all (should) want to know:  how the hell do they do it?  It could be that Goodall's long overdue inclusion at the table, and his clear prowess at it, was the only surprise this year.

So in the end, the Championships at Wimbledon 2015 had the potential to make an impression on the tennis world, but once again failed to do so, and as such we learned little from this tournament that we didn't already know.  Will the US Open do the same?

I have a feeling that just like the last 5 years of that tournament, the last major of the year will turn out the last surprise of the year as well - because this one sure didn't.

YOU SHOULD KNOW BETTER, ANA

By all accounts, Ana Ivanovic is having something of a revival this year - she won Aukland, defeating Venus Williams (for just the second time in her career) in the final.  She made the quarterfinal in Melbourne, losing to Genie Bouchard in a tough 3-set match.  After some mixed results in the premier spring hard court events of Indian Wells and Miami, she won Monterrey with a semi-final victory over Caroline Wozniacki.  She followed this up with arguably her best performance of the year at Stuttgart, despite losing the final.

It was the first time in 5 years that she made consecutive finals - not too shabby.  Along the way, she defeated Julia Goerges (meh...) Svetlana Kuznetsova (2-time major winner and winner at the Citi Open last week) and her personal nemesis Jelena Jankovic, who always puts up a good fight - particularly against her.  In the end, she succumbed to the best clay-courter on the WTA tour, Maria Sharapova (7 of her last 8 titles have been on clay, BTW) in the final.  She capped off the highlights of this season so far with an impressive victory at the Aegon classic at Birmingham, where she never lost more than 5 games in a match and won the only grass court title of her career.

But a strange thing happened after that - she lost a match in the 3rd round at Wimbledon over Sabine Liscki after winning the first set on Saturday, and appearing to have the match in hand before the match was suspended due to poor light.  Because Wimbledon doesn't play the middle Sunday, the match didn't resume until Monday, but she was still up a break in the second at 5-2, when the match was suspended again due to rain. This proved to be a tipping point, because upon resumption she proceed to lose 7 of the next 9 games, and the match, showing once again that in tennis it is just as easy to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.

Following that capitulation, in the context of the previous 7 months that saw her most successful season since 2008, she took the curious decision of splitting with the coach whose tenure coincided with those results, Serbian Nemanja Kontic.  In and of itself, that is not unusual - players split with coaches for a variety of reasons and often do it when they appear to be really well and/or making great progress. At the end of the day, the player is the employer and they have the prerogative to make changes whenever they like.

What's strange is the reasons she gave for the change:

"You want someone who's going to be there to support you no matter what...to make you motivated, to make you hungry for success.  I really wanted to get higher in the rankings...I definitely look for someone in that manner rather than someone who's going to be technical."

That's my emphasis precisely because I can't believe what I'm reading.

First, she emphasizes that she really wanted to move up in the rankings, and ironically, that is precisely what she did in 2014.  In fact, she not only moved into the top 10 for the first time since 2008, but she also won 3 titles (where she had no titles the previous two years).  You could hardly blame Kontic for scratching his head on this one, if winning titles and moving up in the rankings was truly the objective - in that case he did his job quite well.

She then goes out of her way to imply that Kontic wasn't giving her "unconditional love" so to speak, didn't motivate her, or keep her hungry for success.  Now this is pretty damning for any coach hoping to get a job with the multitude of female professionals who seek a coach that will provide these exact same things for them.  In that regard, Miss Ivanovic did him no favors here - in fact, if I didn't know any better, that really comes across as the last throes of a woman scorned.

But I digress.

The real question is, why in the world does she need someone else to motivate her?  Isn't that something that is really her responsibility to herself?  If she isn't self-motivated, isn't that problem hers and hers alone?  Maybe she should look at the reasons she isn't motivated - too much money, too many matches, too many people around her putting pressure on her to earn their living?  None of those have to do with the coach, because at the end of the day she is the final arbiter of her career decisions, including all of the above.

But the most incredible sentence is the last - that she's less interested in the technical than the motivational and psychological - I just can't believe or understand that.  I mean, after all, this is a sport - a physical activity.  Striking a tennis ball is not like moving pieces on a chess board - it does matter how you do what you do, so it behooves anyone who wants to do what they do better, to find someone who can help with that pesky "doing" bit..i.e. the technical.  Furthermore, even if you work off the assumption that the body follows the mind (despite ample evidence to the contrary) the body still has to follow - in other words, even a mental edge has to translate into a technical edge, so why not cut out the middle man and work on the technical?

The mental game is by far the most overrated aspect of tennis - for a variety of reasons people attribute way too much importance to it, and because this attribution is so pervasive, a lot of people who should know better lap it up like a stray cat over a saucer of milk.

But Ana Ivanovic, you really should know better.

SERENA AND INDIAN WELLS

There was talk that she might play this year, 13 long years after her traumatic victory here over Kim Clijsters in 2001, and the ugly incident that has forever divided the tennis community at this time of year.  But once again it wasn't meant to be.  And despite Larry Ellison's very public determination to see this tournament take its place next to the majors in the halls of tennis heaven, neither she, nor her sister have come back.  One can have an opinion about the veracity of Richard Williams' claims of racial abuse, the tournament's shoddy treatment of the Williams sisters, or whether any player's responsibility to the game supersedes their right to ply their trade when and where they choose.  But one thing is certain:

Tennis has never really dealt with this.

And the monument to that unresolved issue, the eyesore that never fades, is the ignominious absence of Venus and Serena Williams from Indian Wells.  If it weren't for the obvious social chasm between the picturesque surroundings of this tournament, and the bleak and desperate origins of those two immense figures in women's tennis, one might consider it ironic that they have eschewed what should be their annual homecoming. But if you know the history of their last journey to what most view as a tennis paradise, it may very well be that the chasm is a natural consequence of many factors that continues to make tennis the sport least likely to produce black champions.

There have been, and continue to be both, great black players in the making, and others who have just barely missed the mark.  But when one considers what blacks have been able to achieve in other sports, one has to wonder why so few have followed in the footsteps of Althea Gibson, Arthur Ashe, Yannick Noah, and the Williams sisters.  When will another scale that Mount Rush(the net)more of so many great champions that look down their noses at those supplicants who gape to be their heir?  There are a lot of theories of why it hasn't happened. Everything from the cost of the game where blacks have so many more readily accessible options, to the unseen grey faces that rule the game, grim with disdain, making incidents like 2001 possible, even in this day and age.

But nobody's truly answered the question of why?  I certainly haven't.  But I suspect that until another black champion comes to Indian Wells, is received as a people's champion and goes on to win a major, it won't be.  Such is the stain that intolerance, self-absorption, collective martyrdom and entitlement can leave on a game that so many love. 

It's easy to lay the blame at the feet of Venus and Serena.  But maybe not if you can relate to the abject isolation, the ironic rejection and their resentment of the entitlement that those who would have them return so readily, display when discussing the subject.  Likewise, it's easy to lay the blame at the feet of Charlie Pasarell, and the tournament administrators, who did nothing to dispel the suspicion that led to the abusive crowd and their unseemly behavior.  But then again, you could be convinced that (1) they might have actually inflamed the enmity expressed (borne of something deeper than being gypped), and (2) it really wasn't their responsibility to do so.  

It's probably easiest to blame the faceless, collective tennisocracy of Indian Wells - those entitled few who can afford to look down their noses at one of the world's greatest athletes with impunity.  It's an unattractive reminder of those privileged Romans who felt they deserved a better display when a Christian lasted just a few minutes at the Coliseum.  But is it reasonable to hold them responsible for the false impression they were left with by the likes of Peter Graf, Stefano Capriati, Jim Pearce, and so many overbearing tennis parents before Richard Williams?  After all, his predecessors were men that, few would deny, would do anything to prostitute not only their beloved children, but the game itself, in order to manufacture a result that was to their liking alone?

Would they have reacted any differently if they knew that Richard Williams could scarcely compel either of his children to manufacture results?  After all, when he kept his daughters from competing in the same tournaments as children (precisely to avoid the appearance of impropriety) he was foiled by the insolence of Serena who would enter herself in those very tournaments under pseudonyms.  If they knew that Richard was no more able to quell the competitiveness of his daughters as children, would they harbor suspicions that he could so at that stage in their careers?  This after both had already won majors and other tournament finals, against each another?  

And what if the crowd had simply expressed their displeasure, absent of the contributions of the lunatic fringe that chose to include their racial antipathy?  Would the Williams sisters be able to forgive them their trespasses?  I would guess, they would, because after all, Serena returned to Roland Garros after the abuse she took in 2003.  

Is it realistic to be convinced that there was no undercurrent of racial ingratitude towards the sisters (as in, "We let you in here, and this is the thanks we get?") among the less fringe, but no less displeased, spectators who felt they deserved more?  I would say that is unlikely.

I suspect the real answer lies somewhere in between.  Serena has done more than enough on her own to elicit the very lack of universal enthusiasm that she bemoans.  All too often she allows the focus of this backlash to languish in the unmerited realms of the racism, misogyny, or the ubiquitous "haters", or whosoever else conveniently draws attention away from herself and her own failings, and places it on those who react to her personally, and not what she "represents".  

And I also suspect that, though we hate to admit it, there is a part of the tennis going public - not the laymen, but the entitled engine of the social elite who, to this day, drive this game to and fro - that are still just a little salty at the prospect that after all this time, Serena doesn't seem to appreciate how far they've come in welcoming her into the game.  I think they still bristle at her convenient allusions to the fact that there is still probably some overhead of their disapproval that allows Maria Sharapova (and more frustratingly, not her) to be the highest paid female athlete on the planet.

The truth is that Venus and Serena's refusal to return to Indian Wells is their god-given right. No professional, in any field of endeavor, ought to be forced to enslave themselves to a responsibility heaped on them by those that seek only to enrich themselves from their labor.  Nobody should expect them to, in any way, give up their individual right to do whatever the hell they damn well please.  It is their right to hold a grudge, and it is only they themselves that suffer the presumed (self-inflicted) consequences.  

And what of Richard Williams?  Born into the most desperate of poverty, right in the white underbelly of the Jim Crow South, literally the son of a Shreveport, Lousiana sharecropper.  He clawed his way out of that obscurity to the highest echelons of a game neither he, nor his gifted daughters, were ever meant to play, only to be laced with the most heinous racial epithets and the most undeserved vitriol at the very moment when he should have been most proud?  Can anyone blame him for not wanting to return, when so many other places would receive him in a manner befitting his, and his daughter's, achievements?

Of course Serena has done herself no favors.  Hers is a long history of self-absorption and missteps, the very picture of the kind of ego-centrism that has that special ability to make those with the best intentions and the worst, line up on the same side of the argument "against" her, as it is so wrongly and so often portrayed in the media.  Venus was no angel either, but her nature has, over the years, revealed itself to be less confrontational, more responsible. Coupled with her sister's dominance of both her and the game, and her own well documented physical struggles, the tennis world seems to have tempered its collective finger-wagging at her.  Unlike Serena, who continues to rankle, Venus' role in the Indian Wells incident, her incident with Irlina Spirlea, her theatrical outrage at Wimbledon 1998 against Jana Novotna, are faded memories that merit only 240p on youtube, such is the extent to which they have been forgotten. 

She's grown up, and in a way, somehow so have all of us, and those are now bygones.

Unlike sister Venus, I have never been a fan of Serena Williams - I find her to be too hypocritical, too self-absorbed, too contrived, and too petty.  Of course, I'm sure that this is only a facet of her personality, a facet that many of us have, and would it were also on display for the world to see, hers might not be so grating.  But she is who she is, and I simply cannot bring myself to revel in her success.  It doesn't help that she plays a style of tennis that has diminished the quality of the women's game.  While I have admiration for her accomplishments, part of me is uneasy at the prospect that despite my love of tennis' version of "Jogo Bonito", it may turn out that her career will ultimately meet my own standards of the greatest of all time.  Despite my aesthetic distaste for her game.

When she insulted Martina Hingis for a lack of formal education, I found it more than mildly ironic for someone who has a degree in nothing. When she made that hullabaloo over "The Hand", I sided with Henin, because I thought if Serena saw the hand up, she shouldn't have served, and therefore she got what she deserved:  a second serve. When, after having an overhead smash rightfully directed at her feet, she glared at Maria Sharapova in their Australian Open final of 2007 and muttered "bitch", unlike the Rod Laver Arena audience, I didn't think it was funny. When she threatened to shove a ball down a lines woman's throat at the 2009 US Open semi-final with Kim Clijsters and was defaulted only for a third code of conduct violation, I thought she got off easy.  She should have been immediately defaulted from the tournament including the doubles final, which she played and won with Venus.

I also thought it was an act of pandering when the USTA chose to give her only a suspended fine and suspension, which actually didn't expire until the week after her 2011 US Open final, where she was again cited for code of conduct violations.  The "sentence" still wasn't enforced, and I wasn't surprised that she didn't cite being black, or a woman, or the player to beat, for that bit of leniency, even though I suspect all of those contributed to it.  I thought it was absurd that she had the audacity to do to Jelena Jankovic the exact same thing Justine did to her, both at the Family Circle Cup in 2013, and again in Dubai this year.  It was just another in a long list of examples of entitlement that she has, in her view, "earned".

But despite all of these things, despite the fact that I am not her biggest fan, I 100% support her decision not to play Indian Wells in 2002 or any year since then, including 2014.  In fact, part of me would prefer it if neither she nor Venus ever played it again.  Not because I don't want to see them compete.  But if they're protesting, I think they should do just that.  Along the way, if the game's sense of entitlement should be slapped in the face again and again, so that ugly incidents like what she had to suffer, will never, ever happen again in tennis...

Well, there's no harm in that, is there?

THE DECLINE OF THE MASTERS

Nope, I'm not writing a column about golf's version of Wimbledon - I'm talking about the year-end championships that used to have all the cachet of a major, and had the one thing that the modern incarnation does not - interest outside of tennis.

The year-end championships of tennis have gone through so many iterations over the years, it's hard, even for the most ardent fan, to keep track of what it has been and become over the years. So imagine the difficulty of getting space "above the fold" in major sports media today, which is the surest measure of the popularity of the game outside the game.

The ATP World Tour Finals, one of the most idiotically named championships in the history of tennis, is the current version of what used to be known as "The Masters", and until 1990, it was magically more than just a tennis tournament - it was an event that the sports world followed almost as closely as the crowned jewels of the game (the four majors). And in a rare moment of agreement with John McEnroe, I think the move away from Madison Square Garden was the beginning of the end for the luster that once accompanied the event.

Of course, in his native-New Yorker narcissism, he thinks the answer is to move it back to the Garden, and while I think he's on the right track (and wouldn't necessarily disagree with such a move), I think the event is missing something that the other majors have in abundance - an identity. And it is by finding its identity that I think this once great sporting event can return to the pantheon of great sporting events, where it belongs.

In 1970, two years following the advent of open tennis, Grand Prix tennis had been initiated with the help of Jack Kramer, as an answer to the disparate hodge-podge of semi-professional circuits controlled by anyone with enough money to cobble together what passed as a tour. It competed with the WCT championships held in Dallas, which was based on results from the WCT tour, a tour run by Lamar Hunt as an answer to the open invitation to Grand Prix tennis which was controlled by the International Lawn Tennis Federation (ILTF - the ancestor of the modern ITF).

The first year-end championships were held in Tokyo, which happened to be the highest bidder, and in their never ending, insatiable appetite for a bigger payday, the event moved six times in six years, to tennis hotbeds such as Paris, Barcelona, Boston, Melbourne and Houston - where it promptly had a problem.

Nobody outside of tennis particularly cared about the event because the rules for qualification, the format of the tournament itself, and the players that participated, were about as reliable as predictions of the weather. In the end, the perceived value of the tournament, outside of tennis, suffered badly, and so too did the event.

Then in 1977, somebody came up with a brilliant idea - bring the mountain to Moses. For the first time in a string of 13 glorious years, the Masters was played at Madison Square Garden - then the mecca of sports entertainment - and with it came all the cachet the tournament could hope for. Sure, along the way there were questions about the format, the rules of qualification, and of course the quality of the tennis. As a matter of fact, very often the tournament was played in the year after the year for which qualification was determined - so late it was in the tennis calendar. And complaints about injuries and fatigue were seen as just a subterfuge for players to tank some matches in favor of bigger fish to fry.

Nevertheless it was an event that people outside of tennis covered with almost as much gusto as the majors. And why wouldn't they - initially the popularity of Connors, Borg and Vilas, would give way to the triumvirate of Connors, Borg and McEnroe, and then Connors, McEnroe and Lendl. In all three cases, the differences in personalities and the personal conflicts between some or all the heads of the tennis families provided the base, spine and glitter to make it a great event. But as the top players got old, retired, or lost their personal animus towards one another, the event petered. And as playing at Madison Square Garden had less and less of a cachet, the brilliant minds at the newly anointed emperors of tennis (the ATP tour) decided to chase the money and move the event in 1990 to, where else...Frankfurt.

Huh?

That's right, given that the game's dominant players were becoming predominantly European, and given the money they offered to host the tournament, Germany became the new mecca of tennis. First it was Frankfurt from 1990 to 1995, then that other internationally known metropolis, Hanover, hosted the event for a stretch from 1995 to 1999. And as you might expect, despite the star power of Andre Agassi, Pete Sampras and everyone else, the tournament slowly lost its identify, and as a result (in my opinion) its luster outside of tennis.

Along the way, it just so happened that when the ITF was frozen out of control of everything but the majors and Davis Cup, they decided (quite rightly) there was a gaping hole that they could fill, and promptly initiated a competing year-end championship called the Grand Slam Cup. And because one thing the ITF is very good at is hiding behind its tradition, they at least had the good sense to keep it in Munich for nine years from 1990 to 1999 as well (although they couldn't resist locating the tournament in Germany - where the money obviously was at the time). The other thing they're good at is hiding in front of prize money, but this time, they smartened up and put up an astronomical $3M payday to the winner of the Grand Slam Cup if they also happened to win a slam that same year. At the time, this was an astronomical sum of money - more than any of the majors, and way more than the ATP Tour World Championships.

As the ATP's year end championships slowly but surely caught up with the prize money of the Grand Slam Cup (money problems caused them to reduce their prize money to make it closer to the ATP's season finale), the latter suffered, and had to change when the event was held, as well as include a women's championship for two years 1998 and 1999 (both not surprisingly won by Venus Williams and Serena Williams respectively), in an effort to remain relevant. It didn't, and eventually was subsumed by the Tennis Masters Cup in 2000 - itself an homage to both year-end championships. They all figured half of a big pot of money is better than all of a small one, so they did the only sensible thing and merged.

But once the Masters moved from MSG, and the Grand Slam Cup lost its purely capitalist appeal, what was left was an event that served as nothing more than a book-end to the ATP tour's nine flagship events, and an anti-climactic denouement to the year's major quadrilogy. This interested nobody beyond the game. Within the game, it can be argued that the importance of the tournament was not only maintained, but improved. After all, points started to count towards ranking and the money was hard to ignore. But something was missing...an identity.

So here's my solution.

If this tournament is really all about (dare I say it) the money, then don't be ashamed of it - embrace it! Put the prize money at $10M for the winner if he is both a grand slam champion and finishes the year ranked #1 - you could clip off $2M for each of the two conditional compensations, and simply call the winner, if it happens to be someone like Nikolay Davydenko (instead of Federer, Nadal or Djokovic), the $6 million dollar man...I'm only half joking, by the way.

Also, they should put it at the same venue and leave it there for at least 10 years (in fact if they had a brain, would build a venue that they could keep it there forever). That way, the event and the venue would both benefit from the cachet of the other, and would help to perpetuate the other's viability. This business of chasing the money by changing the location every time someone shows up with a bigger check is the very reason that the women are now furtively begging to join the men at the O2. Although the venue is new, it has sufficient razamatazz to be an event in and of itself. The problem is that, at the moment, it's carrying the tennis. They should each do their own share of the heavy lifting and that's where the last component would come in.

Put the points to the champion on par with winning a major and make the final a 5-set match. Then the money and the points won't seem to have been capriciously handed out to someone who got hot for 8 sets. Making the final a 5-set match, and putting major-level points on the table would be the final piece to the puzzle making this tournament everything it should be both inside and outside of tennis.

So, $10M to the winner, major-level points, a consistent venue and a 5-set final. Now who could ignore that?

BLAME IT ON STEFFI

There’s been a great deal of discussion at this year's US Open about the problems that top WTA players have had serving. Almost as curious is the paucity of good analysis as to the source of their problems.  If all of a sudden women on tour are having problems properly serving, and all at once, it makes sense to compare the serves of women say, 20 years ago, to modern players and analyze the difference.

I am a firm believer in the philosophy that all problems in tennis are essentially technical – even the ones that appear to be mental, and nothing has made that more apparent to me than the serving issue. In the past, wielding unforgiving 85 square inch 15 ounce wood racquets, a player couldn't get away with bad technique on the serve - today they have over sized composites to help them hide the fact that their technique is sorely lacking.

I had a soccer coach years ago who used to hammer us on technique – the way he did this was to get our fitness training in first. Running hills, sprints, push-ups, sit-ups, etc.; he really ran us through the wringer before we ever touched a ball. By the time we got around to ball work, our legs were like jelly and our lungs were on fire. The result: when you’re that tired, and wondering just what on your body is about to fail next, the only thing you have rely on, the only thing you have left, is your technique - it's the only thing that makes you kick straight.

I think it’s exactly the same with tennis.

Tennis is a game that demands constant adjustment to many factors to perform at a high level. There are a lot of factors that can affect your ability to hit the ball properly: your opponent's play, your level of fatigue, your movement – these are all physical factors. Ironically, of all the factors that can affect your play, pressure, whilst existing only in the mind of the player that allows it to, is the only one that is completely intangible. That doesn’t mean, however, that it doesn’t have a physical impact. In fact the variation created by all the physical factors are mimicked by pressure. You hesitate slightly and the ball isn’t where you’re accustomed to hitting it. You’re tentative and you don’t move into the position you should. You try to just keep the ball in bounds, and you lose racquet head speed, even though that’s the fastest way to lose control of your strokes.

So while pressure is an intangible factor, it has a physical consequence, and as such, the only thing that will allow a player to manage pressure, and all its consequences, is the same thing that will allow a player to manage all the other actual physical variables that affect her ability to hit a proper stroke: that thing is technique.

The best serves in the history of tennis have one and only one characteristic in common: the point of contact is at the optimal point of racquet head velocity. That’s it. Everything else is imagined and totally overrated. In short, if you can hit the ball when your racquet head is moving the fastest, the speed, accuracy and consistency of your serve will improve. If you can improve racquet head acceleration it will improve your power and accuracy, but at the end of the day everyone has their limit and generally the limit of women is lower than the limit of men. The key is to hit your optimal point of contact every time, so the question is how to do this and the answer is as simple as it is obvious.

The toss.

Take a look at the worst serves on the women’s tour and they all have one common characteristic – the toss is awful - it's all over the place - and as such, it’s anyone’s guess how often (if ever) they’re going to reach their optimal point of contact. If the toss isn’t out in front, you don’t transfer your weight forward, and you lose racquet head acceleration and speed. The ball on the toss travels slowest just before and after the apex, so if the apex of the toss is beyond the point of contact, when it finally returns to the point of contact, it travels through it too quickly to consistently make the optimal point of contact. If the sun is in your eyes, the point of contact on a high toss is obscured even more, and if it’s windy out?

Fegheddabouddit…

So without naming any names, you’ll note that the most inconsistent and/or least powerful serves in the game (men’s or women’s) are always the ones with the highest ball toss. It sounds simple, and in truth it is, but the problem is that once a player gets into a comfort zone with all the mechanics of their serve, it is very difficult to tinker with the toss with immediate success – if the movement of the feet and the shoulder rotation all depend on the timing of a toss that soars 3-4 feet above the point of contact, you basically have to re-engineer the entire serve in order to accommodate the new toss – the very toss that’s causing all of their problems in the first place.

That’s a daunting task for a player who will undoubtedly watch their ranking plummet in the process, and because so much money is riding on the ranking, it’s almost impossible for a coach who is largely judged by a player’s ranking to be willing to say something like:

“We need to re-engineer your serve – you’re going to lose a lot of matches while we go through this process, and your ranking will fall. But a year from now you’ll have a better serve and all the points you’ve lost you’ll gain back and then some.” In fact, how do you tell that to someone who’s already in the top 10?

So who is to blame for all of this? Typically in tennis the prominence of one player who appears and dominates the game causes millions of players to try to emulate their game in the hopes of re-creating their success. In the case of women and their serves, that player is one Stefanie Marie Graf.

For all her qualities as a tennis player, there’s probably never been a player with more aberrations from sound fundamental technique, that’s had more success in the game. Although this article concerns the serve, as an appetizer I give the Graf forehand – powerful and dominant as it was, it was singularly the most consistent cause for the few losses she incurred. Rarely did Graf lose a match because her backhand went off the boil, and in the worst case scenario her slice and movement would win her 8 out of 10 matches and the forehand was the difference in the ninth and/or tenth.

Why?

Because the point of contact on Graf’s forehand was at a point of contact with the racquet head parallel to the baseline – in other words it was very late. It was so late, that the only way for her to keep the ball in the court was to have massive racquet head acceleration and it was precisely that massive racquet head acceleration that gave her all that power. But if the timing on that stroke was slightly off, Graf suddenly became human - rarely, the timing was off because she wasn't feeling at her best, and certain players like Seles or Sabatini would find ways to disrupt that timing, hence their success against her. But generally speaking, if she got the timing right, the racquet head speed she had to generate on her forehand made it the most powerful stroke in women's tennis.

That condition was exactly the same for her serve.

Graf’s serve toss was, at the time, one of the highest in the game – with the apex of the toss consistently reaching 3-4 feet above the optimal point of contact. When the ball descended through her point of contact, she needed tremendous racquet head acceleration to meet the ball in the optimal point of contact range, and it was this racquet head speed that gave her all her power and direction on the serve.

Fast forward to 2009 – every idiot and her sister on the WTA mimics the toss on Graf’s serve, but none of the racquet head acceleration and speed, and as a result their point of contact is rarely in the optimal range and the result is the comedic tragedy of faults, double faults and just flat out terrible serves you see on the women’s tour.

So what was the difference with Graf? Why was she able to be so technically aberrant, but successful?

Well, let me tell you a couple things about Steffi Graf – if she hadn’t been a tennis player she could have been an Olympic decathalete, or volleyball player, or a champion in just about any other damn sport she wanted. Once clocked at a 23 second 200m dash, Graf was easily one of the most gifted natural athletes in the world, not just tennis, but she complemented her gifts with a tremendous focus and work ethic that allowed her to maximize her special abilities into her own brand of tennis technique. Her technique is so unique that some players may be able to emulate one or two things about it, but nobody can put together the whole package like she did.

Does anyone think Ana Ivanovic could run 200 meters in total, let alone 200 meters in 23 seconds? Not likely – and the paucity of physical gifts as compared to her idol doesn’t stop there – she also has terrible timing on the serve.  But rather than recognizing and accepting this limitation and adjusting her ball toss on the serve, she, and oh-so-many other tennis players on the WTA have inherited much of Graf’s technique and unfortunately almost none of her physical gifts, and not surprisingly, almost none of her success.

Even Venus Williams, who once was caught grinning at her own meaningless 130mph serve, has one of the worst 2nd serve’s in women’s tennis, and her toss is just as inconsistent as the serve itself. When she has a serve in reserve (i.e. she's hitting a first serve), she has the freedom to go after that ridiculous toss and every once in a while serves huge. But put the pressure of a second serve on her mind, and suddenly the racquet travels just that little bit slower and the bad technique on her toss is revealed when the physical effects of pressure put stress on her very poor technique.

For all the time, money, and commitment that women on the WTA show their coaches, they have been shamelessly rooked in quality of coaching – in my opinion it’s nothing short of highway robbery. When they’re juniors and nobody can serve anyway, a stupid toss on the serve doesn’t reveal itself as a weakness until the bright lights come on and someone stands on the other side of the net that will have a Thanksgiving feast on the results of bad technique.

Well, in the big leagues, there’s nowhere to hide. So maybe, instead of showing-off during changeovers or grimmacing on camera every chance they get, these coaches should earn their money and teach their pupils how to properly toss the ball on the serve, and by doing so, end their woes.