THANK YOU CITI OPEN - RICHARD GASQUET v MICHAEL LLODRA 2014

You know how the first thing you do when you walk on a tennis court is always the first thing you do when you walk on a tennis court - a ritual, a rite of passage, an homage to the faces on Mt. Rush(the net)More?  For some it's doing your laces a certain way, for others perhaps arranging the water bottle in some perfect alignment with an empty can of balls, that serves a purpose known only to your own imagination.  Well, I have a ritual every time I go to the Citi Open - the first thing I do after I cross the main entrance, and pass all the promotional modules is hang a hard left to visit the first 3 practice courts.  These days one of those courts is Grandstand 1, a beautifully seated stadium court, from which almost every seat has a perfect vantage point to view a match tennis - sufficiently distant to appreciate the angles, but close enough to feel the weight and pace of every shot.

But back in the day, Grandstand 1 used to be 3 practice courts where you could often watch 6 of the worlds best players at once, getting into the kind of groove that you rarely get to see in a match.  And it is as they train that you truly appreciate what it takes to be a professional tennis player.  The warmups begin with a slow exercise in simply increasing the blood flow and finding the range - they are hardly putting anything on the ball, and all the pace and spin are generated by rote.  This is where, if any conversation takes place, it will take place - I remember back in 1990 watching John Boytim, a top shelf junior from the great state of Texas, who had turned professional to ignominious results, telling his practice partner every sordid detail of a dinner and a movie he had been to the night before.  I was as fascinated by the day to day lives of these players, as their games...but I digress. Not so any more - with the pervasive presence of perma-coaches, these conversations are not as extensive or intimate or frequent.

Then the pace picks up slightly, with players putting a little more spin on the ball, making the flight path tighter and tighter over the net until it reaches an impossibly tight curl over the net and the ball lands somewhere in the middle of the no-man's land (that area just beyond the service line and before the baseline).  With modern poly-strings and composite racquets, the spin on shots landing that short push players at least 6 feet beyond the baseline at this point in the warm up.  By now, the sinews are stretched, the blood flows readily, and the players are ready for their full throated knock about - this is when it becomes truly amazing.

Because at this point, the players begin to strike the ball with true venom, full-bodied pace and spin, on a line tighter and tighter towards their partner, harder and harder, until one of them folds by dumping it in the net or long.  They're not moving themselves around, in fact that is considered a soft cop out, because the objective in this exercise is to hit the ball as hard as you can straight at your opponent, and they do the same, straight back at you, until somebody folds.  In this way, they're fighting a battle of attrition, and the loser is the guy with the ball on his side of the net.  This goes on until they have to wipe the sweat from their hands, or someone breaks a string.

They then move onto a long session of volleys, with the same principle, you're not trying to pass your partner, as much as you're trying to hit the ball through him, and he loses if he dumps a volley straight into the net or long.  They do this over and over again until the reactions are so quick and instinctive, you almost wonder how their minds are able to process all the variables and decision points to arrive at just the right point of contact.  After a few overheads, then a few serves and returns, a practice set is played.

The best set of tennis I saw last year won't show up on the AT P's head to head records.  That's because it was a practice set at, hideaway on practice court 2, between Richard Gasquet and Michael Llodra.  And after the initial pleasure of watching an extended 30 minute warmup, I then witnessed one of the best sets of tennis I've ever seen.  Not only because Gasquet has one of the most beautiful backhands in tennis, and Llodra is one of the last bona fide serve and volleyers left in the game.  The set was extraordinary because the spirit of these two players, their trades plied at opposite ends of the tactical spectrum, is exactly the same - swashbucklers.  Not that the term isn't overly used, particularly when it comes to french tennis players, but it very much applies to these two.  They do whatever they can, whatever it takes, whenever they can do it, to win the point, and entertain, and not necessarily in that order.  There is a quality of the spectacle which is as important to french players and french audiences, that must be met in order for the match to have been worth watching.  And boy was this one worth watching.

Gasquet started serving, wide serve in the deuce court, which is the right play against a lefty with a one-handed backhand, but because the pace was reduced to ensure placement, Llodra promptly replied with a drop shot return - I repeat, a drop shot return - to which Gasquet had no choice but to pump his desperate foray to net with a cross court angle which Llodra promptly hit around the net post for a winner.

That was the first point.

And it continue like this, shot after shot was hit with angles so acute the players were continually trying to avoid running into things - the net post, the side fence the back fence, the change over chairs, etc.  Some players shrink the court by forcing you to hit to the same spot over and over again, but the vision and improvisation of Gasquet and Llodra had them making the court every larger with each point.  Llodra once hit a kick serve to Gasquet's forehand in the deuce court on break point, which Gasquet replied with a chip forehand lob over Llodra's backhand side.  And as if that wasn't difficult enough to handle had he taken it conventionally, Llodra decided to hit a tweeter lob (also over the backhand), which Gasquet dispatched with a blind leap and incredible backhand smash - made all the more impressive when you recall the he stands 5'11 if he's got two pairs of socks on.

And there's something about the vantage point of watching from the side, as those practice courts force you to do - particularly when you watch from the net.  As a conventional tactic, topspin is usually associated with more margin over the net, but keeping the ball inside the baseline, but actually from this vantage point I could see the effects of Gasquet's reverse forehand (hit almost as frequently as Nadal's but his with a continental grip that also allows him to switch to or from a forehand slice) not only imparted enormous topspin, but used in conjunction with a very low net clearance, actually worked to keep the ball very low.  This is of particular use to a player who hits through the ball on the forehand side and is unaccustomed to having to generate either his own pace, or his own spin on the ball.

The set finished in a tie-break after each player broke once, then the other immediately broke right back.  The serves were not huge, but hugely effective, placed in all four corners, with slice, top and flat making for a beautiful array of 18 different kinds of serves from two players using the serve to set up very different things.  The shotmaking was fearless, which is nothing to shake a stick at when you consider the kind of impact losing would have on either players' reputation in their relatively large circle of compatriots (people talk about Spanish tennis, but really, it's the French that have the most players of consequence in the top 100 today).  But most importantly, although there were only 5 people watching that set, it was enough motivation to those two to entertain, curse each other out (in a playful way) and along the way play one hell of a practice set of tennis - indeed one of the best I've ever seen at the Citi Open.

So, for making the first thing I do, one of the best things I do, every time I go to Rock Creek in August, I say, "Thank you Citi Open".

THE FLEAS COME WITH THE DOG

Well, with egg on my face, I must admit, I got it all wrong with regards to the ATP Rankings, and the ATP Race. Basically, I jumped the gun on my assumptions about the reasons for the differences, and have come to the conclusion that, in the words of Congressman Dick Dodge from The Distinguished Gentleman:

“Son, the system ain’t perfect; but the fleas come with the dog.”

First, to explain the differences between the two points systems, and why each, in some form, is necessary to maintain legitimacy and sense in professional tennis.

THE SYSTEMS

As I write, the #1 ranked player in the world is Rafael Nadal. This ranking is based on the system of the official name “Entry Ranking System”. To be honest, I still haven’t quite figured out what is the meaning behind this name, but basically it is a rolling 52-week backward facing accumulation of points, giving a 1-year snapshot of the relative ranking of all professionals. It is used to determine which players are eligible to enter the various events, and the seeding thereof.
The points are allocated across 7 categories of tournaments:

[1] Grand Slams
[2] The Masters Cup (Year End Championships)
[3] Masters Series
[4] International Gold
[5] International
[6] Challenger
[7] Futures

The ATP Race serves two purposes: first, it determines the year end #1 player for the season, and it also determines which eight players will play in the TMC. The genesis of the ATP Race was the perception that the #1 ranking was not intuitive, and observers not intimately involved in tennis had a hard time keeping track of who was the #1 player.

The categories of the ATP Race differ from the ranking points in that only the first 4 categories of the ranking points transfers to the ATP Race – challenger and futures events are excluded from the ATP race. The points allocated to the yearly points is also smaller by a factor of 5, but proportionally the same. The only remaining difference between the two is that the Olympics are not included in the ATP race points, and as such have no bearing on the year end #1 ranking, or the TMC invitations.

The structure of the ATP Race is that all players begin the year with 0 points, and begin to accrue points in various categories of competitions throughout the year. This differs from the entry rankings in that players maintain points accrued from the previous year, into the current year. The players earn points at the grand slams, all the masters series events, and the best five results from the two international series in both systems.

If the ATP had their druthers, they would do away with the entry ranking system, since it is not a palatably marketable tool to promote the casual fan tracking the progress of the season, but the problem comes with the seeding at tournaments. If there were not carryover from the previous year, players could only be seeded either by the tournaments themselves, in a haphazard way, or based on the ATP race points, and players who either manage their schedule or suffer injuries would suffer unjustly.

For example, Mikael Youzhny, and Michael Llorda would have been the top two seeds at the Australian Open, while Federer and Nadal, could possibly have wound up facing each other in the earlier rounds, and nobody wants to see that. Furthermore, if for some reason one of them were injured early in the season, they would see their ranking suffer terribly, and have a very big hill to climb for the remainder of the year.

TWO SYSTEMS, ONE #1 (FOR THE MOST PART)

For these reasons the dual system exists, and on the face of it, makes perfectly good sense. That there are two points systems in play at any one time would seem to make it very confusing for anyone outside of tennis trying to follow who’s doing what during the season, and would over emphasize the value/quality of a hot player, versus one who consistently demonstrates superiority over the field over the course of a year.

Of course, it doesn’t help that the points go back a year in terms of the confusion, and because in Olympic years there are proportionately more points available for seeding than there is to determine the year end #1, it makes for the possibility that depending on the results, a player could wind up with a higher ranking, but still lose out on the year end #1. It would require an extremely coincidental and convoluted series of results to expose such an oddity, and fortunately, because tennis is sport that tends to be dominated by a consistent small group of players, particularly the top 5, we haven’t seen a lot of peculiarities due to this asynchronous allocation of points.

IDEALLY....

Ideally there should be one system that everyone refers to, and the entry ranking system could be renamed the entry seeding system, to alleviate confusion. After all, David Nalbandian is ranked #7, but given that he was the highest ranked player at Stockholm, he was the #1 seed, but nobody is going to confuse him for the best player in the world. Even the casual observer could look at the ATP race and see that he must be seeded so high because nobody else with a better ranking (or in the new system, seeding) is playing in the tournament.

It turns out that there is really no problem at all with the entry ranking system per se – the real problem is with the #1 ranking. It has taken on a significance all its own, independent of the results in the slams, some kind of badge of honor that (for them most part) only the best players in the history of the game have been able to attain. Each time we get a Marcelo Rios or a Jelena Jankovic reaching #1 in the world without winning a grand slam, it feels wrong because we know the prestige in the game is related to results in the crowned jewels of the game, and as such, the #1 ranking is an artificial accolade, created by the ATP many years ago in order to standardize seedings and create a holy grail towards which their sponsored/controlled events are geared, giving them more gravitas than they would otherwise have on their own.

THE SOLUTION

Maybe we should do away with the #1 ranking. It would take a genius to figure out that the #1 ranked player in the world can’t really be determined until the end of the year, and leading the ATP Race, wouldn’t hold much value until the TMC came around. But there’s something about being able to rank players from one event to the next, and have a ranking commensurate to the marketing of an event that makes tennis special. In college sports, there is an excitement around #1 versus #2 that tennis benefits from because of its ranking, but that system is fraught with problems as well.

I don’t know if it would matter to anyone if the abstract #1 ranking disappeared. It’s only been around for 35 years and would, in history, be treated as an aberration owing to the evolving structure of professional tennis that was eventually rectified by the consolidation of power in the ATP and the introduction of the ATP Race as a proper vehicle to determine who the best player in tennis was in a year.

It would also eliminate, or at least mitigate the embarrassing historical asterisk of the Marcelo Rios’ of tennis.