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Back on the Indian Express
Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim will answer your tennis questions weekly. Click here to send a question. Loads of questions this week, so let's get down to business ...
What do you think about the breakup of the Indian doubles pair of Mahesh Bhupathi and Leander Paes? And now, just recently, the possibility of the former No. 1 doubles team getting back together? I, too, have heard rumors that they're in the process of reuniting. There are obviously two sides to the story, but they essentially split because Bhupathi wanted his own coach and Paes wanted Bob (Nails) Carmichael to oversee the two of them as a team. It's a shame that after reaching the finals of all four Slams last year (and winning more than $1.3 million combined), they've done little in 2000. Paes is still nursing an injured wrist, but as I understand it, they're hoping to get back together in time for the Olympics. I'm not sure if/how they resolved their dispute, but I think they both realized there was simply too much money on the table not to patch things up.
It's almost August and the U.S. hard courts are baking in the sun. Who's looking good going into the summer hard-court season? Which tourneys should we be looking at for a harbinger of what'll happen in Queens? Revisit this address in three weeks. As a rule, the events in Canada and Cincinnati are good barometers for gauging players' success at the Open. Same for the women's events in Palo Alto, San Diego and L.A.
Now that the U.S. Davis Cup quest has ended in a total fiasco, the following question, if cynical, begs to be asked: Why does the U.S. even bother playing Davis Cup? Why not have the U.S. simply not play in 2001? This would send a message that the format needs to change to make it relevant to the modern sports world. The U.S. could regroup and figure out how we would want to represent ourselves in the future in this event. And, for the time being, the rest of the world can duke it out, as countries like Brazil, England, Australia and Spain seem to be the only ones who really care about it anyway. Comments? No offense, but that's sort of an ugly-American solution. Hey, we suck, so let's not participate. For all the talk of changing the Davis Cup format, I'm not so sure that it's so terribly awry. Sure, it might be more meaningful to hold the event every other year, but when Australia plays Spain in December's finals, you can rest assured that fan malaise won't be an issue. One proposal I've heard bandied about is to play all four rounds at one site at the end of the year, à la Euro 2000. The problem with this is that most players want to run screaming from tennis come December. With psychic batteries running low and a year's worth of nagging injuries in need of repair, are the top guns really going to converge on, say, Sao Paulo for a month? The problem in the U.S. is simply getting the top players to commit. When Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi play, the event is plenty "relevant," as you put it, to American sports fans. When the Yanks send a jayvee team to Spain, to compete against three of the top-10 clay-courters in the world, a fiasco is nearly inevitable.
Wouldn't it be fair to select the Olympic team from consistent Davis Cup and Federation Cup participants? Guilt Davis Cup play (Sampras in L.A. -- what a sham) shouldn't count; heroic efforts (Agassi in Zimbabwe) should be heralded. That's essentially how it's going to shake down anyway. It looks as though Agassi will play for the U.S. while Sampras -- who had a miserable experience in Barcelona in 1992 -- won't. As for the women, I believe Fed Cup participation was a pre-req for Olympic eligibility.
It seems that Serena Williams has had better results than Monica Seles, who has not won a Grand Slam since 1996. Some players, including Martina Hingis, feel that Serena is a better player than Venus. Why, then, shouldn't Serena have a chance to play singles at the Olympics? Wouldn't it be better for the team to have Serena instead of Monica in a singles match? Quite simply, Billie Jean King used the objective criteria of the WTA Tour's rankings to determine her roster and singles lineup. I agree with you that right now Serena is probably the better player head-to-head. But as someone famous, who's now eluding me, once said: "Rules is rules."
In most other sports, coaching is O.K., and I think it would be nice if coaching were allowed in tennis. There would be more breakthroughs from the younger pros like Mirjana Lucic, Jelena Dokic, Anna Kournikova and Alexandra Stevenson, who are not as confident as the Williams sisters. I am almost 100% sure that Kournikova would have won a tournament by now were coaching allowed during matches. What's your opinion on this? Trust me, it's not a lack of coaching that's prevented Kournikova from winning a tournament. Anyway, I'm pretty conservative when it comes to coaching. Personally, part of what gives tennis its appeal is that once players step on the court, it's strictly (wo)mano-a-(wo)mano. No caddie to consult, no 20-second timeouts, no corner to exhort (and extort) you between rounds. I like to see how Kournikova can extricate herself from trouble when she hits a rough patch in a match. I want to see how Pat Rafter adjusts his game when Agassi is jumping on is second serve. The presence of a coach essentially destroys this dynamic. There's also a practical concern. Coaching greatly favors the top players, who can afford to retain the best minds. Brad Gilbert, for example, probably makes more scratch from Agassi that 90% of the other players clear in a year. The game is already so stacked against the middle-class players; permitting coaching would simply create another disadvantage.
There seems to be an exceptionally low number of female coaches on the tour. I realize they might not make the most challenging hitting partners, but surely their experience could benefit some of the players. Any thoughts on why so few women turn to coaching the pros? You answered your own question. Female pros simply can't get a good enough hit from female coaches. If Lindsay Davenport can go blast-for-blast with a former top-20 player like Robert Van't Hof, imagine how little she would gain from a practice session with, say, Wendy Turnbull. In a lot of cases, a female coach would probably be better for the player psychologically -- "I've been doing this for almost a decade and I still profess to know nothing about women," one male coach told me recently -- but inequity on the practice courts makes it hard to justify.
Has there ever been a tennis player as dominant as Tiger Woods is in golf, or is such dominance not possible because of the different types of tennis surfaces? It always seems to me a silly exercise to compare golf and tennis. For starters, tennis is a sport and golf is ... well, what do call an activity that is interrupted by cart girls?* Golf isn't played simultaneously with other players, the ball doesn't move and the dimensions of the playing field are forever changing. It's even tough to compare sports empirically: A golfer can win three events in a year and become a legend. In tennis, a player like Davenport can reach the finals of 90% of the tournaments she enters and still not get the No. 1 ranking. In terms of domination relative to expectations, I'd say Tiger's feat this year is awfully tough to beat. Yes, tennis players have won three Slams in one year -- Hingis did it as recently as 1997 -- but it's rarer in golf for a player to devastate the field the way Tiger has. I'd say Steffi Graf's "Golden Slam" in 1988 is the last time tennis has witnessed such dominance. *A number of you were upset that I didn't attack my colleague Gary Van Sickle for his screed against our beloved sport in a recent Golf Mailbag. Here's a terse rejoinder: When was the last time a pro tennis player was spotted wearing sans-a-belt apparel?
How come I never see "all-court player" attached to anyone's name anymore? I seem to remember it being applied to Jimmy Connors in the '70s, but when I read about him now he's classified as a baseliner. Are there still any all-courters? Who are they? Can you list the five best, please? I assume we're just talking men since women are pretty much tethered to the baseline. In no particular order: 1. Sampras: He makes his pay playing serve-and-volley tennis, but if need be (or surface dictates) he can stay back and bang. 2. Yevgeny Kafelnikov: As doubles success indicates, he's an underrated volleyer. 3. Rafter: See Sampras. 4. Cedric Pioline: Can do a little of everything. 5. Hernan Gumy.
In your recent five most popular players on tour lists, you made no mention of Mary Pierce. Yet she's considered to be a very nice person on and off the court, she's good to her fans, she's polite to the media, she gives her opponents credit for their accomplishments, and she makes no distasteful comments about anybody unlike some other players. Couldn't she be in the top five? Perhaps so. Pierce is perceived as a bit of a drama queen. But you're right to note that she's generally well-liked and pleasant to deal with. Despite her past, she also steers clear of controversy, going out of her way to dispense praise -- short of her ability to get reimbursed for cab fare at Wimbledon. I think I've written this before, but you have to hand it to Pierce. Given an upbringing one could objectively describe as hellish, she is admirably well-adjusted.
Do you think Anna Smashnova has a chance of getting much further in the rankings? She's talented, tough and extremely motivated. She's also waist-high from the point of view of someone like Lindsay Davenport. Can she progress from winning small events to being a real threat to top players? After a storied junior career, Smashnova has established herself as a solid top-40 player. A quantum leap is pretty much out of the question. As you note, she is too small (too kataan, as it were) to pose a legitimate threat to the likes Davenport. She moves well, returns well and is capable of some nifty shotmaking, but at 5'2" (i.e., nearly a half-foot shorter than the oft-overpowered Hingis), her fate is essentially sealed.
Journalists constantly say that "Anna Kournikova has played in X tournaments without a title." To give this statistic more meaning, what is the comparable total for players such as Hingis, Davenport, Seles, Pierce or the Williams sisters? How many tournaments did they each play before winning their first titles? Good point. And in Kournikova's defense, it is a somewhat obscure statistic. Still, Kournikova's dubious distinction is striking for a player not only of her stature, but her ranking. Hingis has played in roughly as many careers events as Kournikova and has won 27 titles. Davenport won a tournament her first year on Tour, Pierce bagged her first trophy at 16, Serena Williams had played in fewer than 30 events prior to this year and already won five titles. Perhaps a more cogent statistic is that Kournikova is -- far and away -- the highest-ranked player never to have won a WTA Tour title.
I've been wondering about this for a while and figured you might be as good a candidate as any to answer it. What's happened to Robin Finn, who used to cover tennis for the New York Times? She was one of the best, in my opinion, and her voice is sorely missed. Robin Finn is off the tennis beat. You can still read her inimitable work in the Public Lives section of the Times.
What kind of tennis skills do you think the children of Andre Agassi and Steffi Graf will have? If there's any karmic justice in this world, Graf and Agassi's hypothetical child will lack the coordination to drink out of a straw.
Send a question to Jon Wertheim, and check back the beginning of each week to read more of his answers.
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