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Canadian tennis and the points race
Sports Illustrated staff writer Jon Wertheim will answer your tennis questions every Monday. Click here to send a question. So the legend of Goran Ivanisevic grows. For those of you who missed it, the phylo-dough-flaky Croat had to default his match to Hyung-Taik Lee in Brighton, England, when he smashed all the rackets in his possession and was left with no implement. "At least when I'm finished playing tennis, they'll remember me for something. They'll say, 'There's the guy who never won Wimbledon, but he smashed all his rackets.'" Pretty much. ... Lots of angry mail about Monica Seles being omitted from the Hot List last week, when she reached the Chase final. You guys have a valid point -- particularly given the move-to-Munich subplot -- but consider the quality of her wins. Sandrine Testud, Amanda Coetzer and Elena Dementieva, realistically, are players she ought to beat handily. ... Speaking of angry reader mail, I was roundly roasted by Alison Matthews of St. Albans, England, for insinuating that the entry rules for the Grand Slam Cup may have been jerry-rigged so Andre Agassi could squeeze in. "It is an amalgamation of the old Grand Slam Cup and the ATP World Championship. In the GS Cup the players who had done best in Grand Slams were invited; in the World Championship the top eight," she wrote. "The new format is a clear compromise between these rules and was agreed upon before anyone knew who would win the Slams or be ranked in the top eight." ... Anyone getting smug about the burgeoning popularity of women's tennis wasn't watching the Fed Cup coverage from Las Vegas. No doubt there were bigger crowds at the $4.99 all-you-can-eat buffet. ... Good to see Thomas Johansson, who beat Yevgeny Kafelnikov in the Stockholm final, back in the winner's circle. A wonderfully fluid player, he was bound for the top 10 before he contracted a virus in the lining of his heart muscle in the middle of 1999. Watch for him in 2001. Onward.
Elena Dementieva vs. Kim Clijsters. Whom do you like better?
I'll take Door No. 1. Both teenagers are surefire top-10 players who, in keeping with the current trend, are big, powerful women who move well and smack the bejesus out of the ball. But Dementieva, who will finish 2000 ranked No. 12, has that X factor. After she lost to Lindsay Davenport in the U.S. Open semis, she had every right to smile and savor a Cinderella run. Instead, she was in tears in the dressing room. She genuinely thought she was going to win and was dispirited when she didn't. Two months later, she comes back from match point down and beats Davenport in the first round of the Chase. As the experts like to say, "You can't teach that."
I am curious about the Canadian player Jana Nejedly. She fared well at the Australian Open and is ranked somewhere in the top 75. I know she has a sister whom she tours with. Do you have ANY info on Jana? I am dying here!!!
Down, boy. A few more exclamation points in an inquiry about player ranked outside the top 50, and we'll have to summon the stalker police. Nejedly, who was born in Prague, has been on tour for the better part of the decade and has had some decent results, but you won't be seeing her in too many finals. She's a tall, slender, athletic-looking player who has nice groundies and a decent serve. Good Canadian that she is, she likes the Toronto Maple Leafs. She also favors Thai and Japanese food. Now, please, take a cold shower.
Now that the men's season is almost over I was wondering what you thought about the changes the tour made this year? Let's hear the good, the bad and the ugly. I for one think the Champions Race has done nothing but confuse people. What's your take on the rankings and the other changes that were made?
Stay tuned for the third annual Baggie Awards, where we'll review the year 2000. As for the Champions Race, I agree with you. The ATP should be commended for aspiring to think outside the box and shake up a ranking system that yielded confounding results and encouraged half-hearted efforts. But the points-race idea was strictly New Coke. Unlike golf, tennis players don't start the year tabula rasa. We need a rolling rankings for seeds and draw-offs, and as long as that's the case it's silly to have a race simultaneously. What's more, the No. 1 ranking is imbued with too much meaning and history to do away with it so blithely. It's telling that the "race" is actually suffused with some drama heading into Lisbon (a number of players could end up in the top spot), and yet no one seems to care.
Here's a suggestion for reducing the load on the top players: Instead of using the top 14 tournament performances to calculate the rankings points, use the best 100 match results. Matches naturally would be weighted according to the tournament, round of play, etc. That way top players who typically have to play more matches to make up their tally of 14 tournaments would have a reduced load. What do you think?
First, players don't play anything close to 100 matches in a year. If you took the top 50 matches, a player like Martina Hingis might be 50-0. If you took the top 75, a workaholic like Sylvija Talaja or Kafelnikov might easily fare better than the Williams sisters or Pete Sampras. The fundamental tension is this: A rankings system has to give the athletes the incentive (if not the mandate) to play as much as possible, so promoters can sell tickets and the tour can grow financially. At the same time, the rankings can't go so far in that direction that it dilutes the product and unduly rewards players who have unremarkable results but just play a lot. As it stands, the "problem" with the women's system is that it forces players not merely to play well in the Slams but to score big in Filderstadt, Moscow, Montreal, Amelia Island, etc. (Consider that Hingis didn't win one major but finished with the top ranking by more than 1,000 points.) The "problem" with the men's system is that it packs so much importance into the Slams and Masters Series events that there is little incentive (save guarantees) for players to venture to Indianapolis, Lyon, Memphis and Stockholm.
What happened to Mirjana Lucic? I heard at Wimbledon that she and Harold Solomon were going to pair up; can you confirm this? What do you think Harold can do to get Mirjana back on track? I haven't heard much about her since Wimbledon.
Lucic had an absolutely miserable year, and a lot of players wonder whether she'll surface again. Lucic did, you're right, work out with Solomon last summer, but after a brief uptick at Wimbledon, little came of it. Barely a year removed from reaching the 1999 Wimbledon semis, she was ranked outside the top 200. She had to endure the indignity of qualifying for the U.S. Open. She was successful but then lost her first-round match to the indomitable Kristie Boogert. Lucic, of course, had an ugly incident with her father, from whom she is now estranged. She also had trouble -- warning: euphemism alert -- with her conditioning. As her game went south, her confidence, her much-maligned work ethic and her eating habits followed suit. She is a powerful, talented player who, if you believe her (and many don't), is only 18. Plenty of time for a turnaround. But she has fallen an awful long way for a player whose prospects were so bright a year ago that she made the 2000 commitment list.
What's up with Thomas Enqvist? I can't believe he crashed out of Stockholm in the first round. He has ruled that event for several years in a row and I expected him to defend his title successfully. Is he injured again?
I'm not sure what happened in his match against Johansson in Stockholm, but Enqvist has had a bum ankle for much of the year. More generally, Enqvist is one of those maddeningly erratic players who is supremely talented and capable of greatness, but never seems to be able to get it together when the stakes are highest. At age 26, this should have been a prime year for him. And on paper, anyway, he did fine: He won the Cincinnati Masters Series event, reached the Indian Wells final, and will finish in the top 10 and earn his million plus. On the other hand, he failed to advance beyond the fourth round of a Slam and lost to grossly inferior players like Richard Fromberg, Francisco Clavet and Gianluca Pozzi. Somewhere between "New Balls" and the "Keep Dreaming" age groups, there is a lost generation of players on the ATP who never fulfilled their promise. Enqvist, Nicolas Kiefer, Marcelo Rios, Tommy Haas and Mark Philippoussis have worlds of promise but thus far have registered zero Slams. When historians write about this lackluster era in men's tennis, my guess is that a lot of the blame will fall on these guys.
I was wondering what you think about the future of Canadian men's tennis. Right now, we have two respectable players in Daniel Nestor and Sebastien Lareau, but do you know of any up-and-comers who are trying to make a splash on the international scene in the pros or the juniors?
Canadian women's tennis is enjoying a modest bull market. As we noted last week, Sonya Jeyeseelan is a top-50 player. Nejedly is inside the top 75 and Vanessa Webb has played well of late. (Alas, Maureen Drake, a.k.a. Mo Majick, seems to have lost her mojo.) The men are a different story. Outside of Olympics doubles gold medalists Lareau and Nestor, who are both nearing their autumn years, I don't believe there's another Canadian in the top 200. (A promising prospect named Bobby Kokavec, who was buddies with Gustavo Kuerten, never panned out.) On the bright side, Greg Rusedski might still have a few good years left in him.
What are the five most ridiculous excuses that tennis players have made after losing? (And please do not fill all five with quotes from Ms. Hingis.)
A timely, topical question. Running out of rackets because you've smashed them all has to top the list. Others: 2) Rios blamed his loss at last year's U.S. Open on the Nikes he's paid big bucks to endorse. 3) John McEnroe and Peter Fleming once got stuck in rush-hour traffic on the Long Island Expressway and had to default a U.S. Open doubles match. 4) Jelena Dokic claimed that the 2000 Australian Open draw was rigged against her, five minutes after she trashed her victorious opponent, Rita Kuti Kis, as a scrub. 5) Fabrice Santoro allegedly attributed a recent loss to his inability to sleep the previous night, because an intertour couple were making romantic noises in the adjacent room.
Click here to send a question or comment to Jon Wertheim's Tennis Mailbag.
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