Let's Get Meaningless

by Pete Bodo

Greetings, everyone, and Happy New Year. I don't know about you, but this was one of the best holiday breaks I ever experienced. Basically, I just hit the virtual wall and shut down everything for a four-day period ending yesterday, which we spent mostly at the farm in game-rich Andes. I especially want to thank Rosangel for keeping the shop open while I was gone. I'll report a little more on the holidays and post a picture or two in Thursday's Deuce Club.

But let's get down to business, because for me it's officially Day One of 2009 at TennisWorld. I have two items to bring up here, the first of which is the new ATP Tour website. The best thing I can say about it is that my boy Luke probably would love it, but that's because someone named Jabba the Hutt has already infected his tiny brain with the Star Wars virus. The new website looks way too futuristic (in the worst, most commercial sense) and dark, and nothing about it evokes any of my own associations with tennis. And here I thought tennis was a sunny, bright, colorful game -  a game of pageantry and lush grass and rich clay. Perhaps I'm too old-school, and my associations are too sentimental. But when I open my browser, I feel less like I'm entering the realm of international tennis than the portal to a Paint Ball website, or the home page of some Trekkie convention.

Of course, this has Marketing Strategy written all over it, and in the most ghastly and heavy-handed way. And that undermines the basic integrity of a site like this. The ATP home page ought to have a certain degree of gravitas, and convey the feeling that the site is a no-nonsense source of information and facts about the ATP Tour and its players. If it can also be elegant and eye-catching, so much the better. I guess the good news is that the information is still all there, once you get past the hideous packaging. I just hope the outcry is sufficient for the ATP to fire its web-design team and come up with graphics and a background that says Tennis, rather than Long Ago in a Galaxy Far, Far Away. . .

The other item is the double-shot recently fired across the bow of the game by Andy Murray. He beat Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, back-to-back, to win an exhibition in Abu Dhabi. Both matches were three-setters, and Murray earned his win over Federer via a third-set tiebreaker. In fact, an OT tiebreaker that ended 8-6. When I mentioned Murray's feat this morning to Tom Perrotta, T-bone kind of waved it off with the same response many of you undoubtedly had: Yeah, but it was just an exhibition.

Okay, nobody short of a British sports reporter is apt to confuse Abu Dhabi with the Australian or US Open, but it's good to keep certain realities in mind. Great players hate losing when they feel sufficiently invested to make a match of it, and both Federer and Nadal made a match of it with Murray. You can cruise through a match and win (or lose) two-and-four and tell yourself, it's just an exhibition. But I don't think Rafa or the Mighty Fed were thinking that way in Abu Dhabi, even if they weren't exactly thinking the opposite: This is as huge as a Wimbledon final!

And one thing I feel certain I can guarantee is that Andy Murray didn't walk off the court after beating TMF 8-6 in the third-set tiebreaker thinking, Gee if only this meant something! Historically, exhibitions have ranged from meaningless to critically important, and for a variety of reasons. The trouble with them is that you can believe what you want, and nobody is going to prove you wrong. That's true for the players, too. Rafa and TMF might walk have walked away with a shrug and put it their losses to Murray down to pre-season training, but I have a feeling Murray was pretty proud of what he accomplished. Anyone who understands the role of confidence in tennis has to see this as a great start to the new year by Murray - all other considerations aside.

I feel on solid ground making this argument. In the first match of their rivalry (1973), Bjorn Borg surprised Jimmy Connors on a hard court in Stockholm, Sweden, winning 7-6 in the third set. Stung by this new threat to his dominion, Connors then reeled off six wins in a row, and had Borg dazed and confused all the way into 1977. But early that year, both men played in an exhibition, The Pepsi Grand Slam, on a clay court in Boca Raton (I covered the event).

That event, which lasted for a few years, was something of an embarrassment to the "official" game. As the name implies, it was nakedly commercial, but it also featured such krazy money that even the icons of the game were unable to resist. Theoretically, the PGS brought together the four Grand Slam title holders of the previous year in this nationally-televised four-man exo, and offered substantially more money to the players who fared best. Each man, it was assumed, also received a hefty appearance fee. And keep in mind that at that time, a $100,000 payday - or prize-money differential - was a very big deal, for anyone. So there was plenty of incentive to take the big prize.

Anyway, Borg won their encounter on Har-Tru, 6-3 in the third. It was a fine match, and nobody uttered a single complaint about the degree of effort put forth by the players. A week or two later, Borg and Connors were both entered in the US Pro Indoor in Philadelphia (they did not end up meeting). During his first press conference in Philly, Borg was asked about the sorry state of his rivalry with Connors. Borg immediately cited his win in Boca as a sign that maybe things were turning around, to which the reporter who asked the question quickly responded, "Yeah, but that was just a meaningless exhibition."  Borg's response was swift, and I'm forced to paraphrase (I was present at the presser, but memory fails): You call that a meaningless exhibition? I don't think so. . .

It was very clear to everyone in that room that win was tremendously important to Borg, and the years proved it out. Borg continued to cite that match as the turning point of his rivalry with Connors, and the record supports the claim. For just a few months later, Borg beat Connors 6-4 in the fifth in the Wimbledon final. And his head-to-head with Connors, starting with Boca, ended up 14-2. [[note: Interestingly, the ATP website has the Wimbledon final taking place before the Pepsi Grand Slam, although neither is dated (except by year). But having been party to all this, I'll have to insist that the Boca match took place in the late winter of '77 - until somebody proves me wrong.]]

Now I'm not trying to draw a parallel here between Murray's feat and Borg's accomplishment. These are different times, and different men. But when the jockeying at the top is really tight, there's no such thing as a meaningless match - not when it's played under conventional rules with a financial incentive to win. My bottom line is that Abu Dhabi may fade into memory for Nadal and Federer as a spirited, fun, competitive, meaningless exhibition, but for Murray it could end up being considerably more. And when you think about how closely stacked the competitors are in what appears to be a wide-open year, you'd be foolish to discount the effect these two wins may have on Murray in the days to come.