The One-Ended Spectrum

Howdy. Many of you will remember that we've often touched on the issue of court speed in recent posts, almost always with the effect of launching a spirited debate. I figure now is a good a time as any to take a deeper pass at the subject, given the fact that the Australian Open, while making claims about speeding up the court, is not an appreciably different surface this year.

This is extra relevant because one of the striking elements in Tennis Australia's move from the grass of Kooyong to the Rebound Ace of Melbourne Park was that it represented a thorough repudiation of the Australian fast-court tradition, which also amounted to a chilling, patronizing brush-off of the men and women who once made Aussie tennis fearsome.

It was as if TA had said, It was nice of you to get all this pro tennis going, Emmo, Gong, Maggie, Rocket, Newk, but this is a new era, why don't you just repair to the beer garden and pop a few tinnies - we'll call you when we need you for some champion's parade or something. . .

Of course, the Lords of Aussie Tennis weren't taking a flier into the great unknown here. Just as Kooyong was a kind-of parallel universe Wimbledon, complete with decorated veterans marching around the grounds bedecked in ribbons, the new Aussie facility that replaced Kooyong as the site of Australia's major in 1988 was strikingly modeled on somebody else's idea of the better mousetrap - the flagship facility of the burgeoning Open era, the USTA National Tennis Center.

Of course, all this transpired before the Aussies decided that they were good and tired of drafting behind the pace car and proudly declared themselves The Grand Slam of Asia/Pacific.

Hey, time-out guys -- are you saying that Antarctica doesn't matter?

In any event, the hidden factor driving the change of surface at both the U.S. and Australian National Tennis Centers was the quest for maximizing the "entertainment" value of the game, and this subtle - and to many TW readers, poisonous - motivation has helped shape the game into what it is today. And before I define that, let's just pause for a moment and look at how the other two Grand Slams handled the siren song of the new era.

Wimbledon chose to remain unchanged, banking on its sui generis status as an event of transcendent, iconic importance to the segment of the audience that matters most - the British. Fair enough. But contemplate the dilemma of Roland Garros in the early stages of the Open. With three of the majors on fast grass, RG was the exotic, provincial major (Oh, you know those French. . . rolls eyes) and very conspicuously the odd-man out. But with the windfalls of cash and prestige looming, did the French cave and hurry to get in lock step with the U.S. and Australia? Absolutely not.  They decided to emphasize the fact that they were different, and hurried to make improvements that would ensure that the operative phrase would be "equal but different." At this, they have been remarkably successful and God bless them for it.

So lets get back to today's game. You may remember that a few weeks ago I highlighted Andy Roddick's contention that the death of serve-and-volley and power tennis (read: pressure tennis) had one root cause that towered above all else: the general, worldwide slowing down of courts (and to a lesser degree, balls). As Andy put it, "It’s weird, there’s this obsession with power, a lot of talk about serves, a lot of talk about equipment and stuff, but I was the only big server at the Masters in Shanghai. So I guess it’s a 52 week coincidence."

It was an interesting way to put it, and the subtext is startling: power has been driven out of the game. More precisely, power as a legitimate tool has been driven from a game because the courts and balls have been radically slowed down.

This is the 800-pound gorilla in the room. The quest to present tennis that would welcome the broadest range of stylists (allowing the maximum number of players to do well, week-in, week-out - a fairly honorable intention, going in) and the desire to make tennis appealing to all spectators, including casual drop-in television viewers, has produced yet another nice lesson in the Be Careful What You Wish For book of cautionary tales. Tennis today is like the Indianapolis 500 being run with governors keeping engine speeds below 80 miles per hour.

This begs an interesting question: what role should power play in the game?

Power, in every application from national interests to  personal relations, is a controversial thing. In sports, though, it has almost alway been of critical and highly esteemed value. The lexicon is littered with references to "power backs" and "power forwards" and "power plays" and "power pitchers". And at one time, tennis featured the "power game" (think John Newcombe, Don Budge, et al). But all that changed when the Open era began to pick up steam, and the Lords of Tennis began to seek tennis of a specific kind (entertaining tennis) - tennis that was choc-a-blog with attention holding points and tight matches.

Back in the day, the hard courts on which the U.S. game (the serve-reliant Big Game) was developed were lightning quick by today's standard. So was grass. There wasn't much choice about this, because the technologies that would produce synthetic surfaces for indoor play (indoor play boomed in the Open era) or even outdoors use did not exist.

But when the Lords determined that the most marketable and appealing tennis was the kind featuring lots of rallies and long points, the manufacturers responded. And as players trained on clay, beginning with Europeans and closely followed by South Americans, began to break the stranglehold fast-court players had on the game, the desire to give new superstars like Bjorn Borg, Ilie Nastase, and Guillermo Vilas maximum exposure and comfort on clay accelerated the process of slowing the courts.

It must be 20 years ago now that I had a conversation with David Wheaton, a fine serve-and-volley player, about these changes. And he was the first to point out to me that equating hard courts with fast courts was no longer valid. In fact, he said, hard courts offered the worst of both worlds: long, grueling matches of the kind you expect on clay, combined with the physical stress and punishment you get from playing on hard surfaces.

Another key factor in the slowing of the courts was the hue and cry over the Wimbledon finals played by guys like Pete Sampras, Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg and Goran Ivanisevic. For a period in the mid-1990s, the big debate over tennis centered on the way power, aided by new racquet technologies, was making tennis an excruciatingly boring game to watch. It did not help that, at the time, tennis was in the throes of waking up from the glory days of the tennis boom. The meme put the kibosh on power tennis on fast courts, for good.

This, in many ways, was an unfortunate turn, and in some ways it did for tennis what abstract expressionism did for painting, or free verse did for poetry. In a way, it liberated it. In another way, it confused and perhaps even degraded it. But tennis isn't art or poetry, even though it is often artistic and even poetic. Tennis is about beating the person across the net, and taking the application of power out of the equation is an enormous, radical removal.

To me - and I'll be the first to say there 's plenty of room for debate on this - the serve is the central stroke of the game; the straw that stirs the drink. And the inner logic of the game, at least until the last decade, has been built around the idea that the serve is such an asset that the person serving ought to hold his games.

I think that when you're serving well, you ought to get at least two points per game out of it; when you depart from that principle, matches become confusing, and there's nothing worse than a senseless, break-riddled tennis match that ends, well, because at some point it must.

Roger Federer is not a typical power server, yet I think Roger ought to get more free points from his serve - something he's hard-pressed to do under todays conditions.

Rafael Nadal, with his punishing, grinding game and outstanding stamina, has demonstrated in some of his matches with Federer just what happens when there is no appreciable reward for serving well - when you demonstrate and exploit power with a stroke designed to maximize it, and in which to anchor your entire strategy and game plan.

Only at Wimbledon does Federer enjoy the benefits that were once considered a fair and natural reward for serving well, and I'll grant that how you feel about this may be driven by your preference for one player or the other. But there is a larger point here: If the serve isn't a special asset, then there is no special value in holding or breaking. If The Mighty Fed, or anyone else, has to back up his best serve with two or three shot groundstroke combinations to win a point, why not just start the point like you do a casual rally?

TMF has proved that he has more shots and a more versatile game than anyone else - by far. He's like the skater who can nail the Triple-Toe-Loop, or the Backwards Heidy-Ho with a Double Putz, better than any of his rivals. That this is of such paramount value today goes a long way to explaining TMF's domination. This is an open and shut case; even Marat Safin on his best day can't match TMF as a shotmaker. But do we really want to boil tennis down to so simple a demonstration of shotmaking ability? Right now, Nadal can challenge Federer from the other end of the spectrum - the slow end, where stamina, consistency, shot-retrieving rather than shot-making, can pay dividends. And that generally has been a good thing for the game.  But there is no longer any other end of the spectrum. And this is a pity.

The legislation against power has in some ways made tennis achieve exactly the opposite of what it set out to do in the Open era. Instead of broadening the game to include all sorts of stylists, the trend toward producing more entertaining tennis has destroyed style; the players from all over the world now roll off the assembly line like so many Fords Tauruses, different from each other only in terms of where they happened to be manufactured, and quirks of personality. You can pretend that it's really the fault of Nick Bollettieri, technology, the speed of information, but the answer is simpler. Tennis may be more entertaining in terms of the sheer, how-long-can-I-watch-this-before-I-switch-to-dwarf-bowling sense, but it probably isn't more competitive, at least not in the Big Picture, because there aren't nearly as many ways to win a tennis match anymore.

There's a reason that the Top 20 on the men's tour is littered with strikingly one-dimensional guys who show very little strategic nuance or technical versatility. Andy put his finger on it for me when he said: "The way the courts play today puts the emphasis on returns and movement. What’s the point in coming in if you’re playing in an sandbox? The guys today are fast enough, they're great athletes. But give them an extra half-second to hit the ball - well, it makes a great difference."

Sometimes I long for the variety and texture the game had on surfaces that were more dissimilar than alike. The variety also added greatly to the color of the game, and helped it churn out both great characters and great stories. You may believe that Andy is merely lobbying for conditions that would favor his game when he talks about this stuff, but I don't think that was the case. Here's a little more of his analysis (you'll have to read my long interview with him in an upcoming issue of Tennis for the full monte):

The ATP and the ITF should have a task force look at these issues, for it isn't really just serve-and-volley players that have been driven out of the game. The serve itself has been diminished in a way that's completely disproportionate. You can run the Indy 500 at 80 MPH, and somebody will win, because somebody always does. But isn't it more fun when there is a variety of variables at play in any competition?

P.S. - I owe D-Wiz an apology. In my haste to play the role of wise counselor (not to mention know-it-all) last night, I confused Funny Bones and Ding Dongs; she was right about the Ding Dongs after all, and she had the class (or was she merely bored?) not to call me on it.