Andy Roddick is at it again.
And by "it", I don't mean playing good tennis.
As reported Monday morning, Roddick walked out of his press conference at the China Open after being upset in the first round by South Africa's Kevin Anderson.
A reporter asked Roddick, now 28-13 on the year following the loss, how low his ranking would have to drop to before he considered retirement.
It was a legitimate question, perhaps phrased poorly, but something that is certainly on the mind of more than a few tennis fans considering Roddick has been an afterthought since falling out of the Top 10 in the first week of April.
Roddick plunged as low as 21st in late August before rising back to the mid-teens, a place he will remain after his latest bomb-out.
Roddick's reaction to the question was something you might expect from Donald Young, Ryan Harrison or Jack Sock - players who are young, emotional and inexperienced with the media crush.
But on Monday, Roddick forgot the most important part of being a professional athlete: being professional.
Reporters ask a lot of dumb questions, and sportswriters are often the worst of the worst.
Don't believe me? Do a Google search for "dumb Super Bowl" questions and you'll get such luminaries as someone asking former Washington Redskin Doug Williams "How long have you been a black quarterback?"
But what Roddick did Monday, and what he has had the penchant for doing a lot in the last 18 months or so, is biting the hand that feeds him.
Winning tennis tournaments can make a player successful, but the media can make him famous, loved, a sex symbol or a world-class jerk.
Now "jerk" is a pretty strong word for Roddick's behavior of late, because let's face it, there are very few athletes out there without a whole lot of ego.
The real problem is that the little acts of petulance aren't being overshadowed by victories. Since his thrilling win over MIlos Raonic in Memphis in February, Roddick is just 14-10 overall in tournaments and an unflattering 1-5 against players ranked in the Top 20.
Compounding the issue is the surging popularity of Roddick's fellow American male players.
Mardy Fish has proven that 2010 wasn't a flash in the pan, rising to No. 8 in the world and doing so without a shred of controversy and Young bounced back from his Twitter-gate to capture the fans' hearts at the US Open.
Posted to Tennis and stuff. by
Nick on 10/3/2011 10:34:40 PM | with 0 comments
You know what really bothers me about Serena Williams' ongoing shennanigans? That she's tarnishing her own legacy with them.
I understand Serena getting a bit bored with tennis over the last few years, I really do. She was trained from an early age to push, push, push to be the best in the world, and when she became that, indisputably so, well, what next?
 Competitors want to compete, and the chief among them will fling themselves into any field they can find to regain the thrill of competition, of starting at the bottom and working their way up to ultimate success.
It's the reason billionaires buy baseball teams, why singers suddenly want to act (and sometimes vice versa, with horrible results, I'm looking at you, Don Johnson!), why Michael Jordan played minor league baseball and thinks he can run an NBA team and why Arnold Schwarzenegger ran for governor of California (although, because of term limitations, he won't be back).
Serena dominated women's tennis. So, like sister Venus, she's attacked other industries - fashion, advertising, investing in a sports franchise and writing.
 The results have been a mixed bag, but it seems that what Serena likes most is the spotlight, as we all saw with various degrees of tolerance during her month-long paparazzi fest during the 2010 US Open Series.
Seen flouncing around town with the likes of social luminaries such as Kim Kardashian and administering a pedicure to Oprah Winfrey, Serena seemed a lot more focused on making Page Six than getting back to tennis shape.
Most frustrating of all, she kept the true nature of her injury(ies) a closely-veiled secret, something she is now repeating by listing her reason for withdrawing from Tokyo and Beijing as "medical reasons."
Unless she's suffering from some mystery disease, there's really no rhyme or reason for the continued hush-hush nature of what otherwise would simply be called "taking time off".
Since the start of the 2009 US Open, Serena has two Grand Slam titles, one mysterious foot injury that seemed to molt like a virus from one malady to another, a life-threatening blood clot that no one found out about until after the fact, two run-ins with US Open officials that made her look like a whiny baby, a few magazine covers and a break-up with Common.
Not exactly the resume of someone Sports Illustrated crowned as the greatest female player of all-time following her conquest of Wimbledon in 2010.
Posted to Tennis and stuff. by
Nick on 10/4/2011 10:04:22 PM | with 5 comments
|
|
Saying he's sorry, 140 characters at a time.
|
Andy Roddick apologized for his press conference walkout on Monday in the most unpersonal way possible - he Tweeted it.
As reported earlier on TennisNow.com, Roddick backed off his tirade in Tokyo, claiming that he had not walked out of the press conference but that the moderator had announced it was the last question of the day.
If it's true, that is one heck of a coincidence - that the question that made Roddick act like a baby was also the last question of the day.
 More than likely, Roddick got home to the states and had a few terse answering machine messages from his agent, publicist or perhaps the lovely Brookyln Decker telling him what a jackass he looked like on television after getting his butt handed to him by Ivan Drago, and what was he going to do about it?
Twitter is an amazing communication tool, shown by its role in the rebellions in the Middle East earlier this year, but it has its limitations - notably that you're limited to 140 characters at a time and nobody can see your face when you're apologizing for looking like a moron.
Posted to Tennis and stuff. by
Nick on 10/5/2011 10:42:13 PM | with 1 comments
Dinara Safina downplayed her brother's announcement from last week that she was retiring, but the horse is clearly out of the barn for the former No. 1 who has been plagued by injury problems for the past two years.
Regardless of when Safina announces, her rollercoaster ride of a career shows just how tough it is to make it to the top and stay there, and just how fleeting fame and success can be.
Safina was just another player until 2004 when she reached the Paris semifinals and jumped 20 places in the rankings to No. 31. She took another huge step forward in 2005, winning Paris for her first WTA title, knocking out No. 1 Maria Sharapova in the Moscow quarterfinals and finishing the season 36-20, ranked 20th in the world.
Her next four years were an express ride to the top of the women's tennis world. Jumping to 11th by the end of a 44-21 2006; finished 15th in 2007 at 43-22; then took off in 2008, winning Berlin with wins over three top 10 players - including #1 Justine Henin. She reached the French Open final by defeating No. 1 Sharapova; won Los Angeles and Montreal in back-to-back weeks, took the silver medal at the Olympics; reached the US Open semifinals and won Tokyo to finish No. 3 in the world with a 55-20 record.
In 2009, Safina became the first player to ever achieve the No. 1 ranking without a Grand Slam title on her resume, but she hardly needed it - reaching the finals of the Australian and French Opens; winning Rome and Madrid back to back and falling in the WImbledon semifinals. She maintained the No. 1 ranking for nearly seven months before finishing the year No. 2.
As quickly as the fame came, the injury followed for Safina. A back injury plagued her throughout 2010 as she lost five striaght first-round matches between May and August, missed Wimbledon due to injury and dropped to 70th in the world by mid-August before finishing 50th.
She had the same number of losses (16) in 2010 as in 2009, but her win total dropped from 55 to 13.
This past season, Safina learned the hard way that no opponent is more frustrating and difficult to overcome than one's one body .The back injury - an L5 S1 disc herniation - brought with it pain, numbness and discomfort that starts in the lower back and travels to the glutes, legs and feet. While the injury is treatable, treating it to the point of being able to play championship-level professional tennis for 11 months a year.
Safina took 12 career singles and nine career doubles titles, won more than $10.5 million in prize money and won 68% of her matches as a pro. But despite all of her success, she is close to retirement at age 25 and will join the likes of James Blake and Monica Seles as the ones we always wonder what their true potential might have been, had fate not been so darn fickle.
Posted to Tennis and stuff. by
Nick on 10/12/2011 6:44:26 AM | with 1 comments
|
|
Make the Slams Truly Grand
|
Warning - gripe incoming.
Here's why I don't like the year-end championships - because they aren't.
This isn't the end of the year, unless Santa Claus tore two pages off his calendar by accident, and no championship is on the line.
This is a money grab for players, advertisers, one selected city and the tour itself. The winner of this tournament isn't guaranteed to be the No. 1 player at year's end, so how can it be a championship?
If after the Super Bowl, all the teams got a ranking based on their wins that season, and the Super Bowl winner had won nine games while another team won 13, would it make sense to have the 13-win team declared NFL champion?
I've harped before on how much I hate the points ranking system, but this just really takes the cake for me. Caroline Wozniacki needed only win two matches in her group to claim the top spot for the year, a campaign in which she yet again failed to win a Grand Slam title.
With so many tournaments, so many 1,000 and 500 point opportunities to allow a very good player to stockpile points without taking out the best of the best, something needs to be done to prevent this from becoming the era of the paper champion.
When i check out the current WTA rankings, I have to get down to Samantha Stosur at No. 7 before I find a player that I'm convinced Wozniacki could beat in any given final.
Yet there she sits, No. 1 in the year-end rankings thanks to a 64-15 record on the year and five tournament titles.
Gaudy numbers to be sure, but delve deeper into them and tell me how Wozniacki is possibly the best player in the game right now.
Out in the third round at the French Open and the fourth round at Wimbledon, she did herself proud by reaching the semifinals at the Australian Open and the US Open, but losing in the final four makes her Andy Murray, not Novak Djokovic.
In her five tournament championships in 2011, she defeated a grand total of four Top 10 opponents. One of those five tournament victories was at Copenhagen, and while I laud her for playing to her home country fans, winning a tourney where your opponents have an average ranking of No. 84 in the world isn't exactly convincing the critics.
What really bothers me is the way Wozniacki loses. Much like fellow "why aren't you winning?" candidate Vera Zvonareva, when she loses, it's crash and burn, not fight tooth and nail.
Don't believe me? The proof is in the Danish pudding - Doha: 6-4, 6-4 loss to Zvonareva in the final; 7-6, 6-3 loss to Julia Goerges in the Stuttgart final; 7-5, 6-3 to Maria Sharapova in the Rome semifinals; 6-1, 6-3 to Daniela Hantuchova in the French Open third round and 6-4, 6-2 to Serena Williams in the semifinals at Flushing Meadows.
That is not the work of the top player of the game. A good player, maybe even a great player, but not the No. 1.
So what's the solution? Simple - overvalue the Slams and undervalue everything else. Nobody remembers who wins Indian Wells or Miami every year, but even casual fans of the game can tell you who won Wimbledon the last five years.
If the WTA insists on keeping the points system, then weight it accordingly. Drop the 1,000-point events to 500, and the 470s to 250. Bump the majors up to 2,500 points. Those are the tournaments that carry the sport. And winning even one of them in your career is an absolutely amazing thing, don't undersell the power of them.
Part of winning a big tournament is getting through the early rounds when there's a target on your back in every match and beating you will make a lower-ranked player's entire season.
And then there's the year-end championships. Keep having them, keep inviting the top eight players to compete, but take the points out of it. Make it all about prestige and money, athletes seem to like those things.
Posted to Tennis and stuff. by
Nick on 10/31/2011 8:07:40 AM | with 0 comments
|