US Open
Report
Thursday,
September 8, 2011
Jerry
Balsam
Amateur
Hour
My
final visit to the 2011 US Open gave rise to two conflicting feelings: (i) the
people who run tennis are greedy and incompetent; (ii) the sport itself is a
thing of beauty. I must express my dissatisfaction with the United States Tennis
Association before celebrating another day of engrossing
competition.
The USTA makes me think of the works of Jimmy
Breslin. There’s his book on the first year of the New York Mets,
Can’t Anybody Here Play this Game? And then there
is his Mafia comedy, The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight. Any
resemblance of these titles to the workings of the USTA is purely
coincidental.
Now, I’m sure the USTA tries to do the right
thing, at least on those rare occasions when it is not contrary to the
organization’s pecuniary interests. But when some rain comes to the
The biggest problem, of course, is that Arthur Ashe
Stadium is too big and therefore too expensive to cover with a retractable roof.
This leaves the US Open behind
When I arrived a bit late on Thursday, September 8 –
having been rained out on Tuesday, September 6, the first of two consecutive
days to be washed out – I hurried to Armstrong to see the match between Andy
Roddick and David Ferrer. The players, having played a couple of games, were
huddled at the net with officials, discussing a moisture bubble on the court. As quoted by the Wall
Street Journal, Roddick told Brian Earley, the tournament referee: “You’re
killing us. I’m baffled right now. Absolutely baffled.”
Roddick and Ferrer trundled off to the cozy Court 13, and I did not even try to follow them,
figuring the stands would be inaccessible. I’m willing to give the USTA the
benefit of the doubt on the saturation of Armstrong – again, the decision to
build on landfill is in the past – and even on moving a marquee quarterfinal to
Court 13, since there was a rush to get matches in as soon as possible,
especially with the weather forecast being dicey.
What I will never get was a decision that came later in
the day. I assumed we would hear some kind of plausible explanation for the
decision, but I’m not aware of any. After the second match on the Grandstand,
about which more later, Melanie Oudin and Jack Sock got a walkover from Elena
Vesnina and Leander Paes in the mixed doubles semifinal. There was thus an
opening for a match on the Grandstand. At the same time, Caroline Wozniacki and
Andrea Petkovic were about to start their quarterfinal. One would think that any
rational person would put Wozniacki and Petkovic on the now-available
Grandstand. Instead, the Grandstand got (after a long delay, just to make things
more irritating) a doubles match between the team of Daniela Hantuchova and
Agnieszka Radwanska and that of Sara Errani and Roberta
Vinci.
In
what universe does that make sense? A Wozniacki-Petkovic quarterfinal and a
doubles quarterfinal are both ready to start, and the two available courts are
the Grandstand, with several thousand seats, and Court 13, with under 600. For
what it’s worth, the fans in the Grandstand saw Brad Gilbert descending from the
broadcast booth before the decision had been announced and asked who was next on
our court. He responded: “I think Wozniacki.” You didn’t have to be a tennis
savant like BG to think that. Part of me still wants to believe that the USTA
has a good explanation for the decision to put Wozniacki and Petkovic on Court
13, but I simply lack the creativity to come up with it.
Perhaps there is no good explanation, and this unforced
error was produced under the pressure of having to make a quick decision.
Fortunately, another unforced error was averted when the USTA had time to think,
or the players had time to demand that the USTA think. Because of the rain
delays, the USTA was prepared to have one of the men’s finalists play
best-of-five-set matches on hard courts on four consecutive days. At least that
bad decision was reversed. George Vecsey, writing in the New York Times,
put it well:
The best players in the world wonder if
they are not only dueling a respected opponent and the forces of nature but also
the crass purposes of management. The star male players more or less shamed
officials into extending the weather-plagued Open to Monday, rather than forcing
them to play four consecutive days.
A
cynical, and entirely plausible, explanation for the USTA’s acquiescence in the Monday
men’s final was the availability of Serena Williams as a headliner for weekend
television.
So
much for the administrators of the game; let us focus on the athletes who make
it great.
Grandstand: Donald Young (
I
saw a friendly face as I tried to hustle from the now-disabled Armstrong to the
Grandstand: Chris, one of the people who handle court assignments
at the
So
is Andy Murray. Of course, I can’t say he’s always
pleasant and helpful. What’s more, he has entered the Azarenka Zone: don’t bet
on him to win a major until he shows he can do it. But he is wonderfully
skilled, and it showed in this match, when he easily took revenge on Donald Young for a defeat in Indian Wells earlier this
year.
If
you like service breaks, a
Young showed an admirable willingness to move forward,
even behind his serve, but this generally did not trouble
Brad Gilbert was calling the match and, according to a
fan who had a radio earpiece, was switching off to call play on Court 17. We
noticed that, when speaking on television, Gilbert stood up. His
broadcast partner, Patrick McEnroe, remained seated.
The new and improved Young was not much in evidence on this
occasion. He held his temper till the end of the third set: after going down the
decisive break, he pounded the Citizen clock in frustration before
Final Score:
Grandstand: Samantha Stosur (AUS) (9) v.
Vera Zvonareva (RUS) (2)
In
this year’s US Open, Sam Stosur has had considerably more success than
Napoleon did in battling Russians. She beat Nadia Petrova in a tight third-round
match and Petrova’s doubles partner, Maria Kirilenko, in a fourth-rounder that
featured a 17-15 tiebreak. Now she was to meet Vera Zvonareva, number 2 in the world, who doesn’t feel
like a number 2 any more than Wozniacki feels like a number 1. Zvonareva was
wearing a black
ribbon on her visor in memory of those who perished in the recent plane crash in
Going into Thursday’s play, the forecast called for a
window to get in some matches in the late morning and early afternoon, and then
a return of showers. The sun was shining during the Murray-Young match, and I
stayed in the sheltered seats on the west side of the Grandstand. For
Stosur-Zvonareva, I treated myself to a box seat on the south end of the court.
After criticizing the USTA for just about everything, I should note that the box
seats on three sides of the Grandstand (all but on the west, or Armstrong, side)
are now open to all ticketholders. If you can get this close to the action, you
can really appreciate what the players are doing, especially when a serve is
coming at you.
The monitor that reports service speeds was present on
the Grandstand, but not working. Later in the day, when I got to Court 17, I saw
that it no longer even had the monitor. I suspect this has something to do with
those courts being shut down in the second week and then called back into action
unexpectedly. Indeed, on 17, the big television camera that would go behind the
court was missing, and instead the action was being shown via a camera that
hovered in a corner of the court at the end of a long boom.
Stosur’s kick serve was very effective, and she also hit some
flat ones to good effect. Her net game was somewhat less powerful than I’d
expected; it appeared that her backhand volley could use some more pop. But she
moved ahead of Zvonareva with a break of serve in the sixth game and served out
the set without a hiccup, finishing it off with a backhand pass at the feet that
Zvonareva could only graze. Zvonareva retreated under a towel during the changeovers, which
was not a reflection of her fragile mental state but rather her standard practice.
Stosur played a superb receiving game to start the
second set, breaking at love with great court coverage and passing shots. She
faced some trouble in the eighth game, falling behind 0-30 on her serve, but
then reeled off four straight points, largely with the help of punishing
inside-out forehands.
Stosur ran her record against her contemporary Zvonareva
to 8-2 with another break in the ninth game, a victory achieved
without facing break point. Napoleon wished he’d had it so
easy.
Final Score: Stosur d. Zvonareva 6-3
6-3
Court 17: Angelique Kerber (GER) v. Flavia
Pennetta (ITA) (26)
After the confusion regarding the Wozniacki-Petkovic
match and a long delay in which nothing was transpiring on the Grandstand, I
went out to Court 17, a new favorite this year, to watch the German lefty Angelique Kerber take on the Italian Flavia Pennetta, who will be 30 in February. I had seen
Kerber get by Monica Niculescu, whose style made both players look bad. Kerber
looked a lot better against Pennetta, who has a wide range of skills, including
a harder serve than one might expect and a willingness to move to net. (She and
Gisela
Dulko comprised the second-seeded women’s doubles team at the
tournament, though they were ousted in the third round.)
Pennetta played with an elastic brace on her right
elbow, but she did not seem to be in pain. There were probably fewer than a
thousand spectators on Court 17 for most of the match, which, I would guess,
made this an easier venue for Kerber to play her first Grand Slam quarterfinal.
In 2010, she had made the third round at the Australian Open and
The key break of serve in the first set came in the
ninth game, when Kerber’s forehand down the line set up an easy forehand winner
for 15-40, and then Pennetta missed a forehand wide. Kerber served out the set
at 15, finishing it off with an excellent retrieval of a lob followed by a
cross-court backhand passing shot.
There were breaks of serve in the first five games of
the second set, and then Kerber held for a 4-2 lead. The tide turned, with
Pennetta taking six consecutive games, giving her the second set and a 2-0 lead
in the third. Pennetta was being cheered on, possibly to her chagrin, by a
fellow who dressed like an ex-preppy now on Wall Street and talked like an
aspiring cast member of Jersey Shore, albeit without profanity, but with
some attempts at faux Italian. He was ragging on Kerber and kept on announcing:
“Flavia, it’s yours.” It surely seemed that way early in the third
set.
Pennetta was serving at 3-1 when she missed a couple of
forehands to put Kerber back on serve. At 3-3, Pennetta floated a forehand long
and then double-faulted, and suddenly Kerber was on top for the first time in a
long while. In a long struggle, Kerber averted four break points to hold serve
for 5-3. Improbably, Pennetta seemed to have run out of gas. She allowed Kerber
to take the match without having to serve for it, broken on match point when she
poked a forehand volley wide. As against Pennetta’s earlier streak of six games,
Kerber’s skein of five was only marginally less impressive and definitely
weightier, because it put her into a Grand Slam semifinal.
Final Score: Kerber d. Pennetta 6-4 4-6
6-3
Court 17: Rohan Bopanna (
The last match of the day session was also on Court 17,
and it was time for some old-school men’s doubles, in the sense that all four
players followed every serve to net. What differs today is the idea of hitting
the serve at three-quarters speed in doubles has gone by the boards, and thus
most points in men’s doubles are short. We’ve seen the rules for doubles change
substantially on the tour, with no-ad scoring and a match tiebreak now played in
lieu of a third set. Why wouldn’t the ATP Tour experiment with some tournaments
at which doubles would be played with one serve only? This would make for
longer, more interesting points and eliminate the conferences between partners
that frequently take place between the first and second serves. If this approach
resulted in too many breaks of serve, how about an experiment in which each team
could limit its opponents to only one serve on five or ten designated points per
set? Think of the strategy that would be involved in deciding when to announce:
“Second serve.” It might work; it might not. In any case, it’s a better idea
than putting Wozniacki and Petkovic on Court 13.
The rain had held off since the morning, and the
question was whether the day session could squeeze in one more match. As clouds gathered over
Ashe, the celebrated Indo-Pak Express of Bopanna and Qureshi (the second best team on the subcontinent, after the reunited and superannuated Bhupathi and Paes) took the court against the British duo of Fleming, a Scot, and Hutchins, born and still living in Wimbledon. The Brits
made the
Play was rather spotty. I thought Bopanna and Hutchins
were the better players on each team. There were no breaks of serve till the
eleventh game, when Fleming lost a long game after double-faulting at deuce and
then seeing Bopanna hit a winning crosscourt backhand return on break point.
Qureshi served out the set at 15.
The second set was quite a different story, as the Brits
broke Bopanna straight away for a 2-0 lead, climbed out of a 0-40 hole on
Hutchins’s serve in the fifth game, and broke Qureshi in the eighth game to
close it out.
The first two sets, at 7-5 and 6-2, consisted of games
divisible by four, so each team started each set with its stronger server,
Bopanna and Hutchins, as part of the normal rotation. It would have been
interesting to see if they would have changed the order to utilize the stronger
server, as they are entitled to do, had a set gone 6-3 or
6-4.
In
the deciding set, the Brits sprinted ahead by 4-2 when they broke Bopanna in the
sixth game. Fleming averted two break points in the following game, and Qureshi
saved match point at 2-5 30-40. The Brits had two more match points on
Hutchins’s serve, but squandered them with a double fault and missed overhead.
The Indo-Pak Express reached break point when Qureshi nailed a forehand pass up
the middle. On the next point, Fleming seemed to hit a winning backhand volley,
but his team lost the point on the umpire’s ruling. I could not tell whether it
was because Fleming had reached over the net to hit the ball or touched the net
on his follow-through. Either way, the Indo-Pak Express had new life with this
break of serve. Bopanna held at 15 for 5-5 and then put his team ahead with a
forehand passing shot to help break Fleming.
There was mist in the air – remember, this is the 2011
US Open we’re talking about – when Qureshi stepped onto the court to try to
serve out the match at 6-5. He won the first point and dropped two when the mist
became too heavy to
continue. (At the same time, play stopped in Ashe’s night session, as
Roger Federer faced off against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, except that they resumed
play after about an hour.) Thus, my in-person US Open experience
concluded at 8:15 p.m. on September 9, and the Indo-Pak Express wrapped up the
match the next day, as the second match on Court 17.
Final Score: Bopanna/Qureshi d.
Fleming/Hutchins 7-5 2-6 7-5
The first US Open match I recall seeing in
person took place in 1974, at