The Rest of The Story – Farmers Classic, Harrison, Fish, Sweeting,

Written by: Tennischiro on 3rd August 2011

The Rest of The Story - Farmers Classic, Harrison, Fish, Sweeting, |

Well, I had to go back to getting on the court myself and teaching Friday through Monday, but it was a great privilege to bring you some of my perspective on the matches I watched last week. I got so wrapped up in trying to portray what I saw in those three matches I saw on Tuesday, I didn’t get to tell you much about the rest of the week.

There were a couple of matches I had really wanted to see in the second round: Sweeting/Kunitsyn and Bellucci/Falla. I had written extensively on another forum (I don’t think you can navigate, but you might be able to get into just this page: http://www.tennisplayer.net/bulletin/showthread.php?t=1890&page=2)

I wrote about how I felt Mr. Sweeting’s service motion was holding him back and I wanted to get a more up close and personal look at him in action. He reversed a loss in Atlanta the previous week by beating Devvarman in straight sets in the first round and he was playing a more experienced player in Kunitsyn. I also was able to get some great high speed video of Sweeting in practice and I wanted a few shots in actual match play. I was afraid it would be a little warm, but it was a perfect day in Westwood. And a perfect vantage point for me to shoot my videos.

Ryan Serving and hitting a couple of groundstrokes at 420 fps:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C37k2ol9csk

Ryan Serving and hitting a forehand and then a forehand volley:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U_V-s8kgf0E

Sweeting is an amazing physical specimen. He doesn’t appear to look anywhere near his listed 6′ 5″ tall on the court, …and I mean that in a good way. He moves really well and doesn’t show any of the lack of mobility or agility you would expect of someone his size. He has a true NBA point-guard body, a great gift. His ability to turn defense into offense with his great physical strength is quite impressive. I knew he had to have something going for him to get away with the service motion that he has just from reading detailed stats from the breakdowns of his other matches. I wanted to see if he was a true diamond in the rough who was ready to make the last few steps and become something really extraordinary.

I’m afraid I was disappointed. Not because of the continued inability to get his first serve in (52%) and the high ratio of double faults out of second serves (8/42); I kind of expected that. At first, I was kind of amazed by some of the shots he made and he confirmed what I had suspected: great talent. But as I watched, I sensed that he was really just making it on that talent. You have to understand; I am not saying that Mr. Sweeting is a lazy young man. He is very fit and I am sure he puts a lot of effort into the exercises he does on the court. But for him to move to the next level as a player, there has to be an effort to be the absolutely best you can be. And when you are starting from behind, which he clearly is when he is 24 years old and just broke into the top 100 this January despite winning the US Open Junior title 6 years ago, you can not leave any stone unturned. He has had great results in the last few months including winning his first ATP Tour level event in Houston in April. But to break into… say the top 40 players in the world, he will have to produce better and better results. To do so, he would have to practice with a sense of purpose and commitment to eradicate any weakness in his current technique. That takes tremendous focus and mental commitment and maturity. Good practice is much more than just hard, backbreaking exercise!

What really troubled me was an apparent lack of intensity in Sweeting’s match with Kunitsyn. He had defended his points from last year’s 2nd round performance here and had a good chance to move his ranking to a new high and maybe into the top 60 for the first time. In any case, it was a chance to get into the quarters of a very prestigious event. And yet, to me, he seemed almost cavalier in his attitude. He broke Kunitsyn on 4 of 5 chances, but repeatedly put himself in danger and ended up giving up 4 of 9 chances to Kunitsyn with repeated double faults and unforced errors on key points. I just didn’t see the required intensity. As a coach, I was appalled by the lack of footwork and mental focus. He seemed almost petulant. He needed to be channeling every bit of energy he could to winning that match, and instead, he seemed to be getting upset by the fact that a linesman had the temerity to call a footfault on him. If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime and don’t step on the line! Obviously, those signs of petulance, are subjective and there may be things I don’t know about that were influencing his behavior, but to be so close(the match differential in total points was 2) in such an important match and lose in two tie-breakers when you appeared to give less than your absolute best effort…well, I was really disappointed. While he won his first round in Washington in 3 sets yesterday, he will have to go through Monfils and one more player to maintain his points from last year’s effort there. I’m sure he’ll be highly motivated: big player, big stage. I hope his coach has read him the riot act and settled him down. It will be interesting to see what happens there.

The other player I really wanted to see was Tomaz Bellucci who had impressed me in his practice over the weekend. He definitely did not disappoint in the match I watched against Falla. He beat him 6-0, 6-1 and it wasn’t really even as close as the score. I only saw a little of Blake’s match with Del Potro, but I was convinced the match of the tournament would be Bellucci against Del Potro, and I had Del Potro as the underdog. Shows how little I know. Both went down in the quarters. I still think what I saw tells me Bellucci is about to break through to the top 10 in the next 18 months, if not sooner. The way he was hitting the ball just seemed to me to be head and shoulders above anyone else I saw all week.

The other match I was a little curious about was Harrison and Lu. I liked the way Lu hit the ball so crisply and played aggressively finishing at the net quite frequently. Harrison surprised me at how easily he brushed aside Mike Russell. I was sure Lu would be tougher on him with his consistency. But, again, for something like the 12th time this year, Harrison came back after dropping the first set. Lu seemed to fold before Harrison did under the pressure. Ryan almost did it once more in the semis against Fish, forcing a third set tie-breaker despite being thrashed in the first set and falling behind in the third as well. (Harrison won another three-setter yesterday in D.C., but 6-1 in the 3rd and only after dropping the second set).

For a while in the final, it looked like it was going to be an American fairy tale finish for Mardy Fish in his first LA performance as an LA resident as the first set followed form and the top seeded Fish stayed tough and managed to break Gulbis for the final game of the first set. But while the score was really close (they won and equal number of points overall:98/98 and Mardy won a higher percentage of both service (66/65) and receiving (34/33) points, it seemed to me the outcome was really controlled by the Latvian, and especially his backhand down the line. If Mardy could have gotten out of just one more break point in the second set, maybe a different story. Wuda, cud, shuda…no matter, in the end it seemed that Ernests Gulbis was the best player for the week and deserved the championship.

It was a great experience for me trying to cover the event for 10sballs last week. Sure, I had to pick up what I could of the weekend action online when I wasn’t running off to teach my lessons, but it was great being around the LA Tennis Center at UCLA on Friday, Saturday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday. I hadn’t spent that many days at a pro event since 2004 when I was recruiting players for the Huggy Bears at Indian Wells and Key Biscayne. Perhaps I’m not really cut out for day to day reporting from a tournament site. My stories ran on so long, it took me three days to get in the story of my attendance on Tuesday…definitely not up to speed in the internet age. I hope you enjoyed it a little bit and picked up something a little different in the perspective that I tried to convey to you.

And one more thing. I promised you in my first story the explanation of how this tournament got me started on my 40-plus year odyssey in the tennis industry. I had graduated from Harvey Mudd with an engineering degree in June of 1970 (just barely). I had become a decent college player by then and had worked three summers as a tennis pro, the first as a camp counselor for Dennis Van deer Meer; I was teaching private lessons at Griffith Park for Fred Moll awaiting entrance in January in the MBA program at UCLA(that ended up being delayed until 1982). It was just beginning to look like I wasn’t going to get drafted so I wouldn’t have to enlist to get into OCS. (My number was 233 and the draft board for LA was at 195 in June. I was interviewing with the different services and I had already been called in for my physical and was classified 1A. Another jump of 30 to 225 by the board and I was planning to enlist.) There was a recession going on and the Apollo program was ending. The year before I graduated GE and Westinghouse hired 13 or 14 of the 15 graduating engineers at HMC (small school, really small then) and in 1970, they hired just one!

My dad had been in the lithography business his whole life, ever since his father (quartermaster in the Marine Corps) had left him in Shanghai in the depths of the depression and he went to work as an apprentice for the British American Tabacco Company. In 1970, he was a printing salesman and he managed to sell Jack Kramer the printing of the programs for the 1970 Pacific Southwest. They got to talking about me being a tennis player and, like any father, he was worried about his son not finding a job after graduating from college. Jack arranged an interview for me with Vic Braden and Vic hired me to go to NY to run a program he had designed for a Texas company, Tennis International. (Remember tennis had just gone open, largely because of Jake and it was about to burst out all over in the early 70’s; this was before the popularity of running, gyms and aerobics.) I was to live in a tennis club in Grand Central Station (3rd through 5th floors), literally in a closet off the main hallway of the club. I would teach private lessons at the club, but my main job was to run the American Tennis Center at Stadium Tennis Center in Mullaly Park, across the street, literally, from Yankee Stadium.

I was a much better player, relatively, in NYC than I was in LA. There, I was one of the best. And at the Vanderbilt Racquet Club where I was the “resident” pro, we had the surface they were playing the $10,000 winner-take-all-matches on at Madison Square Garden. When the players playing in those matches needed someone to practice with, I was available. I doubt I would have been their first choice, but I came with the court and there weren’t many of those around in 1970. In fact, there weren’t any around in NYC with the same surface, Sportface carpet, that they had to play on in the Garden. And my serve was great practice for them. I got to practice with Laver, Rosewall, Ashe, Graebner, Emerson, Ralston, Belkin, Fitzgibbon, Fox and Savitt. These were all players that I would previously only have met in an autograph line. I was in heaven. Well, I didn’t do the guys playing in the Garden much good. They all lost to Laver as he went undefeated. But that’s how the Pacific Southwest got me started on this ridiculous tennis experience. I guess I have to blame it all on Jake!

So, if you have gotten this far, you’ve put up with an awful lot of verbiage from me. Thanks for hearing me out. I’ve really enjoyed trying to tell you my stories and bring you a little something different (if not quite as timely as it should have been) about the tennis world. I have been a little disappointed that I haven’t seen a single comment in the comment section just below. I figured at least one person would step up and say, “Oh Don, you are full of it!”…But nothing. If you want me to continue to bring you more of my point of view of today’s tennis world and a little more of a look back into stories like how I started my own tennis school in Grand Central Station tearing down a 40′ wide, 30′ high, 2′ thick, brick wall, filled with sand and reinforced with rebar as well as held up by steel i-beams that we had to take out with acetylene torches in the middle of the night in a national landmark building without any building permits…well, you are going to have to give me some feedback in the comment section that shows me that there are some readers out there that are actually interested.

tennischiro