cover story: 2008 yearbook

 

By Matthew Cronin

 

US Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe had seen it all and more in the past six years: a thumping at the hands of the great Federer in Switzerland; a humbling at the hands of Ivan “The Terrible Big Server” Ljubicic in Zagreb; and a muddy, clay-stained boot-in-the-face courtesy of the French. Then the imperialism-hating Spanish fans in a raucous soccer stadium Seville taunted PMac’s Merry Pranksters. The next year, an Andre Agassi-led Dream Team imploded in Carson, Califronia. In ‘06, the team got a chance to visit Moscow, the site of Pete Sampras’ remarkable victory over the Russians on red dirt in ‘95, the last time the U.S. had won a Cup. Unlike Pistol Pete, that U.S. team usurped no one and suffered an exhausting and demoralizing loss.

So, after his team swept Russia 3-0 in Portland to bust its record 12-year-Davis Cup drought, McEnroe recalled the ‘02 semi against France when his top player, Andy Roddick, had lost two singles matches on clay and felt like the world was collapsing on him. “The next morning we were in the van and he said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and I said, ‘What are you sorry about?’ He put it on the line then and did it every time. He’s done it for us and, even though he’s taken his shots from everyone, including me, with the losses he’s had, he’s put everything he has into Davis Cup. He’s sets the tone for us.”

No. 1 Roger Federer’s last tournament of the season began with a hiccup and ended with a double fist pump. Putting aside any thoughts that his sporadic fall season was a harbinger of negative things to come, the smooth Swiss captured his fourth Tennis Masters Cup title in five years by devastating Spaniard David Ferrer 6-2, 6-3, 6-2 in Shanghai. Once again, Federer quashed all hopes by the other so-called elite players that he might soon take off his crown as the mighty king of his sport. He entered Shanghai wondering just how he dropped consecutive matches to Argentine David Nalbandian in Madrid and Paris, and was scratching his head even harder after he took his first loss in 11 matches to Chilean Fernando Gonzalez in his opening contest. The answer was to get more aggressive, to unleash his first serve, come over on his backhand, use his unique volleying skills to his advantage. Down went the steady, yet troubled, Nikolay Davydenko, the aggressive, yet confused, Andy Roddick, the slumping Rafael Nadal and the red hot Ferrer. The Swiss finished the season with a 68-9 record, winning eight titles including his third Aussie Open, fifth consecutive Wimbledon and fourth consecutive US Open. While women’s No. 1 Justine Henin won more titles than he did, she cannot, and likely will never, claim the distinction of winning three Grand Slams for the third year in a row. Federer (whose greatest win was his dramatic five-set “match of the year” victory over Nadal in the Wimbledon final) knows full well that if he plays to his level in ‘08, that the 12-time Slam champ will tie (and possibly) break Sampras’ all-time mark of 14 major titles before the clock strikes ‘09. All that could be accomplished at the young age of 26. “It’s been a great season,” Federer said. “I’ve beaten all my closest rivals, Nadal and Djokovic, more times than they’ve beaten me. Maybe I didn’t win 10 titles, but it’s not necessary to stay No. 1 in the world all the time. If I keep this level of play up, I’m in a great position for next year.” Like her younger sis, Venus had a healthy appetite to grab another major crown. In another powerfully stunning second-week run through an elite field, Venus out-muscled Marion Bartoli, 6-4, 6-1 for her fourth Wimbledon title and sixth Slam overall, capping an incredible final four matches where she didn’t drop a set and torched Maria Sharapova, Svetlana Kuznetsova, Ana Ivanovic and then field-wrecking Bartoli. “There is no one who works harder,” said Venus’ boyfriend, golfer Hank Kuehne. “Most women who get into their late twenties are winding it down. She is going to be around for a while and play at the top level for as long as she wants.” If 12-time Grand Slam champion Roger Federer can’t figure out how to beat Rafael Nadal at the French Open, then again, no one can. At least that’s what the Swiss said after another disheartening run in Paris, this one that ended with a 6-3, 4-6, 6-3, 6-4 loss in the final. Federer pulled every trick out of his bag, but for the third straight year, Nadal grabbed his sack, threw it over his head and suffocated him. When facing the Spaniard in Paris, one thing has been sure over the years — the ball always come back, and with stick and steam on it, too. The Spaniard became the first man since Bjorn Borg to win three straight titles, and is the first guy to go 21-0 at the French, winning crowns every year since his ‘05 debut.

Roddick did that and more with a straight-set thumping of Dmitry Tursunov, which allowed James Blake to cut loose and score the biggest win of his career over Mikhail Youzhny in a vintage four-setter. That brought on the ultimate closers, Bob and Mike Bryan, who despite the worst case of nerves of their career that caused the lefty Bob to puke after the match, closed out Nikolay Davydenko and Igor Andreev 7-6(4), 6-4, 6-2 to give the U.S. its record 32nd crown.

The team celebrated wildly later, pouring beer all over each other while choking back tears of joy. They are a veteran group now, but as Roddick noted, they can act like candy-crazed 10-year-olds. The Davis Cup means everything to them.  “Last year when I lost to Tursunov in Russia I was crying my eyes out, too,’ Roddick told IT. “It hurts more to lose in Davis Cup because it’s not all about you. It affects a lot more people. Davis Cup losses are the worst, but even when you are going through the process of losing, pouring your heart out and having your teammates say they are proud of you, this is always in the back of your mind, that you can win someday, and we finally did it. It’s not real yet to me, but we did it and we are all just thrilled.”

Back in ‘00 when John McEnroe bailed on his problematic captaincy and Sampras and Agassi essentially swore off play, Pat McEnroe was left with a small group of declining veterans and green rookies. There was no way that the U.S. was going to win the Cup until the likes of Roddick, Blake and the Bryans matured. They had one great shot back in ‘05, when Agassi decided to rejoin the team for one tie but they were shocked by Croatia at home, as Agassi couldn’t contend with the speed of the court, the Bryans were out-served and U.S. nemesis Ljubicic played one of the best matches of his life in downing Roddick. “That was partly my fault,” McEnroe said. “That was difficult. And they went on to win it that year. That could have been a year we certainly could have made a real deep run. But other than that, the guys had been there. Andy lost some hellacious matches on the road, including to Tursunov (in ‘06), where he’s just put everything into those matches. He also won some big matches in the Czech Republic. Mardy (Fish) wins in Bratislava. The Bryans win their match, they’re one-all in a relegation match. We remember all those matches.”

This new U.S. team’s real Achilles heel was playing away on clay. During McEnroe’s and Roddick’s tenure, before Portland, they had reached two other semis and one final, all of them losses away on dirt. But in ‘07, they pulled off a huge win over the Czechs on clay away (sans Stepanek) and that set things in motion. They faced Spain at home, Rafael Nadal pulled out and they crushed them indoors in Winston-Salem. They went to Sweden for the semis, but the Nordics chose a fast indoor court and Roddick and the Bryans came up huge again.

Then, against defending champions Russia, they were clearly the better team. Sure, there were sporadic nerves from Blake and the Bryans, who at times were flummoxed by Davydenko’s razor-sharp returns and Andreev’s nuclear forehand, but they threw the hammer down when they had to. “This year I think it looked like, hey, maybe we could play a decent country, and Czech Republic has a good team, but maybe not one of the top, top teams, away on clay,” McEnroe said. “When we won that, we thought maybe things can break right for us. The experience that these guys have had over the years was really key towards handling the away matches and also handling the emotion of the home matches really well.”

The Bryans nearly let their emotions get the best of them, but remained composed enough to be able to race around the Joel Coliseum with the flag held high. Bob said later that once he finished his stint in the bathroom, that he was ready to go out into the Portland night on a much-deserved bender. “I just puked my guts out in the shower,” Bob said with a laugh. “I’ve been nauseous for three days. I’m not going to try to hide that my stomach was doing back flips. I had a circus of monkeys in my stomach, just playing tambourine in there. It was a lot of emotion, especially running out for those intros with the crowd going nuts, fireworks, the whole deal.”

The Bryans’ incredibly enthusiastic yet nervous father, Wayne, told IT: “I’ve always envisioned this. I’ve always wanted doubles to be like this — like another athletic contest, not like a tennis match. I loved all the enthusiasm, the energy. I didn’t dream it, I just saw it with the streamers coming down, the boys winning, the boys playing great, playing loose, not overwhelmed. It was real. I’ve been here.”

The team showed up at their post-match press conference soaked in beer and cracking jokes. “This team is not just this year,” Roddick said. “It’s not just this year we won. It’s a process. This is just the final goal.”

McEnroe’s group has drawn a fair amount of criticism during the past three years, as they have sported two to three top-10 singles players (Roddick, Blake and Agassi) and the world’s No. 1 doubles team and still weren’t able to get it done. But they stayed the course and for all their disdain of the so-called negativity of the analysts, Roddick admitted that the bar was not set too high for his group. When you come from a nation that holds the record in Davis Cup crowns, you are expected to bring home a Cup at least once a decade.

Mission accomplished for Roddick, McEnroe, Blake and the merry Bryans.

“We went into every year expecting to win,” said Roddick, as he left the building with his new girlfriend, SI swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker. “You enter a tennis event expecting to win it. We had one of the best teams on paper. Clay is tough for us and we need a little bit of the luck of the draw and we were not thinking that we could beat Spain and Nadal on clay, even though miracles can happen. But we are always going to bust our butts, and I always believed we would win it.”

 

Not since 1994, when Sports Illustrated asked the infamous question, “Is Tennis Dying,” on its cover, has the sport taken such a wretched PR hit. Simply put, 2007 was a helter-skelter freefall as gambling allegations, an alleged poisoning, doping suspensions, a mugging and ill-conceived round robin formats dominated the headlines.

The bad news hit first at the Tennis Channel Open in Las Vegas in February, when the ATP’s Round Robin experiment took a huge hit after ATP CEO Etienne de Villiers, gave defending champ James Blake a pass into the quarterfinals and then reversed his decision and instead, rightly stuck by the rulebook, allowing Russian Evgeny Korolev to advance. There was so much outcry that the tour killed the concept in March. “I don’t see how you can get around pull-outs, going to a match and having to win five games and hit three drop shots to advance to the quarters, a million other things. There’s too much left to the players, whether if it’s a friend, maybe dodging a game to let another one through — there’s too many holes in it,” said Andy Roddick. “You treat tennis as a business because there are players involved and matches are won and lost. It’s not completely a show.”

While only three obscure men were suspended in ‘07 for violating the anti-doping regulations, one of the most beloved European players ever, five-time Slam champ Martina Hingis, revealed that she had tested positive for cocaine at the ‘07 Wimbledon (see related story). Perhaps more bizarre was the case of German star Tommy Haas’ alleged poisoning in Moscow during the Russia-Germany Davis Cup semi. Haas’ teammate Alex Waske alleged that an unnamed Russian claimed that someone poisoned Haas, who was forced to pull out of his Sunday match. But the ITF could find no evidence that he had been. Chaos was not contained in Russia, as in December, Anna Chakvetadze and her family were robbed and attacked in their Moscow home.

But what really put tennis continually on the sports ticker were a bevy of gambling stories, where numerous players revealed they had been approached to throw matches. The suspicious result that lit the scandal’s fire was when Betfair suspended wagering after $10 million was placed on a Nikolay Davydenko-Martin Vassallo Arguello match in an obscure tournament in  Poland. As of this writing, that’s the only ATP match amongst dozens cited that was being formally investigated, even though Belgian Gilles Elseneer said that soon after he qualified for ‘05 Wimbledon, he was approached “bluntly into my face” in the locker room and told that he could make a hundred times more than his first-round winner’s check for giving up the match. The WTA said it knew of two matches in ‘07 that were marked by suspicious betting patterns and only investigated one, an obscure quarter between  Tatiana Poutchek and Mariya Koryttseva in Calcutta, where an incredible $1.5-million was wagered. The WTA found nothing wrong. At year’s end, WTA CEO Larry Scott told the Telegraph that a lot of players have told him that they had been approached. “It’s very unfortunate that we live in an age where gambling threatens the integrity of sport,” he said.

Still, while Davydenko continued to claim innocence, one player, Italian journeyman Alessio di Mauro was suspended for nine months and fined $60,000 after the 124th-ranked Italian was found guilty of making 120 bets (not throwing matches) with an online bookmaker from November ‘06 to June of ‘07. De Villiers said: Then, the ATP did suspend and fine two other Italians, Potito Starace and Daniele Bracciali, for making minor bets on matches. “Do I believe we have a corruption problem? No, I don’t. Will we do anything we can to deal with this threat? Yes.”

 

Last August, some six weeks after she failed a drug test at Wimbledon, Martina Hingis was quietly sitting inside a banquet room at the La Costa Resort reconsidering whether she might have made the wrong decision in coming back to professional play.

Always the extrovert, Hingis didn’t allow her thoughts to quietly sit in her head and questioned a IT reporter: “Should I, shouldn’t I, do I like it enough, am I going to like it next week, is it still worth it? Maybe this week, maybe not next week. Sometimes I have very fast thoughts. When I feel better I say I can continue for another five years, but then when I am not, I say, ‘Do I really have to do this to myself?”

Hingis then asked the reporter whether he thought she could get back close to the top. “Only if you are 100 percent committed, because the way things sound from you now, you already have one foot out the door and teenagers will blow right past you,” the reporter responded.

“That’s a problem,” she said. “Some days I just don’t know where the fire is.”

It’s very possible that at that time, that Hingis already knew that she had failed her drug test at Wimbledon, testing positive for cocaine. In October, the former No. 1 announced her retirement, saying that “I have no desire to spend the next several years of my life reduced to fighting against the doping officials” and adding that “ I’m now 27 years old, and realistically too old to play top class tennis.”

She also strenuously denied that she had used cocaine and said she had never taken drugs. Hingis wanted to tell the story her way and head off what was sure to be a forthcoming story based on a leak in the investigation. She had already called off her season due to a bad left hip and under Anti-Doping Program Rules, the ITF (which conducts the testing) is not allowed to release results or comments on a doping test until a tribunal has met rendered a guilty decision.

If Hingis was found innocent, nothing would have been made public unless a reporter got a hold of the information, as only anti-doping authorities are made aware of who has tested positive.

But as Hingis said in her statement, she had little chance of succeeding of proving her innocence in the short term given that she failed both the A and B test. How right she was as her appeal was rejected and she was suspended for two years.

Hingis called it quits, because she didn’t want to be in the public eye fighting the accusations she termed “so horrendous, so monstrous,” especially when it had already become so difficult for her to play at a highly completive level. It’s a huge embarrassment for someone who has always considered herself to be one of the most honest people on tour.

In fact, since February, Hingis has been underwhelming on court, struggling with injuries, her technique, her confidence and her personal life.

Interestingly, the ‘97 champ entered Wimbledon without having played for five weeks due to a back injury and there, she put on one of her most disappointing performances ever in a 6-4, 6-2 third round defeat to Laura Granville. It only got worse from there for Hingis, who ended ‘06 ranked No. 6 after her comeback from three and half year off due to burnout and injury. She had a decent start to ‘07, reaching the Gold Coast final , the Aussie Open quarters (where admittedly choked in three sets to Kim Clijsters) and then winning Tokyo over Ana Ivanovic. But after returning from Japan, her body began to fail her again. No lover off court training, it began to get harder for her to win any kind of match and for the rest of the season, she failed to beat any player ranked inside the top 30 and only reached one other quarter.

Hingis more than likely never set foot on court again and her Hall of Fame credentials are now tainted. She may not deserve that, but as things stand, she’s just another high profile athlete who tested positive and is pointing fingers at the anonymous testers and saying they got it all wrong. As Hingis herself said at La Costa, “Sometimes reality just kicks in.”

 

The most mentally tough player on the WTA Tour all year long proved once again that when you put her back up against the wall she’d turn her executioner’s weapons against her. In one of the most dramatic year-end battles ever, No. 1 Justine Henin clawed her way back from a set down to overcome a spirited Maria Sharapova 5-7, 7-5, 6-3 and retained her Sony Ericsson WTA Championships title in Madrid. The victory capped a spectacular year for the 25-year-old, who won a career-high 10 titles, including the French and US Opens. The win extended Henin’s winning streak to 26 matches and made her the first woman since all-time great Steffi Graf in ‘89 to go unbeaten post-Wimbledon and win $5 million in a season. “I feel it’s a dream what’s happened this season,” she said.

 

Written by some in tennis’ “pundit-ocracy” as an unfocused, overweight underachiever who was squandering her vast talent, Serena Williams was few folks’ favorite early on at the Aussie Open. But by the time Williams reached the final, the world knew the elusive diva wasn’t putting anyone on about the size of her renewed commitment and just how physically fit she was again. Maria Sharapova had never seen anything like it and neither had the rest of the tennis planet. In one of the most inspirational and gritty returns to prominence for an all-time great, Serena crushed the then-No. 1 6-1, 6-2 to win her eighth Slam. “I was really eager and famished,” said Serena. “I needed to feed.”

 

Tiny Serbia (population 10.1 million) is the most productive tennis nation on the planet, so good right now that the former war-torn Eastern European nation sported three, nice-as-pie top-five players at year’s end — comedic all-courter Novak Djokovic, a 20-year-old who reached the US Open final, the semis of the French and Wimbledon and ended the year No. 3; the always chatty and smiling Jelena Jankovic, 21, who ended the year ranked No. 3 and won four titles; and the daring beauty Ana Ivanovic, 20, who finished the year at No. 4 and reached the French Open final. Little Serbia looks like it could be the new Russia in tennis, a giant nation (population 141 million) that just 10 years ago had no Grand Slam titlists, but now has five such champs. “It’s amazing for our country,” said Ivanovic, who grew up playing in an old swimming pool as NATO bombed Belgrade. Djokovic added, “We’ve been through a lot of difficulties and problems as a country in the last 15, 20 years, so now it is something positive going on.”

 

Three of the sport’s most notable “just-missed” retired: former No. 1 Kim Clijsters (she of one Slam title, the ‘05 US Open), the ultra-popular Tim-bledon (Tim Henman, he of four Big W semifinal appearances) and Grinning Greg Rusedski, another Briton who never faired well at SW19, but did reach the ‘97 US Open final.

After reaching the Aussie Open semis, Clijsters, 23, quickly packed it in as she was too consumed with her wedding plans. She married U.S. basketball player Brian Lynch in July and is now pregnant. Former top-fiver Rusedski retired in April after helping his nation beat the Netherlands in the Davis Cup, while Henman did much the same, calling it quits after winning a Davis Cup point at Wimbledon over Croatia in September. Henman and Rusedski, both in their mid-30s are unlikely to re-emerge, but young Clijsters always loved to run and strike the ball and can’t be counted out of returning in ‘09.

 

 

© 2008 INSIDE TENNIS All rights reserved.
All photographs, text and graphics, appearing on the Inside Tennis web site are protected by copyright.
Any republication, retransmission or reproduction or other use is prohibited without express written permission of Inside Tennis.