Kvitova, Pironkova, Schiavone, Stosur: Are you wondering
where these women came from? Are you wondering what’s happening in women’s
tennis right now? You’re not alone. This was supposed to be the year when the
old ruling class—in short, the Williamses, the Belgians, and Maria
Sharapova—was going to be reconstituted and set loose against each other in one
epic Grand Slam final after another. Instead, the last two majors have brought
us a parity that’s bordering on chaos.

Partially, this has been a product of the draws, and the wrench
that the current rankings of Justine Henin and Sharapova have thrown into them.
Henin had to face Sharapova and Stosur early in Paris, and Clijsters early at
Wimbledon. Maria, who seemed to be playing as well as anyone, had to face her
nemesis, Serena, in the fourth round at Wimbledon. But when you look at the
bigger picture, what’s striking isn’t that the old guard hasn’t dominated the way we
might have predicted, it’s that there’s no new guard there to take their
places. Each of the women I’ve mentioned so far made her debut all the way back in the 1990s, with the exception of Sharapova, who isn’t exactly a new face; she won Wimbledon in
2004. 

If you have a plausible overarching explanation for this aging process,
you’re one up on me. Clijsters and others say that it’s the physical nature of the
WTA now, and the women probably do hit harder then ever. But this has been a
long-running trend. When Steffi Graf won her Golden Slam in 1988, we didn’t
foresee someone like Monica Seles coming along so soon to knock off her off her pedestal—Graf played the most powerful and intimidating baseline game in the
history of women’s tennis up to that point. But there Seles was, just a couple of years later, taking Graf’s power and sending it right back—and past—her. When Serena won her Serena Slam in
2003, it looked like she would dominate for years. And, for the most part, she has. While she’s had her lean
seasons, no one has come along to knock off her and take over. There hasn’t
been a Monica, a new future, this time around.

The other theory I’ve heard recently is that the tour’s
age-eligibility rule, which limits the number of tournaments that young players
can enter, has held some girls back. This is also possible, but if there’s been a
player of Seles’ or Serena’s talent and competitive abilities who has been thrown off track by that
rule in the last decade, I’m unaware of her.

But, even though I’ve just spent 400 words on it, none of
that matters at the moment. There’s no reason to lament the lack of a new
Monica Seles, when the four players who are currently in the semis have provided us
with as much determined excellence (that would be Serena) and inspired surprise
(that would be the other three, the Va’s). We like to see the legends go head to head as often as possible, because their matches immediately go into the lore and
history of the sport. But one small beauty of the Grand Slams is that, when the stars fade out, the tournaments still go on
long enough for you to develop a brief but eye-opening connection with a new player or two. You may never see them again, but each of these players brings
something fresh to your appreciation of the sport. This week I’ve liked
Pironkova’s energy, court sense, and I’ll-hit-any-shot-it-takes-to-win
approach. I’ve liked Kvitova’s athletic attack, even if I can do without her
particular brand of fist pumping. And I’ve liked Zvonareva’s level
third-set head. She really doesn’t come across at all like a basket case off
the court. Deep down inside Vera, maybe there’s a cool competitor just waiting
to break out.

Will we see that competitor break out tomorrow in the semis?
The head to head isn’t comforting: In their only meeting, on hard courts in
Moscow last year, Pironkova routed a hurting Zvonareva 6-0, 6-2. And from a who-is-less-likely-to-melt-down-under-the-pressure-of-a-semifinal-on-Centre-Court point of
view, you’d probably go with Pironkova. She showed intelligence and craft in
the way she kept Venus on the run, and the ball out of her strike
zone, in the quarters. There’s just one minor issue from the Bulgarian’s standpoint: She’s not as good
as her opponent. I mean that purely from a ball-striking standpoint, of course,
but that’s the one that counts the most. The key for Pironkova will be to avoid a lot of straight-ahead baseline to baseline rallies. The key for Zvonareva will be to
keep it together if she doesn’t start winning those rallies right away.

Serena Williams and Petra Kvitova, 20, of the Czech
Republic, have also played just once, with Serena predictably winning 2 and 1, at the Aussie Open this year. Serena obviously played well at that
tournament—she won it—but I’d say she’s been even more impressive so far at
Wimbledon. She’s played with pretty much total calm and self-assurance—I don’t
think I’ve ever seen her smile and joke with her opponents as much as she has
here. Serena and her sister idolized, and were smart enough to model their
serves after, fellow Californian Pete Sampras growing up, and Serena has been
more than a little Sampras-like in the way she’s gotten through this draw. She’s been challenged, but
she’s won with her serve, and she’s won exactly when she’s had to win. There
can hardly be a more perfect distillation of the difference between Serena and
Sharapova than what happened at 9-9 in
their first-set tiebreaker. Sharapova threw in a wild double-fault; Serena took
the same ball and fired an ace for the set. Come to think of it, that’s what
separates Serena from everyone else these days, and maybe why she’s never been
knocked off that pedestal I mentioned earlier.

Does Kvitova have a chance? The first time I saw her play
was at the U.S. Open last year, when she upset the No. 1 seed, Dinara Safina. I came out of
that match thinking that it really hadn’t been an upset, that the better player
and bigger hitter, regardless of her ranking, had won. So, yeah, Kvitova, who can
play offense and create openings, and who competes with gusto, has a chance. It
may happen to be in hell, rather than at Wimbledon, but she has a chance.

by Pete Bodo

It’s the cruelest swing of all, in a game that can be full of them. One moment, you’re up 5-4 and serving for the match at Wimbledon, where a single service break can be insurmountable. It’s match point, but something goes awry and you fail to convert. Deuce. You lose the next point, and you’re now down break point—one measly forehand error or double fault away from dead even. You’ve slid from the summit of achievement all the way down into the valley of despair.

Tomas Berdych found himself in just that position today, in the fourth set of his match against Roger Federer, the defending Wimbledon champion and six-time singles titlist. Worse yet, he then served up a fault on first serve. The world, or at least that portion fixated on tennis, held its collective breath. And Federer could provide them no reason to exhale. As the ball approached his powerful, quick-strike forehand, his knees locked up and he more or less waved at the ball, sending it on a leisurely trip into the net.

It was a telling moment, and don’t for a moment think it had anything to do with the back or leg injuries that Federer cited in his subsequent press conferences. It wasn’t his back that failed, and it wasn’t his leg. It was his nerve. That’s how it is when a great champion’s determination and courage begin to ebb. And, like the proverbial cuckold, he’s always the last to know.

True, it isn’t as if converting that break point would have guaranteed Federer yet another back-from-the-brink win of the kind he managed in his first-round match with Alejandro Falla. And it’s not like Federer has morphed from the greatest player of all time into chump-of-the-month. But that point represents Federer’s present dilemma, and it will stand as a handy symbol for the price Federer has had to pay for emerging from that cocoon of invincibility in which he’s lived so long.

For most of this year, Federer has—consciously or not—operated on the premise that when it really matters, he’d be able to summon up not just his A-game, but his A-desire. His A-appetite. His A-determination.

Not true. What he conjured up today, when he most needed to perform like a storybook hero, was his A-humanity. He’s just like you and me. Only better at tennis. As he would say, after an unconvincing if healthy bout of excuse-making (turns out he was “unlucky” as well as hurt), “I definitely gave away this match, I feel.”

The man Federer “gave” it to saw it a little differently. Berdych was reasonable in his assessment of Federer’s post-match comments, suggesting without malice that Federer was just “looking for excuses.” He dismissed the bad-luck motif, and told us that all this stuff about the back and whatnot was news to him—when he’d read the newspaper in the morning, Federer said he felt “fine,” and pointed out that despite Berdych’s win over him at Wimbledon, Federer won “pretty easy” the last time the men met there.

Neither Federer nor Berdych is given to trash-talking, and Berdych understands that a multiple Wimbledon champion and owner of 16 major titles is unlikely to pronounce himself unworthy of beating a guy who’s only made the semifinals at one other Grand Slam event—a month ago in Paris. But it’s also unlikely that Berdych is going to melt back into the tour woodwork, just another big guy with a big serve and equally menacing ground strokes who happened to come up with a hot hand when it most mattered.

Greg Couch, an AOL.com columnist, asked a pertinent question of Federer: Are these big, strapping guys taking your measure, do you need to do anything differently to combat the threat they represent? After all, Berdych, who’s now 2-0 against Federer in 2010, as well as Robin Soderling, who blasted Federer out of the French Open in the quarterfinals (thereby ending TMF’s Grand Slam semifinal streak at 23) are among the top performers this year (Soderling lost today to Rafael Nadal, albeit while suffering from an injury that was confirmed by a televised close up of his heavily taped foot during an injury timeout).

The way Berdych and Soderling have been playing is bound to resuscitate the “big men will rule” predictions that began when Marat Safin astonishingly belted his way to the U.S. Open title back at the dawn of the new millenium, and which Roger Federer, with assists from Rafael Nadal and the unreliable Safin himself, stopped dead in its ontological tracks. But now that Federer appears increasingly vulnerable, and Soderling and Berdych have shown themselves capable of beating both icons, it’s bound to re-emerge—with a vengeance.

Federer dismissed Couch’s suggestion, saying, “Well, if I’m healthy I can handle those guys, you know. Obviously it’s a pity that [Juan Martin] del Potro is not around, because I think he would have a run at world No. 1 or a run at another Grand Slam. It’s unfortunate for him. But, you know, he’s been playing well, and these guys do play very well. I played these guys 10 times. They’re not going to reinvent themselves in a year, you know.” 

Funny that Federer should mention del Potro, who overwhelmed him in the U.S. Open final last September. Del Potro has been sidelined since the beginning of this year with a terrible wrist injury, and his return has been put off month after month. But put him in the company of Berdych, Soderling, and perhaps even Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, as a new wave of big men reviving an old theory. Perhaps Federer, in his signature passive-aggressive way, is not as oblivious to the big man theme as he made out. It’s undeniable that in the last four Grand Slam events he’s played, he’s lost to one of the towering, physical players three times (on the fourth occasion, he beat Andy Murray for the Australian Open title in February).

Federer was talking about his sore back when he said, “It’s just not nice when it doesn’t go away and you can’t play freely. That’s what I was missing today.” But it was not simply Federer’s back that prevented him from assuming leadership in the match, and working his magic untrammeled. As he said a little later: “He [Berdych] played well when he had to. It was brutal for me. Every time he had a chance, he took it. On the break points—he played great on those. Then when I had chances early on, I was actually not too bad, I just felt like I got the unlucky bounce once in a while, you know. Thirty-all he got it on the line over and over again. I just felt like I couldn’t create enough chances to really get the breakthrough. When I did have chances, I played poorly. It was just a frustrating match the way it all went.”

With those words, Federer gave a fair description of exactly why it can be so hard to beat a big, powerful player who can lean on you, take your time away, irrespective of the state of your back, or leg. It’s true on any fast surface, and particularly so here at Wimbledon. Sure, the courts have been slowed down, making life easier for ground-strokers and baseline players. But the impact on the serve has been less pronounced, and the serve remains a greater weapon on grass than any other surface.

So what of that critical swing at the end of the match, with Berdych going from match point up to break point down?

“I think it was one of my, like, toughest close up of a match when I was serving. I would say through all my career matches, this one was the toughest one to close up, this match against Roger, Centre Court in Wimbledon. But, you know, I handle it pretty well. I just closing up with my serve. I didn’t lost it. And, you know, I mean, that’s how it is. It was a really close match, about a few points. This day it just went on my side.”

That’s an honest and humble assessment from a man who made the round-trip from the peak to the valley and lived to tell about it. Luck had very little, if anything, to do with that exalted journey.

By Pete Bodo

Howdy. I was just over at Radio Wimbledon, chatting on air with the station’s talented interviewer, Sam Lloyd. RW is one of the nicer features at Wimbledon; it’s a very professionally run operation with a robust, expert staff. More than a million people listen via the Internet, and I like thinking that some kid in Mumbai, or Uzbekistan, is sitting there, daydreaming about Wimbledon – imaging what it must be like to be here, to watch Roger Federer or Serena Williams swing the stick.

Yesterday was a remarkable day here at Wimbledon, and today could offer more of the same. Let’s face it, three of the four matches are very close to pick-ems  – the only quarterfinal prediction that would strain credulity would be Yen-Hsun Lu of Taiwan bouncing Novak Djokovic. This is a shame, because I really like everything about “Randy” Lu, starting with his ultra-clean game.

Things were a little hectic after Lu took out Andy Roddick the other day, so I didn’t catch his presser. It’s a pity, because it was a gem.

Lu is 26, and has been a pro since 2001. Unfortunately, his father – the guiding hand in his tennis development – died right around the time he turned pro. “He was always planning which direction I should go,” Lu remembered. “I should go to school or keep going professional?   In the moment (I decided to go pro), he pass away. So I’m just upset that he didn’t (share it) with me.That’s why I’m just very sad about this. But today I think he’s here and he also very happy for me. . . yeah.”

Lu’s father was a chicken farmer, raising the animals for tablefare. “I can catch chicken,” Lu revealed. “I can show you. Yeah, I’m serious. I can catch a chicken. It’s very tough work. You work between 1 and 6 in the morning, because that time the chicken cannot run away because they cannot see.”

But Lu had no desire to follow in his father’s footsteps in the barnyard, “I don’t really like because it smelled so bad. It’s tough work.”

In school, Lu was asked to choose an English name for his class in that tongue. He explained: “In Taiwan, it’s difficult to pronounce my (proper) name. So the English teacher, they want us to get American-style name.”

For reasons Lu didn’t disclose, he chose “Randy.” At the time, he didn’t know the meaning of the name when it’s used as a common-slang noun (okay, consult your Urban Dictionary, folks), and when asked if he wanted to know, Lu said, “No, better not. . .”

He smiled. He knows now.

Given the frosty relations between China and Taiwan, I can see weeping and hear the gnashing of teeth – as well heads rolling – in the Chinese tennis development program, which hasn’t produced a single male player of Lu’s caliber. I don’t see it as an embarrassment for China, but the way I see it doesn’t count; it’s how the Chinese see it.

The bitterness between tiny Taipei (aka the Republic of China) and giant China runs deep; in a capitulation to the Chinese, Wimbledon lists Lu as a native of Taipei (TPE), which is the Chinese name for the place the natives (including Lu) prefer to call Taiwan. Why Wimbledon would capitulate to the will of the Chinese on this I don’t know, but will attempt to find out.

Anyway, Novak the Entertainer is a prohibitive favorite in the match, but the way things have been going here that hardly means he’s safe. Maybe Lu can pull off another upset, and celebrate with the chicken dance. He’s on the run of a lifetime, and that always diminishes the significance of the form chart.

As Lu said the other day, trying to explain how he felt after surviving Roddick: “I make this result. I’m really proud myself to share this victory with him (my father) in the sky. I hope he see this match. So in that moment, I just sit and tell myself, I done it. I done for my father. I done for myself also.I done for all the people support me.”

Enjoy the tennis, feel free to post your comments on the action here.

Thomas Muster has lost the first match of his comeback 6-2, 6-1 to Conor Niland at the Braunschweig challenger. Former No. 1 Muster, 42, announced earlier this month that he was planning to make a return on the challenger circuit.

Stanislas Wawrinka has split with longtime coach Dimiti Zavialoff. “He played a central role in my career and I’m very grateful for this,” said Wawrinka, who did not give a reason why the two stopped working together.