Wishing a happy and healthy Thanksgiving to all our American readers. And to everyone else, hope your Thursday is going better than Serena Williams‘, who was forced to withdraw from the 2011 Australian Open. More on that and the ATP World Tour Finals later in the week. For now: parades, mashed potatoes, gravy and football. Happy Thanksgiving.
Andy Murray has qualified for the London semifinals by winning the first set of his match against David Ferrer 6-2. Murray, who went on to win the match 6-2, 6-2, joins Roger Federer in emerging from the Group A round robin.
Federer had assured he would be the top finisher in his group by defeating Robin Soderling 7-6(5), 6-3 to record a clean 3-0 sweep in round robin play.
Going into the match, Ferrer needed to defeat Murray in straight sets to qualify.
Gael Monfils, expected to lead France in the Davis Cup final next month, says his foot is not a concern and reports feeling “very good” as the team trains for the upcoming tie against Serbia.
Monfils missed practice on Tuesday and underwent an MRI on Wednesday, raising concerns.
“It was planned that I wouldn’t practice… I was recovering from a cold,” said Monfils, who “took a nap” instead. “Anyway, everything is fine. Like everyone, I have colds… I have the right to blow my nose without everyone thinking I have a crazy virus.”
France’s team doctor said the MRI showed “inflammation between two bones of the foot” but the problem was “nothing serious.”
“If I had a sore foot, I would have said and the captain would have told you the first day,” said Monfils. “The press has made a big thing when there’s nothing.
“What’s a bit annoying is that my relatives called me in a panic… my mother was worried!”
Former French Open semifinalist Dominik Hrbaty has announced his retirement.
The ATP has announced that it has signed the following television deals with broadcasters in various countries:
LONDON (AP)—Roger Federer and Andy Murray easily secured spots in the semifinals of the ATP World Tour Finals on Thursday with straight-sets victories in their last round-robin matches.
Federer continued his dominance over Robin Soderling, beating the Swede 7-6 (5) 6-3 to earn top spot in Group B of the season-ending tournament. Murray followed up by recovering from a shaky start to beat David Ferrer 6-2, 6-2 to hand the Spaniard his third straight loss in the group phase.
Their semifinal opponents will be decided Friday, when the last round-robin matches in Group A are played.
Federer won his third straight group match and improved his career record against Soderling to 15-1, with his only loss to the Swede coming in this year’s French Open quarterfinals.
“(Soderling) always brings out something different every time he plays me, because he has to try different things,” Federer said. “I was able to handle it well, which was a very happy feeling for me to have.”
Federer broke for a 5-3 lead in the second set, hitting a backhand passing shot that Soderling could only return into the net. The second-ranked Swiss then set up match point with a drop shot and converted it when Soderling hit his return into the net.
The two traded breaks once in the first set before Federer took control of the tiebreaker by earning a mini-break with a forehand winner after a long rally, and followed it up with two straight aces for a 5-2 lead. He converted his second set point with a lunging one-handed backhand that Soderling let sail past him thinking it would be long, only to see it land in the far corner of the court.
“At first I was pretty sure it was going out,” Soderling said. “As soon as I let it go, I felt like this one is going much closer to the line than I expected. Of course, it went in. So, yeah, it was a little bit unlucky. But it’s my fault.”
Federer said he hit the shot under pressure but called it a “decent backhand.”
“Unfortunate for him,” Federer said. “But I should have maybe closed the set out earlier myself, too. But it would have been interesting to see what would have happened at 6-all, obviously.”
Federer’s victory meant Murray only had to win a set to clinch second place in the group. He took care of that in 31 minutes, recovering from going down 2-0 in the first set by playing nearly perfect tennis in winning the next seven games to take control of the match.
His only stumble came after breaking Ferrer for the fourth straight time to go up 1-0 in the second set. He was broken at love in the next game, shanking a forehand so badly on break point that the ball hit one of the big video boards hanging over the court.
But Ferrer seemed unable to muster up much energy knowing that he had already been eliminated, and Murray broke twice more for a 5-2 lead. He sealed the victory with an easy forehand winner at the net on his first match point.
The other group features Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Tomas Berdych and Andy Roddick, with all four still in contention for the semifinals ahead of the last round of matches on Friday.
In the doubles competition, top-ranked Bob and Mike Bryan of the United States reached the semifinals by beating Lukas Dlouhy of the Czech Republic and Leander Paes of India 6-3, 6-4. They were joined by Polish duo Mariusz Fyrstenberg and Marcin Matkowski, who won Group A after beating Jurgen Melzer of Austria and Philipp Petzschner of Germany 6-3, 7-6 (7).
MELBOURNE, Australia (AP)—Serena Williams withdrew from the Australian Open because of a foot injury after winning the Grand Slam event the last two years.
Tournament director Craig Tiley released a statement Thursday saying Williams had pulled out of the Hopman Cup international mixed teams competition in Perth and the Australian Open in January.
It will be the second consecutive major Williams misses, and the loss of 2,000 rankings points could cost the 29-year-old star her place in the top 10.
Williams has played only one exhibition match since winning Wimbledon last year. She had surgery after cutting her foot on broken glass at a restaurant following her title. She returned to practice in September but twice put off her comeback, missing the U.S. Open, the season-ending WTA tournament, the Fed Cup and a handful of tour events.
She said she had more surgery last month and couldn’t risk returning before the injury had properly healed.
“As I recently learned, pushing myself back into my intense training too early only caused me further injury and damage,” Williams was quoted as saying. “While I desperately want to be back on the court and competing in the first Grand Slam tournament of the year, it is imperative for my health that I continue to work with my doctors to ensure my foot heals properly.
“This decision, though heavy on my heart, is the right one. I am praying for a healthy recovery and I promise my Aussie fans and my fans around the world that I will be back better than ever as soon as I can be.”
Williams has won the Australian Open five times and is a popular draw in Melbourne.
“Serena is a great champion and we will miss her in January,” Tiley said.
When fit, American sisters Serena and Venus Williams have often dominated women’s tennis during the past decade. Serena has won each of the four majors at least once, and she has 13 Grand Slam singles crowns in all.
Serena Williams finished No. 4 in the rankings in 2010 despite playing only six tournaments, including her wins at the Australian Open and Wimbledon.
She missed three months early in the season with a left knee injury, and hasn’t played a tour tournament since Wimbledon. Despite that, she spent most of the year at No. 1—taking her career tally to 123 weeks atop the women’s rankings—until being replaced by Caroline Wozniacki on Oct. 11.
While recuperating, Serena Williams has spent time pursuing her wide-ranging business and fashion interests and work for her foundation, which is dedicated to educating children in Africa.
Thanksgiving asks us to be thankful on command, which isn’t all that easy. When I walked down the street this morning, was I as thankful as I should have been for that last yellow leaf hanging from an otherwise barren tree on my block? Probably not—once it’s gone, after all, there’s only cold hard colorless winter ahead. If you have to think about appreciating something, how appreciative of it can you really be?
But there is one thing that I have no trouble being thankful for, and it happens to fit right in with this column. Even better, I get to appreciate it virtually every day. Here’s what happens: I walk into my gym, and on the way down to the locker room I pass the treadmills. There I see a line of people running in place, staring straight ahead at nothing—this gym doesn’t equip its treadmills with little TV sets; all you get for your veiwing pleasure is another treadmill-runner staring back at you from the other side of the room.
When I get to the bottom of the stairs, I pass a dark room. Inside are a dozen people bicycling in place, as fast they can. Disco blares and a man yells, like a friendly drill sergeant, at the cyclists. It is at this point that I am officially thankful—thankful that I don’t have to get on a treadmill or walk into a dark room full of bicycles. Thankful, above all, that I picked up a tennis racquet as a kid, which saved me from those fates.
I realize that running and spinning have their appeal. I do the former in the summer, and I know people who swear by the endorphin rush they get from the latter. I need that rush, too. It lightens life, clears the cobwebs and the sweat, promotes sanity. Everything is easier to savor—your food, your music, your Martini—with exercise. Even bad music. Last week I walked back from the gym and stopped at the bagel store. The place pipes in soft 1970s pop, stuff you don’t have to pay attention to. It was the same on this morning, but the song that was playing as I waited in line—the ultimate in bubblegum pap, King Harvest’s “Dancing in the Moonlight”—suddenly sounded like a happy masterpiece. Its most comical line, “Everyone here is out of sight,” seemed like the simple truth of life revealed. Everything did feel kind of out of sight.
(It works with good music, too, by the way. Recently I played a morning squash game before work and put on my IPod on the subway ride afterward. As the IPod will occasionally do, it landed randomly and fortuitously on a forgotten favorite, Tom Waits’ “Hang Down Your Head.” I’d liked him in college, but I’d never been part of his cult, exactly; not enough tune to his songs for me. But on this morning, riding a squash rush, the song hit hard in a sad, mesmerizing—and tuneful—way. It’s a melancholy break-up song, but its elegiac quality was exhilarating in the moment.)
Back to my point, which is that tennis and squash offer more than the raw, mood-altering endorphin rush of exercise. There’s the mental exercise involved in strategic thinking, of course, as well as the hand-eye coordination and delicate touch needed to put the ball exactly where you want it to go. More important, there’s the society that surrounds these sports, that’s created by them. Ten years ago, the common conservative, small-town lament was that people in America were “bowling alone”; we weren’t joining together in clubs and on teams anymore. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik provided the liberal-urban counter-point, that the modern yuppie equivalent of the bowling league was the gym, where we were satisfied to be alone together. That seemed like a true, if not exactly comforting, explanation.
Tennis and squash bring us a step closer. We compete alone and together. While you may or may not like the round-robin format at the pro level, I’ve found it to be the best way to play the two sports. As a teenager, I was part of a loose group of players who got together and took over the local college tennis courts each day around 6:00 P.M. (There’s another societal change in the direction of workaholic yuppiedom—I’m still at the office at 6:00 these days). We rotated partners each day, but there was no set schedule. You’d finish a match with Gary, and call over to Rob, who was two courts down, “We’re on for tomorrow, right?”
The same is true at my club today. Two guys who are part of my rotation might be playing each other on the court next to me. On a changeover or during a break, I’ll set up a future game with each of them. I can’t tell you why this simple interaction is so re-assuring. There’s a sense, I guess, that there’s always a match coming up, and that moving from one opponent to the next will always keep the sport fresh. Still, while it’s hardly cutthroat competition, the competitive aspect does count. “How did you do against so-and-so?” is always the question the next day. It’s important to keep something on the line, so that tennis doesn’t become just socializing.
The round-robin can be taken a step further in squash. My club has four courts, lined up next to each other, which means you can rotate between four or five opponents over the course of one afternoon. Soon, maybe next weekend, I’ll walk into the club, past the trudging treadmillers and the maniacal spinners, and walk up to the squash courts. There might be five or six people there (men and women compete in singles in this sport). One might be stretching. Two other might be talking about football or Wall Street or their 3-year-olds. Another will be out on the court, warming up, hitting that little black ball against the bright while walls. Like a tennis court on a sunny day, the squash court will appear to have all the energy of the world gathered inside it. The purity of the white walls set off by the simple red boundary lines is more than beautiful—it makes you hungry to get out on it.
Here’s the moment I’ll be most thankful for. The guy hitting on that court will turn around and see me. He’ll lean out and ask, “You ready?” I’ll take off my warm-up jacket, grip my racquet, start walking forward, and answer, with more antipication than I’ve had for just about anything else all week: “Let’s do it.”
***
Have a good Thanksgiving
The round-robin phase of the ATP World Tour Finals has worked out ideally for Roger Federer: three matches played, three matches won, zero sets lost. After a 7-6 (5), 6-3 win over Robin Soderling on Thursday, his games-won to games-lost is a dominating 37-20.
Soderling came out clubbing the ball as hard as he could, trying to rattle Federer. But the Swede couldn’t keep it up, losing his serve in the third game. For a minute, it looked as if the match might turn into another Federer romp, akin to the Swiss’ 6-1, 6-1 drubbing of Soderling five weeks ago in Shanghai. It wasn’t to be, though—Federer started his service game at 4-3 with a double fault and eventually lost it by over-hitting a forehand.
In the ensuing tiebreak, Federer took an early mini-break lead after a patented inside-out forehand (preceded by a weary Soderling chasing balls madly from side-to-side). It was soon 6-4, but Soderling had new life after a Federer forehand caught the net. Soderling appeared to have pushed matters to 6-all when he drilled an inside-out forehand of his own that Federer barely got to. Still, he reached it, looping a high, lame-looking backhand pass through the middle. Fatally, Soderling choose to let it go. It landed in, ending up a set that could have gotten much more complicated for Federer.
A competitive second set went on serve until Soderling held the ball at 3-4. There was little separating the players at this juncture, but Federer put himself ahead—for good—with two outstanding shots. At 30-30, the players engaged in a fabulous rally that Federer abruptly terminated with a flawless inside-in forehand. On the break point, the always-suspect-at-net Soderling approached to Federer’s backhand and got a resounding response. The Swiss unloaded down the line that Soderling was helpless to handle on the forehand volley.
Five more points on Federer’s serve and the match was over in an hour and 28 minutes. It was a textbook statistical performance—65 percent of first serves made, 82 percent of first serve points won, 54 percent of second serve points won, a 23/18 winners to unforced errors ratio and two of four break-point chances converted.
Now, with a day off, Federer could not be better placed as he heads into Saturday’s semifinals, rested and reassured by his fine level of play.
—Tom Tebbutt
