Read More Andy Murray’s Tweet:

at

Watch More Videos from:
at

LeBron James came out this weekend to watch Rafael Nadal show his talents in South Beach. Accompanying teammate Dwyane Wade and his two sons, the Miami Heat star took in Nadal’s match against Kei Nishikori and participated in the pre-match coin toss.

"There’s certain things in Miami that guys should experience," Wade told reporters. "So I had to drag LeBron out here, but I think this is something he’ll probably come back to next year and come back for years after that. This is a good experience."

A few observations:

1. Combined, Nadal and LeBron have nine titles. Of course, combined, Nadal and I have nine titles too.

2. Chris Bosh can’t score an invite? (He did attend the tournament a few days earlier, sans teammates.)

3. I’d imagine Roger Federer saw these pictures and wondered why LeBron and D-Wade didn’t come to his match.

Read More Tennis’s News from:

I didn’t see Kim Clijsters‘ epic comeback against Ana Ivanovic. Unless you’re in Miami right now, neither did you. Weather delays forced the fourth-round match at the Sony Ericsson Open to tiny Court 2, which doesn’t support television broadcasts.

For Ivanovic fans, it was probably just as well. The 23-year-old Serb was one point away from the biggest win of her recent comeback, leading the second-ranked Clijsters 5-1, 40-0 in the decisive third set. And then it all came undone.

Those three match points were wiped away. Two more followed. By the time it was over, Clijsters had prevailed 7-5 in the third-set tiebreaker 7-5 and completed the most epic comeback on the WTA this year. And Ivanovic had a broken racquet.

Clijsters spoke about her comeback after the match:

"Even if it’s 5-1, you start a game at 0-0. Your opponent has to win four points. You just try to work your way back into it. When you feel your opponent starts to be a little less aggressive and makes a few more mistakes, or looks at the sideline a little bit more, you noticed those things.

"That’s what made me think there was still a little chance."

Maybe we read that different ways, but that sounds like Clijsters is trying to say Ivanovic choked (in the nicest possible way, of course — she is Kim Clijsters, after all). Reports from folks in Miami said Clijsters played phenomenally in the final games, painting the lines with rocket groundstrokes and attacking Ivanovic’s serve. It takes two to tango, though, and if you read Clijsters’ quotes, she makes it clear that her confidence was buoyed by Ana’s lack of it. Frankly, whether or not Ana choked is irrelevant. Clijsters believed it to be so and forced the issue.

Ivanovic was more sanguine about the loss than you’d expect:

"It’s very hard, yeah — you should see my racquet. But I felt like I did nothing wrong. I had my opportunities and she played some really good tennis. I fought hard and stayed with her the whole match. I’m of course disappointed but there are positives.

"[...] I kind of broke my racquet, then kind of cried a little bit. And then I was OK."

There were positives. Once Clijsters got back on serve, Ivanovic held at 5-6 to force a tiebreaker. After getting down early in that, she managed to tie at 5-5 before Clijsters won the final two points. Maybe she didn’t choke after all.

I don’t know, though. Thanks to some bad luck, poor planning and a television network’s reluctance to think outside the box, the specifics of what happened Tuesday afternoon on Court 2 will be left to our imaginations.

Read More Tennis’s News from:

The last two Miami winners faced off tonight, but you wouldn’t know it watching this messy quarterfinal punctuated by winners out of nowhere and errors everywhere. Especially off the racquet of 2010 champion Kim Clijsters, who lost to 2009 titlist Victoria Azarenka, 6-3, 6-3, in 80 long minutes.

It’s not that Azarenka, wailing and whaling away, didn’t bring quality tennis. She brought enough, using depth and all that pace to hit a dozen winners. It’s just that the Planet Tennis stat of the match was this one: 39. That was the number of errors from Clijsters, who threw in 16 winners, but mostly played listless tennis that made you wonder if she wanted to be playing (and why you were watching).

Clijsters was broken three times in the first set, which ended when she barely got to a return Azarenka barely got back. Azarenka’s return clipped the net; Clijsters’ reply went into it. It was an appropriately undramatic end to an undramatic set.

The second set was a little better. Especially once Clijsters faced two match points down 1-5. You couldn’t help but wonder if she’d come back, even then, considering how she came back after being down 1-5 in the third yesterday against Ana Ivanovic. But today it wasn’t to be, and the match ended when Clijsters hit a ball long on the third match point.

Before the match Clijsters told Brad Gilbert, “I’m a little tired.” After the match Azarenka told Gilbert, “I thought she would be a little tired.” The Planet Tennis word of the day? Tired, of course.

Clijsters has seemed tired lately, both mentally and physically. She barely got to this match, having faced five match points against Ivanovic. She said afterwards she wasn’t feeling the ball. Then there’s also the shoulder injury, the reason she retired against Marion Bartoli in Indian Wells. And she commented recently about the obligations that come with being in the Top 10 again. Her comments last week that she’d pull out of several Asian tournaments, apparently because of radiation fears, were surprising too. Lately she hasn’t sounded as…ambassadorial. Time to heal and recharge the batteries, perhaps?

As for Azarenka, it’s hard to know what to make of her these days. She’s a regular in the Top 10, but you can’t help but feel it’s not enough. Is it because, among all the young players, she was the sexy pick for so long but hasn’t done as well as expected? Or perhaps that she’s often compared to contemporary Caroline Wozniacki, who’s leaving everyone in the rankings dust? Plus there’s always a new young player to watch—the sexy pick now seems to be Petra Kvitova (Bud Collins is keeping an eye on her) or Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova. Yet on her way to this match Azarenka beat Pavlyuchenkova, who beat Kvitova. And, of course, Wozniacki’s no longer around either.

Azarenka said after the match that something’s changed, that she’s now “more happy and stable” on court. We’ll see if that makes a difference, starting tomorrow in her semifinal match against Vera Zvonareva.

—Bobby Chintapalli

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at

MIAMI, Fla.—David Ferrer had a case of indigestion yesterday. So, apparently, did an infant who began to wail just as Ferrer prepared to serve, down 5-7, 1-1, 30-40 in his quarterfinal with Mardy Fish at the Sony Ericsson Open. Twice, Ferrer pulled back off the service notch because the unhappy baby interrupted his concentration, glancing toward the source of the noise.

The gesture may be enough to shame a couple of chatty friends, or one of those ultra-important types who just can’t turn off his cell phone like ordinary people do, but an infant couldn’t care less. Not about Ferrer’s stomach issues, or his equally pressing service issues. Ferrer quickly realized that he wasn’t going to win this one, so he gritted his teeth and forged ahead with his toss and swing despite the Sesame Street sound track.

Whap! Double fault—whereupon Ferrer petulantly fired a ball in the direction of the crying infant, causing all the young parents in the crowd to gasp (most of them had the good sense to leave their childrern home with grammy, but must have been moved by feelings of solidarity). With his tummy aching and even the babes-in-arms clearly against him, Ferrer folded up his game. He won just one more game before Fish wrapped it up on his first match point.

“You tried to clock (the baby) with the ball,” a reporter charged during the formal post mortems.

“It was one moment in the match,” Ferrer said, shrugging, “but nothing special.”

“He’d probably take that one back if he could,” Fish remarked. “He’s a very nice guy. Obviously he was flustered.”

It isn’t the best of days to parse Ferrer’s game, although his stomach ailment didn’t appear to be a factor until after he’d dug himself into a big hole. Fish has been serving extremely well in this tournament, lobbing rather than merely firing aces, and generally confusing opponents with a colorful palette of spins and cuts. Fish is no giant at 6’2″, but then Ferrer is well below the ATP mean at 5’9″. Thus, when Ferrer is receiving a powerful, rangy opponent’s serve, he has to maneuver his racket less like a baseball or cricket player taking a cut than a Romanian monk trying to fend off a vampire with a cross.

Fish made some interesting comments about his serve; he obviously knows where his break points are buttered. He confessed that he tends to “overserve,” citing his first-serve percentage of 37 in his match against Richard Gasquet. “I know he’s a very good returner, so sometimes in the back of your mind you’re trying to over-serve and hit it much too hard.”

Fish worked on various parts of his serve after the Gasquet match to get it back in good working order, and has served with greater modulation—and success—since. He likens big servers such as himself to baseball pitchers, who pay a lot of attention to the mechanics of their motion and are well aware of the need to keep batters guessing. His next opponent probably will be that lethal returner, Novak Djokovic, so Fish will need to be in full command of his service powers. “I’ll have to mix up speed, spins, kicks, flats, hard, slice, all that stuff—just to keep him off balance.”

Admittedly, Ferrer had an unusually difficult day, but it still leaves open the question: Why do these sorts of things happen to him at big tournaments? He’s been an absolute model of consistency, and he’s maintained a ranking over a significant period that even Fish can only covet (long stretches in the Top 10, a career-high of No. 4, a current ranking of No. 6). He’s been to the final of the year-end ATP championships, and made a semi and two quarterfinals at Grand Slam events. Yet he’s never won a Masters 1000 event or better and reached only one final (Rome, 2010). And he’s already 28 years old.

Other players who never made No. 1 and/or won a major have done better. The extreme example is  Andy Murray, although he’s been ranked higher than Ferrer. Murray has already bagged six Masters Series titles and been in three Grand Slam finals. Nikolay Davydenko, who’s just a little older than Ferrer provides a better comparison; he has three Masters titles to his name. Ivan Ljubicic has played four finals, winning one. Fish himself has played—and lost—three Masters finals.

I asked Fish why he thought Ferrer had so much trouble punching through at that highest of levels, and he wouldn’t bite. He said: “No, this guy’s got some solid results. He’s got results on every surface. I think he’s made the quarterfinals of Wimbledon. He’s put himself in the semifinals of Australia and the U.S. Open at different times. He’s got tournament wins on clay, on indoor hard courts, fast courts, slow courts, doesn’t matter. The guy is one of the fittest guys in the world in any sport. Guy can run forever. You know, he battles and plays hard.

“You respect the heck out of him just the way he plays. He’s one of my favorite players to watch. Fights for everything. There’s nothing—he doesn’t go out and blow anybody off the court. I respect the heck out of his career. It’s tough to play like that. You’ve got to be real strong.”

Okay, but…

I broached the subject with Ferrer, too, trying to be respectful and knowing that he’s a tough quote, especially in a language not his own. Why has he had so much trouble getting over the hump at big events?

“Well, it’s my game, no?  My game need to do a lot physic (fitness). My fitness is very important for me. I need to work every day, no, because my game is very consistent, and I need to play very regular all the time.”

I’m assuming “regular” means “consistent,” but that reply still fails to satisfy, as did the spirited defense of Ferrer offered by Fish. Ferrer seems to have the fitness thing nailed, as well as the consistency thing. My own feelings are pretty simple; Ferrer just seems to come up small at big moments (shrug). It’s a psychological thing—some deep-seated if not terribly meaningful lack of self-confidence or self-worth as a player. Many pros have that problem, although it kicks in much more frequently and/or sooner, keeping them out of that elite Top 10 group of which Ferrer is a legitimate and deserving member.

So the mystery continues and the career clock keeps ticking. Should Ferrer end his career without having won a Masters or better, he would truly have a unique if not particularly desireable distinction.

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at

We talk about turning points in sports a lot because oftentimes there’s more than one over the course of a match. That wasn’t the case in Mardy Fish’s surprisingly straightforward 7-5, 6-2 win over David Ferrer, sending the American into the semis.

At 5-all in a well-contested opening set, Ferrer served at 30-30. Two double-faults later, he had surrendered the first break of the match and would proceed to win just two more games. If that isn’t the definition of a turning point, I don’t know what is.

Ferrer has long been classified as a player who can outlast anyone with his consistent shotmaking, but the Spaniard’s play worsened as the match went on. He struck an usually high amount of errors and, even more puzzlingly, seemed to give in mentally. When a crying baby interrupted his service motion early in the second set—was there any doubt he’d go on to lose the point?—Ferrer hit a ball into the stands after the inevitable break. Judging be the sharp, derisive whistles from the crowd, I can only assume it was lobbed toward the wailing infant.

With the win, Fish is now the highest-ranked American on the ATP tour and can crack the Top 10 if more results go his way. He prevailed today by doing the same things that got him where he is in the rankings: by mixing in timely offense with patient, deep rally shots; moving well; and utilizing his serve as a weapon. He was never broken today; in the first set he won 90% of his first-serve points. The second-set encore was even better, at 92%. Better for everyone, that is, except Ferrer.

—Ed McGrogan

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at

Spending changeovers with a white towel draped over her head like a sunburned surfer seeking shelter from the elements, Vera Zvonareva likes to limit face time between points. But the third-seeded Russian, who even applies sunscreen while her towel shields her face like a veil, needed no such protection when staring down a set point today against Agnieszka Radwanska. She ripped an ace to save it, then used a sustained dose of forward thinking to repel Radwanska, 7-5, 6-3, to reach the Sony Ericsson Open semis for the second time in the past four years.
 
Last year’s U.S. Open runner-up could face Kim Clijsters in a rematch of their Flushing Meadows final if the No. 2 seed, who saved five match points in fighting back from a 1-5 third-set deficit against Ana Ivanovic yesterday, beats 2009 Key Biscayne champ Victoria Azarenka in today’s 7 p.m. quarterfinal.
 
While Zvonareva lacks a major weapon, she can hit every shot from virtually anywhere on the court. Her versatility was valuable as the 2010 Wimbledon singles and doubles runner-up astutely attacked the front court on pivotal points, winning 17 of her 20 trips to the net.
 
“It was a very important moment down set point in the first set,” Zvonareva told ESPN2. “It could be a different story if I had lost the first set. I felt like I was able to raise my game at the end of each set. I had to take my chances. I had to come in and I’m really happy with the way I came to net.”
 
The ace that saved the set point sparked a run in which Zvonareva won 11 of the next 14 points to take the first set, after breaking Radwanska at love for a 6-5 advantage.
 
A smooth ball striker with shrewd court sense, Radwanska’s skills are more subtle than most. She has exquisite feel for the ball and showed some slick stick skills in sprinting back to the baseline, tossing up a blind lob over the shoulder and firing a running forehand pass down the line to hold in the first game of the second set.
 
Ultimately, Zvonareva was the more proactive player who was willing to push the issue when it mattered most. She is adept at creating angles off her backhand on balls hit directly down the middle, and did just that to draw a forehand error and break for 3-2. She stretched her lead to 5-2 before Radwanska slid a forehand pass beneath the Russian’s racquet to break back for 3-5.
 
It was a brief reprieve. On her second match point, Zvonareva blasted a backhand pass down the line to seal the one hour, 34-minute match.
 
Though she’s never reached the Key Biscayne final, Zvonareva has enjoyed past success at Crandon Park: she won the prestigious Orange Bowl junior title as a teenager, and if she can take the title on Saturday, will surpass Clijsters for the world No. 2 rank.

—Richard Pagliaro

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at

by Pete Bodo

MIAMI, Fla.—Near the end of Ana Ivanovic’s press conference yesterday, someone asked her to talk about Andrea Petkovic, who is nominally a German, having spent almost her entire life there, but was born in Tuzla, Bosnia. “A lot of us don’t know her well,” the reporter admitted, “Obviously she did well in Australia. I know she is 23. Can she beat anyone out there?”

“Yeah,” Ivanovic replied, her eyes lighting up. “You gonna get to know her.”

Ivanovic’s tone suggested that we would not be disappointed, but also that it was going to be fairly impossible not to get to know Petkovic, and that doing so would be an experience comparable to, oh, your first ride in an F-15 fighter jet, or your first Lady Gaga concert. “She’s great girl, and she’s playing really well. I think she can challenge anyone out there…She’s (also) very, very smart girl—and very well educated.”

“And she’s really a Serb, of course,” someone interjected.

“Yeah. Exactly.”

Now keep in mind that Ivanovic had just lost a match (to Kim Clijsters) after being up 5-1 (and, ultimately, five match points) in the third set—not an ideal time for talking about how great some other player is, especially one who, unlike Ivanovic, was still in the hunt at the tournament. But Ivanovic is one of those girls who just can’t help but be nice, and Petkovic is not just her doubles partner but a fellow Serb. And there isn’t a group of players on tour who share a comparable sense of solidarity, or seem to draw as much inspiration from each other (and we’re talking about players of both sexes), as the Serbs.

Petkovic has captivated one and all here in Miami, as she has at past tournaments. And that “Petko dance” is the least of it. She’s one of those people who seems to exist to remind you that there’s no point twisting yourself up in knots, putting on airs, adopting a game plan for how to deal with the basics of life, or worrying about how you’ll be perceived by others. Just go out there and be yourself; meet the world with an open mind and a smile and all the rest will take care of itself.

She isn’t the first person to bring us this message, but it’s rare to get it from a professional tennis player. As a group, ATP and WTA pros are a clannish, self-sufficient and stand-offish group, and there’s no point blaming them for it. It wasn’t always that way, of course; you can blame the degree to which tennis pros seem to occupy a different plane of existence (where their neighbors are film and rock-music stars) on the growth of the game, and the specific direction of that growth (the march has been relentlessly upscale—bourgeois, if you prefer—since Day One, Bethanie Mattek-Sands with her knee socks and eye-black non-withstanding).

But lo and behold, here’s Petkovic, a young lady who engages the people living outside her bubble without simultaneously implying she’s only doing it because some agent or tennis official is holding a gun to hear head. Walk away from a meeting with her and you’re likely to ask yourself, “Why are the rest of them so guarded and opaque? It doesn’t seem all that complicated…”

Petkovic appears to live by the advice good parents give their good children as they prepare for life: Look people in the eye, shake hands firmly, always tell the truth, give others the benefit of the doubt—and don’t ever think you’re better than anyone else. This isn’t an easy attitude to maintain in a game that thrives on notions of elitism, right down to the ranking system, and it can get you in plenty of trouble on the WTA side, where secrets are closely guarded and the overarching seige mentality keeps many women from ever saying what they really feel. I asked Petkovic if she ever got in trouble for actually saying what she thinks, and she answered:

“It gets me often in trouble…Sometimes I talk sarcastically and people don’t seem to get it, especially in the writing media. You cannot really bring that to the media, so I get in trouble all the time. But I learned to deal with it in the last (recent times). I’m not so long on the tour. I’m now on the tour maybe for one‑and‑a‑half years. Especially in the beginning I made some mistakes that got back to me, and I’m more careful now. But I still try to stay as honest as I can.”

That’s good enough, I suppose, given her situation. And it’s only going to be more challenging for this refereshing new voice and face as she improves. She’ll be playing Maria Sharapova in the semis of the Sony Ericsson Open tomorrow, in what is most decidedly a great opportunity. Sharapova showed last night that her game is still infected with the virus that causes it to freeze up for long periods, and she can’t afford to have that happen against Petkovic, at least not the way the 23-year-old from Darmstadt, Germany, has been playing. Remember, Petkovic knocked out Venus Williams and Sharapova in back-to-back matches just a few months ago at the Australian Open. And here, she’s taken the scalp of Caroline Wozniacki (the current No. 1) and Jelena Jankovic (No. 7).

Petkovic is only just making her move (her current ranking is 23), but that’s partly because she chose to complete a university-level education in Germany before taking her chances on the pro tour. As the daughter of a teaching pro whose dreams of playing the tour were crushed, she not only understood the risks of trying to become a pro, she had them drilled into her. She practiced and played a bit while she was school, but didn’t really fling herself into the tennis culture with the requisite commitment until around 2009.

“I had a big fight with my dad because he didn’t want me to be a professional tennis player at that time when I was making decisions if I should go to university or try to be a professional tennis player…he didn’t really make it and I think he didn’t want his little daughter to go through the same things. But, yeah, I had the bigger head in this decision, and I’m quite happy that it ended this way.”

Stylistically, Petkovic plays a bread-and-butter game. She’s very solid, but also aggressive and always looking to force the action. And she’s willing to follow up her penetrations with finishing placements or volleys. She considers herself (along with the likes of Petra Kvitova) part of a “new generation”—women who have big games and a less defensive mindset than some of the old guard.

“I think what we all have in common is just the general fitness level is just raised so much,” she said. “That’s why you have to be—even for an aggressive player like me or Petra who are going for their shots—we have to be able to play them 10 or 12 times in a rally. That’s just a big difference to earlier times, maybe.”

It will be worth remembering those words when the season of interminable matches, aka the European clay-court circuit, gets underway. And, as befits a woman with her attitude, Petkovic is awed by Steffi Graf but was most impressed and influenced by Serena Williams.

“I can really relate to her (Serena) with her fighting spirit on court, and she impressed me so much with the way she turned around matches even when everything was lost. I just remember this match against Azarenka at the Australian Open, where she was down 6‑2, 4-0 and Azarenka was playing unusual and she kept playing unbelievable. Serena just stepped it up two levels, and it was too much for Victoria.  That impressed me so much. She was the first player that really, really, yeah, that really touched me emotionally on the court.”

Perhaps if Petkovic were a German by blood rather than citizenship (her father initially went to Germany to coach tennis, but moved the family there when the former Yugoslavia began to disintegrate) she might feel differently. But she seems so much more the Serb. Let’s be real here; Graf was known and adored for many reasons, but a sense of humor was not among them. Whereas…

“We (Serbians) hang around all the time together, you know, and Novak is making his jokes, you start to try to be funny, as well. Sometimes you are; sometimes you are not. And it’s just a very good energy between all of us. So I really enjoy all my time spending with them.”

Petkovic insists that whatever else happens here in Miami, this will be the last place where she’ll perform the Petko dance after each win. It’s a good move, because the times she’s done it here she seemed to be merely going through the motions, quickly and half-heartedly. Clearly, the dance has become dangerously close to something like a trademark or “brand,” instead of a spontaneous act.

And that’s not how Petko rolls.

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at

Novak Djokovic will lose again. He might even lose tonight; his opponent, Kevin Anderson, stopped a similar hot streak of his in Key Biscayne in 2008. But before that happens, and before we try to answer any more unanswerable questions about whether he’s going to sweep all the Slams and dominate the tour for the next decade while traveling from city to city on top of a bi-plane, let’s take a moment to appreciate what Djokovic has already done. We know the stats, we know the 21-match win streak; unlike Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, though, we don’t hear much about Djokovic from an aesthetic point of view. Even in his current form, there’s not a lot of talk about why he’s worth watching. Here are five reasons that come to my mind when I see him play.

***

It’s So Much Easier to Watch Him Serve Now
Remember the old serve? Or, I should say, remember the old serves, plural? Djokovic went through approximately one per season. What united them all, though, was the amount of effort he seemed to expend. There was a hitch in the middle that he had to fight through; there was a raspy and fatigued-sounding grunt; there was a sense that he was serving up a hill and into the court, rather flowing into the shot. Djokovic still grunts, but the sense of effort and fatigue is gone from his motion. I’m not sure if his toss is farther into the court now, or he’s changed his arm position when he takes the racquet back, but he’s on top of the ball now, and it’s penetrating more easily.

But I wouldn’t enjoy watching the new Nole serve as much if I’d never seen the old. It’s rare that we get this chance with a top athlete, but more than most, Djokovic’s career has been a work in progress—it’s taken him awhile to streamline both his game and, from what he says, his life off the court.

***

He Doesn’t Put You on an Emotional Roller Coaster
In the past, even when he was winning, Djokovic played with a barely buried edge of frustration. It drove him to play well on good days, but it drove him over the edge on bad days. There was always a sense that he might pull the plug at a certain point and just start smacking balls; then, when a few of those balls went in, he’d be right back to sticking his tongue in his cheek and pounding his chest. Not so anymore.

Of course this is a chicken and egg situation: If Djokovic ever plays another close match, he might be right back on the roller coaster. And the old signs of frustration did surface in his matches at Indian Wells. I used to get kick out of the dramatic Nole, but I enjoy the serene version more. There’s an easy sense of purpose to the way he moves between points now, a command that’s calming to see.

***

He’s the Ultimate in Tennis Fluidity at the Moment
Maybe it’s the shiny black clothes he’s been wearing. Maybe it’s the white sneakers. Maybe it’s because he’s dropped a few pounds. But Djokovic seems to be moving with more ease than ever. Is he more fluid than Federer himself? He doesn’t attack the ball when he moves forward, the way Federer does; Djokovic always seems to be cruising, but he’s always there. His specialty is the side to side; from his rubber-legged flying split step to his lightning shuffle across the baseline, Djokovic often looks like he’s dancing back there. It’s tough to get anything by him these days.

***

The Long Forehand Roll and the Short Backhand Takeback
Djokovic’s strokes split the difference between style and efficiency. Where Federer’s are elegant and elongated, Djokovic’s are compact and sleek. What I’ve loved during this run is the easy roll of his crosscourt forehand; he’s making that shot look effortless at the moment. I’ve always been a fan of the Nadal inside-in forehand, where he gets it side-spinning out of his opponent’s reach. But Djokovic’s inside-in might be even better these days. His hapless opponents are nowhere near the thing. On the other side, I like the abbreviated backswing on the backhand. It’s nothing more than what’s necessary, but at the same time it’s not just utilitarian—it works, but it’s not workmanlike.

***

He Still Wears a Shirt that Tells You His Name
Djokovic has always wanted to be the Man, even if it means forcing the issue. Even if it means having your entourage wear shirts with your face on it; speculating about moving to the U.K. to further your sponsorship opportunities; changing racquet companies so you can be the top name at Head, rather than second fiddle to Federer at Wilson. Djokovic is from a small country, and not a rich country, and he and his family have shouted to be heard.

Do you find this obnoxious? I think it’s touching, because underneath the obvious desire for glory, Djokovic is a nice guy and a classy loser. I was scheduled to interview him in Rome in 2007. The interview, as these things usually are, was put off for a couple of days. Finally I was told I would get him after one of his press conferences. But when he finished, Djokovic started to walk off with a friend. Thinking it was my last chance, that the whole trip was going to be wasted, I shouted from behind him, “Novak!” It must come off as pretty rude, but he turned around and smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Oh, hey, sorry, I’ll be ready in a minute.” And he was.

I’m glad Djokovic has changed in certain ways during his run of success—he’s never been more fun to watch. But I also hope he doesn’t get too classy. Do we want a No. 1 player whose parents wear his face on their shirts? Do we want one who tells you his name on his, as if we weren’t already aware of it? Why not? He’s proud of how far he’s come. Right now, though, all he needs to do is play, to cruise around the court and curl those inside-in forehands for winners, to make us appreciate him.

***

Come by Tennis.com for a live chat about Miami, Novak Djokovic, and anything else tennis-related, at 1:00 P.M. EST.

Read More Tennis’s News from:

at