American tennis player Donald Young has apologized to the U.S. Tennis Association, saying he is sorry for the obscenity-laced message he posted on Twitter criticizing the American tennis federation. Last week, Young sent out the expletive-filled tweet, saying he was sick of the treatment he received from the USTA, after losing in the final of a tournament that awarded the organization’s…

Fifth-seeded Sara Errani of Italy beat Maria-Teresa Torro-Flor 6-1, 6-0 at the Barcelona Open on Tuesday. Fellow Italian Alberta Brianti topped third-seeded Tsvetana Pironkova 6-1, 6-2, while Mirjana Lucic of Croatia’s first win of the season was a 7-6 (4), 6-3 victory over No. 4 Ekaterina Makarova of Russia.

Second-seeded Stanislas Wawrinka was upset by German wild card Dustin Brown 6-7 (6), 6-4, 7-5 in the first round of the BMW Open on Tuesday. Wawrinka, making his debut in Munich, was the only seed not to win his opener. Born in Germany to a Jamaican father and a German mother, Brown lived in Jamaica and was ranked No.

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4.25.11

Dear Rafa:

Hi. At first, I wasn’t at all sure that I ought to write this letter. For most people, that gut feeling is enough to make them put  down the old pen, so to speak, and maybe get on the Stairmaster for half-an-hour, or go Ajax the plates around the light switches. Not me! I’m averse to exercise and cleanliness and when I get an idea in my head I like to let it rip. You might be surprised to learn how much fun it is to celebrate birthdays, important holidays and home-team Super Bowl victories in the company of your goldfish.

So the particular idea in my head at this moment is that you should hang up the sticks now, before this Madrid tournament starts, and just kick back and smell the roses. You’ve achieved more already on clay than any man before you, including  Bjorn Borg. Let me go warm-up this coffee and I’ll explain. 

Okay. We get it, Rafa. You’re good on clay. Really good. So how many times do you really need to win Monte Carlo. . . Barcelona. . . Madrid. . . Paris? Seven (Monte Carlos)?  Six (Barcelona)? Five (Roland Garros; sure its a so-so number, but then it’s a Grand Slam event and 99.9 per cent of your peers never even get a sniff of a final). Enough already!

I can anticipate your answer: “The true is, is not about the tournaments.”

Okay, so it’s about the competition, about the challenge to see just how good you can be. It’s about the adrenalin rush, and the ecstasy of victory and the agony of defeat, blah-blah-blah. But I’ve noticed that the only guys who go around claiming that it’s about the ecstacy and agony have no freakin’ idea about the “agony” part. They never experience it! I’m talking guys like you, Michael Jordan, prelapsarian Tiger Woods, Joe Montana. . .

Oh yeah, it really, really hurt to lose to Robin Soderling in the fourth-round of the French in 2009 when your knees felt like rusty hinges on a barn door. Nothing will ever make that little “1″ on your career record at Roland Garros (38-1) go away, will it? (I need a little more coffee here).

Where were we? Oh, yeah,cry me a river, Rafa, but what about your friends and countrymen, like that little dude David Ferrer whom you took to the woodshed in the last two tournaments? Hello, agony! Hello, defeat!

Does it ever occur to you that while you’re biting the trophy, they’re contemplating swallowing cyanide? These are people you grew up with, Jet Boy. People you like. You are to clay-court tennis tournaments what a wolf is to a pen of sheep and don’t think they don’t notice. Don’t for a minute imagine they’re standing there on the awards podium, holding their dinky little runner-up trophies and thinking, as they watch you hoist and lock your fangs on your big shiny one: That ecstacy of victory looks kind of overrated to me. . . I’ll take the agony of defeat anytime! Or even, Those are some guns on that Rafa.

They are thinking, I wonder if that Tonya Harding girl’s phone number is listed?

I am here to tell you, Rafa, that Da-veed, no. 5 in the world and one of the best clay-court players of this era, isn’t all that jazzed about having lost in your last 10 consecutive meetings on clay. And you know what? Were it not for you – Man, what is this, decaf? Hang on.

Were it not for you, Mr. Guns R Us, Roger Federer would probably be closing on 20 Grand Slam titles. With you in the picture, he’s Oh-for-three-in-Grand Slam-clay-court-finals-also-featuring-Rafael Nadal. With you in the picture, he has to keep fielding embarrassing questions about that weird quote from Mats Wilander, you know the one about “How can he be the  greatest of all time if there’s a guy in his own time who he can’t beat?” Up until around 2007, everybody  – including probably the great man himself – thought you’d be kind of cute playing Robin to Roger’s Batman. But you know what? You’re not Robin, Mr. Pirate Pants. You’re. . . Clayface!

Well, anyway. . . I’m wondering, if it’s not the tournaments, nor the competition (WHAT COMPETITION?????) . . . sorry . . . what else could it be?

Surely it’s not the money. You come from Spain, where apparently everybody has plenty of money even though few people seem to have jobs (You have one, I’ll give you that, although at this time of year it’s about as demanding as being from Pittsburgh and drinking beer for a living).

Can it be the ego-thing? I mean, do you get some kind of sick thrill out of all those pictures of you throwing a vicious upper-cut while simultaneously mimicking a knee-shot to the groin? What do you do at home, photo-shop images of your enemies faces into those iconic photos? And where might those enemies come from – certainly they can’t be in tennis. Did some kid steal your lunch money in grade school?  Give you wedgies that have left you kind of paranoid about them for life? You’re just like Ivan Lendl, another pretty good clay court player, but with nobody around to play the part of John McEnroe.

This may sound a little bit like I’m criticizing you, or have some kind of hater-hat on. But really, I’m telling you for your own good. People are starting to talk. Sure, they pay lip service to the idea of perfection, but they sure get tired of it quickly. Often, they end up hating it. And the way you’re going to town here on this clay-court tour, people are beginning to say you’re. . . boring. that maybe watching you destroy people is still fun only in a vaguely sadistic kind of way. They’re starting to see you as Johnny Carson with a revolving cast of Ed MacMahons.

You don’t really look like a stoner to me, Rafa, but when it comes to playing on clay you might consider the wisdom of Nancy Reagan, who advised many of us to “Just Say No.”

And if you don’t want to do this for yourself, think about your image (Imagine overhearing this: Did you see – that poor boy Nadal got his clock cleaned on grass by Donald Young. He’s not very good but you gotta love how hard he fights and he looks like such a nice young man!). And if you don’t care about that, do it for us. And if you don’t do it for yourself, your image, or us, do it for the ATP.

Did you see how last week, while you were beating up on an assortment of ATP stiffs, the WTA popped two freshly-baked champions out of the oven? That gorgeous Julia Goerges girls won in Stuttgart in front of her countrymen and women (there’s no truth to the rumor that certain people wanted to celebrate by immediately marching on Warsaw). What a story! And in mysterious and exotic Fez, a 31-year old Italian woman with a one-handed backhand named Alberta Brianti won her first WTA Tour title (What did they do, clone that Schiavone girl?). Now, those were juicy stories.

You know what we say in journalism, Clayface? “Dog  Bites Man” is not a news story. “Man Bites Dog,” now there’s news – and a story.

Sorry to have to be the one to tell you this, but you’ve become just another rottweiller taking a chunk out of the mailman’s butt. You need to re-invent yourself, and stepping away from the clay would be a good start.

Your Faithful Friend,

Pete

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by Pete Bodo

As conference calls and other similar media events go, it was a corker. Patrick McEnroe, General Manager of the USTA Player Development Program, pulled no punches in discussing the recent controversy created by indiscreet Tweeter Donald Young Jr., following his loss to Tim Smyczek in the final of the USTA’s French Open wild card playoff. The card belongs to the USTA to do with as it pleases, thanks to reciprocal agreement between the French major and the U.S. Open.

Although the call was billed as a forum for discussing that wild card playoff and other, general player development issues, it was clear from the get-go that the main and perhaps only item on the agenda for McEnroe was the Young affair. At times during the call, McEnroe’s tone was so impassioned that you might have easily mistaken him for that other McEnroe.

But Johnny Mac’s most exquisite outbursts were always grievances filed on his own behalf. By contrast, the anger of brother Pat, long known as the patient, level-headed, diligent McEnroe, was fueled by the extent to which Young’s childish and vulgar outburst on Twitter was felt as a cruel blow by half-a-dozen USTA coaches and trainers whose work for McEnroe and the program consisted in large part of working with Young. “My emotions are not just coming from my personal feelings,” McEnroe said. “But from my feelings for our team, the guys who have tried to do everything to help this kid.”

If you don’t know the background, click on the above link or read the post I wrote for ESPN on the genesis of the controversy. But yesterday, McEnroe accurately characterized the incident as just the “tip of the iceberg,” the body of which is a remarkably long history of USTA support for Donald Young frozen solid to a staggering sense of entitlement and self-destructive tendencies in the Young camp. The group consists basically of the 21-year-old champion manqué and his parent-coaches, father Donald and mother Ilona.

This is a truly sad narrative made all the more poignant by the fact that USTA operatives feel that on those occassions when they’ve successfully kept Young’s parents sidelined, Young has been a co-operative, enthusiastic, pleasant kid. That’s one of the reasons the McEnroe and the USTA haven’t simply cut Young off, although it will take an apology and probably a few healthy meals of humble pie at the Young household if the relationship between the parties is going to survive.

McEnroe took pains to point out that the USTA doesn’t want to take over and run any kid’s life. The Player Development program is flexible, and it accomodates players with different desires and needs, including those who want to keep their private or non-USTA coaches involved in the development process. “There are lots of parents and coaches involved,” he said. “We deal with a lot of different scenarios. But we want the relationship to be a two-way street, when a lot of times these people basically come and say, ‘Here’s what we want, here’s what we need for you to do for us.’ That’s just not the way it works.”

McEnroe feels that the Youngs have frequently violated that basic, good-faith concept, and bucked the USTA even while appealing for—and gladly taking—its help. Mostly, this has taken the form of meddling; Young’s parents frequently ignored or reversed the advice and even the specific instructions given to Donald by the USTA coaches working with him. “When the coach working with Donald says that he ought to spend some time before his next match doing some conditioning work and Donald’s mother says, ‘Oh, no, he can’t do that, he has to take a nap…’ well, that gets a little demoralizing, never mind how it might affect Donald’s progress.”

Many USTA-affiliated coaches and trainers have similar stories, all of them pointing toward a culprit that not be a person or persons but an attitude—a sense of entitlement in gifted young players that is so strong that it ruins them—and, in the process, keeps U.S. tennis mired in the doldrums. “We’re trying to affect some change in that culture of entitlement,” McEnroe says. “Sure we live on our own little world, but we (at the USTA) have a passion for this, we have people who care.”

The wild card playoff system (the U.S. has a similar reciprocity program with the Australian Open) that helped create this controversy is part of the effort to diminish the delusional expectations of some gifted players. It departs from the philosophy under which wild cards are meted out to those who are perceived to “deserve” them, rather than those who earned them in an immediate, direct manner—via competition against their peers. Young personally has received 13 wild cards into the U.S. Open (albeit in different draws, including mixed doubles and qualifying) as well as a load of wild cards into other U.S. tournaments. Just how much those free rides have helped—or hurt—him is an open question.

Partly for that reason, the USTA instituted and is committed to sticking with this concept of holding an invitational mini-tournament (this year, the USTA deemed just six players worthy of an invitation, including Young) with the wild card at stake. “This is a golden opportunity to compete and achieve something, not some kind of chore,” McEnroe said. “John Isner showed up for the playoffs when he was No. 70 in the world. And he won it and earned a card. We try to send the message to the players—you need to earn what you get.”

That can be a hard lesson, especially for someone who’s had as much attention and support lavished upon him as Young. That raises the question, Did the USTA somehow have a hand in spoiling Young, simply by giving him too much, too soon?  Ironically, McEnroe is one of the few former players who, thanks to his celebrated older brother, understands how wild cards can hurt as well as help you. Between October of 1998 and the following November, McEnroe received wild cards into seven consecutive tournaments—and never won a match. He believes he holds the ATP record for getting the most wild cards in a single year. “I felt guilty taking them,” he has said. “Down deep I knew I was just getting them because I was John’s brother.”

A sense of entitlement can came in many different forms—and have an unpredictable range of consequences.

The big question now is, Can the Youngs and the USTA move beyond this? Do either of them really want to, or is this the final, disappointing chapter in the history of a former tennis prodigy? It could happen, it could all end right here and now because it’s been almost three, long years since Young hit his career-high ranking of No. 73, which is still a long way and many wins away from his present ranking of No. 95. And left to their own devices, the Young’s haven’t demonstrated any great ability to shepherd Donald to the promised land.

A few weeks ago, Young qualified for Miami shortly after posting his best performance in a big event at Indian Wells. But he lost in the first round to Denis Istomin, after which he promptly disappeared with nary a word to the USTA. I’ve learned that he was next spotted by USTA eyes at the qualifying event for Houston. He showed up to practice on a court adjacent to the one being used Mardy Fish. Donald was out there with Ilona, and an unknown hitting partner of little note. Young did not qualify—although he did go on to win that Tallahassee Challenger the following week (beating only one player with a ranking in the double digits, No. 86 Rainer Schuettler), with USTA strength and conditioning trainer Rodney Marshall helping him out that week.

During his successful run in Tallahassee, Young reportedly turned to Marshall as he battled his way to the title, shouting and repeatedly pumping his fist. But just about a week later, Young, a loser in the playoff tournament, was denouncing the USTA on Twitter, reducing Marshall in effect to a persona non grata. Young hurt a number of people, and that’s why McEnroe let go with both barrels. “I know what all the members of my team are doing on a daily basis, and that’s why I take this so personally. Because they’re my team.”

if Donald Young is going to play in the main draw of the French Open, he’s going to have to get in through the qualifying tournament. He’ll have to earn his place, and unless Young issues some dramatic and heartfelt statements and apologies in the coming days, it could be a pretty lonely quest.

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Donald Young has apologized to USTA Player Development head Patrick McEnroe, as well as USTA coaches Jay Berger, and David Nainkin, the LA Times reports.

On Monday, McEnroe held a conference call to discuss Young’s expletive-laden tirade against the USTA on Twitter after he was not granted an automatic wild card for the French Open and then fell in the final of the USTA wild card playoff to Tim Smyczek.

McEnroe was clearly upset on the call, not only because of the content of what Young said but because, as he pointed out, the USTA has provided Young with free coaching, housing, grant money and a slew of wildcards since 2005. Moreover, he was upset because he believes that his coaching staff has put in a tremendous effort to help the 22-year-old.

“My emotion is not coming from my personal opinions,” McEnroe said. “It’s coming from the people on my staff, our team, that have gone above and beyond to try to help Donald Young, and not just him, but all the players we try to help. Again, we can go back and debate whether you like our program. You can do a referendum on me and my run in another two, three years. Kick me out the door if you don’t like the results. I get that. I understand the position. I understand the responsibility. But I also understand what my team is doing on a daily basis, and I don’t like what I heard. I don’t like my team being put in that situation based on all they’ve done. I do take it personally, but I take it personally because of who I am in my position in this team.”

It is unclear whether Young, who has worked a lot with Berger, Nainkin and USTA physical trainer Rodney Marshall, will continue to seek USTA help. He and his representatives have yet to have yet to accept requests for interviews. Moreover, his father Donald Sr., and his mother, Illona, are both still in the picture as their son’s coaches. Both are teaching pros. It was Donald Young Sr. who requested the wild card for his son after Donald won the Tallahassee Challenger.

However, McEnroe left the door to working with the 98th-ranked Young again as long as he apologized, and apparently he did.

“I’m a pretty positive guy,” McEnroe said. ”Every time Donald has come and worked with our team, he’s been an absolute delight. When he comes, he does what we tell him to do. He goes with the program. He’s gotten better and stronger. There’s no doubt in my mind that he can get a lot better and become a Top 50, Top 30, maybe even a Top 20 player. But you can’t go halfway. You need to be all in. He’s not totally all in. If he doesn’t want to be with us, if he wants to keep his parents as his coaches, go in with someone else, we wish him all the luck in the world and we’ll try to help him…I’m not going to say we’re going to withdraw support. But I’m going to say a lot of things are going to have to happen for us to reconsider.”—Matthew Cronin

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Donald Young has apologized to USTA Player Development head Patrick McEnroe, as well as USTA coaches Jay Berger, and David Nainkin, the LA Times reports.

On Monday, McEnroe held a conference call to discuss Young’s expletive-laden tirade against the USTA on Twitter after he was not granted an automatic wild card for the French Open and then fell in the final of the USTA wild card playoff to Tim Smyczek.

McEnroe was clearly upset on the call, not only because of the content of what Young said but because, as he pointed out, the USTA has provided Young with free coaching, housing, grant money and a slew of wildcards since 2005. Moreover, he was upset because he believes that his coaching staff has put in a tremendous effort to help the 22-year-old.

“My emotion is not coming from my personal opinions,” McEnroe said. “It’s coming from the people on my staff, our team, that have gone above and beyond to try to help Donald Young, and not just him, but all the players we try to help. Again, we can go back and debate whether you like our program. You can do a referendum on me and my run in another two, three years. Kick me out the door if you don’t like the results. I get that. I understand the position. I understand the responsibility. But I also understand what my team is doing on a daily basis, and I don’t like what I heard. I don’t like my team being put in that situation based on all they’ve done. I do take it personally, but I take it personally because of who I am in my position in this team.”

It is unclear whether Young, who has worked a lot with Berger, Nainkin and USTA physical trainer Rodney Marshall, will continue to seek USTA help. He and his representatives have yet to have yet to accept requests for interviews. Moreover, his father Donald Sr., and his mother, Illona, are both still in the picture as their son’s coaches. Both are teaching pros. It was Donald Young Sr. who requested the wild card for his son after Donald won the Tallahassee Challenger.

However, McEnroe left the door to working with the 98th-ranked Young again as long as he apologized, and apparently he did.

“I’m a pretty positive guy,” McEnroe said. ”Every time Donald has come and worked with our team, he’s been an absolute delight. When he comes, he does what we tell him to do. He goes with the program. He’s gotten better and stronger. There’s no doubt in my mind that he can get a lot better and become a Top 50, Top 30, maybe even a Top 20 player. But you can’t go halfway. You need to be all in. He’s not totally all in. If he doesn’t want to be with us, if he wants to keep his parents as his coaches, go in with someone else, we wish him all the luck in the world and we’ll try to help him…I’m not going to say we’re going to withdraw support. But I’m going to say a lot of things are going to have to happen for us to reconsider.”—Matthew Cronin

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MUNICH (AP)—Third-seeded Marin Cilic of Croatia edged Simone Bolelli of Italy 7-5, 7-6 (4) to advance to the second round of the BMW Open on Tuesday.

Cilic was the runner-up last year and used his 11 aces to help win the close match.

Fifth-seeded Florian Mayer of Germany eased past qualifier Steve Darcis of Belgium 6-1, 6-2.

Also through were Teymuraz Gabashvili of Russia, Radek Stepanek of the Czech Republic, and Philipp Petzschner of Germany.