NEW YORK — As the best in his country for years, Andy Roddick has long been the man to turn to when questions about the future of American tennis come up.
On Friday night at the U.S. Open, he saw that future up-close in a player named Jack Sock – and made sure Sock didn’t become the story line of the present.
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Andy Roddick Tops Jack Sock At U.S. Open
TORONTO — World No. 1 and defending champion Caroline Wozniacki lost to Roberta Vinci 6-4, 7-5 in a second-round match at the Rogers Cup on Wednesday.
Wozniacki had a bye in the first round and never really got going against the 22nd-ranked Italian, sending her return long on match point.
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Caroline Wozniacki Loses To Roberta Vinci In Opening Match At Rogers Cup
WIMBLEDON, England — Defending champion Rafael Nadal reached the Wimbledon final for the fifth time with a 5-7, 6-2, 6-2, 6-4 win over Andy Murray on Friday.
After Murray won a close first set, the match turned dramatically in Nadal’s favor early in the second set. The fourth-seeded Briton was leading 2-1 and over-hit an easy forehand that would have given him two break points.
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Rafael Nadal Beats Andy Murray To Reach Wimbledon Final
PARIS — Heading into Sunday’s French Open final, Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal already have played against each other in seven Grand Slam title matches, more than any pair of men in tennis history.
But this will be their first meeting at this stage of a major tournament in more than two years.
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Roger Federer vs. Rafael Nadal In French Open Final 2011
Filed under: WTA
Alec Baldwin is hot for her sweaty body. Todd Woodbridge is focusing on her breasts. Serena Williams‘ mom thinks she has a scary, Medusa eye.
Not only that, but Kim Clijsters also has won the past two major tennis championships. And when she officially reached No. 1 in the rankings Monday, she became the first Mommy to get there.
Clijsters has already done much more than I thought she could during her comeback, not so much on the court, but off, bringing attention to women’s tennis. Her play, and now her ranking, has brought credibility.
Did she just solve women’s tennis No. 1 problem? She is more like a Band-Aid, temporarily covering up the real issues of women’s tennis:
The game is moving backward. And Serena Williams, who had been holding up the sport during majors when most people are watching, suddenly is completely unreliable.
“I am proud that I was able to achieve it (No. 1) in my second career,” Clijsters wrote on Twitter. “Never expected it to happen.”
She has restored an order to the game, finally bumping out Caroline Wozniacki from the No. 1 ranking. No one thought Wozniacki, who hasn’t won a major, was deserving.
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Kim Clijsters’ Rise to Top Exposes Women’s Game
Filed under: French Open, WTA
PARIS (AP) — The French Tennis Federation voted to keep the French Open at its traditional Roland Garros venue and renovate the existing site by making it considerably larger, more attractive and modern, rather than moving it elsewhere.
Three other venues were bidding to host the clay-court Grand Slam tournament by 2016.
The proposed new sites at Versailles, close to the hugely popular Versailles palace, and in the suburbs at Gonesse and Marne-La-Vallee were much more expensive because they would have required building from scratch.
The FFT said Sunday that it had chosen the option of renovating Roland Garros, located in western Paris for more than 80 years, by making it 60 percent bigger while preserving its “unique history.”
“The Federation decided to stay on its original site at Porte d’Auteuil,” the FFT said Sunday. “It chose an ambitious, prestigious project resolutely looking to the future.”
The new-look Roland Garros will feature 35 outside courts, a new press center and a center court with a retractable roof so that matches could go ahead when it’s raining, and where night sessions could be played.
“Our ambition was to offer a project with a real future and of a very high quality,” FFT president Jean Gachassin said. “To improve the reception and the comfort of the players and spectators.”
Kim Clijsters, who will become the No. 1 player in the world on Monday, welcomed the news.
“I would have thought that it was sad to see it go away from the place where I know (the French Open) should be. … It has a lot of great memories for me even as a junior,” Clijsters said.
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French Open to Stay at Roland Garros
Filed under: WTA, WTA Rankings
Add another accolade to Kim Clijsters‘ comeback story.
After 256 weeks, the 27-year-old Belgian will regain her No. 1 spot on tour when the WTA rankings are released next week. Clijsters last held the top-ranked spot the week of March 20, 2006.
Fresh off her fourth Grand Slam victory at the Australian Open, she overtakes current No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki, who has yet to win a career major. Clijsters, the 41-time WTA singles champion, briefly retired from the sport with one major in May of 2007 before coming back unranked in the summer of 2009.
The 256-week stretch it took for Clijsters to reclaim the top-ranked singles spot is second only — on the ATP and WTA tours — to Serena Williams. After 265 weeks devoid of the top-ranked spot, Williams reclaimed No. 1 on September 7, 2008.
Wozniacki joins Jelena Jankovic and Dinara Safina as recent top-ranked players to leave the post without a major title.
Meanwhile, Clijsters continues to roll. Before claiming the year’s first major at Melbourne Park, she finished last season a winner at the U.S. Open and season-ending championships in Doha.
“I’m very happy to again be the world No. 1 player here,” the 27-year-old Clijsters said during an on-court presentation. “It’s not in Belgium, but it’s very close. Thanks for all your support. I hope I can maybe win the tournament, too.”
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Kim Clijsters Retakes No. 1 Ranking
Filed under: Grand Slam, U.S. Open, Australian Open, French Open
Rafael Nadal had won the French Open after a year of uncertainty about his body, his career, his family, and it all came in the same place where Francesca Schiavone had won a day earlier, and rolled around in the red clay like a little kid. I admit to feeling the emotion.
And the ghosts, too, of Roland Garros, of Bjorn Borg, Suzanne Lenglen, Rene Lacoste. So I went down to the court, pulled a Tic Tac box from my pocket, emptied it, scooped up the red clay and took some history home.
On Sunday, the French tennis federation will vote on whether to keep the French Open at the quaint spot in Paris, or possibly to move to a modern expanse in, gulp, the suburbs.
How do you feel about that, about what modernization is doing to our most cherished sports memories? Is your baseball team still in the place of your greatest childhood memories? Your football team?
Two hours after the Chicago Bears lost to Philadelphia in the playoffs a few years ago at Soldier Field, the old place was coming down to make room for a new stadium. Modern times insisted. It was a rush job.
So I went out to the stands for one last look. Sat there. Called my dad on the cell. Talked about seeing the Bears there as a kid, watching Stan Smith in a tennis tournament there. My dad said he saw auto races there.
History. Even Jack Dempsey fought Gene Tunney in the famous long count. Al Capone had bet on Dempsey.
The bulldozers were already there when my dad mentioned something about, well, never really liking the place. I noticed it smelled like urine. The seats were uncomfortable and didn’t even face the middle of the field. The bathrooms are disgusting, the food no good, the sightlines a disaster.
We started laughing and realized: The place is a dump.
Reality weighs more than memories.
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Time for French to Kiss Roland Garros Goodbye
Filed under: WTA, Sports Business and Media
We might have to start calling this the Serena Clause. It took 11 minutes for nearly all 12,000 tickets to sell for Nike’s tennis exhibition March 8 at the University of Oregon.
Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Maria Sharapova and …
That’s right. Williams is about to come back. She will have been gone eight months, since winning Wimbledon and then toughing it out for an exhibition and estimated seven-figure guarantee in Belgium.
Since then, she has missed everything, after having an alleged foot surgery for an alleged incident that allegedly involved broken glass at an alleged restaurant in Germany, a country that definitely exists. Until Williams settles on her own story, we’ll consider all facts up for grabs.
Anyway, the announcement about Williams’ return was exciting and everything until you got to this sentence prominently placed in the second paragraph of the press release for the event:
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The Serena Clause: Buy Tix at Own Risk
Filed under: WTA
Oracene Price, mother of Venus and Serena Williams, has not tweeted in six days. I wanted to make sure I was the first to report that news. It is clear she’s embarrassed and angry by what she had tweeted before the women’s final of the Australian Open.
If you missed the little storm she created last week on Twitter, she said she was hoping Li Na would beat Kim Clijsters because she thought it “would be cool for a Chinese to win.” She also wrote, “Let’s say I’m not pulling for the other one. I dislike dubious people.”
It’s clear she hates Clijsters. People wrote to Price on Twitter, complaining that it was clear she’s racist against white people. Price also made some sort of comment comparing Clijsters to Medusa, clearly stating she thinks Clijsters is funny looking.
Look, the truth is that nothing is clear here at all, possibly not even to Price. This was a study in modern media and in Twitter itself. There is an entire Twitter world, and it’s unclear what it even is.
It means different things to different people. Tennis moms can use it in varying states of consciousness. Media types are using it mostly to try to stay on top of the game, and also to give instant analysis.
I use it, too, and can be found @gregcouch. To me, it is mostly for little throw-away, stream of consciousness type of thoughts, but not always. You don’t do much in-depth analysis in 140 characters, including spaces between words, to make your point. That’s all you get on Twitter. This paragraph blew past tweet length about two sentences ago.
But I think we make a mistake when we read too much into tweets, or even try to.
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Williams Sisters’ Mom Tastes Tweet & Sour of Twitter
