Wimbledon is the toughest tournament to do a preview for. There is really no grass court season. For most players, it lasts all of one week. Grass favors big servers with big groundstrokes. The French is different. There's six weeks of tournaments with three Masters 1000 events. You get a long time to see clay
AEGON must have a monopoly on all UK grass court tournaments which aren't Wimbledon. Sam Querrey just won Queen's, also known as the AEGON Championships. This week, there's another small men's tournament held in Eastbourne called the AEGON International. Most players like to take the week before Wimbledon off to fine-tune their game. You won't
Few players have won on three surfaces. Sure, we look at the best of the best, at players like Nadal and Federer who have either won career Slams or may win career Slams. But the average top 100 player does well to win maybe a dozen matches in their careers. It's not easy when you
Roger Federer used to fear Lleyton Hewitt. His groundstrokes, he knew, were better than his. Federer would come to the net and take his chances there. Federer knew, if he were ever to become number 1, that he needed to improve his baseline game. By 2004, when Hewitt had a 7-2 win-loss record, Federer turned
After spending weeks in Europe doing the clay court thing, Sam Querrey had had enough. Many players may have experienced what Sam experienced, but few show the bravery (or stupidity, as some may call it) to tell the world that he didn't want to be on the court. He had just come off a loss
There's barely a grass court season, so the transition from clay to grass can be a rough one. Were the grass court season comparable to, say, half the clay court season, say, 4 weeks of tuneup events prior to Wimbledon and maybe 1-2 Masters 1000 events on grass, perhaps we'd see a different set of
Queen's organizers must have looked up to the tennis gods and said "why has thou forsaken me?". Tournaments give seeds to top players to protect them from beating up on one another so that they might play in the later rounds. And yet Queen's has the singular privilege--if one can call it that--of all top
Federer probably wishes his game would have taken him back to the 1960s when so many tournaments were played on grass. He'd have to adjust, admittedly, to wooden racquets and such, but his game seems so much better suited to grass. Today, in a second round match marked by rain (and a quick roof that
Once, the Australians dominated amateur tennis, in the days before Open tennis, and even in the early years of Open tennis. Then, 3 of the 4 Slams were played on grass, the lone exception being the French, always played on the terre battue. If you were an exceptional grass court player, you could dominate most
Since the Slams are weighted more heavily than other tournaments, it's not surprising that the rankings have changed since the conclusion of the French Open. Rafael Nadal has reclaimed the number 1 spot, leaving Roger Federer one week short of tying Pete Sampras's 286 weeks at number 1. Nadal has 8700 points to Roger's 8390
