Italian tennis has seen better days, at least, on the men's side. The women seem to be doing fine. Once, players like Adriano Pannatta would give Bjorn Borg all he could handle on clay. Today, Andreas Seppi is the highest ranked Italian player at 47. Seppi is a solid clay courter. Steady enough to hit
Last year, Andy Murray might have felt he was making progress on clay. Always his weakest surface since turning pro, Murray's problems were compounded this year by his loss in the finals of the Australian Open. While his straight set drubbing by Federer was not entirely unexpected, what was unexpected was how the loss affected
Visit any tennis website or any YouTube tennis instructional video and you discover the focus is primarily on technique. It's about how you hit the ball. If you were to take a computer programming class, say, in Java, you'd be essentially taught the grammar of the language. You wouldn't really be taught how to program
The two were considered the next wave of good players. After Nadal became the first serious challenge to Federer and after Federer's years of dominance (in the mid 2000), Novak Djokovic leaped to 3rd in the world in 2007 and mostly stayed there until 2009. Andy Murray moved from number 6 in the world in
If you were told that Andy Roddick and Andy Murray were playing today, and one lost, which might you pick? Of course, the answer would depend on who they were playing, but minus that information, you might say Andy Murray, since he's ranked higher than Andy Roddick. OK, so let's look at the opponents. Andy
The seeds, they keep a falling. It was already something of a miracle that Djokovic got this far. After watching his game spiral out of control in the second set in the previous around against Philipp Kohlschreiber, Djokovic had to scrap to fight off match points, get a break of serve back and eventually win
The big news of the day was someone who didn't play today. Nikolay Davydenko, who had been playing great tennis up through the Australian Open, withdrew from Indian Wells. It turns out he had broken his left wrist and is expected to take a few months off to recover. Last year, Davydenko had to take
If you're in the United States, you're used to team sports. It's so common in the US so important to Americans, that many in the US view sports with a team sports lens. There are other sports which lack a regular season/postseason structure. For those Americans that don't like sports--and there are plenty, or for
If this were a political thing, perhaps there would be more antagonism between Novak Djokovic, a Serb, and Ivan Ljubicic, a Croatian. But each player has their own drama, independent of which country they play for. In particular, Novak Djokovic, who came from nowhere in 2007 to be a solid number 3, and entered Dubai
After Andy Murray was dismissed in straight sets by Roger Federer, some may have thought Murray would have gone back to the drawing board, figuring how to retool his game to beat the number 1 player in the world. However, the tears that came during the post-match ceremony was only the tip of the iceberg,
