0 comments by Matt Zemek on 11/23/2014
On a certain undeniable level, the big banner headline for the 2014 Davis Cup Final is simply this: ROGER FEDERER WINS ELUSIVE DAVIS CUP TITLE, ADDING TO HIS LEGACY. When any athlete with Federer’s level of stature and centrality wins a prestigious championship for the first time at a latter point in his or her […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 11/17/2014
In reviewing a full year of men’s tennis, there’s no need to cover new ground — it’s been covered. You know the major stories. The time spent looking back at 2014 on the ATP World Tour is best used in the service of perspective and, in spots, appreciation for what’s happened since early January. The […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 11/16/2014
The ATP’s season-ending championship (before the International Tennis Federation puts the capper on the tennis year with the Davis Cup Final) is called the World Tour Finals. The acronym for the event, as you can plainly see, is WTF. This year in London, “WTF” was the universal reaction to the showcase singles tournament held in […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 11/2/2014
The BNP Paribas Masters — informally known as “Bercy,” distinguishing this Parisian event from the major championship held at Roland Garros every spring — represent the last stop on the road to London, the site of the ATP World Tour Finals. With 1,000 points being awarded to the winner and stacks of points in play […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 10/26/2014
The Women’s Tennis Association moved its end-of-the-year showcase event from Istanbul to Singapore this year. The time difference put a lot of matches on American television in the middle of the night. The sport is bigger than one country or continent, and Li Na — who retired before the 2014 WTA Finals began — had […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 10/12/2014
It’s a common occurrence in sports: During a tournament, a season, a series, any kind of competition, an elite team or athlete gets away with a bad day at the office or a frustrating series of events, barely scraping through to live another day. Given a reprieve, that athlete or team regains form and focus, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 10/5/2014
The just-concluded China Open in Beijing is not quite a crown jewel on the Women’s Tennis Association’s annual calendar. Yet, it owns the distinction of being the last main-stage event before the season-ending WTA Finals in Singapore, which begin on Oct. 20. You can identify this event as part of the “Asian swing” on the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/14/2014
Rafael Nadal has already compiled a legendary Davis Cup profile. See for yourself — if you click on the results tab at this link, you’ll see that he’s lost only one singles match in his Davis Cup career, and that came in 2004 at the age of 17. Novak Djokovic, though not as accomplished a […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/12/2014
American television’s coverage of major-tournament tennis is never less complicated than at the Australian Open each January. ESPN2 has to work around its college basketball programming at times, but Tennis Channel picks up the early window of coverage on most if not all days, and deep into the night, ESPN2 and ESPN are all too […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/9/2014
No editorial commentary here. We’ll save that for the end of the 2014 tennis season. Here are the results for 20 notable players on the WTA and ATP Tours from the four majors this year. Feel free to bookmark this link and reference it when the 2015 majors begin at the Australian Open in Melbourne […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The last major tennis tournament of the year is over. The Davis Cup semifinals begin this Friday, and there are a lot of points to be won (or defended, depending on the player) in the Asian swing and the fall indoor portions of the tennis calendar. Both the WTA and ATP will unfurl their year-ending […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/8/2014
It was not a day anyone who follows tennis — as fan or chronicler — expected to see two very long weeks ago, when the 2014 U.S. Open began. It was, however, a one-day window into the future of tennis… not next year or the year after that, but six years into the future, when […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/7/2014
The U.S. Open’s trophy presentation ceremonies are usually the tackiest in tennis, even worse than the Australian Open’s prolonged affairs. The U.S. Open ceremony becomes something of a game show, with the CBS emcee rattling off the prizes and money totals for the champion and runner-up. This time, though, the U.S. Open ended with an […]
0 comments by Juan José Vallejo on 9/6/2014
One has to wonder what was going through Roger Federer’s mind when Kei Nishikori completed his improbable upset of top-ranked Novak Djokovic on a blistering hot Saturday afternoon at the US Open. Roger’s biggest obstacle to an impossible 18th major title seemed to have just been removed from his path. Federer had never lost against […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
We kept waiting. We, the global community of tennis reporters, bloggers and fans alike, kept waiting for the moment when Novak Djokovic — tired, listless, dragging, generally lacking answers — would do what he’s done dozens upon dozens of times in the past, including and especially in the U.S. Open men’s singles semifinals. In the […]
