0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/23/2014
It did not take long for the 2014 Wimbledon tournament to provide a stormy, polarizing moment. After only two hours of play, Sloane Stephens — owner of six consecutive round-of-16 or better showings at the majors, the longest active streak in women’s tennis — crashed out of the All-England Club with a 6-2, 7-6 (6) […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/22/2014
Clay-court fans and the backers of immensely successful clay-court players view the French Open as the crown jewel of every year. The longtime chroniclers of tennis — those who have been around for at least 40 years in the press boxes and media centers of the sport — will calmly point out how marginalized grass-court […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/20/2014
The Wimbledon men’s singles draw is out. Click on each quarter of the draw to scan the full 128-player field. * If there’s a single theme which looms over the 2014 Wimbledon men’s tournament, it is that the first week can no longer be seen as an easy, breezy prelude to the second week. This statement […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The Wimbledon ladies’ singles draw was announced Friday morning. Click on each quarter of the draw to see the full 128-player bracket, with 32 players in each quarter. What stands out in the WTA portion of the 2014 Wimbledon bracket? As is the case with Novak Djokovic’s quarter in the men’s draw, it is as […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/17/2014
The following list is sure to raise some pointed questions and spirited disagreements, but it is based on the simple contention that a significant match and a great match aren’t one and the same thing. Many far greater and more memorable matches have been staged at Wimbledon, but only a few other men’s matches can […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/16/2014
The All-England Club is where history lives and breathes more fully in tennis. So many of the sport’s important dramas and contentious rivalries have come alive in its most tradition-soaked setting. Keeping in mind that this list is not a measurement of pure quality or drama, here are the 10 most significant women’s matches of […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/9/2014
The four major tournaments do a lot to redefine the sport of tennis. Yes, these two-week events affirm many of pre-existing truths — Rafael Nadal’s a tolerably good tennis player on clay; Maria Sharapova is no longer a cow on ice when it comes to crushed red brick — but it’s always particularly fascinating to […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The year’s clay-court major is over, but the memories from Paris are fresh and demand an overview. What were the biggest (though not always the best) headlines from the past two weeks of tennis on terre battue? Without further ado: 5 – IVANOVIC’S AGONY The upsets of Serena Williams and Li Na were notable, to […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The second week of a major tennis tournament will regularly offer broadcast outlets fewer chances to make mistakes in terms of programming and match selection. The first week is chock full of matches, so in many ways, that week tests a network’s commitment to tennis in ways the second week can never really match. The […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/8/2014
Major-tournament finals are played on the same tennis rectangles used for first-round matches and fourth-round matches, but they advance the story of tennis in ways the preliminaries rarely if ever do. When a 13-time major champion takes on a man who has made nine of the past 12 major finals (not including the 2013 Roland […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/7/2014
Maria Sharapova’s 6-4, 6-7 (5), 6-4 win over Simona Halep in the Roland Garros women’s singles final on Saturday was, before and beyond anything else, a magnificent three-hour feast of generally great tennis, spiced with maximum drama and enough plot twists to fill a 400-page novel. Sharapova’s victory showcased not just everything that’s great about […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Sports are often cruel and contradictory. They frequently force the human person to do that which is so utterly essential in matters far more important than playing a game: Hold competing, counterintuitive, coexisting truths in tension with each other. Walking in the present-moment reality of complexity, ambiguity, pressure, and conflict — this is what the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/6/2014
We told you. We told you in our Roland Garros viewer’s guide nearly two weeks ago: The Eastern time zone was the only time zone that could reasonably expect to see the second French Open men’s singles semifinal live on NBC. This was a possibility for the Central time zone, yes, but never a certainty. […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
Want to start a good, old-fashioned war among tennis fans? Label players. Ball-basher. A defensive wall. A pusher. Retriever. Servebot (aka, John Isner or Milos Raonic). Fighter. Shotmaker. Showman. The above terms have many connotations, some of them good, most of them bad, especially “ball-basher,” “wall,” “pusher,” and “servebot.” Tennis players come in many forms, […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/2/2014
The way in which tennis networks cover major tournaments has been a constant source of exasperation for American tennis fans (and also Canadian fans when their sports networks cede coverage to the American ones). Yet, complaining can only do so much. Why not simply document the various moves American tennis networks make during a major […]
