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 […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The first week of a major typically concerns the undercard matchups and the floaters in the draw, the players who unexpectedly reach the second week. However, whenever a big name in the sport is knocked out of the bracket, that’s a headline development, and at the women’s Roland Garros tournament, we saw a number of […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
The first week of a tennis major is cluttered with stories, due to the sheer volume of matches. As the field of 128 is narrowed to the round of 16 or the quarterfinals, the first-week headlines generally emerge in two forms: the upsets of the higher seeds and the unexpected successes of comparatively unheralded or […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 6/1/2014
After winning the 2007 U.S. Open in a tense straight-set match against a young Novak Djokovic, Roger Federer remarked of Djokovic’s failure to win seven set points in a 7-6 (4), 7-6 (2), 6-4 contest. “You could sing a song about it,” Federer poetically reflected. It was indeed the script that inspires a sad love […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/31/2014
It’s inside baseball for the tennis diehard, but for the casual American sports fan, the reference needs explaining: There are two “Vic-es” (or “vitches,” take your pick) in women’s tennis. Who (or what) are they? They’re the two best WTA players from Serbia: Ana Ivanovic and Jelena Jankovic. One of them is still alive at […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/30/2014
It’s a long-running belief among many (maybe not most, but certainly many) in the tennis community that the sport — in order to break through various layers of disinterest on the part of more casual fans — needs more “personality” among its players. Well, this weekend at Roland Garros, plenty of personality will be on […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 5/28/2014
On Monday, it was Stan Wawrinka. On Tuesday, it was Li Na. On Wednesday afternoon in Paris, the biggest shocker of an already-wild Roland Garros reverberated across the tennis world. Garbine Muguruza, hitting with depth and consistency while finding an above-average T-serve, dismissed defending champion Serena Williams in little over an hour. The 6-2, 6-2 […]
