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 10/12/2014
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 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 9/8/2014
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 9/6/2014
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 […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/5/2014
Every single human person brings his or her perspective to an event he or she covers. It is true that when a person’s job is to provide a straightforward match recap (which is not what this or any Bloguin site is meant to do — not centrally, anyway), there’s less room for commentary, so in […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 9/3/2014
Tuesday — not counting the 2:26 a.m. finish from Monday’s order of play between Kei Nishikori and Milos Raonic, written about here by Juan Jose Vallejo for Rolling Stone magazine — was not an exciting day at the U.S. Open. Three men’s fourth-round matches were decided in straight sets. The fourth match was a drawn-out […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/21/2014
Bracketed tournaments — in basketball, soccer, tennis, water polo, and anything else under the sun — always elicit certain kinds of conversations when the brackets are first revealed. Some people are bracket zealots, in that they think the draws mean everything. Other people, tired of the bracket zealots, think that draws mean absolutely nothing, or […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek
You saw this same list (shortened) before the French Open. You saw it before Wimbledon. Now, you get to see it before the U.S. Open. Just so I don’t get any hate mail or hate tweets, this is not a list of the greatest U.S. Open matches of all time. Significance and greatness certainly intersect […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/18/2014
We’ve seen two utterly fascinating weeks of North American hardcourt tennis since the world’s best (minus Rafael Nadal, Juan Martin del Potro, and Li Na, among others) came to Canada in early August. Tour action continues this week in New Haven (Connecticut) and Winston-Salem (North Carolina). Moreover, a few of the big names on the WTA […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 8/11/2014
A weekend in Canada, a change of sceneWas the most I bargained forAnd then I discovered you, and in your eyesI found the love that I couldn’t ignore. — Canadian Sunset, 1956 * Norman Gimbel, the lyricist for a song that’s almost 60 years old, knew what a weekend in Canada could do for the […]
0 comments by Matt Zemek on 7/6/2014
The story of a memorable gentlemen’s singles final at Centre Court Wimbledon begins in Melbourne, Australia, on January 29, 2012. On that night, Novak Djokovic won the Australian Open final, 7-5 in the fifth set over Rafael Nadal. Djokovic was so close to winning in four sets, but Nadal uncorked a string of clutch points […]
