Federer and Hingis get adventurous, Radwanska does the Full Monty and Murray mania goes mental
Roger Federer – No rest whatsoever!
For a tennis enthusiast, the post-Wimbledon period may as well be called the post-apocalyptic black hole of nothingness. After the most intense phase of concentrated, high quality tennis of the year – the back-breaking challenges of Roland Garros immediately followed by the exhilarating highs of Wimbledon, everything else looks dull and pointless.
It doesn’t help that the immediate aftermath of Wimbledon abounds with tournaments in curiously named places like Bastad, Gstaad, Umag, Kitzbuhel and Bad Gastein. How can any good come out of a tournament that has ‘bad’ in its name?
Now that we’ve got the poor joke out of the way, let’s take stock of what’s been going on in the post-apocalyptic tennis world.
Roger Federer goes rogue
What does the all-time Grand Slam champion do after suffering his earliest Slam exit in nearly a decade (and on his favourite surface to boot)? Take a long break from the game, perhaps? Or maybe the exact opposite – put in countless training hours on the surface with which he’s really comfortable, and which incidentally, is the surface on which the next Slam will be played? Shows how much we know.
In a move that seems to defy logic, Roger Federer has arrived in Hamburg to participate in the German Tennis Championships, also called the bet-at-home Open. I get the emotional connection that he has with the tournament – Hamburg was the scene of Federer’s first triumph at a Masters tournament (back in 2002, when Hamburg was a prestigious 1000 event and not the lowly 500 tournament that it has been reduced to now). But is the sentimental attachment worth playing a tournament on clay after the completion of the European claycourt swing? Even Justin Bieber would tell you that that is not ideal preparation for the summer hardcourt swing coming up.
Maybe this is just Federer’s way of telling the world that he’s done playing by the rules of the tennis calendar. Or maybe he’s so desperate for match practice that he’s willing to go to any part of the world as long as he gets to hit a ball across a net. One thing’s for sure, though: I never want to know what goes on inside a tennis player’s head.
Speaking of the head, there’s another major change in Federer-land: he’s switched over to a bigger racquet head (98 square inches) from the 90 square inch frame he’s been using for more than a decade. You know what they say about racquet head size – with a bigger head, you get more power and a larger ‘sweet spot’, which in turn gives you a higher margin for error on your strokes.
Does this mean the legendary backhand shank from the Swiss’s racquet is a thing of the past? Knowing Federer and his newfound tendency to ‘switch off’ during matches, he’ll probably find a way to send the ball into the stands even with this bigger frame. Maybe the ball will now go only as far as the first row; not all the way up to the last.
Martina Hingis continues to make waves
From one Swiss to another, and a far more colourful one. It’s been a busy couple of weeks for Martina Hingis. First, she helped her World Team Tennis side Washington Kastles create history by winning their 134th consecutive match, which is now the longest winning streak in American professional sports history.
Then, her soon-to-be-ex-husband Thibault Hutin claimed in an interview that tennis’s darling Swiss Miss doesn’t quite know how to be a darling in her personal life. According to Hutin, Hingis is a serial adulteress who has “always been unfaithful to her boyfriends”, and that she has a very personal, and presumably warped, conception of morality.
Strong words, huh? It’s probably a good (or twisted, take your pick) thing then that the ITF came to her rescue just in the nick of time. In a gala ceremony that saw her smiling from ear to ear as though she didn’t have a care (or a thoroughly upset husband) in the world, Hingis was inducted into the Tennis Hall of Fame. Five Grand Slam titles and 209 weeks at No. 1 are, by any standard, sufficient accomplishments to merit a place in the Hall of Fame, but trust the timing of Hingis’s induction to be the most delicious of all the inductees.
And before the brouhaha over the series of adventures in her life could pipe down, Hingis announced yesterday that she is all set to make a comeback to the WTA tour, if only in doubles.
Does she ever get a quiet moment for herself, that smiling little devil?