Worth Celebrating...

(Photo: ROLAND MAGUNIA/AFP/Getty Images)

Just because Hamburg is his first title of the year, and just because that expression deserves some kind of homage.

And all at once, Constantine's back in the top ten.

Gimme a Kolya over a Gilles or even a Jo-Willy any day of the week.

Hamburgers and French Fries...

Alright enough.

Even I know when to call a halt.

So enough on the 'American Beauty' of single handed backhands.

Enough with the fanciful and giddy kung-fu tennis fusions.

And Enough with the Andy Murray film scripts that sound like they've been written by an intern. During their lunch break.

We're returning to tennis we are.

But biding time is fun. Know that I intend to do a lot more of it. Especially when the most interesting thing to report on tour is that Gilles Simon continues to have only a slightly worse time of it than the German Open itself. That's the new no-frills deMASTERised ATP 500 name for Hamburg btw.

A tournament that's had it's new director Michael Stich mucking in at doubles this week in an effort at staving off declining interest. A tournament Simon (the #1 seed) was unceremoniously ejected from by a qualifier, a wildcard no-name somebody called Daniel Brands. So sorry Danny. Congratulations, until yesterday I hadn't heard of you. Now you're a label in my tag cloud. A label that's currently too feint to be detected. But Go Germany, nevertheless.

And that wasn't the end of it. Wawrinka, of Wimbledon single-handed shootouts under-the-roof fame: comprehensively duffed-up, I think is the phrase. Tommy Robredo, clay-court extraordinaire, supposedly out of a funk: Now he's out of the event too. And Melzer out to Uruguayan qualifier Cuevas. Remember folks, it's the depth in men's tennis is what it is.

There's still a watchable enough cast with Davydenko, Sod, Ferrer and Kohlschreiber holding fort, I suppose. But it won't stop me feeling that the event's effectively been crippled, an event that was already having trouble these last few years, with it's placement immediately prior to Roland Garros. A situation that meant the marquee names either didn't show up at all, or came hobbling in after taking part in some of those other historic battles of Rome.

Well it's been pinioned alright, and moving it to mid July, that no-mans-land of the tennis calendar seems too much like adding insult to injury.

It also goes without saying, but I'm going to anyway (even at the risk of sounding smug), that I was largely unimpressed with Simon's rise to the top. And now, as they say, those factory-fed chickens are coming home to roost. They're set to arrive over the next few months as the points he accrued over that marvelous run of last year drop off.

But Gilles is an easy target. His top ten position is after all reflective of a 52-week rankings system. It seems to be swipe-Simon season, but I'm not much more impressed with Tsonga either. Great start to the year with those titles in Jo'burg and Marseille and that quarter final appearance in Oz, but now beginning to settle into what looks like a Nalbandian-like hangover, recovery from which is only possible late into the indoor season. If that.

I haven't much time for French tennis these days. It's easy on the eye, but not on the nerves. Monfils' short-lived stay in the top ten has rightfully come to an end. One wonders if Gasquet can rebound from Dopesville. Not by the sounds of it. Not if 'Pamela' has anything to do with it.

But it's like that across the board. If anything I see Simon as a lower case Dinara, castigated for the failings of a necessarily imperfect system, that rewards every win you've had in the last year. Wins, the totality of which is against only a slice of the field anyway. Not that reflective of very much at the best of times.

The unglamorous reality is that apart from a handful of guys and girls at the very top, most every player has an inconsistent shoddy looking performance sheet. Full of potholes and pockmarks. And bunkers, to bring in those recent golfing metaphors I lovingly introduced. It's the point at which I think the rankings system really comes into its own. Seemingly custom built to mediate between a field of wildly fluctuating neurotics.

Nice to know it's good at something.

What sort of Tennis Tournaments do you Rejoice in where YOU come from?

"I don't rejoice in tennis tournaments at all", Alice said, "some of their names I rather dislike - especially the ATP 250's".

"Of course they have geo-sensitive names", the Gnat remarked carelessly.

"I never knew them to."

"What's the use of their having names the Gnat said, "if you can't tell where they're held?"

"No use to them,' said Alice; "but it's useful to the Sponsors who name them, I suppose. If not, why do events have names at all?"

-- 'Alison Lang through the Looking Glass'

***

And just like that, the world's blue again.

Well tennis courts are anyway. Is anybody else struck by just how bloody quickly it's happened?

It seems just yesterday that a teary eyed Federer gave us that runners-up acceptance speech in Melbourne, we witnessed that seismic Rafa upset in Paris, and that Federer was finally and rightfully crowned GOAT after serving 50 aces past A-Rod. Oh wait, that last one was just yesterday, almost.

Three staggering images for three different surfaces.




Those first two might have touched a nerve. I know they both did for me.

Time for some band aid with what I consider to be perhaps the two most wonderfully iconic moments of 2009.






I feel better all ready :)


And yet, apart from a few pockets of descent, where clay court tennis will obstinately continue to be played out like a peculiar experiment in denial over the next month, the rest of the year will be blue, momentum-conserving and feature elastically perfect bounces.

If, like me, you find post-Wimby July to be by far the most boring tennis month of the year, and if like me you also rejoice in the power of oxymoronic totalities, you too will be spectacularly apathetic towards the tennis on offer in July.

Even more so than official downtime in December where, despite the absence of tennis, there is at least the sense that the lull in sumptuosities may be necessary to fully savour (and recover from) the decadence you've been party to. And have partied to.

I think what makes it so difficult for me is that it sits there quite unsure of it's mission in life, sandwiched between that period consisting of arguably the two most important months in the tennis calendar, but not quite yet at the stage where the action has cranked up in earnest in the build up to the US Open.

And what do they do, but fill this interval act up with tier 3 clay court tennis. What an unimaginatively tragic knee-jerk reaction that is. Wasn't the clay court season meant to have ended in the first week of June? You can hardly describe it as a 'season' if you choose to have another three week stretch a couple of months later.

And yet Gstaad might have what it takes to challenge Monte Carlo's standing as the world's most scenic clay court event.

I want to live, work, and play there...
(Photo: ATP)

Clay or no clay, surroundings like that I do rejoice in.

Whatever your thoughts on clay court tennis in mid-July (and Michael Stich overseeing one of it's more important events), I've yet to hear a convincing argument as to why we can't use this stretch to accomodate a slightly lengthier grass court season.

Newport shows us it can be done. Collective rejoicing for Rhode Island! Huzzah for Rajeev Ram! (Who also picked up the doubles title there with Jordan Kerr)

And as to the rest of the month, I'll probably only be tuning into the less swanky version of Hamburg, that will be featuring eight of the worlds top twenty.

That's pretty much what all the top players will be doing I imagine. All except Nikolay that is, who'll proudly be doing his annual bit for the "Society for the Revival of Tennis Played on Surfaces Incongruous with their Position in the Tennis Calendar" and cementing his claim to being the ATP's contribution to the 'Consistency over Quality' debate. He got started this week in Stuttgart.

I also find it difficult to get overly-roused up by the happenings at Washington (Legg Mason Classic), LA (presented by Farmers Insurance), and Stanford (Bank of the West Classic). That's nobody's fault but my own. It's why I missed out on the first act of del Potro's meteoric rise up the rankings last year.

These events (and the Premier/Masters 1000s that follow them) form part of the US Open Series, the eventual winner of which will see their earnings double at the US Open. After winning the US Open in 2005, Clisjters was on the receiving end of a $2.2M payout that to this day stands as the largest ever payday in women's sports. (Of course Swiss Big-Cheese topped that in 2007 by earning $2.4M, the largest ever payout in US Open history. He does things like that).

But very little of those earlier events are televised here, and the fact that their titles read like the front page of the FT serves as an immediate turn off.

Though it is refreshing to see that the LA Women's Tennis Championships (is being) presented by Herbalife, and not some Insurance Conglomerate headquartered in the Cayman Islands.

But I'm not sure I rejoice in it.