Thursday, August 26, 2004
CONVENTION TIME IN THE APPLE -- FOR REPUBLICANS AND RACKETEERS

It’s the last stop on the Quintessential Quadrilateral, the 134th American convention of genuine spin doctors – top, chop or slice -- swinging rackets. Flushing Meadow, where the U.S. Open completes the Big Four for another year, and the slate of Roddick and Henin-Hardenne will conduct a two week campaign. Andy Roddick and Justine Henin-Hardenne, who carried the U.S. a year ago, will strut upon the paved stage and dare 127 rivals to knock them out of office.

Another defending champ, George W. Bush, will do his strutting at an indoor playpen just across the East River, Madison Square Garden, and he can’t lose – the nomination anyway.

At the Meadow it takes two weeks for everybody to lose but the champs. W. won’t know whether his serve is broken until November. But he has a better tennis blood line than his foe, Kerry, since his grandmother, Dorothy Walker, made it to the final of the 1918 U.S. Junior Championship. However, she lost, 6-3, 8-6, to one Katherine Porter.

One-hundred-twenty-seven losers on either side of the Meadow’s gender line. That’s the proposition, although you can get rich without going all the way to the title in this $ 17-plus million fiesta of the fuzzy ball. Why, there’s merely a cool million in prize money for the qualifying tournament alone. The guys and dolls who pioneered tennis into the open era of cash-up-for-grabs – people like Rod Laver and Ken Rosewall, Billie Jean King and Rosie Casals – must smile at what they helped bring about.

In 1968, the first U.S. Open offered a pot of $ 100,000 total, and there was no qualifier. The purse seemed gigantic at the time. U.S. Tennis Association president then, Bob Kelleher, who was the administrative force in dragging his stodgy, conservative organization into the open era alongside the British proprietors of Wimbledon, looks back in amazement?

“Did we have $ 100,000 to back it up? Hell, no,” laughs Kelleher, now a federal judge in Los Angeles. “We took a chance. We believed that people would want to buy tickets to see all the best players – pros and amateurs together – for the first time in our Championships, and that we’d get some TV money, too. It all worked out. Better than we hoped.”

Roger Federer and Henin-Hardenne are supposed to win. But there are seven trials for both if they’re to succeed. A title for Roger would make him, the Australian and Wimbledon champ, the first guy to corner three of the four majors since Mats Wilander’s conquest of Australian, French and U.S. in 1988. Before that you’d have to go back 30 years to Jimmy Connors, who won the Australian, Wimbledon and U.S. of 1974 but was unfairly deprived of a shot at a Grand Slam by the French Federation.

Jimmy’s crime was nothing more than signing a contract to play for the Baltimore Banners in the newly created World Team Tennis league. WTT, celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, a brainchild of Billie Jean King and her husband, Larry King, frightened the Europeans. They feared it would threaten their tournaments, and barred the players who signed up. Whether Jimmy could have Slammed will never be known. But it was lousy that he didn’t have a chance to join Slammers Don Budge, Maureen Connolly, Laver, Margaret Court and Steffi Graf.

WTT was no threat. Nevertheless, it has been a moderately successful sideshow to which the International Tennis Federation has foolishly turned a blind eye. Olympic tennis would be given a zippy look and lift in 2008 if the ITF added a WTT-style team event, making tennis the unique sport of blending men and women.

Olympic tennis needs imaginative reforming, the injection of flair that sets it apart rather than looking like just another circuit tourney. The players should be divided into pools for round-robin play, as some other sports do, leading to the climax, thereby broadening the Olympic experience. A team event and round-robin pools for the individual tourney would add medals and spark. But spark? That word forever escapes the ITF.

Still, the Chileans Nicolas Massu and Fernando Gonzalez are to be congratulated for their gold medals, those coming shortly after the retirement of the most gifted player to spring from their country: Marcelo Rios. Rios will be missed and won’t be missed. He was glorious in his strokemaking and miserable in his persona. Physical injuries did him in at age 28, but the venom that flowed through him couldn’t have helped.

Henin-Hardenne was golden, too, and seems to have regained her sharp-edged form after battling a viral infection for months. Is she ready to hold up for two weeks?

That’s one of the numerous questions to be posed at the Open. Such as:

Are Venus and Serena really interested any more? Have we seen the best of the Sisters Williams?
Will Federer overcome his New York malaise. Never past the fourth round in four tries, Roger may miss his cow, Juliette. Unfortunately for him, I haven’t spotted many bovine citizens wandering Flushing.

Can Andre Agassi pull body and soul together for a crescendo to his up-and-down campaign?

Is Lindsay Davenport, who talked of retirement and babies at Wimbledon (yet riding an 18 match streak since), going to deliver as in the championship year of 1998?

Has David Nalbandian, who came within a point of the final last year, regained his fitness?

Might Lleyton Hewitt or Andy Roddick gain their second Flushing titles?

Or the “Headless Horseman,” Marat Safin, the most gifted of all in several ways?

Does Jennifer Capriati, who should have won last year, have one more good Open in her system?

Can Maria Sharapova – overloaded with expectations – pull off a Wimbledon reprise?

Will silver medalist Mardy Fish follow up on that by realizing his tremendous promise?

Is it possible that Martina Navratilova can swipe another major in the doubles or mixed? The answers are to be found on the Meadow where my picks are Roddick and Davenport.

Hope to see you there, a convention far more interesting and less scripted than the Republican version a few miles distant.

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