2014 Early Season Notes…

2014 season has begun with several unexpected events that set the stage for a terrific year in tennis. The Australian Open, although by now it seems to be a distant memory, provided a number of spectacular matches and ended with a surprise women’s final in which Li Na captured her second Slam and her first Australian Open titles, defeating Dominika Cibulková in the finals. She also went through the draw without facing a single top 10 opponent. On the men’s side, Stanislas Wawrinka did a couple of things that he has never done in the previous 12 meetings against Nadal: win a set, and then win the match. He also defeated the world number one Novak Djokovic en route to the title. His win was overshadowed by Nadal’s injury in the second set which caused the Spaniard to play the rest of the match at less than one-hundred percent; however it should take nothing away from the Swiss’ well-deserved title, especially considering that he was dominating the match when Nadal injured his back in the second set.

On the one hand, Djokovic’s early form produced a couple of disappointing losses and no titles, putting question marks next to the Nole-Boris collaboration that began two months ago. I find it premature to question the partnership based on two losses to two in-form players, Wawrinka and Roger Federer. While Nole has not necessarily looked to be in top form à-la-2011, he has certainly not played poorly either. The Indian Wells and Miami tournaments should shed more light on the direction of the partnership. On the other hand, Federer seems to have found his good form. He played better in the Australian Open, even in his semi-final loss against Nadal, than he has played throughout 2013, and performed impeccably in the Dubai tournament, especially in the third sets against Nole in the semi-finals and against Thomas Berdych in the finals, before capturing his 78th career tournament victory.

Like Djokovic, Serena Williams has suffered couple of unexpected losses, first to Ana Ivanovic at the Australian Open, then to Alize Cornet in the semifinals of the Dubai tournament. Unfortunately, her after-match comments following her loss to Cornet once again showed the stunningly wide gap between the amounts of class that exist amongst the elite of men’s tennis and that of women’s. John Isner pointed out after his victory against Juan Martin Del Potro in Cincinnati several months ago that the top guys in men’s tennis were all class acts, and it shows in their comments about each other in the post-match conferences as well as how they handle the fans and the media. What do the elite women have to show in comparison? Bunch of players who never talk to each other, who do not acknowledge some of the lower-ranked players in the locker room, and who, like Serena did following her loss to a lesser-ranked opponent, cannot find the magnanimity to simply say “my opponent was better than me today, all the credit goes to her.” instead, Serena sarcastically chuckled and laughed through the questions saying how embarrassed she was to have lost (to Cornet) and that she has not played that poorly since three or four years ago. There is no need to wonder why women’s tennis is losing audience while men’s tennis is flourishing: if I were the WTA, I would desperately search for ways to make the top faces of the tour more identifiable to fans. There is more to being a ‘complete’ player on the tour than shrieking on the court as loud as possible and grimacing as if it was a miracle when an opponent hits a good shot.

Davis Cup also produced the unexpected so far, with Spain, minus Nadal and David Ferrer, losing to Germany, and Serbia, minus Nole, losing to Switzerland that featured both Wawrinka and Federer. With teams like Kazakhstan, Japan, and Great Britain in the quarterfinals, the last one making it to this stage for the first time since 1986, the weekend of April 4-6 promises to be an exciting weekend. If Andy Murray plays, the tie between Italy and Great Britain in Naples, Italy, looks to be the most compelling tie of the quarterfinals.

I close this article with an “I told you so” anecdote. For years, I have been saying that I found it disingenuous that the players constantly complained about the length of the season and argued that the season should be cut shorter so that they could have time to recuperate from a grueling season of tennis. I did not believe in their candidness at the time because many of them scheduled exhibition matches, and traded trips and days in the hotel to pocket more money instead of resting and staying home like they claimed they desired to do. Now the hypocrisy is official. The International Tennis Premier League (ITPL) is set to begin its first year of competition at the end of this year, and just about every top player in women’s and men’s fields, as well as some legends such as Andre Agassi and Pete Sampras, have signed up for the event that will occupy half of the period of the so-called 7 weeks of rest following the WTA and ATP year-ending championships.

The competition will take place in Asia, putting players like Nadal, Djokovic and Williams in traveling mode and hotels for over three weeks at a time that they supposedly need their rest. Yes, the matches are supposed to be one set only per match, and yes maybe the intensity may not be what it is in the Slam tournaments, but when there is money to be made, you can bet that the competition will not be taken lightly either. It will certainly require an intensity level that is higher than that of an exhibition match. I am simply curious to see how Nadal, Nole, Murray, Williams, Victoria Azarenka, and Caroline Wozniacki will answer the tough questions by the press about the need for “rest.” If Roger Federer were to win the 2015 Australian Open, and Maria Sharapova and Li Na were to play in the women’s finals, I will certainly not want to hear about how well-rested those three were because they chose not to participate in the ITPL. The “worn-out” excuse will not carry much weight at that time.

SAM_1417

No more tired legs excuse in the end of 2014!

Welcome to the New Home of Mertov’s Tennis Desk !

Dear friends,

Mertov’s T-Desk finally has its new home. Please replace your old bookmarks with this one. With the help of my “tech-able” friend JT, we tried to keep the site as simple as possible, without too many widgets or menus. After all, the discussion points are what matters the most. Yet, feel free to let us know if you think there is something that we could improve.

I hope you will continue to enjoy the future articles. As usual, feel free to join the discussion using the comments section at the bottom of each article. There is also a “share” button for those who wish to share them on social media.

Only a few selected articles from 2013 forward were added to this new site. All other articles dating back to 2002 are still stored in my hard drive. If any of the faithful readers over the years would like to get a copy of a certain article you liked in the past, feel free to email me at mertov (at) mertovstennisdesk (dot) com

If you wish to be added to the “new article update” list, send me an email. I promise to not share your email with anyone and only use it to let you know that a new article has been posted.

Take care everyone.
Mertov’s T-Desk
Email: mertov (at) mertovstennisdesk (dot) com

Invented Categories: Diluting the Greatest Player of All-Time Debate

Is it Rod Laver, Pete Sampras, Bjorn Borg, Rafael Nadal, or Roger Federer? Will Novak Djokovic soon be added to the list? In any case, the Greatest of All-Time (GOAT) debate has been alive since the mid-1990s and furiously kicking since the second half of the 2000s. While the debate has mobilized some intriguing research with regards to the history of men’s tennis in the Open era and stirred considerable passion for the sport, the partisanship in the debate has in many ways hurt the objectivity of the public opinion.

The most glaring examples of this “my-guy-must-be-the-greatest” anxiety come in the form of invented or overrated categories that have, in reality, no businesss in the GOAT debate if reason and objectivity were to prevail. This article will not make a case for any one player; instead, it will attempt to foreground the problems of partisanship’s over-involvement in the debate by pinpointing to a few of those artificially created measuring sticks.

Davis Cup Titles

This is one category that has no place in the GOAT debate, yet through the “if-repeated-enough-people-will-swallow” tactic, it has made its way into the debate as many times as it should have never been a part of it. First of all, no player wins the Davis Cup, officially or unofficially. In the tennis record books, you don’t see that “Borg has won the Davis Cup”; instead, it reads that Sweden has won it. Second, this category is not only inaccurate, but also non-existent. It was born out of the desire of John McEnroe fans back in the early 1980s to lift their player above his main American rival, Jimmy Connors, who regularly snubbed the Davis Cup, and further strengthened in the late 2000s by the wishes of the fans of players other than Federer, with the aim to place their chosen player ahead of Federer in the debate.

There is no doubt that when a player wins both his singles and doubles matches, he plays a major role in his team’s march to the Davis Cup title (for example Borg in 1975, and McEnroe in 1982); but “he” does not win the title!  There are four players and a captain on the team, contributing to the victory, and the country’s name goes on the records as having won the title.  A player wins two matches maximum by himself, which is neither enough to win a single tie nor to win a title.

The fans of this category somehow try to paint a portrait that shows their man winning the tie/title by themselves, which shows disrespect to the team and the country since on the Cup the country’s name is carved and not the player’s name. It also inaccurately assumes that a particular doubles competition — that of the Davis Cup encounter on the middle Saturday — somehow has more value than any other doubles matches or titles. Doubles play no role in the GOAT debate. If it did, one would need to include Bob Bryan and Mike Bryan individually in the debate since they would then have more Major titles to their names than Sampras or Nadal and more Grand Slams to their names than any other player in the Open era (not to mention their Davis Cup titles — not the USA’s!), and John McEnroe would be looking better than ever with a total of 16 Majors and several Davis Cup titles.

But this is not how the GOAT debate operates because doubles’ results are not included in the debate. McEnroe’s doubles titles do not get weighed in when discussing his GOAT status versus Borg or Andre Agassi. Whether doubles should be included or not, that is a debate for another day, but the way the GOAT debate is conducted today, doubles are basically a non-factor, thus so should the doubles match in Davis Cup, effectively erasing any illusion that a single player wins the Davis Cup. But again, one does not have to go that far to see that Davis Cup titles have no place as a measuring category in the GOAT debate. As noted earlier, it is a category that does not exist. A country, not a player, wins the Davis Cup, and so it goes into the records, period.

Major Titles

This is the most ironic category in the sense that the same group of experts who pushed this category’s rise to the dominant category in the determination of the GOAT probably now regret that they ever did it. While this is certainly not an invented category and should definitely contribute to determining the GOAT, the impression that exists today that this has always been the determinant category could not be more false.

In the 1970s and 1980s, accolades such as the number of Majors won in succession, the amount of time spent at No. 1, and achieving the Grand Slam outclassed the number of Majors won as far as the players and fans were concerned. From mid-1970s to mid-1980s, most top players did not even play the Australian Open, simply because its timing was odd and it was considered too far away. Borg openly said that he would only consider playing the Australian Open if he won the U.S. Open and had a chance to complete the Grand Slam. He never won the U.S. Open, thus he never played the Australian Open, except one time in 1973 as a youngster. As a result, he won 11 Majors in eight years, playing only three of them per year. McEnroe played the Australian Open for the first time in 1983, and Jimmy Connors never played it after 1975.

The importance of Majors won got put on a pedestal when Pete Sampras began collecting Majors in the 1990s.  The American media galvanized its viewers once they saw that one of their own could come out of the shadows of Borg and Laver that Connors and McEnroe could never quite surpass, and grab the GOAT title by focusing on the number of Majors he won. Well-known tennis commentators on the American TV quickly reduced all statistics-related discourse to the number of Major titles.

By using this narrative, they saw the means to quicken the process of officially naming their man the GOAT.  As soon as Sampras surpassed Borg’s 11 Slam titles, he was essentially declared the GOAT; the 13th and 14th titles were the icing on the cake.  The American media clung on the number of Majors as long as it could, in the name of keeping an American as the GOAT.  The reality was that by the time Roger Federer won his 12th and 13th Major, his list of accomplishments was already superior to that of Sampras, including titles on a surface that Sampras never came close to mastering.  But all that mattered was the number 14, and the American media reminded the public at each opportunity, through eye-catching graphics and colorful vocabulary, that Sampras was still the GOAT due to his 14 Majors.

The irony is, several years later, what Federer fans considered a farcical tactic to keep their man behind Sampras in the GOAT debate became their biggest asset when their man began collecting loss after loss against his main rival Nadal.  It seems that in the next couple of years, the number of Majors will remain Federer fans’ biggest ally.  Once again, the partisanship in the GOAT debate has accorded a category more importance than it deserves.  The number of Majors won was not the most important category for two and a half decades into the Open era.

Even after two decades of a powerful push by the American-led tennis media, the number of Majors should still not be the central factor in determining the GOAT.  Sampras should not have kept the GOAT status when Federer had 12 or 13 Majors, and Federer should not keep the GOAT status simply because Nadal’s titles (possibly) remain below 17.  On a similar note, I would not hesitate to already put Nadal ahead of Sampras, albeit by a small margin, even though the latter has more Majors to his name.  Nadal’s ability to win on all surfaces and his career Grand Slam, along with his record as the most Masters Series titles should at least be enough to trump Sampras’ one more Major over Nadal.

Head-to-Head

While this category shows who you may pick in a match between two players if your life depended on it, it does not say much about which player should be considered in a higher status than the other in the GOAT debate.  A given player becomes great not by consistently beating one player, but by consistently outperforming the rest of the field against which he is competing.  Once again, this is an invented category that Nadal fans cling on to due to their player’s fantastic head-to-head record against Federer.

Currently, it will matter in roundtable debates since both players are active and their fans can banter on message boards and blogs.  But tennis historiography shows that, twenty years from now, it will matter very little.  Guillermo Vilas, the player that history considers as one of the top 5 clay court players in the Open era had a 5-8 record on clay against Manuel Orantes, with one of the five wins coming in a walk-over, and another on an abandoned match.  Despite this one-sided head-to-head record, history would hardly consider Orantes a better clay-court player than Vilas.  Would anybody consider Vitas Gerulaitis ahead of Ilie Nastase in the ranking of the best players in the Open era?  I hardly doubt it and so would most tennis historians.  Yet, Gerulaitis had a crushing 10-1 record against Nastase, simply because he would endlessly chip-and-charge to Nastase’s backhand force ‘Nasty’ to use his weakest shot to pass him, the one-handed backhand topspin off of a slice that stays extremely low.  The bottom line is that history accords, and rightfully so, very little importance to the head-to-head record between two players.  Tennis rankings are not determined by how well a specific player does against another specific player; they are determined by how a player performs against the rest of the ensemble of ATP players.

I am sure others can find more frivolous, overrated, or invented ‘false’ categories if needed.  The truth is that partisanship consistently hurts the older players on the hand – how many ‘Laver fans’ or ‘Borg fans’ remain today compared to Nadal, Federer, or Djokovic fans? – and hinders analysis based on facts by diluting the debate with unhealthy emotions and inaccurate (and sometimes false!) data on the other.  It is understandable that fans of particular players fall into this trap.  After all, they have the right to be emotional, which is a major component of fandom.  However, it is utterly worrisome that the leading figures in the tennis media fall into this trap and wrongly influence the public opinion.

Coaches for Top Players: Necessary, Not, or Not Necessarily?

Last week Gasquet revealed that he had come to an agreement with Sergu Bruguera, the two-time French Open Champion (1993-94), and that the Spaniard will begin his duties in February of 2014. This is on the heels of a bizarre development during the ATP Tour Finals in London, when Ricardo Piatti abruptly walked away from coaching Gasquet after his second loss in the round-robin matches. Gasquet admitted to being in shock as much as anyone else, especially considering that he was closing the curtain on his career’s most successful season that culminated in qualifying for the year-ending even in London, reserved for the top eight players of the year. By the way, Gasquet also employs Sébastien Grosjean as a coach with whom Piatti was splitting his duty. Thus, Bruguera will become co-coach with Grosjean, probably spending more time with the player over the year. Why? Because Grosjean is also the Davis Cup Captain for France, and he can’t quite be a full-time coach for a single player. In fact, he is the one who recommended Bruguera to Gasquet, meaning a coach suggested to his employer which co-coach to hire. Are you, the reader, keeping up with this? Because, you better get used to it. Coaching changes are coming at increased frequency, co-coaching has been the new trend for a few years, and some coaching changes are done quicker the replacement of a light bulb. Player-Coach duos like Li Na & Carlos Rodriguez (pictured below) who stayed together through the 2013 season are progressively in the minority.

If you have not heard, in 2013, Sharapova let Thomas Högstedt go after the second-round loss at Wimbledon, despite having a successful season until that loss, and having the best results of her career since Högstedt began coaching her in 2010. She hired and fired Jimmy Connors in less than a week, after one loss to Sloan Stephens in Cincinnati, in one of the quickest turnarounds in coaching-changes history, with Connors getting the news one day after announcing that the loss to Stephens was a bump on the road and he was looking forward to working with her. Sharapova has since hired Sven Groenefeld, and Högstedt has moved on to coaching Caroline Wozniacki.

Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, split from his coach Roger Rasheed in August because of, get this: “language barriers and geographical issues”. Uhm, how did they manage to collaborate for ten months with those kinds of complications? Why not simply announce “for reasons undisclosed”, “or private reasons” than produce such a tall tale? In any case, Rasheed moved on to Grigor Dmitrov since, and Tsonga recently hired Thierry Ascione and Nicolas Escude, – yes you guessed it: co-coaches. They also coach another Frenchman, Nicolas Mahut, joining a rare category: co-coaches simultaneously coaching their co-employers.

In the meantime, Simona Halep just split with her Coach Adrian Marcu following the most successful season of her career; Samantha Stosur hired the ex-Murray coach Miles McLagan after splitting with long-time coach David Taylor. I could go on and on, and I have not even mentioned Jelena Jankovic who certainly must hold the record for most coaching changes since her career rose to prominence.

The increasing frequency of coaching changes, the reduction in the durations of collaborations, the ever-expanding ‘co-coaching’ concept, and the results that some players have had without a coach begs the question, how much is the coach’s role in the player’s success? Moreover, who is helping whose career? Did Nick Bollettieri help Andre Agassi’s career more than Agassi ultimately helped Bollettieri, and his floundering academy, come back to limelight? Similarly, did Brad Gilbert help Agassi’s career or did Agassi actually make Gilbert’s career? In a more obvious and contemporary case, is Patrick Mouratoglu helping Serena’s career more than Serena is helping his?

There are no black-and-white answers to the preceding questions, but in any case, I would maintain that thinking that a coach is absolutely can lead to more disastrous consequences than choosing to be without one. Hiring a coach that does not fit the frame of what the player needs is more likely to happen if hiring a coach is seens as the only and absolute road to success. Roger Federer had arguably the best season of his career in 2004, and spent most of 2007 & 2008 without one. It is true that Severin Lüthi has supported him, but only since 2007 in any significant amount, and anybody who is familiar with that partnership will tell you that Lüthi’s function approaches being the ‘solid foundation’ of his team more than acting uniquely as a tennis coach. Tsonga spent over a year coachless, resulting in possibly the best 12-month period of his career in terms of results. Did Serena really have a successful year because of Mouratoglu or was it another routine year for Serena who has had 13 Slam titles and ‘Serena Slam’ far before she hired him? For now, I am more inclined to agree with the latter.

Gone are the days of long-term successful coach-player relationships, such as Bjorn Borg & Lennart Bergelin, Boris Becker & Ion Tiriac, Stefan Edberg & Tony Pickard, Steffi Graf & Pavel Slozil, and Sampras & Tim Gullikson, each lasting more than five years, at least. Currently, the only high-profile players who would fit that type of description are Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic. Lo and behold, they are the top two players in the world; and Serena Williams, the current number one women’s player in the world, got there years ago in the first place coached by the same person with whom she began playing tennis as a child. Thus, the question is not “does the coach serve a purpose?” The answer is obviously, yes! However, my answer to the conventional belief that a player is always better off with a coach than without one would be “not necessarily.” Not necessarily, because finding the right fit comprises of a tedious process that requires more than a trial-week at the local courts with a prospect coach; not necessarily, because if the right fit is not found, the time spent together can not only turn to waste, but it can regress the player’s development; not necessarily, because a player who feels rushed to get a coach will hire one after another for short periods of time until finding the right fit, and will face continuous adaptation periods, confusion, and interrupted developments in technique. On the one hand, I agree that any player will thrive with the right coach who aims for long-term success and knows the player’s ‘soul,’ because coaching is not just telling the player to ‘follow-through’ or ‘move the feet.’ On the other hand, a player without a coach, and spending that period of time to reflect on his/her game while taking the time to do a sensible search for a new coach, has a better chance of success than a player who hires a coach simply due to the belief that having a coach trumps not having one.

Wacky Week in Women’s Tennis

The tennis season is nearing its end. WTA already played its year-ending WTA Championships in Istanbul, Turkey, with Serena Williams emerging as the champion one more time. Historically, this tournament signaled the end of individual competition for the year in Women’s Tennis. Fed Cup finals take place one week later, but it’s a team competition involving two countries and a handful of players, which means that it’s resting time for the players until January. But for the last four years, the WTA has scheduled an additional event. To top it all, it has the wackiest name that I have ever heard for a tournament: “Masters bis”. This year, it was held in Sofia, Bulgaria, and it involved those players who finished high in the rankings, but not high enough to qualify for the WTA Championships. It was merely a matter of time before the events butted heads, and it finally happened this year.

This year’s event clashed with the Fed Cup finals between Italy and Russia. The problem began when one Italian player, Roberta Vinci, and three Russian players, Maria Kirilenko, Elena Vesnina and Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova received invitation to play the “Masters bis” – I admit, I can’t get over the ‘Parisian street address’ name. Roberta Vinci chose to represent Italy in the Fed Cup finals, but all three Russians chose the tournament over Fed Cup. With Sharapova, Kuznetsova, and Makarova unavailable for various other reasons, the legendary Russian Captain Shamil Tarpischev found himself unable to field a competitive team despite having 6 Russian players in the top 30 rankings. He settled for four players outside the top 100 against the Italian team composed of its top guns, Sara Errani (#7), Roberta Vinci (#13), Flavia Pennetta (#31), and Karina Knapp (#41). To add salt to the Russians’ wounds, the tie was held in Cagliari, Italy, in front of an enthusiastic and partisan crowd.

Needless to say, the Italians won without losing a match, although the first match between Vinci and Alexandra Panova produced a dramatic encounter, lasting 3 hours and 13 minutes, with Vinci saving four match points before finally defeating Panova 5/7 7/5 8/6. The presence of the second-tier Russian team should take nothing away from the Italians performance. It was impressive how united they appeared throughout the tie, constantly cheering their teammates, moving from one side of the stadium to the other every game change so that their encouragement could be heard by their teammate on the court. Francescha Schiavone played the leader role on the sidelines without even being officially selected for the team. Errani confirmed the positive influence of her presence when she told Italy’s leading sports journal La Gazzetta dello Sport that she was glad to see that even Schiavone was part of the team. In short, the Italians showed how team spirit can still have a positive effect on tennis performance, which otherwise would seem to rest on individual skills and effort.

Next year, there will not be a repeat of this conflict, since the International Tennif Federation (ITF) – responsible of Davis Cup and Fed Cup events – agreed to move the Fed Cup finals a week later, coinciding with the week scheduled between the ATP Paris Masters and the ATP World Tour Finals (this year, they are back-to-back, but it will have a week in-between in 2014).

Lastly, the conflict also brought to the surface the larger set of problems facing Russian tennis on the one hand, and the tension between the International Tennis Federation and the WTA on the other.

Tarpischev, who is also the President of the Russian tennis Federation, has already expressed his dismay in 2012 at how the Russian authorities balk at every proposal the Federation brings to the table with regards to their tennis programs. The young talented Russian players defect to other countries – for example, Mikhaïl Kukushkin and Andrey Golubev now represent Kazakhstan – due to the promise of more money and better opportunities. There is also a communication problem between the women’s tennis players and the Federation considering, for example, that Elena Vesnina put the blame on the Tarpischev for not managing the problem in a timely fashion. It is already widely known that Maria Sharapova and the Russian Federation have had close to zero communication and that Sharapova is not likely to play for Russian anytime soon (although, this time around, it can ‘officially’ be blamed on her injury).

There is equally a ‘cold war’ brewing since 2009 between the ITF and the WTA. That is the year the extra event was scheduled by the WTA. Then, in 2012, the ITF decided that it would double the requirement of representing his/her country in Davis/Fed Cup for tennis players who wished to participate in the 2016 Olympics. While they were required to participate in two ties to be eligible for the 2012 London Olympics, now they have to play in four ties if they wish to be eligible for the 2016 Rio Olympics. Both the ITF and the WTA are standing firm behind their position, and other than the ITF’s decision to accommodate the scheduling next year, there does not seem to be much communication or compromise.

Under these circumstances, it is hard to cheer the 50th-year anniversary of Fed Cup Competition but Italians deserve high praise for their fourth Fed Cup title since 2006.

The Most Famous #100 Player in ATP History

Derek Tarr and his daughter (2013)
Derek Tarr and his daughter (2013)

The year is 1984 and the location is the U.S. Open in New York. In the first round, the 12th-seeded player and one of the most buoyant characters of the Golden Age of tennis “Disco” Vitas Gerulaitis plays a little-known South African player by the name of Derek Tarr (pictured in 2013 with his daughter Lauren). Gerulaitis wins in three straight sets and Tarr gets in his car later that day to drive back to his residence in Birmingham, Alabama. He plans to drive for a day, take a break, and arrive the next day to his destination.

At the press conference, a journalist asks Gerulaitis to compare the skills of John McEnroe and Martina Navratilova who happen to be the number 1 players in the world in men and women respectively. The days of being politically correct have not quite arrived yet and women’s tennis is still climbing the steep hill to equal prize money in tournaments. Gerulaitis bluntly says that Navratilova is so dominant because 95% of the women don’t know how to play tennis, and insists that men’s tennis rankings are much deeper. Then, he casually adds fuel to the fire by claiming that he bets his 2-million-dollar home in Long Island that the number-100 men’s player in the world would beat Navratilova!

Ironically, he is not aware that the guy he has just beaten in the first round, Derek Tarr, happens to be ranked 100 in ATP that week. Wheels begin turning in the media and Gerulaitis’s claim is all over the wires. Everyone has an opinion, including well-known players of the period. Harold Salomon, ex-French Open finalist who was contemplating retirement claims he can take Navratilova on “anytime, anywhere”. Ilie Nastase says he will put on a skirt and still beat Navratilova. Navratilova claims on a given surface she could have a chance to win. Chris Evert-Lloyd disagrees with her rival and says that even male college players or some men over 40 could beat the top women. Derek Tarr’s name gets around in the media, but he is nowhere to be found.

I recently talked to Derek, whom I have known for a long time, about those days. He has been an American citizen since 1986 and still lives in Birmingham, Alabama. He never left the world of tennis: he coaches the University of Alabama in Birmingham Men’s Tennis Team and he is the Tennis Director at Brook Highland Racquet Club.

Before getting into what Derek had to say about the episode, let’s clarify the chronological context. The concept of “social media” is about two decades into the future, internet has yet to be invented, and the only cell phones in the early 1980s are the size of a large coffee maker. The idea of carrying around a cell phone has not integrated into everyday life. Thus, while Derek is driving back to Birmingham for a day and a half, he is completely oblivious to the mayhem back in New York gravitating around Gerulaitis, Navratilova, and his name.

He arrives the next day and finds himself baffled when a friend asks him if he would play “that” match with Navratilova. After inquiring about what his friend meant, Derek slowly realizes that while he was on the road, there has been a lot of noise about an encounter between him and Navratilova back in New York. He even tries to get in touch with Gerulaitis to learn directly from the source what has precisely taken place, but Gerulaitis’ mom answers and says that her son is not at home. Gerulaitis later distorts the purpose of the call to the media saying that Derek called to talk to his mom and that “he is so nervous he can’t sleep”!

When I talked to Derek, he promptly set the record straight by pointing out that it must be either Gerulaitis’ mother who misinterpreted or Gerulaitis who tried to entertain the journalists. Derek simply wanted to talk to Gerulaitis to get the so-called “full scoop.” In any case, Derek takes a break for a few days to rest at his place. Eventually, the tournament moves on and other stories take over – this is the year of the famous “Super Saturday” at the U.S. Open.

In retrospect, Derek regrets not having pursued the affair while it was hot and on the front page. He was in and out of top 100 few times in the early 1980s and his career-high ranking was 87 in 1983. He has notable ATP wins over Tim Mayotte, Henri Leconte, and a young Andre Agassi, and had a respectable doubles career, reaching the quarter finals of the French Open in 1982 with partner Brad Guan of Australia. He says that, on the days following Gerulaitis’ quote, he should have gone straight back to New York and “talked it up”, and promoted the idea of a possible battle of the sexes match between him, the number 100 player, and Navratilova, keeping Gerulaitis’ claim on the front page. Back then only a small portion of the player had agents, and Derek was not one of them. He adds that having an agent would have helped in this particular situation. The agent would have known with whom to get in touch and what is required to increase the chances of such an encounter taking place.

Few weeks later, Derek did indeed get in touch with an agent who, in turn, got in touch with Navratilova’s agent. The latter said that Navratilova had no plans to play any male player under any circumstances at any moment in the future (although she did in 1992 against Jimmy Connors in Las Vegas). Derek admits that he may have missed a potentially lucrative opportunity by not adding fuel to the fire when the topic was hot. Then, he smiles and adds: “I guess I had my 15 minutes of fame.”

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