Big Four: manca Nadal, l'elemento vitale (The New York Times)

12-01-2013

MELBOURNE — With another Australian Open about to begin on Monday, the addition and subtraction continues at the top of the men’s game.

Though Andy Murray appeared to transform the lead pack into a true “Big Four” last year by winning the Olympics and the United States Open, the pack is now back to being a “Big Three” with Rafael Nadal’s layoff from competition well into its seventh month.

“It’s like missing one of the lead singers of a band,” said Brad Gilbert, a leading coach and analyst. “And it’s not like he’s 32 years old. He’s in the prime of his career, and there’s great dynamic with the other players, and it just kind of takes it away. Obviously it gives an opportunity for more other guys, but I just miss seeing Nadal compete.”

Murray — often thwarted by Nadal in the latter stages of the game’s major events — was a clear beneficiary of Nadal’s absence in London and New York.

Murray, seeded third, landed in Roger Federer’s half of the draw on Friday, leaving the defending champion, Novak Djokovic, with David Ferrer, the No.4 seed, in his half and Tomas Berdych in his quarter. The question is whether the 26-year-old Nadal’s absence makes it easier for an outsider to win, with Djokovic, Federer and Murray still in the mix.

“I still think you’re going to have to beat two of those guys at least to win a major, so the equation is still the same,” said Roger Rasheed, the veteran Australian coach now working with one of the other leading outsiders: Jo-Wilfried Tsonga.

“Does Rafa being out help anyone think, ‘Well now is my chance’? I guess it depends a bit on the work you’ve done. We’re in a climate now where you just can’t fluke any results. No one is going to fluke a Grand Slam or a Masters Series unless we get some major upsets throughout the course of it and right now you just can’t see where that’s coming from.”

Nor is it easy, with Serena Williams fresh off her latest bravura performance in Brisbane, to see any outsider staging a meaningful uprising in the women’s tournament in Melbourne.

“I think you can only go by what we saw last season, and I think motivated is the key word for Serena,” said Chris Evert, an ESPN analyst and 18-time Grand Slam singles champion, in an interview. “If Serena’s motivated, she’s going to be fit and going to train harder and going to be focused. So the motivation factor is the one factor that has kind of gone up and down with her during her career, because quite frankly she has such a zest for life that she had other interests and she hasn’t been as tunnel-visioned as probably champions are. But now, I think, she realizes.

“She realizes she’s older and doesn’t have a lot of time. So I think she’s eyeing the number of Grand Slams and eyeing history, and I think she has in her mind that she has two or three vintage years left in her.”

In 2006, Evert wrote Williams an open letter in which she counseled Williams during a difficult phase of her career to concentrate on her core mission.

“I wonder whether 20 years from now you might reflect on your career and regret not putting 100 percent of yourself into tennis,” Evert wrote then. “Because whether you want to admit it or not, these distractions are tarnishing your legacy.”

Evert concluded the letter with this: “Just remember that you have in front of you an opportunity of the rarest kind: to become the greatest ever at something. I hope you make the most of it.”

So how — Evert was asked this week — is Williams doing now?

Evert laughed. “Well I think she’s on the course,” Evert said. “She’s definitely in the last couple years been on the course, and again she’s had some things happen to her that I think would make anybody more appreciative of coming back and playing the game and being healthy again. I think she’s definitely more focused.”

Relative greatness can be tricky to define across tennis eras. The game is more global now; power and athleticism more constant. There is also ever-more emphasis on the Grand Slams, which means their fields are loaded as a matter of course.

Margaret Court, who holds the all-time record for Grand Slam singles titles with 24, won 11 of them in Australia when many of the world’s best did not routinely make the long journey.

Steffi Graf ranks second with 22 titles, followed by Helen Wills Moody with 19; Evert and her friendly rival Martina Navratilova with 18 and then Williams with 15.

A true Grand Slam — winning all four tournaments in the same calendar year — would close those gaps in a hurry, but it remains a long shot for Williams, who has not won the French Open since 2002 and who has been prone to unexpected episodes of extreme tightness when she pirouettes, fingers splayed after errors, and her timing escapes her.

Exhibit A from 2012: her shock first-round defeat by Virginie Razzano in Paris.

“She comes up with one, two or three a year where the top 200 players could beat her,” said Evert, who nonetheless, thinks Williams can still win in Paris.

“Look,” Evert said. “If Maria Sharapova can win the French, Serena Williams can win the French, and I don’t mean that in any bad way toward Maria. But Maria learned to play on clay properly and she worked at it, and she committed herself and she really worked on her movement and her patience, and Serena can do the same.”

Williams is No.3 in the rankings, behind No.1 Victoria Azarenka, the defending Australian Open champion, and No.2 Sharapova. Williams will be in Azarenka’s half of the draw at the Australian Open.

But there is no doubt about the leading player of the moment.

“When I’m commentating a match and Serena is walking out with Sharapova or Serena is walking on with Azarenka, it’s all about Serena,” Evert said. “I used to hate it when Martina used to play me and she would say, ‘Well I either win the match or I lose the match.’

“I used to be defensive and say, ‘What are you talking about?’ I took offense to that, but you’ve got to say it with Serena. It’s hard to beat her when she’s 80 to 100 percent.”

This will be the first Grand Slam tournament since the second and presumably final retirement of Kim Clijsters. Though Andy Roddick is still listed in the rankings (he is at No.39 this week), this will also be the first major since Roddick retired last year.

The American women appear to be back on the rise with 10 players in the top 100. Sloane Stephens, 19, is seeded for the first time in a Grand Slam tournament (at 29th), and Madison Keys, 17, is now pushing her elders in earnest after improving her fitness and consistency to complement her powerful serve and forehand. In all, there are 10 American women in the top 100, more than any other nation except Russia, which also has 10.

But with John Isner’s withdrawal because of a knee injury and Mardy Fish’s ongoing recovery from health concerns related to an accelerated heartbeat, the United States has just one player in the men’s draw ranked in the top 50. That is the 22nd-ranked Sam Querrey.

But the big absentee in Melbourne remains Nadal, the swashbuckling Spaniard with the fragile knees who lost to Djokovic last year in the marathon final here and is not expected to add himself back into the mix until next month and the clay-court swing in Latin America.