Posted by Stephen Tignor, TENNIS.com
Many compelling stories have cropped up during the French Open. There's the Roger and Rafa Show, the curiously meek effort by Serena Williams, and the Serbian Revolution. But is there a subtler change going on beneath the, ahem, surface on the men's side?
Take a look at the semifinalists. Between Roger Federer, Nikolay Davydenko, Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal, only Nadal could be called a "clay-court specialist." But he's also much more. Unlike his Spanish predecessors, he's willing to change his game to succeed on all surfaces. Of the other semifinalists, all three grew up on clay but can play equally well or better on faster courts. Federer is the king of grass, Djokovic loves hard courts, and Davydenko won a Masters event on a quick indoor court in Paris last year.
Does this mean anything? It is only one tournament, and there are still guys who earn their ranking points almost exclusively on clay (Nadal himself seems twice as good on dirt). But the trend is clear. The best clay-court players in the world are now the best players in the world, period.
Federer already has accomplished more on clay than Pete Sampras did in his career, and Djokovic will challenge for all the Slams. This isn't a surprising development. Most men now play a baseline game no matter what court they're on, so they're at least competent on clay. Anyone who grew up in Europe -- as these four did -- played regularly on the stuff as kids. Only the Americans are left out of the new clay fluency.
There's another reason that the surfaces have unified. The ATP's Masters Series of nine events -- six on hard courts, three on clay -- are mandatory for the top players. This has forced everyone (except the Americans, of course) to cross over -- the Spanish onto hard courts, say, and the Federers and Djokovices onto clay. No longer are there two circuits that meet for the Slams. (Sampras and Marcelo Rios played twice in their careers; Nadal and Federer already have faced off 11 times.) An ATP elite exists now, and at Roland Garros it flies higher than the clay specialists.
I mention this because I like clay tennis, but I don't think the perception of it has caught up with reality. When Nadal beats Federer, it's qualified by the fact that he did it "on clay." But when Federer beats Nadal on a hard court, the surface is never mentioned. (Have you ever seen a "hard-court specialist?") There's a sense that hard-court tennis is the real game and clay's a sideshow. There's no inherent truth to this -- there are just more hard-court and indoor events than clay, as well as a persistent U.S.-Anglo bias that can be traced back to the sport's English origins.
Perhaps more semifinals like the ones Friday will help. The world will see the best players in the game running, sliding and fighting on the sport's most entertaining surface. It will be hard for anyone, even an American, to dismiss that as anything less than "tennis," pure and simple.
