Posted by Peter Bodo, TENNIS.com
This is holiday party week, which means you really have to be on your verbal game in order to make the most of all the time you'll spend chit-chatting about this and that with your fellow workers and buddies as you make the rounds with that red-and-white stocking cap on your head and an amber or green bottle in hand. Oh, I forgot, the ESPN crowd skews more to green tea, right?
Anyway, here are a few of the things I'd be inclined to bat around with acquaintances who are into tennis:
1. The equipment revolution. Sure, the original Prince Pro (dull aluminum with a green plastic throat) sent shock waves through the world of tennis at every level, and overnight the basic tennis racket was radically transformed -- it's odd that absolutely nobody plays with a "standard" sized head that, as recently as the 1970s, was allthat anyone used.
But the move to polyester-based strings (Luxilon etc.) may have had an even more profound, recent effect on how the game is played -- and for a bizarre reason: They're "dead" and have none of the elastic effects that once made gut the only string the pros used.
2. Can Rafael Nadal keep the heat on? We all know how important winning the Wimbledon title was to Rafa -- it expanded his empire from the realm of clay, and also was the key win in his successful drive to unseat Roger Federer as the year-end No. 1 player. But I think it's legitimate to question whether Nadal can stay on the offensive, perhaps even passing up some of his clay-court gimmes in order to become a more dominant all-surface threat. The question lurking beneath the surface? How often does a guy really need to win Monte Carlo, or Rome, if he has other fish to fry?
3. Is Ana Ivanovic really cut from champion cloth? Ivanovic's struggles after she won her first major at Roland Garros and vaulted to the No. 1 ranking were striking and, if not exactly alarming, at least the equivalent of a flashing yellow light on her road to glory. Some players invest so much in the drive to reach the top that when they finally get there, they're thrown for a mental loop. They have to respond with flexibility and a calm, measured program for embracing and building on their new status. The wide-open nature of the WTA game these days -- the tour is populated by volatile and unpredictable talents -- presents both opportunity and pressure.
4. Who, if anyone, among the new generation of talents on the ATP side is going to step up and build on 2008? OK, Andy Murray, Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Juan Martin del Potro (not to mention Gilles Simon, the contender nobody wants to believe in) got our attention as the dog days of August yielded to fall and winter. Can they make powerful statements early in the year, with Federer and Nadal fresh, and some of the old guard (Andy Roddick, Nikolay Davydenko, David Nalbandian) still capable of playing great tennis?
5. With the ATP tournament and ranking structure modified, and the WTA Roadmap 2009 kicking in, are we going to see either of these two much-desired results: A high degree of player commitment, with the top players meeting each other more often, and a decline in what has become the annual year-end swoon, with top players using fatigue and/or injury as a rationalization for pulling the plug on their year sometime in the mid-fall? In other words, were these moves by the ATP and WTA incidental tweaks, or do they represent meaningful change?
6. Will the new dual-gender event in Madrid, created at such enormous cost and effort (including the demotion of the ATP Hamburg Masters) be an instant hit, or will the promoters end up shrugging as they say, "We built it. They just didn't come."
Pass the eggnog.
Peter Bodo
