The promoters of the Australian Open should be awfully pleased. Often—too often—the women's final in a major is a dud. Usually the semis are better matches, and one player freezes up to play a bad match in the final. But even though the 2012 women's final was a 6-3, 6-0 rout, a new Number One was crowned, and the match wasn't completely awful. Maria Sharapova wasn't dumping serves into the net, was returning well, and hit a few winners—she was simply led into a boatload of errors. The NY Times' Straight Sets blog offered the theory that Victoria Azarenka won mostly because she hit with more topspin than Sharapova. Even though she obviously does hit with topspin, Sharapova is considered a flat hitter in the modern game. My feeling was that Azarenka covered the court a lot better than Sharapova, while hitting the ball just as powerfully (and shrieking just as loudly).

The men's semifinals were excellent, and the final may be one for the ages. The Atlantic speculates that this final may portend the new look of men's tennis: as an endurance sport. Even given that both Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal took a lot of time between points, the match took almost six hours, and many of the points involved over twenty shots, even thirty shots. A popular tennis coach once noted that, statistically speaking, for the average player the point will end on the next shot. For these guys, it seems that no matter how well they hit the ball, the point will go on at least another six shots. Part of that is because the tennis authorities have slowed down the courts, and part of that is because these guys are very fast and very fit, and part is because they are hitting with extremely exaggerated topspin. [Read more]

Yesterday, the New York Times' Straight Sets blog raved about the intensity of the Nadal-Federer semifinal, but this morning's match between Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray was a dogfight. I woke up at 4:30AM to a score of Djokovic leading 6-3, 3-5, but Novak fell behind on serve and was broken to lose the second set. All even.

The third set was very tight. The first game, Djokovic serving, took over ten minutes. Murray was serving crisply and controlling the baseline rallies with tightly-angled forehands. Reportedly suffering from a "stuffy nose," Djokovic looked tired and far less confident than usual. He wasn't serving that well, and repeatedly had to fight back to hold his own service games. Nole did well to reach a tiebreak, but couldn't hold off Murray. Andy only needed to keep going and take the fourth set. Crikey, even Ivan Lendl cracked a smile. [Read more]

Women's tennis will have a new #1 next week, and the current top-ranked player, Caroline Wozniacki, will drop to #4 in the WTA rankings. A lot of scenarios were possible before the semis, but now that third seed Victoria Azarenka and fourth seed Maria Sharapova are to play the finals, the winner will also secure the #1 ranking.

According to a contributor at Yahoo, if Azarenka wins, the points will stand at:
1. Victoria Azarenka 8585
2. Petra Kvitova 7690
3. Maria Sharapova 7560
4. Caroline Wozniacki 7085 [Read more]

If I were a betting man, and I'm not, I'd bet the house on the Giants beating the spread which currently has them 3 point underdogs versus the Patriots.  In fact, I'm very confident that they will win the Super Bowl.  For the life of me, I can't figure out how the Patriots are favored.  Okay, I can.  Tom Brady. 

Brady is a great great quarterback.  Quite possibly, he is the dominant 21st century pro football player - although Ray Lewis devotees certainly have an argument.  But I'm not even sure he's better than Eli Manning right now and Manning has more weapons and a better defense. [Read more]

We're half a month into 2012. Novak Djokovic's streak is long gone and most of the top names are at the Australian Open. Even though Australia is not presently as big a tennis powerhouse as say, Russia, tradition has the AO as the first major of the year. While planning the first Grand Slam—winning all four majors in one year—Don Budge was advised to skip the Australian Championships. In 1938, Australia took several weeks to reach by steamship, and his friends warned that he was such an attraction that the Aussies would play him to death in preliminary tournaments. But Budge schemed to win all four majors before turning pro, and had to start down under—as did Maureen Connolly, Rod Laver (twice), Margaret Smith Court and Steffi Graf. [Read more]

It is a wonderful coincidence that Muhammad Ali's 70th birthday comes the day after Martin Luther King Jr. Day. While the two essentially ran in different circles, as it were, both were amazing parts of a time that saw America change dramatically for the better.

While yesterday saw Americans look to King's words and actions, all would be remiss to overlook what Ali did to change social and cultural norms in the United States. [Read more]

Three weeks into this weird, compacted four month NBA season, the experts who rated the Chicago Bulls less likely than the Miami Heat, Oklahoma City Thunder, and even the Los Angeles Lakers to win the championship look pretty dumb.  The Bulls are 12-2 (and an eye-popping 7-2 on the road), and are easily the class of the league to this point.  Here's why the Bulls look like they are set to repeat as the best regular-season team, and have the best chance to win the 2012 NBA championship. [Read more]

When Junior Dos Santos creamed Cain Velasquez to win the UFC Heavyweight belt, it codified something everyone knew - from top (Dos Santos) to bottom (Jose Aldo), Brazilians are a dominant force in the UFC and MMA.
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Named for the famous revolutionary who was stabbed in the bath, Marat Safin was about as talented and powerful as anyone that has played tennis. While the he earned a handful of good results on the tour, like defeating Sampras in the 2000 US Open and briefly claiming the #1 ranking, the rumor was that he spent too much time satisfying his female fans. Though charming off-court, he was known for angry outbursts on court and claims to have smashed over a thousand racquets. He once played the Hopman Cup, "sporting a bandaged right thumb, two black eyes, a blood-filled left eye, and a cut near his right eye, all suffered in a fight several weeks earlier in Moscow."

So he's well prepared for a life in Russian politics.

Marat Safin Reveals His Plans for His Future [Read more]

Some live tennis is being played, but in a series called Love-30, the Tennis Channel has been mostly rebroadcasting the 30 best matches of the year. There certainly is live controversy Down Under, though, in advance of the Australian Open. On Tennis Channel's news crawler, I caught a glimpse of a story about players being fined $75K for playing the Hopman Cup, an exhibition tournament named after the legendary Aussie tennis coach.

Exhibitions have long been controversial. In 1991, Monica Seles ticked off a lot of people when she withdrew from Wimbledon, citing an injury, only to play an exo in Mahwah NJ for a guaranteed six-figure payday. There's no income equality in tennis. Once they've succeeded on the tour, top players can make stress-free money playing exos, but the tour and the tournament organizers need those top players to attract crowds that keep their tournaments profitable, and claim that without the tour, there would be no top players. Tennis politics is truly Byzantine. [Read more]

In a move that won about as much favorable press as Bud Selig declaring the All-Star Game a tie, NBA Commissioner David Stern tarnished his legacy when two days ago he voided a completely legitimate trade that would have sent star point guard Chris Paul from the New Orleans Hornets to the Los Angeles Lakers, Lakers center Pau Gasol to the Rockets, and three starters and a first round draft pick to the Hornets.  The move was a blatantly illegitimate kowtow to the owners of other franchises.  Stern needs to reverse himself, and with a figleaf of the trade being resubmitted to him modestly tweaked, hopefully will do so imminently. [Read more]

As of this very moment, there are two men that are dominating the news – and both of them are just awful at their chosen professions. But amazingly enough, we are all witnessing mediocrity rise to incredible heights as a lousy NFL quarterback is leading his team to victories while a lousy politician is leading the race for the GOP nomination for President.

Yes, my friends, with Newt Gingrich and Tim Tebow, America is putting its worst foot forward and getting a chance to enjoy the fruits of lousiness. And while the two are incredibly different in many ways, there are some striking similarities to their current runs of success. [Read more]

In high school swimming at a boy's school, I only remember one girl on an opponent's team—probably Sidwell Friends. She swam one race, then got out of the pool and ran to the locker room with her hand over her mouth. In college, men and women swam separate events, except for diving. In masters, men and women swim in the same heats all the time, and meet managers publish the results in separate lists by gender and age category. I've finished behind enough tiny but fast women that I don't even think about it anymore. [Read more]

In two days the top eight male tennis professionals will play in the Barclay's ATP World Tour Finals in London. The tournament is organized much like the WTA Championship in Istanbul. There are two groups of four players, who play each other. Whoever has the best record and second best record in each group are seeded into the single-elimination semifinals. Number and percentages of matches, sets and games won all count towards breaking ties - which is supposed to discourage less than stellar efforts by making no match entirely meaningless. [Read more]

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We love sports because they are narrative.  We organize everything into narratives:  our jobs, relationships, and lives.  Sports can be morality plays of good guys against bad guys, nationalistic narratives of the USA against the Russians, redemptive narratives of comebacks, little guy narratives of the-underdog-become-the-champion.  But they are always narratives.  The 2011 World Series illustrated an immutable law of sports, that is at once a narrative principle and yet entirely true in reality -- that catastrophic, emotional collapses in championship baseball make a series loss inevitable.    [Read more]

Wilt Chamberlain once said, "Nobody loves Goliath."  While stories about Chamberlain's personal life tend to belie that bit of self-deprecation, it is true that sports fans love an underdog.  This explains why there was so much rooting for the Boston Red Sox when in the 2004 ALCS they came the first team in baseball history to come back from a 3-0 playoff deficit and won Boston's first championship since 1918.  It explains how exhilarating the 1980 Miracle on Ice was, when the USA topped the Russian juggernaut in the semifinals en route to a gold medal. [Read more]

Since they've just come out with a film version of Moneyball, starring Brad Pitt as Billy Beane, I thought it would be interesting to revisit a 2003 review I wrote comparing Moneyball, the Michael Lewis book, to Long Strokes in a Short Season, a book about swim coaching.
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I just read three books in a row. One involved a boy wizard with a scar on his forehead. The other two were about men taking a new approach to their sports using ideas that were not new, but which had languished because they challenged the conventional wisdom. In both cases, their teams showed significant success due to the contributions of athletes who were not obviously gifted.

After I suggested being honest about college sports on this blog page, Taylor Branch has made the same case, better, in The Atlantic. With, you know, actual reporting and everything.

Here's a bit from Branch's lead, as a shoe-advertising king pin talks openly about "buying your schools" in order to increase his market share:

Not all the members could hide their scorn for the “sneaker pimp” of schoolyard hustle, who boasted of writing checks for millions to everybody in higher education. [Read more]

The US Open has played out on the men's side more or less as expected - the top four seeds made it to the quarterfinals and the top two seeds made it to the finals. Mardy Fish and Andy Roddick had decent runs, but lost to Jo Wilfried Tsonga and Rafa Nadal. Tsonga could not beat Federer this time. The former teen phenom Donald Young had a good run but eventually lost to Andy Murray. In his bio, Hardcourt Confidential, Patrick McEnroe hinted at the stormy relationship he had with Young's parents, claiming that they demanded far more resources than USTA player development had to give. But as a broadcaster PMac had only positives for Young. [Read more]