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Rafael Nadal – It’s a Matter of Time

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By Lisa-Marie Burrows

Rafael Nadal is crowned champion in Brazil. (Photo credit: InovaFoto)

Rafael Nadal is back. How long have his fans and supporters been waiting to hear those words? A very long 222 days.

Time is a great healer, or so we are told. The Spaniard may have been back for less than two weeks, but in that time he has reached the singles and doubles final at Viña del Mar and has been crowned champion in São Paolo.

Today he won his 51st ATP Tour title and 37th on clay, but is Rafa back at his very best after a great two weeks of his comeback? I doubt it, but give him time.

‘Nothing valuable can be lost by taking time.’ – Abraham Lincoln

Taking time out from the ATP Tour to recuperate and recover has been necessary for the 11-time Grand Slam champion to ensure his knee heals and to prevent further injury. Undoubtedly his rhythm and feel for the ball is not at its best, but at least he is back on the courts competing again and without taking the time to recover, he may have made his injuries worse.

He may have ‘lost’ seven months on Tour, but in doing so it’s possible he has lengthened his time competing and that is the most valuable thing.

‘It’s better to do the right thing slowly than the wrong thing quickly.’ – Peter Turla

Nadal has won his first title in eight months and has received a mix bag of press about his return. He has been honest that he is not 100% and still feels some occasional discomfort in his knee. Whilst playing at the two South American tournaments, he revealed that he has struggled with his movement and timing on the ball, but after months of not playing, that is natural.

The Spaniard will not be playing in Buenos Aires next week and this is a sensible decision. It will give him an opportunity to assess his performance over the last two weeks, evaluate how he is feeling physically and relax mentally after two weeks of interrogation about his knee and level of play. Taking things slowly now may create better results in the future.

‘All the flowers of all of the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.’ – Chinese Proverb

The South American swing of the Tour is a good test for Nadal. He may not be playing against the top 5 players, but match practice is more vital. Clay is his favourite surface and one that is the least likely to cause further injury to his knee. Participating and winning at these tournaments are small stepping stones towards his bigger goals – winning against the best and adding further Grand Slams to his outstanding list of achievements.

Not being able to do the one thing you love always has the ability to make you realise how much you miss it. Have the last two weeks planted the seeds for future success for the King of Clay? I believe so, but only time will tell…

Rafael Nadal in your Pocket!

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Rafael Nadal has launched his own tennis coaching application.

This week, 11-time Grand Slam champion, Rafael Nadal, may be making his debut of the new season at Viña del Mar in Chile, but he has also made his debut in the world of mobile technology.
Nadal has launched his new application, which can be downloaded on the iTunes App Store. The new Rafael Nadal Tennis Academy App is for all recreational players, which helps you to learn directly from the Spanish champion himself.

The application offers exclusive, in-depth tennis tutorials of Rafa’s strokes and has easy-to-use video coaching tools so players can capture their strokes, analyse their games and compare their technique side-by-side with Rafa.

The application allows you to learn the technique of his strokes.

With this application, it is like having a bit of Rafael Nadal in your pocket, learning his secrets on his powerful serve, brutal forehand and ripping backhand.

The Rafael Nadal Tennis Academy App comprises of nine tutorials featuring his serve and returns with a host of future tutorials of all Rafa’s strokes, along with exclusive insights from Rafa himself on what makes him one of the world’s best tennis players.

For those who download the application can also upload their own videos as well as their own Vstrated coaching sessions to the Rafael Nadal Tennis Academy on Vstrator.com.

It seems to me that for any budding future tennis star, this is the easiest (and most likely cheapest!) way of having Nadal as your own personal tennis coach!

Le Grinder- Some Appreciation for David Ferrer

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by James A. Crabtree

David Ferrer has been an elite top ten player for a considerable amount of time. He has made four grand slam semi-finals and won three Davis Cup titles for Spain.
He has also won eighteen career titles and leads the 2012 tour with titles won in Paris, Valencia , Bastad , s-Hertogenbosch , Acapulco , Buenos Aires  and Auckland . If you weren’t counting that is seven titles and on every surface.
Not bad for a guy who could have ended up on a building site.

Wikipedia
“Once, as a teenager, when Ferrer did not practice hard enough, his coach, Javier Piles, locked him in a completely dark 2m x 2m ball closet for several hours, giving him only a piece of bread and a bit of water. After this incident he was fed up with tennis and went to work at a construction site, but after a week he returned to Piles and asked if he could remain at the club and play tennis. As of 2012, he is still coached by Piles and has said he considers him a second father.”

Simply put Ferrer is a player who has become a tennis master on the grandest of stages because of necessity.  Not only does he have the talent, but also the determination needed to match it to become successful. It is obvious that he has found his resolve from hours and hours on the practice court then consistently polished it to a winning formula when the points have counted. Judgement  and retort, dependability and dexterity. The guy’s feet never ever stop moving, even on a changeover.
But should David Ferrer be an elite player? Well, no, depending on whom you ask?
For a start experts believe an elite player should be 6’1 or taller and they should possess a dominant serve. The majority of technicians believe a player should hit the forehand with a circular ark. Fans believe a player should have one dominate stroke that strikes fear into any foe.

On the face of it David Ferrer has none of these attributes. For a start he is listed at the most popular actor height of 5’9, which puts him at eye level with Johnny Depp and Robert De Niro. He isn’t intimidating like Del Potro, flashy like Tsonga or powerful like Berdych. In fact of all men ranked within the top 10 some would argue that Ferrer is the least talked about. He doesn’t have a dominate stroke and he scurries around the court in between points like a man without a coat on a cold winters night.
However during point play the scurrying takes on a whole new form. His side stepping baseline coverage beggars belief. Most importantly he takes charge when returning serve. Statistically speaking in 2012 he ranked within the top five for points won on the first serve, second serve and return games won. He is fourth on the all-time list of career return games won, winning 35%. In layman’s terms the servers are under pressure. Once the ball comes back the pressure is compounded by the consistent grinding that has been the major characteristic of his career, and the success of his most recent win in Paris.
A career that could have been very different,  it’s safe to say that this determined little Spaniard has made the right choice in pursuing a professional tennis career over that of a very different sort of grind.

SAP Open: Defending Champ Raonic through to Final, Faces Istomin

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The SAP Open final is set for Sunday, with defending champion Milos Raonic preparing to defend his title after a hard-fought 7-6(4), 6-2 victory over 19-year old American hope Ryan Harrison. At the start of the week, Raonic was surely one of the favorites to make it to the final, but his opponent is something of a surprise. From the half of the draw that contained former champions Andy Roddick and Radek Stepanek, the top Uzbekistani player Denis Istomin has fought his way to the final after beating Julien Benneteau 6-3, 6-7(4), 6-3.

Harrison played well, but Raonic was just too good today

Raonic will be trying to defend a title for the first time and at his first opportunity, since his victory in last year’s SAP Open was the first tournament win of his career. In addition to trying for his second SAP Open title, Raonic is hoping to win his second title of the year, after he bested Serbian number two Janko Tipsarevic in the final of the Chennai Open in three tiebreak sets. Raonic is now 10-1 since the start of 2012, with his only loss coming to Lleyton Hewitt in the third round of the Australian Open. His match against Harrison was tight, with both players serving extremely well in the first set. During the inevitable tiebreak, the American up-and-comer played one loose point to start it off, and that was sufficient to allow Raonic to take the breaker. Once he had secured the first set, the lanky Canadian began swinging more freely and hitting his serve even harder, tipping the speed gun over 150 miles per hour on multiple occasions. It was too much for Harrison to whether, after dropping such a close first set.
Denis Istomin’s semifinal against Julien Benneteau was no less competitive, but it would be difficult to say that there had been as much of an extended period of consistent play from both players as there had been in the first set between Raonic and Harrison. Both Istomin and Benneteau played spectacular shots from every part of the court, but each of them had their ups and downs. After going up by a set and getting the second set to a tiebreak, Istomin cracked a backhand return winner to take the first minibreak, but with the end of the match in sight, he faltered and ended up losing the breaker. In the closing stages of the third set, however, Istomin upped his aggression once again, and this time managed to sustain his level long enough to break Benneteau and serve out the match. This was the first time that Istomin had managed to even take a set off the Frenchman, after three previous meetings.
Istomin will be competing in only his second career ATP final. He reached his first in August of 2010, in the New Haven tournament where he lost in three sets to Sergiy Stakhovsky. Since then, Istomin’s results dipped in 2011 when he reached just one quarterfinal during the entire year, which was at the SAP Open. He has started this year off with much stronger results, with a 9-3 record on the year. In 2011, Istomin only managed 10 wins over the course of the entire year. He’s been serving better and playing with more consistency off the ground than he was last year, waiting for better opportunities to deliver his booming winners. Particularly this week, Istomin has reminded some viewers of Czech Tomas Berdych for the way he strikes the ball off both wings, though Denis has yet to demonstrate the kind of firepower that propelled Berdych into the top ten and all the way to a Wimbledon final.
Raonic felt confident in his level play in his post-match press conference

If Istomin wants to win his maiden title against Raonic, he will certainly have his work cut out for him. When asked what he would have to do to win the match, he laughingly replied that he would need to return Raonic’s serve. But that has not been an easy task. In the two years that Raonic has been playing the SAP Open, he has only dropped serve twice in seven matches: once this year against Tobias Kamke, and once last year against James Blake. Other than that, he’s been untouchable on serve. Ultimately, it will likely come down to big points. In the seven matches that Raonic has played at the SAP Open, he’s played seven tiebreaks, and he’s won every single one of them. Istomin comes into the final with a less impressive tiebreaker record, since he’s just 1-3 on the year. That could prove to be the difference.
Defending a title is never an easy task, but winning the first title of your career isn’t either. Up to this point, Raonic has proven to be unflappable in the most tense situations. All he needs to do is reach back and bring out another 150 mile per hour serve. If he can hold his nerve and play consistently, in addition to serving well, it will be difficult for Istomin to maintain a sufficiently high level of play for long enough to take a set from Raonic. That said, both of these players love playing at the SAP Open. Both of them have more wins at this tournament than any other. I have no doubt that both of them desperately want one more win at the HP Pavilion this year.

Enqvist and Ferreira Post Opening Wins In Dallas

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DALLAS, October 23 – Thomas Enqvist and Wayne Ferreira each posted opening round-robin match victories Thursday at the 2008 Stanford Championships at the Turpin Tennis Center on the campus of Southern Methodist University. Enqvist, from Sweden, defeated American Jimmy Arias 6-3, 6-2, while Ferreira, the defending champion from South Africa, defeated Justin Gimelstob of the United States 6-2, 7-6 (4). The Stanford Championships are the sixth of eight events on the 2008 Outback Champions Series, the global tennis circuit for champion tennis players age 30 and over.
Enqvist, a former world No. 4 and the singles runner-up at the 1999 Australian Open, is competing in his second Outback Champions Series event. The Swede, who is two-and-a-half years removed from his ATP career, posted a 2-1 round-robin record in his debut event in Charlotte last month, but failed to advance into the tournament’s championship match or third-place match. His win over Arias Thursday puts him in good standing in round robin Group B with upcoming matches against Todd Martin and Aaron Krickstein. Against Arias, Enqvist broke serve to open the match and held on to win the opening set 6-3. The Swede over-powered Arias from the baseline in the second set, registering two service breaks to close out the second set 6-2.
“I played steady and I took my chances, so I think it was a good match,” said Enqvist. “It’s always important to get off to a good start.”
Arias, 10 years older and six inches shorter than Enqvist, said his inability to put enough balls away against his younger, stronger opponent was the major difference in the match.
“I’m annoyed at myself in some ways, because I can hit the ball big enough to compete with him, but I have trouble pulling the trigger sometimes,” said the 44-year-old Arias. “I’m just a little edgy, so that I over spin and when I over spin, it doesn’t do enough to hurt him. Like, I’m not going to hit a winner and then eventually he’s going to get a hold of one and hit it 700 miles per hour and then I’m in trouble. Obviously he serves bigger than me and all that sort of stuff to. I just wish there were certain points. Like in the last game, I had love-15, and I had a short forehand and I approached to his backhand with spin. And he got there and ripped a backhand cross-court winner. I should have been able to put that ball away, the forehand, but I was so tense, I couldn’t quite let it fly. And that’s not good enough against him. It might be good enough against some people, but it’s not good enough against him.”
A fan favorite at Outback Champions Series events due to his constant bantering with his opponents and the fans, Arias admitted in his post-match press conference that his behavior is not a reflection of him being loose on the court, but rather a cover for his nerves.
“I’m the opposite of loose – I’m faking like you wouldn’t believe,” said Arias, who ranked No. 5 in the world in 1984. “I’m as tight as a drum. I wish I could relax. I mean, I’m having fun playing. But I want to play well. I hit some cool shots, actually, that I was happy with. A couple of half-volleys that I couldn’t believe I made.”
Ferreira won the Stanford Championships last year when the event was played indoors at the Dr. Pepper StarCenter in Frisco, defeating Jim Courier 2-6, 6-3, 11-9 (Champions Tie-Breaker) in the final. Against Gimelstob, a last-minute replacement in the tournament for the injured Boris Becker, Ferreira registered back-to-back service breaks in the sixth and eighth games to capture the first set. Neither player surrendered serve in the second set, before Ferreira took the tie-breaker 7-4.
“It’s great here,” said Ferreira of Dallas and the Turpin Tennis Center at SMU. “The facility is fantastic. The kids at this school are a little spoiled to have a facility like this to come out to everyday. It’s fun for us to come out here and play, too. A lot of the guys playing here are really, really good. It’s a blast. I’m already having a lot of fun.”
Despite being a replacement for the popular Becker, who pulled out of the event on Wednesday with a back injury, Gimelstob received plenty of crowd support from the fans, including a group of women who were quite vociferous in their support for the former U.S. Davis Cup team member.
Joked Gimelstob of the group of female supporters, “They’ve got very good taste down here in Dallas.”
Gimelstob, 31, was competing against Ferreira on the exact one-year anniversary date of his final ATP singles match in St. Petersburg, Russia in 2007.
Founded in 2005, the Outback Champions Series features some of the biggest names in tennis over the last 25 years, including Pete Sampras, John McEnroe, Courier and many others. To be eligible to compete on the Outback Champions Series, players must have reached at least a major singles final, been ranked in the top five in the world or played singles on a championship Davis Cup team. Each event also has the right to choose a “wild card” entrant.
The Outback Champions Series features eight events on its 2008 schedule, with each event featuring an eight-man round-robin match format. The winner of each four-player division meets in the title match while second place finishers in each division play in the third-place match. Each event features $150,000 in prize money with an undefeated winner taking home $54,000 as well as Champions Series ranking points that will determine the year-end Stanford Champions Rankings No. 1. Beginning in 2008, the year-end champion will receive a $100,000 bonus courtesy of Stanford Financial Group, the official rankings sponsor of the Outback Champions Series.
The 2008 Outback Champions Series kicked off March 12-16 in Naples, Fla., at The Oliver Group Champions Cup where Martin defeated McEnroe in the final. Courier won the second event of the season at The Residences at The Ritz Carlton Grand Cayman Legends Championships April 16-20, defeating Ferreira in the final, while McEnroe won his first career Outback Champions Series even in Boston April 30- May 4, defeating Krickstein in the final. Pat Cash won his first Outback Champions Series title in Newport, R.I., in August, defeating Courier in the final, while Courier won his second event of the season in September in Charlotte, defeating Martin in the final. The next three events on the 2008 Outback Champions Series calendar are Dallas, Surprise, Ariz., and Dubai, U.A.E. More information can be obtained by visiting www.ChampionsSeriesTennis.com.
InsideOut Sports & Entertainment is a New York City-based independent producer of proprietary events and promotions founded in 2004 by former world No. 1 and Hall of Fame tennis player Jim Courier and former SFX and Clear Channel executive Jon Venison. In 2005, InsideOut launched its signature property, the Outback Champions Series, a collection of tennis events featuring the greatest names in tennis over the age of 30. In addition, InsideOut produces many other successful events including one-night “Legendary Night” exhibitions as well as charity events and tennis fantasy camps, including the annual Ultimate Fantasy Camp. For more information, please log on to www.InsideOutSE.com or www.ChampionsSeriesTennis.com
The remaining schedule for The Stanford Championships is as follows;
Friday, October 24
1:30pm
Wayne Ferreira vs. Karel Novacek
Todd Martin vs. Jimmy Arias
6:30pm
Thomas Enqvist vs. Aaron Krickstein
Jim Courier vs. Justin Gimelstob
Saturday, October 25
1:30pm
Aaron Krickstein vs. Jimmy Arias
Mixed doubles featuring Anna Kournikova
Jim Courier vs. Wayne Ferreira
6:30pm
Thomas Enqvist vs. Todd Martin
Mixed doubles featuring Anna Kournikova
Justin Gimelstob vs. Karel Novacek
Sunday, October 26
1:30 pm
3rd place match
Championship match
Round-Robin Results from Wednesday, October 22
Aaron Krickstein, United States, def. Todd Martin, United States, 7-6 (4), 6-4
Jim Courier, United States, def. Karel Novacek, Czech Republic, 6-3, 6-1
Round-Robin Results from Thursday, October 23
Thomas Enqvist, Sweden, def. Jimmy Arias, United States, 6-3, 6-2
Wayne Ferreira, South Africa, def. Justin Gimelstob, United States, 6-2, 7-6 (4)
Round-Robin Group Standings
Group A
Jim Courier 1-0
Wayne Ferreira 1-0
Justin Gimelstob 0-1
Karel Novacek 0-1
Group B
Aaron Krickstein 1-0
Thomas Enqvist 1-0
Jimmy Arias 0-1
Todd Martin 0-1

Wear your liver on your sleeve

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SportsBusinessJournal‘s Daniel Kaplan reports that the ATP has dropped its ban on players selling patch space on their kits to alcohol companies. This happened as of March.
This prohibition was part of an anti-vice umbrella instituted in 2004, which also included provisions against gambling and advertising involving tobacco. The latter two, of course, are very much still in effect. So how did booze get the boost?
“The tour changed the alcohol rule because of requests from several Asian players, as well as the fact that several tournaments are sponsored by alcohol companies, said Kris Dent, a spokesman for the men’s tennis circuit.”
And while this change looks different on paper, it likely won’t affect the Rogers and Rafas of the world, whose lucrative clothing contracts leave no room for patches on their clothes. As for everyone else, may I suggest a sponsorship from St. Pauli Girl? Busty women are the best.