Recorded the trophy stuff to watch the Browns choke.
Poor Rod still in the stands. Poor Novak having to see him there and not up on the platform.
Fuck Novak!
Does DM have enough to get to #1 yet?
No, and he actually lost ground this week.
I think I’ve asked this before and I forgot the answer. Why is Novax so much better at the Australian Open than the US Open? Are the surfaces really that different?
At the Australian Open he is nearly Rafa on Clay. At the US open he’s just a notch or two below that.
All I can relate to his one of the parks here has a slightly grittier service. Flats balls bounce less. Top spin balls bounce more. It’s not noticeable underfoot. But all of us that play there notice it’s “different”.
The surfaces are different but in what ways and by how much is extremely difficult to answer. The court surfaces change a lot. In fact, I’m pretty sure they resurface the courts at all of the venues annually and play around with the top coat formulations but here is a quick history:
The AO switched from grass to Rebound Ace (the green court) in 1988 and kept it until 2007. A lot of players complained about it, claiming that it got sticky in the heat and caused injuries (a later analysis found no evidence for this claim). They switched to Plexicusion (the blue court) from 2008 to 2019 and now use a surface called Greenset. The US Open used DecoTurf from 1978 to 2019 but recently switched to Laykold. These are all just different brands of basically the same thing which is a layered court with a rubberized cushion beneath an acrylic top coat, but different formulations of the components can lead to different speed, skid, and bounce.
It doesn’t seem like good scientific measurements exist for these factors and what you’ll usually see is how players describe the courts in a particular year. I know they were saying the AO played extremely fast this year. Also, they have been intentionally slowing all of the courts down for years to make tennis “more exciting” for casual fans which is one of the reasons why a few players win all of the slams:
This is why I think all of the gushing over the current dudes with 20 slams being the GOATs is kind of LOL. This game they’re playing is just completely different from tennis that was played before ~2000. Agassi winning a career grand slam was a huge deal at the time. Would anyone even get excited about that now?
Thanks. That was an interesting read, but it actually makes Djoker’s disparity between Aussie Open and US Open results even more inexplicable.
Slowr hard courts
Rafa fed and Novak would curb stomp Agassi
And that’s coming from Darren Cahill and BG who coached Andre
Andre is just a poor mans version of Novak
If AA played from 2005-2020 he would have -0- slams
Similar to roddicks Career
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Yes. Modern day sportsmen and women are always superior to their predecessors.
There’s just more gluten in the air in NYC.
It’s all those pizza ovens.
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It’s not just that
Andre won majors because he was an amazing returner
Djovokic is a better return and has a better game
Sampras would still have won majors. His serve forehand combo can just shut people down
Lol ok guy
Agassi is just an example of my point. The best players study and take from their predecessors and improve on them: Nadal and Djok were better returners and the rest of their games were much better.
Sampras was a mediocre returner whose block returns were just a way of getting the point underway, and relied on his incredible serve and powerful ground strokes. He was finished by 30, beaten by 19 year old Federer at Wimbledon. I’m not sure he’d have got past the big three at their peaks.
Sampras was also not taking PED
sure fed beat him but if they played 10 times and Wimbledon Pete is getting 3
He’d likely have to beat at least two of the big three. They’re much faster around the court and I don’t see him coping with them.
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Sampras played a PS 85 strung with natural gut at 70-75 lbs. By comparison, Nadal uses an Aero 100 strung with RPM Blast (co-poly) at 55 lbs. If you haven’t hit with both of these then it may not be clear how different they are. The PS feels like stiff fly swatter that generates zero spin compared to an oversize poly. There is no realistic set of tennis conditions where both are viable so this is really just an exercise in people talking past each other.
Afaik, Gustavo Kuerten was the first guy to win a Slam with an elastic polymer string (Luxilon @ 1997 French). I think he and Carlos Moya may have been the ones to kickstart the craze. Federer used very similar setup to Pete’s until switching to the PS 90 with hybrid gut/poly in 2002. Easy to argue that he reaped the biggest benefits of the transition period.
In Agassi’s biography, he talks about trying Luxilon for the first time in 2002 during the Italian Open which is a red clay event that he hated. He says that after changing strings he didn’t miss another ball the entire tournament (which he won). Before that he had always used some kevlar hybrid called ProBlend that wasn’t spinny at all. So he was really confident with this new string and took it to Wimbledon:
Weeks later we go to the 2002 Wimbledon, and my great new attitude abandons me, because my new string undoes me. On grass my newly augmented topspin makes the ball sit up like a helium balloon. In the second round I play Paradorn Srichaphan, from Thailand. He’s good, but not this good. He’s crushing everything I hit.
I try everything to get back on track. Nothing works. My ball is a cream puff,
and Srichaphan devours it. I’ve never seen an opponent’s eyes grow quite so
large as Srichaphan’s when he tees up my forehand.
This is worth watching for the lulz. There is just nothing on his ball which seems to be arcing and landing short. Sri is taking these inside the baselines and crushing them like hanging breaking balls lol.
Darren [Cahill] and I spend the next two days experimenting with different
combinations of strings. I tell him I can’t continue with his new polyester, and
yet he’s ruined me for the old string. If I have to go back to ProBlend, I say, I
won’t play tennis anymore.
Find something, I tell him, that lets me swing from my heels and get
rewarded. Like Srichaphan. Make me like Srichaphan.
He works night and day and comes up with a combination he likes. We go to
Los Angeles, and it’s perfection. I win the Mercedes-Benz Cup.
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Agassi bio is a good read. Fuck Jeff Tarango
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