Serve’s the Thing For Men’s Tennis

Later for men’s tennis. It’s not even tennis. It’s target practice. It used to be serve and volley. Now, it’s just serve. Volley comes on the chance that there’s a second serve.

Stefan Edberg, the most elegant tennis stylist since John McEnroe and a beautiful serve-and-volleyer, is being more or less forced into retirement. At age 30. You know what stat you check more than any other in men’s tennis nowadays? Unforced errors? No. Winners? No. Miles per hour is the only stat that counts for the men. If you’re not banging first serves at 115 mph, don’t bother to show up. Better to stage these matches at a shooting range than on a tennis court.

Three semifinal matches were played at the U.S. Open in Louis Armstrong Stadium Saturday, and two were aesthetically worthless. Steffi Graf and young Martina Hingis played tennis, not Hit The Serve Past The Mannequin. Instead of being played at 11 a.m. like some prelim, the women should have gone on later in the day as the main event because that’s when actual tennis -- strokes, rallies, back-and-forth -- was played. You recall rallies, don’t you?

The men’s matches barely had any. The 10th game of the first set between Graf and Hingis was better than anything the Pete Sampras-Goran Ivanisevic or Andre Agassi-Michael Chang matches offered. Once, Graf and Hingis produced a 27-stroke point, and three points later they produced a 26-stroke rally. There were too many 15- to 18-stroke rallies to keep track of. Spins, slices, lobs, half-volleys, ground strokes from both sides, power and finesse, strategies and counter strategies. Skills. That’s what the women have: skills-in-evidence.

Graf actually said afterward that part of her game plan was to run Hingis, the precocious 15-year-old, side to side and make her so tired she wouldn’t be able to apply any pressure. Hingis, smart and skilled as she is, still doesn’t have the wherewithal at her young age to concentrate like Graf or Monica Seles over three full sets against the top two or three players on a consistent basis. When Graf’s side-to-side tactic took full effect, young Hingis started tossing her racket like a ticked off weekend hacker and pounding the fence behind the baseline. So Graf set up a game plan, then executed it.

It’s the same thing Tilden, Budge, Segura, Gonzales, Laver, Rosewall, Ashe, Smith, Borg, and McEnroe used to do.

Here’s today’s game plan:

BOOM the first serve, baby.

Even Chang -- threatened to be relegated to the second tier -- did what he had to do to survive: He got a longer racket and added about 20 mph to his serve. Chang -- I said Michael Chang! -- was hitting 117 mph serves for aces Saturday in his straight-set snore-bore victory over Agassi. Six strokes into the match and you were ready to give a standing ovation. It was terribly difficult to find the art of tennis in the Sampras-Ivanisevic semi as well. Ivanisevic is the anti-Borg, a one-dimensional guy who evolved from Roscoe Tanner and is everything that is wrong with tennis. The only reason they produced a 28-stroke point in the third set (with Sampras holding match point) was that each was too scared to go for it during the tiebreaker at 6-6.

Of course, it’s the rackets. Bigger, longer, stronger, fatter. If the International Tennis Federation hadn’t just passed a rule limiting rackets to 29 inches in length, they’d be playing with screen doors pretty soon. In the current edition of Inside Tennis, the entire inside back page is an ad that brags about how the “Yonex Super RD-Tour” boosted Richard Krajicek’s serve “from 134 to 136 mph. This improved power helped him through the draw, even defeating three-time winner Pete Sampras.” The ad goes on to say that Krajicek’s serve gives you “Just enough time to wonder why you ever chose a sport where you’re not required to wear a cup.”

In the front of the magazine there’s an ad for “Bollettieri Tennis & Sports Academy” that says, “This fall, turn your racquet into a rocket launcher.” Combine the rackets with new conditioning and a man’s preoccupation with anything bigger and faster, and what you’ve got is the tennis version of an Old West shootout: Bang, you’re dead. If stupid baseball is smart enough to outlaw aluminum bats, you’d think the ITF would say, okay, back to wood. Then, we’d find out who among the men can really play.

This is probably the time to ‘fess up and admit I use the biggest, longest graphite racket I can find and try to bludgeon people to death in my weekend hackfests. It’s a guy thing. As a result, what skills I once had have now eroded. But hey, who cares when you can hit four aces and beat your chest?

Thankfully, the women still play tennis. Hingis and this kid Anna Kournikova have every shot in the book. But it will take a little while longer before either catches Graf. Hingis, in fact, had Graf down, 5-3, and serving for the first set, but let Graf off the hook playing it safe and wound up losing that set, and the second. “I was almost dead,” Hingis said of Graf’s strategy to run her around. She was warned by the chair umpire about taking too much time between points, but said later, “I had no energy. I had to take a little more time. It doesn’t matter if you get a warning.”

Graf talked afterward about Hingis’ intelligence and shot-making. “You can be intelligent and not have the shots for it,” she said. “She had the shots to use the possibilities.”

So, of course, do Graf and Seles. They create more possibilities than anybody, which is why they’re back in the final Sunday. Neither has lost a set in the tournament. Each has a first serve in the 90s, but neither relies on that to blow an opponent off the court. Seles, in fact, has won despite almost not having a serve because her left shoulder is so sore from a tear that will require surgery soon. Serve gone, Seles has gone to other weapons. The points last longer, but her strokes are as sound as anyone’s. She winds up playing defense on second serves, but her anticipation and knowledge of opponents helps her fight off aggressors.

Graf and Seles will play tennis Sunday, probably brilliantly. The woman most on top of her entire game will likely win.

Sampras and Chang will enter the court with rackets Sunday. The man who does one thing better -- serve -- will probably win. Picking winners is difficult, but I know for sure which match will demonstrate more skills and be infinitely more entertaining.