By GEORGE VECSEY
Published: September 6, 2010
It’s Noah’s Ark time at the United States Open, with one Venus Williams and one Sam Querrey left amid the rising tide of Spaniards and Eastern Europeans.
This low supply of Yanks is hardly a sporting disaster for a nation that is currently rolling through the basketball world championships, and it should not ruin the final days of the Open, also known as Tennis Without Borders. It hardly matters where Kim Clijsters comes from, or Roger Federer. They are universal.
But the question hovers over the United States Open: why did Spain (current population 45,966,925) have six men in the Round of 16, while the United States (current population 301,182,616) had two? This question was posed to Mardy Fish, who went out Monday with a 6-3, 6-4, 6-1 loss to Novak Djokovic of Serbia.
“I think one of the things, if you look at, they’re all in unbelievable shape,” Fish said of the Spaniards. “You won’t come across a top-50 Spaniard who isn’t afraid to take his shirt off in practice, you know, and looks good doing it.” Fish added that Spanish players of today were far more than the clay-court specialists of the past.
Fish knows about being in shape. Diet and hard work paid off for his most consistent year as a professional. On Monday, he was selected to play in the Davis Cup tie this month in Colombia, as the United States attempts to avoid the dreaded relegation out of the main round.
The Davis Cup, that traveling circus of national pickup teams, is another barometer of international success. The United States has won the Cup once in the last decade under Patrick McEnroe, who on Monday announced that he was leaving his captaincy after the tie in Bogotá. Now he has only two jobs — broadcasting and general manager for development for the United States Tennis Association.
In his development role, McEnroe has encountered a gigantic nation of individual coaches and players and academies and clubs. Yet Spain, with its major regional differences, manages to produce players who seem fit and disciplined, somewhat on the same page in tactics. McEnroe insisted that the success of Spain was not because of superior athletes.
Another knowledgeable view of Spanish tennis versus American tennis was provided by José Higueras, the director of coaching for the U.S.T.A., who worked his way out of poverty in rural Spain to win 16 tour events, 15 of them on clay courts. He has lived in the United States for more than 30 years, remaining a Spanish citizen with an American wife and children.
Higueras listed the traits of the top Spanish players: “One, they move great. They’re moving every direction, laterally, diagonally, forward, back. Another very important thing, they play great percentages. The unforced errors normally are going to be less generally than the rest of the players. The third one is that their shot tolerance is pretty high with a good quality shot.”
Asked to define shot tolerance, Higueras said, “It means when you can play more than one shot or two, as many as you need to stay in the point, and not lose advantage on the point.”
He defined it further as about halfway between aggression and defensiveness — “a middle ground, which is normally the shots that are used more in tennis.”
“So it’s not about playing defensive,” he said, “it’s about playing good percentages.”
Why do Spanish players know that?
“Because they’re taught it,” Higueras said, with McEnroe saying the same thing virtually as an echo.
“They’re taught it at the beginning,” Higueras said. “I mean, for them, accountability about missing is very, very important. And it also comes with the surface that you grow up with. If you grow up on hardcourts, on a fast surface, missing becomes a lot more normal because the courts are faster and you don’t have much chance to get set up.” He added that the slower clay made poor shots “not as acceptable.”
However it happens, Spanish players seem to be exposed (and accept) a common wisdom, whereas American players may feel pressure to be the next Sampras or the next Agassi, without accumulating collective discipline. Tennis is not like basketball, for example, where the greatest players, male and female, have tested themselves against the best, in structured systems but also challenging playgrounds in spare time.
McEnroe said American players needed to play fewer tournaments and learn the fundamentals — exactly the direction the United States Soccer Federation is emphasizing to give children more professional training and fewer weekend tournaments.
But first, McEnroe will conduct his last Davis Cup tie. With Andy Roddick unavailable after a grueling year, McEnroe chose Fish, Querrey, John Isner and Ryan Harrison to play against Colombia. Jim Courier, once a Davis Cup stalwart, told a CBS audience that he would be interested in being the next captain..
Meantime, Spain’s six men in the Round of 16 tied Australia for the highest total by a country other than the United States since 1969 (Ralston, Barth, Ashe, Buchholz, Gonzalez, Riessen) and Australia (Laver, Emerson, Rosewall, Roche, Stolle, Newcombe) in 1969. Tennis has become vastly more universal in four decades, and the United States is decidedly playing catch-up.
(Source: A version of this article appeared in print on September 7, 2010, on page B13 of the New York edition.)