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Tuesday, August 31, 2021

US.2- A Parlour Full of Possibilities ...

The Czechs are checking in, and might not be checking out for a while.



The great women's tennis talent of the Czech Republic has been apparent for quite some time, as the nation's Fed Cup dominance in the 2010s proved, with different squad members taking turns assuming the lead role en route to multiple championships. While the Czech dominance in the slams hasn't resulted in the sort of title numbers we saw from the Russians during the prime of the Original Hordettes, as only Petra Kvitova has lifted a major singles trophy in the current era, the many layers of depth have kept names like Pliskova, Safarova and Strycova in the tennis headlines over the past decade.

Well, don't look now, but the Czech depth appears to be growing.

2021 has been something of a monumental season for the *next* generation of Czech women's tennis. While Petra Kvitova is still relevant, and Karolina Pliskova's spring/summer surge (including a Wimbledon final) leads one to believe that she might have several more slam-contending years left, it's been their younger countrywomen who've significantly stepped up their level of accomplishment.

Barbora Krejcikova, already a doubles #1, swept the Roland Garros singles *and* doubles crowns (as well as doubles Gold in Tokyo) and has risen into the Top 10. Her WD partner Katerina Siniakova, seemingly inspired by Krejcikova's success, has posted her best singles results in years. Marketa Vondrousova, a past RG finalist, won Olympic Silver. Karolina Muchova was a semifinalist at the Australian Open. Even the barely-noticed Tereza Martincova has put together the sort of career year that might make her a beaming national star in one of the many other countries whose WTA players' success have virtually put their nation on the tennis map in recent years.

So far at this U.S. Open, the Czech trend has continued. Krejcikova and Vondrousova won on Monday (Marie Bouzkova and Martincova drew *both* '20 finalists, Naomi Osaka and Vika Azarenka, respectively, so their losses were understandable). Tuesday afternoon saw Karolina Pliskova and Siniakova both advance in straight sets, with the likes of Kvitova, Muchova and Kristyna Pliskova still to play (as of this posting).



It's been 36 years since a Czech woman won the Open (Hana Mandlikova '85), with just two from the country reaching the final since (Helena Sukova 1986/'93, Ka.Pliskova '16), but if the numbers continue to swell that stat may well fall in the near future.

Meanwhile, don't sleep now, but the *next* next generation is stirring, as well.

There are currently nine Czech juniors ranked in the girls Top 65. All of them have been '21 achievers, with #6 Linda Fruhvirtova (who's also had some early tour-level success), #36 Brenda Fruhvirtova, #11 Linda Noskova (RG champ), #34 Nikola Bartunkova, #43 Barbora Palicova, #49 Linda Klimovicova and #64 Dominika Salkova all winning or reaching the final at J1-or-higher level events this season. #50 Lucie Havlickova has reached a J1 semi, while #60 Sara Bejlek won a $60K challenger in just her fifth pro event (at age 15).



So, whatever happens in the majors over the next 5-8 years, by the end of which time the Krejcikova/Muchova/Vondrousova generation will have fully replaced the Kvitova/Pliskova group as the veteran minders of the flame, the next battalion of Czechs will already be grouping for a long and continued assault on the slams into the 2030s, not to mention likely maintain the Czech Republic's lofty position in (now) Billie Jean King Cup competition. The nation's future presence on tour seems more than secure.

Speaking of the BJK Cup, with the recent news that the long-delayed final is being moved from Budapest to Prague this fall, one can't help but get a certain image in one's mind when considering the possibilties.

Something along the lines of a family of spiders welcoming a contingent of visiting flies into their lovely parlour. Surely, nothing bad could ever happen to them there, right?




=DAY 2 NOTES=
...after Day 1 saw more seeded women exit via injury-related withdrawal (2) than defeat (1), the trend of a lack of seeded players losing continued during the daytime session on Tuesday.

One spot in the draw where it seemed a seed could be in trouble concerned #17 Maria Sakkari in her match-up with Marta Kostyuk, but the Greek handled the Ukrainian in straight sets, winning 6-4/6-3 to join countrywoman Valentini Grammatikopoulou in the 2nd Round. A few years ago, Sakkari decided to split her portion of financial assistance from the Greek federation prior to the Tokyo Games with the lower-ranked Grammatikopoulou (as well as the then-lower ranked Stefanos Tsitsipas) because she felt that she didn't need it as much. Yesterday, the qualifier won her first career slam MD match (while Tsitsipas advanced, as well, FWIW), so it seems to have been money well spent paid forward.



Other seeded women who pushed through to the 2nd Round were Olympic champ Belinda Bencic (#11), who won out over Arantxa Rus 4 & 4, and #24 Paula Badosa, who defeated Alison Van Uytvanck 4 & 3.

#1 Ash Barty, down the stretch in her two-set win over Vera Zvonareva, wasn't in anywhere near the form she was while winning in Cincinnati two weeks ago, but the Aussie has come to embrace the "finding a way" motto in the early rounds of majors and she employed it again against the only Original Hordette in the '21 draw. Barty served for a straight sets win, only to be broken and taken into a 2nd set TB by the veteran Russian (who made her U.S. Open debut 18 years ago, and reached the final in 2010). Barty held a MP in the TB, but a few moments later saw Zvonareva with a SP chance to force a deciding 3rd. Barty pulled the breaker back, though, and saved herself the extra (unnecessary) additional work.



...elsewhere, future U.S. Open seeds were busy making their mark. 18-year old Brit Emma Raducanu, who has carried over her Wimbledon momentum with good lower-level results in recent weeks ($100K QF, Chicago 125 RU) and then had a successful a qualifying run for this Open (making her 11-3 since her SW19 Round of 16), notched her maiden Flushing Meadows MD victory with a straight sets win over Stefanie Voegele.


21-year old Russian Varvara Gracheva has quietly posted some notable results in her short time on tour, including a pair of 3rd Round slam runs ('20 US/'21 RG) and last week her first tour-level SF in the Chicago 250 event. She won her third U.S. Open match in four tries today, staging a comeback after losing the 1st set to Spanish qualifier Nuria Parrizas Diaz (making her slam debut at age 30), dropping just two total games in the 2nd and 3rd sets. After losing five of the first six games of the match, Gracheva won sixteen of the final twenty.



Meanwhile, qualifier Anna Karolina Schmiedlova advanced in three sets against a very game Ashlyn Krueger.



The 17-year old U.S. wild card, the USTA 18s champ, was the youngest player in the women's draw (slighty edging out Coco Gauff) and will also play in the junior competition. For her part, the win by AKS puts her into the U.S. 2nd Round for the first time since 2015. It hasn't been easy.





...the Paralympics semifinals are set in Tokyo, with the top four women advancing today. While #1 Diede de Groot and #2 Yui Kamiji continued their straight sets march, #4 Jordanne Whiley (vs. Dana Mathewson) and #3 Aniek Van Koot (vs. Wang Ziying) both took three sets to advance. De Groot will next face Whiley, while Kamiji gets Van Koot. Of note, after meeting in all those slam finals, if the top two seeds meet for Paralympic Gold it'll be in their *second* face-off in the event's history. Five years ago in Rio, Kamiji defeated a still-green de Groot in the Bronze medal match. De Groot wouldn't win her first slam title until '17, but picked up her first big honor that summer in Brazil by winning the doubles Silver with Marjolein Buis.



...tonight, #6 Bianca Andreescu *finally* makes her return to the U.S. Open after her 2019 title run.




*PARALYMPIC WHEELCHAIR SINGLES SF*
#1 Diede de Groot/NED vs. #4 Jordanne Whiley/GBR/USA
#3 Aniek Van Koot/NED vs. #2 Yui Kamiji/JPN

*PARALYMPIC WHEELCHAIR DOUBLES SF*
#1 de Groot/Van Koot (NED) vs. #3 Kamiji/Ohtani (JPN)
Wang/Zhu (CHN) vs. #2 Shuker/Whiley (GBR)







...LOL ON DAY 2:




...(SIMULTANEOUS) BELATED DAY 1 NOTES ON DAY 2:




...A CHAMPION MOVE FROM DAY 1 ON DAY 2:

I mean, walking onto the court, not the win.




Putting one foot in front or the other produces forward movement. Genius. And the ability to repeat the action? Legendary.


...ONE FINAL WAVE (hmm, maybe) ON DAY 2:








When it comes to marketing itself, the WTA has just never “gotten it.”

It’s not a totally foreign concept to utilize the personalities of the tour’s athletes -- the most identifiable thing about the sport, and upon whose talent and star quality the game’s fortunes rise and fall -- to sell the tour to people who might not be regular followers (while also entertaining those who already are). And the easiest way to do that is to produce promos that get some attention.

The LPGA has understood that for years, and its attempts to do what the WTA never has are particularly compelling in comparison. The women’s golf tour, super-competitive, global and populated by players from a huge number of nations (just like the tennis tour), has used its promotional spots to highlight those athletes and point out the LPGA’s best qualities. Here are a few ads -- from 2014, ’15 and ’18 -- that do just that.



And the tour wasn’t afraid to take a light-hearted approach -- as opposed to the we-take-ourselves-WAY-too-seriously angle we saw in the WTA’s #ItTakes and #ForTheGame campaigns, which followed the we-can-take-nice-but-not-particuarly-interesting-photos years -- to promote the sport.



The WTA, at least once, could have gone any of those routes and made much more hay from the effort because, let’s be honest, the tennis tour is and has always been -- sometimes in spite of its decision-makers -- THE leading women’s sport in the world. The most lucrative sports career for a female athlete is that of a tennis player (see Naomi Osaka’s name atop the endorsement earnings for last year), and more tennis players are known by name and/or face by general (or even casual) sports fans than those from any other tour or league (though the U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team has made great inroads in that area in recent years, at least back home).

Actually, the closest the WTA has come to something creative that it “could work with” (naturally, though, the tour marketing arm didn’t follow up) has come from promotions and/or videos produced in-house by or for individual tournaments.

In 2008, a year-end Championships ad latched onto a superheroes-in-disguise idea that would still work now in an environment where superhero movies -- especially ones that spotlight female characters -- are instant cultural touchstones (by the way, Ana Ivanovic is really the star in this -- such urgency in her stride!)...



It's an idea that current ads from DirecTV Stream echo with Serena Williams morphing into Wonder Woman.



And some of the videos produced by the now-defunct Connecticut Open (ala the eclipse video from 2017, below) -- which got some attention when they debuted, and are still remembered fondly today -- showed that using the players in humorous spots would work quite well, and they’d enjoy it, too. (I wish I could find the one where Julia Goerges continually interjects “Nien!” but, unfortunately, my search didn’t unearth it).



Recently, photographer Radka Leitmeritz -- again someone at least initially outside the official “WTA bubble” -- has produced a series of beautiful, more informal, off-court images of tour players (she hashtagged the series #HerTrueSelf) that instantly made one see the potential for such a thing being at the center of an interesting marketing campaign as opposed to the almost-so-polished-they’re-unrecognizable-as-the-players-on-the-court photos in past WTA efforts.



In fact, the value here was SO obvious that even the WTA (!!) could see it. Not long after the photos started to appear on social media, the WTA started highlighting them in its own Twitter and Instagram posts. This month, an official tour-related teaming with Leitmeritz was announced as part of a "Court Supremes" photography project celebrating the... wait for it... "strength + beauty of women's tennis." Sigh.

Really? Apparently, someone just dusted off the copy that was used for all those old tour marketing pushes that centered around having fully-outfitted players in full make-up posing for “action shots” under modeling studio lighting. The tag lines for those were always some combination of “strength” and “beauty.” I guess the “+” is the new innovation.



Leitmeritz, somewhat playing the role with tennis stars that photographer Annie Leibovitz has always done with entertainment celebrities, will surely bring her strong game along for the ride. It’s a pity that the tour marketing arm has already shown itself to not able to keep up with her, though.

Anyway...

For a few years now I’ve espoused the notion of the WTA producing the sort of oddball ads that aired to promote ESPN’s SportsCenter program years ago. They included athletes from all sports, along with various program hosts, in funny, strange and *memorable* spots that sometimes seemed to take place in an alternate universe. They comprised easily the most memorable series of sports-related ads since, I don’t know, maybe the old Miller Lite beer campaigns in the 1970s and ’80s, but at least since the more recent group that featured Michael Jordan (for Nike, featuring Mars Blackmon played by Spike Lee, and the Gatorade Be Like Mike spots), Bo Jackson (Nike/Bo Knows) and Peyton Manning (Mastercard/”Cut that Meat!”).

Here are a few of the ESPN ads:



And just because it’s relatively timely...



After talking about it for a while, I finally came up with some ideas for a series of WTA-related ads following along this line, so for the rest of this U.S. Open I’ll be posting written-out scripts for each one that “made the cut.” First up...

FADE IN:




”The Couponer”

INT. GROCERY STORE
We see an overhead view of a busy grocery strore. Customers casually stroll the aisles, pushing carts filled with items. Everything is calm.

A cashier checks out a customer at the front of the store, running the final item over the scanner until he hears the familiar and reassuring BEEP. The customer is Petra Kvitova. She smiles and eagerly offers up a paper coupon from the handful clutched in her hand.

PETRA
Oh, and I have these...

The cashier takes the coupon and runs the bar code over the scanner. BEEP.

PETRA
(doubling over with clenched fist, full-throated)
Pojjjjjd!

The cashier flinches, but only slightly. She hands him another coupon. He performs the same task. BEEP.

PETRA
Pojjjjjd!

She happily hands him another coupon, visibly pleased with her act of saving money. Once she does, the view of the store from above is seen once again. As the shoppers move along, the calm is interrupted by another burst of “Pojd!” that rings across the establishment, echoing from one side to the other.

This seems to be a regular occurrence, since most shoppers go about their business with little notice. In the corner of the screen, though, a young girl sitting in the child’s seat of a cart is seen pointing in the direction of the cash registers. Suddenly, another “Pojd!” rings out.

The screen fades to WHITE, with the everyday sounds of the grocery store still audible.



PETRA
Pojjjjjd!

END.


To be continued...


















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**2021 FIRST SLAM MD WINS**
=AO=
Olga Danilovic, SRB
Liudmila Samsonova, RUS
Mayar Sherif, EGY
Nina Stojanovic, SRB
=RG=
Hailey Baptiste, USA
Tereza Martincova, CZE
Harmony Tan, FRA
=WI=
Lesley Pattinama Kerkhove, NED
Maria Camila Osorio Serrano, COL
Emma Raducanu, GBR
=US=
Valentini Grammatikopoulou, GRE
Rebeka Masarova, ESP

**BACKSPIN 2021 WTA PERFORMANCES-OF-THE-MONTH WINNERS**
JAN/FEB: Sabalenka wins 3rd con. title (Abu Dhabi)
AO: Osaka wins 4th career slam (Australian Open)
FEB: Swiatek wins Adelaide w/o losing a set
MAR: Muguruza reaches Doha (RU) & Dubai (W) finals
MIAMI: Barty defends Miami title, keeps #1 ranking
1Q...OSAKA (AUSTRALIAN OPEN)
BJK 1: Frech wins all 3 pts. in POL PO win over BRA
APR: Barty sweeps Stuttgart singles & doubles
MAY: Swiatek wins Rome with 6-0/6-0 victory in final
RG: Krejcikova sweeps Roland Garros singles & doubles
2Q Clay Court...KREJICKOVA (ROLAND GARROS)
JUN: Ostapenko wins Eastbourne
WI: Barty wins 2nd career slam (Wimbledon)
2Q Grass Court...BARTY (WIMBLEDON)
JUL: Krejickova wins Prague
OLYMPICS: Bencic takes Gold in Tokyo
AUG: Barty dominates in Cincinnati






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TOP QUALIFIER: Rebecca Marino/CAN (first US MD since '11)
TOP EARLY-ROUND (1r-2r): xx
TOP MIDDLE-ROUND (3r-QF): xx
TOP LATE-ROUND (SF-F): xx
TOP QUALIFYING MATCH: Q3: Katie Boulter/GBR def. #8 Kristina Kucova/SVK 7-5/2-6/6-4 (from break down at 4-2, wins final 4 games to reach first U.S. Open MD)
TOP EARLY-RD. MATCH (1r-2r): xx
TOP MIDDLE-RD. MATCH (3r-QF): xx
TOP LATE-RD. MATCH (SF-F): xx
=============================
FIRST VICTORY: Kristina Kucova/SVK (def. Li/USA)
FIRST SEED OUT: #31 Yulia Putintseva/KAZ (1st Rd./lost to Kanepi)
FIRST SLAM MD WINS: Grammatikopoulou/GRE, Masarova/ESP
UPSET QUEENS: xx
REVELATION LADIES: xx
NATION OF POOR SOULS: xx
CRASH & BURN: xx
ZOMBIE QUEEN OF NEW YORK: Nominees: Mertens (1r vs. Peterson; down 6-3/5-3 and RP served twice for match; saved 5 MP in 2nd, 1 MP in 3rd; 3:40); Masarova (1r vs. Bogdan; down 7-6/4-1; saved 2 MP in 3rd TB, on own 6th MP; 3:40 for first slam win)
IT ("xx"): xx
Ms.OPPORTUNITY: xx
LAST QUALIFIER STANDING: 1r wins: Danilovic, Grammatikopoulou, Masarova, Raducanu, AK.Schmiedlova (LL: Kucova, Rakhimova)
LAST WILD CARD STANDING: 1r wins: xx
LAST BANNERETTE STANDING: xx in 2r
COMEBACK PLAYER: xx
VETERAN PLAYER (KIMIKO CUP): xx
DOUBLES STAR: xx
BIG APPLE BANNERETTE BREAKTHROUGH: xx
BROADWAY-BOUND: xx
LADY OF THE EVENING: xx
JUNIOR BREAKOUT: xx







All for Day 2. More tomorrow.
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