I just take this from Safin's Forum and I'm really upset ... I don't know why but I always felt that Safin hates Guga. He never say nothing good about him... I could be wrong but I think like this... anyway ... I hope Guga doesn't see this depressing Safin's words.
Knee-jerk reactions
Posted 02/28/2007 @ 5 :05 AM
Tuesday in Las Vegas can pretty much be summed up by one word: wind. Forget about getting a reading on Tim Henman or Lleyton Hewitt’s game– just getting and keeping the ball in play was the main preoccupation. Some of the service tosses alone were worth the price of admission, and some players wore long sleeves to keep warm in the low temperatures.
Henman and Hewitt, who both won in straight sets, are making their comebacks from knee trouble this week. Henman’s led him to pull out of the Australian Open, and Marseille (plus Rotterdam with flu) but he said he’s now playing without pain.
Hewitt has been struggling with his right knee since last August and pulled out of Rotterdam last week. He still puts himself at less than 100% and has been getting treatment on the knee “three to four times a day. “I haven’t been hitting many tennis balls, just trying to get my body right,” he said.
Marat Safin is on the other side, having been hit by a knee injury in 2005 and spent most of last year working his way back up. So he must have some insight into the comeback process, right?
Stand back:
“Well, you have two stages.
“The first stage is when you get injured and doctors, they try to tell you this and that, that you might not recover. So you try to prepare yourself in case it doesn’t work and you won’t be able to recover or you won’t be able to play at the same level, so at least you mentally prepared to give up and try to do something else.
“And you start to enjoy life too much a little bit – is not bad either. [Cue laughter]
“But the other way, once you start to play and you start to recover, it’s also tough to come back... it’s also tough mentally to hang around 100, 80 in the world and not be able to be in the top 10. So motivation is missing. Because nothing interesting anymore, you think you cannot come back anymore, because you’re not the same speed as the other guys, other guys don’t respect you any more. You start to believe you won’t be able to come back, so it’s kind of depressing.
“You need to be lucky that you win a couple of good matches to give you the motivation. And also when you have knee injuries or something with the legs it’s difficult to move on the court that same as you moved before because you start to protect yourself.”
Sounds daunting. If it makes you wonder why someone like Gustavo Kuerten wants to go through it – well, Safin’s wondering the same thing. “He’s an old guy and he’s 31 years old, he wants to come back,” he said. “It’s going to be tough, one year one and a half, so I don’t know how, why he’s coming back.”
But “if he wants to play, why not?”
Safin also had an interesting characterization of the way he’s seen the lockeroom atmosphere change over the years. “When I started in ’98, in the middle of the nineties, everybody was more together,” he said. “But now everybody is just doing their own thing and nobody communicate with anybody.”
He defined the older group as players born between 1974 (e.g. Henman) and 1976 (e.g. Kuerten). “I prefer the generation before because [they were] more close and a lot of people, they are from different countries and they are good friends. And now it’s more individual.”
“Just new generation,” he said. “It’s not good, is not bad, it’s just different.”
Back to the wind, which was hard to get away from in any case on Tuesday. Blake was the only big name to lose, going down 6-2, 6-4 to Evgeny “Anna K.’s cousin” Korolev.
Henman actually managed to be upbeat about the conditions, noting that it was the worst he’d played in since Sydney in 1997, when he won his first ATP title. “Nice omen,” he grinned, flashing that tiger tooth on the left. After all, he said, wind just means he can play this game with more gusto: “Because my swings are pretty short and I can get forwards – I think playing at the net is a big advantage in the wind – I think it actually suits me not too bad.”
“It’s less about the tennis and more about the mind. It’s almost like you’ve got to keep a sense of humour about it and just try and have some fun.”
Here’s Hewitt on the wind: “It’s more a mental battle than a physical in conditions like that – you know, playing the percentages, playing within yourself, playing smart out there.”
Safin: “It’s a little bit difficult to try and play your best tennis and to try to get the rhythm, so I try to stay as cool as I can and I try to attack, because that’s the only way to try to control the ball.” (Incidentally, Safin did a great job in getting over 70% of his first serves in the first set, when the win was at its worst.)
Blake: “No, I tried really not to change my game for the conditions. That’s what I’ve always been taught, that’s how I’ve always played – not to play too cautious in the wind or anything like that.”
It has to be noted that Blake was the only one who said he tried to ignore the conditions and was the only one who lost, but it’s also hard to see him chipping and charging like Henman or counterpunching Hewitt and winning. Actually, it’s hard to see him playing like Henman or Hewitt, period. Korolev’s bullet-like groundstrokes cut through the wind much better and he took full advantage of Blake’s inconsistency.
Blake has to now win his match against del Potro to stay alive, but at least he knows his opponet’s game plan. Del Potro was wandering around the grounds on Tuesday wearing a t-shirt that said something like, “My mission in life is to serve people off the court.” Doubt he was talking about charity work.