Talk About Tennis 2.0

They were the good ol' days for me...
I know the first name of every player on that list, and remember those days fondly.

Kevin Curren is South African - became a U/S. citizen sometime in the 1980s.
He and Steve Denton (from Texas) were a good doubles team in the '80s.

Richie Reneberg - like Wheaton - was also supposed to be 'the next great American'. As was Scott Davis.
Jay Berger's service motion was bizarre...

Suliso wrote: ↑Fri Feb 26, 2021 9:21 pm Of course the other way around is not true, not everyone who starts very bright ends up winning Slams although chances are high. I already mentioned that Thiem is not really on the "right path" statistically, but is anyone younger than Dominic on it? Let's have a look...

Alexander Zverev 18.0 // 19.0 // 19.5
Stefanos Tsitsipas 19.2 // 19.7 // 20.0
Denis Shapovalov 18.4 // 18.6 // 20.0
Felix Auger Aliassime 18.5 // 18.6 // 19.0
Jannik Sinner 18.2 // 19.1 // 19.6 . Sinner is currently #34 and 19.5 years old, likely would be in the top 20 already if not for covid.

As you see these five fit the mold much better than Thiem. Will they all win Slams? Unlikely, but I'll be very surprised if there are not at least two Slam winners in this group.

Sinner has now officially joined the list of very likely future Slam winners. Lorenzo Musetti is the next feasible candidate, but he only has till the end of the season to join the top 20. Can't rule it out, but likely a bit early...

JazzNU wrote: ↑Sun Apr 11, 2021 9:19 pm I've never heard of 7 of those players and one of the ones I do know, I'm not at all certain I would know of him if he wasn't a TV commentator.

I feel very very old now.

Kevin

Yeah, so I haven't heard of 8 of these players with an additional 2 that I may not have heard of but for their successful coaching and commentating careers. Gonna keep getting worse for me the further he goes back I think. Goes to show how seldom these players get talked about after their time has come and gone if they weren't great. I'd have thought the 80s were a safeish decade for me to recognize most names, but clearly not based on the last two posts like this.

86 was a fantastic year. At the USO, the Czechs swept the finals: Lend D Mecir, Navs D Sukova. The TENNIS magazine review started "we have seen the future of tennis and it is NOT red, blue and white...", disregarding the fact that those are the same colors of the Czech flag; they got roasted because of that. Becker and Edberg defended their W and Aussie opens and we thought they were good for 7, 8 slams. We were close.
Martina looked vulnerable all year: she lost like 4 matches. Chrissie was about to depart. And that young girl from Germany with the weird forehand but no backhand... well, some people were saying she was for real but that slice backhand was going to always be a liability.
Average length of points on any surface other than clay must have been around 2.7 strokes. Thierry Tulasne, if I remember well, not only played serve and volley tennis, he played RETURN and volley tennis, chipping and charging on first and second serves. At times, he made Leconte look cautious

It's all before my time. First tennis match I remember watching was Edberg vs Courier (91?). I still recognize 11 out of 18, but same as JazzNu some only because of their coaching careers.

ti-amie wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 6:33 pm

From memory (no googling)...

Ivan
Mats
John
Boris
Jimmy
Stefan
Yannick
Joakim
Anders
Kevin
Brad
Andres
Thierry
Henri
Paul
Martin
Tim
Miloslav

Wonderful, wonderful memories...

Suliso wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 10:16 pm It's all before my time. First tennis match I remember watching was Edberg vs Courier (91?). I still recognize 11 out of 18, but same as JazzNu some only because of their coaching careers.

Edberg/Courier at the USO, indeed. The most incredible demonstration of volleying (my opinion, of course) in the open era. Courier must have hit 50 passing shots at Edberg's shoelaces and Edberg volleyed 40 for clean winners. That is how I recall that match.
if that was your first match ever, you picked a good one.

I obviously don't remember most of them playing (I was 2 n '86) but there weren't any unfamiliar names on the list for me. Although of course, many I know better in latter days as coaches/commentators/TDs/references.

Look at all those American, Swedish, and French flags...

Had never heard of Tulasne or Jaite. I was 12 then, living in the country without cable TV, and tennis was only on during Grand Slams - maybe even only the weekends, occasionally the afternoons. The only tennis news came from Tennis magazine and occasionally Sports Illustrated. I'd check out back issues from the school library and knew every SI issue in the local library's archives with a tennis story in it. I'd photocopy those stories and re-read them. It's a miracle I became a tennis fan in that environment. This is why I love to see examples of tennis courts in remote or unlikely places. It's everywhere. One of the things I love about the sport.

ponchi101 wrote: ↑Mon May 03, 2021 10:05 pm 86 was a fantastic year. At the USO, the Czechs swept the finals: Lend D Mecir, Navs D Sukova. The TENNIS magazine review started "we have seen the future of tennis and it is NOT red, blue and white...", disregarding the fact that those are the same colors of the Czech flag; they got roasted because of that. Becker and Edberg defended their W and Aussie opens and we thought they were good for 7, 8 slams. We were close.
Martina looked vulnerable all year: she lost like 4 matches. Chrissie was about to depart. And that young girl from Germany with the weird forehand but no backhand... well, some people were saying she was for real but that slice backhand was going to always be a liability.
Average length of points on any surface other than clay must have been around 2.7 strokes. Thierry Tulasne, if I remember well, not only played serve and volley tennis, he played RETURN and volley tennis, chipping and charging on first and second serves. At times, he made Leconte look cautious

I can't believe you can remember the Tennis magazine story verbatim. That's one thing I love about TAT - the depth of memory, people who have watched tennis for 40, 50 years. I haven't.

Oh, wait, I remember Thierry Tulasne. Just forgot that was how his last name is spelled. So that leaves Jaite as the only unfamiliar name to me. Return-and-volley tennis! The original SABR?

meganfernandez wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 2:43 pm Look at all those American, Swedish, and French flags...

Had never heard of Tulasne or Jaite. I was 12 then, living in the country without cable TV, and tennis was only on during Grand Slams - maybe even only the weekends, occasionally the afternoons. The only tennis news came from Tennis magazine and occasionally Sports Illustrated. I'd check out back issues from the school library and knew every SI issue in the local library's archives with a tennis story in it. I'd photocopy those stories and re-read them. It's a miracle I became a tennis fan in that environment. This is why I love to see examples of tennis courts in remote or unlikely places. It's everywhere. One of the things I love about the sport.

Even in the late 90s, I remember waiting for the newspaper to come to see the results from the previous week's smaller tournaments, none of which were televised!

meganfernandez wrote: ↑Mon May 10, 2021 3:02 pm

Oh, wait, I remember Thierry Tulasne. Just forgot that was how his last name is spelled. So that leaves Jaite as the only unfamiliar name to me. Return-and-volley tennis! The original SABR?

He coached Nalbandian and was the Argentinian Davis Cup Captain

At that time, TENNIS magazine was a real magazine and mandatory reading. They had some real journalists, most notably Bodo, who was very close to Borg, Gerulaitis, Mac and Connors. Plus, my opinion of course, he was a great WRITER, not just a tennis-writer. His style and prose were (are?) excellent.
Tulasne was not the sole "mad dash to the net" player. Tim Wilkinson was his American counterpart, and Paul Annacone did it too. On one occasion, and playing against McEnroe, Mac served and came to the net. Wilkinson, recklessly (it was his style), chipped and charged too. McEnroe's lunging volley floated and left him helplessly stumbling. As Wilkinson was also coming forward, he took a swipe at the ball, hitting a forceful swinging volley, that conked Mac on the temple. He laid on the ground, recovering, and Wilkinson went back to the baseline without even pretending to apologize. Mac got angry and went into his mad overdrive, producing tennis that could only be described as sadistic. He whopped him bad.
I know that Deuce will be the only one in agreement with me but it was a bit more dangerous in those days. Players had no problem going at you if you were helpless at the net. In Lendl's infamous quote: "I did not ask him to come to net".