Here are some more moments, and notable trends, from the 2006 version of professional tennis.

Brain transplant: As Jimmy Connors and Andy Roddick sat next to each other at the media session announcing their partnership last July, I sat in the second row envisioning a tube coming out of the top of Connors’ head and going into the top of Roddick’s brain. The brain-transplant image might have been a bit extreme but it reflected the biggest question of their partnership: could Connors somehow implant his aggressive attitude into Roddick? It’s easy enough to teach someone how to hit a forehand and backhand, but how do you teach attitude? Especially to a player whose confidence had dropped so far that it looked like desperation led him to call Connors and ask for help.

Connors moved Roddick forward to the baseline on service return and told him to get to the net as often as possible. It worked well enough to propel Roddick from a number 11 ranking to the final eight at the Masters Cup in Shanghai, where he narrowed the huge gap between his game and Roger Federer’s by getting three match points in their round-robin meeting before finally losing in the third set. Maybe we should start calling Connors Dr. Frankenstein.


14,000 tennis fans can't be wrong. Fantasy tennis has arrived. Yes, over 14,000 tennis fans around the world repeatedly interrupted their workdays to log onto the ATP website and check the daily match results to see if their fantasy-team players were winning. They spent a few more hours jawing with the Talk Tennis Forum fantasy fanatics about everything from the Federer-Nadal rivalry to Guillermo Coria’s case of the yips. I wouldn’t be surprised if a fantasy player called up Federer’s management to find out if he really was going to play the Paris Masters event because they had one more Federer left and only needed a few more points to move up and take the championship of their fantasy tennis subleague.

If they’d bothered to read my fantasy tennis column each Sunday they’d have known that Federer hasn’t played the Paris Masters since 2003. You might view this kind of behaviour as obsessive and even a bit silly, but once you’ve played fantasy tennis, any other kind of fandom is boring. And before you dismiss it, consider that today’s fans require interactivity and if fantasy tennis follows the same arc as fantasy baseball and fantasy football, at the very least it’ll help improve the popularity of tennis and that can only be a good thing.


Tell it to the National Labor Relations Board. Too many tournaments and too little down time. If an ATP player makes it to the year-end Masters Cup championship in Shanghai, or even better, the Davis Cup final, their off-season will last just over three weeks. If you’re an Asian player, it could be even shorter.