From: I. Zelnik
Category: Amis
Date: 7/7/99
Time: 10:32:30 PM
Remote Name: 129.219.247.118
MARTIN AMIS SAID IN 1993: On grass, the ball doesn't sit up; the ball slides or shoots---the ball is *gone*. During an average rally, which consists of serve, return, and volley putaway, the ball makes only one 'live' contact with the ground. Yet this split second determines the entire game plan. So: you hold your own serve, coming in on everything, and hope to break your opponent once per set. (On grass, the pros say, break points are like set points.) And how do you break? Well, the Becker method is---or was---as follows: You psych yourself into giving four returns of hysterical brilliance, in succession.
Nothing was stranger in 1992 than to see Agassi deliver his first serve---and *stay put*. In the final, against Goran Ivanisevic, who served over two hundred aces in the tournament, you couldn't believe how hard Agassi was going to have to work. He would be obliged to rally for every point---on grass, where the service game aspires to the condition of a formality. Agassi has never played the Australian Open, which is disputed on a surface designed to give equal chances to the serve-and-volleyer and the baseliner. The surface is called Rebound Ace, which is also a good description of Agassi's Wimbledon strategy. His idea was to channel the server's speed into his own return, directed not wide but right at the server, and low; from the server's defensive volley he would then produce the pass (or the disguised topspin lob). Unbelievably, and perhaps unrepeatedly, it worked. Ion Tiriac was right when he said that Agassi should be hired by NASA, because he had rewritten the laws of ballistics.
Pete Sampras's father was *already* an aerospace engineer. This was an omen.
Non-British players, and particularly Americans, talk of Wimbledon in terms of dignity, refinement, tradition---class, in a word. You don't really want to tell them that to a Londoner the whole area is a synonym for petit-bourgeois Babbittry, duff protocol, and tweedy gentility. Still, here are the shining courts, with Michael Chang to your right, David Wheaton to your left, and Wayne Ferreira directly below, like a public park in Elysium. The edging, inching crowds look innocuously suburban: at the All England Club, as in all England, tennis is a polite enthusiasm. When Ferreira furiously slam-dunks the ball out of the court, a young woman in the concourse retrieves it, or what's left of it, and *throws it back*.