RG12: ana

court 2

may 30, 2012

paris postcard: roland garros, "simple dames"

gisela dulko:

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tsvetana pironkova

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Vika Azarenka

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maria sharapova

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all photos © anita aguilar

2010 us open: practice, miss melanie oudin

this one is my favorite, somehow.

all photos @ anita aguilar

french open 2010: winning shots

francesca schiavone, 2010 french open champion, ladies' singles. june 5, 2010.

AP photo/michel euler via tennis.com

miss schiavone gave one of the sweetest, most moving victory speeches i can recall.

(i'd never seen her play an entire match before--and i wasn't really rooting for her over stosur. i just wanted the tennis to be really competitive, which seems kind of a big ask of a ladies' slam final in recent years? but she was amazing to watch--how does her shoulder stay in its socket with that backhand of hers?) during her speech, when she thanked "everybody, really" and sent her love to her "mommy and daddy," and her post-match interview, she had me crying fat, happy tears of joy. i'm not finding the speech on youtube and there seem to be no easy links on the roland garros site, but here's the AP write up that includes quotes that give you a sense of her wonderful perspective...

and what can i say about these, except...hooray!

my favorite shot...after the 6-4, 6-2 6-4 victory...

AP photo/michel euler via tennis.com

2010 french open champion, mens's singles.

AP photo/lionel cironneau via yahoo!sports gallery

surrounded! (rafa with the rg tournament staff) photo ©fft via rolandgarros.com

desert dispatches

my favorite writer is blogging from the bnp paribas open in indian wells, california, and his readers/fans are being spoiled by (sometimes twice!) daily dispatches that are so vigorously observant, that to turn on the actual television broadcast and see and hear the commentary on any single match is akin to being stranded in the desert: it's colorless and dry and it saps your energy but quick. you need refreshment. you want life. so you turn away from the tube, and back to his blog, where the real action is.

this is what happened to me on sunday night. "mfw" gave glorious build-up: i could envision the drive from LA to the desert (with no less than a joan didion reference) and the grounds as "the tennis aquarium" (what right-minded tennis fan doesn't wish to be out there after reading that?). and then, this brilliant stuff:

Opposition is tennis' essential quality. Two people face each other with nothing but themselves and a stick. The court's 90-degree grid and pure white lines are set off by the curve of the ball. At the professional level, the grunts of the players and the dry thud of their shots are enclosed in the soft authority of the chair umpire's voice.

All that was true this afternoon when Caroline Wozniacki of Denmark stood across from Kaia Kanepi of Estonia at the BNP Paribas. The match was played on Court 4, where the Tennis Garden meet the desert. Beyond this, there's nothing but sand and scrub grass. Call it another form of opposition.

The stands are low out there. You get a full view of the cavernous sky and its gradations of blue—it seems more prominent here, a bigger deal, than in the East—which is set off by jutting brown hills and rows of stark, white lighting towers that line each side of the courts. From this vantage point, everything is dry and stripped and hard. Wozniacki's and Kanepi's shots cracked through the air, and you could hear each individual scrape—chicka-chicka-chicka—of their shoes as they set up to hit.


and later, this:

The crowd is dozing, the second set is dragging, and the woman across the net isn't giving Dinara Safina anything to work with. Peng Shuai shovels one ball down the middle after another—no angles, no pace. It's time for the top seed to take matters into her own hands. This, of course, means that she must let out an unintelligible, or perhaps Russian, scream that turns into a full sentence—maybe a paragraph—of anger. The sleepy Southern California afternoon is punctured. The audience, collectively stunned out of its torpor, gives the players the biggest cheer they receive all afternoon. Safina wins the next two points, the game, the set, and, eventually, not without more struggle and a few more self-lacerations, the match. After yesterday's upsets, the tournament needs its No. 1 seed. Safina, not at her best, has obliged.


see what i mean?

so, on sunday night, i ran home after a long swim, ready to make a nice pasta dinner, pour a glass of wine, and giddily camp out in front of the tube for my first opportunity to take it all in with mine own eyes. and i saw...well...nothing but a big, buzzless stadium court, with gael monfils swinging wild, like his moods, on his way to yet another disappointing loss (i'm really starting to worry about him), this time to john isner. there was no remarkable commentary to enrapture me. my shoulders slumped. i plopped face down on the couch. drat.

i perked up a little after hearing that rafa was up next, against michael berrer. the players entered the stadium to "where the streets have no name" and that at least got me to turn over and face the television. (i don't care what people think or say about bono, or U2, or their music now--the video and song were fun and "rad" and very LA when it came out in 1987 and i'm still happy to hear it when it comes on.) rafa proceeded to make the night a bit more memorable, wowing the crowd with his usual brio (notably in the 5th game of the first set, with a crazy backhand slice approach off a berrer mis-hit, from a good foot outside the alley, hit extra sharply cross-court; and, immediately following that, with a defense-to-offense morale wrecker: out of position on the forehand side, rafa lobbed one over berrer's head, berrer managed a weak overhead down the middle, and sort of positioned himself right there, mid-court, in nowheresville--the phrase "sitting where he stands" comes to mind--and nadal passed him before he even got his bearings. i mean, rafa executes this kind of shot-making with delightful regularity, but berrer looked about ready to invoke the mercy rule. and the match was only 21 minutes old. poor guy. he didn't even play that badly).

but that's been about it so far. oh, it's not been terrible--i would rather have any live tennis than none at all. but like i said, some of us are getting spoiled...

one pleasant surprise: lindsay davenport has a real talent for commentary. there are times, when to watch her play is to feel yourself age. slowly. bitterly. but i always knew she was bright and well-spoken. she strikes a calm, confident tone in the booth, and she brings a thoughtful, pro's eye view:

on hantuchova: daniela has such a pretty game, her strokes are...textbook perfect, and she's a very... very nice player to watch...i really wish she would have a little bit more patience and go cross-court more. i was always taught that [you] work the points cross-court, and wait til you have the right shot to go up the line...i really feel she goes up the line too soon in rallies...

on the weakness of ivanovic's two-handed backhand: her contact point is a little bit late, most balls go up the middle of the court, or to her opponent's forehand...[she] doesn't use her left wrist all that much and it's very prone to errors, [she] misses a lot of balls late up the line when she is not on...

that's straightforward stuff, but it's more along the lines of what i want to hear and think about.

(unlike her counterpart gimelstob who is so reliant on the superlative as to be unconvincing. he makes me want to excise the words "great," "greatest," "best," and "most" from my vocabulary. i probably use them as unsparingly as he does. lesson learned.)

if you're not able to catch the matches on tv because you're going to join revelers for st. patrick's day (happy, happy, btw) or watch the NIT (meh), or later this week, the NCAA tourney (woo hoo), or you just can't find the broadcast (it's actually on an MSG channel, in nyc), do not fret. just visit the concrete elbow blog for "hi-def" observations and anecdotes from the crowd and the press room, and music and literary references (that you and i can look up later). it's writing that is far and away more compelling than what is on tv, and the next best thing to being there.

making the personal, political

shahar peer. grand central station, nyc, 2006.

when i picked up the sports page of yesterday's nytimes and saw harvey araton's column, with a photo of shahar peer, and this headline, "a political swing at one player sours a tournament for all" i thought, uh oh. this is big...

and it's getting bigger...

i've been trying to keep up with the news and the blogosphere during the day while formulating my own thoughts. here goes.

the situation room: shahar peer, an israeli player currently ranked 45th on the wta tour, was denied a visa to enter the united arab emirates, to compete in a tournament for which she had qualified (and in the eyes of some, based on her play coming into the event, had a decent opportunity to win). while wta officials long feared she might have trouble securing a visa, it seems they were offered some assurances that it would be granted...at the very last hour her visa was denied. officials have gone on record to say that the denial was due to "safety concerns." the atp and its players will also have to confront this issue as it appears that andy ram, a doubles specialist, may also be denied a visa for the upcoming atp tournament there.

the reaction (as of tuesday, feb 17) : while it considered cancelling the tournament, the women's tennis association, decided to proceed (to the dismay of many), issuing this statement. the tennis channel has dropped televised coverage of the event (earning praise from many). more to come from the atp, i'm sure...possibly (hopefully) the players...

the good word: tennis' top writers have weighed in on this, with tennis mag eic james martin, calling out not only wta chief larry scott, but the wta players for their unwillingness to pay more than lip service to the matter; my favorite writer acing one out wiiiide--noting that the atp players (especially federer, who lives and trains there in the off-season) should make their voices heard on this, too; and tom tebbutt asserting that after this year tennis in dubai is done. and how.

my take: many fans are loathe to mix politics and sports, i don't think the two can ever really be separated. sport is a part of our culture, and it reflects whatever dynamics loom large in the world. sometimes it reveals exquisite acts of sportsmanship, but it also exposes cheating, racism, discrimination, violence... and i think that athletes, especially the most high-profile ones, should take a stand, especially when their own sport is affected.

in the perfect world (inside my head), my favorite player would withdraw, offering some simple, but totally right-on, no-nonsense reason: "if it is not fair for one player the way he is treated, it is not right for everyone. it's simple, no?" and then call on everyone to boycott! but with nadal and federer both suffering from injuries, it's possible that both may escape making some kind of statement on the situation that the wta and atp are facing, at least for now...we'll see how things unfold.

i don't toss out the notion of a boycott easily. i took gymnastics for a spell when i was a kid, and was obsessed with the sport. in 1980, kurt thomas was poised to make history as the first american gymnast to finally break through the death grip that the soviets and eastern bloc nations had on the men's event, and win the gold medal...and then president carter ordered the boycott of the moscow games. dream over. as a fan, i was crushed. i don't know how the athletes managed. but when you're part of a team, especially a national team, you have no choice. and anyway, those were very different times. you couldn't try to escape the link between sport and politics...

these days, most athletes will try to dance around a political question (hell, athletes are so media trained, you're hard pressed to find anyone to answer a question about a game that's not rehearsed and repeated from day to day to day, let alone say something political. jordan, jeter, tiger woods are inoffensive to the point of being...uninspiring).

but in this case, absent a brave decision by the atp or wta, or the player's union, the individual players should have the option to boycott the event, without penalty. i don't need the players to tell me their views on middle east politics if they don't want to, but i would want them to simply think about it on a personal level: if you care (and i think you should) and if these players are your friends (as some say they are) and if you put yourself in his or her place, and then think about what it is you might really be losing by taking a stand--or not taking one...take all other considerations about money and points and ranking out of the mix (and this is where some might need a ruling by the sport's "governing bodies" to help them clear their mind?) and make the personal political, then we might start to see progress toward a solution where they all have a safe place to play--here, there, everywhere, from now on.

hom-age

natalie coughlin, photographed by marc hom, for men's vogue, april 2008.

i have "used" the obvious charms of some of my favorite female athletes (tanith belbin, ana ivanovic, maria kirilenko) to lure a couple of (now former) boyfriends, with less than zero interest in sports, into watching the olympics with me or joining me at the us open. shameless? perhaps. maybe even a little bit wrong. but it worked. i am actually a little proud that, after initially appealing to them on this most superficial level, the merits of these and other athletes and the thrill of sport-spectating left a lasting impression on one of them (maybe he doesn't watch figure skating anymore, but i know he follows tennis. and, most unbelievably, i managed to turn him into a baseball fan).

but if there were a need for me or anyone else to employ such a tactic again, i'm pretty confident that with si's 2009 swimsuit issue, we could turn a few disinterested heads toward the wta. the ladies know how to "represent": tatiana golovin, looking mighty comfortable as the bombshell; daniela hantuchova, revealing even more (i would argue) with her lovely, vulnerable gaze; and maria kirilenko, starring as the most adorable, enviably athletic girl-next-door. these might be the best tennis pictorials in si's swimsuit issues to date.

but i personally favor a different kind of swimsuit shot: the portrait of natalie coughlin by the danish photographer marc hom. it marries the classic with a sleek, modern look. i love that it is basically a three color affair, with terrific geometric repetition of right angles and triangles.
has a gal in one-piece ever been more devastating?

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the coughlin shot, which appeared in men's vogue in april 2008, inspired a little research on marc hom.

if you've admired these esquire covers of angelina jolie, sienna miller, keira knightley, and johnny depp (and the march 2009 clive owen shot that's on newsstands now), then you're a fan of his work. and if you're like me and blessed with a fashion-obsessed sister/friend and you've been perusing her issues of harper's bazaar, black book and british vogue, then you know his fashion photography pretty well too.

take a quick scan through the marc hom galleries on the trish south management site, and you'll see a lot of bare legs, bare feet, and cool (very cool) scandinavian blue highlights.

his book, "portraits" is a collection of some 260 shots from a 12-year period, featuring celebrities like lauren bacall (who also penned the foreword), anouk aimée , christopher walken, martin scorsese, liv and steven tyler and many more.

here are a few black and whites that i found especially appealing:

rachel ward and bryan brown

juliette binoche (and friend)

a very pretty pink

bjork (little bare feet)

a bit more on marc hom, via a 2006 copenhagen exclusive article, here.

interested in natalie coughlin's book (published in 2006 by the company i work for)? you friends o' mine can borrow my copy, or buy it here.