American tennis – Heavy Topspin

October 6, 1973: Built Like Mickey Rooney

Top dog John Newcombe must have yearned for the days when Australia produced a seemingly endless parade of up-and-comers. Tennis’s center of gravity had decidedly shifted to the United States–Newk was one of many foreigners with a home in the States–and when a new face appeared in the late rounds of a tour event, odds are he was American.

The first of week of October 1973, it was Eddie Dibbs’s turn. “Fast Eddie” was a two-time All-American at the University of Miami. In his first year as a full-time pro, the 22-year-old offered a few hints of stardom, picking up two titles against second-tier and knocking out Stan Smith in Toronto. At the US Open, however, he won just six games against countryman Tom Gorman.

Dibbs won his first two matches at the Colonial Pro in Fort Worth, earning him a place in the quarter-finals against top seed Newcombe. Newk had continued streaking after winning the Open a few weeks before. The adopted Texan had picked up a title in South Carolina, then fell to Tom Okker in the Chicago final a week later. Eyeing the number one ranking, the mustachioed master was no longer a part-timer: He would play every week up to Australia’s next Davis Cup date in mid-November.

Rain wiped out the quarter-final slate on Friday, so the two men met on Saturday, October 6th. The contrast could hardly have been greater. Newk converted every inch of his six feet into raw power. Dibbs… well, he was fast. Writing in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Mike Shropshire described Fast Eddie as “built along the lines of Mickey Rooney”–the five-foot, two-inch actor not known for feats of athletic prowess.

Dibbs’s five-foot, seven-inch frame hardly intimidated the Aussie, but it was enough to get a racket on Newk’s fabled serves. Overcoming a second-set lapse, the American scored the upset, 7-5, 1-6, 6-3.

“I returned unbelievably,” said Fast Eddie. “He’s got a huge serve, and I returned it.” Dibbs added another point to his own credit: The cement surface should have favored Newk and his cannonballs. Not today.

The 22-year-old carried his momentum into the semi-finals against another big hitter, Roscoe Tanner. Thanks to the previous day’s rain, there was little break. Dibbs relaxed as much as he could, watching the first day of the baseball playoffs on television. This time there was no mid-match lull: Dibbs outplayed Tanner in a first-set tiebreak, then sealed the victory with a 6-3 second set.

American players had been shut out of the championship matches at their home major, but Dibbs and another youngster, Brian Gottfried, would make it a red-white-and-blue final in Fort Worth. Newcombe’s assault on the number one ranking would have to wait.

* * *

This post is part of my series about the 1973 season, Battles, Boycotts, and Breakouts. Keep up with the project by checking the TennisAbstract.com front page, which shows an up-to-date Table of Contents after I post each installment.

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June 16, 1973: An American Sweep

Less than two weeks from Wimbledon, and the warm-ups were in full swing. The field divided into two combined men’s and women’s events: one in Nottingham, the other in Beckenham.

The 1973 Nottingham ladies’ draw boded well for the big event. Billie Jean King lived up to her top seed, sweeping the tournament without the loss of a set. In the final on June 16th, she defeated in-form home hope Virginia Wade, who had drubbed Chris Evert the day before.

King had watched Margaret Court dominate the circuit while she sat out with a stomach injury. Now she was riding a three-tournament, eleven-match win streak. She was well-rested, too. “I am feeling fitter at this stage,” she said, “than for quite a few Wimbledons past.”

The men’s action in Nottingham provided the surprises. Brit Roger Taylor, one of the best players present, lost in the first round. Mark Cox, another top Englishman, fell in the quarters. Jimmy Connors suffered the same fate as his love interest Chrissie, departed in the semis. Jimbo’s conqueror was another American, the oft-forgotten Erik van Dillen.

When van Dillen’s name came up, it was usually to do with his doubles prowess. Just 22 years old, he was already the veteran of two Davis Cup campaigns. He and partner Stan Smith lost a close match to the Romanians in the 1971 final. The next year, the American pair went 5-0. They saved their strongest performance of all for the hostile crowd in Bucharest, where they demolished Ilie Năstase and Ion Țiriac, 6-2, 6-0, 6-3. Many observers thought van Dillen was the best player on the court that day.

No one questioned van Dillen’s talent. He had been winning tournaments since he played 12-and-unders. The problem was consistency. One day he could outclass Smith and Năstase, or drop a 6-1, 6-0 wrecking ball on Arthur Ashe, as he did in February 1973. Then he would fail to put two good sets together for a month.

In Nottingham, van Dillen upset both Cliff Drysdale and Dick Stockton to reach the semi-finals. At that stage he encountered a “surprisingly quiet” Connors. Jimbo took the second set but the underdog retook the ascendancy with a comfortable three-set win. Van Dillen’s final opponent was another player with a two-handed backhand, the South African Frew McMillan. The American struggled with McMillan’s double-hander in the first set, but when it started going astray, van Dillen capitalized with his best game. The score: 3-6, 6-1, 6-1.

Naturally, he won the doubles, too.

Then he headed to Queen’s Club. He was entered in qualifying.

* * *

Down in Beckenham, two men tested the limits of a single tiebreak set. Wimbledon and other British tournaments adopted the first-to-seven tiebreak for the first time in 1973. Of course, they had to do things a little differently. Instead of holding the shootout at six games apiece, they would wait until eight-all. And the deciding set would be played the old-fashioned way, even if it took all week.

Soviet standout Alex Metreveli took the Beckenham title 6-3, 9-8(9). That’s a second set consisting of 16 games plus another 20 points. The challenger who pushed Metreveli to such extremes was gaining a reputation for turning routine victories into dogfights. The runner-up in question: Björn Borg. A week after his 17th birthday, playing just his third career grass tournament, the Swede made it clear he was more than just a dirtballer.

In the semis, Borg had dismissed the Australian Owen Davidson, a veteran with two grass-court titles in the last month. Davidson was suitably impressed. He said, “I cannot remember ever playing a better 17-year-old.”

* * *

Borg, Metreveli, and van Dillen would be three dark horses to watch at Wimbledon–if there were a men’s tournament worth the name. Players and federations had made no progress toward resolving the status of Niki Pilić, the Yugoslavian player banned by his national body, sanctioned by the ILTF, and now heartily backed by the players’ union. Nearly 100 players were ready to boycott.

On June 16th, Pilic and Arthur Ashe headed out to the All-England Club, hoping to get some practice in. They didn’t make it past the door. “I turned them off,” said the club secretary, “because this is a private club and they are not members.”

* * *

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Podcast Episode 103: Katrina Adams on Role Models, Grassroots Development, and Tennis Governance

This week’s episode features Katrina Adams, author of the new book Own the Arena: Getting Ahead, Making a Difference, and Succeeding as the Only One.

As a former player, coach, and commentator, and as the first African American to serve as president of the USTA, Katrina has a unique perspective on the world of professional tennis. She talks about the importance of giving proper credit to Althea Gibson and other Black tennis pioneers, why tennis is one of the best sports to help youngsters succeed off the court, how players should think about life after retirement, what the USTA can teach other national federations in and out of tennis, the underrated brilliance of Lori McNeil, and what she likes about the Dutch.

Katrina’s book is a great look at what it takes to go from a gifted junior to a top-ten doubles player to an influential executive, and I hope you’ll check it out.

Thanks for listening!

(Note: this week’s episode is about 44 minutes long; in some browsers the audio player may display a different length. Sorry about that!)

Click to listen, subscribe on iTunes, or use our feed to get updates on your favorite podcast software.

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Are American Players Screwed Once You Drag Them Into a Rally?

Long after retiring from tennis, Marat Safin remains quotable. The Russian captain at the ATP Cup had this to say to his charge, Karen Khachanov, during a match against Taylor Fritz:

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Safin to Khachanov on typical US player's approach to the game:

They employ shock-and-awe tactics and want to scare you with one-two shots. Once you drag them into the rally they are screwed.
— Oleg S. (@AnnaK_4ever) January 5, 2020

This isn’t exactly testable. I don’t know you’d quantify “shock-and-awe,” or how to identify–let alone measure–attempts to scare one’s opponent. Or screwed-ness, for that matter. But if we take “screwed” to mean the same as “not very likely to win,” we’ve got something we can check.

Many fans would agree with the general claim that American men tend to have big serves, aggressive game styles, and not a whole lot of subtlety. Certainly John Isner fits that mold, and Sam Querrey doesn’t deviate much from it. While Fritz is a big hitter who racks up his share of aces and second-shot putaways, his style isn’t so one-dimensional.

Taylor Fritz: not screwed

Using data from the Match Charting Project, I calculated some rally-length stats for the 70 men with at least 20 charted matches in the last decade. That includes five Americans (Fritz, Isner, Querrey, Steve Johnson, and Jack Sock) and most of the other guys we think of as ATP tour regulars.

Safin’s implied definition is that rallies of four shots or fewer are “shock-and-awe” territory, points that are won or lost within either player’s first two shots. Longer rallies are, supposedly, the points where the Americans lose the edge.

That is certainly the case for Isner. He wins only 40% of points when the rally reaches a fifth shot, by far the worst of these tour regulars. Compared to Isner, even Nick Kyrgios (44%) and Ivo Karlovic (45%) look respectable. The range of winning percentages extends as high as 56%, the mark held by Nikoloz Basilashvili. Rafael Nadal is, unsurprisingly, right behind him in second place at 54%, a whisker ahead of Novak Djokovic.

Fritz, at 50.2%, ranks 28th out of 70, roughly equal to the likes of Gael Monfils, Roberto Bautista Agut, and Dominic Thiem. Best of all–if you’re a contrarian like me, anyway–is that Fritz is almost 20 places higher on the list than Khachanov, who wins 48.5% of points that last five shots or more.

More data

Here are 20 of the 70 players, including some from the top and bottom of the list, along with all the Americans and some other characters of interest. I’ve calculated each player’s percentage of points won for 1- or 2-shot rallies (serve and return winners), 3- or 4-shot rallies (serve- and return-plus-one points), and 5- or more-shot rallies. They are ranked by the 5- or more-shot column:

Rank  Player                 1-2 W%  3-4 W%  5+ W%  
1     Nikoloz Basilashvili    43.7%   54.1%  55.8%  
2     Rafael Nadal            52.7%   51.6%  54.3%  
3     Novak Djokovic          51.8%   54.6%  54.0%  
4     Kei Nishikori           45.5%   51.2%  53.9%  
11    Roger Federer           52.9%   54.9%  52.1%  
22    Philipp Kohlschreiber   50.1%   50.1%  50.7%  
28    Taylor Fritz            51.1%   47.2%  50.2%  
30    Jack Sock               49.0%   46.5%  50.2%  
31    Alexander Zverev        52.8%   50.3%  50.0%  
32    Juan Martin del Potro   53.8%   49.1%  50.0%  
34    Andy Murray             54.3%   49.5%  49.4%  
39    Daniil Medvedev         53.9%   50.4%  49.0%  
43    Stefanos Tsitsipas      51.4%   50.5%  48.6%  
44    Karen Khachanov         53.7%   48.1%  48.5%  
48    Steve Johnson           49.2%   48.8%  48.3%  
61    Sam Querrey             53.5%   48.0%  46.2%  
62    Matteo Berrettini       53.6%   49.3%  46.1%  
66    Ivo Karlovic            51.8%   43.9%  44.9%  
68    Nick Kyrgios            54.6%   47.4%  44.2%  
70    John Isner              52.3%   48.3%  40.2%

Fritz is one of the few players who win more than half of the shortest rallies and more than half of the longest ones. The first category can be the result of a strong serve, as is probably the case with Fritz, and is definitely the case with Isner. But you don’t have to have a big serve to win more than half of the 1- or 2-shot points. Nadal and Djokovic do well in that category (like they do in virtually all categories) in large part because they negate the advantage of their opponents’ serves.

Shifting focus from the Americans for a moment, you might be surprised by the players with positive winning percentages in all three categories. Nadal, Djokovic, and Roger Federer all make the cut, each with plenty of room to spare. The remaining two are the unexpected ones. Philipp Kohlschreiber is just barely better than neutral in both classes of short points, and a bit better than that (50.7%) on long ones. And Alexander Zverev qualifies by the skin of his teeth, winning very slightly more than half of his long rallies. (Yes, that 50.0% is rounded down, not up.) Match Charting Project data is far from complete, so it’s possible that with a different sample, one or both of the Germans would fall below the 50% mark, but the numbers for both are based on sizable datasets.

Back to Fritz, Isner, and company. Safin may be right that the Americans want to scare you with a couple of big shots. Isner has certainly intimidated his share of opponents with the serve alone. Yet Fritz, the player who prompted the comment, is more well-rounded than the Russian captain gave him credit for. Khachanov won the match on Sunday, and at least at this stage in their careers, the Russian is the better player. But not on longer rallies. Based on our broader look at the data, it’s Khachanov who should try to avoid getting dragged into long exchanges, not Fritz.

Frances Tiafoe’s Narrow Margins

Italian translation at settesei.it

Yesterday, Frances Tiafoe added another breakthrough to his young career with a fourth-round defeat of 20th seed Grigor Dimitrov at the Australian Open. The whole tournament has been a coming-out party for the just-turned 21 year old, as Tiafoe only got this far thanks to an even more impressive upset of 5th seed Kevin Anderson in the second round. The American will see his ranking climb into the top 30 for the first time, and his marketability as a potential superstar will soar even higher.

The role of the statistical analyst is often to stand athwart an exciting trend yelling “Stop!,” and I’m afraid that’s my role today. Yes, Tiafoe is a compelling young player with a lot of potential. Throughout 2018 he repeatedly demonstrated he could hang with the best players in the world, something he further solidified with the win over Anderson last week. But the Dimitrov win, life-changing as it may be, was a bit of a fluke.

In fact, yesterday’s match was–by a couple of simple metrics–less impressive than a lot of his 2018 losses, including a defeat at the hands of Dimitrov in Toronto last year. Across 337 points against the Bulgarian on Sunday, Tiafoe lost more than half of them, winning only 34.7% of his return points compared to Dimitrov’s 39.5%. The resulting Dominance Ratio (DR) for the match is 0.88, a mark that almost never results in victory. (DR is the ratio of return points won to opponent return points won: 1.0 means that the players performed equally, and higher is better.) On the ATP tour last year, more than 92% of winners recorded a DR of 1.0 or better, and 97.4% of winners–that’s 39 out of every 40–won enough points to amass a DR of 0.9.

As I’ve said, many of Tiafoe’s losses have seen him play better. Against Dimitrov in Toronto, his DR was 0.98; versus Anderson in Miami his DR was 0.99 in a straight-set defeat; and even in his routine, 6-4 6-4 loss to Joao Sousa in the Estoril final, his DR was almost as good as it was yesterday, at 0.87. In the range of close-but-outplayed matches–let’s say DRs from 0.85 to 0.99–Tiafoe won 4 of 18 last year, and all but one of the wins were closer than yesterday’s triumph.

The trick to winning a match while tallying fewer than half the total points and a lower rate of return points than your opponent is to play better in the big moments, like break points. The American certainly did that, converting 5 of 13 break opportunities while limiting Dimitrov to only 3 of 18. Execution in tiebreaks also helps, though it didn’t make a difference in yesterday’s upset, as the two men split a pair of breakers. To Tiafoe’s credit, he outplayed the Bulgarian when it mattered most. In that sense, he deserved the victory, no matter what the stats say.

But break point and tiebreak performance tends to even out. Just because the 21-year-old captured lightning in a bottle at a few key moments to win a high-profile match doesn’t mean he’ll be able to do it again. Just as there are almost no players who win tiebreaks any more often than their overall performance would suggest, players with excellent single-year break-point records quickly regress to the mean. It may not be correct to say that Tiafoe was lucky to win yesterday–he may well have kept his focus and maintained his level better than opponent did–but whatever made the difference, it’s not something with predictive power. Next week, next major, or next year, he isn’t any more likely than the next guy to post a DR of 0.88 and come out on top.

Still, I’m not here just to throw cold water on a young player’s prospects. For one thing, had a couple of break points gone the other way yesterday and Dimitrov gotten through, a fourth-result result would still represent an encouraging step forward for the American. His upset of Anderson sported a particularly impressive DR of 1.29–35.1% of return points won compared to Kevin’s 27.2%–which was better than all but ten of Anderson’s matches last year. (Three of those ten came at the hands of Novak Djokovic, and seven of the ten were against top ten players.)

Tiafoe is getting better, and there are plenty of signs that indicate he’s the brightest young star in American men’s tennis. He’s accomplished a lot of things in Melbourne, but outplaying Dimitrov isn’t one of them.

Mackie McDonald’s Secret Weapon

Italian translation at settesei.it

In the first round on Monday, the 23-year-old American Mackenzie McDonald defeated young Russian Andrey Rublev in four sets, 6-4 6-4 2-6 6-4. While Rublev missed part of the 2018 season due to injury and carries a ranking just inside the top 100, the victory still qualifies as a bit of an upset for McDonald, who has never come close to Rublev’s peak of No. 31.

The handful of fans who kept tabs on Court 10 were treated to an unusual display. The American relentlessly attacked Rublev’s second serve, rushing the net behind his return almost two dozen times. Many players don’t hit return approach shots that often in an entire year. What’s more, the tactic worked. Without it, the already close match would have been a coin flip.

By my count, in the log I kept for the Match Charting Project, McDonald came in behind his second serve return 22 times. Approach shot counts are never precise, because when a player hits a winner or an error, he may lean forward as if to continue toward the net, but quickly stop when he realizes it’s unnecessary. To be precise, he came in at least 22 times, and perhaps one more return winner or a couple of return errors should also be added to the total. No matter, the conclusions are similar regardless of whether the number is 22 or 24.

Rublev hit 62 second serves, but 9 of those resulted in double faults, so we’re looking at 53 playable second serves. McDonald netrushed 22 of those, winning 10. Of the other 31, he won only 11. That’s a return winning percentage of 45% on return approaches compared to 35% on other returns. Had he won all of those points at the 35% rate, it would have cost him two, perhaps three points off his overall total. He barely outscored Rublev as it was, 124 points to 118, so every little bit helped.

A rarity in context

The Match Charting Project has shot-by-shot data for nearly 2,000 men’s matches from this decade, and Monday’s four-setter was the first one of those in which a player hit at least 20 second-serve return approaches. (Dustin Brown approached at a higher rate in multiple matches, including his 2015 Wimbledon upset of Rafael Nadal.) There are only ten other matches in the database in which one player hit at least ten such approaches, and Mischa Zverev accounts for three of them. More than three-quarters of the time, the total number of second-serve return approaches is zero.

McDonald is not alone in enjoying some success with the tactic: The 1500 or so second-serve return approaches in the dataset were about 14% more effective than non-approaches in the same matches. However, it’s hard to be sure what that number is telling us, since most players approach so rarely. Some of the attacks are probably on-the-fly decisions against particularly weak serves, not pre-planned plays like many of Mackie’s netrushes on Monday.

Thus, it’s difficult to know how much success most men would have with the tactic, were they to adopt it more often. The fact that they employ it so rarely might tell us all we need to know: If more players thought that attacking the net behind the second serve return would win them more points, they’d do it. But for McDonald, it doesn’t matter what his peers do; it only matters what works for him. These 22 return approaches represented a lot more aggression than he displayed in the four previous matches we’ve charted, and it paid off.

It wasn’t enough to get him a win today against Marin Cilic, but he did outperform expectations, taking a set against the 6th seed and defending finalist. Best of all, he won more than half of Cilic’s second-serve points–a better rate than he managed against Rublev, and several ticks above 46%, the fraction that the average opponent manages against Cilic. In a sport often criticized for its uniformity of tactics, McDonald is an up-and-comer worth watching.

Tracking European Dominance With Fictional Laver Cups

Embed from Getty Images

Italian translation at settesei.it

No matter what happens this weekend in Chicago, tennis fans can safely say that Europe holds the edge over the rest of the world in the men’s game these days. According to my forecast, Europe has a healthy advantage in the second edition of the Laver Cup, and that’s with Rafael Nadal, the top-ranked singles player (and an excellent doubles player!) skipping the event.

It hasn’t always been this way. Back in 1999, a pair of Americans, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi, held sway, and an Australian, Patrick Rafter, was also in better form than anyone Europe could have sent out in a proto-Laver Cup. Earlier in the 90s, Sampras and Agassi fought it out at the top of the rankings with even more Americans, such as Jim Courier and Michael Chang. Europeans have almost always been present near the top of the ranking table, but the rest of the world has often held its own.

Imaginary clashes

The Laver Cup format provides a plausible way to measure regions against each other. Comparisons like this are virtually impossible to quantify, because there’s no consensus on what it means for one region to dominate another. Laver Cup gives us a compromise. Singles is more valuable than doubles, but doubles plays a part. Depth–at least to the extent of six guys–is required, but the top three players can have a greater impact on the result.

Using (surface-neutral) singles Elo ratings and year-end ATP doubles rankings, I built six-player Team Europe and Team World rosters for each season going back to 1983. I followed the logic I set out in yesterday’s post about the value of a doubles specialist, so each team consists of the five best available singles players plus the highest-ranked doubles player. If the best doubles option was already on the singles list, I took the next player on the list. I required that each singles player have a minimum of 20 victories that season, so as to filter out the most substantial injury problems (for instance, Andy Murray didn’t make it onto the hypothetical 2018 Europe squad), but otherwise, I assumed everyone was healthy and willing to participate.

As an example, let’s look at the fictional 1983 competition. The World team consisted of John McEnroe, Jimmy Connors, Jimmy Arias, Guillermo Vilas, Jose Luis Clerc, and Peter Fleming, while the Europe squad was made up of Mats Wilander, Ivan Lendl, Jose Higueras, Anders Jarryd, Yannick Noah, and Pavel Slozil. (Lendl didn’t play under the USA flag until 1992, at which time the imaginary Team World, then captained by Rod Laver himself, snapped him up.) These sides made for one of the tightest hypothetical scenarios, with Team World winning 55% of simulations.

World’s fortunes soon turned. They were more heavily favored in the 1984 competition, but fell to underdog status for nine years after that. The graph shows each team’s probability of winning the Laver Cup every year, from 1983 to the present:

Keep in mind, the figures for 2017 and 2018 assume that the best available players all show up. Yesterday I gave Europe a 67.6% chance of winning with this week’s actual rosters; add Nadal and move off hard courts to a neutral surface, and Europe’s chances improve to 75%, even with Juan Martin del Potro and Kei Nishikori available for Team World.

The gap between Europe and the rest of the world peaked in 2012, when the Big Four plus David Ferrer all had higher singles Elo ratings than any non-European player. It’s even worse than that: All the Europeans had Elo ratings about 2200, and among potential World team members, only Delpo rated above 2000. Plug those numbers into a Laver Cup forecast, and the hypothetical European side has an 87.5% chance of winning.

The 1987 competition–only three years after the World team would have been favored–looks nearly as lopsided. McEnroe and Connors were still leading the World side, but their levels had dropped while Lendl’s had risen. Add Stefan Edberg and Boris Becker to the mix, and it’s an 86.3% edge for the Europeans. Team World had a nice run in the 1990s, but at no point did their probability of winning a Laver Cup-style competition exceed 75%.

Europe’s power has eroded somewhat since 2012, but it’s difficult to imagine the event tilting fully in World’s favor anytime soon. Four of the five top ATPers under the age of 23 hail from the continent. There’s more hope in the teenage ranks, with Denis Shapovalov and Alex de Minaur (both potential World members) the only under-20s in the top 100, but even there, Europe’s depth wins out. Of the top ten teenagers in the ATP rankings, six are European.

Based on my hypothetical rosters, Team Europe would have been favored in 24 of the last 36 Laver Cups, and they would have won 23 of the 36. The format of the event introduces enough randomness that World is bound to win one of these years. But it will probably take a lot longer before tennis’s current top continent loses its position, even to the combined forces of the rest of the world.

The Proud Tradition of Americans Skipping Monte Carlo

Italian translation at settesei.it

The Monte Carlo Masters is unique among the ATP’s 1,000 series events. The stakes are high, but attendance isn’t mandatory, so while most of the game’s top players show up, a few take the week off. No group has so consistently skipped Monte Carlo than players from the U.S.A.

This year, six U.S. players had rankings that would’ve gotten them into the Monte Carlo main draw, where winning a single match earns you 45 ranking points and just over €28,000 in prize money. Five of those players–including John Isner, who reached the third round two years ago and won a pair of tough Davis Cup matches at the same venue–opted out. All five played the 250-level Houston tournament last week instead. Only Ryan Harrison made the trip to Europe–losing in the opening round, as Carl Bialik and I safely predicted on this week’s podcast.

Choosing the low-stakes event on home soil isn’t the wise choice, but it’s nothing new. Since 2006, only seven Americans have appeared in a Monte Carlo main draw: Isner twice, Harrison, Sam Querrey, Donald Young, Steve Johnson, and Denis Kudla, who qualified in 2015. From 2006 to 2016, 7 of the 11 Monte Carlo draws were entirely USA-free. In the same time span, Houston draws have featured 35 Americans ranked in the top 60–all players who probably would have earned direct entry in the higher-stakes clay event, as well.

For a player like Isner or Jack Sock, an April schedule can handle both tournaments. Four of the seven Americans who went to Monte Carlo played Houston as well, including Querrey in 2008, when he lost in the first round in Houston but reached the final eight in Monte Carlo.

Most U.S. players, including just about everyone I’ve mentioned so far, would much rather play on hard courts than on clay. (The Houston surface is more conducive to aggressive, first-strike tennis than is the Monte Carlo dirt, one of the slowest surfaces on the calendar.) However, as Isner and Querrey have shown, a one-dimensional power game can succeed on a slow court, even if it looks nothing like the strategy of a traditional clay specialist.

Isner, in particular, has racked up plenty of points on the surface. While he’d much rather play on home soil, he has twice reached the fourth round at the French Open and pushed none other Rafael Nadal to a deciding set in both Paris and Monte Carlo. Sock is also a threat on the surface, having won nearly two-thirds of his tour-level matches on clay. Many of those wins came in Houston, but like Isner, he took a set from Nadal in Europe on the surface the Spaniard typically dominates.

Even if the top Americans had little chance of going deep in Monte Carlo, one wonders what the additional time on the surface would do for the rest of their clay season. Most will show up for Madrid and Rome, and all of them will play Roland Garros. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question–do Americans avoid the dirt because they suck on clay, or do they suck because they avoid it?–but it couldn’t hurt to play on the more traditional European surface against elite-level opponents.

The difference in rewards between a 250 like Houston and a Masters 1000 like Monte Carlo make it likely that the risk of playing in unfamiliar territory would pay off, as it did for Querrey in his one trip and for Isner two years ago. And I suspect that the rewards would stretch beyond the immediate shot at a bigger payday: If someone like Sock invested more time in developing his clay-court game now, he could become a legitimate threat at a faster clay tournament (such as the Madrid Masters) in a few years. It’s probably too late for the likes of Querrey, but the next generation of U.S. men’s stars would do well to break with tradition and give themselves more chances to excel on the dirt.

Donald Young’s Perpetual Hopes and the Lefty Serve That Isn’t

Donald Young celebrated his 25th birthday last week, and if you’ve been following the ATP for any part of the last decade, you know all about his talent, his potential, and his underwhelming results. Every time he goes deep in a tournament–as he has in Washington this week, upsetting Kevin Anderson in three sets today–all that upside talk gets dredged up again. Is this finally the breakthrough for which we’ve waited so long?

In general, it’s a safe bet to watch longer-term trends more closely than short-term peaks and valleys. So the short, obvious answer is: No, it’s unlikely to be a sign of much greater things to come. Still, Young has beaten three top-50 players this week, and it’s a good time to take a closer look at what might be holding him back.

A prime obstacle isn’t hard to identify. Donald has one of the weakest serves on the ATP tour. While that doesn’t automatically keep him out of the top fifty in the world, it sure doesn’t help. Young’s year-to-date ace percentage, 3.4%, is among the ten worst on tour, and with the exception of David Ferrer and Roberto Bautista Agut, none of the other players on that list are inside the top 35. This year’s number is no slump, as Young’s ace rate has been below 4% every year since 2009.

Another metric to indicate the effectiveness of a player’s service game is the ratio of service winning percentage to return winning percentage (SW/RW). If a player wins lots of service points, it might be due to a good serve, or it might owe to a strong overall game. This ratio gives us a rough measure of how much a player’s success on serve is due to the serve itself.

Coming into Washington this week, Young’s SW/RW was 1.49, one of the lowest marks of any left-handed tour regular in the last ten years. A few right-handers succeed while winning only 50% more service points than return points–including Ferrer and, for one season, Andy Murray–but the average player on tour wins roughly 73% more serve points than return points. Even Rafael Nadal hasn’t fallen below the 1.5 mark since 2005.

As Ferrer has demonstrated, a player with Young’s level of service success can have a very good career on tour. Yet Ferrer’s skillset is unusual, and importantly, he’s a righty.

Not every successful ATP left-hander is a big server. Nadal won dozens of titles before fully developing the serve he uses today. Neither Fernando Verdasco nor Jurgen Melzer, two lefties who cracked the top ten, are known for overpowering deliveries. But in the last decade, Nadal is the only left-hander to consistently succeed with a SW/RW under 1.6.

It’s a different story for righties. As we’ve seen, Ferrer is a perennial top player despite Young-like serve stats. Fabio Fognini, Nikolay Davydenko, and Lleyton Hewitt have all enjoyed solid seasons without greater serve dominance than Young. (Though Hewitt has racked up better ace totals.)

Surprisingly, it isn’t that lefties are bigger servers. On average, both lefties and righties win about 73% more service points than return points. The tentative conclusion I see from these numbers is that lefties–with the typical exception of Rafa–can’t get away with a weak serve the way that right-handers can.

Young’s SW/RW this week of 1.69 suggests that, despite only 13 aces in four matches, he’s playing well behind his serve, and the results have followed. It may be, though, that a modest improvement to his serve–or perhaps his tactics behind the serve–would be particularly valuable, seizing whatever specific advantages worked for guys like Verdasco and Melzer.

If Young is (finally) to take a big step forward, he’ll need to do more with his serve for a season–not just a week. He doesn’t need to become the next Feliciano Lopez; he just needs to be a little less like a left-handed Fognini.

Serve-and-Pray: The Quirks of Isner’s Early Exit

The big story after Steve Johnson‘s upset of John Isner today was Isner’s unhappiness with his court assignment. Still, for those of us more interested in the game itself than in post-match carping, Johnson’s surprise victory was plenty notable.

Almost every Isner match is a serve-dominated, one-dimensional contest. This one was even more unidimensional than usual. Both players won 89% of first-serve points, a combined mark that stands as the most extreme of the season. Two players haven’t combined to win more than 89.2% of first serve points since Brisbane early last season, when Grigor Dimitrov and Milos Raonic combined for an outrageous 94.0% of first-serve points won.

The difference between Isner and Johnson–slim as it was–appears in their success rate on second-serve points. Johnson won an impressive 68% of second offerings, while Isner won only 43%. That typically doesn’t do the job–since 2010, Isner has won only eight of 36 matches when he wins fewer than 45% of second-serve points. Still, he managed to avoid clustering too many of those ineffective second serves, allowing Johnson only two break points.

As bad as that second-serve winning percentage is, it would often by sufficient when combined with that other-worldly win rate on first serves. Taken together, he won 73% of service points, which–barring particularly good or bad streaks–translates to a hold of serve in 93% of service games. That’s Isner’s hold rate for the season so far, and sure enough, it was his hold rate today, when he was broken only once in 16 tries.

While Big John often seems unbreakable, he typically loses a service game or two in every match–even on the days he wins. He’s been broken exactly once in nine hard-court matches this year, and he’s won seven of those matches. Since 2010, he’s won 45 of the 60 matches in which his opponent broke him exactly one time–many of them thanks to his excellent tiebreak record.

But today, his opponent really was unbreakable. Compared to Johnson’s service numbers, Isner’s look positively pedestrian. Steve won 80% of service points, which–again, barring too much streakiness–translates to a hold of service in an incredible 97.8% of service games. Put another way, that’s one break of serve every eight sets or so. (For reference, Isner’s 93% season-to-date average is best on tour, and no one topped 92% for the 2013 season.)

Johnson’s not usually that good–Isner’s indifferent return game explains much of the magnitude of these numbers. Still, it’s an extremely bad return performance by any standard. It’s only the fifth time since 2010 that Isner has won so few return points in a match he completed, and it’s only the second time this year he has failed to earn a single break point. Remarkably, that last aspect of return futility isn’t always enough to keep him out of the win column: Three times, he has won a tour-level match without earning any break points.

Today, despite the lack of break points, despite the dismal second-serve percentage, despite winning 12 fewer points than his opponent, he found himself in a third-set tiebreak, two points away from victory. Big John’s game isn’t much fun to watch–while this all transpired, I was across the grounds taking in a doubles match–but on paper, his results are endlessly fascinating.