The Hindu : Sport / Tennis : Customary start to the Henman soap opera

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Wednesday, Jun 23, 2004

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Sport - Tennis

Customary start to the Henman soap opera

By Nirmal Shekar

LONDON, JUNE 22. WANTED: A new scriptwriter for a long-running play at the All England Lawn Tennis Club, Wimbledon. Requirements: Fantastic powers of imagination, a natural inclination to ignore reality, and a total ignorance of tennis history. Previous experience irrelevant. Walk in interview on the Henman Hill, Wimbledon, on Wednesday.

Ah, well, it is that time of the year, those two weeks, the fortnight when two vastly different scripts are written, and only one of them enacted with soul-shattering certainty.

Welcome to Timbledon, and welcome too to Henmania, not quite as epic a phenomenon as the Roomania set off by Wayne Rooney in Portugal, but far more familiar and certainly far more civilised.

Year after year after year from the time Tim Henman beat the reigning French Open champion Yevgeny Kafelnikov in five sets in the first round in the 1996 Wimbledon championships, the gap between hope/hype and reality has grown and grown and grown.

Unless you are British, you would say with Kiplingesque certainty that the Popular Script is the Popular Script and the Real Script is the Real Script. The twain shall never meet.

Then again, this — the 118th championships — is the time when there seems to be an almost desperate need to make sure that the gap is finally bridged and dream becomes reality.

It — the great big dream — almost crashed on Tuesday as a little known Spaniard playing his first match at Wimbledon silenced the thousands of dreamers and believers on a gloomy afternoon, taking the first set from Henman and running up two set-points in the second set tie-break.

That Henman did manage to dig deep and fight from the trenches for a 4-6, 7-6(6), 6-4, 6-2 victory over Ruben Ramirez Hidalgo of Spain in three hours and two minutes might have hardly added new sheen to his status as one of the tournament favourites. Once again, Henman put thousands of his fans through the emotional wringer before living to fight another day.

And this is precisely the reason we need a brave new scriptwriter who can come up with a glorious, bold climax. Missed heart-beats, collective sighs, periodic elation and then, finally, the crash landing. The long-running soap opera does need a new script and a new climax.

Then again, now less in jest and more in real earnest, Henman alone can author that sort of ending. And he'd better plan on doing it this fortnight, for he will be 30-something when he arrives for next year's championship.

Hidalgo himself is no spring chicken, in tennis terms. Nor is he a household name outside of his drawing room in Alicate. At 26, after years of sweat and toil in the lower reaches of the game, he saw this as his hour and grabbed the chance to make everyone take notice of his surprisingly substantial skills on the No.1 court today.

Standing well beyond the baseline and finding impossible angles with his double-handed backhand, the pony-tailed Spaniard, world ranked 89, whipped winners at will and served superbly to take command early.

Henman, for his part, seemed far too defensive for a serve-and-volley player on grass. Perhaps he was a touch nervous, labouring under the crushing weight of expectations. But he struggled to find any sort of rhythm on his serve and ground-strokes and his volleying touch was perhaps the poorest it's has been in a long, long time. Hidalgo broke to 4-3 in the first set with two superb return winners and a glorious pass before wrapping it up on serve.

In the second, the Spaniard was up an early break but squandered it in the sixth game. But in the tiebreak, Hidalgo opened up a 5-2 lead and went on to 6-4 before Henman hit back decisively, a breathtaking backhand crosscourt drop volley signalling his revival. On Henman Hill, there was a huge collective sigh of relief. The fans were now sure that their man would go through.

Safin, Mirnyi beaten

The only thing you can be sure of when Marat Safin is on court is this: he will break a racquet or two and let us add a few choice swear words to our limited Russian vocabulary. The rest is as unpredictable as the English summer weather.

In the event, it wasn't a shock of seismic proportions today when the little known Russian Dmitry Tursunov, world ranked 70, outlasted his more famous tennis-playing countryman in four sets. Safin seemed in control in the first set — which is pretty much like saying a drunk driver was on top of things merely because he managed to avoid the first traffic island and stay on the road — but Tursunov wore down the inconsistent former U.S. champion with pinpoint ground-strokes from the baseline for a 4-6, 7-5, 6-3, 7-6(1) first round victory.

Also through to the second round is Jan-Michael Gambill of whom much was expected a few years ago. The blond American poster boy lost his way then but he played superb attacking tennis and looked surprisingly sharp today in beating Max Mirnyi of Belarus 6-3, 7-5, 6-4.

A Rooney fan

Serena Williams did not look quite as sharp as she might have wanted to be as she kicked-off her title defence on the Centre Court. But the fashion-conscious American whose last major title was won 12 months ago here, grew in confidence as the match progressed to dispose of Jie Zheng of China, world ranked No. 52, rather handily, winning the first round match 6-3, 6-1 in an hour and six minutes.

Zheng, who had made the fourth round at the French Open last month, sought to play well above her customary altitude to try and match the champion. She had her chances too in a match in which Serena mixed outrageous brilliance with shocking error-prone mediocrity as if it was the right brew with which to knock out her little Chinese opponent.

Zheng, lacking the power, pace and muscle power of a much bigger opponent, showed the heart that is so necessary to compensate for these disadvantages and matched Serena for a while before the two-time champion began to gallop.

The 20-year old Chinese woman had 10 chances in the two sets to break Serena's powerful serve but the American swatted out the challenge with the arrogance of a lion chasing off a wild dog which sought to share its hard-won antelope for lunch.

Serving for the match in the seventh game of the second set, Serena was down 0-40 but with the almost bored expression on her face making way for a hint of anger, the champion raced to the finish.

Predictably there was little talk of tennis in the post-match press conference. Instead, Serena talked soccer.

"I am a big fan of English football. I am a big fan of Wayne Rooney. I was screaming when England came back and scored those goals last night,'' said Serena.

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