2013 Season - Serenadal Or Serenovak

[RJD11]

Jon Wertheim's Mailbag

As a regular contributor to your mailbag, I thought I would offer my comment on the 2013 season. The 2013 season could best be summed up by the following portmanteau: "SERENADAL." The definition is tennis dominance attributed to talent, athleticism, mental toughness and tenacity.
-- D. Harris, Memphis


• Portmanteau is the love child of Natalie Portman and Julien Benneteau, is it not? I like Serenadal, though it sounds like a new product line from Pfizer. Williams is the WTA MVP the way 6 x 6 = 36. There's not even a valid alternative view. If I had to choose an ATP MVP, Nadal would get my vote after finishing 75-7 with 10 titles, including the French Open and U.S. Open, and reclaiming the No. 1 ranking. But Novak Djokovic's late charge -- he won his last 24 matches to close 74-9 with seven titles, including the Australian Open -- puts him in the conversation. Serenovak? I think that's an AstraZeneca product.



Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/news/20131204/wishes-2014-serena-williams-rafael-nadal/#ixzz2mXUzE0Pl

 

[RJD11]

Wertheim's Wishlist for 2014


-- For Serena Williams: Continued excellence. As the kids say, "Keep doing your thing."

-- For Rafael Nadal: A year of uninterrupted health.

-- For Maria Sharapova: A strong bounce-back year.

-- For the ATP rank-and-file: A breakthrough performer. Beginning with the French Open nine years ago, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic and Andy Murray have combined to win 34 of the last 35 Slams, including 32 for those first three. (Juan Martin del Potro is the only other player to win a major in that time, at the 2009 U.S. Open.) Time for someone to break the hegemony. (We're looking at you, Milos Raonic, Grigor Dimitrov and Tomas Berdych.)

-- For American men's tennis: A modest uptick. This isn't just jingoism. The sport is better served when there's an American in the mix. Ask the folks who control the purse strings.

-- For Marion Bartoli: An unretirement.

-- For tennis administrators, plenipotentiaries and board members: An instinct to put the overall good of the sport over personal agendas.

-- For Andy Murray: The ability to withstand the pressure of trying to become the first British male since 2013 to win Wimbledon.

Easy question as we look to 2014: One male and one female player I should be watching for?
-- Jon P., Houston

• Let's say -- for very different reasons -- Simona Halep and Bernard Tomic. Halep is picking up titles as though volume shopping at Costco. The question, as we discussed recently, now becomes: Can she replicate these results at bigger events? In Tomic's case, there's a lot of drama here. Some of it unfortunate. Some of it his own doing. ('"Toolie' Tomic bemused by lap dance controversy" might be my favorite tennis headline of 2013.) The fact remains that he has a lot of game that will eventually make a jailbreak, so to speak.

As for potential breakouts from less established players, I'll take 18-year-old Madison Keys, who went 34-21, made the third round at the Australian Open and Wimbledon and cracked the top 40 in her first full season on the WTA Tour; and 20-year-old Jiri Vesely, the Czech answer to Jerzy Janowicz and the youngest player in the ATP top 100, at No. 85, after beginning the year at No. 263.


Read More: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/tennis/news/20131204/wishes-2014-serena-williams-rafael-nadal/#ixzz2mXW716Lb