Innumeracy in the French Open brackets

The tennis majors drive me nuts when their brackets are unbalanced.  If all seeds advance, your #1 seed should play the #4 seed in the semifinals, NOT the #3 seed, and yet here we are, with #1 seed Djokovic playing #3 seed Federer in a rematch of their 2011 semifinal.  Worse, just last year Federer and Djokovic were the #2 and #3 seeds, respectively, so it's not like the French Open planners get this wrong every time.  If you want the rematch, then make Nadal the #1 seed; after all, he was last year's champion and the greatest clay court player of all time.  That could be unfair to Djokovic, because he has won the last 3 majors, but it's actually *more* unfair to Djokovic to force the Federer/Djokovic semifinals rematch because it gives Nadal an easier path to the finals.  Well... maybe it's not so much that it gives Nadal an easier path to the finals, because he owns Federer on clay, but that it makes Djokovic's path to the finals harder because Federer does well against Djokovic.

16-14 in the fifth?!

Wow. We've been out of town and away from internet access, and spent the last week recovering from the trip. Our flight took off right at the end of the 1st set, so we saw the last few games on the airplane's TV, including Roddick breaking Federer, and I figured we'd see the whole match, but we landed in Orlando at 8-8 in the 5th. It's too bad Roddick couldn't close out the 2nd set tiebreaker -- there was one point that stood out, where he mis-hit a high backhand volley (practically an overhead) that he "should" have gotten. It was a difficult play, but he wasn't quite able to make it, and I couldn't help but think that it's the kind of play Edberg or McEnroe would have made. If the sets (before the 5th) didn't go to tiebreakers, I'll bet Roddick would have won. Federer simply couldn't break Roddick that day until the very end.

One last addition: I really hate it when I read articles by people who think that Roddick isn't an elite player because he doesn't have more slam titles. It's really hard to win slam titles when Federer and Nadal are out there; Djokovic (2008), Gaudio (2004), Hewitt (2002), and Roddick (2003) are the last people not named Nadal or Federer to win each of the four majors, in order). There have never been a pair of men's champions like this; even Seles/Graf and Navratilova/Evert might not have been quite this dominant. To suggest that their greatness is due to a lack of competitiveness at the top is not really fair to anyone.

Completely missing the point on Tiger vs. Federer

In a June 16 article for ESPN the Magazine, Bill Simmons (the Sports Guy) lays out his theories on why tennis lags behind golf in popularity and what can be done to bring the sport back from the dead. Unfortunately, he completely misses the single most important reason why the casual American fan won't be watching Wimbledon (or any other major tennis tournament) this year is that Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic -- the only players with legitimate shots to win a major -- aren't American. I guarantee that:

• if Tiger and Mediate met in the (tennis) U.S. Open finals while Federer and Nadal meet in a playoff to decide the (golf) U.S. Open, most Americans would watch Tiger and Mediate, not because Tiger is a "better personality" than Federer (they have roughly the same personality, to poke at another of his theories), but because Tiger and Mediate are Americans and Federer and Nadal are Euros.
  
• if no American had won a golf major since 2003 (the year Roddick won the U.S. Open), while Americans had dominated major tennis tournaments during that time period, Simmons would be writing about why golf was "once a successful mainstream sport"

It's really as simple as that. That's really the only substantive point I have to make, but just to rub it in, SG also makes the "the game of tennis has gotten too fast for the equipment" argument, saying

When John McEnroe and Björn Borg had their "Battle of 18-16" at Wimbledon, it wasn't serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley, serve-and-volley

...which was a valid concern 10 years ago when "Pistol Pete", Patrick Rafter, and their ilk were on top of the tennis world, with Agassi as "the counterpuncher", but the top players have largely not been serve-and-volley players for several years, so the points are lasting longer (than 10 years ago; with today's conditioning, I don't think we can go back to the pace of the Wilander-Lendl Finals).

As far as the claim that

succeeding at tennis lends itself to being an exceedingly boring person. You need to be calm, focused and diligent, 24 hours a day

...apparently, he's never seen Djokovic doing imitations. Next!