The Canadian Open, one of the ATP Tour’s “Super 9” tournaments that weigh most heavily in the calculation of world ranking, officially starts on Monday, 24 July. What’s going on for the two days right before it is the Qualies. This is essentially a competition to determine who will occupy the eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw designated for “qualifiers.” It is a pre-tournament tournament. A qualifying tourney precedes just about every big-money ATP event, and money and prestige and lucrative careers are often at stake in Qualie rounds, and often they feature the best matches of the whole tournament, and it’s a good bet you haven’t heard of Qualies.
The realities of the men’s professional tennis tour bear about as much resemblance to the lush finals you see on TV as a slaughterhouse does to a well-presented cut of restaurant sirloin. For every Sampras-Agassi final we watch, there’s been a week-long tournament, a pyramidical single-elimination battle among 32, 64, or 128 players, of whom the finalists are the last men standing. You probably know that already. But a player has to be eligible to enter that tournament in the first place. Eligibility is determined by ATP computer ranking. Each tournament has a cutoff, a minimum ranking required to get entered in the main draw. Players below that ranking who want to get in have to compete in a kind of pre-tournament. That’s the easiest way to explain what Qualies are. In actual practice the whole thing’s quite a bit messier, and I’ll try to describe the logistics of the Canadian Open’s Qualies in just enough detail to suggest their complexity without boring you mindless.
The du Maurier Omnium Ltée has a draw of 64. The sixteen entrants with the highest ATP rankings get “seeded,” which means their names are strategically dispersed in the draw so that (barring upsets) they won’t have to meet each other until the latter rounds.7 Of the seeds, the top eight—here Agassi, Sampras, Chang, the Russian Yevgeny Kafelnikov, Croatia’s Goran Ivanisevic, South Africa’s Wayne Ferreira, Germany’s Michael Stich, and Switzerland’s Marc Rosset, respectively—get “byes,” or automatic passes into the tournament’s second round. This means that there is actually room for 56 players in the main draw. The cutoff for the 1995 Canadian Open isn’t 56, however, because not all of the top 56 players in the world are here.8 Here the cutoff is 85. You’d think that this meant anybody with an ATP ranking of 86 or lower would have to play the Qualies, but here too there are exceptions. The du Maurier Omnium Ltée, like most other big tournaments, has five “wild card” entries into the main draw. These are special places given either to high-ranked players who entered after the required six-week deadline but are desirable to have in the tournament because they’re big stars (like Ivanisevic, #6 in the world but a notorious flakeroo who “forgot” to enter till a week ago and got a last-minute wild card) or to players ranked lower than 85 whom the tournament wants because they are judged “uniquely deserving” (read “Canadian”—the other four players who get wild cards here are all Canadian, and two are Quebecois).
By the way, if you’re interested, the ATP Tour updates and publishes its world rankings weekly, and the rankings constitute a nomological orgy that makes for truly first-rate bathroom reading. As of this writing, Mahesh Bhupathi is 284, Luis Lobo 411. There’s Martin Sinner and Guy Forget. There’s Adolf Musil and Jonathan Venison and Javier Frana and Leander Paes. There’s—no kidding—Cyril Suk. Rodolfo Ramos-Paganini is 337, Alex Lopez-Moron 174. Gilad Bloom is 228 and Zoltan Nagy is 414. Names out of some postmodern Dickens: Udo Riglewski and Louis Gloria and Francisco Roig and Alexander Mronz. The 29th-best player in the world is named Slava Dosedel. There’s Claude N’Goran and Han Shin (276 but falling fast) and Haracio de la Pensa and Marcus Barbosa and Amos Mansdorf and Mariano Hood. Andres Zingman is currently ranked two places above Sander Groen. Horst Skoff and Kris Goossens and Thomas Hagstedt are all ranked higher than Martin Zumpft. One more reason the tournament industry sort of hates upsets is that the ATP press liaisons have to go around teaching journalists how to spell and pronounce new names.
So, skipping a whole lot more complication, the point is that eight slots in the Canadian Open’s main draw are reserved for qualifiers, and the Qualies is the tournament held to determine who’ll get those eight slots. The Qualies itself has a draw of 64 world-class players—the cutoff for qualifying for the Qualies is an ATP ranking of 350.9 The Qualies won’t go all the way through to the finals, only to the quarters: the eight quarterfinalists of the Qualies will receive first-round slots in the Canadian Open.10 This means that a player in the Qualies will need to win three rounds—round of 64, round of 32, round of 16—in two days to get into the first round of the main draw.11
The eight seeds in the Qualies are the eight players whom the Canadian Open officials expect will make the quarters and thus get into the main draw. The top seed this weekend is Richard Krajicek,12 a 6′5″ Dutchman who wears a tiny white billed hat in the sun and rushes the net like it owes him money and in general plays like a rabid crane. Both his knees are bandaged. He’s in the top twenty and hasn’t had to play Qualies for years, but for this tournament he missed the entry deadline, found all the wild cards already given to uniquely deserving Canadians, and with phlegmatic Low Country cheer decided to go ahead and play the weekend Qualies for the match practice. The Qualies’ second seed is Jamie Morgan, an Australian journeyman, around 100th in the world, whom Michael Joyce beat in straight sets last week in the second round of the main draw at the Legg Mason Tennis Classic in Washington. Michael Joyce is seeded third.
If you’re wondering why Joyce, who’s ranked above the #85 cutoff, is having to play the Canadian Open Qualies at all, gird yourself for one more bit of complication. The fact is that six weeks ago Joyce’s ranking was not above the cutoff, and that’s when the Canadian entry deadline was, and that’s the ranking the tournament committee went on when they made up the main draw. Joyce’s ranking jumped from 119 to around 80 after this year’s Wimbledon, where he beat Marc Rosset (ranked 11 in the world) and reached the round of sixteen. Despite a bout of mononucleosis that kept him in bed through part of the spring, Joyce is having his best year ever as a pro and has jumped from 140 in the world to 79.13 But he was not in the world’s top 85 as of early June, and so he has to qualify in Montreal. It seems to me that Joyce, like Krajicek, might be excused for brooding darkly on the fact that four wild cards in the Canadian’s main draw have been dispensed to Canadians ranked substantially lower than 85, but Joyce is stoic about it.14
The Qualie circuit is to professional tennis sort of what AAA baseball is to the major leagues: somebody playing the Qualies in Montreal is undeniably a world-class tennis player, but he’s not quite at the level where the serious TV and money are. In the main draw of the du Maurier Omnium Ltée, a first-round loser will earn $5,400 and a second-round loser $10,300. In the Montreal Qualies, a player will receive $560 for losing in the second round and an even $0.00 for losing in the first. This might not be so bad if a lot of the entrants for the Qualies hadn’t flown thousands of miles to get here. Plus there’s the matter of supporting themselves in Montreal. The tournament pays the hotel and meal expenses of players in the main draw but not in the Qualies.15 The eight survivors of the Qualies, however, will get their weekend expenses retroactively picked up by the tournament. So there’s rather a lot at stake: some of the players in the Qualies are literally playing for their supper, or for the money to make airfare home or to the site of the next Qualie.
You could think of Michael Joyce’s career as now kind of on the cusp between the major leagues and AAA ball. He still has to qualify for some tournaments, but more and more often he gets straight into the main draw. The move up from qualifier to main-draw player is a huge boost, both financially and psychically, but it’s still a couple plateaux away from true fame and fortune. The main draw’s 64 or 128 players are still mostly the supporting cast for the stars we see in televised finals. But they are also the pool from which superstars are drawn. McEnroe, Sampras, and even Agassi had to play Qualies at the start of their careers, an
d Sampras spent a couple years losing in the early rounds of main draws before he suddenly erupted in the early ’90s and started beating everybody.
Still, most main-draw players are obscure and unknown. An example is Jacob Hlasek,16 a Czech who is working out with Switzerland’s Marc Rosset on one of the practice courts this morning when I first arrive at Stade Jarry.17 I notice them and come over to watch only because Hlasek and Rosset are so beautiful to see; at this point I have no idea who they are. They are practicing groundstrokes down the line—Rosset’s forehand and Hlasek’s backhand—each ball plumb-line straight and within centimeters of the corner, the players moving with the compact nonchalance I’ve since come to recognize in pros when they’re working out: the suggestion is one of a very powerful engine in low gear. Jacob Hlasek is 6′2″ and built like a halfback, his blond hair in a short square East European cut, with icy eyes and cheekbones out to here: he looks like either a Nazi male model or a lifeguard in hell and seems in general just way too scary ever to try to talk to. His backhand’s a one-hander, rather like Lendl’s, and watching him practice it is like watching a great artist casually sketch something. I keep having to remember to blink. There are a million little ways you can tell that somebody’s a great player—details in his posture, in the way he bounces the ball with his racquet-head to pick it up, in the casual way he twirls the racquet while waiting for the ball. Hlasek wears a plain gray T-shirt and some kind of very white European shoes. It’s midmorning and already at least 90° and he isn’t sweating. Hlasek turned pro in 1982, six years later had one year in the top ten, and for the last decade has been ranked in the 60s and 70s, getting straight into the main draw of all the big tournaments and usually losing in the first couple rounds. Watching Hlasek practice is probably the first time it really strikes me how good these professionals are, because even just fucking around, Hlasek is the most impressive tennis player I’ve ever seen.18 I’d be surprised if anybody reading this has ever heard of Jacob Hlasek. By the distorted standards of TV’s obsession with Grand Slam finals and the world’s top five, Hlasek is merely an also-ran. But last year he made $300,000 on the tour (that’s just in prize money, not counting exhibitions and endorsement contracts), and his career winnings are over $4,000,000 U.S., and it turns out his home base for a long time was Monte Carlo, where lots of European players with tax issues end up living.
Michael Joyce is listed in the ATP Player Guide as 5′11″ and 165 pounds, but in person he’s more like 5′9″. On the Stadium Court he looks compact and stocky. The quickest way to describe him would be to say that he looks like a young and slightly buff David Caruso. He is fair-skinned and has reddish hair and the kind of patchy, vaguely pubic goatee of somebody who isn’t quite able yet to grow real facial hair. When he plays in the heat he wears a hat.19 He wears Fila clothes and uses Yonex racquets and is paid to do so. His face is childishly full, and while it isn’t freckled it somehow seems like it ought to be freckled. A lot of professional tennis players look like lifeguards—that kind of extreme tan that looks like it’s penetrated to the subdermal layer and will be retained to the grave—but Joyce’s fair skin doesn’t tan or even burn, though he does get red in the face when he plays, from effort.20 His on-court expression is grim without being unpleasant; it communicates the sense that Joyce’s attentions on-court have become very narrow and focused and intense—it’s the same pleasantly grim expression you see on, say, working surgeons and jewelers. On the Stadium Court, Joyce seems boyish and extremely adult at the same time. And in contrast to the Canadian opponent, who has the varnished good looks and Pepsodent smile of the stereotypical tennis player, Joyce looks terribly real out there playing: he sweats through his shirt,21 gets flushed, whoops for breath after a long point. He wears little elastic braces on both ankles, but it turns out they’re mostly prophylactic.
It’s 1:30 P.M. Joyce has broken Brakus’s serve once and is up 3–1 in the first set and is receiving. Brakus is in the multibrand clothes of somebody without an endorsement contract. He’s well over six feet tall, and like many large male collegians his game is built around his serve.22 At 0–15, his first serve is flat and 118 mph and way out to Joyce’s backhand, which is a two-hander and hard to lunge effectively with, but Joyce lunges plenty effectively and sends the ball back down the line to the Canadian’s forehand, deep in the court and with such flat pace that Brakus has to stutter-step a little and backpedal to get set up—clearly he’s used to playing guys for whom 118 mumps out wide would be an outright ace or at least produce such a weak return that he could move up easily and put the ball away—and Brakus now sends the ball back up the line high over the net, loopy with topspin, not all that bad a shot considering the fierceness of the return, and a topspin shot that’d back most tennis players up and put them on the defensive, and but Michael Joyce, whose level of tennis is such that he moves in on balls hit with topspin and hits them on the rise,23 moves in and takes the ball on the rise and hits a backhand cross so tightly angled that nobody alive could get to it. This is kind of a typical Joyce-Brakus point. The match is carnage of a particular high-level sort: it’s like watching an extremely large and powerful predator get torn to pieces by an even larger and more powerful predator. Brakus looks pissed off after Joyce’s winner, makes some berating-himself-type noises, but the anger seems kind of pro forma: it’s not like there’s anything Brakus could have done much better, not given what he and the 79th-best player in the world have in their respective arsenals.
Michael Joyce—whose realness and approachability and candor are a big reason why he’s whom I end up spending the most time watching and talking to—will later say, in response to my dry observation that a rather disproportionate number of unranked Canadians seem to have gotten wild cards into the Montreal Qualies, that Brakus “had a big serve, but the guy didn’t belong on a pro court.” Joyce didn’t mean this in an unkind way. Nor did he mean it in a kind way. It turns out that what Michael Joyce says rarely has any kind of spin or slant on it; he mostly just reports what he sees, rather like a camera. You couldn’t even call him sincere, because it’s not like it seems ever to occur to him to try to be sincere or nonsincere. For a while I thought that Joyce’s rather bland candor was a function of his not being very bright. This judgment was partly informed by the fact that Joyce didn’t go to college and was only marginally involved in his high school academics (stuff I know because he told me it right away).24 What I discovered as the tournament wore on was that I can be kind of a snob and an asshole, and that Michael Joyce’s affectless openness is a sign not of stupidity but of something else.
Advances in racquet technology and conditioning methods over the last decade have dramatically altered men’s professional tennis. For much of the twentieth century, there were two basic styles of top-level play. The “offensive”25 style is based on the serve and the net game and is ideally suited to slick (or “fast”) surfaces like grass and cement. The “defensive” or “baseline” style is built around foot-speed, consistency, and groundstrokes accurate enough to hit effective passing shots against a serve-and-volleyer; this style is most effective on “slow” surfaces like clay and Har-Tru composite. John McEnroe and Bjorn Borg are probably the modern era’s greatest exponents of the offensive and defensive styles, respectively.
There is now a third way to play, and it tends to be called the “power-baseline” style. As far as I can determine, Jimmy Connors26 more or less invented the power-baseline game back in the ’70s, and in the ’80s Ivan Lendl raised it to a kind of brutal art. In the ’90s, the majority of young players on the ATP Tour now have a P.B.-type game. This game’s cornerstone is groundstrokes, but groundstrokes hit with incredible pace, such that winners from the baseline are not unusual.27 A power-baseliner’s net game tends to be solid but uninspired—a P.B.er is more apt to hit a winner on the approach shot and not need to volley at all. His serve is competent and reasonably forceful, but the really inspired part of a P.B.er’s game is usually his return of serve.28 He us
ually has incredible reflexes and can hit winners right off the return. The P.B.er’s game requires both the power and aggression of an offensive style and the speed and calculated patience of a defensive style. It is adjustable both to slick grass and to slow clay, but its most congenial surface is DecoTurf,29 the type of slow abrasive hard-court surface now used at the U.S. Open and at all the broiling North American tournaments leading up to it, including the Canadian Open.