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Serve and Volley in the Park
The match on Court Four at the FitzGerald Center in Washington’s Rock Creek Park had Maxime Cressy hitting 130, 135 mph serves to the lines or to the feet and Daniel Galan could not do anything about them and the first game was over in less than a minute.
This is the storied Washington summer tennis tournament, one of the major events, outside politics, of the ancient city on the banks of the Potomac River, but even so, first round matches in the morning, with the temperature rising, tend to be low-attendance affairs. Court Four is the only outside court with an awning so it gets good turnouts. Fans sat under in the shade like sardines in a can as the mercury kept rising as if it wanted to keep up with the Cressy Serve, ninety-four, ninety-five. Every changeover they let more fans in and I kept glancing toward the empty benches that were not under the canvas but I was sitting with a direct view of the net and I could see Cressy’s service shots hitting the ground. Galan sometimes connected. When he connected, he placed them away from Cressy when he could — Cressy following the shot to the net to catch the return and put it into a distant corner. He had the technique cold; it is called the serve-and-volley.
Cressy is one of a kind, or at least one of a rare breed, the pure serve-and-volley tennis men. They go for short points. Cressy is no exception. He comes in with a running forehand volley, a low sliced backhand, an overhead smash when the return goes high in an effort to lob it over him (he is six-seven), and that’s the point, three shots.
As a game plan, the system works. Except when the man on the other side of the net is willing to wait and see if he can figure out how to handle that serve, stand behind the baseline and get used to it, send passing shots away from the tall and agile French Californian with the wide wingspan, and in the meantime work hard to hold his own serve, see if he can change the dynamic.
Daniel Elahi Galan is from Bucaramanga in the Colombian Andes and like many players from Colombia has the intrinsic “chess sense,” or you might call it tactical intuition, that comes from growing up on clay courts. His plan is to get into long rallies from the baseline, find open space on the other side. He can also hope for inconsistencies in the barrage of shots from the other side — double faults traded for aces, mis-steps that produce overhit groundstrokes that go outside the lines.
It was a fair calculation, better than trying to play Cressy’s game. Cressy, who took a medical time out at 2-1, early on showed poor control from the baseline. Galan’s plan was to get the ball to the backcourt and aim for the corners and keep the rally going, wait for an unforced error or a hole to put away a winner. At 3-3 Cressy took a 30-love lead and lost it on repeat doubles, lost the ad on a brilliant staccato backhand return of serve, and then compounded the slide with a third double fault that gave Galan the break and the lead, 3-4.
It was what Galan needed. Looking uncomfortable and out of sorts, Cressy let him hold at love to go up 5-3. Cressy then bore down with a superb display of s & v to prove he can hold at love too, but Galan, serving for the set, overcame a double to keep the tenth game even at 30-all, whereupon Cressy hit a weak backhand return of serve and on the next point Galan did not waste his chance, he fired a classic serve-plus-one to the opposite corner: game and set.
The second set also began with an explosive s & v demonstration by Cressy, but by now Galan had him pretty well figured out. It is interesting to watch players with such different styles. You see that it is not whether defense beats offense or the reverse, it is how well you stick to your own game and make adjustments along the way when necessary. The charge on one side, the patient chess moves on the other, and the mental toughness to sustain either. As the Cressy doubles piled up, ten in total including three to give Galan a break at 3-3 in the second set, plus the evident discomfort, he simply could not sustain his game long enough to catch up once he was broken. He managed to save a match point while serving at 3-5, but on the second one Galan passed him at the net. Galan played an elegant, intelligent game, Cressy a dramatic and bold one; win and lose, it was a good match.
The Women Also Serve
Obviously, the Washington Open, known now as the Mubadala D.C. Citi Open after having been known as the Citi Open and before that the Legg-Mason and before that the Washington Star Invitational, is not the same without America’s favorite girl players: Coco Gauff and Jessica Pegula and Emma Navarro and Daniel Collins are absent from the WTA lineup. Miss Gauff is the defending champ in the ladies’ draw, Miss Pegula won in 2019; Misses Navarro and Collins are having very good seasons. They are all in Paris participating in the Olympic Games. This gives some room to local favorite daughters Robin Montgomery and Clervie Ngounoue and Hailie Baptiste who won a nice if at times error-prone match in the qualifiers against Australia’s Arina Rodionova.
The qualifiers were pretty good, as we mentioned a day or two ago, with respectable crowds, considering the temperatures and the occasion. Qualification draws are well worth watching in that you see astonishing players who are just below the best, maybe up and coming youngsters or veterans who have been hovering near the very-big-time for a few years and for reasons of circumstances, including the ability to consistently, not only occasionally, play your best — this is the real key to success in sports — still must work through the qualifying rounds to get into tournaments. Note that it sometimes happens to the top of the top, who may have dropped in the rankings due to losing points while on the sidelines with injuries and thus lacking automatic entry to the main draws, but this is rare, because in these cases they usually will get a “protected rank” if they ask for it or they will be given a wild card by the tournament organizers.
At any rate, what with the Olympic distraction the WTA is fielding a 32-draw field; the ATP draw remains at 64, which is okay too because a week of tennis in the hottest days of a Washington summer, while certainly a relief from Democrats and Republicans downtown, is enough for anybody. Actually and to tell you the truth, the East Side Athletic and Social Club is playing daily all summer long at the Banneker courts on Georgia Avenue, but we do it at dawn to take advantage of the cooler temperature, and we work productively to pay the taxes of those morons downtown, the rest of the day. Observe that East Side Athletic Club is only the latest name change and it may change again tomorrow to Banneker Civic and Sporting Club and next week to Georgia Avenue Athletic and Social Community Organization, because if the Washington Open can keep changing its name why can’t we? Why can’t you? It’s still a free country, no?
Moreover, last year the Washington Open had a 32-line draw on the women’s side and a 48-line draw on the men’s, so go figure. All these name changes and variations of the composition of the main draws reflect nothing so much as the venue. Washington, the entity not the sleepy southern town that Allen Drury wrote about in Advise and Consentand A Shade of Difference and other classics of American political fiction, is a place where you cannot trust what anybody says. Legislation, policy, support-of-candidate(s), meeting, conference, phone call, forget what they said until you see them do it, then remember that it’s the exception that proves the rule.
And tennis in Rock Creek Park is a splendid exception to Washington’s basic business, which is to see if you can fool enough of the people enough of the time to get what, in the end, may make you happy for a spell, but with what consequences for the Union? In this is it not like the mighty Summer Olympic Games? Hoopla and universal brotherhood? They’re on their way in Paris, France, and we are awaiting reports from our local correspondents. Meanwhile, the show goes on at 16th and Kennedy Streets (you can also get off the bus at Colorado Avenue), and even with the summer temperatures, the detour, as they say, is worth it.
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