Cincy Friday, August 17, 2007

Cincinnati

I missed the tournament at Montreal, so for me Cincinnati was my first masters event of the summer. I ended up sliding in on a wild card entry with young American, Sam Querrey. In the first round, we drew Nenad Zimonjic and Novak Djokovic. It was quite a tough draw as Djoko was straight off his win in Montreal and Zimo is quite the accomplished doubles player. We got up early, but went down 6-3, 6-4.

Other notes from the tourney.....

Upset-day (Weds) - The day started off with Hewitt handling Gasquet. I don't really consider this an upset, cause Hewitt has a very impressive record against the young Frenchman.

Soon to follow, was my DP (Querrey) getting it done against Mikhail Yhouzny. Yhouzny just reached a career high last week ( #10), so this was a big win for Sam.

Next to fall was Nadal, who suffered an injury and went down to Monaco. This sounds like a bad loss for Nadal, and probably was, but Monaco is confident and is ranked #25 for a reason. That reason may be that he's won 3 tour events this year.

And...to cap off the day...Novak Djokovic, after showing the world that he's ready to be considered in the top of the men's game, bombed out to former Cincy champ, Carlos Moya in his first match.

Behind the Scenes....
A lot of people wonder what players get up to when they aren't playing matches. The player's lounge is often full of tvs, computers and sometimes video games. I'm not a huge arcade game player, but this week I decided to give Mrs. Pac Man a go. I've played the game before, but decided I was really going to figure it out. I was in the middle of posting my biggest score of the week (33,000), when Andy Murray came behind me and started verbally abusing me for my poor play. I thought this was another case of Andy shooting his mouth, but when he took control the next game, I was very impressed. After watching him post 83,000 (my best for the week was 53k, and I was in the zone for that game) I picked up a few techniques...

1. Its all about eating up the ghosts, especially in the early rounds. You need to get all 4 almost every time.

2. They never change direction, so sometimes you can follow them and they won't turn around and get you.

3. From watching Andy, it helps to talk trash to the ghosts. I never realized Pac-Man could be a game of confidence...but he was often berating the ghosts for how slow they were. It seemed to really work well.

That's the news from Cincy....