Tipsarevic

In the 80s, shortly after Borg retired, there was a spate of young Swedish tennis players that dotted the top 100 players. This, from a country that barely has 9 million people. 9 million! The United States has something like 250 million people, which is over 25 times as populous as Sweden.

And yet, Sweden cranked out players like Mats Wilander, Stefan Edberg, Anders Jarryd, Henrik Sundstrom, Joachim Nystrom, and perhaps half a dozen others. While these players claim to have drawn some inspiration from Borg, who was Sweden's star player from the mid 70s to early 80s (probably the height of tennis popularity, due, perhaps as much to an exhibition between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs, as to anything else in the game).

But Borg was a loner. He played Davis Cup rarely, except at the beginning of his career, and kept his distance from most of the rest of the Swedes, who were all best buddies and rather modest about their considerable achievements.

This success was mostly confined to the men's game. You can hardly name any Swedish women players.

These things seem to go in cycles. The Spaniards have done well since the 1990s with players like Sergei Bruguera, Carlos Moya, and nowadays, world number 2, Rafael Nadal.

But the country du jour are the Serbians. The Croatians have done well, most notably, Goran Ivanisevic. However, their Yugoslav counterparts have only had a good player in Monica Seles, and she often hushed up about her heritage, as the Serbians, at the time, were into some ethnic cleansing, which is basically genocide.

But, you know, Americans barely register this kind of thing when there are no images being blared in their faces, and when it's, you know, over there, overseas. Americans are so American-centric that they barely pay attention to starvation in Africa, conflicts in Europe, atrocities in Southeast Asia.

Even as Americans have learned to become far more aware of the world, understanding this phenomenon called Bollywood, the burgeoning Indian film industry, being more PC, there's still a lot of the world Americans willfully ignore, with the news media more than complicit in this jingoistic fervor.

So, with these past events firmly in the past, Serbian tennis has enjoyed a resurgence. It's really hard to call it a resurgence given that Serbia was part of Yugoslavia, and Yugoslavia was the rebel child of the Communist countries, and many Soviet bloc countries avoided playing world tennis for many years, until the mid 80s, when players like Andrei Chesnokov, Andrei Cherkasov, and most importantly, Nathalia Zvereva, who famously waved a winner's check on national TV, a check she said she couldn't keep because of the Russian federation, which eventually yielded fewer restrictions, more take-home pay, and eventually, Russians back in the top ranks of tennis.

In those days, you had Bobo Zivojinovic and Monica Seles, and they were the forefront of Serbian tennis. These days, you have Novak Djokovic, but you also have Janko Tipsarevic who is giving Roger Federer all he can handle.

He looks a lot like a grungy Novak, with his funky glasses that resemble racquetball glasses, and his scraggly facial hair, almost as if Djokovic put on a disguise and came on court. Tipsarevic is three years older than his 20 year old compatriots.

Many Serbian players train outside of Serbia, having gone to Europe or the United States. (By the way, there have been a ton of challenges by Tipsarevic, who has won a surprising number of them).

While the men have fared quite well, the women have done even better for themselves. Ana Ivanovic is ranked number 3. Jelena Jankovic is ranked number 4. True, there's no other player til you reach about the mid 200s, but having two top ten players in the women's and three players in the top 100 (barely), with a population that's maybe a million people more than Sweden, and you realize that this is quite an accomplishment, especially as many have had to train outside of Serbia.

Occasionally, you have a player like world number 1, Roger Federer, who comes from a country (Switzerland), that is more famous for chocolates and cheese than for producing top players, and you wonder, where the heck are the other Swiss players? There's Roger, and that seems to be it (not entirely true, but other players pale in the glow of a dominant number 1).

But give this to the Serbs, they've got a lot of fight.

This is one reason (other than a nap late in the evening) that I'm watching a Federer-Tipsarevic match that has already gone to two tiebreaks, and one where Federer has ample chances to break, but hasn't fared really well.