Why I love tennis, especially the clay season.

From Steve Tignor's latest TENNIS.com article:

For a long time I wondered why I liked watching tennis on clay so much, and why it looked so different, so much more flowing, than it does on hard courts. Finally a friend clued me in: “I think it’s the sliding.” Oh right, the sliding. That was it. Why hadn’t I thought of that before?

I’ve read that all art forms aspire to musicality; to lose themselves in the flow. So it must be with tennis. Its players expand their palette when they walk onto clay—the drop, the lob, the angled volley, we’ve seen plenty of all of them already this week in Monte Carlo. These days, it seems more natural for players to find themselves at the net, at least temporarily, on clay than it does on hard courts. Here you get some help from the court: You can slide forward to pick up a drop shot, and then slide back to the baseline to reach the lob that comes after it.

Yes, it's also about the sliding for me. Amidst all that red (and even blue) dirt, I think players actually look more graceful playing on this surface than in a hard court or a grass court. 

More from the article:

Perhaps, also, it's because genius doesn’t get you all that much. Think about Andy Murray, another player gifted by the Hands Gods. The ever-sober Murray can do virtually anything with the ball, but he mostly chooses to play it straight and solid. Every so often, though, he’ll relax enough to do a little showing off. Up 5-0 in the first set against Viktor Troicki on Monday, Murray hit a forehand at an extreme angle, and with an extreme amount of topspin, that crossed the net and immediately dove to the court—it was a circus shot, and something I’d never seen before. Pleased with his success, Murray tried it again on the next ball, put it in the net, and yelled at himself. He must know that geniuses look cool, but you can’t count on them.

Ok, got it. No more acting cool from now on, Andy.

Another excerpt:

“Stay hungry, stay humble,” was how Mary Carillo once summed up the tennis, and life, advice that Toni Nadal gives to his nephew Rafael. It’s worked well. Today, Nadal made his 2012 debut at Monte Carlo, a tournament he’s won the last seven years. Toni was where he’s been for all of those years, in the front row at the end of one sideline.

What, rationally, could Rafa have to prove, to himself or anyone there, after all of those wins? Plenty. Everything. Watching him—this year in a peach shirt—you might have thought he was still trying to break through for title number one. He played with the same look of concerned concentration, the same nervous energy contained by a semi-superstitious attention to ritual, the same earnest looks of encouragement shared with Toni, the same temporary jitters when trying to serve out a set, the same spring in his step after winning a point and slowed-down tempo after losing one, and, when he needed them, the same dive-bomb passing shots hit on the full, clay-scattering slide. Otherwise, it was a pretty routine win.

Hunger: The most useful talent of all.

I may not be a big Rafa Nadal fan but I really appreciate the guy's desire to always improve himself and his dedication to the sport.