Some Feel Querrey Could Be Answer For U.S. Tennis

There were racket throwers and referee abusers, big servers and grind-it-from-the-baseliners, but what the top players had in common during the glory days of U.S. tennis was a knack for getting to the finals of Grand Slam events and wresting the spoils from the world's best.

Americans Jimmy Connors, John McEnroe, Pete Sampras and Andre Agassi claimed 37 major titles from 1974 to 2003.

Recent years, however, have seen the search for a successor sputter largely over the promise and disappointment of Andy Roddick, who burst onto the scene by winning the 2003 U.S. Open at 21, then saw his career eclipsed by the brilliance of Switzerland's Roger Federer, who has held the No. 1 ranking since February 2004.

If a nation's dominance in sports goes in cycles, as most observers say, the present gyrations of American tennis will be on stark display at Washington's Legg Mason Tennis Classic, which gets underway today.

The sentimental favorite, no doubt, will be Agassi, 36, the last vestige of the golden era of American tennis. He will be competing in Washington for a 17th and final time before he retires this fall.

Top-seeded James Blake, the event's 2002 champion, is reveling in a career-high No. 5 ranking, having overtaken Roddick as the best American at the moment. Roddick, meanwhile, will be looking to reassert his dominance.

Then there is 18-year-old Sam Querrey, a 6-feet-6 Californian with a whopping serve and forehand who may well prove to be the next great American contender. Among his fans is U.S. Davis Cup captain Patrick McEnroe, who has included Querrey in workouts during the last six months as a practice player for the squad.

"A lot of kids these days know how to hit the ball, but they're not great tennis players," Patrick McEnroe said last week. "Sam understands how to play the game. He understands how to use the court and how to move. Especially for someone his size, speed is not his natural strength, but he makes up for it. He's got a big serve, a very big forehand, a good two-handed backhand. And he's got a good head on his shoulders."

The magnitude of the country's lack of top tennis players was underscored by a dismal showing this year at Wimbledon, where no American reached the quarterfinals for the first time since 1911. While some bemoaned the decline in American talent, others simply saluted the rest of the world for investing in the game and raising its level of play.

Former world No. 1 Jim Courier, who won two French Opens and two Wimbledon titles before retiring in 2000, is among the latter group, interpreting the current American slide as primarily a consequence of other countries catching up.

"The analogy I make is to Tom Friedman's book, 'The World is Flat,' " Courier says, referring to the bestseller about the global economy. "The rest of the world is competing; the barriers have been dropped. A lot of these foreign players who are winning events, Tommy Haas of Germany and Maria Sharapova of Russia, are American tennis players. Their games were nurtured and honed on our soil. We've given away our information to the world, which is very generous, in the same way we've given away fiber-optic cable. The world is playing at a much higher level than before."

Still, no one thinks American tennis should sit idly by.

Against the grim backdrop of the country's washout at Wimbledon, the U.S. Tennis Association in June unveiled plans to open its first live-in tennis academy in conjunction with the Evert Tennis Academy in Boca Raton, Fla., where 20 or so of the country's top 14- to 18-year-olds will live and train year-round. The initiative was spurred in part by Billie Jean King, chairman of the USTA's high performance committee, and has support from such former champions as McEnroe, Connors and Sampras, who are expected to mentor the prospects.

Said Patrick McEnroe: "We can't sit there and say, 'Hey, someone makes better widgets now, so we should forget how good we can make our widgets.' We've got to try to improve, and we've got to try to get better and face the realities. . . . There's obviously no guarantees, but I think there's also the fact that if we don't do something, it's not just going to get better necessarily. We can't just hope that Venus and Serena Williams come out of the parks again in southern California."

The Williams sisters, who have 12 Grand Slam titles between them, were taught to play by their father, outside the traditional USTA development system.

"In our day it was Australia and America competing," said former champion Chris Evert, who founded the Evert Academy with her brother, John. "Nowadays, they're coming out of the woodwork, these players."

Querrey can attest to that. He played on the international junior circuit before turning pro in June and said the competition came from all corners of the globe -- Croatia, the Netherlands, Brazil, Japan, Russia and India, to name a few.

Querrey's young pro career is off to an impressive start. He won his first two challenger events and advanced past the first round of major tour stops in Newport, R.I., Indianapolis and Los Angeles this summer.

"He has a bright future," says Courier, 35, who founded and competes in the Champions Series. "But what all these guys are up against is that everyone keeps reminding them of the prior generation of American tennis, of which Andre is the last man standing. Our fans are spoiled; we had it so good for so long, having Andre and Pete and Michael Chang and Todd Martin and Mal Washington and David Wheaton and me -- this whole group that was in major finals and semifinals every year, it seemed. It's difficult to live up to. That was a group with depth that we hadn't seen before. But we will again."