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None Like It Hot

Move it. Move the Legg Mason Tennis Classic to a 4 p.m. start. Forget all these blistering hot matches at lunch hour. Forget starting play at midday, when the courts were above 110 degrees every day this week and topped out at an almost inhumane 116 degrees.

Tournament organizers said yesterday that they are strongly considering switching the local tournament format from two sessions — a day session and a night session — to one session starting at 4 p.m. It was the smartest statement they made all week. It would be great if they could move the tournament altogether — move it to some time of the year when Washington does not routinely experience its most oppressive weather — but that’s not really feasible, given the men’s tour schedule and the traditional American hard-court build-up to the U.S. Open.

But they can follow through on their proposed plan to change the times. And there’s no better argument for doing that than what happened in yesterday’s final. Michael Chang, who is one of the best-conditioned players on the tour but who also happened to play all his matches during this week’s night sessions, had plenty of energy for the three-set final and won, 5-7, 6-2, 6-1. Petr Korda, who played every one of his previous matches in the midday sun, who was so crippled by the heat that he puked into a flowerpot on Friday, died by the start of the second set and all but gave up in the third. It wasn’t tennis that the fans saw at the end of the final, it was a waiting game. Korda played it that way.

To sum up Korda’s performance in the final, you only need look at his demeanor in his first service game and his last. When the match opened, Korda stood for an extended period of time and stared at an unseated fan, refusing to serve until the person (who was behind him and in no way in his line of vision) got settled.

When the match was at its tail end, with Chang holding on to double break point, Korda didn’t even bother to wait for the "Let’s go, Michael!" applause to die down before winding up for a weak first serve that landed in the net. He didn’t care about the distractions. He didn’t care about anything but getting off the court.

That much was obvious when Korda saved the first match point by the grace of a net cord, and his body language made it clear that he was unhappy about his break. Unhappy as in, "Oh, man, now I have to serve again, and play another point and can’t we please just get this over with?"

It’s not even necessary to accuse Korda of tanking, which is exactly what he did. Korda admitted it himself.

"I just gave effort for the first set," Korda said, "and I was better in the first set."

Now, it’s hard to feel too much sympathy for Korda because of the way he whined about everything — not just the heat — for most of the week. And schedule or no schedule, heat or no heat, Chang was the better player in this final, no matter how Korda felt about his performance in the first set. Chang is known for playing long matches, for getting in a hole and digging himself out. Just because Korda managed to beat Chang in the first set — managed to beat him for what was a hard-fought 7-5 victory — does not mean that he would have beaten him in either of the next two. Indoors or out, in heat or in a chill, Chang is more heavily favored the longer a match lasts, and deep down Korda should know that.

But once you cut through all Korda’s whining, you have to admit he has something of a point. Tournament schedulers were right to give Chang the advantage of playing the night matches — that’s the bonus that comes with being the showcase player. (And as far as putting the lower-seeded Andre Agassi on for a night match rather than No. 2 Korda, well, there’s something to be said for giving the larger night crowds what they want. Fans pay for their tickets, after all). But it certainly would be nice if nobody had to play tennis here in the worst of the day’s heat.

"Maybe I’m going to have to pray a little bit more for the evening matches," Korda said yesterday. "I don’t know."

Korda isn’t the first to wilt on these courts because of heat-related exhaustion, and he’s far from the first to give up on the court. It’s become a ritual in Washington in mid-July: Big-name players come and big-name players leave, quickly, because playing on this surface, in this weather, is an absolute nightmare. Korda isn’t even the first to vomit because of the heat. Agassi did so in the flowerpots two years ago, in the 1995 final, when he was so ill from the heat and humidity that it seemed a miracle he survived to beat Stefan Edberg.

Face it: A two person-in-three-years puke ratio is not exactly a promising statistic.

Korda recovered from Friday’s match to take a quick two-set victory in the semifinals on Saturday, a victory in which he admittedly was able to conserve energy. He came here yesterday to find fabulous weather, at least when compared with what it had been all week. There was a breeze. The temperatures had dropped below the triple digits.

And, for the first set, the crowd got to see some pretty intense tennis. Long rallies, pretty winners, sharp forehands from Korda and impressive returns from Chang.

But the damage had been done. Korda had nothing left for the second and third sets of this final. Maybe if he were as well-conditioned as Chang always has been, Korda might have been able to put up more of a struggle. But the combination of Chang’s conditioning, Chang’s consistency, and — yes, at least in some part, Chang’s schedule — played a factor in the match. If they’d both played late-day or night matches all week, Chang probably still would have won this thing. But it’s a pretty safe bet that the final would have been much better to watch.

© Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company

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