Nombre de messages: 3847 Date d'inscription: 14/09/2009
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 19:58
«Marat Safin, comment vous sentez-vous alors que vous venez de finir votre carrière ? Plutôt bien en fait. Evidemment j'ai beaucoup de souvenirs qui me reviennent et je pense que ça va encore durer un bon moment mais c'était bien de voir tous ces gens venus pour moi aujourd'hui, particulièrement les joueurs. J'espère juste que l'ATP n'a forcé personne parce qu'il y en a certains que je n'attendais pas ! (rires) Cela veut donc dire beaucoup. Si c'est sincère, ça veut dire beaucoup.
Que s'est-il passé dans votre tête lors du dernier jeu ? Je savais que je n'avais quasiment plus aucune chance de le battre mais je savais aussi que finalement j'avais fait un assez bon match alors... C'est plus facile de jouer sans pression et j'ai assez bien réussi, j'ai eu des occasions mais oui le dernier jeu c'est évidemment spécial. Je pense que c'est peut-être plus facile dans ces conditions là, ici et contre Juan Martin Del Potro.
Parmi vos nombreux souvenirs, est-ce qu'il y en a un qui vous revient en ce moment particulièrement ? En fait je crois qu'ils me sont tous revenus aujourd'hui. Roland-Garros pour commencer quand je sors des qualifications pour battre Agassi et Kuerten. L'US Open face à Sampras évidemment, mon année 2000 où je jouais si bien et puis le titre à Melbourne en 2005 que je voulais tant. A chaque fois cela a été une émotion spéciale. Vous savez, des tas de gens pensent que je n'étais pas un gros bosseur mais tous mes entraîneurs vous diront que je me suis donné à fond et que j'ai travaillé dur pour tout ça.
Quel joueur va prendre votre succession de casseur de raquettes ? (Rires) Il y a du potentiel chez certains ! Mais il faudra que ce soit un joueur un peu dingue. Je suis sûr que ce sera quelqu'un de spectaculaire, quelqu'un qui sera encore meilleur que Goran Ivanisevic et moi réunis !
Et demain, pour votre premier jour de retraité, qu'avez-vous prévu ? Je ne sais pas mais je suivrai mes envies. Je n'appartiens qu'à moi désormais, je n'ai pas de planning, pas d'entraînement, rien. Je suis totalement libre. Mais pour ce soir et demain je ne m'en fais pas, j'ai beaucoup d'amis ici donc on va bien trouver comment célébrer tout ça.
Qu'est-ce qui vous manquera le plus et qu'est-ce que vous ne regretterez pas ? Etre sur le court et jouer pour la gagne, ça va certainement me manquer. Les gens aussi vont me manquer, les joueurs mais également le staff et même les journalistes. Tous ceux qui ont été là avec moi depuis le début de ma carrière vont me manquer. Mais en même temps c'est un sport difficile où on est toujours sous pression. Vivre dans le stress, à penser à mes points, à mes blessures, à être tête de série... C'est vraiment ce que je détestais dans ce métier. Le tennis ce n'est pas comme le football où tu signes un contrat et seras payé pareil peu importe comment tu joueras. Au tennis, tu joues mal tu ne gagnes pas d'argent, un jour tu es Top 10 mais tu peux te retrouver 150 très rapidement aussi. A force toute cette pression ça devient trop.
Trouvez-vous que vous quittez un circuit qui a fondamentalement changé ? Je suis sur le circuit depuis dix ans et ce n'est plus du tout le même sport. Les gars ont fait d'énormes progrès, ils sont plus puissants, plus rapides. Pas plus talentueux forcément, mais quand j'ai commencé par exemple on n'était pas nombreux à retourner des services à 205km/h alors que maintenant pour eux ce n'est rien. Tout le monde sait jouer, tout le monde a des armes.
Que voudriez-vous qu'on retienne de Marat Safin, le joueur ? Que j'étais un bon joueur évidemment. Mais aussi que je me suis toujours bien comporté envers mes adversairs sur le court et avec tous les joueurs en général. Je n'ai jamais eu de vrais ennuis avec qui que ce soit sauf peut-être deux fois et ce n'est pas beaucoup en douze ans ! Oui je me suis souvent querellé avec les arbitres mais bon ensuite on s'excuse et basta. Donc oui ce serait une manière sympa de se souvenir de moi.
Si vous pouviez changer des choses dans votre carrière... La demi-finale de Roland-Garros en 2002 contre Ferrero et la finale de l'Open d'Australie contre Johansson. Défnitivement ces deux échecs là.
Terminer votre carrière en France, est-ce que c'est un sentiment spécial pour vous ? C'est là que tout a commencé et c'est là que tout se termine. Je n'aurais pas pu trouver de meilleur endroit. Le public français a toujours été fantastique avec moi et a toujours prouvé qu'il connaissait très bien le tennis. Ma carrière n'aurait pas pu se terminer dans un meilleur endroit qu'aujourd'hui à Bercy.
Nombre de messages: 235 Age: 28 Date d'inscription: 18/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 20:04
non que marat Bien sûr que j'aime le tennis, j'adore ce sport et c'est grâce à lui, tout vient de lui, RG 98 match contre Pioline et bam!! je tombe amoureuse de ce sport
Nombre de messages: 5439 Age: 19 Date d'inscription: 12/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 20:07
Dasha a écrit:
non que marat Bien sûr que j'aime le tennis, j'adore ce sport et c'est grâce à lui, tout vient de lui, RG 98 match contre Pioline et bam!! je tombe amoureuse de ce sport
Nombre de messages: 235 Age: 28 Date d'inscription: 18/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 20:08
Il a raison pour ses deux regrets, la demie contre ferrero il la joue même pas et la finale contre johanson no comment... Il n'a pas eu le palmarès qu'il aurait dû avec son talent mais bon...il a marqué son temps ça c'est sûr
Nombre de messages: 235 Age: 28 Date d'inscription: 18/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 20:09
$lenox$ a écrit:
Dasha a écrit:
non que marat Bien sûr que j'aime le tennis, j'adore ce sport et c'est grâce à lui, tout vient de lui, RG 98 match contre Pioline et bam!! je tombe amoureuse de ce sport
alor pkoi tu quitte un forum tennis
Ben j'y reviendrais peut-être plus tard mais là tout de suite j'ai pas de raison d'y rester
Nombre de messages: 7829 Date d'inscription: 14/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 21:52
Du blog de Steve Tignor
Citation:
Marat TV: A Teenager in Paris
Posted 10/23/2009 @ 3 :40 PM
Have you heard that Marat Safin is retiring? His long and mostly painful farewell tour made its way through his home country of Russia this week, where he lost to Evgeny Korolev in the Kremlin Cup. Safin likely has no regrets about packing his bags this year—50 percent of his tournaments have ended in first-round losses in 2009—but by the U.S. Open he was beginning to regret he’d ever mentioned it out loud. “It’s too many questions about what I’m going to do, why I’m retiring and this and that,” he said with a tired but tolerant shrug at Flushing Meadows. If he wasn’t exactly enjoying himself, by August Safin had learned to smile at those questions. At least he looked a little happier than he had in the spring, when he performed the Herculean feat of breaking his racquet in half at the handle during an excruciating defeat to Nicolas Lapentti in Monte Carlo.
Not that it mattered. Whatever Marat’s mood, fans came out to get one last look, and hopefully one last racquet smash, as he passed through their part of the world. I’ll miss watching and listening to him play as well, especially his rifle-shot serve and backhand, but I’ll also miss the unique and heady atmosphere that would inevitably develop at his matches. There was always a giggling anticipation in the air—giddy girls will do that—and it would peak whenever he missed a couple of shots and began to look to the heavens for an answer. Here we go, you could hear the crowd thinking. “This is what they paid for, this is what they want,” Safin might have said to himself, Connors-style, if he’d been more of a showman.
But he wasn’t. Safin had all-world talent, but he was too much of a normal guy, even too much of a gentleman in a perverse way, to exploit all of it. The attention seemed to suffocate him, and he had a love-hate relationship with the sport, which his mom drilled into him when he was a kid. Safin seemed to play less from the joy of competition or performance, and more as an obligation to his athletic gifts.
I can see Safin becoming the Ilie Nastase of this era, the skilled head case whom fans will look back on with fondness and say, “I remember the days when Safin would be out there bashing his racquet. That’s when tennis was great…” Starting today, I’ll get the nostalgia going early with a series of You Tube clips of the man at his best and worst—sometimes they occurred in the very same point. I’ll begin with a look at a match I watched at the French Open in 1998, Safin’s classic five-set quarterfinal with Cedric Pioline.
—I wrote at length about watching this match in a post two years ago (wow, time does fly). It was the first time I’d been to Paris and Roland Garros, and the first time I’d seen Safin play. I was there on a trip with my family. We would eventually visit my mom’s relatives in Germany, but along the way we spent three days in Paris and two at the tournament. We were blown away by the drive through the center of the city, executed in the traditional whirling, zig-zag fashion of a Parisian cabbie. I spent my days looking up in awe at the house where James Joyce wrote, the apartment where Oscar Wilde died, and the house where Gertrude Stein talked (I liked writing); admiring the Marais while trying not to get leveled by a careening Mini; and finding the wall behind the late Serge Gainsbourg’s house, where love notes to him are scrawled—call it the hipster version of Jim Morrison’s grave. We had a great time, and we saw some great matches.
—The videos of this day are broken into six parts. None are perfect encapsulations, the way the You Tube highlight reels are, but each gives you an idea of what was going on. I chose this one in part because the sun was out during this part of the match. I remember it coming in and out that day, and it was chilly enough that its rays made you feel like a new and better afternoon had broken out. Seeing a speck of that sunlight again here brings back the feeling of that day, the ambiance in the stadium, even the particular temperature and warmth and smell of the air.
—I also chose this clip because the first thing you see is a thin, clean-cut, 18-year-old Safin jumping to hit a backhand. If he didn’t invent this shot, he was one of the first I saw use it. But it was his normal, court-bound backhand that was the revelation, as well as the revolution. It allowed him to fend off opponents' inside-out forehands, which Ivan Lendl and Jim Courier had used to dominate through the early part of the 90s. This would help make the men’s game the all-around, four-cornered slugfest it is today. Watching this match live, particularly the pace Safin was generating, you thought the future of tennis was right in front of you. Seeing it 11 years later, it doesn’t appear that these guys are belting the ball with abnormal power, but that’s the way it seemed that day. Safin, who had beaten Andre Agassi and defending champion Gustavo Kuerten at this event, and who came out firing here, looked like he might knock Pioline through the tarp at the back of the court. But the wily old Frenchman adjusted.
—Speaking of Pioline, look at his old-school, long-follow-through, Heninesque, one-handed backhand, which is shown in slow motion just a few minutes after Safin’s new-school jumping two-hander. He was a wonderful player to watch, a mix of the athletic and the balletic. Plus, he usually appeared to be exhausted; or, as the announcer says here, très fatigué. Guess it’s tough to smoke and play tennis. The Parisian crowd, of course, let him know their displeasure through the years, but on this day he had them. I can still hear the chant: “Ced-reek!”—clap-clap-clap—“Ced-reek!” I’d never heard a tennis audience sound so united.
—For a fan who had only attended tournaments in the U.S., the center court at Roland Garros constituted a sort of alternative tennis universe. Clay instead of asphalt; red courts instead of blue or green; an entire stadium unified in its approval and disapproval, and ready to show it at any moment; loopy strokes and long hair; rallies that extended the playing area far beyond the lines. When you’re at Roland Garros, you can’t believe the court you play on at home can possibly be the same length and width as the one you’re looking at below you. It’s like a ruin—the Tennis Court of the Clay Gods.
6a00d83451599e69e200e54f2845df8834-800wi —The alternate universe extends to the sports stars in the crowd. At one point, everything stopped as two people walked into the French Federation box at the back of the court. The crowd began to stand and clap, and even the players paused and looked. Anna Kournikova had walked in with a strange-looking, gap-toothed guy in a white hat. My parents and I looked at each other and shrugged. It turned out to be Ronaldo, the Brazilian Ronaldo, in Paris for the 1998 World Cup. (Look how young he and Anna are there!) Seeing the reaction of the audience to him, I felt like I was eavesdropping on the conversation of a very large family I didn’t know.
—Safin lost that match to Pioline 6-4 in the fifth, a harbinger of many heartbreaks to come. But I was impressed, of all things, by his maturity. In his own way, he drew the audience toward him, another harbinger of things to come. Late in the afternoon, Safin slammed his racquet to the clay. The crowd came down on him with a frenzy of boos, frightening in its uniformity and intensity. Safin picked up his racquet and immediately put his hands in the air to apologize. The crowd cheered; he’d listened to their scolding and admitted he was wrong. But as he was doing it, there was a rakish half-smile on his face.
We’ll miss that, too.
***
Next episode: Back in Paris six years later, Marat drops trou in the Bullring. And I’m there again.
Nombre de messages: 7829 Date d'inscription: 14/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 21:53
Citation:
Marat TV: Taking New York
Posted 11/06/2009 @ 2 :17 PM
It's highly unlikely that anyone will ever refer to the past 12 years of men's tennis as the “Marat Safin era.” As much as he did over that time, and the man did a lot, it was his contemporary, Roger Federer, who achieved an epoch-defining stature. Instead Safin became the world’s most talented and temperamental sideshow, a show that will be airing its final episode next week at the Paris Masters.
Nine years ago, when the last ball of the 2000 U.S. Open had been hit, a “Safin era” seemed like a very real possibility. Just 20 years old, the Russian had dismantled the best player of the 1990s, Pete Sampras, in three quick sets in front of Sampras' home-country fans. Beyond that, Safin appeared to be an evolutionary leap for the sport. He was 6-foot-4 and blessed with fluid, impeccable timing on every stroke. His two-handed backhand was as much of a weapon as his forehand, and his return was as potent as his serve. He had all the makings of a new model for the men’s game.
The Safin era was destined to be a very short one. It lasted for two months, ending, for all intents and purposes, at the final tournament of that season, the Masters Cup in Lisbon. That’s where Gustavo Kuerten put on the performance of his life, beating Sampras and Andre Agassi on an indoor hard court and catching Safin, who lost in the semifinals, at the wire for the year-end No. 1 ranking. I remember being surprised by how devastated Safin was after this relative failure. You got the sense that it confirmed something that he suspected about himself, that he wasn’t a winner after all. Either Safin was right, or it was the first step in a career-long self-fulfilling prophecy.
Anyway, let’s take a look at the high point of Safin’s brief reign, the long, nerve-wracking final game against Sampras at Flushing Meadows.
—Right off we hear John McEnroe make a telling comment. Sampras is serving at 2-5 in the third, one game from losing the match. Safin has apparently hit a strong return, which McEnroe describes as “routine.” He goes on to say that Sampras’ kick serve bounces right into the “zone” of the 6-foot-4 Safin. McEnroe had identified two elements in the sport that would gain importance in the next decade: height, and the return of serve.
—The first observation we must make is how young Safin looks, of course. He would age pretty dramatically over the coming years. He lumbered around the court in between points even then, but he appears to be calm as he gets set to serve out his first major title. Even after opening the game with a double fault, he stays cool under the pressure of Sampras’ approaches, rifling two passing shot winners on the next two points.
—Sampras at 29 is sweaty and haggard. Ten years earlier, he had served notice of his own generation’s ascent by ending Ivan Lendl’s run of eight straight final-round appearances at the Open on his way to winning his first major. Seeing Sampras take one last stab at Safin—up until this game, he hadn’t had a break point—I have the same reaction I’ve had watching other old Sampras clips. Where I used to think of him as dull and a little smug, his demeanor now seems almost heroically controlled to me now. His method of competing is the opposite of someone like Rafael Nadal’s. Sampras was about not getting fired up; for him, it was about the long-term rather than the moment, about not getting especially high or low after any one point. You can see the conscious effort he makes to settle himself before each return.
—Each of Safin’s ground strokes would get a little longer and more elaborate over the years. I wonder if this hurt him. Here he’s prepared for anything Sampras throws at him.
—What a torturous game this must have been for Safin. He started with a double, missed every first serve until it was break point, and hit the tape with what must have seemed like a gimme backhand pass at deuce, allowing Sampras a second break point. But he held up like the future champion he wouldn't turn out to be. He saved both break points bravely, by moving to the net for a swinging volley and a spectacular stretch-back overhead. Then he swung the momentum permanently back in his direction by keeping his nerves at bay and outlasting Sampras through a long baseline rally. No wonder Safin got down on his knees and kissed the court afterward.
—Two quotes from Safin about this match remain two of his best, and show both sides of the man.
Afterward, he was asked if he was going to get drunk that night.
Safin: “Guys, do you want me to say ‘yes’ to put in the press? Between us, I hope so.”
Seven years later, after losing early at the Open, a reporter said, “When you won here in 2000, Sampras said you were able to be No. 1 in the world for as long a time as you wanted to.”
Safin: “See, even the geniuses make the mistakes. He was wrong.”
Was Sampras as wrong as Safin thought? The Russian was No. 1 for only a brief period. That wasn’t because he didn’t want to be there longer; it was because, at some point, perhaps as soon as Lisbon, he stopped believing he belonged there.
Whatever the reason, judging by the way Safin held off Sampras at the Open, he still believed he could be a great champion at this point. In that sense, the 2000 final is a glimpse of a potential alternate tennis history, one in which Safin kept his head and controlled his frustration at the biggest moments. As it was, it would happen only once more, in Australia in 2005. The rest of the time, we got the Safin show. The clip above gives us an idea of what the Safin era might have looked like.
***
We’ll see how the show ends in a few days. Have a good weekend
Nombre de messages: 7829 Date d'inscription: 14/06/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Mer 11 Nov - 21:54
Citation:
Marat TV: Knocking Out the Federer
Posted 11/11/2009 @ 3 :30 PM
The long, ragged farewell was brought to a suitable end today. Marat Safin, 6-foot-4 champion of the past, lost his last match to a 6-foot-5 champion of the future, Juan Martin del Potro. You might say a torch was passed—both guys beat all-time champions at the U.S. Open as 20-year-olds to win their first majors—except that I’m not sure del Potro is looking to pick this particular torch up and run with it.
But Safin’s loss was appropriate, and so was the manner in which it transpired. As usual, he showed flashes of flowing brilliance, and as usual, he couldn’t summon them at the very end of a tight match. For today, let’s remember one of the exceptions to that Safin rule, the best match he ever played, and one where he summoned his flowing brilliance all to the way into the 15th round.
If any match is worthy of a music-video treatment, if was Safin’s 9-7-in-the-fifth-set win over Roger Federer, the man he called “the Federer,” in the semifinals of the 2005 Australian Open. That’s the treatment it gets here, to the tune of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly.” And once you get used to it, it does add a certain momentum to these highlights. My favorite line from the song—“I don’t need to be forgiven”—might even sum up Safin’s career as he walks away.
—Unlike most YouTube highlight reels, this one doesn’t show entire points. It’s cut all the way down to the memorable strokes. It gives you an idea of what these guys were doing best that day, and how many shots still stick in the collective tennis memory from this match.
—On Federer’s side, there’s a drop shot that’s threaded so finely it can only be described as vicious. There’s a shot-hop backhand pass that could be sent off in a time capsule as an example of his smoothness under pressure. There’s a skyhook overhead, and an inside-out backhand return winner that seems to shock Safin. And there’s the ill-advised tweener he tried at match point in the fourth set. He didn’t need to hit it, and the choice cost him.
—On Safin’s side, there’s a half-volley drop shot winner that shows off McEnroe-like touch. There are numerous thudding backhands up the line, culminating in the best of the evening, the one that brought Federer to his knees on the final point. And then there’s the get Safin made and the lob he hit over Federer to save that match point in the fourth set. Did we know he could run that fast?
—Safin’s confidence and determination grow as these highlights accumulate. He has said that winning this tournament was very important to him because he needed to prove to himself that he could take home a second major. He was never a guy who could keep that level of belief up for long, but perhaps doing it this time was enough for him. He’ll always know that he really was that good.
—The match reminds me of the del Potro-Federer Open final in many ways. You have a taller, heavier hitter trying to batter through the skinny, springy Federer and his wildly curving shots. In both of those matches, as well as in the 2008 Wimbledon final, Federer almost snuck through a match where his opponent was playing lights-out, only to lose in the end.
—Fittingly, this one ends on a high note. You can see some exhaustion from both guys in the fifth set, but after nailing all those backhands down the line, Safin puts the last one even closer to the corner. That’s how accurate he was with it that day. Federer finally succumbed, but he forced Safin to throw the final punch and literally knock him to the ground.
—I may miss Safin's handshakes the most. Win or lose, he was always respectful of his opponent; he always realized it was just a game—in some ways, he was too gentlemanly. At first I was surprised by his harsh reactions this week to the Agassi revelations. But then he was always a guy who believed in the solidarity of the players, that it shouldn't be every man for himself. It makes sense that he would see Agassi as betraying that.
Notice also his muted celebration here. It was exactly like his muted celebrations after both of his Slam wins. He doesn’t want to revel in his opponent’s defeat, and he knows that winning a tennis match is not the most important thing in this world. That attitude might have hurt him as a player, but it made him a favorite of everyone who played with him and those of us who watched him. He was one of the guys. And in his “failures”—to master his nerves, to discipline himself, to live up to his potential—Safin was one of us.
***
There's more from me on Marat over at ESPN.com. Paris talk tomorrow.
Nombre de messages: 7528 Date d'inscription: 03/09/2008
Sujet: Re: Marat Safin Jeu 12 Nov - 13:19
Tweener a écrit:
Fed aurait dû finir ce match en 4 sets
La preuve que non. En tout cas, c'était un vrai moment d'anthologie. Safin à son top c'était quelquechose. Il va trop manquer. En plus, il avait un côté "meilleur pote idéal" qui va me manquer sur le court.
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non que marat 
Bien sûr que j'aime le tennis, j'adore ce sport et c'est grâce à lui, tout vient de lui, RG 98 match contre Pioline et bam!! je tombe amoureuse de ce sport 
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