PLAY CLAY

“Sinner takes him out seven six six three. He has been completely dominant since Doha, inning wells, Miami, Monte Carlo, three straight 1,000 titles. Backhand to backhand, no one can go can stay can hang with him. Not even Carlos right now. And Carlos kind of admitted that.”

“Jack is gonna be stepping away. Of course, he's our guy. We're gonna try to bring him on from time to time, but his schedule, has just proven to be too difficult, to, to show up each and every time. And we discussed it, and that's that. But, you know, we love Jack.”

“Because of that wind, it that wind affected Carlos's creativity more than it affected Sinner's, consistency. That was from Jim Courier. I think that's, like, summed it up really well. Carlos, especially in the second set, just seemed like he was couldn't find the momentum or, like, that that one miracle shot.”

“I thought it was cool that maybe before the tournament, they're interviewing Carlos, and he acknowledged that he's going to lose the Narayan ranking at some point. Whether that was Monte Carlo at some point along the clay season, he knows, basically, he has too many points to defend. Sinner doesn't have any.”

“I saw his interview on ESPN. Thought it was fantastic. Golf, tennis, so much crossover. ESPN did a great job, getting Rafa on there. Must have been weird for him to be at the masters while Monte Carlo was going on. He won that tournament, what, 10 times in a row?”

“And then basically midway through Indian Wells, the app stopped working and I have not heard from them. So this is where my information on what's going on is very limited. I don't know what happened, but I think it's safe to assume Bulkie is not going to be a thing. I hope everyone's okay over there. More likely than not, they probably just axed the project and they haven't been communicative with me.”

“The funny thing is this week, coincidentally, the ATP has launched its own fantasy tennis game. I was not a genius for the last three years thinking that this is something that should get done. And I've even reached out to other podcasts and I've been like, hey, can we do this together? Well, the ATP, they have made a move here. So for now, let's just do that. I have signed up. I have made a league. It's called Monday Match Analysis.”

“It is of the clay tournaments. It generally reads as the slowest. It's windy and it is slow. The ball is going to lose a ton of energy on the court surface. And the real sort of natural clay quarters, especially because there's less time for the less natural players to even make that adjustment and to get comfortable again on the dirt, the real natural clay quarters are usually going to do pretty well at this tournament.”

“I also want to say before we go quarter by quarter, this is a pretty significantly weakened field based on just withdrawal. So I'm going to go down the list right now. It's Djokovic, Fritz, Draper, Davidovic, Vakina, Feis, Munnar, Korda. And then a few Americans didn't sign up. Shelton, Tommy, Paul, a couple others. So, there are plenty of players who you would normally expect to see in a Masters 1000 tournament that we will not be seeing.”

“I want to pick from the section with Tiafoe and Bublik because as far as which unseated player is most likely to make a deep run, it's going to probably be out of that section. And then you have a very close on-paper matchup against Martan Fucovic, who actually beat Tabilo in Bucharest in 2024. But I just feel like Fucovic will have a lot of trouble hunting forehands against Tabilo's lefty precision. And I like the way Tabilo is playing overall. And to me, he's just easily the most dangerous unseated player in that particular section.”

“If you take green clay and rub it between your fingers, it'll probably feel a little bit more like salt, like where it's kind of hard and firm. If you go to like Roland Garros, it's almost like powder, like it's like baking powder. Like they all are a little bit different. I like the thick clay because I wasn't a native mover. I feel like I could commit a little bit more. Whereas like, you know, the European clay can really like expose movement because you have to be so precise and light and like flow.”

“Clay is rare. It's not the default service in the States. Like warmer climates, there's more clay, right? You go to Florida and there's way more clay. But I always heard that, I was like, we have to do something to make our players better on clay all the time. You know, we need to play year round on clay. I'm like, I don't know, there's three Grand Slams on hardened grass. Like, are we going to commit time and resources to, like, addressing the worst of it and still have to go through RAFA? That doesn't seem smart.”

“I mean, that serve translates anywhere. Potato patch, like when you can serve 140 and then kick it over someone's head both ways. That tends to work. His ball flight on his forehand naturally has a lot of spin on it. You know, I think as the surfaces have become kind of more mono-surface, I think the entire thing is like, can Ben beat me today with his backhand? Which is tough because there's only so many people that can neutralize the serve.”

“If you have a lingering knee issue, you take the time during the parts of the year where you're probably going to be the least successful. Like, is it smart to play through it, Indian Wells and Miami? Yeah, probably your likelihood of playing through that there and getting a result, it didn't work out for him because there's no script in tennis. But yeah, I mean, if I had something bothering me, I was more likely to try to heal it during the part of the season that was the biggest struggle for me.”

“I love answering questions about the French Open. We haven't played a tournament on clay yet. It's my favorite. Zverev. I mean, he's been in the final. He's won master series on it. Like you go back and you recreate his career and you take out those names you just said, and he's looking at five or six slams.”