Tommy Haas and the Golden Era

First topic message reminder :

I'm sorry, but I just can't help myself!

Here he is, all bust up and most of the way at 35 to drawing a pension, #13 in the World and despatching clay exponent Tommy Robredo is straight sets.

Can you imagine how good this guy must have been in his prime?

Very seriously though, what a super player he is and has been. We could do with a few more like him.

Socal, you sound in denial again. Some changes happened before 2003, some after...you cannot say "most of the changes happened by 2003", its simply not true and you do not know the changes made since.

Come on Lydian you don't know the actual composition of the courts and relative speed over the last few years either. The biggest changes to technology happened a decade ago. That is when you started to see the incredible routine cross court passes from meters behind the baseline and pulled wide. Now I won't say that there have been no minor refinements. For example now the luxilons come serated and their surface texture is no longer smooth to give you more bite on the ball. The racquets to have improved but not so much in comparison to what we saw from lets say the early 80s to the beginning of the nighties when we went from wood to graphite and composite racquets. Some of the players still play with ten and twelve year old frames that have maybe been updated ever so slightly. I can hit just as well with my 10 year old stick as I can with my newest racquet. But the fundamental changes were in place by early 2000s give or take a little. This inexorable march to slower courts and conditions I simply do not see it, if that was the case by now they would be playing on beach sand.

@MfC... here is a perfectly good English language version of the speed comparison video in Josh Goodall's clear voice - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=owzTwjC5kMk

Goodall indicates what the speeds are when it reaches the opponent, while I use his speed numbers to be the speed of the ball when it makes contact with the surface in the service box. I also do not factor in the coefficient of restitution.

Using a very simplistic model and leaving aside the environmental conditions, 52-43=9mph. 9/126 = 7.1%.

To travel the minimum 18ft, the time differential would be 18 / 13.2 = 1.37 seconds.

@SoCal... Rotterdam is an example of the court being slowed between 2009 and 2011, as is Paris. The printed versions of the ATP draws have surface names, that can be used to determine relative speeds approximately.

If Haas, a fast court player circa 2002 can adapt to conditions now, others are also quite capable of it, like Youzhny, no matter what his training was. Murray trained in Spain on clay, but lost to Berdych on it today.