BoardWatch: Did Safin Have Knee Surgery of Not?

Posted on August 5, 2005

By Sean Randall, Special to Tennis-X.com

Tennis BoardWatch tracks the hot topics of the week on the internet tennis message boards.

Russian tennis czar Shamil Tarpischev indicated earlier this week that Marat Safin's knee surgery did not go well, and that he may miss all the way through the US Open. Marat's agent, on the other hand, said he never had a surgical proceedure.

"Did he have the surgery or didn't he?" posed miriam on the Tennis-X Discussion Board with the question of the week. "The russian tennis federation says that the knee surgery didn't go too well...meanwhile, safin's agent insists he didn't have a surgery in the first place. They need to get together and decide what happened."

Rosie at MensTennisForums summed up the mood of fans familiar with Russian tennis: "Tarpischev can be full of **** at times -- so perhaps don't get too despondant until we hear something from Marat himself."

Hello? Can we get anything out of Marat besides photos of his girlfriend in his lap receiving a "massage"?

"After practising in Bologna it was decided that he would not be ready for Montreal," said Paloma on the Safinator.com message board. "Marat will go to Valencia (Spain) this weekend and practice there and then fly to Cincinnati next Friday. It is still his intension to play Cincinnati."

If the reigning Australian Open champ finds his knee still weak and pulls from Cincy, that could be all for the US Open as the Russian isn't under pressure to defend points after an opening-round loss last year in New York.

Tim Henman's slide out of the Top 20 continued this week when the aging Brit was ousted in his opener at the ATP event in Washington.

Brit fans are piling on Henman while holding their collective breath for the tour-level emergence of "the other Andy," Andrew Murray who made a splash at Wimbledon but is competing mainly on the challenger circuit these days.

MensTennisForums' skel1983 of Britain summed up the Brit mood: "I think Tim Henman should retire at the end of the season, next year i feel he will tumble down the rankings i feel between 50 and 100 his game has gone, not only that his attitude, in an interview he did after his defeat to Moodie he said HE WAS HAPPY, i mean this guy needs to look in the mirror, he went on about he has been out for a while and was happy with his returning performance. Does that sound like a guy who is 13th in the world, i would be going crazy if i had been beaton by a guy such as Moodie..."

I would be going crazy if I produced a paragraph like that, but point taken.

Roberts on rec.sport.tennis notes that Timbledon maybe ought to consider getting match tough by playing a few of the lower-rung tour events.

"Henman ought to consider playing a couple of extra events instead of just the MS events and USO. He needs matchplay. I see that in his press conference, he said that it was difficult to come back after such a long layoff. That was his choice, however. He could easily have picked himself up after Wimbledon and played Newport, Indy, LA or any of the other events."

"Our Tim," as the British love to say, has nary a quarterfinal result to defend until the US Open, where he has a huge chunk of ranking points ready to fall after his 2004 semifinal loss to Roger Federer.

Was anything you've seen at a tennis event more entertaining than last Sunday's ESPN-televised trophy presentation at L.A. where Andre Agassi, riffing in his watch-my-crazy-sense-of-humor joking mode, told tournament officials to take back the prize check envelope because he knew it was empty, then called the $1K watch from sponsor Raymond Weil an "eBay watch"?

Bwaaa ha ha! Did someone get a picture of a Raymond Weil execs face standing there?

Could anyone but Andre (who profusely apologized afterwards off-camera) get away with that?

"I'm all for spontaneity -- whether it makes one appear foolish or not," Deuce opined on MensTennisForums. "It beats the hell out of the standard, boring, 'polite', 'politically correct', rehearsed, artificial words usually uttered. Anyone who has a problem with this kind of stuff takes petty things much too seriously. Agassi's nearing retirement, and might just be deciding to say and do some of the things he hasn't had the 'guts' to say or do previously. Time to take both the leash and the muzzle off -- more should do the same, and not wait until they're near retirement."

For those oldsters in the house, you have to remember that this is the guy who in his teens, on tour with the long hair and the spandex, thought it would be funny to tell the assembled media in a post-match conference he was "happy as a faggot in a submarine" while he contradictorily read a Bible on tour while shouting f-bombs at chair umpires.

Added fantom:

"I think he was just trying to give an interesting and light-hearted interview, and didn't think about the sponsors at the time. I was in Houston a few years ago when he won the US Men's Claycourts and mentioned to Mattress Mac (the owner of the club) in his interview after the final that he wouldn't buy any of the furniture that was in his furniture store. The comment was basically insinuating that the furniture was sub-par. I think he was just trying to be funny then, too, but may have insulted somebody in the process..."

Agassi has made an amazing transformation into adulthood from those baudy, gaudy early days -- guess you can run from your past, or your past sense of humor, but you can't always hide. The general consensus is, 'that's good entertainment.'