In this episode, The CouchExpert’s Goutham Chakravarthi, Chandrasekhar Jayaramakrishnan and Niranjan K discuss KP’s retirement and compare it with the news space Rakhi Sawant gets and debate if he is a cricket mercenary. Also in discussions is Chanderpaul and his selfishness. They also wonder if Narine’s novelty will have worn off by the end of his first Test.
Introduction Music: Composer and singer – Rakesh Salian
Guests: Chandrasekhar Jayaramakrishnan, Niranjan K
Host: Goutham Chakravarthi
It is but natural that people pick the best players from their generations as the sport’s best ever no matter what sport. For many octogenarians, Sydney Barnes was the greatest bowler to play the game of cricket as would many middle-aged men swear by Malcom Marshall. The spread is similar in all sport. Here, I take a look at one of tennis’s all time greats, Jack Kramer, who, as a player and as an administrator.
Early Years
Kramer: Tennis's single most significant figure
Born to a railroad man in Las Vegas in 1921, Big Jake would go on to be a part of the golden generation of American tennis players who dominated world tennis: King, Marble, Riggs, Schroeder, Wills, Budge, Vines.
Young Kramer played an aggressive game with a huge serve, which he generally followed-up with a winning volley much like the way Pete Sampras played.
His aggressive serve-and-volley game earned him a doubles spot in the U.S. Davis Cup team in 1939. Almost immediately after that Kramer went away to serve as a Coast Guard officer during the Second World War. He lost some of his best years serving as the Coast Guard officer at the pacific.
After returning from the war he had a great run at Wimbledon in 1946 only to lose in the semifinals as he suffering from blisters in his feet. He went on to win the U.S. Nationals, forerunner of today’s U.S. Open, the same year.
He followed it-up with a victory at Wimbledon in 1947, where he swept past the challenge of Tom Brown 6-1, 6-3, 6-2 in a mere 45 minutes.
He went on to defend his U.S. Nationals title in a classic five-setter; coming from two sets down to beat Frankie Parker.
That finals holds significance, as it was just before the final that Kramer decided he would turn professional.
“It was simple,” he said. “I needed the money.”
Also, those were the times of “shamateurism,” when players remained amateurs in order to compete in major tournaments, but took money under the table.
It was a significant step for tennis and as Bud Collins, Hall of Fame tennis journalist observes of Kramer, “From a competitor to an administrator to a broadcaster, Jack Kramer was the most important figure in the history of the game.”
Between 1946 and 1953 he was considered to be the no.1 player in the world. At the peak of his powers as a player, he was asked to endorse a racquet from Wilson Sporting Goods. They named it Wilson Kramer.
At His Peak
Kramer chucked his beloved Don Budge racquet for Wilson’s new one, but sent it back after going down to Bobby Riggs. He asked Wilson to repaint it, and Wilson obliged, as they wanted to have a racquet named after Kramer.
Since 1947 Wilson has manufactured more than 30 million Jack Kramer Autographed Racquets, giving it the distinction of being the most popular racquet in the history of the game.
Kramer was to get two-and-a-half percent of the racquet sales. Wilson eventually had to renegotiate the deal as the racquet sold by the millions.
“We just did a flat rate,” Kramer said. “I understood. I was making more money than the president of Wilson Sporting Goods.”
He started playing on the pro-tour playing in cities across the world. He had a great time against his rivals Bobby Riggs, Frank Sedgman and Pancho Gonzales. With little left for him to achieve, and suffering from an arthritic back, he retired in 1954.
From Player to Advocate
He was, by then, running the pro-tour that he had dominated so much. He took on the tennis establishments of Australia, England and other nations and sought identity for professional tennis.
In those days, there were severe restrictions on the money that could be taken out of Australia, so Kramer took some of his earnings in racehorses.
As “The Kramer circus” grew in stature over the years the pressure began to tell on the tennis federations, which finally led to the establishment of “Open tennis” in 1968.
From Advocate to Executive
In 1972 he became the first executive director of the players union, Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP).
Kramer also served as an announcer at Wimbledon for the BBC. BBC banned him in 1973 following a player boycott headed by Kramer. Niki Pilic, the Yugoslavian, refused to play in the Davis Cup and a suspension by the International Tennis Federation extended through Wimbledon.
When Wimbledon honored Pilic’s suspension, Kramer led a player boycott that left Wimbledon bereft of top players. Kramer turned villain as a result. But, as it turned out, it led to players gaining more control of tennis.
Kramer was a shrewd businessman. He once hired “Gorgeous Gussy” Moran to serve as a part of his warm-up matches for one of his tours. As you’d expect he hired her more for her beauty than for her game.
His belief that women didn’t sell as well as the men eventually cost him in 1970, when Billie Jean-King led a walk-out after a tournament run by Kramer. That event, the Pacific Southwest Tennis Tournament, offered only 15 percent of the available prize money ($50,000) to the ladies.
The walk-out led directly to Virginia Slims Tour and then to the creation of Women’s Tennis Association (WTA).
Final Days
The Pacific Southwest Tennis Tournament became the Jack Kramer Open in 1979, and was known by that name until 1983. His son Bob Kramer now runs the event at the UCLA Tennis Center.
This year Jack Kramer saw his last tennis match from the sidelines of that UCLA Tennis Center, as he took in an exhibition match between Pete Sampras and Marat Safin.
“Dad loved the way Pete played,” Bob Kramer said, “because it was a lot like he played.”
“He was a class act and always willing to help. I was happy to see him and say hi at the L.A. Tennis Open. This is truly a great loss for tennis,” said Sampras the day after Kramer passed away.
Ramanathan Krishnan, the ace Indian player who was offered a three-year contract for $150,000 in 1959 says, “He was a great player, a critic, commentator, and above all, a wonderful human being who cared for fellow players. Open Tennis, as we see today, is the legacy of the great Jack.”
“We all needed money and he helped a lot of players get some,” says Rod Laver who came into the game when Kramer was a monumental figure in tennis.
Jack Kramer knew everyone in the game of tennis for over half a century. He was a great tennis player and an astute businessman, but it is for his contribution in the elimination of the line between professionals and amateurs that he will be best remembered.
A version of this article first appeared on Bleacher Report
With this being the Olympics year, and with Usain Bolt being its main attraction of the Olympics’ blue-ribbon event – men’s 100m – here is a re-look at the race that stunned the world, when he ran the 100m in an astonishing time of 9.58 seconds.
August 19, 2009
Every batsman around the world must be thanking his heavens that Usain Bolt gave up fast bowling for sprinting. At 6’5” and capable of doing the 100 meter dash swifter than I can in my car, if his bowling speeds was anywhere near his sprinting deeds he’d have been a handful!
Cricket’s loss is athletics’ gain. On Sunday in Berlin he decimated his Olympics time of 9.69 seconds by 0.11 seconds to stun the sports world. Sprint records are meant to be broken incrementally like in long jump, pole vault or high jump.
Here, within a span of 9 and half seconds, he went a generation ahead of everyone else like Jesse Owens did with his long jump leap at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. If anything, it is befitting that both should have happened at Berlin where Hitler wanted to demonstrate the superiority of Aryan race over ethnic African race.
Sample this: since Jim Hines became the first man to go under 10 seconds in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics to set the then world record, it has been broken 12 times since.
Bolt: Simply the best
The world record time has never been bettered by more than 0.05 seconds – when Maurice Green clocked 9.79 seconds in Athens (1999) he broke Donovon Bailey’s 1996 Atlanta gold medal winning performance of 9.84 seconds by 0.05 seconds.
Ben Johnson did thrash Calvin Smith’s world record of 9.93 seconds by 0.10 seconds in Rome in 1987 only for his time of 9.83 seconds to be disallowed along with all his other achievements between 1981 and 1988 after testing positive right after winning the Seoul Olympics gold with another world record time of 9.79 seconds.
That it took another 12 years for anyone to get to that mark of 9.79 seconds shows how difficult it is to nick a good 1/10th of a second off the world record. Bolt has now smashed his last world record of 9.69 seconds from Beijing Olympics by 0.11 seconds. It has never happened before that a sprint record is bettered by so much, at least since electronic timing came into the sport in 1977.
He is the only person to have breached the 9.7 and 9.6 seconds’ barrier. Now he says he can go under 9.5 seconds! The next fastest time ever is 9.71 seconds – Tyson Gay (0.13 seconds behind). Asafa Powell’s best is 9.72 seconds.
The 12 fastest men after Bolt are separated by a mere 0.15 seconds between them. It simply shows how much he is dominating his sport and how far ahead he is from anyone else.
It is not like Sergei Bubka and Yelena Isinbayeva bettering their pole vault world records by a centimeter or two each time, it is like bettering it by 15 centimeters at one go (Bubka took more than 10 years to better his world record by 20 cms and Isinbayeva has taken 4 years to increase her record to 5.05m after breaking the 5m barrier in London in July, 2005)!
Bolt is sprinting his way to becoming the greatest athlete of them all. 9.58 seconds! I still can’t believe it!
This article appeared on Bleacher Report on August 19, 2009.
Laurent Riley
Many people that play casino games feel that poker is a game of chance like blackjack, roulette, and craps. In reality, poker is a mind game that requires a superior strategy in order to be successful in the long-term. While short-term luck can play a factor in poker, those that develop a long-term strategy will be successful over time. Let’s look at the three pieces that comprise great poker strategy.
Knowledge
The first piece of developing a successful strategy at the game requires knowledge. That knowledge starts when a player learns what the best starting hands are and how to use their position at the poker table to their advantage. Next, that knowledge continues as a player learns the concept of pot odds and hand odds. This allows them to know what percentage of the time a hand will hit given a set of circumstance. It will also help them determine whether to draw at a hand, or abandon it in lieu of a better spot.
Cricketer Warne, known for his gambling instincts on the field, is now a keen Poker player
Psychology
The next piece of a successful strategy is psychology. Poker is not about having the best cards. Sometimes, it is convincing the other player that you have the best cards or taking advantage of their fear of losing to make them fold. This starts by a player learning how to evaluate his opponents and spotting their weaknesses. Part of this is based on what the player shows down, but sometimes it can involve subtle hints called tells. Tells are more than just a nervous tick. Tells can also involve how a player bets when they have a hand or even the way they bet when they don’t. It also can involve things as subtle as how willing a player looks to fold his hand.
Confidence
The third, and many times the most important piece of developing a strategy is confidence. Confidence in knowing what type of play to make and having the confidence to pull off a play. When a player is confident in his ability, it is reflective in his play and can even be intimidating to other players. Inferior players will many times stay out of the way of a confident player unless they have strong hands. They perceive that the player has exceptional skill and refuse to risk their bankroll to them.
As you can see from above, developing a superior strategy in poker is not just about playing the best cards. Unlike other games like video poker, the game also requires being able to evaluate and even manipulate the other players to achieve the results. More times than not, the game is about playing the player more than the cards. This makes poker less of a game of chance and more of a mind sport than any other casino or gambling game.
The CouchExpert 