Although Jim Courier is playing his first French Open as a favourite, the pressure is only felt in the first set when the Swede pushes the American to a tie-break. A lost set to retain his crownĪ Grand Slam first round is never an easy task, even when the opponent - in this case Nicklas Kroon - has just come out of the qualifiers. So it was a confident man, unbeaten in 16 consecutive matches, who came to France to defend his title. You could tell he was there." The Swiss can rest assured that he was not the only one to suffer from Courier, who lost only two sets at the Australian Open before going on to retain his title on the clay court in Rome. In Australia, I remember in the warm-up, when I was at the net, he was hitting me hard. He wasn't unplayable that year because I beat him in the Davis Cup and the Olympic Games, but in Australia he was much stronger than me, that's for sure. Atomised in the round of 16 in Australia, Marc Rosset remembers: " I got my ass kicked. The fortnight in Melbourne was only a foretaste: 1992 was to be the year of the great Jim. It was logical: "The Rock" was the defending champion and had just snatched the world number one spot from Stefan Edberg, whom he had dominated a few weeks earlier in the final of the Australian Open. When Jim Courier arrived in Paris to play his opening match in the spring of 1992, he quickly realised that his popularity had risen with a Parisian public that had seemed to discover him a year earlier. The last one? No: the beginning of a two-year domination of world tennis, culminating with a second Porte d'Auteuil title in 1992, won after a bulldozer-like tournament (only one set lost and Agassi devoured in the final). Like Jim Courier, the Las Vegas Kid trained at the Nick Bollettieri Tennis Academy and got his revenge in the last 16 in 1990 before a great victory in the 1991 final, when Courier surprisingly won in his first Grand Slam. Then, it got stronger in 1989, the year of his first victory over a top 10 (Andre Agassi, beaten in the third round). This love affair with the Parisian ochre began in 1987, when he won the junior French Open in doubles with Jonathan Stark, with whom Courier also won the Davis Cup eight years later. But, over the course of his career, the American has managed to forge a special relationship with the French clay court and not just because he speaks French. Born and trained in Florida, Jim Courier, armed with his cap and his super-powerful right arm, had, at the beginning, no reason to depart from this rule. The figures prove it. Since the beginning of the Open era, United States has only won four men's titles at the French Open (Michael Chang in 1989, Jim Courier in 19, Andre Agassi in 1999) compared to fourteen at the Australian Open, fifteen at Wimbledon and nineteen at the US Open. It seems that Americans don't like clay courts.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |