And now people are declaring U.S. tennis dead again...until Roddick starts winning hard court tournaments and everyone starts saying if he can just get over the hump...Save your energy on that one by the way. Roddick, while apparently very intelligent, has no idea why he plays tennis and won't do anything interesting until he figures it out.

The other great cyclical argument in the sport, the one that brings all of the doomsayers out of their basements, is whether tennis itself has run its course, been overwhelmed by technology, lost its psychological ardor.

To lend some perspective to the argument, let me say that I have already heard it twice before. The first time was in the early 90s, during Pete Sampras' prime. The golden era of the mid-80s when Lendl, Connors, and McEnroe were mingling with Wilander, Becker, and Edberg among others had ended. Those guys had grown up playing with wood rackets, which meant they had developed classical all-courts games from an early age and then adapted to the bigger hitting surfaces the new technology afforded.

The guys playing around Sampras, my age-group, mostly had not played with wood rackets and some of them had come under the sway of the Nick Bolletieri school of tennis. Bolletieri is famous for developing Andre Agassi, but his real significance in the sport's history, aside form cultivating a skin tone as close to saddle leather as humanly possible, comes from teaching the Western forehand grip. Aaron Krickstein was his first famous protégé and the prototype of the American Tennis Academy Brat. The Western forehand allows its practitioners to hit with extreme topspin and power, but the grip is so extreme that it takes feel from the player and often detrimentally affects his/her ability to volley.

If you shake hands with a tennis racket, you have just learned the Continental grip. It is the standard way to teach tennis and the most prevalent wood racket grip. It allows you, in theory, to hit forehand, backhand, volley, and serve with the same grip. No one really uses it that way, though. They shift the hand slightly to accommodate each stroke. Imagine you have just shaken hands with the racket, presented to you with the hitting surface perpendicular to the group. Your Continental grip. If you now shift your hand around the grip clockwise, you are adopting a forehand grip. Counter-clockwise, a backhand grip. The farther you go each way, the more you close the face of the racket in its disposition to the ball, which allows you to generate more spin with either stroke.

The Western forehand grip is different. If you turn the racket so that its hitting surface is parallel to the ground, reach out and grab the handle like a hammer, and try to imagine hitting the ball with the bottom face of the racket, you are visualizing a Western forehand. If your arm hurts thinking about it, you are doing it correctly.

Before Sampras emerged as a champion people were saying that serve-volley tennis was dead. Now people are saying that again. The reason tennis fans are prone to pronouncing things, is that the game moves in cycles. Normally what happens is that one player gets so good at doing something, looks so unbeatable, that a generation of coaches begins to design youngsters capable of beating that person. Additionally, as racquet technology changes, new opportunities emerge.

I was just re-reading Levels of the Game , the best book I have ever real dealing with the psychology of tennis. It's essentially a point-by-point recount of the Arthur Ashe-Clark Graebner semifinal of the first U.S. Open Tennis Championship at Forest Hills. John McPhee , who has mastered the art of presenting fascinating subject matter with absolute written clarity while interspersing commentary that points to its larger significance, rarely writes about sport, which is one of the reasons the book is so good. He doesn't get lost in all the jock chatter. He describes what he's seeing, which is two men who are the products of two radically opposed social backgrounds, exhibiting two contrasting tennis styles as they compete for a championship of great significance.

The passage that jumped out at me during my re-read wasn't about Ashe and Graebner but about how the power game was ruining tennis back in '68.

McPhee says: "Reformers who remember the Old Game and think something should be done about this one have suggested eliminating the first serve or making the server serve form several feet behind the baseline. Possibly the best suggestion is that the serve be left intact- for the sheer spectacle of it- but that the server not play his next shot without first letting the ball bounce." (p. 21)

In describing the "mega-game" played by Ashe and Graebner in 1968, McPhee offers that the solution is to ban the serve and volley. These days people are practically willing to offer subsidies to anyone willing to try to serve and volley anywhere other than Wimbledon. Cycles.

Pete Sampras dominated tennis for the better part of a decade with a power game that relied on his massive serve and return games. Sampras made the game predictable by taking hold of points from the beginning and hitting through his opponents. A lot of people thought it was boring, but everyone admits that Pete could do a lot of things with his racquet and feet at the biggest moments in matches.

The solution to the Sampras problem-besides letting him get old-was to create players who were so fast, both with their hands and feet, that they could deal with his power by returning aggressively, chasing heroically, and capitalizing on his suspect backhand and tendency to go on error streaks. Lleyton Hewitt was the first prototype. He reached the number one spot in the world by frustrating his opponents as a new kind of chaser.

Then Federer emerged on the men's tour after struggling with his game for three years. He played like Sampras on ecstasy, without any weaknesses and with only a fraction of the streakiness. He doesn't hit quite as big as Pete did, but he moves better, hits with more variety, and creates more angles on the court. He plays with the same level of unrelenting mastery but he controls each point the way Agassi did at his best, namely aiming to strike every ball perfectly. Chasers become self-torture machines against Federer.

Nadal, meanwhile, is the Super Hewitt. Bigger. Stronger. Faster. More Powerful. Sounder of Mind and Tactic. He is a chaser whose game is so big that he mashes through players with less power, allowing him to conserve energy that Hewitt had to expend in early rounds of tournaments. He beats Federer, not just on clay by the way, by hitting a ball so heavy that it throws off Federer's timing just enough to get in his head.

Tennis is cyclical because it is a game played at the convergence of three elements: technique, psychology, and physical prowess. No other sport is so evenly placed between them. Learning to swing correctly takes years of practice and high level instruction. Being able to cover the court against a professional and at the same time react to a 130-mph serve, takes a type of athleticism that only a few people possess. Being capable of taking all the responsibility for your own success or failure onto your own shoulders, and then adapting your strategy to beat a player who seems superior to you in a game that demands a tactical memory, requires a type of mind that most athletes do not have.

McPhee says: "A person's tennis game begins with his nature and background and comes out through his motor mechanisms into shot patterns and characteristics of play." (p. 6)

David Foster Wallace, in his musing Roger Federer as Religious Experience , suggests that Federer will engender a new kind of revolution in the game. As players and coaches attempt to solve his all-court mastery, they will experiment with a greater variety of strokes. They will try to out-Federer Federer.

May be. But the fascinating thing about tennis is that all you have to do to beat someone who is unbeatable is to beat them a few times in a row, and everyone else stops believing they are unbeatable. Nadal has done this to Federer on clay.

No one could solve Borg, on any surface, until McEnroe did it on grass. Only grass. But Borg's failure to dominate drove him crazy and he quit. The lesson is that even a player with no weaknesses is a few losses away from weakness.

As Federer and Nadal rip through this year's draw, they are on course to collide in one of the game's greatest showdowns in history. To me, the most unique thing about this rivalry, is that they seem to really like each other, a fact that points to a new trend in the game.

These days players play the ball, not each other. The game is so fast, so athletic, so instantaneous, that it has become zen-like, a pursuit of stillness and not a competition between adversaries...