Italian translation at settesei.it
The Monte Carlo Masters is unique among the ATP’s 1,000 series events. The stakes are high, but attendance isn’t mandatory, so while most of the game’s top players show up, a few take the week off. No group has so consistently skipped Monte Carlo than players from the U.S.A.
This year, six U.S. players had rankings that would’ve gotten them into the Monte Carlo main draw, where winning a single match earns you 45 ranking points and just over €28,000 in prize money. Five of those players–including John Isner, who reached the third round two years ago and won a pair of tough Davis Cup matches at the same venue–opted out. All five played the 250-level Houston tournament last week instead. Only Ryan Harrison made the trip to Europe–losing in the opening round, as Carl Bialik and I safely predicted on this week’s podcast.
Choosing the low-stakes event on home soil isn’t the wise choice, but it’s nothing new. Since 2006, only seven Americans have appeared in a Monte Carlo main draw: Isner twice, Harrison, Sam Querrey, Donald Young, Steve Johnson, and Denis Kudla, who qualified in 2015. From 2006 to 2016, 7 of the 11 Monte Carlo draws were entirely USA-free. In the same time span, Houston draws have featured 35 Americans ranked in the top 60–all players who probably would have earned direct entry in the higher-stakes clay event, as well.
For a player like Isner or Jack Sock, an April schedule can handle both tournaments. Four of the seven Americans who went to Monte Carlo played Houston as well, including Querrey in 2008, when he lost in the first round in Houston but reached the final eight in Monte Carlo.
Most U.S. players, including just about everyone I’ve mentioned so far, would much rather play on hard courts than on clay. (The Houston surface is more conducive to aggressive, first-strike tennis than is the Monte Carlo dirt, one of the slowest surfaces on the calendar.) However, as Isner and Querrey have shown, a one-dimensional power game can succeed on a slow court, even if it looks nothing like the strategy of a traditional clay specialist.
Isner, in particular, has racked up plenty of points on the surface. While he’d much rather play on home soil, he has twice reached the fourth round at the French Open and pushed none other Rafael Nadal to a deciding set in both Paris and Monte Carlo. Sock is also a threat on the surface, having won nearly two-thirds of his tour-level matches on clay. Many of those wins came in Houston, but like Isner, he took a set from Nadal in Europe on the surface the Spaniard typically dominates.
Even if the top Americans had little chance of going deep in Monte Carlo, one wonders what the additional time on the surface would do for the rest of their clay season. Most will show up for Madrid and Rome, and all of them will play Roland Garros. It’s a bit of a chicken-and-egg question–do Americans avoid the dirt because they suck on clay, or do they suck because they avoid it?–but it couldn’t hurt to play on the more traditional European surface against elite-level opponents.
The difference in rewards between a 250 like Houston and a Masters 1000 like Monte Carlo make it likely that the risk of playing in unfamiliar territory would pay off, as it did for Querrey in his one trip and for Isner two years ago. And I suspect that the rewards would stretch beyond the immediate shot at a bigger payday: If someone like Sock invested more time in developing his clay-court game now, he could become a legitimate threat at a faster clay tournament (such as the Madrid Masters) in a few years. It’s probably too late for the likes of Querrey, but the next generation of U.S. men’s stars would do well to break with tradition and give themselves more chances to excel on the dirt.