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WIMBLEDONJune 26, 2007James BlakeLONDON, ENGLAND THE MODERATOR: Questions for James. Q. You and Andy coming out smoking serves first round. I guess that's what you want to do here. JAMES BLAKE: Yeah. I don't know if you can put my serve and Andy's serve in the same sentence and keep a straight face, but I played well and served well. That's pretty important on these courts. I mean, obviously Andy does it pretty often. That's why I think he's the second best grass court player in the world. For me to have a good serving day is going to make my job a lot easier, make me be able to swing a little freer, especially on my forehands, go after it, feel comfortable on the other guy's serve, which I did today. Four or five times I broke him. It's a good feeling. Q. You've had some disappointing early exits this year. Can you put this into perspective, how much it means to get this out of the way, get it done in quick fashion? JAMES BLAKE: Yeah, it was a great win. I felt like it was a tough draw to start out with. Andreev is an excellent player, huge forehand, big serve. Not ideal to play him first round. But to get through it is a really good feeling, especially since I maybe got a little tentative towards the end and he fought back and started going for broke and things were going in, which can be dangerous. It can be a time where the guy starts going for broke, making a lot of shots, and before you know it, you're back in a dogfight. I managed to kind of steady myself, keep going after my shots, play well. To have a win like that is a really great feeling. Like you said, there have been some early exits. I don't let those get to me. I know a lot of those were one or two points here and there. Those matches can go against you in a hurry, but they can start going with you in a hurry and get on a roll. Before you know it, you're right back where you were or even more confident hopefully. Q. Are you following the Mets from afar? JAMES BLAKE: I am. Four wins in a row, I believe. I'm pretty happy about that. I was hearing too much from Mardy Fish about the fact they lost that series to the Twins. I stayed away from him for a couple days because I knew it was coming. Q. If I remember, after that day in Paris when all the Americans lost, you said, I guarantee we won't go 07, 08 at Wimbledon, and obviously that is correct. JAMES BLAKE: Yeah. It helped when I saw Roddick versus Gimelstob first round. I knew we couldn't go. I was safe (laughter). But, yeah, I mean, obviously the surface plays more into our styles. Most of us grew up playing a little more aggressive, going for your shots, ending points a little quicker. It plays more to our strengths. I have a feeling we tend to perform better here. We're showing it so far. I think we got a long way to go to appease the American public's ideas of what it takes to have a good American tennis scene right now. I think it's pretty darn good with two players in the top 10, Andy being the third seed here, got the Bryans as a top seed. We're still in the Davis Cup. I think tennis in America is doing great. It was one of those coincidences or bad luck incidents where we had everything go wrong at the French Open. I just hope that doesn't happen again for a long time, especially as long as I'm playing. Q. Could you expand? One of the great problems I think the media finds is there's no American star except for you two. There's baseball, football, basketball. Do you think there needs to be a greater presence? You can only play your own game. JAMES BLAKE: Exactly. I can only speak about what's going on in my head, on my side of the coin. But I think having two pretty big stars in the sport of tennis from any one country is a big deal with how globalized it's become. Last year at Shanghai, there were only two countries that had two players in the Masters Cup: Us and Spain. It seems like there really aren't very many countries that can say they have two top 10 players, top 20 players even, because the sport has become so global, it seems like it's happening in every sport, in terms of basketball. We had an MVP of the finals from France, an MVP of the season from Germany, last two MVPs from Canada. Things are changing. In baseball, there's so many more Dominicans. There's so many Latin players. It just becomes tough for any one country to dominate. In years past, in generations past, to have Sampras, Agassi, Chang, Courier, it was so dominant that every American tennis fan would just turn on the TV the second weekend of a Grand Slam, and you know you're going to see at least one of them. You can't do that any more. Just about the only person you can be pretty sure of seeing is that Swiss guy, and he's going to be there the second Sunday it seems like the last eight. It's pretty tough unless you're from Switzerland to say you have a star that's guaranteed to be there every second week. But having two guys that have the chance to get there, I think we're in pretty good shape. Q. You're a guy looking for a streak. As you search for that, have you had to find your own way? Have you sat down with Brian and tried to talk it out? Are you leaning on other people outside your tennis group to find that secret? JAMES BLAKE: No. I get it from my tennis group, from Brian and Mark Merklein. My game took a little longer to develop than other guys who came out at 17, 18, swinging for the fences, it was all going in. For me it took a while, some trial and error, some bad losses, some good wins, some things happening until I figured out my game. My game is one that's pretty aggressive and it's one that can be pretty hit or miss. With that being said, there are times when I'm going to seem like I have some bad losses, but I have to play that way because I can't guarantee any match I'm going to win. I can't go out and just push and assume I'm going to win. So my best way, my best chance to win, is playing sometimes lower percentage tennis, but the kind of tennis that I'm best at. Those are the chances -- that's the only way I'm going to be able to play and get on, like you said, a streak. That's the only way I'm going to be able to go deep in a major, go deep in a Masters Series. When I do that, I'll look back and say, All those losses were worth it or everything was worth it, because I have to play that way. I'm not going to win just staying six feet behind the baseline and just retrieving balls. These guys out here are way too good. They push me around too easily. I need to be the one attacking. That hopefully will turn into a streak sometime. If it doesn't, I know I did my best and that's why I don't come in here and hang my head too much. I don't come in here and say what could have been or what should have been. I know that's the best chance I have. If I don't have it that day, I don't have it that day. If the other guy plays too good, he plays too good. I beat myself up in the locker room a little bit, but what can you do? I'm not going to complain about the talent I have or anything like that. I do my best with what I was given. Q. Putting aside the question of the level of success of American tennis, if there were one or two things you could do to make it even better, more popular, what would that be? JAMES BLAKE: More popular? I'd love to see it on TV more. I think if people got to know us a little better, the stories that are out here on tour are just incredible. I'm going to make an ingratiating plug to myself saying I'm coming out with a book because I have a story. July 10th it's coming out in case anyone's wondering. Literally, everyone in the locker room could write a book. The more you get to know some of these guys, the more you're impressed with what they've gone through to get to this level. There's almost no one out here that it was just smooth sailing all the way through. Like, Okay, I did great in juniors, I came to the pros, did great in the pros, now I'm going towards the middle of my career, everything has gone smoothly. There's ups and downs in everyone's career. There's situations where they could have gone the other way. They could have been broken down a little bit. But to get here and stay here, it's not easy. All these people, if they could hear those stories more often and appreciate how hard it was for all these guys to get here, how hard they're working every day. Maybe just if it's on TV more they'll have chances to see maybe how hard the guys train, maybe get inside their lives a little bit more and just understand the difficulties people go through. I'm not going to sit here and try to get you guys to tear up with we've got tough lives or anything, but we worked hard for what we got. It's something that I think fans would appreciate a lot more. Once you get fans, they're going to get out there and play a little more. The more they get out there and play, the more they're going to appreciate the tennis that we're playing. I think if we could just get it on TV a little more, get ourselves out there, would be the best thing. Q. How are you involved in the book? JAMES BLAKE: I'm the author. Q. Did you sit down and write it? JAMES BLAKE: I wrote a lot of it. Andrew Friedman was with me, and he did the actual editing. He did the writing. It was my thoughts with his grammatical skills and his editing, his putting it into a story that would probably be better. Basically he's a better storyteller. He told the story a lot better than I would have been able to from what I told him. We're both excited about it coming out. I can't wait. It's going to be something that's interesting because I'm used to a life where you go out, you win, you lose, you answer questions based on that. Some people care, but most people just care if you win or lose. They don't care how you got there, what happened before, what happened the night before, anything like that. This is kind of my story. To see if people are really interested in what's happened to me the last few years. Q. Are you going to make a tour? JAMES BLAKE: Sort of. I don't obviously have the time to just go on a full-fledged book tour. I'm going to do some signings in New York right after Wimbledon. I'm going to try to incorporate it with most of the tournaments, going out to L.A. playing there, I'll do some book signing. Same with Indianapolis, at the US Open, at the Pilot Pen. So I'll could a lot of book signings and things. I can't obviously do just a full-fledged book tour unfortunately. But I'm going to do everything I can for promotions. I'm going to be on a lot of the kind of talk shows and things like that in the States hopefully promoting it. We'll see if it sells a few. Q. You mentioned you're a Mets fan. Are you also following Barry Bonds' home run chase? JAMES BLAKE: I think he's going to break it. I think he's going to go down as the greatest home run hitter ever, obviously. Unfortunately for him I think a lot of the fans, the media as well, is going to wonder if there should be an asterisk there. It's unfortunate. It's really unfortunate for him if he is clean. If he's not clean, it's really unfortunate for the game. So that's kind of the way I look at it. Q. You're known for some rather lengthy interview transcripts, which we all enjoy by the way. How long is your book? JAMES BLAKE: I think just over 200 pages. Hopefully it's not as rambling as most of my interview answers are. That's what Andrew is there for. He could cut me off if he needed to. Q. Last year you were critical of Vince Spadea in terms of his revealing locker room information. Did you reflect on that issue, how much athletes should reveal, where the line is? JAMES BLAKE: Yeah, well, I think first and foremost, the line should be that my book stays in the non-fiction section. That for me is one thing that was important to me. Otherwise, yeah, I really do think things that happen in the locker room, stories that we do tell, like I said, I have a million stories about tons of guys in the locker room, and most of them are very impressive. Most of them I would love to share, but I would never do it unless they shared it. If some of these guys want to tell you their stories then that's up to them. It's not anyone else's business to go out and tell stories about other people. That's why my book is about me and my family. Everyone that's in the book, every interview that was done by Andrew, with all my friends, were consented to. There's nothing in there that someone is going to come out and be -- hopefully not -- going to be upset about, saying, I didn't say that; I didn't do that. Hopefully there's no controversy whatsoever because I didn't bring locker room stuff into it. Q. What's the name of it? JAMES BLAKE: Breaking Back. Q. If I could beg to differ with what you said before about Americans. You and Andy are actually the only ones that won so far here. I'm wondering if we're at the point, post the fab four era, we need to set the bar lower but seriously set it lower about the results people like Ginepri and Fish and Dent and these guys are going to put up? JAMES BLAKE: Dent unfortunately has been injured for a long time. We don't know how his back will ever react again. Mardy has a tough draw here. Robby had a pretty tough draw. To play a former quarterfinalist, last year's finalist, is not easy. They're working hard. They're doing their best. It's tough when you don't get seeded because you end up with those tough draws. Like I said before, if you want to beg to differ, that's up to you, but we've got two guys in the top 10. We have the best doubles team in the world. We're probably the favorite right now to win Davis Cup. If the expectations are higher than that, I'm sorry. I'm doing my best. It's pretty -- those are pretty lofty expectations then. End of FastScripts |
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