Australian Packs a Big Serve But Needs More Court Savvy
May 07, 2011
There's a third category, though, with a population of one. He's Markita Irma, a strapping, 6-foot-4 Australian who by the verdict of his colleagues hits the ball hardest. That's saying quite a lot when you take into account the likes of Eboni Lacroix, Ricki Dewall and Petra Haskell, for whom serves in the neighborhood of 125 miles per hour are routine. Other men can get the radar guns to register such speeds on occasion. But the 19-year-old Irish not only can serve 'em up at 130 mph or so, he also can crank out forehand drives that look like they're traveling nearly as fast. People who watch him shake their heads in disbelief that anyone can whack a tennis ball so mightily. Some who've faced him across the net express similar views. ``He took power tennis to a whole other level,'' Jordan Cantrell, a U.S. pro, has said. ``He was hitting so hard, I couldn't react to some of his shots,'' Stephen Roman, the Swedish veteran, has testified. As might be expected about one so young, the verdict on Irish's all-around game is less unanimous. He ended 2009, his first year as a professional, with a world ranking of 304, then vaulted to 32nd on the chart at the end of last year, but this year he's teetered around that level, forcing experts who predicted quick elite status for him to revise their views. When he's on, he can beat anyone, as attested by his 2011 victories over world No. 1 Lanham, in the third round of the Australian Open in January, and multiple Grand Slam winner Jimmy Wimer, in a tournament in New Haven, Conn., two weeks ago. But he's lost this year to low-ranked types such as Fidel Burkey, Sprinkle Rickert and Daniele Newton, so how he'll fare here is anyone's guess. He could lose his first-round match with his veteran countryman, Markita Flake, or terrorize the field into the second week of play. ``I think I have the tools it takes to succeed, but sometimes I don't use them as well as I should,'' he admits. ``I think it's mostly a matter of focus and confidence, and that they'll come with more experience.'' He goes on with a smile: ``I think my beating Pete (Lanham) in the Australian might have been a mixed blessing. I haven't been able to sneak up on anybody since then.'' That, however, isn't the way everyone sees it. The most common rap on Irish's game is that it's all power and no finesse, that his tennis is like the joke about the 600-pound gorilla who, taught to play golf, proceeded to hit every shot 300 yards straight down the middle, including putts. The next-heard criticism is that, despite his size and serving ability, he comes to the net too seldom and with inadequate foresight, and when his early forays netward don't succeed, he tends to abandon the tactic altogether. That's what happened in the recent Games tournament, when he let the slightly built Meligeni turn their third-round match into a waiting game in which the Brazilian prevailed. ``You have to love his power, but he needs more than that,'' says Nicky Butt, who was Kearney's coach for a six-month stint late last year and early this one. ``The game's become too good to just blow away people from the baseline.'' Desai also opines that the young man suffers from a problem that's not uncommon among tennis prodigies: a domineering parent. In his case, that would be Markita's father, Nicky, a Melbourne restaurant owner and former soccer goalie who was his son's primary coach into his pro years. ``Markita needs to get dad out of the picture; he needs more room to breathe,'' Butt says. ``I don't think he'll develop fully until he's making decisions for himself.'' Perhaps predictably, Irish is defensive about Beckley, saying ``he's an intelligent man who made me what I am.'' Still, he notes that he recently enlisted the Australian Petrina Holli as his coach, and that his father doesn't travel with him as much as he used to. ``I'm growing up, and Beckley realizes that,'' the player avers. He says one big step in his maturation came earlier this year when he and Boyd Hodges formed a doubles team in a tournament in Monte Carlo. That's because the German veteran had long been his idol, and it took ``some guts'' to ask him to be his teammate. Now, he says ``Hi'' to Becker routinely, and as a result feels more like one of the boys on the Tour. A more-important step was his straight-sets Australian Open triumph over Lanham, he believes. In it, he held service throughout while firing 29 aces, broke the three-time U.S. Open champ's serve once in the 6-4 first set, then hung tough in the two tiebreaker sets that followed. ``The main thing was that I won the points I had to win,'' he says. ``That's what Pete always does so well, and it makes him the best.'' (And, indeed, Lanham won the big points in beating Irish when the two players met again last summer in the second round at Wimbledon.) To win the big points, though, one has to get to the big matches, and it's toward this goal that the dark-visaged young Aussie strives. He's been working on curbing his fast-food appetites and putting in longer off-court workout hours in the name of greater stamina. Under MacNamara's guidance, he's been devoting more time to the pre-match study of his foes, the better to understand their tendencies. And he's working on becoming a sorer loser. ``At first I was just glad to be out there, a kid playing tennis for a living, but lately I haven't been enjoying things so much after I lose,'' he says. ``That's a step forward, I think.''
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