One reason Roger Federer has had the longevity he’s had is due to good scheduling.  There have been those that have suggested a “streamlined” calendar would make it more interesting for the fans, thus, the idea would be to have 8 months of tennis, with 2 months devoted to the Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and US Open and leadup tournaments, much like the French has 6 weeks of clay events or the US Open has about the same weeks in the US Open Series.

The downside of this approach (other than weather, which affects how much you can space the tournaments out) is lack of breaks.  Somehow, even tennis commentators believe that tennis is immune from injuries or, if they sat to think about it, they might shrug and say, well, in American football, there’s no rest.  That lack of rest, of course, means football teams get beat up, and thus, wins and losses aren’t always due to the team with the best players playing their best, but due to the luck of being less injured than most.  Tennis, at least, aims to have its players playing reasonably healthy, and even then, players complain (yet, have the right to skip as many tournaments as they want, if they don’t mind dropping in the rankings).

Thus, Federer took a fairly lengthy break after the Australian Open, and has taken a fairly lengthy break after Wimbledon.  Federer almost never plays the early parts of the hard court tournaments and makes his first appearance in Canada, the first of two Masters 1000 events that precede the US Open.

Tuesday, Federer sported a new outfit, looking very much like a Neopolitan, one-third strawberry (his shirt), one-third chocolate (his shorts), and one-third vanilla (Roger).  Pink always seems to send the press in a tizzy as if tennis, not exactly the most masculine of sports, doesn’t need its men wearing pink.  Rafa wore pink for a tournament (and lost) and people were happy to see him wear a different color.  Perhaps Nike felt the pink experiment would work better with Roger.

As with all of the top 8 seeds, Roger had a bye in his first round, so his match against the venerable Chela, although his first match, was a second round match.  Chela has had a mini-resurgence of some sort.  Not quite Nalbandian good, but not so bad.  Earlier in the year, he won Houston, beating Sam Querrey, who has been making a habit of winning ATP 250 events, but never quite seems ready to play in the big tournaments.  Chela beat the Colombian, Alejandro Falla, quite easily in the first round.  You remember Falla?  He was the one that nearly excused Roger Federer from Wimbledon.  Not that Roger would likely have lost to Falla, given his ability to rebound against lesser players.

Roger’s break was partly for recovery.  He complained that his back and leg hurt and this contributed to his loss to Tomas Berdych at Wimbledon in the quarterfinals.  He spent time on a yacht with wife Mirka.  Then, he reached out to Paul Annacone to serve as his traveling coach.  The last time he sought a coach, he asked Darren Cahill, who was happier doing ESPN commentary than traveling full-time with any player, including the great Roger Federer, and turned him down.  Annacone was a good player who played roughly in between John and Patrick McEnroe, i.e., in the 1980s.  He was known for an attacking style that had him rushing the net on serve and return.

Annacone coached Pete Sampras after Tim Gullikson, his previous coach, who had died of cancer.  He had recently been recruited by UK tennis to help them with development efforts, but that responsibility had waned, probably due to the lack of any good players to succeed Andy Murray.

Presumably, Roger hired Annacone to get himself back into his aggressive roots.  Although Roger primarily wins from the backcourt, as he heads closer to 30 (he just turned 29), he’s been on a new trend (well, the last few years) to get to net more often and finish points sooner.  One reason may be the increasing number of players that can now bang with the maestro.  Another may simply be to end points sooner.

Roger couldn’t have wished for a better first opponent.  Chela may be a tough cagey veteran, but he’s also that rare bird that is older than Roger Federer.  It should come as no surprise that the matches Roger won most easily at Wimbledon were against players older than him, including a straight set beatdown of Arnaud Clement and Jurgen Melzer.  Federer rarely loses to players older than him.

Federer started off well, getting to a 4-2 break.  Already, his backhand is starting to look better, more reminiscent of the way he played in Australia.  Federer, as he gets older, now relies on variety to augment his game, including slice approach shots off his backhand and drop shots.  Even so, Federer was unable to close out the set, and needed a tiebreak to win the first set.  The second set proceeded much as the first with Federer again getting an early break, but this time, he held through to win the match.

In other tennis news, Andy Roddick, who fell out of the top 10 this Monday, leaving no American in the top 10 for the first time since ATP started its rankings in 1973, has chosen to skip Toronto, citing fatigue.  Roddick lost last week to Gilles Simon and felt something was wrong, so he is taking time off to figure out what that may be.  Given that he’s defending semifinal points from last year, he’ll basically stay out of the top 10.  Roddick needed to reach the semifinals to have any chance of moving back into the top 10.  Somdev Devvarman took Roddick’s place as lucky loser, but lost to Gael Monfils.

Robin Soderling opened up with a tough match against Ernests Gulbis.  Gulbis took the first set, 6-4, before Soderling returned the favor in the second set.  The two were even in the third until 4-all, with Gulbis even having an ad point to hold serve, when Gulbis played 3 sloppy points, and handing a quick, unexpected break to Soderling.  Gulbis, as usual, forced Soderling to come to net by dropping him frequently.

It says something about Tennis Channel that they show the “interesting” matches rather than the matches that feature Americans.  The Soderling-Gulbis match was the featured match rather than Sam Querrey against fellow American, Michael Russell.  To be fair, Tennis Channel takes its feed from the UK, and so they are basically rebroadcasting the tennis that goes out to Europe with the team of Jason Goodall and Robbie Koenig and Doug Adler.

There were a few other tough matches.  David Nalbandian went from a win in DC to playing David Ferrer.  Nalbandian was using his power to overwhelm Ferrer in the first set, but Ferrer is a tough opponent and took the second set.  Ferrer seemed to suffer from fatigue and eventually lost the third set.  This is a pretty good roll for Nalbandian.  One hopes he can regain some form and play good top 20 tennis a la Hewitt (who is, by the way, injured and had to withdraw from Toronto).

Marcos Baghdatis, who lost last week in the finals of Nalbandian, was not as fortunate, as he lost to Frenchman Jeremy Chardy in a third set tiebreak.  Baghdatis was irritable throughout, especially at the end, when he felt a few line calls were called against him.  Apparently, Baghdatis speaks fluent French (despite being in Toronto) and kept spewing commentary until the chair umpire warned him for verbal abuse.

Radek Stepanek is playing once again, but he lost to Fabio Fognini rather easily.  Stepanek had not played for some number of months due to injury.  He and countryman, Tomas Berdcyh, reached the finals of DC in doubles, but lost to Mardy Fish and Mark Knowles.

Xavier Malisse, who lost to Nalbandian in the finals of DC last week, won his opening match against Michael Berrer of Germany in straight sets.  Dolgopolov continues to show he can play top 30 tennis with a win over Petzschner, who pushed Nadal to 5 sets in Wimbledon.  Michael Llodra, who was the hero of France in the last Davis Cup meeting against France, won over Colombian, Santiago Giraldo in straight sets.  Verdasco needed three sets to beat Argentine Eduardo Schwank, despite a 6-0 opening set.  Wawa beat veteran Canadian easily, but has to get ready to play top seed, Rafa, in tonight’s featured match.

And Marin Cilic lost.  Again.  Predictions of a Cilic breakout year seems premature.  Maybe he’s mildly injured, but he doesn’t seem ready to make the leap to top player just quite yet.

Andy Murray and Rafa play today.  A bunch of players who played yesterday, including David Nalbandian, are out on court again.

Finally, the Rogers Cup (this tournament) has a hideous website.  Can’t they just imitate the Slams and be done with it?  So many tennis websites, and inconsistencies between all of them.  So painful to look at.