Root, root, root for the home team Continued

"I got my ass kicked by Marcelo in Paris last month and I wasn't happy about that," said Krajicek. "I think that on an indoor court in Eindhoven, on a fast surface, with me having trained properly … I'm going to beat him." Again, isn't the 31-year-old Rios a little young to be playing the seniors? And is he really helping entertain corporate clients?

Here's what Ilie Nastase told Scoop Malinkowski about Rios: "He's the worst prick I ever met. The players of today probably have the same opinion of him. Ask all the players what they think of him, you'll get the same thing. When somebody doesn't sign autographs for the kids, that is a prick for me. (What about his game?) I don't give a shit. I don't look at him. For me, he's an idiot. I don't know what else to tell about him. And that's the first time I say something about somebody like that. I think he was the worst thing for tennis. He did not deserve to be No. 1 - one or two days. To live with the other players like he did - terrible. He really was the worst. I never say anything about anybody else like this but about him I have to say this. Sorry."

Here's more from Scoop on Rios from Chile's Jaime Fillol: "The President of Chile was practically disgraced by him. When he became number one and the President invited him to the Palace and he came in a shirt, looking like he was going to the beach. And the President said, 'Marcelo would you like to say something to the people?' 'No, I don't want to say anything.' So he turned the President of the country off just by being different. He didn't think it was a big occasion, but he's not a bad person."

Charlie Bricker redux
I was just going to let the whole brouhaha over my comments on Charlie Bricker die on the vine, but given the substantial volume of e-mails and calls that I've received on the subject, I feel I have to clarify why I went after the Sun Sentinel tennis writer.

Right after the ’06 USO women's final, he took a big cheap shot at my boss at Inside Tennis magazine – Bill Simons – and spent entire column writing around the Sharapova coaching issue just because it was Simons, The New York Times and The Washington Post who were confronting Maria and not him. Bricker offers no real opinions in the piece except for trying to prove that the line of questioning was irrelevant because it wasn't him asking the questions. Moreover, that "little once-a-month tennis magazine you've probably never heard" he speaks of – Inside Tennis – reaches far more tennis readers than the Sun-Sentinel, which has a circulation of around 255,000, of which you can generously estimate 60,000 read about tennis. Inside Tennis estimates 200,000 tennis readers.

For all the speculation done in the chat rooms as to why I would write that Bricker frequently takes public positions merely to counter other journalists he doesn't personally like, no reader did his or her research. So if you are interested, go and find how many times he's cracked the Miami Herald or Palm Beach Post for no reason other than that he doesn't like their reporters, or how in June, how he wrote that he wanted to puke because the excellent Mark Hodgkinson of the Daily Telegraph had broken the story that Jimmy Connors was going to coach Andy Roddick. There was NO WAY that was going to happen. Bricker wrote that because he doesn't like many of the British reporters, not because he knew either way.

There's another point that missed too by those who torched me for being unfair: I agree that the criteria for being a good journalist should not be winning a popularity contest amongst your peers, but in journalism, you cannot separate your ability to sustain solid, working relationships with your peers from your ability to write truthful stories on players if you've shown no indication that you know how to develop a truthful, polite relationships from those who work the closest to you. It's called Relationships 101. You build from the ground up. I believe I have that I've done that with the vast majority of peers. Bricker hasn't especially with most regular women tennis journalists, who steer clear of desk to avoid vicious and unwarranted cracks.

But yes, Bricker has written some terrific pieces over the years and he does work hard.

Enough said on that front, but I am going to attempt to dispel two other Matt Cronin myths:

1: I wasn't embarrassed when Andy Roddick "torched" me (his words) at the US Open about what I written about his game. I'm fine with someone defending himself, just as I feel like it's okay to have opinions and to write what they are, rather than hiding them. I write and speak aggressively; Andy plays and talks aggressively. He has the right to air his beefs and I maintain my right to analyze his game the way I see fit. Believe it or not, we get along pretty well. But for someone to say that I only wrote about Davis Cup to take a shot at Roddick is absurd. I've covered a lot of ties and unlike most other sites; we had someone filing from Moscow (Chris Bowers).

2: I never told any "crazy" story about Jennifer Capriati and that “film star.” TennisReporters.net published a piece by a contributing writer about her and the “actor.” She was angry with me because I didn't call her and get her side of the story. I was on vacation at a major family function at the time and trusted both the writer and the writer's sources. Still do. In retrospect, I should have found a way to hold the story until I talked to her because we had a good relationship at the time and she deserved that. Unfortunately, I was caught in a blizzard and there wasn’t an internet connection, but excuses, excuses. My bad. But we never retracted the story. And I'm not "wondering" why she won't talk to me: I know why, because she feels betrayed. Someday, I believe she'll get past that. I have.

Before I'm off to entertain two of my favorite European in-laws (during baseball!), I have to note that Lynn Berenbaum went a little overboard on Tennis-X busting on Pete Bodo. I know that I've also gone after other scribes in the past, but Peter is an excellent outdoor writer and having him write about trips up to the mountains comes with his tennis territory. Plus, he recently propped Malcolm Lowery's brilliant "Under the Volcano," one of the top three books written about Mexico by an ex-pat. My other two at a later date.