Paul Thomas: Personality missing in intense tennis

Nicholas Kiefer, David Nalbandian, Marcos Baghdatis - who are these people?

No, they're not Eurovision Song Contest judges or the Chelsea midfield - they're tennis players, semifinalists no less, at the Australian Open, which this weekend, heatwave permitting, trundles to its conclusion.

The fourth men's semifinalist was Roger Federer who, following the departure of Pete Sampras, the imminent departure of Andre Agassi and the ongoing evolution of the women's tour into a gravy train for leggy, pouting Slavs, seems to carry the tennis world on his shoulders.

Which brings me back to my question. What about this Ivan Ljubicic, who was apparently roped in to make up the numbers for the quarter-finals? Well, it turns out he's become the eighth-ranked men's player in the world and has accumulated $5.8 million in prize money without anyone in the real world noticing that he exists.

Tennis has become the sporting equivalent of a 19th-century Russian novel without the tragedy and the grandeur: a slow-moving juggernaut featuring characters with unpronounceable names whom one has great difficulty telling apart.

Who's the one who plays in a negligee: Sharapova, Petrova or Pullova?

Agassi is both the prototype of the modern tennis player and the odd one out. Courtesy of the mandatory obsessive parent, he was introduced to the tennis ball while still in the cot and, if you can believe the legend, was serving overarm on a full-sized court by the time he was 2.

Agassi became a male version of Anna Kournikova, earning millions in what was effectively appearance money. Dolled up in torn-off jeans and eyeliner, he adorned many a schoolgirl's bedroom wall and inspired many a middle-aged woman's toy-boy fantasy.

Against all odds he became a great player and a gracious human being, which makes him exceptional on several counts.

It wasn't always this way. Time was tennis was a freewheeling drama full of vivid and equivocal characters such as Ilie Nastase, who when all else failed zeroed in on his opponents' ethnicity, and Jimmy Connors, whose speciality was a performance art piece - Simulated Sex Act With Tennis Racquet.

Most distinctive of all were Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe, whose epic rivalry transformed the game, and from whose giant shadows succeeding generations of players have struggled to emerge, most unsuccessfully.

So black and white in their differences were these two that they could have been created by a Hollywood scriptwriter with a world view based on John Wayne movies.

Borg was a lank-haired Swede whom the tabloids called "IceBorg" for his blank, nerveless self-possession or "CyBorg" for his machine-like consistency.

Nothing was left to chance. After his parents had watched him lose at Wimbledon in 1975 and win in 1976, he banned them from attending in odd-numbered years.

In the 1980 Wimbledon final Borg blew seven match points in the course of losing a monumental fourth set tie-breaker 18-16. He sat down, checked his racquets and walked back on to the court for the fifth set as if nothing had changed. Which it hadn't: there was still a tennis match to be won.

"I thought Borg would be physically deflated," said McEnroe. "Whatever he had inside him was beyond anything I could imagine."

But having painstakingly constructed this fortress of self-belief, Borg left by the back door. After losing the 1981 US Open final to McEnroe, he skipped the presentations ceremony and drove straight to the airport. Three months later he retired.

As driven and neurotic as his fellow New Yorker Woody Allen, McEnroe had the misfortune to be a perfectionist whose talent bordering on genius made perfection seem attainable.

As a result, many of his matches were a mesmerising blend of artistry, raucous conflict and primal scream therapy.

McEnroe raged against anything that intruded on his quest for perfection: dodgy line calls, camera noise, his own fallibility. When he insisted that one of his more florid outbursts - calling an umpire "a disgrace to mankind" - was actually directed at himself, he wasn't being entirely disingenuous.

Referring to Cyclops, the machine that determines whether serves are in or out, he said, "I don't want to sound paranoid but that machine knows who I am." The last stop on this journey was, not surprisingly, the psychiatrist's couch.

His heir, in tennis terms at least, is Federer, a 24-year-old Swiss.

While some judges believe Federer's well on the way to being the greatest player ever, watching him slouch through his games this week one felt that, for both his sake and the game's, a worthy rival can't emerge soon enough.

Federer knows he can win most matches without having to galvanise himself and his intermittent disengagement from the contest drains it of drama and intensity.

In his brilliant little book On Being John McEnroe the English writer Tim Adams attributes much of McEnroe's theatrics (and private anguish) to Borg's premature retirement, which deprived him of the inspiration to be as good as he could be and the measure for how good that was.

"There was this void," said McEnroe, "and I always felt it was up to me to manufacture my own intensity thereafter."