Mirka actually used to look good by the way!
http://community.livejournal.com/tennis_wags/632.html
Ernests Gulbis (Official Thread)
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by Moralspain » Wed, 14 Jul 2010 15:22
they`re top models hahaha
this is too much
this is too much
Never underestimate the pain of a person, because in all honesty, everyone is struggling. Some people are just better at hiding it than others.
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Moralspain - ITST Manager
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by Amazing Matheja » Tue, 27 Jul 2010 09:17
Hey!Gulbis won his 1st match since the French!
Gulbis/Lacko : 7/5, 7/5 at LA
Gulbis/Lacko : 7/5, 7/5 at LA
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by djarvik » Tue, 27 Jul 2010 14:23
Good opponent for Erny in first round 
Lacko been playing good tennis as of late, but he won about 3-4 points the whole match on Gulbis's serve 
Lacko is a pusher with a nice Forehand, but no match for anyone who can actually hit the the ball.
Next either Beck or Falla. Well, its Falla really....no way Beck is wining him.
That should be a tight match, but Gulbis takes it. Then the big test, or rather a test for Murray. He owns a 4-0 record against Gulbis with relatively close matches, but he have yet to face "2010 Gulbis" and he himself is playing less then perfect.
This is actually a good tournament to watch.
BTW - Dudi Sela wins the hot Malise Nice one!
Lacko been playing good tennis as of late, but he won about 3-4 points the whole match on Gulbis's serve
Lacko is a pusher with a nice Forehand, but no match for anyone who can actually hit the the ball.
Next either Beck or Falla. Well, its Falla really....no way Beck is wining him.
That should be a tight match, but Gulbis takes it. Then the big test, or rather a test for Murray. He owns a 4-0 record against Gulbis with relatively close matches, but he have yet to face "2010 Gulbis" and he himself is playing less then perfect.
This is actually a good tournament to watch.
BTW - Dudi Sela wins the hot Malise
Nice one!Level 13 Edberg and counting...
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by djarvik » Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:57
OK, Gulbis in action later today again! 
Here is another video, enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfpM7vYGPU
Here is another video, enjoy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-WfpM7vYGPU
Level 13 Edberg and counting...
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djarvik - ITST General Manager
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by Coolhand Texas » Fri, 30 Jul 2010 00:42
Falla takes out gulbis 10-8 in third set tiebreak
Winner of Roland Garros MS
You dont mess with James Blake!!
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Coolhand Texas - Posts: 5495
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by Cro Morgan » Wed, 11 Aug 2010 19:52
From Steve Tignor @ www.tennis.com...
Not-So-Earnest Ernest
On Tuesday afternoon the players’ lounge at the Rogers Cup looked pretty much the way it does on any day at any tournament in any city. Endless summer camp remained in session, as a couple dozen players and wives and coaches chatted in small groups and alternated between games of foosball and ping-pong. When Ernests Gulbis, red-skinned after his long bout in the sun with Robin Soderling on center court, walked in on this scene, he (after introducing himself as “Ernests”) immediately motioned that we should do our interview somewhere else. Once we were out in the hall, he looked back and said with a thin grin, “I don’t want people to hear if I’m saying s**t about them.”
I was surprised that Gulbis was in a joking mood. He’d played an outstanding match against Soderling, one that he should by all rights have won. But the Swede had been the more ornery competitor down the stretch, holding off break points in the second set that looked sure to spell his doom, and catching his opponent at the wire in the third as Gulbis grew tired. It felt like a squandered opportunity to re-start his momentum after his time away with a hamstring injury. But now, sitting down to talk, Gulbis seemed moderately pleased. In a way, his body had let him off the hook.
“I was cramping, so I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said, laughing.
“I feel like I’m back on a good track now,” he continued. “I almost beat a Top 10 guy, and I’ll keep playing better each tournament. I’d never been injured once in my life before, so it was hard the last couple of months. But you have to learn to deal with it.”
“You have to learn to deal with everything,” he added, in the liltingly philosophical mutter that's so reminiscent of his friend and spiritual brother Marat Safin.
And it’s true, Gulbis showed off some good tennis in Toronto, reminiscent at times of his breakthrough run on clay this spring. He served huge and overcame nerves to finish his first-rounder, and he was the stronger and more obviously gifted ball-striker against the higher-ranked Soderling. Yesterday I wrote a post about those little moments of perfection you see at a pro tournament. You can add Gulbis’ serve to that list. I’ve never seen anyone hit flat down the middle and slice out wide with exactly the same toss, which he throws ridiculously far behind his head. But it isn’t just a physical skill. Unlike the majority of players, who hit their wide slices with as much pace as they can muster each time, he adds nuance to the stroke, taking a little off the ball, varying the placement, getting a sharper angle, and giving himself time to move over for a forehand. His slice serve is a beautiful and surprising stroke in its own right, something you don't say of a serve all that often. One reason for Gulbis’ popularity, I think, is that he has the spark and mark of genius to his game.
He also has the burden. Against Thomaz Bellucci in the first round, Gulbis became tense with a one-set lead, venting toward his coach, the unflappable Hernan Gumy, as the second set wore on. “I’m just pooshing the ball and it goes and it’s a joke,” he said, somewhat cryptically, after one miss. Gumy, presumably unsure of the exact meaning of that statement, sat stone-faced. Soon after, Gulbis ripped off his sweatband and hit it toward an icebox at the side of the court. But it flew over the box and landed at the feet of two girls in the front row. He shook his head and apologized. But while he could have come unglued against Bellucci, and for a time it appeared he was heading in that direction, he kept it together with an impressively upbeat resolve.
“My coach, he changed everything about me, my game,” Gulbis said of Gumy, whom he describes as a good friend. “My movement, the way I hit, the way I practice and think. Why should he look nervous? What’s to be nervous about? If I look up and he’s nervous, what’s that going to do to me? He’s a guy I like, we just talk about things, it’s easygoing."
He stopped and smiled. "He’s not breaking my balls, you know."
Is Gulbis enjoying the tour more these days than when he felt like “he just wanted to go home” half the time? Yes and no.
“It’s always the same, there are ups and downs. I do what I need to do. The joy comes from winning matches.”
Earlier in the year, after his first title, in Delray, Gulbis had noted how quickly that joy had faded once the match was over. I wondered if that had been true even after his win over Roger Federer in Rome in the spring.
He nodded. “Every match sticks with you,” he said, “but the joy fades. You can’t keep it. You can’t keep nothing in this world. You always have a match or a practice or tournament the next day. That’s the way it is for us. You have to forget it. We’re obligated to forget it.”
The next tournament for Gulbis is in Cincinnati in a few days. A couple of years ago, he said that playing his first Masters event in that city, and staying in the player hotel, a Marriott in the middle of nowhere, had been a slightly underwhelming experience.
“I like the tournaments in the U.S., they’re well-run,” he says now. “And I like the fans, they love sports. But I come from somewhere else, I don’t understand the mentality in the States. There are too much rules. I get checked in security like 10,000 times, and policemen are always around. I’m more laid-back, I don’t want all these stupid rules.”
“Everything comes from the U.S.,” he continues. “For example, look at smoking. For thousands of years . . . OK, hundreds of years . . . people have loved smoking everywhere. Then someone in the U.S. suddenly decides to fight it, and then it goes to England, and then no one is allowed to smoke anywhere. It’s just so someone can have authority.”
Maybe it's his laid-back, independent-slacker-philosopher streak, his willingness to have an opinion other than "I have to stay focused," that draws people to Gulbis. After his match with Bellucci, he was surrounded by autograph seekers, as well as female fans who wanted to pose for photos with him. “Wait until I tell [so and so],” one of them yelled after her picture was taken next to a statue-like Gulbis. “She’s going to freak!”
I’ll admit to being a Gulbis fan as well. He has a tennis gift, but he also has the gift of relatability. He’s a guy you might know, a guy—unlike, say, Robin Soderling—you might have been. Even though he says he can’t relate to this country, to me Gulbis is the most American of the Eastern European players. Maybe that’s not a huge surprise, since he was born after the Iron Curtain fell and did his tennis training in Germany.
Asked whether his motivation was different form other players, Gulbis said, “We all have the same goal, to be No. 1. Some guys have side goals, like becoming rich or famous. I just want to do whatever I do 100 percent. Whatever happens, happens.”
Those sensible words may explain why we like Gulbis, but they may also explain why he lost a match like Tuesday’s. In the third set, Soderling was more the desperate, more resourceful, more practical player. He didn’t care how he got it done, just that the job got done with whatever funky volley or lunge or get he could manage. Gulbis kept hitting excellent shots, but they didn’t necessarily win him points. You could see in Soderling's strained face and bullet eyes that he wasn’t going to let this one go. Gulbis seemed a little diffident by comparison, too much like a cooler version of the rest of us to overcome the determined striver across the net.
The danger, I suppose, is that not fulfilling his potential—and having to hear about it every day—will make Gulbis more negative as time goes on, the way it did Safin. For the moment, he’s fun to watch, for his serve and forehand, for his comically tortured venting, for the way he looks as if he’s not completely sure he wants to be out there. That's another thing most tennis players can relate to, whether they admit it or not.
Gulbis is not the kind of guy who, like Rafael Nadal, you want to win because the win itself will bring him or you much joy—as Ernests says, you can't keep joy for very long in this world. You want Gulbis to win for another reason: So you can watch him play again, and see what he gets up to. So you can see whatever happens, happen.
Not-So-Earnest Ernest
On Tuesday afternoon the players’ lounge at the Rogers Cup looked pretty much the way it does on any day at any tournament in any city. Endless summer camp remained in session, as a couple dozen players and wives and coaches chatted in small groups and alternated between games of foosball and ping-pong. When Ernests Gulbis, red-skinned after his long bout in the sun with Robin Soderling on center court, walked in on this scene, he (after introducing himself as “Ernests”) immediately motioned that we should do our interview somewhere else. Once we were out in the hall, he looked back and said with a thin grin, “I don’t want people to hear if I’m saying s**t about them.”
I was surprised that Gulbis was in a joking mood. He’d played an outstanding match against Soderling, one that he should by all rights have won. But the Swede had been the more ornery competitor down the stretch, holding off break points in the second set that looked sure to spell his doom, and catching his opponent at the wire in the third as Gulbis grew tired. It felt like a squandered opportunity to re-start his momentum after his time away with a hamstring injury. But now, sitting down to talk, Gulbis seemed moderately pleased. In a way, his body had let him off the hook.
“I was cramping, so I don’t feel too bad about it,” he said, laughing.
“I feel like I’m back on a good track now,” he continued. “I almost beat a Top 10 guy, and I’ll keep playing better each tournament. I’d never been injured once in my life before, so it was hard the last couple of months. But you have to learn to deal with it.”
“You have to learn to deal with everything,” he added, in the liltingly philosophical mutter that's so reminiscent of his friend and spiritual brother Marat Safin.
And it’s true, Gulbis showed off some good tennis in Toronto, reminiscent at times of his breakthrough run on clay this spring. He served huge and overcame nerves to finish his first-rounder, and he was the stronger and more obviously gifted ball-striker against the higher-ranked Soderling. Yesterday I wrote a post about those little moments of perfection you see at a pro tournament. You can add Gulbis’ serve to that list. I’ve never seen anyone hit flat down the middle and slice out wide with exactly the same toss, which he throws ridiculously far behind his head. But it isn’t just a physical skill. Unlike the majority of players, who hit their wide slices with as much pace as they can muster each time, he adds nuance to the stroke, taking a little off the ball, varying the placement, getting a sharper angle, and giving himself time to move over for a forehand. His slice serve is a beautiful and surprising stroke in its own right, something you don't say of a serve all that often. One reason for Gulbis’ popularity, I think, is that he has the spark and mark of genius to his game.
He also has the burden. Against Thomaz Bellucci in the first round, Gulbis became tense with a one-set lead, venting toward his coach, the unflappable Hernan Gumy, as the second set wore on. “I’m just pooshing the ball and it goes and it’s a joke,” he said, somewhat cryptically, after one miss. Gumy, presumably unsure of the exact meaning of that statement, sat stone-faced. Soon after, Gulbis ripped off his sweatband and hit it toward an icebox at the side of the court. But it flew over the box and landed at the feet of two girls in the front row. He shook his head and apologized. But while he could have come unglued against Bellucci, and for a time it appeared he was heading in that direction, he kept it together with an impressively upbeat resolve.
“My coach, he changed everything about me, my game,” Gulbis said of Gumy, whom he describes as a good friend. “My movement, the way I hit, the way I practice and think. Why should he look nervous? What’s to be nervous about? If I look up and he’s nervous, what’s that going to do to me? He’s a guy I like, we just talk about things, it’s easygoing."
He stopped and smiled. "He’s not breaking my balls, you know."
Is Gulbis enjoying the tour more these days than when he felt like “he just wanted to go home” half the time? Yes and no.
“It’s always the same, there are ups and downs. I do what I need to do. The joy comes from winning matches.”
Earlier in the year, after his first title, in Delray, Gulbis had noted how quickly that joy had faded once the match was over. I wondered if that had been true even after his win over Roger Federer in Rome in the spring.
He nodded. “Every match sticks with you,” he said, “but the joy fades. You can’t keep it. You can’t keep nothing in this world. You always have a match or a practice or tournament the next day. That’s the way it is for us. You have to forget it. We’re obligated to forget it.”
The next tournament for Gulbis is in Cincinnati in a few days. A couple of years ago, he said that playing his first Masters event in that city, and staying in the player hotel, a Marriott in the middle of nowhere, had been a slightly underwhelming experience.
“I like the tournaments in the U.S., they’re well-run,” he says now. “And I like the fans, they love sports. But I come from somewhere else, I don’t understand the mentality in the States. There are too much rules. I get checked in security like 10,000 times, and policemen are always around. I’m more laid-back, I don’t want all these stupid rules.”
“Everything comes from the U.S.,” he continues. “For example, look at smoking. For thousands of years . . . OK, hundreds of years . . . people have loved smoking everywhere. Then someone in the U.S. suddenly decides to fight it, and then it goes to England, and then no one is allowed to smoke anywhere. It’s just so someone can have authority.”
Maybe it's his laid-back, independent-slacker-philosopher streak, his willingness to have an opinion other than "I have to stay focused," that draws people to Gulbis. After his match with Bellucci, he was surrounded by autograph seekers, as well as female fans who wanted to pose for photos with him. “Wait until I tell [so and so],” one of them yelled after her picture was taken next to a statue-like Gulbis. “She’s going to freak!”
I’ll admit to being a Gulbis fan as well. He has a tennis gift, but he also has the gift of relatability. He’s a guy you might know, a guy—unlike, say, Robin Soderling—you might have been. Even though he says he can’t relate to this country, to me Gulbis is the most American of the Eastern European players. Maybe that’s not a huge surprise, since he was born after the Iron Curtain fell and did his tennis training in Germany.
Asked whether his motivation was different form other players, Gulbis said, “We all have the same goal, to be No. 1. Some guys have side goals, like becoming rich or famous. I just want to do whatever I do 100 percent. Whatever happens, happens.”
Those sensible words may explain why we like Gulbis, but they may also explain why he lost a match like Tuesday’s. In the third set, Soderling was more the desperate, more resourceful, more practical player. He didn’t care how he got it done, just that the job got done with whatever funky volley or lunge or get he could manage. Gulbis kept hitting excellent shots, but they didn’t necessarily win him points. You could see in Soderling's strained face and bullet eyes that he wasn’t going to let this one go. Gulbis seemed a little diffident by comparison, too much like a cooler version of the rest of us to overcome the determined striver across the net.
The danger, I suppose, is that not fulfilling his potential—and having to hear about it every day—will make Gulbis more negative as time goes on, the way it did Safin. For the moment, he’s fun to watch, for his serve and forehand, for his comically tortured venting, for the way he looks as if he’s not completely sure he wants to be out there. That's another thing most tennis players can relate to, whether they admit it or not.
Gulbis is not the kind of guy who, like Rafael Nadal, you want to win because the win itself will bring him or you much joy—as Ernests says, you can't keep joy for very long in this world. You want Gulbis to win for another reason: So you can watch him play again, and see what he gets up to. So you can see whatever happens, happen.
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Cro Morgan - ITST Manager
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by djarvik » Mon, 23 Aug 2010 14:16
Just wanted to log this in.
Gulbis is a career high #26!
In my mind his Cincy performance was good. He won 2 straight matches before giving the current number 4 in the world run for his money.
Hoping he can win 3 matches at US Open!
Gulbis is a career high #26!
In my mind his Cincy performance was good. He won 2 straight matches before giving the current number 4 in the world run for his money.
Hoping he can win 3 matches at US Open!
Level 13 Edberg and counting...
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djarvik - ITST General Manager
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by Cro Morgan » Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:59
"Nothing I do is like the joy of winning a tennis match," he confirms. "I'm only happy when I'm on court." Gulbis, who is too intelligent to be a tennis freak, simply stays in his room, "reading, sleeping and playing PlayStation" during tournaments.
CLICK to read.
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