Monte Carlo is the best tournament of 2018

Tennis is a duopoly in 2018. There is Roger Federer, there is Rafael Nadal, and that is all that matters.Roger Federer has decided to sit the clay court season out. Supposedly, we were to be left with a boring, Spanish monopoly of the clay court season coming from a lefty forehand that drips topspin.Who cares, though, right? Clay court tennis is mudball anyway. It's long rallies defined more by who screws up first rather than who can put the ball away. The ball sits up, you can't hit through the court, and the game becomes a grindfest. After all, the results from the mini-clay court season in South America were, on balance, garbage water.This week's tournament in Monte Carlo isn't even one that people care all that much about.Monte Carlo exists in a very weird place in the tennis universe. It is, technically, a Masters 1000 level event. It carries as many points as Indian Wells, or Madrid, or Shanghai. However, it is an "optional" Masters event. Thanks to the never-ending, largely inexplicable nature of how the ATP Tour functions (tl;dr, Shanghai spent a bunch of money, Monte Carlo got the short end of the stick), Monte Carlo now exists in a weird state slightly below the rest of the 1000 level tournaments. The best way of explaining what this means is that seven of the top twenty players in the world (Roger Federer, Juan Martin Del Potro, Kevin Anderson, John Isner, Sam Querrey, Jack Sock, and Hyeon Chung) aren't in the principality. The Americans listed were happy to play a 250 level event in Houston instead.As a side note, if you'd rather spend time in Houston than Monte Carlo, you should be forced to take a psych examination.The biggest tournaments of the season coming into this week thus far have been a bit of a mixed bag.The Masters events, Indian Wells and Miami, were defined by dropped seeds and uninspiring play. This serves as your reminder that we have fallen into a geohell in which John Isner is a Masters champion. The Australian Open was great. We had Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal in the semifinals, young guns announcing themselves to the world, and John Isner lost to a Challenger level, hometown player, Matthew Ebden.Monte Carlo has smashed expectations. It's been so much better than anything we've seen, or probably will see, this year.It goes from the bottom all the way up to the top.19-year old Stefanos Tsitsipas came through qualifying and easily handled Denis Shapovalov in the first round. Drawing a healthy and fresh David Goffin in the second round hides the fact that Tsitsipas is establishing himself as a legitimate clay court player. 34-year old Fernando Verdasco played two super exciting matches, and he was beyond unlucky to lose to Marin Cilic in straight sets. Verdasco was the better player for the vast majority of the match.But what matters most is the way the best players in the world have played, and nearly all of them delivered in spades in Monte Carlo this week.It does begin with Rafael Nadal, and rightly so. He missed the Sunshine Swing tournaments because of injury problems yet retains his number one world ranking because tennis is stupid, and one could have forgiven him for arriving out of form. Instead, he's his world destroying self yet again. He smashed his two unseeded opponents, but what he did against Dominic Thiem deserves its own paragraph.Thiem is the second best clay court player in the world right now. He won in Buenos Aires earlier this year for his seventh career clay court title (he's also added titles on hard court in Acapulco in 2016 and a grass court title in Stuttgart in the same year). Nadal should have had some trouble dealing with him. Instead, Nadal ground him into the red clay and spat on what was left. Nadal won 6-0, 6-2. He won 83% of points on his serve and never gave Thiem a break chance. Far more impressively, the Spaniard won 57% of points on Thiem's serve. That doesn't happen. It is as comprehensive a defeat in a match between two top-ten players you will ever watch.Grigor Dimitrov will be Nadal's semifinal opponent. He's been shaky, yes, but he is Grigor Dimitrov. We're to expect that at this point. The semifinal match between him and Nadal shouldn't be close, but Grigor has at least put himself in position to make some noise.On the other half of the draw is a matchup between Sascha Zverev, the moody wunderkind, and, shockingly, Kei Nishikori.Nishikori has been through it all over the last few years. In 2014, he made a US Open final. He made it up to fourth in the world the following year. Then his body fell apart. His latest injury, a wrist, forced him to take an extended hiatus from the tour. His route back to the ATP included playing two Challenger events in lieu of bigger, ATP level events. That's like Xander Bogaerts deciding to stay in AAA ball for a month and miss the first round of the playoffs. But here he is, in the semifinals of a Masters again. He came back from a set down against Tomas Berdych in the first round and had to take down the second seed, Marin Cilic, in the quarters.The tour is a better place with Nishikori healthy.Zverev's plenty interesting himself. He's been existing in a permanent state of moodiness over the past month or so and is yet to play a seed, but also yet to win a match in straight sets. Giles Müller, Jan-Lennard Struff, and the corpse of Richard Gasquet have all taken a set off the biggest young star in the game. It's still a good sign that his fitness is good enough for him to win three grinds in a row and that he can win without his best stuff.What we're left with is two great semifinal matches, three worthy and exciting champions, and also Grigor Dimitrov.For as top heavy as the ATP can be, we don't get a lot of tournaments where three of the top four seeds and a fourth player with top-ten level game are left at this stage of the draw. Tennis needs heavyweight match-ups every bit as much as it needs its young stars to flourish. The next three matches this weekend will all be must-see events.Clay season has set itself an awfully high bar to reach in its curtain raising event.