We’ll look at the bright side of the schedule today. No other sport gets to start fresh as often as tennis. Here we are four months into the season, and turning on my TV this morning it feels like a new day. The court is orange, the sun is out, the crowd is highly Euro, and the Mediterranean, lapping forward, surrounds everything from below. We’re in Monte Carlo again, one of the ancient capitals of the game. This is tennis on the edge, of oblivion and vacation.
The draw is generally loaded, with the notable exceptions of Americans Andy Roddick and James Blake. Since the tournament is already under way, I’ll condense my usual preview. At the top, Federer has work ahead with either Ramirez-Hidalgo or Simon, who can both play on clay, and Nalbandian in the distance. In the second quarter, I’d like to see Djokovic vs. Murray, and I can’t believe I’m looking at Sam Querrey’s name in the second round. On the other side, the man who may stand in the way of yet another Rafael Nadal title run is his countryman and two-time conqueror last year, David Ferrer. But Nadal likes nothing more than to settle his scores on dirt.
Semifinals: Nadal d. Almagro; Djokovic d. Nalbandian
Final: Nadal d. Djokovic
I caught one full match today, Andy Murray vs. Feliciano Lopez. Like the setting, the play felt fresh. Clay allows for so much more than hard courts—here we suddenly see drop shots, lobs, arcing topspin from far behind the baseline, touch battles around the net, and rallies that force both guys to cover every corner of the court.
This is the first I’ve seen of Murray in a while, maybe since he lost to Haas in Indian Wells. He’s here with an expanded entourage that includes his mom, agent, trainer, and clay coach Alex Corretja. The size of this crew makes me wonder just how confident Murray is in himself—multiple coaches, helpers, and cheerleaders is more the Martina Navratilova style than the way of a sour Scot, it seems to me.
Maybe it can be his style as well: Murray is calmer throughout the match than he ever was with Brad Gilbert. He and Lopez proceed to play as entertaining and high-quality a first-rounder as you’re likely to see. Points go generally as follows: Lopez hits his awkward, truncated, slightly leaping topspin forehand to Murray’s compact two-handed backhand, and then they move each other around until Murray gets a chance at a drop shot, at which point it becomes a mad scramble on both ends.
Murray hits a drop shot on the second point. By the fourth game, he’s hit seven of them. He drops from both sides, from any spot on the court, and from any point in a rally. He rarely, if ever, misses one, and they almost always result in him winning the point. Maybe Gilbert’s war against the Murray drop shot was misguided. The Scot doesn’t own a putaway forehand stroke—he keeps the face too closed and takes the ball too late—so the drop functions as his kill shot. He sets up points with it in mind. I’ve never seen that before and it isn’t ideal, but if he doesn't miss a drop, it’s hard to argue against it.
I’ve never liked Lopez’s game. Maybe it’s his stiff movement, rec-style serve, or spoiled aura—can a man with a face like his really be a great player? There hasn’t been a universally handsome No. 1 since Stefan Edberg, right? (I’m a bad judge, but its seems like a guy such as, say, Marat Safin is too good-looking to be the top player—the lord giveth one thing, and the lord taketh away another.) But for today I’ve changed my mind about Lopez's play. He does his best within his limits, the same kind of limits you see among club players. He pulls up on his forehand and can’t come over his backhand; most crucial, he seems constrained by self-skepticism, as if he’s waiting to lose a tight first set. Which he does. Despite playing his best and most wide-open tennis at the end of the first-set tiebreaker, he manages to lose it 7-5.
What is holding Murray back? Why is he not Djokovic? I’d say there are two reasons. First is the forehand I just mentioned. He doesn’t get under it enough to take a mid-court ball and punish it. The one common denominator among Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic is their ability to end points with their forehands whenever they have a chance. Mortals have to end points in more difficult ways. Hence the Murray drop shot.
In a broader sense, I’d say Murray has a problem with authority. Namely, his own. Tennis, like all sports involving a ball, is about what you do when you have authority over that ball. You serve and you take control; then you cede it to your opponent. Murray, with his return, fights authority well—he’s a terminal adolescent in that way. But he hasn’t learned to exercise his own authority yet. There’s a part of him that still considers himself a child in a man’s game. Like Lleyton Hewitt, he’s not a natural attacker. Murray doesn’t have point-ending power or a point-ending mentality. He typically hits his winners on the run and from defensive positions. And witness his many failed attempts to serve out matches. It happens again today. Serving at 5-2 in the second set, Murray hits two backhands from well behind the baseline that fall into the net and is broken. But he holds firm at 5-4, finishing the match with a full-swing forehand down the line, into the corner, and out of Lopez’s reach.
It’s a small step forward, the only kind in tennis, and one in a long series that must get him from fighting authority to exercising it.
