How will the 2009 World Tour Final be remembered? It might
become known as the week when Nikolay Davydenko jumped the last hurdle before his personal Grand Slam finish line. It might be recalled as the tournament where
indoor tennis lighting and photography saw their futures, by leaving the fans in darkness and
the players sculpted in spotlight. Or, the tournament's many three-set matches,
as well as the lack of dominance by any one player, might just portend a new
and much more chaotic era for the ATP tour.
We’ll see how all of that plays out. What we do know now is
that the WTF has left each of its eight participants with something to think
about over the next month. Often the indoor season has no affect on the start
of the next year—David Nalbandian, anyone?—but it did on at least one occasion, in 2004-5,
when Marat Safin built the momentum in Europe in November that he needed to win
the title in Melbourne the following January. Let’s look at what each of this
year’s Top 8 might be considering for 2010.
Nikolay Davydenko
As Davydenko stepped to the baseline to serve for the match
at 5-4 in the second set on Sunday, your first reaction might have been to worry that he
would gag. He’s tightened up many times in the past, and he usually doesn’t
have the kind of serve that can help him relax again. But for today, that all
seemed like a distant memory, a part of his first career, which had come to an
end the day before when he had beaten Roger Federer for the first time in 13
tries. This was the New Kolya, and he used his more imposing serve to hold
easily and win the biggest tournament of his career. The quickness, the
ball-striking, the efficiency, the ridiculously early contact, all of that has been there for years. The
trouble with Davydenko is that he has always been too unassuming to consider
himself a Grand Slam contender, so he has focused on playing as
much as possible and winning as much money as possible. This was a
semi-understandable attitude: After all, he probably always thought Federer would stand
in his way at the majors. Today, at 28, Davydenko finally knows that he can beat anyone. It’s time for
him to deal with that fact.
Juan Martin del Potro
He was testy and morose from the start of the final, which
is a strange reaction considering that he’d just beaten Federer in the round
robin and survived the best that Robin Soderling could throw at him over three
sets. Del Potro proved again in this event that he can persevere after losing
first sets and that he can turn himself around completely over the course of a
week. He’s like a tank; he has a big game, but it takes him a while to get it in
position to use it. In the final, del Potro didn’t react well to the magnitude
of the moment, and Davydenko didn’t give him the time he needed to get over
that first reaction and get his sights set on his target.
Roger Federer
Is it a sign of an aging championship team that they start
slowly before recovering to win in the end? It would make sense. The youthful
speed and hunger aren't there right off the bat; the players, weighed down with success, need more time to reach
top gear, to get themselves in position to hit an overhead off an overhead. It
also takes a little while for them to remember how much they don’t want to
lose. In the end, they pull a lot of games and matches out because just because they've done it so many times before. This was a theme of Federer’s performances in London. He lost the
first set in every match he played. The first two times he escaped, the next
two times he didn’t. We’ll see if this is the beginning of a pattern for the
latter part of his career.
Robin Soderling
I can remember writing more than one article for TennisMagazine in the early part of this decade naming Soderling as a snake-in-the-grass sleeper at Wimbledon. Then I started leaving him
out. Then I forgot all about him. So what changed? This past week the Alternate looked
like he'd always belonged among the best, beating Nadal and Djokovic in straight
sets and going up a break in the third set against del Potro in the semis. I
know it was indoors, where his high ball toss and long swings don’t hurt
him—the usual wild forehands were few and far between last week—but Soderling is projecting
the confidence of a guy who can replicate this performance wherever he goes.
He’s a snake in the grass, on hard courts, on clay.
Andy Murray
This wasn’t a good week for the hometown boy. He looked out
of answers against Federer; he gave away the game that might have qualified him
for the semifinals; and more than ever he seemed to have succeeded in
compressing his wide variety of strokes inside an utterly one-dimensional game.
As I’ve said, his biggest liability is his lack of a putaway forehand—Federer,
Nadal, del Potro, those are the guys who have won Slams recently, and those are
the guys with the biggest forehands around. Maybe it’s time for Murray to shift
his relatively conservative forehand grip a little to the West and see what happens.
That’s the only plausible way I can see for him make it into the weapon he
needs, in the time he has.
Novak Djokovic
The Serb said it best and worst, all in one
sentence. After winning his opening match over Davydenko, he stated that he had
finally “matured” over the last two months, but that “anything can happen on
any day” in tennis. He was right about the latter; the former remains to be
seen. Just when it seemed like Djokovic, winner of two events coming into
London, was ready to take his place at No. 2 in the world and go into 2010 on a
hot streak, he moped through a dismal two-set loss to Soderling and chucked away
his shot at the semis. Like del Potro, Djokovic, for all of his Grand
Slam-winning skill, still hasn’t shown the ability to bring all of his patience and concentration to every important match. Neither guy is the master of the moment yet.
Fernando Verdasco
Watching the other Spanish lefty in London, I generally
found myself doing two things. First I thought about how rare it is to see him grab
a rally and make it his, without resorting to an all-or-nothing stab at a winner.
If he wasn’t going for broke, he was looping the ball back in the court. Then I
waited for him to make a forehead-slapping mistake at exactly the wrong moment.
He never failed me. That said, the guy had the best year of his career and was
competitive in all of his matches at the WTF. Imagine if he ever learns to
construct points on his terms?
Rafael Nadal
One major, three Masters titles, the No. 2 ranking, maybe a Davis Cup on top. That’s a fantasy season for 99 percent of the tennis
universe. Nadal has always faded over the second half of the year, but this week
seemed particularly drastic. The old pattern was that it took him until spring to find his range, which he then kept until the U.S Open. In 2009, he
found it earlier, in Australia, and lost it earlier, in Paris. At 23, he’s got
a few more world-beating six-month runs in him.
If he doesn’t, if Nadal is the same wounded kid and Federer is
the same slow-to-the-plate old man, then the first shots of 2010 may
have been fired. The threats could now come from the old (Davydenko), the young
(del Potro, Djokovic, maybe Murray), and even the middle-aged, in the hulking
form of Soderling. One thing only is for sure: It will never get easier for Federer and Nadal to fight off the next era, to keep the chaos we saw in London at bay.
What was your favorite moment from London this week? Mine
didn’t happen on the court, or in London for that matter, but in the Stateside studio
of the Tennis Channel. Even if you’ve been watching on a different outlet, I
think you’ll appreciate it.
Near the end of the second set between Roger Federer and
Juan Martin del Potro—it may have been in the tiebreaker—Federer stepped up to
serve desperately needing a point to stay in the match, and by extension the
tournament. In the booth, Jimmy Arias stated that it was a must-win moment for
him. Approximately half a second later, Federer fired off an ace. It was a nice
shot, and an important shot, but hardly a startling one coming from him. What
was astounding was what came next: Arias did not say “that’s what champions do.” Depending on how much tennis you watch, this may not sound all that newsworthy. But I found my eyes welling with tears. Tears of joy, of freedom. I had forgotten
that a well-played shot at a crucial moment by a Grand Slam winner could be
followed up with any other words.
What was your second favorite moment from London? This one
happened on the court for me, after the match between Novak Djokovic and Rafael
Nadal. The loser, Nadal, who had finished the week 0-6 in sets and played about
as ineffectively and dejectedly as he ever has, took a moment to salute the audience,
to sign a few autographs, and even to share a respectful pat on the shoulder
with Djokovic’s father in the stands. The only thing that troubled me about
this wonderfully sporting gesture was that it looked like the kind of thing
that athletes do when they’re retiring.
OK, on to my real purpose here, to preview Saturday’s semis
at the World Tour Final—just had to share those two little tales.
Roger Federer vs. Nikolay Davydenko
Was it possible that Robin Soderling wanted to see Davydenko
in the semis rather than Novak Djokovic? You could be forgiven for wondering
after the way Soderling lost to the Russian on Friday, by hitting a sitter
forehand all the way to the backstop on match point. But that’s what round robins do, they
scramble players’ normal motivations. Andy Murray fails to hold serve when he’s
down 1-5 in the third to Federer and it costs him a spot in the semis. Djokovic
wakes up on the wrong side of the bed, goes into tank mode against Soderling,
and he’s out, too, despite having gone 2-1 and beaten Davydenko, who advanced.
The bottom line, of course, is that these guys have to know the rules of the
event and play accordingly, even if it goes against their normal tendencies.
And if you think the head-to-head record within a group should decide who moves
on, rather than total sets and total games, you’d have been stumped by Group A
this year, where Murray beat del Potro, del Potro beat Federer, and Federer
beat Murray. The only thing that was clear was that Fernando Verdasco, the guy
they all beat, wasn’t going anywhere.
So, back to Federer-Davydenko. The first stat you must know
is that Federer is 12-0 in their head to head, and that he has dropped just one
set to the Russian in their last nine matches. The second stat you must know is
that Federer is coming in with a day of rest, and Davydenko is coming in having
just finished a three-setter in the late match the night before—if there’s a
flaw with this event, it’s that scheduling quirk/issue.
Do I need to tell you a third factor in this match, or is that all we need to know?
There are all the normal caveats, of course. Federer has been up and down in
this tournament, losing at least one set in each match and starting slowly all
three times. He has rushed his forehand at certain moments and failed to serve
his way out of trouble at others. And while his obvious desire to beat Murray
resulted in him finding his best form, his obvious desire to beat del Potro
resulted in him pressing for much of their match, going to the drop shot well
once too often, and letting his frustration get the best of him in the end.
Davydenko will, as they say, having nothing to lose (until
he gets ahead, that is). And he’s way beyond due. But wasn’t that the joke about the
Generals, the team that lost to the Harlem Globetrotters on a thousand straight
nights? They stayed due for decades.
Juan-Martin del Potro vs. Robin Soderling
There isn’t a lot to go on in the head-to-head here. They’ve
split two matches, one of which came in the small Aussie Open tuneup in Auckland last
year, and the other in 2007 in Davis Cup. The key tactic is the same for both of these
long-swinging bashers: Get the other guy moving, preferably side-to-side. Each
of them is absolutely lethal when he gets a chance to set up in the middle of the court.
Del Potro is the better all around player, with a touch more
touch in the forecourt and a more penetrating backhand. His confidence and motivation were shaky at the start
of the event, but he’s steadied himself and begun to build the kind of
battering-ram momentum that he had at Flushing Meadows—while del Potro wavered in the second set against Federer on Thursday, he looked calm again
in the third. Soderling’s game has more holes, but he’s looked completely sure
of himself all week. I thought he was tired in the third against Davydenko, who lifted his machine-like game toward perfect automation near the end.
Unfortunately for both Sod and Kolya, there will be no rest for the weary on
Saturday.
How else would you expect an 11-month season to end?
Enjoy it, it’s almost over. And if it happens to end with Federer playing del Potro, won't that be an intriguing way to go out? You know Sire Jacket, I mean the Goat, doesn't want to lose to the slow-walking, slow-challenging galoot three straight times.
It's tennis time in London, but tomorrow is Thanksgiving in the States. In theory, I should be able to use this space to write an appropriately thankful post saluting someone from my tennis past. I’ve done it on
a couple of occasions here before, and when you’ve reached my lofty status as
a niche-sport blogger, you have a lot of people to thank. This year, though, as
I get ready to leave New York for a few days to visit my parents and my
sister’s family in Pennsylvania, I’ve been thinking of something more basic to
my experience with the sport: the public courts in each of those places. No,
I’m not going to say a prayer of thanks this weekend for those slabs of asphalt
and their rectangular white lines. But as darkness begins to descend at 5:00,
temperatures drop into the 40s in the Northeast, and the nets see their last
rays of sun before being folded up for the winter, let me acknowledge the
existence of three sets of those courts. Two still exist; the other
disappeared years ago.
***
The vanished courts were situated on a hillside in a
leafy, middle-class residential section of Williamsport, Pa., my hometown in
the central part of the state. They were owned by Lycoming College, a small
school in town, but along with the college’s football field they had been built a dozen or so blocks from the campus. In reality, the courts belonged to the city,
not to the school. I don’t think I ever saw a player from the college use them;
I wasn’t sure if they even had a team. So maybe it’s not surprising that the
courts were eventually removed to give the football players more room to roam.
In the 1970s and early 80s, the Lycoming courts had been the
bustling center of a Williamsport tennis scene that seems almost preposterously
thriving by today’s standards. There were 8 or 10 courts, painted green inside the
lines and red outside, which made for an appealing contrast when you stood on
the tree-lined street above and looked over them. Court time was at such a
premium that a small, red, wooden shed was erected nearby so someone could take
your reservation and, when things got too busy, arrange for singles players to
form themselves into doubles teams. This is the way it’s still done in New
York, where there seem to be about 100,000 people for every court. But it’s unimaginable at most small-town public facilities today.
This is where the city’s best players had their matches, and
where’s its biggest summer men’s tournament was held. When I was 11 or so, I
sat in the bleachers next to the football field with a fellow six-grader, Sean,
and his girlfriend, Heather—or what passes for a girlfriend at that age; after
15 weeks, Heather was still patiently waiting for Sean to kiss her for the
first time. That day I got up and walked toward the tennis courts. The idea,
understood by all three of us, was that it was time for Sean to make
his move. He never did, of course; they sat alone in those gigantic bleachers for hours
that afternoon, talking about whatever 11-years-olds talk about. At one point,
when I looked back from a distance, I saw Sean, a floppy-haired professor’s
son, holding up a brightly colored square object. He was showing Heather how he
had solved the Rubik’s Cube.
In the meantime, I wandered over to the tennis courts, where
the annual open men’s event was being played. A 14-year-old local kid name
Greg was entered that year. I’d heard that he was a great tennis player, though
I’d never seen him. I’d yet to give up baseball and basketball and commit full
time to the sport; that wouldn’t happen for another two years. It seemed amazing
to me that Greg, with his newfangled Western grip and heavy topspin, could hold
his own with grown men. We’d eventually become teammates in
high school and spend hundreds of hours practicing together on these courts.
Looking back, it’s not surprising that I ended up with a grip and a topspin
stroke almost as extreme as Greg’s.
I would eventually play with most of the guys who were in
that tournament as well. They were solid athletes who had gravitated to tennis
during its boom years, when the area’s indoor racquet club was built and new
public courts were still springing up. By my mid-teens, I had reached their
skill level, and I joined them at 6:00 each weekday after school and work on the Lycoming courts. It
felt good to be part of their club, to take over the courts with them and
show the town’s assorted hackers and slackers how the sport was played. Most
memorable, though, were my matches with Joe, a bodybuilder who was slightly
below, or outside of, Williamsport’s tennis elite. He’d fashioned his rough-edged game without
the benefit of lessons, and his stiff strokes were little more than extended
bunts. But he was fast and fit and eternally tan, a fact that he made obvious
to everyone by never wearing a shirt. Joe had no serve, but winning a baseline
game to 21 against him was an arduous task. The times when he would beat me,
he’d sit back on the sideline bench at the Lycoming courts—the hot wood must
have burned against his skin on summer days, but he never showed it—fold his hands behind his head with
a satisfied smile, and say, “You can’t touch me, lad, you don’t have it.”
Afterward, he’d drive me home in his white sports car. He’d put on his
sunglasses and pop in a tape, and while we glided downhill he'd sing along in a deep country crooner’s voice to his favorite song, Gary Stewart’s “People Out There Turning Music into
Gold.”
This weekend, I probably won’t have a reason to drive past
the spot where the Lycoming courts were. I used to jog down that street
until I was chased by a neighborhood dog, which made me give up jogging in
Williamsport forever. Now a sand field of some sort is there, a practice space
either for the football or baseball team. From what I can tell, the center of
the town’s tennis scene has moved to the local private outdoor club, whose four
Har-Tru courts sit at the city’s far eastern edge. The sport has left its
central location and retreated toward its traditional confines. With no tennis
tournament to watch on the Lycoming courts, what do 11-year-olds do during
their wingman gigs on the football-field bleachers? Instead of being becoming tennis player, they all must know how to solve the Rubik’s Cube instead.
***
In the 90s, I took my game from the courts of Central Pennsylvania to the courts in Manhattan’s Central Park; it was a big
step up in profile, and an even bigger step up in inconvenience. Suddenly I had
to get up before work to make a reservation, and each hour a loud bell rang to let us know
when our time was up and we better clear out double-quick. There was no time to waste during matches, and no time to
sit back afterward and listen to my opponent say “lad, you just don't have it.”
Not that any of my opponents in those first months could
have said that. I put my name on a bulletin board at the Park under the word
“Advanced,” but I couldn’t find anyone who fit that description. On more
than one occasion I was motivated to beat an opponent as badly as I could just
so they would never call me to play again. After a year, I stopped lugging my
racquets from my apartment downtown up to the Park.
Still, I liked the courts too much to give them up entirely.
The setting, between Central Park West and the famous Reservoir, under a canopy
of trees and overlooked by a fine clubhouse, is hard to beat—up there, you can feel like you're in a J.D. Salinger story and a Wes Anderson movie at the same time. On
either side of the clubhouse, there’s a long series of benches that run behind
four or five courts. Even if I had no desire to play, I was still drawn to the
sport, to be around it, to hear it, to see it out of the corner of my eye. I
found that it made excellent background noise for reading. One summer, maybe in
’94 or ’95, I spent many hot weekend afternoons—I had neither the means nor the
money to get to a beach in those days—reading Remembrance of Things Past. I
almost hate to admit it because it sounds absurdly pretentious, but I can’t go
back in time and put a James Patterson novel in my hand. Plus, the Central Park
courts will always be tied up in my mind with the huge, heavy, 1,000-page silver editions
of Proust that I carried there. And their dense rectangles of text—you could go for
15 minutes without coming to a new paragraph—will forever be linked with the sound of tennis balls popping off racquets on green humid Manhattan days. I would read Proust’s series of novels off and on for years, on beaches, in backyards, under lamps at 3:00 A.M. When I finally got to the last page a decade later,
my fingers started to shake; it felt like an historic event. But I never loved it as much as I did at the Central Park tennis courts.
***
In the mid-90s, I moved to Brooklyn and forgot about those
afternoons with Marcel. It wasn’t until this summer that I rediscovered the
pleasures of hanging out and reading within sight and sound of public tennis
courts. My girlfriend Julie and I got into the habit of walking to the park in the
Ft. Greene neighborhood on weekends. The south side of the park is dominated by 10 or
so green hard courts surrounded by handsome black fencing. If the quality of
play here leaves something to be desired—I’ve never seen people play tennis in
shoes before—there’s also a sense of camaraderie among the regulars. In a big
city, tennis provides a social niche without the enforced exclusivity of a
club. The courts are one public place where you know you’ll see a few familiar
faces on a Saturday afternoon.
The biggest diehard in Ft. Greene this year was a guy in his
20s with long blonde hair and a roosterish strut. He was a Rafa fan all the way.
He sported the sleeveless shirt, the white bandana, and the Babolat; though the white
socks pulled halfway up his lower leg was his addition. He was a big guy and he
walked on court with his chest out. But despite his protracted, herky-jerky
windup, he had a shockingly tame serve. I thought he was going to blast the
ball over the court, but he played careful, short-stroke tennis. And he loved doing it.
Julie and I nicknamed him Joe Pro and speculated on what his unseen wife, Jane Pro, might wear to the courts. If he wasn’t already there when we arrived, we waited impatiently for that sidewinding strut to appear
over the top of the hill at the far end of the park—he looked he
couldn’t wait to see what was going on at the courts. One day we saw the strut
in the distance, but Joe Pro was in his street clothes. He roostered his
way over to his buddies, who asked him why he wasn’t in his Rafa gear. “I’m
taking the day off,” he said, “but I wanted to check it out over here anyway.”
A guy who doesn’t just like to play tennis, but who likes being
around tennis courts even when he's not playing. Thanks, Joe, for letting me know I’m not alone.
The WTF is a winner so far. I like the stagy lighting and
the shimmering blue court. I’ve been impressed by the officiating. I’ve
enjoyed seeing the guys in their schoolboy ties. And I’ve liked watching them
play their matches over the first three days; while none will go down as
classics, they’ve been close, back and forth contests, and of far higher
quality than what you get in the opening rounds at a normal single-elimination
event. Most of all, after the years in Shanghai’s cavern, I’ve relished the
sight of people occupying every one of this stadium’s 17,500 seats for each
singles match. The spectators may be hard to find in the dark, and they have a
tendency to get up and walk around whenever they please; but you know that
there’s a lot of them there, and that’s enough to make what’s happening on the
court seem important and worth watching. London has elevated the men’s tour and
done justice to the achievements of its top eight players. What would it take
to get the women inside the same arena over the same week? Then we’d finally have an
event we could call the fifth major.
For now, though, the WTF is just a few days into a
five-year London run. And you never know how the quality and commitment will hold up
in a round-robin event after certain players clinch their berths in the
semifinals. What else has it shown us so far?
Juan Martin del Potro looks unsure
The impression I’ve gotten from the Argentine in his first
two matches is that he’s had to convince himself to be fully invested in this
tournament. I don’t know if it was the setting or the moment or what, but he looked nervous even during the coin toss before his first
match, against Andy Murray. And he played like it to start. When del Potro
immediately went down 0-3 and called for the trainer, I thought disaster was
about to strike and he was about to DQ from his third straight event.
Which made me wonder: Are del Potro’s defaults a result of physical, or mental,
fragility? Do they happen because he’s hesitant about putting himself on the
line? I don’t know, but as good a competitor as he can be, he doesn’t appear to always love the battle.
Still, against
Murray he soldiered his way out of his funk and gave the match his
best. And his momentum has grown from there: Del Potro won the second set of
that match and beat Fernando Verdasco in a third-set tiebreaker today. He
should be invested now.
Andy Murray and Roger Federer are off the air
The lights, the court, the crowd, it peaked with the match between Murray and Federer this evening. You could see that both guys were treating this with Slam-like seriousness, to the point where I thought that Murray might be a little over-juiced to start. But it was Federer who was rushing in the first set, pulling the trigger too early with his forehand. After six games, he had eight unforced errors and one winner from that side. Meanwhile, it looked like it could be a watershed moment for Murray. He was doing what he always does—that is, nothing spectacular, except mixing up depths, spins, and trajectories. But he was doing it at the WTF, in London, against Federer. If anything was going to make him feel like he could perform his best at a major—other than performing his best at a major, that is—it was winning this match.
A few days ago, Federer said that despite his losing record against Murray, their matches were always on his racquet. And it was true again today. Murray is like a lock for Federer to pick; he has to find and execute just the right combination of pace, angle, surprise, and consistency to put the ball past the Scot, who moves so well, recovers so well, and reads rallies so well. In the second set, using his first serve as the starting point, Federer found that combination by waiting a few shots to go for the inside-out forehand; by sending a ground stroke deep but not too close to the lines and following it to the net for a volley winner; by chipping and charging on a second serve at break point. Unfortunately, I don't know what he did after that; at 3-1 in the third, my TV and Internet connections both cut out. But since Federer ran it out 6-1, I’m going to go ahead and say that he ended the match in his finest form since the first set of the U.S. Open final.
Murray was left with nowhere to go in the third. At 1-1, he tried to take the offensive, and the result was an overcooked backhand long and a rushed forehand into the middle of the net. For the moment, he lacks the transition game that will let him put all of his vaunted touch and variety to use in the forecourt. Turning a match around by turning up the heat from the baseline isn't an option for him. Will this end up being a watershed match for Federer in their rivalry instead?
Novak Djokovic was good enough to survive
Djokovic, the hottest player coming into this event, lost
the first set to Nikolay Davydenko yesterday. It goes to show that you can
never anticipate anyone’s form on any given day, no matter how well they’ve
been playing. That said, I thought Djokovic was hitting the ball well even when
he was behind. More important, though, his recent run of good form gave him a
sense that he should win this match. The last time he played Davydenko, a month
or so ago, Djokovic had lost in a third-set tiebreaker. This time he stepped
over the clutter of his own errors; he didn’t let his frustration get the
better of him even after he was broken at 5-4 in the third; and he stayed just
steady enough to let Davydenko self-destruct in the final two games. Djokovic
used to have his sights set on being No. 1. He still does, but he also knows
that he has to become No. 2 first, and that he can do that this week.
Rafael Nadal appears to be a shadow of himself
That also means that the current No. 2 could end the year lower than that for the first time since 2004. Thinner, hunched over farther, quicker to shake his head
despondently, his smile more tentative, Nadal seems to have reached a low point
in London, and the whole sport feels a little deflated because of it. His
answer to Robin Soderling’s high strike zone was to go to the slice more.
That’s not a bad idea against a tall guy, but Nadal’s slice is never going to
win him matches. Like most players with two-handed backhands, he backs up and
hacks at it rather than smoothly carving through it from high to low and back
to high. In Australia at the start of the season, Nadal seemed to be improving
his form and getting his slice to buzz through the court with some
speed—remember the shots he produced against Verdasco in the semis? I haven’t
seen those this fall.
Nadal has the right attitude about it all. After his loss to
Soderling, he admitted that the rest of this year would be tough, that he’s lacking
confidence and his favorite term, “calm,” but that he’ll be motivated to prove
himself again at the start of 2010. Based on his record over the years, we can
only believe him. But at the same time, Nadal has always relied on an
otherworldly perseverance and stores of youthful energy—rather than, say, free
points on his serve—to see him through. When will those youthful stores be
tapped.
Jimmy Arias is a welcome change of pace
I’d forgotten how much I liked the snarky Arias in the
booth. He’s funny, he’s not obtrusive, he’s not afraid to rip guys, he knows
his tactics but doesn’t pretend there’s more to the sport than there really is,
he reads body language well, and he doesn’t go overboard in his praise of the
top guys, including Federer. What’s surprising to me is how well he knows the
players' histories. During the Federer-Verdasco match, Arias claimed that Verdasco belted
serves 135 when he first came on tour, but that he spun them in at 105 now
because he didn’t trust his second serve. I had trouble believing that Mr.
Sauce had ever hit anything 135 miles per hour, until he did exactly that at
the end of his match with Federer, much to the delight of Arias.
This month the world celebrated the 20th
anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. Do you remember where you were when
it happened? I have no clue myself. My only explanation is that I was in
college.
I was spending a semester at Pomona, a liberal arts school
in the dry hills east of Los Angeles. The fall of the wall, the raising of the
Iron Curtain, the execution of Ceausescu, the Velvet Revolution: I knew all of
it was happening, and I knew that it was thrilling and utterly
improbable in equal measures. This was a revolt that seemed to have been
devised and carried out in about 30 seconds—history hadn’t changed, hadn’t
changed, hadn’t changed . . . and then it had all changed at once. Everything I’d
known about the world for my first 19 years was gone.
But the upheavals of 1989 existed at more of a remove from
my daily life than they would if they were happening today. Anyone who
remembers being in college knows that your priorities get spun in circles and
turned upside down during those four years in ways that are incomprehensible to
most adults. Including me. These days, on my way to the gym, I pass a small university in Brooklyn. In front of one of the dorms, no matter how cold it is,
no matter what time of day it is, I never fail to see kids hanging outside the
front doors in pajamas and flip-flops, bleary-eyed and smoking, hugging and
texting, looking as if time has lost all meaning for them. Which shouldn’t be
surprising, considering that they have so much of it on their hands. It almost
seems like a cruel trick to play on young people, most of whom have had their
youths regimented to the millisecond.
Time-management wasn’t a problem for me at Pomona. I was a
junior in the fall of ’89, there for just one semester in an exchange with my
normal school. California had seemed more my speed as a 19-year-old than
typical exchange destinations like Grenoble or Glasgow. What I didn’t expect
was that my outsider status at Pomona would motivate
me in new ways. On my own, I could create my own priorities and interests, my
own regimented schedule, without having to worry about the judgments of anyone
around me. I had all that time on my hands, but I didn’t have to waste any of
it creating a campus identity for myself or whiling away the hours smoking and
hugging in my pajamas.
I could spend an hour in the library tracking down and
poring over a book of criticism or poetry—or my bible of that moment, Hunter S.
Thompson’s Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas—that
had nothing to do with any of my classes, and not have to run into someone who
would call me a slacker for it. It was these deep-library discoveries,
which expanded on my natural interests and inclinations, that made me want to
write in the first place. I could also meet people from varying spheres of life
around campus—frat guys, prep-school snobs, black-shoed Lou Reed fanatics,
caffeinated literary types, grizzled Deadheads from the desert, fellow Spy
Magazine obsessives, people who liked to play Centipede, even regular Joes with
no distinctive traits whatsoever—and feel free to hang out with them without
making any social statements or offending any friends. If I happened to hear
Bob Dylan’s “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues”—my anthem of the moment—blaring
across the campus from a dorm window on a warm night, I could knock on the guy’s door, whoever
he happened to be, and stand in his room with his friends and listen to the
song until its end, all of us with our hands in our pockets, tapping our feet
and nodding our heads slightly, smiling at the genius of Robert Zimmerman. Then
I could leave without saying a word. Or, on a weekend afternoon, I could pile
into a van another set of kids and go to the beach. One of them, a barrel-chested,
wild-haired hippie with a perpetually beatific grin, would demand that the rest of us run, bellowing, straight into the cold October Pacific water with him.
What I did more than anything, and as much desire as I
have before or since, was train for tennis. In
the past, I’d never been able to lift weights for more than a few minutes
without feeling both self-conscious and totally asinine.
But I began to look forward to the painful strain of it that fall. I’d never
considered getting up at 8:00 A.M. to do crosscourt drills before I went to
class. But I learned to love this as well, the satisfaction of getting a jump
on the morning. Part of it was the freedom I had to make my days up; another part
of it must have been the weather. Even now when I make my annual pilgrimage to
Indian Wells in California, the sight of blue sky and sun outside my window
when I wake up is enough to pull me out of bed on the spot. (Such is not the
case in Brooklyn right now, where I wake up to the sight of newly bare trees
and ever-grayer skies.) That early day satisfaction in California was
particularly acute on weekends, when, on my walk back to my room, I’d pass the
large TV in my dorm's lobby. There I’d see a dozen guys slouched on various
couches, watching football. This was how I’d spent innumerable weekend days in
the past. Now it seemed like a criminal waste of time.
I played mostly with Paul Cross, who was Pomona’s No. 1 and was ranked in the Top 5 in Division III. (I was somewhere in the teens or 20s at
the time, I think.) He was a funny black-haired frat guy and a good athlete. We
worked hard that fall, emphasizing the drudgery: crosscourt drills, volley
drills, practice sets, and the dreaded I-go-crosscourt-you-go-down-the-line
baseline death march. It was all made bearable by the bright sky and Southern
California’s trademark bald brown hills, which rose in the distance and looked
extra-terrestrial to me. (I think they reminded me of sets from the original Star
Trek.) Now I knew why California had produced so many legendary tennis players.
Not only could you play outdoors all year round, but the sunshine, seemingly
cranked up by a weather machine each morning, could make even the most arduous
aspects of practice enjoyable.
On many evenings, after class and dinner, I came back to the
empty courts to run lines, one more part of the typical tennis regimen that I’d
largely ignored out of laziness. In this drill, you start on the
doubles sideline and sprint back and forth to each of the other lines across
the court—near singles sideline, service T, far singles sideline, far doubles
sideline—for however long you can take it. I started around dusk, which cast a
blue glow on everything around me. The music on my Walkman was
always the Clash’s London Calling; I’d recently graduated from their trebly,
croaking first album, which had finally died in my tape player from overuse.
London Calling was
better college music anyway; by which I mean, girls liked it. At Pomona, I’d
put the CD in at a friend’s party and immediately found myself in a fervent
conversation with a brown-haired girl in black Chuck Taylors who seemed to like
the Clash to the exclusion of anything else on earth. I used to cringe when I’d
remember what we’d said, things like, “‘Death or Glory’ is soamazing.” But now,
when I hear the brisk drum roll that opens “Spanish Bombs,” when its ringing opening guitar lines come in out of nowhere on my IPod as I’m walking around Manhattan, the memory of us
leaning awkwardly against a movie poster and holding beer cups in that dorm
room in 1989 seems almost poignantly cool. College may turn your priorities
upside down, it may turn you into a flip-flop-wearing hug machine, but it also
surrounds you with youth and music and possibilities and the future in a way
that's never repeated in your adult working life.
The Clash were perfect for running lines as well. London
Calling was long, there were no songs you needed to fast forward, and there was that moment at the end of “Rudie Can’t Fail,” one of the most
glorious in rock, when Mick Jones interjects a new, expansive tempo with
his voice: “Rooo-deee can’t fail!” It always happened just as I was starting to
get tired, and it always inspired me to pick the pace back up.
I went back to the East Coast and my regular school,
Swarthmore, the following spring. Our tennis team was ranked No. 2 in
the country in Division III, and we were going to host the NCAA Championships
that May. We’d lost in the final the year before, 5-4, to UC-Santa Cruz. I
hadn’t played well, or anywhere close to my potential; I hadn’t practiced hard.
I'd lost my singles match in the final, then snapped out of it in time to help my
partner and I win in doubles. But it was too late. I sat in the stands above
the famous courts in Kalamazoo, Michigan, where we playing the nationals,
and watched our No. 1 doubles team lose in three close sets. I knew it had been
my fault.
The next spring, when I got back from Pomona, I would have my
best college season, winning most of my matches at No. 2 singles and doubles.
The foundation I’d put down in the fall had supported me through the year.
Whenever I get annoyed at hearing the pros complain about the lack of an
off-season, I remember how that full fall of workouts and practices at Pomona
stayed with me, how it continued to help my game seven months later. There’s no
question that a longer off-season would improve the quality of pro tennis.
At the NCAAs, I reversed my performance of the previous year
by winning all of my singles matches. The team had been going through two-a-day
practices for weeks before the tournament, and by the time the event started
the ball looked like a basketball to me as it came over the net toward me. We reached the
final again in front of our home fans. Waiting there for us again was Santa Cruz. It rained the day
of the match, so we had to play it at a nearby indoor club. We thought our
home-court advantage was lost, but hundreds of students showed up anyway. We could hear them banging on the glass whenever we won a point. I won my match
at No. 2, and we swept to a 5-1 win and the D. III title. The memories of the
previous year’s failure had been wiped away. At a time
when the political world around us was completely new, an old fact had been confirmed
for me: Success, winning, excellence—it’s a process. You really did have to sow before you could reap, but that heightened the satisfaction in the end.
That evening we received the winner’s trophy at a banquet
for all the teams. It was the same brown, rectangular NCAA plaque that the college
basketball champs hold up each year on TV. We walked back to our seats slowly, smiling, trying to get the most out of the moment, a little stunned that a
seemingly impossible goal had been accomplished. Sitting in the
aisle near our table was Paul Cross. He didn’t look up as I approached. Pomona
had been upset in the first round, and he was slouched all the way down in his
chair. As I got closer, he raised his forearm and put his hand up at the side of his face, like an Indian saying “How.” I wasn’t sure what he was doing
at first, and he still hadn't glanced at me. But from up close I could see that his lips were set in a crooked,
rueful, sincere smile. He knew I was coming. He was giving me a high five.
We like to say that certain tournaments on certain occasions
are wide open, that there are no clear-cut favorites or safe bets.
But usually anything can’t happen. Usually there’s a player—his name might be Roger
Federer—who at least qualifies as the default choice to hold up
the champion’s trophy in the end. But I don’t think we can say that for the
ATP’s year-ending World Tour Finals, which makes its London debut on Sunday.
The long, winding, always-surprising 2009 season has left us with eight—OK, maybe
seven; OK, maybe six—guys with legitimate shots at winning the year’s last
and most lucrative title.
Each of them stands at some kind of crossroads. The
world No. 1 hasn’t had much juice in his last two matches. The guy with all the
momentum might be gassed. The guy who has been gassed might be
motivated to back up his breakthrough Slam win. The home favorite is still a
question mark at tournaments of this magnitude. The player with
the lowest ranking, who backed in as an alternate, might have the most favorable draw of anyone.
All of this is to be welcomed, and all of it is as it should
be in a draw that bans anyone outside of the Top 10. There’s no easing into the event and finding your form
here. All of this also seems appropriate for a tournament with these three
particular initials. What the heck is going to happen in London? No, WTF is
going to happen in London.
Group A
Roger Federer, Andy Murray, Fernando Verdasco, Juan Martin
del Potro
This is what we get to wind up the 11-month season? Group A and Group B? The ATP has taken bland to new heights when it comes to naming its fearsome year-end foursomes. What happened to Group Awesome and Group Superb? Too wrestling, I guess.
Group A is nominally Federer’s section to lose, though he's
vulnerable to both Murray and del Potro. Which Federer will show up? Will he
have the energy and hunger to lift himself out of his Paris doldrums? I can see
three reasons why he will. (1) He’s already come out of deeper doldrums this
season and recaptured every bit of his best form. (2) A four-time winner and one-time runner-up, Federer, like regular WTF champ Pete Sampras before him, is motivated by the
presence of his closest competitors. And like anyone else, he’s comfortable playing
guys he’s steamrolled on multiple occasions in the past. (3) Finally, as he said afterward, Federer didn’t play all
that poorly in Paris in the first place. He lacked initiative and pop on his strokes, but Julien Benneteau took the match to him in front of his home crowd.
Speaking of which, how will Andy Murray hold up in front of
his own countrymen? He has never seemed overly awed by the atmosphere at Wimbledon,
though I did feel he was more agitated and tentative than normal by the time
the semis came around this year. Of course, the WTF is not Wimbledon. Maybe
the not-quite-insane level of pressure that Murray will feel next week will help him without making him tight. He’s beaten Federer and del Potro this year, and
while he lost to Verdasco in Australia, I wouldn’t expect a repeat performance of that.
Next question: Which del Potro will show up? All I’m asking for now is
that he lose a match without retiring first, which is how he’s gone out in his
last two events. Does the big man wish he were already on a beach, away from all of his new fans and new expectations? Or does he want to make us remember he’s the
U.S. Open champ and leave one last stamp on his breakout season? Either way, I’m ready to see that monster forehand get revved up again.
Semifinalists: Federer, Murray
Group B
Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic, Nikolay Davydenko, Robin
Soderling
B is for beta male, right? That’s hardly the case with
Djokovic at the moment. The defending WTF champion is riding a two-tournament
win streak, one that includes wins over Federer and Nadal. Will fatigue, be it mental or physical, do him in? Djokovic himself has said that
he'll need to find some energy for one last push. But I think he’s relishing his return
to world-beating form—that vein-straining celebration in Paris, anyone?—too much to let it get away from him so easily in London. The draw is also generally favorable to Djokovic. He
outclassed Nadal last week, he’s beaten Soderling twice this fall, and he lost
a third-set tiebreaker to Davydenko in Shanghai last month. Most important,
Djokovic has played his best tennis of the season in the last two months, most of
it indoors. After last year he knows he can survive the Top 8 at this
event.
On paper, it looks grim for Nadal. He’s lost to all three of
these guys the last time he’s played them, and he’s struggled just to stay in matches with the
world’s best competition since his knee injury and his parents' divorce in the spring. When he gets down early these days, he seems to get discouraged more easily than he did in the past. At the same time,
few picked Rafa to win the Aussie Open at the start of 2009; he has
a habit of coming up with his best stuff just when you think all is lost. Still, he's never done it at this event, where he has yet to reach a final. And while
a run to the title match could give Nadal his No. 1 ranking back—how is that
possible?—his priority right now is being ready for the Davis Cup final the
following weekend.
The guy with the best draw might be the guy who
wasn’t supposed to be here, Robin Soderling. The Sod, ranked No. 9 but upgraded
when Andy Roddick pulled out, can beat Nadal, as we know; he took a 6-1 set
from Djokovic in Paris; and he has developed a bizarre hex on Davydenko over
the last three years, winning five of their last six matches. He also likes
to play indoors. Is this destined to be the Week of the Sod?
Like I said, it's WTF time.
Semifinalists: Djokovic, Soderling
Semifinals: Djokovic. d. Federer; Murray d. Soderling
Final: Djokovic d. Murray
Enjoy the last tournament for a couple of months. It should have more than it's share of twists and turns. The opening matches are on Tennis Channel live starting Sunday at 7:30 A.M. EST.
We thought this would be the generation of the giant. We hoped it would be the generation of the stylishly versatile. We, or at least I, have feared that it could turn into the generation of the nice. But after three hours of watching Novak Djokovic and Gael Monfils labor their way through the final in Bercy on Sunday, I think I know what to call this current crop of male pros: the Generation of the Heavy Breather. Both guys spent long periods sucking wind—Monfils through his mouth, Djokovic up his nose. Add fellow air seeker Andy Murray to this mix and you can see this sport is taking up its share of the world's oxygen these days.
Fatigue was to be expected, considering what the two finalists had been through to get there. Monfils had won his previous two matches 6-4 in the third, while Djokovic was deep into his second straight full week of play, having beaten Roger Federer in Basel the Sunday before. By the third set yesterday, all of that tennis had taken its toll on the quality of play. After a 43-shot rally to end the second game, both players staggered through a final set that was largely decided by breaks of serve, double faults, missed returns, and exhaustion.
If they weren’t at their best physically, though, Monfils and Djokovic made up it for it emotionally. After winning a crucial point, the Frenchman would spin, grimace, beat his heart with his racquet, and demand that the Parisian fans get to their feet. For once, one of their tennis players had them under his thumb. At the same time, Djokovic fought—himself, his opponent, the moment—with the life-or-death ferocity that had once made him look like the game’s next No. 1 player. His muscle-straining celebration after match point was memorable because it went beyond joy or relief and into the territory of primal release. That’s the other thing about this generation: The code of gentlemanly behavior no longer precludes wearing your heart way out on your sleeve—or going past your sleeve and pointing to your biceps, if you’re so inclined. And the sport is more colorful for it.
Still, for 45 minutes this match looked like it would have no color at all. Djokovic built a speedy 6-2, 3-0 lead by doing just what he had done the day before to Rafael Nadal: He took the ball early and made changing directions with it look like child’s play. Djokovic didn’t need to take the full-blooded, down-the-line swipes he’s famous for; he kept the pressure on with plenty of margin for error.
At the same time, Monfils, as is often the case, couldn’t locate the balance between control and aggression. He veered too far in each direction. During his first service game, Monfils rallied passively. On two occasions, Djokovic took advantage of that and pushed him far into his forehand corner. Both times Monfils, rather than sending back something high and safe, let loose with risky down-the-line bullets that ended up in the net. He was broken, the first set was over 15 minutes later, and it looked Djokovic’s momentum from the previous day would be enough to carry him through.
But if Monfils struggles to find a tactical balance, Djokovic struggles to find one mentally. I speculated last week that Grand Slams are difficult for the Serb because over two weeks he expends so much emotionally, goes through so many ups and downs, has to overcome so much frustration, that he can be spent by the semifinals. By Sunday, he was trying to survive another long two weeks, ones in which he had knocked off both Federer and Nadal. He almost didn’t make it. Up a break in each of the last two sets, Djokovic became oddly negative, slump-shouldered, and testy; he’d lost the balance. As the third-set tiebreaker began, he almost looked resigned to defeat.
This attitude likely came from two factors: (1) Djokovic couldn’t forget the fact that he had lost four Masters finals this year, plus an epic semifinal in a third-set tiebreaker against Nadal in Madrid; and (2) He’s not used to being the clear favorite at this type of tournament. His earlier final-round defeats had come to Nadal (twice), Federer, and Murray. It was hard to imagine either Federer or Nadal, two born front-runners, giving away two big leads in one match to Monfils. This doesn't prove that Djokovic is a choker; rather, it proves how hard it is to win the matches you're supposed to win, and how rare it is to have a guy like Federer who has made it look so routine for so long. Maybe this breakthrough in Paris will make crossing the finish line a little easier for Djokovic in the future. What's more likely, though, is that he'll always struggle to keep his emotions in check.
What does this tournament mean for Monfils? I criticized his flash-over-substance style at the U.S. Open this year, but last week he came as close as he ever has to giving us both. Yes, he went for between-the-legs shots. Yes, he tried his share of jumping forehands. Yes, he threw his arms in the air to get a rise from the crowd at inadvisable moments. And yes, he lost. But his comebacks from the brink on Sunday were impressive and encouraging for two separate reasons.
In the second set, Monfils found the elusive balance between control and aggression by attacking Djokovic’s short second serves, and by using high-bouncing semi-moonballs to work his way into offensive positions in rallies. The latter, a tactic that tied up Andy Roddick at Roland Garros, is a smart way for Monfils to take advantage of his length and leverage without having to leave his comfort zone on the baseline too soon. Few guys can generate the kind of spin and trajectory that he can; it's time for him to make the most of these assets.
Then, in the third set, just when he looked out of gas and out of the match, Monfils leaned on his first serve to get him to the tiebreaker. With Djokovic shaking his head, I thought we were about to see the emergence of a new Monfils: Gael the survivor, the cagey match player, the winner. Instead, he locked up in the breaker and gave the initiative back to Djokovic. The Frenchman didn’t gag away the tiebreaker, but he suddenly lacked a surefire way to win a point, to work himself forward. When it counted, Monfils lost his balance, while Djokovic found his.
They’ve played better matches, but this tournament was a step forward for each guy. If Monfils can give us this much substance in the future, if he can find his way through the close ones, I won’t complain about the pointless flash, the empty calories anymore—I’ll be able to say “that’s Gael being Gael” with a smile rather than a sigh. And really, would we want to see the guy intentionally not hit a forehand from 10 feet in the air? As for Djokovic, I was heartened, if a little frightened, by the return of his family and their us-against-the-world rooting style in Paris—even his girlfriend looked like she was ready to mix it up. If they keep him this motivated, if he tastes the top again, if he can tip his mental balance from frustration back to the hunger he had in 2007, we won’t have to worry about this generation being too nice. If Djokovic and Monfils keep playing matches like this one in 2010, all we'll have to worry about is that there's enough oxygen around to keep them on their feet.
If you like your tennis tournaments to have the air of a three-ring circus, this has been the week for you. The Masters event in Bercy has stood logic on its head on a daily basis. Take the bittersweet case of local journeyman Julien Benneteau. Buoyed by his home-country crowd in Paris, he was transformed into a balletic volleying machine and blubbering giant-killer one day, only to be returned to his normal status as an underpowered, stoical third-round loser less than 24 hours later.
Wild swings of fortune are the inevitable result of the compact, six-day Masters format. If you were a player, you'd probably say this format also unfairly punishes those who get the short end of the scheduling stick. And it's true, these events are perversely compressed. The top guys don’t get started until Wednesday, and then they must go at it every day from there. This led to disaster for Andy Murray, who didn’t get off the court until after midnight against James Blake in the second round. Predictably, he showed up the next afternoon half-comatose and lost to Radek Stepanek. He was so out of it, he didn’t even let the Irritator get under his skin. So disappointing.
Otherwise, from a fan's perspective, the tournament has been whiplash-inducing, and more fun for it. At this point in the season, the ATP script has been thrown out the window. Even second-seeded Rafael Nadal’s trip to the semifinals has been an unlikely adventure. I’ve been trying to discern a few trends in all of it, but by the next day they’ve been reversed. So I’ll just wing it with the observations. It’s that kind of week.
Late Season Looks
It used to be Andy Roddick who would show up at the European fall events looking a little worse for wear, his hair a little longer than usual, his baseball hat an inch farther out of place. This year, with Roddick looking for apartments near my Brooklyn neighborhood, it was left to defending champion Jo-Wilfred Tsonga to carry the scruffy late-season baton. His hair was wild—it made him look much taller—but so was his play at the wrong moments today against Nadal. I’d say the same for Gael Monfils' hair, but his late-season look lasts all year long.
Speaking of Rafa, first it was sleeves, then it was the pink shirt, now it’s the plaid pants. He’s going overboard to shed the warrior look. I like the plaid—bold and loud will always be his style—but can a man win a Grand Slam title in those? Maybe that’s why he debuted them at this point in the season, and why they’ll likely be gone by January.
Keep It High and Tight to Jo-Willie
Back to Tsonga for a second. What is unique about the man’s game? He's one of the few players who are much better diving for a volley than hitting one when they can set up. Get the ball away from him and he’s deadly; few others, Pete Sampras notably excepted, have made the athletic moves Tsonga makes in tracking down a passing shot. But like Sampras, he volleys with his legs rather than his hands. Send the ball right at him and chances are he’ll carve under it too much and pop it up. On the first point of the final game, Nadal mishit a pass that ended up diving right into Tsonga's body. Unable to move into it, the Frenchman stoned it 10 feet wide.
Sod’s Dream Dies. . . For This Year
Robin Soderling has come a long way in 2009, but his old weakness—maddening inconsistency—caught up with him just a few inches shy of the finish line. He lost in three sets today to Novak Djokovic, thereby ending his bid for a spot in the World Tour Final in two weeks (unless Roddick is still apartment hunting, that is; then the Sod would be fired into the London draw). But think about Soderling’s Grand Slam season—he lost to Federer at three of them, and two of those losses were in very tight, tiebreaker-heavy matches. Soderling is still only 25, and after this year he must finally believe he belongs in the latter stages of majors. I’ve even started to like watching him play—concentrate on the arms and the swing, ignore the legs. Look no farther for your major-title dark horse for 2010.
Del Potro Gets Back to Business
There are players, like Tsonga and Monfils and Soderling, who at some point in a match will become mentally unsettled and miss a series of critical shots. Then there are players, like Murray and Verdasco and Simon and Robredo, who don’t grab a match and make it theirs. Neither group wins a lot of big tournaments. Then there’s a guy like del Potro, who’s tenacious enough to stop a bad run of errors before it hurts him, and explosive enough to grab the reins in the middle of any rally. His confidence in his ground strokes can be astounding. Serving at 4-4, 30-30 against Marat Safin in the second round, he took a deep mid-court return from Safin and, rather than doing the safe thing and looping back a rally ball, drilled it inside out for a winner. This was a tougher shot than it looked because del Potro had no natural angle to work with; he had to create it himself. At the same time, it wasn’t a wild, all-or-nothing stab designed to get the rally over with one way or the other. It was the immediate, unthinking reaction of a guy who knows he can hit any shot from any part of the court. Those are the kinds of players who win big tournaments.
Rafa Comes Out of His Shell
Was it Woody Allen who said that 99 percent of life was about showing up? That would certainly explain the continued success of both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. They keep their noses down, go about their business, put themselves in contention, and let the rest of the world self-destruct around them. That’s been a key to Federer’s major-title wins in 2009, and it’s been the key to Nadal’s semifinal run in Bercy. In each of his first two rounds, his opponents, Almagro and Robredo, served for the match. Nadal upped his game just enough each time and let their nerves do the rest. Neither had ever beaten their fellow Spaniard, and that’s a tough obstacle to clear no matter how well you might be playing. Like an incumbent running for office or a boxing champion in a close bout, a player like Federer or Nadal will always reap the benefits of status. As Tommy Haas and Nicolas Almagro now know, you have to land the knockout punch against them.
I wrote at the beginning of the week that Nadal needs to sweat his way into a tournament before he can play his best. I just didn’t know how much sweat it would require. Rafa was in his default defensive mode, his feet firmly planted behind the baseline, through his first two rounds and well into the first set against Tsonga. But after saving three break points, he began to come out of his shell bit by bit. Nadal served better to end the first set, which put him inside the court to hit his ground strokes, which in turn led him to stay aggressive—he looked for winners with his forehand and bailed on the defensive backhand slice he’d been using earlier in the week. Even after all of his successes, it still takes Rafa time to show himself that he can win by taking control of points. It still takes him time to believe that he really is pretty good.
Best entrance music of the week: Prince’s “Erotic City” before the Nadal-Tsonga match. What was that about?
Marat TV: Final Episodes
I’ll leave you with two last Safin clips, both of which took place in Paris. That’s about all they have in common. Man of the people, that's all I'll say. Enjoy the weekend.
The long, ragged farewell was brought to a suitable end
today. Marat Safin, 6-foot-4 champion of the past, lost his last match to a 6-foot-5 champion of
the future, Juan Martin del Potro. You might say a
torch was passed—both guys beat all-time champions at the U.S. Open as 20-year-olds to win their
first majors—except that I’m not sure del Potro is looking to pick this particular torch up and run with it.
But Safin’s loss was appropriate, and so was the manner in which
it transpired. As usual, he showed flashes of flowing brilliance, and as usual,
he couldn’t summon them at the very end of a tight match. For today, let’s
remember one of the exceptions to that Safin rule, the best match he ever
played, and one where he summoned his flowing brilliance all to the way into the 15th round.
If any match is worthy of a music-video treatment, if was
Safin’s 9-7-in-the-fifth-set win over Roger Federer, the man he called
“the Federer,” in the semifinals of the 2005 Australian Open. That’s the treatment it
gets here, to the tune of the Who’s “Baba O’Reilly.” And once you get used to it, it does add a certain momentum
to these highlights. My favorite line from the song—“I don’t need to be
forgiven”—might even sum up Safin’s career as he walks away.
—Unlike most YouTube highlight reels, this one doesn’t show
entire points. It’s cut all the way down to the memorable strokes. It gives you
an idea of what these guys were doing best that day, and how many shots still
stick in the collective tennis memory from this match.
—On Federer’s side, there’s a drop shot that’s threaded so
finely it can only be described as vicious. There’s a shot-hop backhand pass
that could be sent off in a time
capsule as an example of his smoothness under pressure. There’s a skyhook
overhead, and an inside-out backhand return winner that seems to shock Safin.
And there’s the ill-advised tweener he tried at match point in the fourth set.
He didn’t need to hit it, and the choice cost him.
—On Safin’s side, there’s a half-volley drop shot winner that shows off McEnroe-like touch. There are numerous thudding backhands up the line,
culminating in the best of the evening, the one that brought Federer to his
knees on the final point. And then there’s the get Safin made and the lob he hit over
Federer to save that match point in the fourth set. Did we know he could run that fast?
—Safin’s confidence and determination grow as these
highlights accumulate. He has said that winning this tournament was very
important to him because he needed to prove to himself that he could take home a second major. He was never a guy who could keep that level of belief up for
long, but perhaps doing it this time was enough for him. He’ll always know that
he really was that good.
—The match reminds me of the del Potro-Federer Open final
in many ways. You have a taller, heavier hitter trying to batter through the
skinny, springy Federer and his wildly curving shots. In both of those matches,
as well as in the 2008 Wimbledon final, Federer almost snuck through a
match where his opponent was playing lights-out, only to lose in the end.
—Fittingly, this one ends on a high note. You can see some
exhaustion from both guys in the fifth set, but after nailing all those
backhands down the line, Safin puts the last one even closer to the corner.
That’s how accurate he was with it that day. Federer finally succumbed,
but he forced Safin to throw the final punch and literally knock him to the ground.
—I may miss Safin's handshakes the most. Win or lose, he was
always respectful of his opponent; he always realized it was just a game—in some ways, he was too gentlemanly. At first I was
surprised by his harsh reactions this week to the Agassi revelations. But then
he was always a guy who believed in the solidarity of the players, that it shouldn't be every man for himself. It makes sense that he would see Agassi as
betraying that.
Notice also his muted celebration here. It was exactly like his
muted celebrations after both of his Slam wins. He doesn’t want to revel in his
opponent’s defeat, and he knows that winning a tennis match is not the most
important thing in this world. That attitude might have hurt him as a player,
but it made him a favorite of everyone who played with him and those of us who watched him. He was
one of the guys. And in his “failures”—to master his nerves, to discipline himself, to live up to his potential—Safin was one of us.
***
There's more from me on Marat over at ESPN.com. Paris talk tomorrow.
He didn’t survive to see the fruits of his labor, but it may turn out that Etienne de Villiers, the
dreaded ex-ATP chief who re-arranged the schedule a couple years ago, was on
the right track with the European fall season all along. You start slow, with a couple
weeks of 500-level events, where the top guys are
free to collect the appearance fee of their choice. You follow that by getting
everyone together for the Paris Masters. You take a week off for hype. And you
end the season in London with the closest thing tennis has to a playoff, the
World Tour Final. Unlike the old, more crowded fall lineup, this version has
brought the world’s four best players to Paris in good form. Andy Murray, Novak
Djokovic, and Roger Federer all reached finals on Sunday, and from what I can
tell Rafael Nadal hasn’t made any noise about the overlong schedule in the last
few minutes. Plus the quality of play last week in Basel was excellent, as it
should be during the indoor season.
This would all be miraculous and cause for applause if not
for one inconvenient fact: The existence of the Asian swing that immediately
preceded these European tournaments. Murray and Federer are in fine form today
in part because they bailed on the trip across the Pacific. What can you do?
Nix an entire Continent? The global reach of tennis remains its blessing and
its curse.
For the moment, we'll keep our attention on Paris, which has become the biggest beneficiary of
the new schedule. While the tournament hasn’t escaped the pullout bug in
2009—Andy Roddick, Lleyton Hewitt, and Juan Carlos Ferrero are MIA—it hasn’t
been devastated the way it has in recent years, either. In the past, the big
names who did show up seemed to play under a dark cloud of obligation, and
they rarely held the trophy at the end. Last year’s finalists were Jo-Wilfred
Tsonga and David Nalbandian. They played a nice match, but you get the feeling
we can do better this time around. Now if only the organizers would scrap that
green court and return to the lounge-blue glory of the old days, we’d have
everything just the way it should be.
First Quarter
Over the years, Federer has been Exhibit A when it comes to those devastating withdrawals. He didn’t play here from 2004 to 2006, and
his career record at the event is 7-5, by far his worst at a Masters
tournament. But this time he’s coming off a long rest and a strong week of tennis in Basel. While it
ended in disappointment—Federer wasn’t sharp when he needed to be against a very sharp Djokovic—it also shouldn’t leave him too drained to start this week. There’s
also a new motivation: For the first time in years, the No. 1 ranking, which Federer currently owns, hasn’t
been locked up for the season.
The rest of this quarter reads like a who’s-who of the
semi-dangerous but hardly terrifying second-tier: Julien Benneteau, Stan
Wawrinka, Gael Monfils, Marin Cilic, Fernando Verdasco. Of them, I’d say
Monfils on his home court, and Cilic on an indoor court, could do the most
damage. But despite Tsonga’s win last year, the French don’t traditionally play
their best in France.
Semifinals: Federer
Second Quarter
Like Federer, Murray is coming off a strong week,
having won the title in that cool new stadium in Valencia (come on, Paris, you can't have an uglier court than Valencia, can you?). Watching him beat
Mikhail Youzhny in the final with his usual blend of thoughtful slices and
running forehand passes, I began to think of Murray as a guy who has absolutely
everything—except for the one thing you need to dominate today, a dictating
forehand. His game is an elaborate edifice built to hide this very basic fact.
Still, he has proven that the edifice alone is enough to get him through a week
at a Masters event.
Murray will start by dealing with a guy who has the opposite
problem, James Blake, he of the go-for-broke dictating forehand and not too much else. It could be
a competitive match; somehow these two have only played twice, and never on hard
courts. But the biggest name and biggest question mark in this section, is
Juan Martin del Potro. He has finally returned after two months with a U.S. Open
hangover and a wrist problem. In his path may be Marat Safin, who is playing
his final event, and then Fernando Gonzalez. Only time will tell if del Potro is
ready to come back full-bore, or if he’s going to cash in his considerable chips from '09 and play for next season.
Semifinals: Murray
Third Quarter
Two of this fall’s top performers, Nikolay Davydenko and
Novak Djokovic, are slotted to play in the quarters here. The question is how
much Djokovic will have left for this tournament after saving match points in the
semis against Radek Stepanek and holding off Federer in three over the weekend.
He played an impressively determined, persistent, and intelligent match to come
back and win the final after losing the second set. Watching, I wondered: Does
Djokovic struggle in the latter stages of Slams—he’s lost a lot of semis over
the years—because of the emotion he expends in each match? One week feels
like the right amount of time for him to keep it together; by the time two weeks
are up, he can seem punched out.
Will he be punched out this week? While I'd love to see him soldier on—few players are as entertaining as Djokovic when they're at their best—I’d have to guess yes.
That might leave this section open for Davydenko, who won this tournament three
years ago and reached the semis in 2008. He’ll need to survive the
winner of Karlovic and a rested and indoor-ready Robin Soderling. But it’s not
like Davydenko should be tired, either. He played four matches last week in
Valencia, which is kind of like a week off for him.
Semifinals: Davydenko
Fourth Quarter
Nadal comes in with the most rest of the top seeds. This is a mixed blessing for the
Spaniard, who often needs to sweat his his way to his best form. He may need to have it early, because his former nemesis, Tomas Berdych, who won in Paris in
2005, might be waiting for him in the third round. The winner there could get
Tsonga in the quarters, though the defending champion had to quit with an
injury last week. If he’s not physically ready, that would really open up the
top of this quarter, maybe even for his buddy Gilles Simon, who is way beyond
due to follow up on his late-season success of 2008. There are no more chances
after this one. As much as you might like to watch Simon play, and as dangerous as has
he might be indoors, don’t count on him. I’ve been trying it for 12 months and
it hasn’t worked once.
Semifinals: Nadal
Semifinals: Murray d. Federer; Davydenko d. Nadal
Final: Davydenko d. Murray
***
As if this weren't enough, Tennis.com will also be debuting a new feature this week, a podcast featuring Tennis Magazine's James Martin, Peter Bodo, and myself. Saying things has never been my specialty, but I'm giving it a shot.
Enjoy the tournament and give me your predictions here. I'll be back Wednesday or Thursday with some thoughts on the early rounds.
