The Jessup house was always too warm, in that way that feels good in winter. The small and friendly living room was typically overheated to the point where it almost felt humid, but you appreciated it when you walked in on a freezing cold night.
I’d been walking into that room on freezing nights for years, but this Christmas eve, when Carl’s parents were away and he threw a party, was as cold as any. There was just silence and snow outside in the Jessup’s neighborhood, no cars, nobody walking down the sidewalk. Inside it was hotter than usual. It was brighter and much louder as well. By the time I got there, the place was jammed with pretty much everyone I knew, as well as quite a few people I had only seen from a distance. The music was loud, but good loud; it was Prince, which meant Carl’s older sister Mary must have been manning the record player. It was one of those small-town high-school parties, on a night when there wasn’t much else to do once dinner was over, where everyone eventually makes an appearance.
I wasn’t used to this kind of crowd at Carl’s. It was usually just a few poker-playing or hockey-watching friends who congregated in the small breakfast room at the back of the house. I made way back there out of habit, past the big blinking tree and the almost-as-big keg, past the football players around the keg, past the cheerleaders around the football players around the keg, past Joe and Josh, two creeps I’d hated since grade school, past a few girls I’d liked since grade school leaning in a doorway—“Hi,” they said; “Hey,” I replied, too coolly; they actually seemed to want to talk to me—and past that weird, nondescriptly nerdish couple who were always staring into each other’s eyes on the bus. They were, naturally, doing the same thing in the corner here.
I wedged my way into the bright back room, where boys’ voices were being raised. “Tignor! Get in here.” It was Bo Setliff, an older roughneck and loudmouth from the country outside of town. He detached the cigarette he was smoking from his bottom lip. “We need some rich kids in here, so we can take your money.”
There was a poker game going on, and the stakes, as I could see right away, were pretty high. I sat down and won a couple of hands. Appearances to the contrary, I knew to play. Then Bo started up a game I hadn’t heard of before, called, appropriately, “guts.” It was essentially blackjack with all skill removed. You were dealt two cards down, and then you bet. “Be careful, jacks will [expletive deleted] you,” Bo said to me, one eye closed against the smoke from his Camel.
I played a few hands and timidly managed to survive as the pots grew. The room went quiet as the $20s began to pile up on the table. On the third hand I looked down to see that I had a pair of jacks. It seemed like a bad hand to me—I would only bet if I had an ace—and I remembered Bo’s cryptically skuzzy words to me about that card. I went out early. When the hand was over, I flipped my cards up and tossed them to the center of the table. Bo saw the pair of jacks. “Jesus, you had a pair! You would have own that hand. How much did you just blow, 300 bucks?” The room exploded; it was the highlight of the evening for everyone there. I felt like bolting into the cold night, but for appearances sake I waited for a couple of hands before cashing in my chips. “Could have made a lot more than that, a lot more than that,” Bo helpfully pointed put.
I got a beer and went down to the basement, the other usual haunt in the Jessup house. There was a ping-pong table, where Carl and I had wasted about a year’s worth of afternoons hitting the ball back and forth (if only we could have all the time we blew in our youth given back to us in our adulthood). The cheerleaders and a few local blow-dryed prom kings had commandeered the table and were banging the ball over the place and leaning dangerously close to each other. The girls’ faces were red and their giggles were starting to get ear-splitting. They were worked up; the prom kings looked pleased. “Steve, you have to be on my team,” one of the girls, Maria, said. “You play tennis, you must be good at this.” I was good enough to win a few games for Maria. The kings looked deflated. Who was this skinny kid stealing their ping-pong thunder? On the last point, I drilled a ball that hit one of them in the stomach.
Thinking I might as well quit while I was on top, I walked back upstairs and looked for a girl named Becky who I had asked to come to the party. She was a professor’s daughter with black hair and black glasses who lived in the country. She’d been in classes with me in the past, but she didn’t belong to any identifiable social group. Becky wore dark clothes and seemingly had a brain, and she had spent some time on the school’s literary review, such as it was. She kept to herself a lot; I saw her mostly from my seat on the bus, as she waited for a different one. She held her books out in front of her, cradled in her arm, the way girls held them years earlier, before anyone strapped a dorky book bag over their shoulders. There was something retro about her that I liked. For some forgotten reason, I’d asked her to see a minor-league baseball game that summer—there wasn’t much else to do, I guess. She’d agreed to go, then seemed profoundly uninterested once we were there. I;d had to tell her that the people who were batting were the same people who would go out in the field in a few minutes. Afterward, we’d stood face to face outside her parents house in the sticks, next to my car, under a thick set off stars. “I didn’t realize you were such a jock,” she said just before going inside. But she had said it with a friendly smile rather than a scornful smirk. I held onto that.
Instead of Becky, I ran into Dan, a semi-friend, a literary-review guy, and a fellow music lover, though his tastes ran hipper than mine. He was our high school’s only Taking Heads and Sonic Youth devotee, while I was a Springsteen and Stones guy. Now he said, “You must have a tape we can put in, right? Did you bring your Walkman?” Of course I had, and of course I had a mix tape ready. We managed to slide the needle off “Little Red Corvette” and plunk the tape in. The first song, “The Closer You Are,” by the doo wop group the Channels, drew Dan’s ire.
“Did you steal this from your grandfather’ record collection?” Dan asked, as the Channel’s five-part harmony soared around the room.
"What, you don't like the Channels, you don't like doo wop?" The voices mixed with the blinking colored Christmas lights to create a kind of blur around the room. It was like slow motion to me. The streets of 1950s Brooklyn, where the Channels had sung together on the corner, was here in 1980s Pennsylvania.
“You now the name of the group? That's sad, man. That’s the problem with you, you only like music that makes you feel good.”
We went on to other subjects. I moved around the party some more, with that feeling of intimacy and alienation that comes with the territory. Leave it to a party to turn you inward. Leave it to a party to feel like the most serious thing you can possibly imagine, where everything is somehow at stake.
I ended up on the couch next to the Christmas tree. It was a glorious fake, fully lit and tinseled, beautiful in an overdone way, like the heat in the room. I looked up; there was mistletoe all along the couch, thoiugh the only couple I'd seen occupy this spot were the staring nerds. My tape continued, and people were dancing sloppily to it in the middle of the room, slipping around in their socks on the thick brown carpet. Becky walked in the door. Dan, her friend, walked up right away and started talking to her. Was there something between them? She saw me, and they came over. Becky say next to me, and Dan went to get beers.
“A real jock party, I see,” she said, smiling and taking off her gloves.
“Yeah, these are my people.” I looked at Bo Setliff, who was arm wrestling one of the prom kings. She followed my look and laughed. Dan brought the beers back, but he seemed to feel like he was intruding, so he walked away, a little surprised.
“Are you good at arm wrestling?” Becky asked. She pulled off her coat and flipped her black hair from underneath her dark turtleneck. Falling over her shoulders and down her arms and back, it was longer and more unruly than I’d remembered it, less 50s and more 70s-style, but still safely outside the Pennsyalvania norm. She put her lips together as if she were forcing down a smile. She was in a good mood.
“Champion thumb wrestler. Didn’t you know that?”
The tape flipped over. The Channels came back on. “The Closer You Are.” I leaned back and automatically relaxed; the world was suddenly right. The dancers in the room didn’t agree. They stopped sliding on the carpet, disappointed. I waited for someone to change the tape, but no one seemed to have the energy.
Becky laughed under her breath. “What?” I asked.
She kept her head down and nodded a little, not looking at me. I took in the room, the torn gold wrapping paper on the floor and the blinking Christmas lights and mistletoe above me. Becky shook her head and laughed again. She seemed amazed by something.
I know what you’re thinking: How can a straight-set match, in which one of the players failed to rise to anything near her best, be No. 1 for 2010? And it’s true, the French Open women’s final didn’t have the surreal grandeur of Isner-Mahut, and it wasn’t a display of back-and-forth shot-making and drama along the lines of Nadal-Murray in London. But there are many reasons to watch tennis, and just as many reasons to love it. I can only say that this was my favorite match of the year, the one I enjoyed watching the most, and the one that, to my surprise, meant the most to me.
I had a friend in high school who owned a tape of the 1983 French final, won by Yannick Noah. If we wanted to feel better on a dreary weekend afternoon, we would put on the final set, where Noah whips himself and the crowd into near hysteria. I could see myself in the future doing the same thing with the second-set tiebreaker of this final, where Francesca Schiavone seizes the moment and seems to take flight above the court, before ending the match laid out flat on it. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to find the tiebreaker anywhere on YouTube. How is that possible? The best I could do was this brief but sweet set of Italian clips. Hopefully, it’s enough to bring back the inspiration of that afternoon. (There's also this crowd film, which looks as much like an assassination as a tennis match.)
I watched Schiavone-Stosur at my tennis club in Brooklyn. I was taping it at home, but I stood with about 20 other members through the tiebreaker anyway. How could you turn away? With each point, the cheers and appreciative laughter around the TV grew—Schiavone had us, even those of us who had never heard her name before. When she won the final point, everyone raised their arms, as if one of our New York home teams had just won a world championship. (Of course, there’s a fair amount of Italian spoken and heard in my section of Brooklyn, which didn’t hurt.)
Maybe it’s OK that there are no points to analyze here. It’s Christmas Eve for many of us, not exactly a time for Xs and Os. But I’ll try to re-create the day by cribbing from what I wrote the day after the final:
One moment can stand in for the entire match, and the way Schiavone went after it. Up 5-2 in the second-set tiebreaker, she was two points from winning what she had to believe, as a 29-year-old who had never cracked the Top 10, would be her only shot at a major. Or at least I thought she had to believe this. I’d been waiting, through the second set and particularly through the tiebreaker that ended it, for her to remember this fact and tighten up accordingly. But she didn't tighten up. Instead, she loosened up and played her most assertive tennis in the breaker.
At 5-2, I thought now, now, finally, the weight of the moment would land on Schiavone’s racquet and make it just a little harder to swing so freely. From a tactical perspective, it might even have made sense to play a little safer against an erratic Sam Stosur; there’s no shame in inching across the finish line. But that wasn’t how it was going to be for Francesca—no backing in, no inching across the line today. On the next point, she took an even bigger cut on her backhand return, ran around and drilled a forehand into the corner, and finished it with a sweet and difficult shoe-top backhand volley that was angled perfectly. From the start, Schiavone had taken Stosur’s biggest weapon, her serve, and managed to get on top of it and attack it like no one else had all tournament. From the start, she had taken this match; there was no other way for her to end it.
No, actually, there was. Along with that 5-2 point, I’ll remember one line from her classic, classy acceptance speech. “I’ve always watched every final of this tournament and I know what the big champions say. I want to thank everybody.” Even after her win, Schiavone was humble and honest enough to differentiate herself from the “big champions.” In one sense, she was right; she’s not Serena Williams or Steffi Graf or Justine Henin. But she’s also wrong. Schiavone showed that, in the right time and place, there can be a big champion in any of us. She showed, by winning the way she did, that opportunities can be taken. Hers is a win I’m going to want to remember.
Six months later, I remember. Six months later, it still feels good. Grazie to you, Francesca.
It was unprecedented, even in the offices of Tennis magazine. Walking around the offices and cubicles here on the afternoon of the John Isner-Nicolas Mahut match, I saw everyone, edit staff, sales staff, marketing staff, online staff, magazine staff, maybe Peter Bodo himself, watching a tennis match on their computer screen. For a long time. And not talking about very much else. It made for a nice afternoon.
Among the American public at large, it was the most discussed match in years, a genuine popular phenomenon that was, to me at least, totally unexpected. But among the people who watch tennis all the time, it was more controversial: Was Isner-Mahut a colossal contest for the ages, or an exhibition in the mundane that should hasten the advent of a fifth-set tiebreaker at Wimbledon? Considering that I’ve ranked it No. 2 for the year, you can guess my opinion. Epics, whether they’re novels, symphonies, films, battles, or tennis matches, tend to have their dull moments, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t epics.
***
Sorry for the relative cluelessness of the commentators doing the highlights on ESPN. It was the best I could find. There were a bunch of match point highlights to choose from, but I went with this one because of the British announcer’s first words: “How will he cope with the enormity of this situation?”
***
I’ve told people this before, but I’ll say it here again. When these guys went out on the second day at 8-7 in the fifth and started to play, I thought, “This is going to be suspended again.” Neither appeared to have even the remotest chance of breaking the other’s serve. While that doesn’t say much for their return games, it does say quite a bit about their serves. We know what Isner can do with his, but Mahut was equally impressive because, while he hit more than 100 aces, he also did it with old-fashioned serve and volley, rather than straight-up bombs.
***
I don’t like statistics all that much—they seem to tell us what we already know. And the length of a match in hours and minutes isn’t all that telling, either. But this time it was. Isner-Mahut was stat heaven:
11 hours, 5 minutes: total match time, 4 and a half hours longer than the previous longest match, between Santoro and Clement at the French in 2004
8 hours, 11 minutes: the longest fifth set ever played. Don’t even bother mentioning another fifth-set in the same breath. You might as well go to baseball for a comparison. The longest MLB game ever played was 8 hours, 6 minutes, in 1984.
138: games in the fifth set, 26 more than have ever been played in an entire match
215: aces hit—Isner, 112; Mahut, 103. Previous record was 78, by Ivo Karlovic
183: total games played
3: service breaks
I don't know the total points won by each, except that Mahut won more, which means that he has won by far the most points in a single match in history.
***
Particularly enjoyed watching: Isner’s forehand, which was as good as I’ve ever seen it, especially inside-out, and which got him out of trouble many times. Mahut’s serve down the middle in the ad court. He’s a skinny guy with an effortless motion, but he kept nailing the corner and getting the ball to hook away from Isner, who had no chance at all of catching up to it. And Mahut's backhand, which he smacked into the corners with relish and abandon (abandoned relish?).
The point-to-point drama wasn’t high, and there were more than a few times when I wanted it to be over, but the quality of play was still good even after eight hours in one day. The slick early-round grass made the points short but rewarded their quality shots with winners.
***
Question: When Isner fell down after match point and lifted his legs back up, how high in the air do you think his feet were? Guessing they were about as tall as Roger Federer.
Also, I guess I have a kewed point of view, but I was amazed in the aftermath of this match how few people had ever heard of Isner. I kept hearing him described as a “nobody” even in the U.S. I thought being in the Top 25 in the world made you, at the very least, somebody.
***
So, after playing for eight hours one day, and going to 59-59, they come out the next day and still play one of the longest sets in the tournament, 11-9.
***
OK, why did this match become such a big deal, at least in the U.S.? Why did Isner read the Top 10 list on Letterman and why was it featured as news—real news, not sports news—on the networks? It was more widely talked about here than even the Nadal-Federer 2008 Wimbledon final. What was the fascination? It had to do with the basic reasons we watch sports in the first place.
There were the stats, of course. The fifth-set score itself, while it ascended, was eye-popping. There was the called-for-darkness-twice factor (how would this match have played out at the U.S. Open, I wonder). And for Americans, there was Isner’s presence. But underneath all that was something more fundamental. It was Mahut, at 50-games-a, leaping, diving, flinging his racquet at the ball, and landing face down at full stretch. It was Isner whiffing on a backhand, standing with his hands on his knees and his hat askew, dead to the world, and still laboring on for 40 more games. It was all the times each of them could have given in—it only took a bad point or two—but didn’t.
This was a first-round match. It was played on the obscure-sounding Court 18. Neither player was a star, and neither, at least in the general public’s eye, had any chance of winning the tournament. All of that only added to the appeal. What mattered was that, whatever the stakes, neither gave in. Isner-Mahut wasn’t the most thrilling tennis match of all time. But it is one of the greatest of all time because, for a longer period than any other, it represented what’s at the heart of every match, and of every sport: The Battle.
It’s another measure of how good Rafael Nadal’s season was that, even as he took home three majors and three Masters and finished No. 1 for the second time, he did it without having to survive one of the drawn-out, see-saw, viciously physical nail-biters we’ve come to expect from him. There was no Rome 2006 against Federer or Madrid 2009 against Djokovic. But just when it seemed like it was too late, Nadal, maybe for old times sake, made his last victory of the season a vintage walk across the tightrope. Now we’ve got one more to add to his reputation as the game’s premier closer: London 2010 against Andy Murray, the 3rd-best match of the year.
***
Like virtually everyone else, Murray has a losing record against Nadal, but he’s still a tricky match-up for him. As you can see from a long early rally here, there aren’t a lot of places Nadal can go. Murray’s backhand is his stronger shot, so Rafa can’t work the rallies with his crosscourt forehand the way he would like.
For him to break open a rally against Murray requires some extra effort, a strong inside-out forehand that gets Murray scrambling to his forehand side and opens up the other side of the court. Naturally, at 6-5 in the first set tiebreaker, the most important point of the match to that point, that’s exactly what Nadal does. His forehand drop volley to win the set reminds me of the backhand drop volley he played to save a set point against Murray at Wimbledon. Both times, Nadal went bold at the crucial moment; both times it worked. Part of me wonders why he doesn’t play a bolder brand of tennis all the time, but that’s a little like asking why he almost exclusively hits his serve to Federer’s backhand side. Surprise is a tactic, too. And why mess with success?
***
I’d forgotten about the little forehand crosscourt flick that Nadal sends past Murray at the net (and which, for some reason, he apologizes for hitting). That shot reminds me of seeing Nadal very early in his career in Australia. He could bruise you from the baseline, but I knew he was something special, and a tennis player by DNA, when he came up with a similar little forehand around the net. That’s been one of the great aspects of following Nadal’s career. He can do things you might not expect a player of his style to be able to do so well. Besides the touch around the net, who would think that a baseliner who’s not known for his serve would have the fiercest overhead in tennis?
***
This match turned on the forehand. Murray had used his backhand as a major weapon in beating Nadal in Australia at the beginning of the season, but Rafa wasn’t going to let that happen again. He made Murray beat him from the other side. At times, Murray was up to it; he went bigger with his forehand than normal, and he closed out the second set by sending one up the line for a winner. But Nadal has a better version of that shot, which from a tactical standpoint makes his life much less complicated. He knows the play he needs to use—work the point so he gets an inside-out forehand—so there’s never much doubt about what he should be doing. For Nadal, it’s a matter of having the confidence to make the right play.
***
Nadal breaks early in the second set by jumping on a backhand return and forcing Murray to miss a volley. He did the same on an important point against Roddick earlier in the tournament. You can serve and volley against him when you go wide in the deuce court, but in the ad court it’s much tougher.
Later, when he has match point, Nadal misses a much easier backhand return long. The one place where he regularly shows his nerves is when he has to return a second serve at break point. If I’m playing him, I might consider intentionally missing my first serve in that situation.
***
In the closing stages, I expected Nadal to pull it out; I have a hard time remembering him ever losing a match when it’s close in the decisive set. But when Murray went up 3-0, I thought Rafa was finished. Now that I see it again, when Murray hits the shot to go up 3-0, he doesn’t react with any assertiveness. Instead, he looks concerned. When Nadal hits a forehand winner to make it 4-4 in the tiebreaker, he has no trouble showing how much he wants it. There’s just a little bit of doubt or hesitation in Murray’s mind.
From a tactical standpoint, what can Murray do differently? You might say he should come forward more, because he is one of the best natural volleyers among the singles players. But I just got through writing a post calling Nadal the best passer of all time. What did work for Murray in this match was hitting big into Nadal's forehand and going from there, but that's risky, too. Murray tends to miss that flat forehand up the line pretty regularly. Just watching Nadal, I would say you have to concentrate on his backhand and see what happens. Murray does have the ability to push him wide on that side.
***
Like I said, this one comes down to the forehand; two of them to be exact. At 6-6, Murray goes for an all-out, inside-out winner. He misses by an inch of two; with his stroke, he just doesn’t get the topspin he needs to hit that type of shot with a ton of safety. At 7-6, it’s Nadal’s turn to go for it all with an inside-out forehand. He makes it, by the same couple of inches that Murray missed his.
***
Late in this match, I also got the feeling that part of Nadal wanted Murray to win. I’m probably wrong in that, but there’s a little added commiseration from him when they meet at the net. Nadal is about to go out and accept his victory applause, at which point he has to forget his opponent’s defeat. But he pats Murray on the back one more time. The look on his face when he does says that on certain days, victory can come with a little bit of regret, too.
Maybe you had to be there. When I talked to people later who had watched the U.S. Open men's final on TV, they sounded disappointed. “It was never in doubt”; “Djokovic never had a chance”; “The rain ruined it”: ‘I couldn’t find it on any channel.”
It didn’t feel any of those ways inside Arthur Ashe Stadium. Novak Djokovic was indeed fighting an uphill battle all the way, but that only made him very loose, and made his opponent, Rafael Nadal, who was facing what would almost certainly be the best chance he would ever have to complete a career Grand Slam, very tight. Tennis players talk about being lonely in front of all those people, but it can’t get any lonelier than trying to finish a match you simply have to win in front of thousands of people who will be stunned if you don't. Nadal was on my side of the court when he got to 5-1. You could see change in him that game; he became visibly nervous, and stayed that way until it was over.
But what made this a memorable match for me—No. 4 for the year—was the shot-making exhibition these two put on. With the various rain delays, as well as the Monday start, the tension that usually accompanies a U.S. Open had dissipated by the third set. There was a sort of wild and stormy feel inside the stadium as these guys threw haymakers back and forth at each other.
Above are one person’s selection of the 12 best points—how closely do you have to watch a match to put something like that together? Seeing them again makes me think you didn’t really have to be there at all. They're just as good on TV.
***
The first point ends with a nice Djokovic drop shot. You know it’s especially nice, since even Nadal can’t get close to it. Djokovic has a very good backhand drop, but he uses it as a bail-out shot too often, from too far back in the court. Here he gets the shot selection right, hitting it from inside the baseline when he already has the advantage in the point.
***
I know these are highlights, but did Djokovic play better in this match than he did against Federer? You can see he’s tired, but that also frees him to go for shots he normally wouldn’t attempt. He makes a lot of them. Deep down, though, he doesn't believe it's going to work out in the end, and that's what dooms him.
In his matches with Nadal, Djokovic has the opposite problem that he does when he plays Federer. Where he has to fight off the early Federer attack, Djokovic typically starts strong against Nadal. He has a chance to control points and hit his shots, and his down the line backhand is a real weapon when Nadal’s crosscourt forehands land short. The catch: He has to keep hitting that down the line backhand, along with everything else, perfectly, game after game, set after set. On most occasions, he can’t.
***
Nadal is gaining on Bjorn Borg as the greatest clay-courter ever, but he may already be ahead of him in the passing shot department. What Nadal does like no one else is shorten his backswing so that he does little more than snap through the shot. He can still get pace doing this, but his specialities are accuracy and redirecting the ball with almost no preparation. He takes one Djokovic volley and snaps it down the line with a forehand; he takes another and blocks it crosscourt at a sharp angle with his backhand. No one can match him as a passing-shot improviser.
***
Does the Sky Sports play-by-play guy seriously mean to say that he thinks that two of these points are the best ever played? I mean, they’re good, but . . .
***
Two of these 12 best points came in the final game, when, like I said, Nadal was more visibly nervous than he had been all day. Nevertheless, he wins them. I’ve noted before that Federer is a master at showing nerves for a second and then playing through them. Nadal, who rarely blows a big match, does it too. Grace under pressure, the one true mark of a champion.
***
Djokovic is caught smiling after a few of these points, even when he’s lost them. On one other, he uses his racquet to clap for his opponent. The previous year, he had a similar attitude in his semifinal with Federer. This is obviously not ideal from a competitive standpoint—notice that he didn’t do any of that stuff in the Davis Cup final. But maybe Djokovic is just being realistic when he plays Nadal and Federer. Maybe we can forgive him for doing what we do when we watch them play, for being one more fan.
“Tennis players' lives should be measured in dog years,” Boris Becker claimed. I think he was pretty young when he said it, but the game did seem to age him very quickly. I’m beginning to think the same should be true for tennis fans and journalists. Something about the length and breadth of the sport’s season succeeds in stretching time. Events inside the same calendar year can seem like they’ve zoomed out of a distant period in history. Or they might have slipped your mind altogether.
I do remember watching Kim Clijsters beat Justine Henin in the final in Brisbane in January. I dimly remembered lots of back and forths, ups and downs, and full court coverage. I remembered that Clijsters won in a third-set tiebreaker. I also remember writing a post about it, but the only thing I recall from that post is that I mentioned Clijsters’ eyes when she waited to return serve—weird what sticks in the mind, isn’t it?
As with the Australian Open women’s final from a couple days ago, all of this forgetfulness made revisiting the Brisbane final—No. 5 on my list of the year’s best matches—that much more enjoyable. These two make for a good set of highlights. Unfortunately, I couldn't embed them in this column. You can find them here.
***
The first thing I notice, and which I don’t think I noticed when the match was being played, is the ridiculous depth on their ground strokes. Lots of shots within a few inches of the line, and which are generally returned without a hitch or a blink. At the upper reaches of the game, tennis can seem a little like archery. Everyone can hit the ball within a certain tiny circle of space until the margins between making and missing shots and winning and losing matches becomes microscopic.
A digression: These shots remind me of a player named Stephanie Rehe, an all-world junior from the 80s. I think she was No. 1 in the country in the 16s and the 18s at the same time, and it seemed like she was going to be the next Tracy Austin or Andrea Jaeger. I watched her practice at the U.S. Open one year—“Wow, come over here, is that Stephanie Rehe?”—and it seemed like she never hit a ball, not one, that landed less than six inches from the baseline. But even she never lit up the tour. Rehe did make it to No. 10 after a few years, but she was certainly no Graf or Sabatini, two women her age. (As Wikipedia has just informed me, a back injury forced her to retire early.) Sometimes even perfection isn’t enough.
***
Compare the two slice backhands, and the difference between one hit with a natural one-hander and one hit by a player who normally uses two hands. Obviously, everything is going to be better with the one-hander, but it even extends all the way to how the ball comes off the strings. You can see that Justine is able to cup the shot and control the ball better than Clijsters. There’s something board-like and rushed about a slice by a two-handed player. I know it from experience. I’ve always used a two-hander, but in the last 10 years or so I’ve gone to a one-handed slice a lot more. Every time I hit one, I kind of want to stop and ask the person on the other side of the net: “Did that look a real slice to you? Did you believe that shot?” I feel like an actor playing a role that doesn’t come naturally.
***
I like the spontaneous Kim celebrations, such as the one she does here where she bends down, walks a little faster, and does a brief fist-pump. It looks like she can’t help herself, and afterward she seems a little embarrassed by it. Clijsters is not a natural show-woman, and she has a tendency to get negative, which makes the times when she does show positive emotion seem that much more genuine.
***
These two are pretty evenly matched from the baseline, which helps the quality of play because points are decided when one of them can get to the net. It’s an all-court match, and more dynamic for it. Once they’re up there, Kim and Justine couldn’t be more different. Justine carves with an old-school punch volley; Kim swings from the heels.
***
This was the season of the second-chance. Djokovic, Berdych, Monfils all got second chances against Roger Federer and took advantage. Cljisters wins this match on her third chance. She went up a set and 4-1. Henin won the second set and went up 3-0 in the third. Clijsters went up 5-1 in the third-set tiebreaker, but Henin came back to 6-6. Clijsters finally won it 8-6. Kim is not a classic underachiever; she’s not a Safin or a Gulbis who seem conflicted about how much all the effort is worth. Instead, she’s an underachiever because of her reaction to pressure. Against her main rivals, she’s not a good front-runner. She has two majors, but her game should have brought her many more.
***
They raise their levels at the same time in the third. The points get more convoluted and exciting, and Henin plays some incredible, and incredibly bold, tennis when she’s down match points in the breaker. She drills two forehand returns, and the little drop shot she hits at 5-6 requires a maestro-like confidence in what you can do with a tennis ball.
Kim wins, but I like Justine’s reaction at the net. These days you expect a hug after a match like that, but that’s not Henin’s style. Like her game, she stays old-fashioned and maintains the dignified distance of a handshake. A couple weeks later she would do something similar in the trophy ceremony in Melbourne. No fashionable tears for Justine; she took her loss in the final with a gracious stoicism. I’ve always liked Henin and love her game, and I respected her in defeat last season. Now I look forward to seeing her in triumph sometime, somewhere in 2011.
Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer played each other five times over the course of the last four months of the season. Federer won four of those matches; Djokovic won this one, the one we’ll remember. It spoiled a potential Federer-Rafael Nadal final, but it was a classic of its own—No. 6 on my list for 2010. The match was exceptionally up and down through the first four sets, or at least exceptionally up and down from Federer’s point of view. His serve was on track only sporadically, and he lost two sets badly but still kept himself alive for the fifth. That’s when things got good, as the highlight clip above attests.
***
What station is this, or what country? Somewhere excitable, it seems. Whatever you think of the announcer—and he would wear on me after a while—he does bring a soccer-like energy to a tennis match. And his cry of “Djooookoooovic!!!” at the end is perfect.
***
These two played in Toronto the previous month and Djokovic was visibly gassed by the end. Federer even mentioned it in his on-court remarks afterward. And there are times in this set when Djokovic looks weary, but it never quite affects him. By the end, he’s running on adrenalin, swinging for the fences, in some kind of competitive ether beyond tiredness. He stays in that zone even after the match is over. You can see it on his face as he approaches the net for the handshake. Djokovic's eyes are still wide, and a little shellshocked.
***
There’s a reason that Federer is 12-6 against Djokovic. Even in this match, he has the natural upper hand in rallies. It’s Djokovic who plays farther back, and who has to hit bigger than normal to stay on even terms. This time he does it. Even the two match points he saves are with extremely risky shots that he wouldn’t go for at 2-2 in the first set of the second round of Basel. Djokovic has to absorb Federer’s early punch and recalibrate his own game. That’s what happened when they played at the World Tour Finals, where Djokovic was run off the court in the first set before making a match of it, with great effort, in the second.
Still, his shots on these match points here weren’t flukes. I thought he had been the better player for most of the match, and that had started all the way back in the first set, even though he lost it. You can see in these highlights that Federer can’t leave a ball hanging; Djokovic is going to be on it. The Serb won two easy sets, but as with Berdych and Monfils this year, he couldn’t kill the king until he’d gotten down match point and found himself with nothing to lose first. Psychologically, it seems to be easier the second time around.
***
Federer was snakebit in this set; he couldn’t finish a couple points where he had Djokovic dead to rights. At 4-3, 15-30, Federer missed a running backhand pass into the net. On a crucial point later, he hit a running forehand pass crosscourt, right to Djokovic’s racquet. Did he do anything wrong on the match points? He’s out of the first one pretty quickly, even though he still makes Djokovic finish it with an insane inside-out crosscourt swing volley. On the second, Federer does leave his backhand just a little shorter than he wanted, but you can’t blame him for that. Djokovic took a neutral rally ball and hit it on the line. You can only tip your hat there.
***
Reason to love Novak Djokovic: He’s facing match points and looking close to beat. He hauls off and wins those two points, and then wins the next point with another winner. Suddenly he’s beating his chest with his racquet, as if he’s been the man all along.
***
He was the man in the end. You know you’re feeling it when you can thread a forehand pass up the line and past Federer at 5-5 and deuce in the fifth set of the semifinals of the U.S. Open. In London, the Tennis Channel’s Jimmy Arias mentioned that Federer often hits his forehand a little early when he’s tight. That’s what happens here at break point at 5-5. He pulls his forehand into the alley.
***
Then we have the Djokovic's celebration, one of the year’s best. It succeeded in being both genuine (“What just happened? I just beat Roger Federer; I’m in a Slam final again?”) and a little hammy (“I’m going to stand here and soak this in for just a little longer than is absolutely necessary”). Novak: genuinely hammy; hammily genuine. He started this tournament in a mediocre place. He ended it on the rise again. It was a trajectory that took him to two convincing wins in the Davis Cup final. We’ll see if it takes him even higher in 2011.
Remember these two? So much promise to start the season; looking back, I guess we should be happy we got one major final between them. We may never get another at the rate things are going. If this wasn’t the finest match of the year—I have it at No. 7—its highlights have been the most enjoyable for me to watch so far. They’ve reminded me of why I like to watch these two, and what makes one of them in particular so great.
*** Remember the Aussie Open? You can feel the summer atmosphere through the TV; from the way the ball comes off the players racquets to the buzz in the stands, it sounds like the most eager tournament of the year. From what I can tell, Australians treat tennis as more of a mainstream sport than other fans from other nations, worthy of the same respect and enthusiasm they bring to their team sports. It makes a difference.
***
Does anyone start off a match with as much venom as Serena Williams? By the third game, she’s already belting forehand returns with maximum disdain. For most players, this type of shot would find the net or the back fence. But while Serena appears not to care where they go, they find the corners for her. She hits an amazing number of winners when she’s off-balance, and an amazing number when she swings for the fences. You might chalk that up to athleticism, but it’s also a product of the timing she developed as a kid. From most accounts, she and her sister practiced as relentlessly and single-mindedly as anyone, and their muscles have never forgotten that practice. Put that together with Serena's obvious athletic ability, and you’ve got a player who can hit shots no one else can hit.
***
Judging from these clips, if you can single out thing that elevates Serena over everyone else, it would be her ability to hit with pace and accuracy from a completely open stance. She doesn’t have to turn and set up, which gives her just a little more time than anyone else. No one else can hit as well with no weight transfer at all; because of that, she can stand her ground at the baseline better than anyone else. This is the innovation that the Williams sisters brought to tennis, but no has matched them at it.
***
I’d forgotten how close Serena was to closing this one out in two sets. She got to 3-2 and deuce on Justine’s serve. We usually think of Serena as never succumbing to nerves, but here I think she did, just for a millisecond. In this deuce point, she has Justine backed up, but instead of doing what she always does—i.e., drilling a backhand down the line winner and curling up in a screaming fist pump—she tries a drop shot. A bad drop shot. Justine tracks it down with ease and hits a drop shot winner back. Soon after, she wins 15 straight points. I would say that if there’s one player who should never bother with the drop, it’s Serena Williams. She’s too good at taking a player’s time away to give them some of it back.
***
But I’m kind of glad she did, because then we got to see some vintage Justine. She dropped, she lobbed, she curled her backhand around Serena at the net and drilled it past her up the line. The new twists Justine had put in her game—taking the forehand earlier, going for more on the serve—were paying off, and when she went up 1-0 in the third, it looked they were going to take her all the way to the title.
What’s interesting is that the first great match of the year was much like the last very good match, between Federer and Nadal at the World Tour Finals. One player got ahead, the other fought to come back, but just when they appeared ready to blow into the lead, they faltered and their opponents re-established themselves. Serena faced two break points at 0-1 in the third. She hit an ace, a swing volley winner, and another ace to win the game.
***
“You can do it Justine, she’s not that good.” A spectator shouted those words at some point in this match. I can’t remember if Serena said she heard it or cared about it, but that’s not a smart idea if you really are a Justine fan—who knows, maybe it was a very smart Serena fan. Serena, as much as anyone, plays on mood and emotion. (This is the woman who skipped the colossal opening ceremonies at the Beijing Olympics because she was in a “foul mood.”) But whether that comment made a difference or not, this set showed beyond any doubt that Serena, when she wants to raise her game to its absolute highest, is the best of her era. Justine had tried everything and for a set had done everything right. Then Serena lifted herself above her, with her serve, with her forehand, with her backhand—drop shots and unforced errors magically disappeared. Justine Henin, winner of seven majors, couldn’t follow.
My favorite moment of Serena's comes on the first match point. Justine's mishit return falls on the line for a winner. Serena starts to laugh, but a second later she's fursiously shouting at herself, scolding herself to concentrate with the same venom she threw at Justine's serves to start of the match. We didn't get much Serena this year, but she gave us her best in Melbourne.
Fernando Verdasco’s win over David Ferrer in the fourth round of the U.S. Open was a major highlight of the season, and it clocks in at No. 8 on my list of the best matches of 2010. But it was a personal lowlight for me. I’d finished writing from Flushing Meadows for the day and was heading out to the train when I saw that these two guys were somewhere in the third set. I could hear the grunts and the cheers from the other side of the stadium walls. I briefly contemplated sticking my head in, just to get in a little bonus baseline bashing before I headed out—you knew these two would have their points. But I didn’t. I kept walking. By the time I got home to Brooklyn and flicked on the tube, the fifth-tiebreaker was starting and the crowd in Armstrong was giving both players a standing O. That’s the problem with going to a Grand Slam—you end up missing so much tennis.
But I did catch the breaker, and its epic finish, which included what may be the best shot-reaction combination I’ve ever seen on a match point. The breaker is the top clip above; below it is a brief highlight reel from the rest of the match.
***
Two Spaniards in New York is an odd sort of match to watch, especially if you have no particular rooting interest. For me, it robs it of some drama. When you have friends and countrymen (but, alas, no Romans) competing, there’s a sense of duty to the proceedings. Neither guy can really relish the battle.
The upside is that you’re free to watch simply for the tennis itself. As you would expect from these two, this match, which was both a war of explosiveness and a war of attrition, emphasized the physicality of today's game. Ferrer can be an entertaining player, but only when he’s playing a shot-maker. He’s good at making rallies happen, but he needs someone else to supply the flash. Judging from the highlight clip, Verdasco supplied plenty of it with his forehand.
***
When he gets hold of a forehand, there’s something Berdych-esque about it. Not in the stroke itself, but in the effortless pace they both generate, and in the way the ball seems to pick up speed as it moves through the court. It’s an illusion, of course, but when they catch it right, Verdasco and Berdych both hit their forehands so cleanly that the ball ends up moving faster than you think it will at first. One of those forehands seems to catch Ferrer by surprise here. Verdasco has a sort of deceptive power, and whether you like power-baseline tennis or not, it can be an awesome sight.
***
Ferrer is a warrior who tends to shy away from the battle at just the wrong moment. Here he was up two sets to love, he was up a break in the fifth, and he begins by going up 4-1 in the breaker. At that stage, you would say there was no way he could lose—his shots and his manner were assertive and assured. Then he totally fell apart. Twice Ferrer hit the ball tamely into the net. Then he was uncharacteristically late on a backhand and sent it way wide—a nervous shot if there ever was one. Then he floated an easy ball long. Suddenly it was 6-4 and Verdasco hadn’t done a whole lot to earn it other than slice the ball back in play. Ferrer remains a soldier of the week-to-week, but doesn’t have a game or a mentality that’s designed to peak at the majors.
***
Then Verdasco did earn it. First you’ve got the mad scramble from behind the baseline, then you’ve got the hook forehand that curls around the netpost and lands with storybook precision in the back corner. Then you’ve got the best part, Verdasco falling, arm raised and eyes wide with elation and surprise, like he’s being pulled backwards into water. Except that he hit Deco-Turf; no matter, nothing was going to hurt him at that moment.
Is there a better shot and reaction at match point? The one that comes to mind was Richard Gasquet’s running backhand up the line pass against Roger Federer in Monte Carlo in 2005. The facial expression wasn’t nearly as good, but the shot was just as much of a stunner.
***
That, unfortunately for Verdasco, is not the end of this clip. The end comes when ESPN’s Darren Cahill says that the Spaniard will now have to be ready to face the winner of a match between two other Spaniards, one of whom is Rafael Nadal—talk about a disappointing reward. Verdasco had just hit the shot of his life and played the match of his life, but there would be another one to play soon enough.
Now I understand why movie studios release their Oscar hopefuls so late in the year. It’s virtually impossible to remember anything that happened more than about a month ago (it’s dawning on me right now that all politicians must realize this fact very early in life). I dimly recall staying up late to see an outstanding match between Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Nicolas Almagro from the Australian Open in January. I’m sure it was an epic; in fact, I checked. It finished 9-7 in the fifth, so it wasn’t a product of my imagination. It may have been even better than my No. 9 pick, which took place in November, within my brain’s one-month statute of limitations. But at the moment it’s Robin Soderling’s nail-biting and heart-breaking third-set tiebreaker win over Michael Llodra in Bercy that sticks with me, both for its emotional content and its contrasting forms of play.
***
First, I couldn’t find any highlight reels from this match. It makes a big difference. Once you’re used to seeing one awesome winner after another on YouTube, with nothing in between them, it can be surprisingly tough to go back to tennis in real time. I find myself thinking: “You mean they miss first serves and walk around in between points toweling off and getting the balls from the ball kids? How do I watch this sport?”
***
Do you realize now how much you missed Robbie Koenig and company? Um, I have to say I’m not quite there yet. Give me another month. Maybe a month and a half. Though I did like hearing him say that this was a “Battle roy-al.”
***
What is the most exciting play in tennis? From the evidence gathered in this match, it’s the sight of a player taking a ground stroke from at or just inside the baseline, using the shot as an approach shot—i.e. not trying to bludgeon it for a winner—then making the long dash through the court and all the way to the net, and winning the point. It doesn’t happen often, even when a net-rusher like Llodra is playing, but he pulls it off once here. There’s a daredevil aspect to it; you’re only used to seeing people run that far side to side. Maybe it should be required that every player has to attempt it from the back of the court to the front once per game. That would spice up the sport.
***
I remembered the special Parisian energy that built up in the stadium for this match, but I didn’t realize how painful it all appeared to be for Llodra’s wife. He should have at least won it for her.
***
I wrote during Llodra’s run at this tournament that the tough thing about being a serve and volleyer is that doing it right involves trade-offs. Western forehands and two-handed backhands are virtual deal-breakers, which means you put yourself at a disadvantage every time you’re forced to stay at the baseline (the Paul Annacone theory of tennis is beginning to make more sense to me). Watching Llodra try to break Soderling at 5-6 in the third, I realized how hard it is for a guy with a net-rusher’s game to finish off a break. His returns aren’t powerful, especially with his one-handed backhad, so he can’t grab the initiative unless he follows them all the way in. And his passing shots are weak. It’s hard to imagine any other player missing the forehand pass he had at match point. Llodra’s forehand is relatively flat and conservative; he doesn’t have the safety of topspin and net clearance that most other players do. Still, he should have made that one. Koenig said at the start of the game that Llodra had a chance to “cement his place in Bercy folklore.” He did it, but not the way he wanted to.
***
While he lost, and while he ended the year on a tragic note in the Davis Cup final, Llodra gave us so much to watch this year, and in this match. The slice backhand that he circles through, with a follow-through that's all flourish. The change of pace flat backhand that he can unleash in the middle of a rally, to the astonishment of his flailing opponent. The inside-out backhand slice approach return (you don’t see that one too often). The smooth and simple service motion that leads him forward. The unusual angles that he carves the court into with his wide lefty serve and crosscourt backhand volley.
It used to be that serve and volley was the easy way to play; not so anymore. It takes a high degree of risk and skill to beat even a garden-variety two-fisted baseliner. There’s a also a higher degree of decision-making involved—when do I come forward, when do I fake like I’m coming in, when do I change the pace with my ground strokes? That can be confusing and lead to mid-point indecision, but it’s also a superior mental challenge. Maybe Llodra will inspire someone else to try it, someone with the young legs he no longer owns.
***
Soderling offers little appeal from a playing standpoint, at least for me, but he ended this match the way I’d hoped he would. A fierce and almost confrontational celebrator at times, he went low-key and didn’t rub Llodra’s face in his own misery in front of the home fans. It’s not something I thought I would ever say about the heavy-hitting Robin Soderling, but here it is: Nice touch. Nice way to end a classic that, I hope, won’t soon be forgotten.
