I was prepared to start getting sick of Andrea Petkovic before she had ever really done anything. The dances, the videos, the professed love of Goethe and Bloc Party, the determination to be intelligent and fun rather than just a ball-smacking drone: In theory, there wasn’t a lot not to like; the Serbo-German seemed to be the type of personality that any fan would want from the WTA. But was she all style, without enough substance to back it up, without enough game to be more than an attention-seeking hipster novelty act? Her mechanical style certainly seemed to be no match for her free-spirit persona.
All of that has changed in 2011—the on-court Petkovic has begun to catch up to the off-court version. She reached the final in Brisbane, beat Maria Sharapova to make the quarterfinals at the Australian Open, and this week in Miami she’s handed world No. 1 Caroline Wozniacki a rare defeat and come from behind to beat Jelena Jankovic to get to the semifinals. While her serve and forehand remain as mechanical-looking as ever, Petkovic’s charismatic confidence has begun to shine through in the clutch.
“She’s going to be a big-match player for years to come,” Lindsay Davenport said after she watched Petkovic beat Jankovic on her third match point with a gutsy, on-the-line, crosscourt backhand winner.
Petkovic says she loves the big moments, though she has gotten tight in them in the past. I watched her hold, and lose, multiple match points before falling to Svetlana Kuznetsova at Roland Garros last year. But this week she’s backing her words up. Against Jankovic she became more aggressive as the third set went on, while at the same time becoming more accurate with her sometimes-shaky forehand.
But Petkovic isn’t just a basher. In her victory over Wozniacki, she also brought her well-advertised intelligence to the court. She was justifiably proud afterward that she hadn’t fallen into the trap of playing too aggressively against the ultra-consistent Wozniacki, a trap that Petkovic says she has seen a lot of other players put themselves in. She knew that Wozniacki was too good a defender to go for broke against her, so she kept her attacks measured and her percentages high. Today she faces a very different player in a rematch with Sharapova. I didn't see much of Petkovic's win over her in Melbourne, si it will be interesting to see how she approaches her this time.
Petkovic herself seems to realize that her novelty was wearing off. She said after her win over Wozniacki that she wouldn’t do her post-win Petko-dance anymore. This is a positive development—champs are known for winning, not dancing. But she couldn’t help herself when that last backhand found the line against Jankovic. Good for her. I’m happy she’s not a sideshow anymore, but I wouldn’t want her to lose her sense of fun along her way up the rankings. The WTA needs winners, it needs players with guts, but it needs personalities, too.
Novak Djokovic will lose again. He might even lose tonight; his opponent, Kevin Anderson, stopped a similar hot streak of his in Key Biscayne in 2008. But before that happens, and before we try to answer any more unanswerable questions about whether he's going to sweep all the Slams and dominate the tour for the next decade while traveling from city to city on top of a bi-plane, let’s take a moment to appreciate what Djokovic has already done. We know the stats, we know the 21-match win streak; unlike Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, though, we don’t hear much about Djokovic from an aesthetic point of view. Even in his current form, there's not a lot of talk about why he’s worth watching. Here are five reasons that come to my mind when I see him play.
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It’s So Much Easier to Watch Him Serve Now Remember the old serve? Or, I should say, remember the old serves, plural? Djokovic went through approximately one per season. What united them all, though, was the amount of effort he seemed to expend. There was a hitch in the middle that he had to fight through; there was a raspy and fatigued-sounding grunt; there was a sense that he was serving up a hill and into the court, rather flowing into the shot. Djokovic still grunts, but the sense of effort and fatigue is gone from his motion. I’m not sure if his toss is farther into the court now, or he’s changed his arm position when he takes the racquet back, but he’s on top of the ball now, and it’s penetrating more easily.
But I wouldn’t enjoy watching the new Nole serve as much if I’d never seen the old. It’s rare that we get this chance with a top athlete, but more than most, Djokovic’s career has been a work in progress—it’s taken him awhile to streamline both his game and, from what he says, his life off the court.
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He Doesn’t Put You on an Emotional Roller Coaster In the past, even when he was winning, Djokovic played with a barely buried edge of frustration. It drove him to play well on good days, but it drove him over the edge on bad days. There was always a sense that he might pull the plug at a certain point and just start smacking balls; then, when a few of those balls went in, he’d be right back to sticking his tongue in his cheek and pounding his chest. Not so anymore.
Of course this is a chicken and egg situation: If Djokovic ever plays another close match, he might be right back on the roller coaster. And the old signs of frustration did surface in his matches at Indian Wells. I used to get kick out of the dramatic Nole, but I enjoy the serene version more. There’s an easy sense of purpose to the way he moves between points now, a command that’s calming to see.
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He’s the Ultimate in Tennis Fluidity at the Moment Maybe it’s the shiny black clothes he’s been wearing. Maybe it’s the white sneakers. Maybe it’s because he’s dropped a few pounds. But Djokovic seems to be moving with more ease than ever. Is he more fluid than Federer himself? He doesn’t attack the ball when he moves forward, the way Federer does; Djokovic always seems to be cruising, but he’s always there. His specialty is the side to side; from his rubber-legged flying split step to his lightning shuffle across the baseline, Djokovic often looks like he’s dancing back there. It’s tough to get anything by him these days.
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The Long Forehand Roll and the Short Backhand Takeback Djokovic’s strokes split the difference between style and efficiency. Where Federer’s are elegant and elongated, Djokovic’s are compact and sleek. What I’ve loved during this run is the easy roll of his crosscourt forehand; he’s making that shot look effortless at the moment. I’ve always been a fan of the Nadal inside-in forehand, where he gets it side-spinning out of his opponent’s reach. But Djokovic’s inside-in might be even better these days. His hapless opponents are nowhere near the thing. On the other side, I like the abbreviated backswing on the backhand. It’s nothing more than what's necessary, but at the same time it’s not just utilitarian—it works, but it’s not workmanlike.
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He Still Wears a Shirt that Tells You His Name Djokovic has always wanted to be the Man, even if it means forcing the issue. Even if it means having your entourage wear shirts with your face on it; speculating about moving to the U.K. to further your sponsorship opportunities; changing racquet companies so you can be the top name at Head, rather than second fiddle to Federer at Wilson. Djokovic is from a small country, and not a rich country, and he and his family have shouted to be heard.
Do you find this obnoxious? I think it’s touching, because underneath the obvious desire for glory, Djokovic is a nice guy and a classy loser. I was scheduled to interview him in Rome in 2007. The interview, as these things usually are, was put off for a couple of days. Finally I was told I would get him after one of his press conferences. But when he finished, Djokovic started to walk off with a friend. Thinking it was my last chance, that the whole trip was going to be wasted, I shouted from behind him, “Novak!” It must come off as pretty rude, but he turned around and smiled, shook my hand, and said, “Oh, hey, sorry, I’ll be ready in a minute.” And he was.
I’m glad Djokovic has changed in certain ways during his run of success—he’s never been more fun to watch. But I also hope he doesn’t get too classy. Do we want a No. 1 player whose parents wear his face on their shirts? Do we want one who tells you his name on his, as if we weren’t already aware of it? Why not? He’s proud of how far he’s come. Right now, though, all he needs to do is play, to cruise around the court and curl those inside-in forehands for winners, to make us appreciate him.
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Come by Tennis.com for a live chat about Miami, Novak Djokovic, and anything else tennis-related, at 1:00 P.M. EST.
There’s only one problem with going to a tennis tournament: You don’t get to watch it on TV. This isn’t anything to mourn when the players are in Stockholm or Basel or some other sunless cavern. But since the advent of HD and its accompanying widescreen TV, tennis’s signature outdoor events, the majors and the Masters, bring their own light and atmosphere into your living room with them. Gazing at the black-rimmed rectangle, especially when the cameras pull away and show off the grounds or trees or desert or sea that surrounds the courts, you can feel like you’re in two places at once. I missed that sensation in Melbourne and Indian Wells this year, but I got enjoy it this weekend while watching Key Biscayne. It was bright and cold in New York; so bright that every color, from brownstone to yellow cab, gleamed and popped. But watching matches on the second stadium at Crandon Park, I felt like I was there again, sweating under the palm trees in that tropical humidity. Except I didn’t actually have to sweat.
You might think that this kind of distance would make it harder to write about a tournament— obviously you can’t convey color from the grounds or impressions from the interview room. But not being able to do that can also free you up to, as an old boss used to say, do some “global thinking” (not that he ever took the time to do that himself). Without having to note every detail of your surroundings, you can consider the bigger picture. Here are a few of the considerations that came to my mind over the tournament’s first weekend.
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Do you find that your opinion, the one you formulate on your own, before you talk to anyone about a player or a match, differs in a consistent way from the opinions of the people around you? And then do you typically adjust it to fit the consensus? You probably wouldn't be human if you didn’t.
I do it all the time, but I only realize it after I’ve come back from a tournament. There I’m hit by other people’s opinions all day; at home I’m left to my own thoughts as I watch. On Sunday I saw Richard Gasquet timidly lose to Mardy Fish. Gasquet, as we know, is a world-class underachiever and frustration to tennis fans everywhere. He showed some life with a win over Andy Roddick at Indian Wells, but had no answers this week. If I had been with a group of tennis people—reporters, spectators, bloggers, fellow players, etc.—I can imagine shaking my head in collective resignation and disgust at another lame effort by the tragic Richard G. But that’s not what I did on my own. Instead, I thought about how hard it can be to win even one match at a Masters event; that, except for the top players, anyone can lose two sets to someone else; that confidence is extremely hard to generate each time out, even when you’re winning; that, no matter what anyone tells you, it’s tough to change your game. Gasquet plays deep in the court, and his strokes are what they are.
This is typical. Perhaps because I relate the pros’ experiences to my own on a court, I take a more lenient stance toward them in my own head than I do after I’ve heard other people's opinions. Am I more humane, or am I just soft? Both, I guess. Are my personal reactions more right, or more wrong, than the consensus? In one case, at least, my natural reaction was probably the wrong one. Watching Donald Young beat Andy Murray, I thought it had been as much Young’s win as it was Murray’s loss. Nobody else in the press room agreed; the match was universally deemed to be one of the worst of Murray’s career. Judging by Young’s subsequent poor effort against Tommy Robredo, and Murray’s subsequent poor effort at Key Biscayne, the consensus appears to have been closer to the truth than I was. I still like to listen to myself, though.
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This brings up another vexing question that you often hear after a match has ended: Did such and such a player lose it or did his opponent win it? Is it possible to answer this? Tennis is a zero-sum game—the winner has taken exactly what the loser has given him, and vice-versa. At the same time, though, when you play a match, you do know the answer, you do know how well you played compared to what you're capable of. You know that you can easily play well and still lose. You can even feel like you played well when the stats, like winners vs. unforced errors, don’t bear it out.
For example, if you just saw the score of Svetlana Kuznetsova’s straight-set defeat at the hands of Peng Shuai this weekend, you would conclude that Kuzzie is falling fast, that she’s not even competitive in early round matches right now, that the early promise of her win over Justine Henin in Melbourne has evaporated. And you wouldn’t be wrong in saying any of those things. But if you watched the match, you would also know that Peng played exceptionally well. From my perspective, there wasn’t a whole lot Kuznetsova could have done. Maybe I’m too lenient. Maybe that’s why I’m not a pro. Or maybe, sometimes, the other player is just too good.
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Wouldn’t it be a dream to have a TV that allowed you to see three, four, five, 10 matches on various channels, one where an entire tournament is at your fingertips? Yes it would. But I would also caution you to be careful what you dream about.
At many important tournaments, every reporter has just this type of television monitor above their desk. At the Grand Slams, you can click to each court on the grounds; for a Masters event like Indian Wells, the three show courts are available. This is very helpful for someone trying to cover an entire tournament, especially in its early, jam-packed stages. It also makes it easy to gather with your fellow writers, who are often sitting in the same row as you, and watch a crucial stage of any match that you happen upon. Some of my favorite moments at tournaments over the years have been spent leaning back in the chair at my desk watching the decisive moments of a match with a couple of colleagues, even as the match itself is going on just a few hundred yards away.
But as with anything that seems a little too good to be true, there is a downside to suddenly having every point of a tournament available to you, for no cost. You realize very quickly that availability can breed indifference. As well as rapid oversaturation; typically, by the end of the second day in the press room, I’m woozy from watching too many tennis balls flying across nets. Compare that to this weekend at home. There I sat and happily watched bonus coverage from Key Biscayne’s second stadium of Cilic vs. Tipsarevic, Tsonga vs. Gabashvili, Isner vs. Bogomolov. If I’d been at my press desk, I likely wouldn’t have seen a point of any of these, unless it came in a tiebreaker. I would have read an article online, kept writing, walked off for a donut, or maybe, don't tell anyone, have clicked to see what was going on in an NCAA basketball game. At home, where my options were limited to whatever the Tennis Channel chose to show me, I enjoyed watching every point I could get of those matches.
As I said at the top, there are trade-offs when you go and when you stay home. When I'm there, I get as much tennis as I can take; when I’m on the couch, I’m happy to take what I can get.
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Speaking of being there, we've got Pete Bodo in Key Biscayne starting today. I'll be posting here and Racquet Reacting through the week.
It’s been a while since I emptied the mailbox. After the days in Indian Wells, it’s stuffed to overflowing, and mostly not with hate letters this time. Maybe the Southern California sun put us all in a better mood.
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Steve, Since you got hired at Tennis Magazine, how often have you seen or heard from Reshma?—Master Ace
This is in reference to the story I wrote a little whole ago about how I get my current job. First, thanks to everyone who commented positively on it. It’s nice to know I can depart from forehands and backhands now and then and still have people reading.
As for Reshma, yes, in the way of our small world, she later became friends with a woman that I worked with at Tennis, and we saw got together a number of times. I could never repay her for getting me out of Yorkville, though. She now lives in Amherst, Mass., with her husband and daughter.
As for my boss at the book store, we passed each other once on 34th St. a few years later. We both noticed the other, and quickly looked away.
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A similar fate had me moving from Brooklyn to Long Island and taking a part-time job in the local library for a year. I have some seriously fond memories and bizarre stories from that time. Checking books in and out, getting to know the locals (and scoring union benefits!) I still sometimes secretly harbor fantasies of becoming a librarian. Do you do the same about owning a bookstore?—Michele
It’s funny but there is a part of me that misses opening the store in the morning and having nothing to do but read, listen to music, and stand outside and watch the street life go by. You don’t feel this way at the time, and I would never wish for this life, but there’s something romantic about looking back on the days when you were struggling. Is it a fallacy, or is there some real beauty in them? Is there an essential element of life that can only be found in failure? If so, it’s a very foreign concept to Americans.
I made $19,000 a year at that job, but, aside from going to better restaurants, I’m not sure I live a whole lot better now than I did then. My books were free.
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Andy Murray is certainly a very competent volleyer - from well inside the service line. But unfortunately, the way the singles game is played today does not afford a player many opportunities to make a half volley or low shoe-string volley from at or just inside the service line, which one often must play with aplomb in doubles. So, it doesn't surprise me that he dumped many of those in the net.—Slice N Dice
What was interesting to me was that Murray was very good at the touch volleys and half-volleys that he hit within rallies at the net, but very bad at hitting a serve, running forward, and making a first volley. That specific play seems to be a lost art.
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Murray isn't one of the big four - Soderling is. And his results suggest he deserves it, so why is Murray always put above him? Is it the influence of the British media?—Corrie
No, I forgot Soderling was ranked No. 4. Leaving aside the all-powerful British tennis media and their vicious campaign to make the world believe that Robin Soderling is not in the Big 4, and leaving aside his horrible post-Melbourne slump, Murray has had the better career to this point.
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I find Dolgo fascinating to watch. You never know what he's going to do next. I remember watching him for the first time against Murray in the AO quarterfinals. At times he seemed to just go away mentally and I thought that Murray had the match in hand. Then he would somehow reappear and start blasting brilliant shots all over the place. His shot selection can range from godawful to genius. If this talented young man wants to continue to progress in the sport, then he needs to work on his mental focus and improve the shot selection and stop being self-indulgent at times. Just because you love a shot, doesn't necessarily mean it's the right one.—Mindy
He’s an interesting case. It seems to take more effort for him to get his game up to its top level than it does other players, to get everything clicking. When he goes bad, he goes really bad, as he did in one set I watched from one of the South American clay events last month. I wonder what the future will be, not for Dolgo, but for those of us who are his fans? Just as he swings between the uncanny and the awful, I can imagine swinging between excitement at the possibilites implied in his game, and eternal frustration when those implications aren’t followed through on.
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I like how the deranged Raonic-bots failed to acknowledge the fact that Ryan was not serving well at all either.—Leo
Wow, this is the surest sign yet of how far Milos Raonic has come in the last three months. He already has fans that can be described as “deranged Raonic-bots.” Haven’t met any myself—yet—but I’ll be on the lookout for these frightening zombie-like figures at the next tournament I attend.
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i´ve always laughed about the weight stats..dont put too much into them-is´s not like the atp makes them step on stage at the beginning of every season..which is to say:i´ll bet you any amount of money that federer is nowhere near 188lbs..more like 178lbs.nadal on the other hand might actually be at around that clip..take my word for it..until someone shows me a scale with roger standing on it (and not holding a 10lb dumbbell in his hand)that displays a figure above 180lbs i wont believe it.—deshawn
It’s true: Federer and Nadal are always the same weight. Couple them with Sampras and you would think that all you had to do be a Hall-of-Famer is make yourself 6-foot-1 and 188 pounds. I can remember Monica Seles being listed as 99 pounds for much much longer than she was 99 pounds.
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I will say one things about consistency though. And I am not talking about match in match out consistency, but, rather, shot is shot out, consistency. And I think Rafa always had the upper hand there. But one thing I have noticed, over the last couple of years, is that Rafa is making more errors...more UFEs than he used to. In the past, that door was always slammed, firmly in an opponent's face, making it very difficult to even get into a match against Rafa and still more difficult to climb back up once down. Rafa gave NOTHING away. I always marveled at that. Over the last 18 mos, or so, very slowly, more UFEs have been creeping into Rafa's game. The door is more often opened just a crack. This may well be due to the fact that, as I believe he has said himself, Rafa is going for more, attempting to end the points earlier. But, and even though he is winning a ton, I think players are going to be more and more able to slip through some of those cracks.—CL
Whatever the case may be with Nadal at the moment. I’ve always thought that one of the unacknowledged effects of aging in tennis players is a slow but inevitable reduction in consistency. I think it’s part of why Lleyton Hewitt stopped challenging for majors: His game was about getting the back more than his opponents, and like everything else, your ability to do that erodes with age. You're not quite as quick to the ball every single time, you don’t see it quite as perfectly, you’re a little less patient and, consciously or unconsciously, a little less willing to kill yourself to win. I haven’t found many people who agree with me on this; we’ll see what happens with Nadal.
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Oy, Jackson, all tennis fans see players in their dreams, or DAY DREAMS for the literal-minded. Ditto basketball fans, soccer fans, baseball fans, what have you. Fans play and replay (and imagine) points and matches in their heads endlessly. And only very special players make it to the day dream level. Roscoe Tanner, for instance – NOT—Raymond
Au contraire, mon frère. I can remember having nightmares about Scoe’s serve as a kid when contemplating my favorite player, Bjorn Borg, having to face it yet again at the U.S. Open.
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tignor! always enjoy your articles cuz you appreciate the djoker + alot of writers don’t—someone
Whoa, you scared me there when you yelled my name. I had a flashback to a drill instructor at Julian Krinsky’s tennis camp in the 80s yelling that same word when I wasn’t running hard enough for him. Good times on those hot days there. You’d have five juniors and one amiably sadistic pro making us drop and give him 20 after every miss. The whole thing would dissolve into mass laughter by the end of the hour; the harder it was, the more fun it became. Practice isn’t all bad, now that I think about.
And I do appreciate Djokovic. Is he under-sung and his game under-poeticized by the press in general? I have to think that would change if he keeps going like he's going. His style is too sleek not to be enjoyed and praised. The poetry was first monopolized by Federer, then Nadal muscled in to get his share. There hasn't been much extra purple prose to go around.
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"defeat, rather than victory, is the “true” of the world." well phrased. And - Isn't this what makes Victory so worth celebrating?—Kristin
Ah, I had never thought of it quite like that. Thank you.
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I suppose that we should be happy that tennis gets any coverage in the LA Times at all, but it seems that Dwyre could do better in communicating the overall experience of a So Cal tournament with 350,000 attendees and covering the American and. particularly, Californian players--Young, Querrey, Harrison, etc. in a way that the AP or Reuters don't do. After my comments to him I am glad, but a bit embarrassed, that he is so well-regarded as a tennis journalist. I feel like I told Jim Murray or Red Smith that they don't know how to cover baseball.—Gerry
Well, no, Dwyre is not the Red Barber of tennis, exactly. But I think he does a solid job for a general sports guy. I mainly appreciate that, unlike some of his contemporaries, like Lupica and Feinstein, he still obviously respects and likes tennis. It's not easy to do the overall experience thing in the space he has, while also not ignoring the big story of the day.
Covering a sporting event really makes so much more sense in a blog-website format, doesn't it? You can do infinitely more.
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Recently I was outside doing some yard work and one of the neighbors had a radio out and tuned to a local station. It struck me that that's a sound you don't hear anymore, but which was a regular part of my childhood. It seemed that any time you were outside someone nearby would have a radio going. The Walkman and iPod have put an end to that (and I guess that's not a bad thing).—low.4.0.player
First, I like the modesty and specificity of your handle, low 4.0 player. And it makes sense: I never would have believed that your opinions could have come from a high 4.0 player—that would have been preposterous.
Anyway, what I remember best about the radio as a kid was the sound of Phillies games over them. Swatting away Pennsylvania gnats—a feature of my youth that has also, thankfully, vanished—I listened to long baseball games in the evening. All of the action happened in the announcer’s voice, and my imagination. It helped that the announcer was the late, great Harry Kalas.
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Someday Steve, after many, many beers, is going to tell us what he really thinks of us.—Cotton Jack
I love everybody here. (Now to crack open that first beer of the day.)
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Have a good weekend. I'll be back Monday with some early notes on Key Biscayne. I'm looking forward to seeing it from my couch, and not having to take a prop plane to get to the living room.
Is there a slow-moving generational shift happening before our eyes this spring? Nothing is definite or permanent yet, of course, but you can see a change in the seemingly unchanging world of men’s tennis with a quick glimpse at the Key Biscayne draw. Rafael Nadal and Roger Federer are slated to meet in the semifinals, something they haven’t done at a single-elimination tournament in six years. This is what qualifies as a stunning turn of events in the men’s game.
But change must happen some day, even to Federer and Nadal, who have had by far the longest co-tenure at the top of the rankings of any two players of the last 40 years. The questions of the moment are: Will Key Biscayne speed this change, or make it move even more slowly? Or will the ATP give us a real surprise?
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First Quarter
It might be hard to believe with what’s gone on so far this year, but Rafael Nadal is still No. 1. He’s only won one tournament since the U.S. Open, but he’s still the owner of three majors. He had so much trouble with his serve last week that his Uncle Toni has flown in for emergency help.
Nadal’s draw looks familiar: He played Jo-Wilfried Tsonga here last year, and was slated to play him in Indian Wells. Now he’s scheduled to face him again in the round of 16. Tsonga has beaten him before, but there isn’t a whole lot to trouble Nadal as he looks ahead. Close to him are Kei Nishikori and Jeremy Chardy—though Nadal may still be a little worried about Nishikori; he called him “Top 5 for sure” after the kid took a set from him a few years ago (by Nadal’s count, there are about 25 guys who are soon going to be in the Top 10 for sure). Dolgopolov is also in the vicinity; I’d like to see a Dolgo-Nadal match myself. On the other side are Almagro and Berdych, neither of whom have beaten Nadal in recent years. Though Berdych has fond memories of this tournament. He beat Federer and reached the final here last year.
While Nadal certainly struggled in his last two sets in Indian Wells, the week was a positive one for him, and included his best performance of 2011, his semifinal win over Juan Martin del Potro. Rafa is in one of his favorite places to be: Rebuilding mode.
Player who will probably be out of the draw by the time I write this but who is nonetheless worth seeing when you can: crafty but small French poet/player Adrian Mannarino
Semifinalist: Nadal
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Second Quarter
Federer should be happy he’s not in Novak Djokovic’s half this time; all of his three losses this year have come at the hands of the Serb. Or maybe not: Moving away from Djokovic only brings him closer to Nadal. Anyway, this is the world Federer faces at the moment, the one he’ll try to work his way out of by the time the Grand Slams roll around in a couple of months.
The upside for Federer is that, as I said, he hasn’t lost to anyone other than Djokovic since Gael Monfils beat him in Paris in November. And while he was hardly in full flight in Indian Wells, he didn’t lose a set before the semifinals. His draw in Key Biscayne isn’t notably difficult, but I expect him to lose a set somewhere along the line; he hasn’t been to a final here since 2006.
First up might be the aging Radek Stepanek or the raging Fabio Fognini. Also near him are Marcos Baghdatis, who beat Federer last spring. On the other side are Gilles Simon, who put a scare into him in Melbourne, and Andy Roddick, who beat him here in 2008.
Also here: Ryan Harrison and Grigor Dimitrov.
Semifinalist: Federer
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Third Quarter
With Soderling and Ferrer at either end, this is the most open of the four sections. Ferrer likes these courts and has been to the semis here. Soderling has had a foot problem and is coming off an early upset in Indian Wells. Has he played too much this season? Or will that loss help him come back rested? Will playing Davis Cup and Indian Wells with the injured foot have longer-term consequences?
Either way, this quarter is up for grabs, with a lot of interesting names grabbing for a semifinal spot. Raonic, Wawrinka, Fish, a somewhat resurgent Gasquet, and, close to Soderling, an even more resurgent del Potro. The big man is getting better each day; the question now is whether he’s physically ready for back-to-back Masters events.
Semifinalist: Wawrinka
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Fourth Quarter
Now we see why the third quarter is so open: Andy Murray, seeded No. 5 and reeling away from Melbourne again, has landed in Djokovic’s section. That’s not great news or Djokovic, but the rest of this quarter shapes up well for him, well enough that he should be able to survive whatever mental letdown or burnout he might have coming out of Indian Wells. Istomin, Bellucci, Blake, Querrey, Troicki, Ilhan, Kukushkin—can any of these guys slow the Djoker’s momentum at last? On paper you have to say no, though Djokovic did lose to Kevin Anderson here three years ago after going all the way in Palm Springs.
Murray has the tougher road. Andreev, Isner, and Verdasco are near him. I keep thinking Verdasco is due for a big win this spring, but so far he’s proven me wrong. Will he give in and listen this time?
Semifinalist: Djokovic
***
Semifinals: Nadal d. Federer; Djokovic d. Wawrinka
It seems prudent at this stage, when thinking about the retirement of Justine Henin, the absences of Venus and Serena Williams, and the indifference to all WTA-run events recently professed by Kim Clijsters, to take a glass-half-full approach to the women's game. Nothing is going to change with those elder stateswomen any time soon, so we might as well sit back and enjoy the women’s game as it stands today. There’s no better place to start than with the draw for Key Biscayne, which represents the state of that game nicely.
Scanning down the names, I can begin to see an upside to the void at the top: Lots of players have a chance to win this tournament. Yes, Caroline Wozniacki is here, she’s No. 1, and she just won in Indian Wells. But is she so dominant that we can expect her to complete the spring double? She's good, she's getting better, and starting to get a little cocky about it—she's even telling people how "likeable" she is now. Is it coronation time? I don't think Wozniacki is that good yet. That leaves us, as we start the second leg of the double, with a lot of possibilities. It also leaves us with the potential for someone to make a strong claim to be a new contender for the Slams just down the road.
***
First Quarter Wozniacki hit a career peak in Indian Wells. She’s added to her No. 1 game this year, without getting away from what she does best. Usually you can figure the Indian Wells winner to have a letdown in Key Biscayne, but Wozniacki is working so efficiently, and is so tough to beat at the moment, you get the feeling she could survive any temporary dip in her play. She even said so herself. Sounding nearly cocky, Wozniacki said her opponents would either have to overpower her or stay out there all day to beat her.
Still, Alisa Kleybanova came close to overpowering her at Indian Wells, but like Caro said, she couldn't stay out there all day. Marion Bartoli did get to her in the second set on Sunday, and may have given the other women a template for how to beat her. The problem is, Bartoli’s template involved throwing the kitchen sink across the net and hoping something worked. But her mix of drops, lobs, net-rushes, and angles was much more successful than Maria Sharapova’s attempt to drill the ball through Wozniacki in the previous round.
Does anyone in this quarter have the variety to mimic Bartoli? The seeds are Jankovic, Wickmayer, Peer, Pennetta, Petkovic, Hantuchova. I can’t pick against the best.
Player I want to see: 32nd-seed Klara Zakopalova. I’m not sure I’ve ever watched her play. Do me a favor and hang around for a round or two, Klara
Semifinalist: Wozniacki
***
Second Quarter Talk about possibilities: It’s impossible to name a favorite, or even a semi-favorite, for this section. Here are the names of note:
Stosur—she’s still seeded 4th in the tournament despite her middle results this season. Safarova—what happened to her over the last two or three years to take her so thoroughly out of contention? Petrova—she made a little noise in Indian Wells. Sharapova—can she continue to beat who she’s supposed to beat? That’s the first step; then we can start to talk about her wretched performance against Wozniacki last week and what that portends. Kuznetsova—my high hopes for her 2011 have been brutally dashed thus far. Li Na—the disappearing act begins.
Who can grab this very grabbable section? Or, failing that, who can back their way in? Against my better judgement, I’ll go back to the well and take the Great Headscratch, Kuzzie.
Player to Watch: The oft-injured but returning Sabine Lisicki; she plays Petrova next.
Interesting result already in the books: U.S. youngster Madison Keys took Patty Schnyder to a third-set tiebreaker in the first round
Semifinalist: Kuznetsova
***
Third Quarter This is third-seed Vera Zvonareva’s section, and there are some good players lined up. Wild card Dinara Safina had a comeback Indian Wells; she might get Zvonareva in the second round. Powerful Alisa Kleybanova gave Wozniacki her toughest match last week before running out of gas. She might get Bartoli in an interesting third-rounder. Ditto for Maria Kirilenko and Agnieszka Radwanska, who went to 7-5 in the third in the desert. And at the top, across from Zvonareva, is Francesca Schiavone. The Italian seems to be saving her epic performances for the Slams these days.
I missed Zvonareva’s loss to Cibulkova in Indian Wells, but heard that it was a terrific match. Despite her tough draw, I’ve become a believer in Zvonareva's ability to contend consistently and avoid the crippling mental meltdowns of old. I’ll stick with that belief for at least one more tournament.
First-round match to watch: Safina vs. qualifier Jelena Dokic
Semifinalist: Zvonareva
***
Fourth Quarter This is also an interesting section. We have Clijsters: She’s the best player in the world when she wants to be, but she’s had shoulder issues, and, more seriously, motivation issues when it comes to the non-Slams. She's already talking about how much she wants the French Open, and she even went out of her way to say last week that she didn’t want any type of rivalry with Wozniacki—come on, Kim, what’s a sportswriter supposed to do with that?
We have Azarenka: She had a good Indian Wells and seemed on the verge of a great one when she went down with a hip injury against Wozniacki. And she’s won this tournament before.
We have Ivanovic: Still jumpy, getting better, ground strokes improved, potential to do whatever her head and her ball toss let her do.
We have Kvitova: A young and violently inconsistent player, she has as much game as anyone in the tournament. She was down last week in Indian Wells, where she disappeared without a trace. Does that mean she’ll be up this week? She already has a win over Clijsters this year.
Semifinalist: Kvitova
***
Semifinals: Wozniacki d. Kuznetsova; Zvonareva d. Kvitova
No rest for player or writer or fan alike: Key Biscayne is upon us. But I'm not quite ready to be upon it. I'll do a women's preview tomorrow and a men's preview Thursday, but for today I'll wrap up the last loose ends and thoughts from my 10 days in Indian Wells.
***
It’s very difficult to imagine a lifestyle different from yours until you try it. How, I’m always wondering, do tennis players spend so much of their time in transitory spaces—taking cars to airports, sitting in airports, flying on planes, taking shuttles to tournament sites, checking into the next hotel? It sounds like a life of non-stop hassle, not glamour.
Sometimes it even seems perilous. My first flight yesterday was in a prop plane from Palm Springs to Las Vegas. It was fine, except for those moments when the little tin can was rocking so severely that the world outside the windows became blurry. Oh, and except for that loud, unexplained ringing that began when we reached what can euphemistically called our “cruising” altitude. And except for the fact that, when we landed, we spent a fair amount of time rushing down the runway with just one of the wheels on the ground. One thing you can say for prop planes, with the roar and blinding brightness through the windows, you really do feel like you’re in the air—but I’m not so sure that’s a good thing. As for airports, I’m glad they exist in a way: They make me thankful for every moment I’m not in one.
Hotels are a different story. I’ve always loved them, their deluxe hospitality, their anonymity, their beds. I stayed at a middle-of-the-road chain hotel in Indian Wells, where a tiny ant or two could be spotted around the sink, but I looked forward to getting back to my room after the day was done, lying in bed and doing nothing more than zoning out to a basketball game. I can see the appeal of this part of the lifestyle: You live a little more lightly in a hotel than you do when you’re at home. You don’t feel the weight, the permanence, of your surroundings. And you have a maid who comes every day.
***
Each year there’s one morning when I walk into the Indian Wells Tennis Garden around 9:00, an hour or so earlier than normal. The sun is rising, the birds are singing, the mountains are still there, there’s quiet all around. The loudest sounds are the grunts and sneaker-squeaks of the players on the courts. Every year these sounds remind me all over again that there is one other aspect to being a professional tennis player that I would find extremely difficult to endure: I’m talking about practice. Specifically, early-morning practice. Seeing the players out running, swinging, sweating, hitting ball after ball at that hour makes me realize how much of a chore this thing that goes by the name of a “sport” can be.
When you and I play, we do it for recreation. All of our exercise is recreation, which means that it’s fun or relaxing or sanity promoting or something similarly salutary—in short, it’s not work. But what if it were work? Everyone knows that the minute a hobby becomes a job, the nature of it changes and some of the pure enjoyment goes out of it.
I got a little taste of that feeling in college, when I had to go to practice each day. The toughest thing for me was getting started, getting my body into it and the blood flowing all over again every 24 hours. So whenever I see a pro getting loose and warming-up for yet another practice session, I cringe. The repetition, of ball after ball after ball, must be mind-numbing. And while sweating feels good even if it’s done for work, a sense of pointlessness can invade even the most productive practice session after a certain amount of time. You know that no matter how many good shots you’ve hit, perfect shots even, you're not doing it when it counts. I sometimes found practicing well to be a burden. It only made me more disappointed when I couldn’t reproduce that form in matches. All of those great practice shots had been exposed as an illusion. Worse, they showed me what my potential was, and exactly how much my nerves kept me from reaching that potential.
Anyway, those are the thoughts that I happily leave behind as I walk away from the practice courts and all that early effort. I’m off to have my breakfast, which this year consisted of two donuts and a cup of coffee. These I consumed in a room manned by volunteers, ladies in green Indian Wells jackets and khaki capris. I enjoyed eavesdropping on their conversations. Nothing was left unsaid.
“I think the licorice jar needs to be refilled.”
“More people are eating it today than yesterday, I think.”
“I love licorice. I could eat that whole jar myself if you let me.”
“Well, let me go back and get some more, before there’s nothing left.”
“It’s empty much earlier than yesterday.”
***
Do tennis players really hate to lose? Sometimes it seems to come as a relief. And do they really despise facing the press after these losses? For three players are Indian Wells, their pressers served as therapy sessions; each left much happier than when they came in.
After Jelena Jankovic’s dismally tame defeat at the hands of Ana Ivanovic, Jankovic could be heard outside the press room loudly telling someone, “I don’t know what to say to them!” Not surprisingly, her first few answers were a little grim. Halfway through, JJ’s face brightened. She began to enjoy talking about what she had done wrong. She left with a smile.
Ditto for Maria Sharapova. You would have thought that her even-more-dismal semifinal defeat at the hands of Caroline Wozniacki would have left her a broken shell of a player. But perhaps because it was so bad, she was relaxed about it afterward. Rambling and giggling, she didn’t seem to want to leave the interview room.
And how about Rafael Nadal? After each of his wins last week, he faced the press with a mix of concern and cautious optimism. At no point was he as free and easy as he was after losing the final to Djokovic. Nadal sat sideways in his chair, smiling and shaking his head. When someone asked him if he thought Djokovic or Federer would end up No. 1, Nadal joked, “So you don’t think I have a chance?” Watching him, I almost get the feeling that defeat somehow confirms Nadal’s exceptionally realistic worldview. As he might say, defeat, rather than victory, is the “true” of the world.
***
One of the nicest things, from my point of view, about Indian Wells is the tournament’s annual award for lifetime achievement to a deserving journalist. This year it went to Bill Dwyre of the Los Angeles Times. He’s a legend in the area, and I was honored to watch a few NCAA buzzer-beaters with him in the press room this year—“Wow, I’m watching a game with Bill Dwyre.” He’s also one of the few veteran sportswriters who has never lost his love for tennis, though there are tradeoffs. I was standing next to him for the end of the Karlovic-Nadal thriller. If Rafa lost, both us were going to have spend a couple of extra hours going to pressers, dissecting the upset, and trying to figure out when it meant for Nadal's future. It wasn’t a pleasant prospect for anyone in the room (now you know how journalists root in tennis; for the result that doesn’t force them to start a new article at 11 P.M.) At one point, Dwyre turned to me and said, “Late-night tennis. It’ll make you grow old fast.” My favorite moment of the tournament was sitting out in the press seats with all of my colleagues and having Dwyre, while receiving his award, gesture to us in fittingly nonchalant solidarity.
***
We’ve already talked airplanes, so all that’s left for this last Indian Wells is to talk a little music. I mentioned earlier that I was stuck with the horrors of Palm Springs radio, and as hard as I tried to be democratic and non-snobbish and to figure out what the heck teenagers listen to now and why, it was mostly a vast wasteland to my ears. L’il Wayne, OK, will check him out some more. But Enrique Iglesias? Not so much. The one newish pop song I liked was about a girl who’s been good all her life but now she’s going to be bad.
But there were two moments, two oases in the desert. One was a set of songs featuring Charlie Parker and Buddy Rich that I’d never heard before. At night, on the road, their music cut through everything, and came slamming right into you (see Parker and Rich together here).
The second moment came in the bright morning sunshine, as I was leaving Indian Wells and driving to the airport. It was a weird coincidence. One day during the Australian Open, I was walking through a Melbourne park when I had—as I’m sure you’ve had many times—an overwhelming urge to hear “Little Doll” by the Stooges. It didn’t happen then, but I got my wish in California. Someone, deep on the left side of the dial, must have taken pity on me and my plight with the car radio, because as I turned onto the highway, “Little Doll” came crashing through the speakers. I’d like to say I was driving off into the sunset when I heard it, but it was too early for that. Either way, hearing those immortal, and immortally dumb, opening lines—“Little doll I can’t forget/Smoking on a cigarette”—was a great way to go out.
INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Let's just say it: Until today, it hadn’t been a great week for the WTA. The women’s tour went head to head with the men at just the wrong moment. The ATP semifinals gathered all the recent Grand Slam champions together, and the early rounds of the men’s draw showcased a potential future in the making in Milos Raonic and Ryan Harrison. Even the men's doubles, with its star players and cool new winning team, was livelier than ever.
Meanwhile, the women were learning a number of disturbing facts about their own future. That Venus Williams will be joining her sister on the sidelines for the tour’s next big mandatory tournament, in Key Biscayne; that her sister, Serena, is “depressed”; and that Kim Clijsters, the winner of the last two majors, doesn’t care about the tour’s events at all. The only consolation seemed to be the discovery that the WTA had been harboring a female Einstein among its ranks: On her way to the final, Marion Bartoli revealed that she has an IQ of 175, but that rather than do math or science or something boring like that, she never found anything she enjoyed doing more than slapping a tennis ball against a wall over and over. Now if that isn’t an endorsement for the sport . . .
But whatever the WTA’s struggles at the moment, the women's champion, Caroline Wozniacki, didn’t need to be quite so apologetic when she received her winner’s trophy, the most important of her career thus far. She wanted to make her speech quick, she said, because, “I know a lot of you are waiting to see the men’s final.”
Wozniacki should have been basking. Her win was a validation of her improved game this season—in the final, she won by subtly dictating as much as did by patiently defending. Her win was a nice turnabout from her heartbreaking defeat in the Aussie Open semifinals to Li Na after she held a match point; this time Wozniacki wobbled when she had the lead, but she didn’t fall over. And as far as the women’s tour went, her win was the best thing that happened all tournament; for one week, at least, the WTA's rankings rang true.
“Once again,” Wozniacki said afterward, “I showed that I can played great tennis, and I’ve beaten some good players this week.”
OK, good, there’s a little of the confidence, even cockiness, we expect from our No. 1's. And in truth, Wozniacki was more assertive about her abilities this week than I’ve seen her. She said that anyone who wanted to beat her had to play well, that they either had to overpower her or be willing to stay out there all day. Those were strong words coming from young Caro, who likes to be liked rather than feared.
But she backed them up, and as usual she did it with a deceptive toughness on the court. Wozniacki is best appreciated live. The stroke production that looks routine on TV is revealed to be the hard-earned product of strong legs and meticulous footwork. She plays a physical brand of tennis, but not an aggressive one—call it athletically defensive. Though “defensive” is a little unfair. Wozniacki plays with the defensive intelligence of a pool shark. It’s an axiom in that game that a good player never forces himself to take a difficult shot.
In 2011, though, Wozniacki has been constructing points proactively, with just a hint more risk, and she did that to perfection in the first set against Marion Bartoli today. She did it softly. A little hook forehand here, a nice quiet, gruntless topspin forehand safely placed down the line, a swing volley that looked like a caress, and the point was hers.
“I played very, very well, I thought,” Wozniacki said, “actually in the whole match, but the first set I felt like I had the most control. I had her running; I had her moving.”
It appeared that Wozniacki was going to run Bartoli straight back to the locker room. But the Frenchwoman made the match an entertaining one by doing the only thing she could do—trying a little bit of everything. She hit harder from the baseline. She came to the net. She hit drop shots on consecutive points. She lobbed. Most of all she carved up the court with the sharp angles that she can get with her two-handed strokes and extra-long racquet.
Not for the first time, I found myself thinking that it’s too bad we don’t see more of the wacky Bartoli and her mad-scientist father. As she noted afterward with a laugh, Dad, sitting back with his feet up the whole time, while his daughter ran herself ragged, was the sole member of her player’s box. From her painful-looking heel-toe service stance, to her strange motion, which begins with her right arm opening up like a car door, to her robotic between-point practice swings, Bartoli gives you a lot to watch, and the crowd at Indian Wells got behind her.
“It was one of the best matches I ever played from the second set on towards the end,” Bartoli said. “I think it was a great match to watch from the crowd, and I really enjoyed playing it.”
That’s the best part of sports: Just when you think the women’s game has had a week to forget, the final turns out to be the better match of the day, full of tactics, turnarounds, and crowd-pleasing surprises.
Then, after all that, Bartoli got tired. Wozniacki showed some nerves in closing it out, letting Bartoli back from 1-4 to 3-4 in the third set. There, though, she righted the ship with a fierce backhand crosscourt winner and a fist-pump. It was a little cocky, and that was a good thing. Wozniacki didn’t lose another game.
***
History really does repeat itself, doesn’t it? Yesterday I watched Roger Federer lose a three-set semifinal to Novak Djokovic from the same seat where I had watched him lose a very similar three-set semifinal to Andy Murray two years before. Today, from that same seat, I watched Rafael Nadal lose a final to Djokovic that bore an uncanny resemblance to a semifinal he had lost to the Serb three years earlier.
The score of their 2008 semi was 6-3, 6-2. Discounting Nadal’s opening-set win, the score of today’s final was 6-3, 6-2. Both times, Nadal started out OK. Then he started to miss, started to miss some more, started to miss shots I’d never seen him miss, started to look like he had no idea where any shot was going, and ended up looking lost and forlorn and unable to put the ball within five feet of where he aimed it. Both times, as Nadal unraveled, the Indian Wells crowd sat in increasing disbelief, calling out for the “Rafa!” they knew and loved but who had temporarily disappeared.
There was an obvious reason for Nadal’s demise, and he stated it right away after the match: His serve.
“I think I was playng my best match here,” Nadal said. “The first set I think I played really good, having the control of most of the points, and I felt well.”
Nadal had played an excellent first set, pushing Djokovic back with his forehand and frustrating him with its spin, which kept kicking too close to Djokovic’s body for comfort. Nadal hit his most impressive serve of the day—an ace out wide in the deuce court—to get to set point at 5-4, and he closed it out a minute or so later. Djokovic was chattering to himself and hanging his head. It looked like it was going to be Nadal's day.
“After that,” Nadal said, “I started to serve really bad. So I was thinking too much about the serve more than the game. The serve was the difference today in my opinion. It’s true I play less intense after the first set, but I think everything is because of the serve.”
Not quite everything. There was the matter of his opponent and his ability, for the second straight day, to beat an all-time great without playing his absolute best. At the most fundamental level, he was steadier than both Federer and Nadal. It’s a fact that he noted early in the tournament. After demolishing Ernests Gulbis, Djokovic chalked up his win to the dullest but most crucial aspect of the game: hitting balls in.
Djokovic did all he needed to do today, as he had yesterday. Recognizing that Nadal wasn’t feeling the ball from his backhand side, he pounded that shot, just as he has pounded Federer’s the last two times they’ve played. Djokovic moved Nadal out wide with his crosscourt forehand, he got returns back in the court, and, as he has been all year, he made first serves when he needed them. Djokovic closed the match with four first serves and a love hold. And unlike against Federer yesterday, he showed no nerves at the end. He didn’t get tentative or safe with the lead. Of course, it also helped that Nadal seemed to be trying to hit his forehands into the alley rather than the court.
Djokovic chalked it up to confidence again. “We’re talking about the momentum in tennis,” he said. “It was just the question of momentum. I managed to hold that very important game at 5-3 [in the second set] and I was on a roll. I am playing with a lot of confidence. I’m feeling the ball well on the court. So it will not stop here, definitely.”
Djokovic has won a total of 19 straight matches, and is undefeated in 2011. He just beat the two best players of this era by playing solid tennis, not stratospheric tennis. Right now, he’s the guy who’s coming up with the big serve, who’s moving his opponents where he wants them, who’s holding steady in the third set, who's venting his anger and not letting it hurt his game. As Nadal said afterward, Djokovic put himself in the best position of anyone to finish the season at the top. And now he’s followed up a Grand Slam win with not only a Masters title, but a victory of the world No. 1.
All that said, I’m going to finish by restating a cautionary thought that I had at the start of this tournament. In 2008 Djokovic won the Aussie Open and Indian Wells, and didn’t win another major that year. In 2009, Nadal did the same. Djokovic sounds level-headed about where he is right now; this time he knows the perils and pitfalls that await. He’s at the top of the mountain today. It’s a nice place to be, but it also, for better or worse, comes with a view. From there, he should be able to see Miami. He should be able to see Monte Carlo, Madrid, Rome, and Paris. He should be able to get a glimpse of the green lawns of Wimbledon, and maybe, way off in the distance, the hard courts of Flushing Meadows. It’s a high mountain. It’s a long season.
INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—When you’ve watched and written about a player long enough, sometimes you can tell that he’s playing well, and is probably going to play well, even if he might not be so sure himself, and even if the scoreline would suggest the opposite. Such was the case when I saw how Rafael Nadal opened his semifinal with Juan Martin del Potro here on Saturday.
I’d seen Nadal practice a few times this week. Practice for him consists primarily of belting every ball on the rise as hard as he can and not missing all that often. That’s what you get when you take an all-time great and remove all the pressure from his strokes. The biggest difference between his practice play and his match play is that in the former, he hits a lot more on-the-rise backhands than he does in the latter. So it was notable to me that he came out attacking his backhand in the first game today. He attacked well enough to earn a break point in that game, but lost it when he hit a backhand—an on-the-rise backhand—into the net. Still, I thought Nadal had “good energy,” as they say in the NBA. He was bouncy and playing at an unusually fast pace—he even came out on changeovers before the chair umpire called time. Always concerned about setting the tempo of a match, he set a brisk one today.
It took awhile for Nadal’s game to catch up. He was off with his forehand. He hit it, as he had been hitting it earlier in the week, over the baseline. At the same time, del Potro was sharp. His forehand was heavy and deep and moving through the court, and he counterpunched well with his backhand, handling Nadal’s topspin, as he handled it the last three times they played, and sending it back flatter and faster than it came it in. When del Potro went up 4-1, I started to wonder whether we’d found Nadal’s kryptonite. It seems like every top player has to create their own version of it. Borg begat McEnroe; Agassi begat Sampras; Federer begat Nadal—had Nadal conjured up his own killer in the form of the towering two-handed backhand of del Potro?
Fortunately for Nadal, he wasn’t thinking along these lines. He was finding a way out of the del Potro trap. He said that his early errors from the forehand side were “not usual,” and may have been the result of his lingering poor form and bad rhythm from earlier in the week. So he made an exceedingly simple but effective change. “I started to put more balls inside [the court]," he said, "play higher to his backhand and try to get the right rhythm, no? I think I did well.”
He did well at a number of things, beyond just hitting high balls to del Potro’s backhand. I had said before the match that it would be a matter of Nadal trying to move the ball side at the same time that del Potro would be trying to move it straight ahead. From 1-4 down, Nadal started to get the upper hand in that battle. He stretched del Potro wide with his serve in the ad court, and he looked to construct points so that he could have a look at a forehand in the deuce court. Once he was in that position, he could pull del Potro back and forth along the baseline at will.
But Nadal’s backhand remained the difference-maker. Del Potro countered him by trying to work the rallies so that he could hit a forehand wide crosscourt and force Nadal into a backhand slice. With Nadal serving for the first set at 5-4, del Potro was able to do that successfully and go up 0-30. But two points later, at 30-30, Nadal came over a backhand down the line and followed it to the net for a volley winner. On the next point, he hit an ace for the set.
It was Nadal’s backhand again that proved the difference in the second set, when he broke at 2-2 with a pass from that side.
“How many people would get to that ball?” del Potro was asked afterward.
“Not many,” he said with a smile, “not many. But for him I think it’s normal. I made my best forehand, but he made a better passing shot.”
From there, Nadal, keeping up the brisk pace, put the clamps down with his traditional weapon, his forehand, and by hitting a variety of targets with his serve. “It was the best match I played at Indian Wells,” Nadal said.
I’d say it was the best match I’ve seen from him in 2011. Or maybe it was the most vintage and characteristic Nadal performance of the year. There were the surprises he likes to spring; this time it was the backhand attack and the speedier pace of play. There was the tactical adjustment, to hit high to del Potro’s backhand. And there was the consummate closing ability. Besides the ace at set point in the first, Nadal came up with a superb wrong-foot forehand in the final game of the match, going back down the line when del Potro was sure he was going crosscourt.
“When you are not playing well,” Nadal said in his usual broken, wise English, “the important thing is keep winning.” That’s what Nadal did earlier in the week. Now he’s doing something even better. He’s playing well.
***
“Oh my God, what is he doing?”
I knew right then that I had sat down in front of a Roger Federer fan. This seems to be their rallying cry at the moment. What Federer was doing was missing an easy forehand long. And it is true, you do wonder how he can miss certain highly makeable shots. As effortless as Federer can make hitting a winner look, that’s just how effortless he can make committing a heinous error appear, so effortless he can seem not to be trying.
We’ve come too far in the Federer-Novak Djokovic rivalry to continue to lay all the blame for Federer's losses at his own feet. Djokovic has won their last three matches and has passed him in the rankings. As of today, the Serb is a definitive No. 2, and he’s earned it—“the crown for my achievements this year,” he said today.
This third installment of 2011 unfolded in much the same way the previous two had. Federer went after Djokovic early, the way he said he would, and Djokovic again had the answers. With his baseline defense, he forced Federer to hit more than one great shot to get ahead in a rally—by the middle of the first set, Federer was trying to force too much action too early. Djokovic also used the court extremely well himself, moving Federer off of it with sharp forehand and backhand crosscourts. And, most important, his found his serve exactly when he needed it.
But, two straight wins or not, Federer is still Federer, that name is still that name, and Djokovic still recognizes what it means to beat that name. As well as he played in Melbourne, he still suffered a second-set letdown before pulling himself back out of it. Sometimes a first set can loom so large in a player’s mind that, once they win it, they stop driving forward and begin to hope that the other player will hand the second one to them—there’s so much emphasis before a match on getting off to a good start and winning the first set that it can begin to seem like the equivalent to an entire match. I thought this was what happened to Djokovic early in the second set. Like a runner, once he had a lead, he was out in front all by himself, with only the finish line ahead. There may be nothing in your way, but it's tough to focus on something that's still so far in the distance.
It was at this point, at 1-1 in the second, when Federer very briefy found the key to unlocking Djokovic’s game. At 15-30 on Djokovic’s serve, he floated a backhand slice that Djokovic dumped timidly into the net. Was this the play? Was it better to junk the Djoker than try to take it to him, after all? Federer tried the same play on the next point. This time Djokovic got down and hit a very good forehand and won the point: 30-40. In the next rally, Federer hit yet another backhand slice into the Djokovic forehand. Djokovic returned a normal rally ball. Federer drilled it for an emphatic forehand winner for the break. The crowd, exceptionally pro-Federer, went crazy. Backed by strong serving, he ran out the set.
There, in that break point at 1-1, was Federer’s solution, and his problem, when playing Djokovic. He mixed it up and he took it to Djokovic. Four years ago, he might have sustained that delicate balancing act for two sets. This time he faltered in the third. Djokovic, having relinquished the lead, could fight again. At the same time, one sprayed ball for Federer led to another, as it had in Dubai. Djokovic won 11 straight points when it counted most, to get from 2-2 to 5-2.
“It was a very close match,” a relieved and quietly proud Djokovic said afterward. “A lot of emotions. You could feel the intensity and the pressure with both of us.”
I thought the afternoon, and the current Djokovic-Federer matchup, was summed in one point at the start of the third set. Up a break at 1-0, Djokovic went on the attack and got to the net. Federer scrambled, and he appeared to have found a way out when he hit a perfect dipping backhand pass. For a second the point seemed to be his, and the crowd began to cheer in anticipation of a huge moment for him. But Djokovic was there to spoil it. Out of nowhere, on the run, and improvising, he came up with an even more perfect two-handed half-volley push shot that went right past a crestfallen Federer.
Federer has scrambled his way out of hundreds of points just like that over the years. This time his younger opponent was one step ahead of him.
INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—One of the fringe benefits of attending a professional tennis tournament as a member of the press, aside from the free donuts, the face time with genius known as Marion Bartoli, the discount rate at the roach motel, and the sunburn, is the chance to pick up all kinds of borderline-pointless pieces of tennis trivia from your colleagues. They’re the lifeblood of tennis journalist and tweeter alike. Here’s one that no one around these parts seems to have an answer for yet: When was the last time that the four semifinalists in a men’s tournament were the last four men to win Grand Slams? Let me know if you come up with anything.
Whether of not that’s ever happened before, that’s what we’ll be treated to on Saturday at the Indian Wells Tennis Garden, when the last two U.S. Open winners, Rafael Nadal and Juan Martin del Potro, face off at 11 A.M. Pacific Time, and are followed by the last two Australian Open winners, Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer. What we do know is that, from del Potro’s comeback to the battle for No. 2 between Djokovic and Federer, it’s going to be a big day. Let’s take a look at what we might be looking at when the matches go off.
Nadal vs. del Potro The stat that keeps getting batted around in the press room is del Potro’s three straight wins over Nadal coming into this match. It’s relevant, considering that all of those matches came on hard courts. But it’s not incredibly relevant, considering that all of those matches took place in 2009, before del Potro’s wrist surgery and before Nadal’s epic 2010. It should also be noted that Nadal won the four times they played prior to that, including here in straight sets in 2009.
That said, del Potro presents what we like to call match-up problems for Rafa. He’s tall enough, and has the two-handed backhand, to handle his topspin. He can hit past Nadal, or at least hit hard enough into his forehand side to open up the backhand. And from his improving forehand to his tank-like confidence, del Potro is close to his 2009 levels, despite his caveats about how it’s going to “take another year” before he’s ready to play with the big boys. You only have to look at the way he came back from a 1-6 deficit in the second –set tiebreaker against Kohlschreiber in the last round to know that he’s settled back in.
Still, the money must go with Nadal. He played, by his own admission, “terrible” in the fourth round against Devvarman, but despite the fact that he barely escaped Karlovic Thursday night, I thought Nadal was sharp for most of it—it’s extremely tough to gauge form against Dr. Ace; surviving is the only aim. Nadal himself said he thought he played better than Karlovic in the first set, even though he lost it, and that he was at the top of his game in the second set. And if any match sharpened his return, it was that one.
Nadal will try to get the taller man moving across the baseline. Del Potro will try to hit the ball through the court and take Rafa’s high-kicking shots early. Whoever wins—and I have Nadal winning the tournament—it will be good to see del Potro back where he belongs at last, back up among his fellow Grand Slam champs.
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Djokovic vs. Federer For those of you who have followed this rivalry closely, especially in recent months, here’s the answer to your biggest question right up front:
“I mean, I won’t be chipping the ball. I’ll definitely go after it.”
This was Roger Federer today when asked about his thoughts on his semifinal with Djokovic. The last two matches they’ve played, both of which were straight-set wins for Djokovic, Federer drifted between attacking and mixing it up, between bringing the heat and throwing in the off-speed stuff. He had success with neither. Still, I thought the only period in those matches when he got any traction—the first part of the second set in Melbourne—he did it by chipping and looping and not going after it.
Federer has been reunited with Paul Annacone, the coach who has advocated aggressiveness, in Indian Wells, so perhaps he’s been an influence. Whatever it is, Federer has decided that he must win the battle for court position. “He’s a very good defensive player and attacking player, too,” Federer said today, “so you’ve got to take it to Novak.”
As Federer also noted, that style worked against Djokovic last year, when he beat him four times. But according to weather reports, the conditions on Saturday in Indian Wells will be close to what they were in Melbourne when the two played. Fairly cool temperatures—73 degrees—and even slower courts, both of which suit Djokovic more than Federer.
As for the Serb, he’ll surely keep trying to do what he’s been doing: Use his improved serve, get the ball to Federer’s backhand and open up the inside-in forehand, and, as Federer says, win the battle for court position. In both of their matches, he’s hit a lot of superb down the line winners off both wings. Can he hit those again?
The bigger question is: Can he beat Federer three straight times? It’s a rare feat: To my knowledge, Nadal is the only person to do it in recent memory. It would, to my mind at least, signal that Djokovic had gotten to Federer not just in the rankings, but in the head as well.
As of today, though, Djokovic hadn’t gotten quite that far. “I know I can beat him," Federer said, "and that’s all I care about right now.” Will he still feel that way at this time on Saturday?
I think Federer is hungrier for this one, Djokovic’s run—he’s won 18 straight matches—will end sooner or later, and he played poorly for stretches today. But I picked Novak to win this showdown at the start of the tournament, so I’ll pick him again now.
