PARIS—The kids were jammed up front, screaming their heads off. Their heroes hurried in together, down the steps, past the flashing lights, and out into the faux lounge that had been constructed at the front of the room. The place: Something called the Interactive Center at Roland Garros. The time: The day before the tournament started. The event: A meet and greet/media access hour/autograph session set up by Adidas for a few lucky young fans and grizzled old journalists. The heroes: Adidas endorsees Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, Gilles Simon, and, bringing up the rear on the way in, Andy Murray.
Half an hour later, after they’d chatted with some nervous fans and answered a dozen questions about Novak Djokovic’s winning streak from reporters, the heroes sat side by side and scribbled their names on whatever a passing child happened to place in front of them. Tsonga plastered his best professional smile across his face. Simon chatted amiably. Murray, who didn’t understand much of what the local kids were saying, somehow managed to twist his lips upward at the ends into a semblance of a smile. His face looked like it might break with the effort. Was it a smile? Close enough. Phoniness doesn’t come easily to Andy Murray.
It doesn’t come easily for him on a tennis court, either. The fact that the man is currently the 4th-best tennis player in the world should make us all question anyone who touts the value of body language, positive thinking, and happiness in general. Hobbling, breathing heavily, walking with his head tilted back and a curse seemingly about to form on his lips at any time, Murray often looks like he’s on his last legs by the third game of a match. He spent much of his fourth-rounder against Viktor Troicki in this state, and worse. He cracked his racquet and was warned. He banged his frame on his ankles, neither of which can stand much banging. He muttered “terrible shot” over and over to describe his . . . well, his terrible shots. He barked something in a mock American accent. He stated that he was “so angry.” Then he really got sarcastic. After one bad miss, Murray muttered, “great atmosphere out here.” After a forehand caught the tape, he said darkly, “Way to go for it.” All tennis players know the torture of not living up to your expectations, but we don’t all know it as acutely as Andy Murray does.
Murray is a conflicted competitor by nature. He’s also a counter-puncher by nature —his autobiography is called Hitting Back—which means he needs something to fight. Whereas fellow counterpuncher Jimmy Connors did his best to work up a good lather of hate for his opponents, Murray is more like John McEnroe—he fights himself, and his expectations of himself. He also seems to find his energy in pessimism, which has its drawbacks. It can lead to long periods where he appears to be bent on sabotaging his own chances.
Yesterday Murray was more conflicted than normal when he started. Nursing a sprained right ankle and worried about rolling over it again, he came out looking as if he wasn’t sure how much effort he wanted to expend or how much wear he wanted to put on that ankle so close to the Holy British Grail of Wimbledon. He had trouble pushing up for his serve and sliding wide to his forehand side. So Murray tried to keep the points short by swinging for the fences. It worked; he kept the points nice and short. The problem was, he lost nearly all of them. He was down 0-5 in a hurry, before he decided that he might as well play some tennis while he was out there.
Murray kept swinging for the fences, and he started to find them. But nothing is ever that straightforward for him. The set ended on a distinctly Murray-esque moment. He played red-line tennis to bring himself all the back to 4-5. He earned a break point. He got a weak second serve. He set up for a down the line forehand, the type of shot he’d been smacking for winners. He swung out. And . . . he shanked it past the doubles alley. Murray turned to his team in the stands and put his hand to his face, as if all was lost. A few points later he stared back at them again as he bashed his racquet on the court. His anger was out of proportion to the moment—it was only the first set, after all; there were at least two more to go. Murray played the last points of the set as if were seeing ghosts. (Sometimes a little self-directed phoniness, a little pretend optimism, can go a long way to clearing them away.)
If you’ve read any of my writing about Murray over the last five or six years, you know what I think his biggest problem is: Lack of a killer forehand. He can’t set up points his way and be sure of winning them, the way Federer and Nadal and Djokovic can, so he relies on nicking and cutting, slicing and dropping and defending you to death (shades of McEnroe again). When Murray finally took control of the match, deep in the fifth set, he did it by digging out balls and hitting finely gauged drop shots, rather than going on the attack.
I’ve noticed another issue this year: Murray’s version of a putaway weapon used to be his down the line backhand, but he hasn’t been hitting it as well and he rarely tried it yesterday. Maybe it was nerves, because he did bring the shot out when he needed it, when Troicki was serving for the match at 5-4 in the fifth set. Murray chose that moment to caress one beautifully up the line.
Murray can makes these types of shots, shots no one else can make so effortlessly, once he gets out of his own way, once the ghosts have cleared. Yesterday, he reminded me of another player who has recently made his own ghosts and demons vanish: Novak Djokovic. A year ago it was the Serb who was quick to doubt himself, quick to jump on the emotional roller-coaster, quick to lapse into pessimistic frustration. Djokovic’s talent is different from Murray’s, less diverse but ultimately greater, and easier to handle psychologically—he does have putaway options, which makes his tactics much simpler.
Can Murray ever find the peace that Djokovic has found over these last 40-odd matches? It’s tough to imagine, but a year ago no one imagined that Djokovic would be doing what he’s doing right now. Murray has a Grand Slam game, too, but he takes the path of most resistance to get to it. Look at what it took for him to get through this fourth round. After going down two sets and going berserk, Murray came all the way back to even it. Then, playing passively, he went down a break in the fifth. Given a reprieve by his opponent, he reached triple match point on his serve. He lost one of those points. He lost another. On the third, Murray backed up and ceded the court. When Troicki finally took the hint and came forward, Murray hit a backhand crosscourt pass from 10 feet behind the baseline that landed smack on the opposite sideline for an outrageous winner. Murray made it as difficult as possible, but he made it. You have to admire him for sticking the match out, when he had good reasons—bad ankle, upcoming Wimbledon, general sanity—to bail on it. He said afterward that the chance to play Juan Ignacio Chela, a man he should beat, in the quarters spurred him on.
Watching Murray bang his sprained ankle yesterday on his tortured, roundabout, perversely entertaining way to victory, I kept thinking: It’s OK to be a counterpuncher, as long as you're not punching yourself.
PARIS—There’s been a lot to follow: top-tier upsets, second-tier moonwalking, and stretcher-assisted exits on the women’s side; on the men's, we've had twilight battles, diet secrets, and the first possible case of fake non-cramps in world history. Now it’s time, after all the watching and the writing and the running around of the last 10 days, to look at the draw again, to get back to fundamentals and find out what the heck is happening in in this tournament. Who are we? How did we get here? What’s in store for us? The quarterfinals seem like a good opportunity to find out the answer to these and the other deep questions that are perplexing Roland Garros at the moment. Let’s slow it all down and take it match by match.
***
Svetlana Kuznetsova vs. Marion Bartoli (Head-to-head: Kuznetsova leads 3-1) I guess with the WTA we should just do our best to forget current form when we get to a Slam. Not only are the top three seeds and last year's runner-up gone, but so is Julia Goerges, champion in Stuttgart and leading potential breakout story in Paris. Meanwhile, Svetlana Kuznetsova, who has had a disastrous 2011 since sending Justine Henin out of the sport in Australia, is alive and blasting in the final eight.
There she’ll play another surprise, France’s Marion Bartoli, the madly determined, and perhaps just plain mad, conqueror of Goerges. Bartoli is the higher seed, Kuznetsova is the more accomplished player. Kuznetsova won their first three matches, Bartoli won their last one easily in Key Biscayne in 2010. Kuznetsova has won this tournament, Bartoli wants it more than anything. The only prediction I’ll make is that Bartoli will make it interesting, provided that she doesn’t wake up and realize that she’s a French player playing in France.
Anastasia Pavlyuchenkova vs. Francesca Schiavone (Head-to-head: Schiavone leads 2-1) This is especially intriguing. On the one side, you have the defending champion, who is starting to look like she could repeat what had seemed sure to be an unrepeatable run in Paris last year. On the other, you have a hard-hitting ex-junior No. 1 and ex-cinch for the Top 10 coming off the biggest win of her young yet undeniably disappointing career. As with Goerges, clay may help the offensive-minded, defensively challenged Russian by giving her just a little more time to catch up to the ball. But Schiavone knows these courts, and in her last match she looked like the gutsy, resourceful, snarling, finger-snapping, seize-the-moment competitor that she transformed herself into at Roland Garros in 2010.
Li Na vs. Victoria Azarenka (Head-to-head: Na leads 3-1) These two faced off in the round of 16 in Melbourne in January, and Li Na was too good, blistering her backhand across the slow hard courts there for a routine 6-3, 6-3 win. Azarenka has been the better player since. She won in Key Biscayne and has been playing some of the best tennis on the WTA, while Na has mostly fumbled her way out of Australia. Na hits bigger, and in her last match she fought her way back from a first-set deficit against trendy Paris pick Petra Kvitova. Azarenka has built up a lot of confidence this year and is playing with a tough-skinned, fast-paced, buoyantly aggressive efficiency. She can’t knock the ball past you like Na, but she can build a rally and defend. Na on the right day is the better player, but the athletic Azarenka seems the more likely winner on clay.
Maria Sharapova vs. Andrea Petkovic (Head-to-head: Sharapova leads 2-1) Did you know that the veteran Sharapova is only four months older than Petkovic, breakthrough story of the last year? That’s enough to remind you of how much more accomplished the famous Russian is than the upstart German. Petkovic won their meeting in Australia, and annoyed Sharapova with her celebration shuffle. So Sharapova got her revenge in the semis in Key Biscayne. Petkovic is still dancing, and still playing well, but this is starting to feel like Maria’s major—those happen every couple of years, you know (Wimby 2004, U.S. Open 2006, Melbourne 2008). Sharapova hits with more pace and, despite some very rough patches against Garcia and Radwanska, she's been clutch in this event so far, clutch enough, anyway, to let her opponents self-destruct. Still, in 2011 Maria has had a tendency to play well for a time before throwing in an unmitigated bomb (Indian Wells semi, Key Biscayne final).
***
Rafael Nadal vs. Robin Soderling (Head-to-head: Nadal leads 5-2) Wow, this one already. Nadal and Soderling split their two matches here the last two years. In the grand scheme, of course, all signs point to another Nadal win. He’s won their last two matches, after losing the previous two, and he ground Soderling into the red dust in last year’s Roland Garros final. But if you go by the form of the moment, Soderling has a chance. He’s been way under the radar so far, but he has advanced smoothly. Once again, clay gives him a little more time to haul off and bludgeon his ground strokes. Is Nadal struggling, is he getting better, is he up one day and down the next? No one knows, including Rafa, who says, rightly, that the future could go in a number of directions. Nadal seems to feel little pressure at the moment (he says he’s won the French five times and has no “obligation” to do it a sixth), but he’s also experiencing dips in his play, especially on his serve, that we’ve never seen before from him on clay. In the 2010 final, he was too consistent and speedy for Soderling—a dirt fortress. He hasn’t been as consistent this year so far. If Nadal hits short and moves poorly, the way he did in the first set and a half today, he could lose. If he opens up the court and moves with confidence, as he did for the second set and a half, he should be OK.
Gael Monfils vs. Roger Federer (Head-to-head: Federer leads 5-1) These two have played twice at Roland Garros, with Federer dropping just one set in two victories. Monfils’ only win in their series came last year at the Paris Indoors, in a three-tiebreaker epic in which he saved five match points.
So Federer is starting with a major historical advantage—will that one extremely tight win really leave Monfils convinced that he can beat Federer again? I doubt it. Federer has been as good and smooth and efficient and in control as ever over the first week. From what I’ve seen, the shanks have dissipated and the movement is where it has always been. With the crowd pushing, I could see Monfils firing away to a first-set win, the way he did against Ferrer. But even then Monfils came down to earth rapidly after the initial burst of adrenalin. His best shots are just too difficult and low percentage to be automatically repeatable. Federer is adept at pushing Monfils back in their rallies. That’s not where the Frenchman is going to want to be on Tuesday. With all of his options, Federer is one guy who can make him pay for his poor court positioning.
***
Those are the six quarters we know. Novak Djokovic, always a step ahead this season, is already past his, thanks to a walkover, and into the semifinals—he’ll meet the winner of Federer-Monfils there. The other Top 4 seed, laggard Andy Murray, has yet to arrive in the quarters. He and Viktor Troicki will play a fifth set on Tueday for the (highly desirous) right to play Juan Ignacio Chela for a spot in the semifinals.
It’s been a somewhat strange ride so far. On the women’s side, it could get stranger, and we could crown a new and highly unexpected Slam champ—I'd love to see it. On the men’s side, we could get one step closer to the assumed three-man Armageddon between Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal. But you know what they say about making assumptions, right? You might say the same for predictions.
PARIS—We’ve heard a lot about the golden era of 1970s tennis lately. I personally like the name “roughneck era,” as coined by one of the sport’s more conservative historians, but "golden" works, too. In the popular American imagination, anyway, those were the years was when the sport was at its best. Three decades after it ended, this writer has a book on the subject at the same time that HBO has produced a documentary about Bjorn Borg and John McEnroe and their very brief—three years, 14 matches—but remarkably enduring rivalry.
That era essentially ended at the 1981 U.S. Open, when Borg drove himself out of a Flushing Meadows facility that had given him so much frustration. But it's hardly a coincidence that before it ended, the period would produce one of the very few great tennis movies, The French, a documentary of the ’81 edition of Roland Garros by the famous photographer William Klein.
It’s a difficult movie to find, but now, through the genius of YouTube, you can see a vast amount of it, maybe all of it if you search long enough. Start with the first 32 minutes above. If you’re a fan of tennis, film, or history in general, you’ll want to see the rest. They show Roland Garros as it was in those heady days for tennis—smaller, more insulated, but also more colorful. Here are a few of the highlights you’ll get in the first 30 minutes.
—The charm of Ilie Nastase, a showman both innocent and vulgar, with a game still lovely to watch even when his body was a paunchy 34. He obviously lived for the sport and the tour, and, as his roving eye tells you in one scene, the women. Also watch him protect a young and half-crazed Eliot Teltscher from a mob.
—A coach’s eye view of a player losing. My favorite scene in the movie is the interview that Harold Solomon’s coach gives as he’s watching Solly lose to Adriano Pannatta. It gives you an idea of how gut wrenching a coach’s life can be.
—Seeing Ion Tiriac hit (he could hit, even if he called himself “the world’s best tennis player who doesn’t know how to play tennis”), and hear him talk. He doesn’t, contrary to popular belief, growl.
—You get Chrissie and Martina backstage, a young and taciturn Ivan Lendl, a passionately youthful Yannick Noah coming of age, Johnny Mac practicing with Jimbo, scenes of fans and administrators—including the Philippe Chatrier—and plenty of rain. The movie tries to paint a picture of an event and moment in time from all angles.
—You also get, right at the start, one of my favorite images in tennis, that of Bjorn Borg practicing on an empty center court, in the morning, with birds chirping around him, in a red sweatsuit. He flits and dances across the court. There was a reason he won six French Opens. This one, hard as it is to believe watching this movie, would be his last. He would never return to Roland Garros.
When this half hour is over, go here to see a scruffy Jimbo (the look suited him) lose, and Johnny Mac go down as well, in an epic meltdown. Klein and his filmmakers understood the slightly depressing beauty of McEnroe well. There’s a fantastic juxtaposition between Mac ranting to the point of near incoherence and then a second later hitting an exquisite bending slice serve as only he could. Notice, also, that McEnroe is shown asking rudely for more towels, and Teltscher is shown asking with equal rudeness for more water, when both players already have plenty of each. A subtle French dig at American entitlement and obsession with service?
Then go here, here, and here for further scenes. Keep going from there; there's plenty of the men's final, between Borg and Lendl, as well as the fabulously talented and youthfully cocky Hana Mandlikova. She's the one player who, when I watch her back in '81, makes me sort of begin to believe that the game really was better, more nuanced and beautiful, back in those waning days of wood.
The French's greatest contribution, though, is not to make you nostalgic for earlier days. What it does best is show you the drama that's inherent in the sport—maybe only a film could emphasize that drama. Where we nornally watch tennis matches to see the result and the competition, here, in these artfully set up on-court moments, we see the personality of the player and the elegance of the stroke first. We see that Borg's silence was a style as much as anything else, that Connors' anger was well choreographed—unpredictable and weird, he belongs in a movie—and that Lendl, along with learning the game at this moment, was also learning how to present himself, his persona, on court and off. He won't let the cameras shoot him getting a massage.
In The French, a Grand Slam, with its cast of characters, its subplots that end surprisingly, and the gradually building drama of its protagonists, is, if nothing else, a great epic tale that goes on for two weeks. Tennis does make for a good movie, all on its own.
And we see that this drama is well suited to Paris and Roland Garros. The fans may be cruel and fickle, but they raise the dramatic stakes here as well. A small scene with Victor Pecci sums it up best. He falls on the clay, then sits on the court for an extra second, milking the drama while the audience rustles and chatters and gasps around him. Would he have sat there for that extra second in practice?
PARIS—I’ve talked Chatrier and I’ve talked Bullring. Now that the tournament is down to two arenas, it’s time to talk Lenglen, the mid-size stadium that often feels like the spiritual and sonic French heart of Roland Garros. I spent a sunny and at times epic Sunday there.
***
Something, after three hours, has happened.
Fabio Fognini and Albert Montanes have been hitting balls back and forth from 11:00 A.M. until mid-afternoon. The scattered, quiet audience inside Court Suzanne Lenglen has observed it mostly at a remove. They’ve sat back in their chairs, behind their sunglasses, feet up, hands folded. Young women keep their heads down and punch at their iPhones. Old men unfold the newspaper and read. Children slump in their seats. The crowd has no rooting interest in these two players, one an Italian, the other a Spaniard, neither of whom does anything special with the ball, and neither of whom has enough game to elevate himself above the other. Most fans are marking time in the bright sun until the big event of the day, Frenchman Gael Monfils versus David Ferrer, which comes up third on this court. Naturally, Fognini-Montanes goes five sets, and naturally, the fifth set, in which there is no tiebreaker, goes past 6-6.
Now, as I said, something has happened to make the young women and the old men look up from the paper and the iPhone. Fognini, a highly combustible drama king, has apparently decided that the afternoon needs some livening up. He usually gets around to this quite a bit earlier, sometimes as early as the second point of the match. Last year at Roland Garros, he waited until it was almost dark to get rolling; against Gael Monfils, and in front of a crowd of screaming teenagers, he spent 15 minutes arguing with whoever was in front of him that it was too dark to keep playing. By the time he was through with his rant, it was too dark to play.
Today Fognini has taken nearly as long to get around to what he does best—riling up the French—but again it will be worth the wait. Serving at 6-7, 15-30, two points from defeat, he tells the chair umpire that he can’t move. They talk back and forth, until she finally takes the odd and perhaps unprecedented step of getting down off the chair, walking over to him, and telling him to sit down on the sideline. Fognini is attended to by a tour doctor, who rubs his left leg. The crowd is roused now. They sit up straight. They don’t like this. Fognini says he doesn’t know what the problem is, and mentions the word “cramp.”
Whatever it is, the Italian walks back out, and to a rising chorus of boos and whistles, holds serve to stay alive. At the next changeover, he has his leg worked on again. The crowd doesn’t like this either. When Fognini serves at 7-8, the match appears to be over. He can’t run. He can’t bend. He seems to have thrown in the towel—he’s called for half a dozen foot faults, yet doesn’t bother to move his front foot back. All Fognini can do is hit the ball. Which, despite facing five match points in his next two service games, he does better than he has all match. Fognini stands still, bails on the topspin that he has probably hit since the day he picked up a racquet, and swings for winners. It makes for the best tennis of this four-hour match. As with Andy Murray the previous day, Fognini's injury has paradoxically freed him to play the kind of tennis he likely plays when he’s fooling around in practice, which is almost invariably excellent tennis. So frustrating: We're at our best when we don’t care; we hit the ball the way we know we can when we have nothing to prove.
Throw in a let cord on one match point, and another that goes for a winner a few points later, and you’ve got a Fognini Special at the French Open. When he wins, as we knew he would, he walks slowly to the net, half-defiantly, half-sheepishly, soaking in the boos.
"It was a complicated match," Fognini says afterward.
***
Francesca Schiavone and Jelena Jankovic offer a strange matchup, of two people as similar as they are different. They’re both tennis players, both fighters, both women who will turn around and viciously vent in the direction of their player boxes. Yet from up close they seem to occupy utterly different psychological worlds. I can't explain it any better than that, except to say that they were destined to go the distance today on Lenglen. Here are a few still lifes, of these two players—two sides of the same coin—and the scenes they created today.
***
Many pros grunt, but Schiavone makes a sort of harsh music out of hers. On most forehands today, she lets out an “Ah-hee!” On backhands, its becomes an “Ah-hey!” At times, when she’s stretched or in the middle of a crucial point, she just goes with a straight-ahead, “Aaaaaahhh!”
***
A skinny ball kid, in green, runs fast and takes a huge wind-up before rolling the ball to a colleague. Too huge, it turns out. The ball flies out of his hand and a few inches from Jankovic, who is about to serve. She turns to him and laughs.
***
The two players, both at the net, engage in a volley exchange. Jankovic’s last shot finds the sideline. She smiles and hops up and down. Schiavone turns around and pretends to shoot herself in the head.
They do the same thing again a few games later. This time Schiavone comes out on top. She finishes with a short leap and a fist pump. Jankovic ends bent double, her ponytail hanging near the clay.
***
There’s noise behind Schiavone as she sets up to serve. She turns toward, holds up the ball, and says, “You wanna play?” A few minutes later, there’s noise from her own player’s section. It’s a young girl who is sitting with her team and waving at her. Schiavone begins to turn around with a scowl, sees who it is, and gives the girl a big smile.
***
Two women in the fifth row, likely in their 20s, sit back and take in the sun. They’re ushers in the pricey sections at Lenglen. Both have long black hair and are wearing the same orange top, high white skirt uniform. Both stare at their iPhones for a few points, then look up for a few. On one of them, Schiavone lets out a shout and does a little Leather Tuscadero-style finger snap. The girls look at each other and laugh, then start clapping.
***
Schiavone is a mix of the graceful and the barely controlled—you might say makes being out of control look graceful. At times, she appears ready to fall over after a big ground-stroke, yet her arm movements, especially on her backhand, have an elegant snap to them.
The pleasure, playing-wise, of watching Jankovic is in her side-to-side sliding scrambles, and in the solid thud she makes when she connects on a high backhand.
***
Pascal Maria, conspicuous in his umpire's chair in a bright red sweater, watches Jankovic vent. She yells into the air, in his direction, and raises her hand in protest. When she turns around to walk back to the baseline, he smiles.
***
There are five cameras visible at court level: One in the far corner, three near the net, two more in back. All of them swerve and rotate and move constantly, like gigantic one-eyed beings.
***
As the sun goes down, the wind dies. The light is golden, the clay a deep red. The flags at the top of the stadium don’t move. The match is poised, 2-2 in the third set. Each player has dominated one set, but neither has played any rally with less than maximum intensity—it’s been a dogfight.
In the third, though, each player goes through a period of struggle. When Jankovic drills a wild backhand into the net to go down 2-3, she looks tired. Schiavone is pumped up. But it’s the Italian who plays poorly when they get back on court, flipping two weak drop shots into the net. Then, just as Jankovic seems destined to win, it all turns around again. Schiavone breaks. She hops, swaggers, struts, and flicks her hands up as she walks to the sideline. The crowd roars. It's 5-4.
***
The stadium is full. A girl who works in the press room pops her head out and finds an inch of space to watch the last game. The pigeons that float through the stadium stand at attention on their favorite tower at one corner of the court. The ball kids make their last run and set themselves in their positions. A shadow has begun to creep across the far side of the court.
Up 30-15, Schiavone double faults and begins to yell at her team again. Then she yells at herself. The Italians in the press section giggle at whatever she’s said. At 30-30, she serves and volleys. A Jankovic lob is long. When it touches down, Schiavone pumps her arms and legs like a maniacal child. On match point, Jankovic has an open look at a backhand pass. She pulls up on it tentatively. Schiavone hits another volley. Jankovic’s lob floats, tamely, wide. The Italian smiles from ear to ear at her team; they're on their feet. She owns Paris again. Jankovic drags herself up to the net to shake hands. Her team, one row behind Schiavone's, files out.
The announcer bellows, “Francesca Schiavone!” She lies down on the clay, kisses it, and rubs it for good luck.
A second later, the ball kids in green are running around the court again. There’s another match to come in Lenglen. The main event of this Sunday hasn’t even begun.
PARIS—What do you hear when you walk onto the grounds at Roland Garros? There may be a d’accord to your left or a mais non to your right. In the distance, past the trees and over a stadium wall, you might catch an “Egalité” or a “Jeu Djokovic” intoned by an impassive chair umpire. As you walk a few steps farther, the pop of a tennis ball and the light clapping of an audience will float in from somewhere unseen. If you get there late in the day, when a French player is deep in battle, you'll probably hear a whistled-filled roar of disturbing intensity.
What won’t you hear on these grounds? You won't hear a PA announcer, in a shiny, slippery voice straight fresh from PA announcer school, advise you to stay hydrated. You won’t hear him tell you, erroneously, that one of the show courts is filled and that you should “enjoy the doubles action on the side courts,” while not forgetting to stop by the food court and a T-shirt vendor while you’re at it.
What else won’t you hear? You won't hear a jazz-funk band or someone fiddling on an electric violin as you walk toward the main stadium. You won't hear REM or Fleetwood Mac or any other musical acts that have been scientifically proven to make people who are over 40 and have disposable income feel warm and fuzzy enough to empty their wallets on a collectors’ baseball cap and an $8 hot dog. In fact, no music at all is played during changeovers at Roland Garros. There is also no jumbo-size scoreboard training its eye on you and haranguing you into kissing the person in the next seat. There is also no roving camera looking for people who are attempting to dance, jump, pogo, wave their hands in the air or do whatever else is necessary to see themselves on a jumbo scoreboard. Somehow, the French don’t seem to have discovered Cotton-Eyed Joe, either, or created their own Cotton-Eyed Jean in imitation.
When the players sit down, the audience sits along with them. Scores from other courts flash silently on the scoreboard. Then the players get up and play again. Over the course of the first week, as far as I can tell, no one has gone from fully alert to fast asleep in the 90 seconds of a changeover. I’m also guessing that no one has become so bored that they wished that they had a chance to throw their hands in the air or play air guitar to some heavy metal. The tennis match seems to be enough. In fact, with no other distractions, the drama of the contest in front of us is heightened. We watch the players. We think about what's happened and what's coming up. If it's beautiful, we look at the sky.
I’m not saying that the French Open is superior to our sporting events in the States, or that we have it all wrong and they have it all right. My friend Chris Clarey tells me that many French people like the extra entertainment when they visit arenas in America. It’s a novelty, the same way the silence here is a novelty to me. This may also explain the “oddly proud gusto” that I noted in the Paris crowd when they do that most heinous of all American fan inventions, the Wave. With no Cotton-Eyed Joe or Kiss Cam, the French have to entertain themselves; apparently, the tennis itself only takes them so far.
What I am saying is that Americans, or American producers of sporting events, don’t trust sports or their fans. They seem to believe that the games we play, from baseball to football to basketball to tennis, are no longer fast-paced and action-packed enough to draw the no-attention-span multi-taskers of the IM generation (or whatever no-attention-span youth are being called these days; I think I was part of the video-game generation). These are games from a different time, designed for more leisurely days. Supposedly, we now need more home runs, so we juice the ball. We need more offense on football, so we make rules that will give it to us. We want dunks and dunks alone in basketball, so we make traveling with the ball virtually impossible.
I thought of all of that last night while watching a soccer game in Paris. Barcelona vs. Manchester United was viewed around the world. During its 90 minutes, there was plenty of action, but there were only four goals. This actually seemed like a high-scoring game, from what I know of the sport. Nevertheless, even though nothing of game-changing significance may happen in a soccer match for 45, 50, 60, 80 minutes at a time, it remains by far the world’s most popular sport. Rabid fans the world over don’t seem to need more scoring or more stimulation than they’re currently getting. Soccer's drama may also be heightened by the lack of commercials during games. There are no breaks for 45 minutes at a time, no chance to do anything but watch the players play.
Roland Garros is undeniably commercialized. You don’t have to look any farther than the giant BNP Paribas logo on the wall behind Roger Federer. But for the most part there’s a separation between the tennis and consumerist elements. There are no bars or stores in Chatrier, the way there are inside Ashe Stadium at Flushing Meadows (maybe that will part of the renovation, who knows). Tennis in the States, and especially in New York, is part of a bigger show, an entertainment package, and during night matches that really can enhance the viewing experience, even for the hardest core fan (as long as you’re close enough to actually see the court). But as one of those hardest core fans, I wish I were trusted a little more to stay awake during changeovers. When I'm at a tennis tournament, I like hearing the sounds of tennis more than anything else.
PARIS—New day, new sun, new crowd: That was all it took to bring out the old Novak Djokovic. This was the one we’ve gotten used to seeing in 2011, the man with all the answers, the guy with the meticulous footwork and technique, who can make a sliding get on your best shot one second, then gun a better one past you the next. Most of all, it was the Novak Djokovic who can take a moment of seeming vulnerability and turn it into one that decisively swings the match in his favor.
It was a different Djokovic, and a very different scene on Lenglen, than what we saw last night. There was an edge to both the player and the proceedings yesterday. The match had been moved, under ominously cloudy skies, from Chatrier to Lenglen, and hundreds of fans from the larger stadium, who had bought the more expensive tickets, staged a noisy near-riot on the Roland Garros grounds as Djokovic and del Potro played their opening set. Djokovic said it had been tough waiting to start all day, and that he hadn’t been able to see the ball very well. It showed: He made three easy errors and double-faulted to be broken in the second set. Even in the first, which he won, he had given del Potro chances to get back in it, but the big man had failed to capitalize.
That scenario played out today as well. Del Potro, who came out hitting the ball with the same powerful accuracy that he finished the previous evening, held two break points at 2-2. But for a player riding the wave of confidence that Djokovic has been riding, danger can quickly be transformed into opportunity. He came back in that game, won a long side-to-side rally to reach break point, and reacted with a leap and a fist-pump. The good feeling that has become so familiar since the Davis Cup final last December was back yet again.
That was the turning point, Djokovic said afterward. “At 2-2 and 3-2. After that I felt like I got into the right momentum of the match.”
A subdued del Potro knew it, too, and he knew what it meant not to convert those break points. “If you don’t take your chance,” against Djokovic, he said, “you lose.”
It’s as simple as that these days. There was something both Federer-esque and Nadal-esque in the way Djokovic played the rest of the way. Federer-esque in the sense that, once he had achieved just a tiny bit of separation from his opponent, all the stored-up confidence from his previous wins seemed to flow through his body and his game. At this point he doesn’t need anything more than a break to feel like he’s in control again, that he “has the right momentum.” Winning is a habit by now, an involuntary reaction.
If Djokovic was Federer-like in his self-assurance, it was his forehand that reminded me of Nadal. Djokovic, despite his semi-Western grip and topspin whip, has always played a flatter game than Nadal. But in this match he was able to do what Rafa has always done: That is, basically, hit the ball as hard as he wants, with very little risk, because of the topspin he’s generating. He still plays flatter than Rafa and doesn’t put as much air under the ball, but today he added a layer of safety to the stroke. By the fourth set, Djokovic was hauling off, round-house, full-body style, and pushing del Potro around, while still appearing to play high percentage tennis.
Djokovic says he shouldn't be tired for Sunday’s match aganst Richard Gasquet, because the rallies with del Potro were fairly short. But he also said that Gasquet is playing some of the best tennis of his career. As for Del Potro, he had his moments, but in the end Djokovic’s game was so comprehensively superior that the Argentine was at a loss to describe exactly how he had been beaten. “I don’t have any words,” he said afterward.
The match ended as a bit of an anti-climax, which isn’t a total surprise. Djokovic has always handled del Potro, and fed off of his power. He can stand toe to toe with the big man while at the same time running circles around him.
What I liked best about the contest wasn’t the tennis itself. It was the spirit in which it was played. This has been a gentleman’s era in the men’s game—from Roger to Rafa to Nole and now to del Potro, with each successive great player there has been a corresponding uptick in on-court etiquette and respect for opponents. There was a striking contrast last night between the riled up fans, inside and outside of Lenglen, and the very palpable and easygoing regard that the players held for each other.
Marks were inspected on request and rubbed out without hesitation. When del Potro briefly came up limping on a bad ankle, Djokovic immediately began walking toward the net to see how he was. Even better was the way they acknowledged each other’s good shots. Lately, I’d noticed that the pros very rarely applaud their opponents unless they’re comfortably ahead in the score. I’d almost begun to think that it was an iron law of the sport. Then, last night, when he was down a break in the second, Djokovic watched a del Potro forehand skid past him for a winner and put his hand to his strings. Today it was del Potro’s turn. Down two sets to one and losing altitude quickly, he nevertheless took the time to do the same for an especially brilliant Djokovic passing shot.
Today Djokovic, with his 42nd straight win, tied John McEnroe for third on the all-time ATP winning-streak list. Del Potro, graciously, said that he was happy to be part of history, while Djokovic professed his admiration for McEnroe, one of the game’s “most interesting characters.” One of the interesting things about McEnroe was that, despite his overt disrespect for many of his colleagues, he felt that the players could do a better job of calling the lines themselves. That had always seemed like a ridiculous idea to me. Until today. It’s a measure of the sporting spirit of men’s tennis at the moment that you had the feeling that Djokovic and del Potro could easily and happily have officiated this match themselves.
These urgent words of advice are being directed toward Viktor Troicki from the front rows of the Bullring as he begins his match on Saturday morning. While they may sound a little basic and obvious as far as professional tennis coaching goes—it’s hard to even call it coaching in the specific sense—they also seem appropriate to the moment. That’s because Troicki is playing a guy with a knack for taking his opponents out of their games and making them forget all about their fundamentals, Alexandr Dolgopolov.
When Troicki’s advisers say “Be ready!” they're really only telling him to be ready for one shot: the drop. “All he does is hit that shot,” one of his coaches says to another. And while that’s technically an exaggeration—Dolgopolov is hitting serves to start the points—it’s only a slight one. The Ukrainian trickster and ponytailed touch artist is hitting drop shots the way Rafael Nadal hits forehands—that is, as often as humanly possible.
He’s been struggling a little with his normal backhand drive of late, so in one sense the drop is a Plan B. But you also get the feeling that this is the way he loves to play, this is what makes tennis not boring for the kid who spent his boyhood on tour with his coach father and has had a love-hate relationship with it ever since. He loves carving under the ball delicately and with varying degrees of underspin and sidespin. Loves trying to make that little “pfft” sound with his strings, the one you hear when you really slice the ball thin, catch it an oblique angle, and make the strings move, the one that usually means the ball is going to crawl over the net and die and drive your opponent up a wall.
And that’s exactly where Troicki is in the middle of the second set. He’s won the first, but been broken early in the second. He’s tried to be ready for every drop shot, every occult spin, every strange and surprising carve of Dolgopolov’s racquet, and he’s mostly succeeded. He has been ready. But in this set it hasn't been enough. Troicki tracks down Dolgopolov’s drops, but they’re so close to the net that all he can do is flip a feeble reply over the net and right into his opponent’s strike zone. When Dolgopolov brings him up to the net and passes him for what seems to be the 10th straight point, Troicki stops, puts his hands on his hips, and stares across the net at his advisers, as if to say, “I was ready, geniuses, and look what happened.”
Among the players, one word is enough to describe Dolgopolov: unpredictable. You never know what’s coming next, and that’s certainly true for Troicki today. Think of the things he must be prepared for from one shot to the next: Aside from the ever-present threat of the drop, there’s the Dolgopolov backhand that comes in with so much sidespin that it bounces straight up, like a top; the backhand with an extra helping of extreme backspin; the backhand hit like a flat, ground-hugging rocket; the slice forehand that floats; the slice forehand that stays slow and buzzes the net cord; the return that Dolgopolov brushes with reverse sidespin, like a pitcher's screwball. It’s this last shot that really shows the kind of magical feel that he has for the ball. Dolgopolov tries it out of necessity, when he’s jammed. Yet even when he’s jumping out of the way of the serve, he still makes contact softy, delicately, and manages to do something a little unusual with the ball.
But it’s an unfortunate fact of tennis that more options does not make the game easier. It just forces you to make choices, to leave things out, to think—the worst thing any player can do as he’s preparing to take his racquet back. For Dolgopolov, a brainy computer lover who has been blessed and cursed with a free spirit, it may mean having to forego some of the elements of the sport that it fun for him, that keep it from being the drag that it got to be in his early days on tour. His struggle is the struggle of the tennis artist to reconcile his idiosyncrasies and outlandlish flights of shot-making fancy with the duller needs of winning. Watching Dolgopolov, you see the limits of tennis’s version of individualism, of its opportunities for self-expression. An artist is paid to go his own way and do his own free-spirited thing. A tennis player isn’t.
Dolgopolov and John McEnroe have little in common as personalities—Dolgo is a mellow and, at least on the surface, distinctly un-tortured artist. McEnroe, well, was not exactly like that as a person, but he was an equally idiosyncratic and artistic player, with a bizarre service motion and hands of magic. As Mary Carillo said of McEnroe after he won the famous fourth-set tiebreaker over Bjorn Borg at Wimbledon in 1980, that was the moment when he couldn’t just be the artist anymore, because he knew he could be the champion.
McEnroe found success because he felt a striver’s obligation to make the most of that talent. He thought he should win every match and went berserk when he didn’t live up to his own expectations. While Dolgopolov has found his love for the sport again, there’s little evidence to suggest that he possesses an extreme drive to succeed or a belief that he should win every match he plays. But there are positive signs for the future. Today, when he abandoned the drop shot, he won points by playing solid, first-strike, big-forehand tennis—he can do it that way, too. And when he got down at the end of the fourth set, he fought brilliantly and doggedly, saving six set points. Dolgopolov also seems to have found a similarly free spirit in his coach, Jack Reader, a shaggy, gregarious, chain-smoking Australian. Will he need a disciplinarian at some point to take him farther? It’s hard to imagine Dolgopolov, like the similarly talented and stubbornly laconic Andy Murray, responding well to that.
To me, Dolgopolov is worth rooting for, not just to see him make the ball spin like a top and drop a centimeter in front of the net, but because I’d like to see someone who can expand the game in so many directions make those directions useful; to see a guy who can do so many things with a racquet also win with one. Watching someone win is enjoyable, too, no matter how a player goes about it. Today, after all of Dolgopolov’s spectacular shots had been used up and ultimately gone for naught, I walked out of the Bullring with a new respect for his opponent, Troicki. He’s taller and stronger than he looks on TV, and a more powerful athlete. He had to do a ton of running, and watch for every kind of shot possible coming off of his opponent’s racquet. And he had to hold serve in the end after squandering six match points in the previous game. Troicki had, as his advisers said, to ignore the crazy genius across from him. He had to hit his shots and find his pace. He was ready.
PARIS—There comes a point in the middle of a long trip when the things that I did a week ago, when they pop back into my head, start to feel like they came from some other visit in the past, maybe another lifetime. Did I really see Manet at the d’Orsay just a week ago? Was Rafa-Isner this year? What was so good at L’Ambassade d’Auvergne? Artichoke hearts? (A highlight of the week, now that I've remembered it.) Maybe it has something to do with getting out of your routine, and being hit with a million new stimuli per second, that makes the recent past recede more quickly and your time seem so much more dense with activity. Whatever it is, I like the phenomenon—it feels like life doesn’t roll along with quite so much unbearable lightness.
Either way, the French Open has reached its first Friday, and I’ve reached the moment when I’ve seen and heard enough stray sights and sounds to collect them in one place and call it a post.
***
I’ll start this notebook with its most recently recorded event: Daniela Hantuchova’s not-all-that-surprising upset of No. 1 seed Caroline Wozniacki this afternoon. A single glance at any point in this match would have been enough to tell you who the superior shot-maker and pure tennis player is: Hantuchova. Her shots penetrated more easily, and with less obvious effort, than her much-higher-ranked opponent’s. As we unfortunately know, there’s a lot more to tennis than ball-striking, and Hanutchova struggles when it comes to the athletic and psychological aspects of the sport. The most interesting thing about this match to me was that Hantuchova didn’t have to play out of her tree to beat the world No. 1—purely from a hitting standpoint, she’s the better player. It’s hard to think of a match that shows just how much those other, non-hitting aspects matter in tennis.
Afterward, Wozniacki said, “She knew what she was going to do, and she was just too good. Sometimes you can’t do anything.”
Wozniacki was off, no doubt about it; she netted more routine balls and sent more of them wildly over the lines than I can remember this year. She said she tried to mix it up by using different angles and hitting with more depth, but that Hantuchova had the answers. And it was true, Hantuchova just had more pace and depth on her shots, and needed less net clearance to make them. If someone can do those things and be consistent about it, they’re going to win.
When she was asked if playing in Brussels the week before Paris had affected her, Wozniacki said no, it hadn’t mattered. She said it as if she didn’t give it a second thought, and purely from a physical perspective, it probably didn’t matter. But Slam winners, and players who dedicate themselves to winning majors, don’t make their schedules just to be physically ready for the biggest tournaments. They put everything into these events.
Wozniacki stuck to the “I’ll just go back and work harder” mantra in her presser. Is this a bluff? At one level, yes: It was reported, as it was after her loss in Melbourne, that she was in tears afterward. Is the “I’ll keep working” mantra also a sane and level-headed way to make your way from day to day on tour? Yes, but it’s also not the attitude of someone who believes that major titles should be theirs, by right or by talent. Wozniacki has yet to win a Slam, which means, among other things, that she doesn’t know what she’s missing.
But this day belonged to Hantuchova. She made the world’s best a definite second best on this day. I’ve always liked her game and shots; they're as effortless as anyone’s on either tour, and there were a couple of vintage beauties today, where she changed the direction of the ball on her backhand and threaded it up the line while making it appear as if she had barely even made contact. Now that’s smooth. And it’s not as if this is just God-given talent; a lot of it is, obviously, but from the evidence you see at tournaments, at least, Hantuchova works as diligently as anyone on the practice court.
Still, everyone who knows her was waiting for the inevitable—for lack of a more accurate term—choke. Her loss to Ana Ivanovic in the 2008 Aussie Open semis was memorably painful, and after yesterday’s collapse by Caroline Garcia, I was hoping not to have to write about a second one in two days. Sportswriters like the heroic comeback because it shows us the best version of ourselves, something better than the normal run of anxiety and mediocrity. Collapses confirm that norm. As someone who hates to see nerves get in the way of world-class tennis skills, I was happy to see Hantuchova finally rise above her own norm.
***
I like it when a tennis player hits a ball just over the baseline, hears it called out, and stares across the net for a few extra few seconds. Our eyes narrow, we push our heads forward, we look as if we've been vaguely wronged. I’ve seen everyone from Maria Sharapova to Radek Stepanek make that face this week. You see it more often on clay, because of the possibility of a mark, but you also see players do it and never ask for a mark to be checked. What are we hoping to see in that moment? What are hoping to change? It’s so frustrating, isn’t it, that the other baseline remains just beyond our sight range, no matter how hard we squint?
***
As far as the game’s evolution, is there a trend that’s been exhibited during this first week? I mentioned that Tsonga-Andreev struck me as an example of the place where technology—racquets and now strings—has taken the men’s game. It was a battle of violently dipping missiles fired from so far back in the court that the players' swings routinely sent linespeople scurrying and diving to avoid having a piece of graphite implanted in their heads. Pretty soon, professional courts, especially clay courts, may have to be expanded.
How has this technology affected the women’s game? There’s been talk over the last few years that powerful racquets and strings have made the WTA a land of all-offense and no-defense, where no one can keep up with the flat lasers that come off their opponents’ racquets. This is true to a degree. The Williams sisters upped the power, and other players have followed; but they also upped the speed needed to defend, which has proven more difficult for others to match. The result is a first-strike game where everyone, before they can think about variety, must to learn to hit big; finesse and nuance won’t get you anywhere if you’re getting blown off the court.
But what about the spin we see so much of on the men’s side? Two women at this tournament showed some of it: Julia Goerges and Caroline Garcia. They both had some success, they both look like players on the rise, and they’re both gone.
***
The French-rudeness thing: Reality, or a stereotype promulgated by service-obsessed Americans? Let me give a few examples of what I’ve encountered this week:
—A surly and unsmiling room-service attendant who brought me my coffee and responded to my “Thank you” with a strange rasping sound that I could only interpret as a scoff of disdain.
—A wine-store owner, Serge, who was exactly the opposite: Knowing I was in a hotel, he offered to open my bottle of wine in the store. This corresponds to my past experience. There are French who are gruff, smug, and querelous, but there are others who are much more openly, even persistently, friendly than your average American.
—A story told by an American living in Paris: A French girl he knew was asked to get up and imitate an American. She stood up, flashed a huge and possibly fake smile, and said, in the dramatically vapid voice of an overly aggressive waitress or sales clerk, “Hi! How can I help you?! What can I do for you?!”
The customer, you slowly learn in Paris, is not always right. This is an incredible thing for an American, or at least this American, to process. It’s such a fundamental belief, a religion, that I still can’t quite figure out how a world like that can function.
—I stand up to walk out of the Bullring. To my right are three people. In the row above, there’s just one person, so I step over the seat behind me because it will, seemingly, be easier to get past one person than three. Except that this one person has his legs over the seat in front of him. I stand next to him for a second, waiting for him to move. There’s no way that he doesn’t undertand what I’m trying to do, but he won’t look at me. Finally, I say, “Excuse me, I’m trying to get past . . .”
He explodes. “Why me! Why me! You see how I am sitting! Why not walk down there?” I step up to the next row and leave from there.
PARIS—It may not be a reason to visit a foreign city, but it is a nice side benefit: You get to enjoy the little things, the routine things, even the things that, back home, you would normally pay good money not to have to do ever again. One of those in Paris, at least for me, is riding the metro.
Yes, many of the same hassles that you might know from the New York subway quickly reassert themselves. After a few minutes spent standing idly on a platform, you find yourself walking out to the edge and staring down the empty tracks, as if that’s going to make the train get there any faster (though they do get there faster in Paris than they do in NYC). And when it’s crowded, you still have to stand up too straight, put your hand on a bar where someone else’s hand just was, and try your best to avoid making eye contact with the person standing five inches from your face. Your eyes kind of rotate around each other, like that scene in the record store in Before Sunrise (except for the unfortunate fact that the other person, even in Paris, never happens to be Julie Delpy). In the metro here, you also have the indignity of actually having to open the doors yourself. This morning was one of the few times I’ve handled the handle Parisian-style, without making it sound like the doors are breaking apart.
Still, in the mornings, leaving my hotel, I’ve been passing up the press van for the metro—maybe it’s a New Yorker’s belief that stuffing yourself into a subway car is the only honest way to start the work day. But there’s novelty here, too. In the way the turnstile sucks in the ticket and makes it pop back into your hand on the other end. In the little drone that the car doors make before they close, sort of like a Star Trek alternate universe version of the ding they make in New York. In the liquid-sounding rush of the cars’ huge rubber wheels as they whoosh into the station (in NYC it’s the screech of steel on iron). In the loud whistling sound that the metro makes when the car comes out of a wobbly turn. And in the air that pours in through the windows, which are usually half-open to try to dissipate the stuffiness of the un-air-conditioned cars.
It doesn’t take much to make the metro stuffy; even a moderately warm day make it muggy in there, because the cars are narrow and the ceilings are low. This would certainly become grating over the course of a summer spent trudging to work, but it’s not a bad feeling after a cold spring in the States—warmth, sweat, feels like life. I can picture, from a morning last week when it was warmer, a girl at the far end of a car with her black hair up and slightly disheveled leaning her head against the window as the car rose above ground. Now that it’s chilly again here, it remains as a nice memory of summer potential.
The best part of my trip to Roland Garros, though, is a brief one: when my line, the No. 6, rises out of the underground and rolls along the elevated tracks for three stops. There are very few elevated lines left in New York, and none that I’m aware of in Manhattan. But this one cuts through the heart of Paris. As the rubber wheels make their whoosh and the car wobbles along (they move more slowly and wobble back and forth more here than they do in steely NYC) I feel like I’m on the old flume water ride—it's a sort of liquid roller coaster—at Hershey Park in Pennsylvania. Except that the ride is cutting past the tall windows and wrought-iron balconies of beautiful old Parisian apartment buildings. While those buildings have an Old World flavor for this new worlder, the graffiti sprayed on the elevated train tracks and bridges makes me feel at home. At home, but with a refreshed sense of the urban world: Slicing through the middle of Paris from this vantage point reminds me of the awe in which I held New York when I was a kid, visiting the city from my small home town.
Yesterday, as the train made its last stop before it went above, a man carrying an accordion got on. He began to play just as the car rose up and was flooded by Paris sun and trees and wrought-iron balconies and graffiti. It could have been the soundtrack to a promo that the Tennis Channel might run for Roland Garros and the charms of Gay Paree. A corny moment? Yes. A mundane moment for Parisians? Yes. A perfect moment for me? That, too.
PARIS—I sat in the press seats in Chatrier for the better part of an hour today rolling the opening line to this post around in my head.
These are the days that make a tennis writer’s life worthwhile . . .
There are legendary wins and memorable matches, but this is the kind of moment that stays with a serious fan . . .
That’s the beauty of tennis: Just when you think there’ll never be another new great player, that the well is dry and the tap has been turned off, a kid comes out of nowhere and proves you wrong, shows you that the sport’s history will go on . . .
You get the picture: I was thinking big. That’s how good 17-year-old Frenchwoman Caroline Garcia looked for nearly two sets today against Maria Sharapova. I don’t think I had ever heard of her before, but I got word from a colleague as the match started that her country’s tennis people were very high on her. It didn’t take much time to see why. Garcia won the first two games of the match. More than that, she did it with a game that looks like it’s built for a long haul and a rapid climb up the rankings. I wasn’t the only one thinking that way. In the middle of the second set, right when Garcia appeared to be running away with the match, Andy Murray tweeted, “The girl playing Sharapova is going to be No. 1 in the world, you heard it here first. What a player.”
Maybe Garcia somehow heard those words or felt the pressure from a million other fans and writers and commentators and former players around the world who were equally wowed by her game, because she chose that moment to remember exactly where she was, and exactly who she was playing.
“In the beginning, I could ignore who my opponent was,” a nervously giggling Garcia said in her press conference afterward. It didn’t take much imagination to fill in the second half of that sentence, even if Garcia, whose English is limited, couldn’t do it herself. She couldn’t ignore where she was and what she was doing forever.
So what was Garcia doing so well, and why was I composing a variety of epic, “I have seen the future of rock and roll and his name is Bruce Springsteen,” openings for my post on her? The first and most important reason is her forehand. She’s a skinny girl with a live arm and an easy whip—there’s a little bit of a right-handed Rafa thing going on, in the way she finishes across her body and the sidespin she can get on it. But she can also hit it surprisingly early and with a deceptive quickness; early on, it caught Sharapova off guard.
Garcia also has good little-step footwork and can move across clay smoothly. She has a solid two-handed backhand but can take a hand off it when needed and hit a pretty natural-looking one-hander for defense. Garcia has a tennis player’s DNA. She can do the big things that you need to survive in today’s WTA—i.e., hit the hell out of the ball—and she can do the little things that have set stylishly great players like Justine Henin apart in the past. Murray liked how Garcia absorbed Sharapova’s power and redirected the ball so well.
Garcia’s peak, and her most spectacular and confident redirecting of Sharapova’s power, came when she was receiving serve at 3-1 in the second set and up 0-30. When Maria missed her first one, Garcia stepped well inside the baseline, farther inside than she had before in the match. It was a cocky, risky move, and I thought it was going to backfire when Sharapova hit a very good second serve into Garcia’s forehand corner. But the kid moved up and knocked off a blatant crosscourt winner. It felt like the match was over.
But this is where the story of the day, and of this post, takes its turn. It circles all the way around, in fact, from a tale of youth—which, despite Garcia’s subsequent collapse, is still legit—to a tale of experience and the still-amazing mental stamina of a veteran champion. Sharapova said she wasn’t moving well at the start and was too worried about the windy conditions. She finally relaxed in the second set.
Most important, Sharapova was there, still in it, and ready for the 17-year to come down to earth, which is exactly what happened—Garcia hit the earth with a thud that could be heard around Paris. The turnaround from 1-4 down—Sharapova, unbelievably, would win the final 11 games—was mostly the result of Garcia’s nosedive. She began to double fault. She began to miss routine shots that she had been cracking for winners. She began to hit the ball much more softly, especially on her backhand side. She even began to stumble a little—it’s hard to believe what nerves can do to you on a court until they knock you flat.
But Sharapova was there to take advantage of it all, still in ther mentally. Would Kim Clijsters have been able to do the same thing today? We’ll never know, but the two Slam champs always present a stark contrast when it comes to their respective reaction to adversity. Sharapova plays 0-40 points as if they’re 30-30 points; at her worst and most pessimistic, Clijsters does the opposite.
So let’s leave this match and this post with dual memories. I sat in Chatrier watching a potential future of the women’s game, but that future remains unwritten. As Sharapova herself said when she was asked to assess Garcia’s game, “There will be a lot of wins and lot of losses. It’ll be a long road.” Indeed, Garcia is right at the opening gate. When she became confused in English, her first reaction was to stick out her tongue and laugh. But by the end, when the French reporters surrounded her for their final questions, she was beaming. She seemed to be enjoying herself.
Sharapova wasn’t going to join Murray or any writer in predicting all-time greatness for Garcia. She was already a Wimbledon winner at 17, after all. It’s fun to glimpse the New, but it’s also heartening to see a veteran, a champion, a former phenom, who still wants to keep traveling down that long road.
