Torn wrapping paper all over the floor, extended family from the other political party in the room, the refuge of a football or basketball game on TV, Phil Spector on the turntable, Scrooged, The Bishop's Wife, and a Three Stooges marathon, crowded stores and subways in Manhattan, a Catholic church parade down the middle of your Brooklyn street, the still-lingering excitement of getting an Atari when you were 12, or an IPad when you were 35, a few days without having to rush, and best of all, those trees in living-room windows all over your neighborhood—warmth from within.
Merry Xmas to everyone who has made this column or Tennis.com a home in the last year, or just stopped by: It was by far our best 12 months yet (I say that every year, but it's still true). Thanks to the commenters here—the cranky and the not as cranky—as well as to the silent majority of readers who don’t say much, but keep reading anyway. Like Richard Nixon, I know you’re out there.
I’m off until 2012, so I’ll leave you with one more favorite thing from this time of year, Elvis. Whether it was a white Xmas or a blue one, no one could forget the words like the King. Which reminds me of a funny interview I saw a few years ago:
In Nascar-land, the famous driver Richard Petty was also known as the King. In this interview, though, he said he didn't like the nickname, because "there's only one King." You're waiting for him to say, "And that's our Lord Jesus Christ" or something along those lines, but when the interviewer finally asks who it is, Petty looks at him with surprise and says: "Elvis, of course."
Before his French Open semifinal with Roger Federer, Novak Djokovic was interviewed in the corridor leading to Court Philippe Chatrier. As the man who had yet to lose a match in 2011 began to answer the first question, he stopped for a split-second to take a breath. I thought: Uh, oh, he’s in trouble, the breathing problems are back!
It wasn’t Djokovic’s day. His streak had made him the talk of the tennis world, and even the mainstream sports world, in the weeks leading to Paris. But when he walked on court for his semi and put his hand up tentatively to the audience, all the best player of 2011 got back was a tepid cheer mixed with a boo or two. Like the low gray sky above the stadium, it felt like an ominous start.
But it made for a great match, the best of the season in my opinion. The famous French crowd was viciously enthusiastic in its support of Federer, and while that was tough on Djokovic, it was the edge in the stands and in the air that helped make this the most gripping tennis that I saw in 2011. It’s not easy to sense in these highlights, but it felt like life and death inside Chatrier. Of course, it didn’t hurt that the play was inspired, and that the storyline—aging legend rises up to stop record streak of young rival—was the most compelling of the year.
*****
—Is it a blessing or a curse to have a highlight reel with no commentators? At first it seemed like a bit of a letdown. In the silence, you realize that a good announcer really does bring something to a match. But after a few minutes, I started to watch this clip as if it were a documentary, and that made it better, in my mind, than any of the others I’ve embedded over the last two weeks (though I wish we could see the ball a little more easily). With no narration, the gestures of the players begin to tell their own story. By the end, when the match is over, the final gesture of each player seems that much more dramatic and meaningful.
—My memory is that Djokovic came out tighter than a drum, and maybe he did. This match was played late on a Friday afternoon, after Djokovic had been off for four days, due to the fateful quarterfinal withdrawal of Fabio Fognini. What I didn’t remember was that he went up a break at 4-2 in the first set. In this clip, anyway, Djokovic doesn’t appear as nervous as I remember, and comes out hitting just about as cleanly as he had been all season.
—Federer was in an unsual position for him: He was the pursuer, rather than the pursued, and you can see that he relished the reversal. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen such an aggressive posture from him, and so many fist-pumps in one match. While Federer goes down early, there’s a bit of foreshadowing here, when he smacks a strong backhand up the line and pumps his fist. It’s a shot that will help him at the end as well.
—There were signs of tension in Djokovic that had largely disappeared for most of 2011 to that point. At 4-2, Federer hits a winner; while Djokovic is still up a break, he throws his hands out in frustration, as if the world is against him. He hadn’t been making those gestures, or showing that frustration much during his streak.
—Soon, Djokovic also has the crowd on his back. They begin to jeer him as he bounces the ball before serving, so Djokovic tells the chair umpire that he was at the line in “15 seconds.” The result? Louder booing. (This is when the clip really begins to feel like a movie to me). Not surprisingly, Djokovic’s netted forehand to lose the first-set tiebreaker gets the biggest roar of the day, and a big roar from Federer as well.
—We don’t see much of it here, but it was full flight time for Federer in the second, and the wind was almost visibly knocked out of Djokovic. All of his nightmares were coming true—he wins Madrid, he wins Rome, and now he's going to lose at the one that really counts, in Paris. Federer is serving well and controlling rallies with his forehand. Djokovic said he “slowed down” in the second, and it was as true from a mental standpoint as is was from a physical one.
—Federer’s 2011 pattern holds true at the start of the third set. As he did against Tsonga at Wimbledon and against Djokovic at the U.S. Open, he stumbles after winning the first two sets. Djokovic, with nothing to lose, loosens up and begins to take it to Federer, the way he had in his straight-set wins in Melbourne and Dubai. In the points shown here over the last two sets, he’s typically the aggressor.
—Watching the closing games again, it seems to me that Djokovic was closer to winning the fourth set, and perhaps the match, than I had thought at the time. He serves for the set at 5-4, and in general, as far as these clips go, he’s the one doing the dictating. You can feel him getting closer to breaking through and turning it around for good. While Federer lost two match points at the U.S. Open, Djokovic must have been almost as pained and bitter at losing this one. For stretches of the fifth, it appeared to be his for the taking.
—At the time, I said that Federer won this with defense, and when I think of this match, I still see him swooping and sliding from sideline to sideline to track down Djokovic’s best stuff, and winning quite a few of those points. Unfortunately, we don’t see many of them here. What we do get are two crucial flick, counter-punched backhands that Federer sends past his charging opponent up the line. Both helped keep the momentum at least on equal terms as it got darker and it became clear that this was going to be the last set of the day (it was much darker than it appears here). The darkness added a layer of desperation—Djokovic knew it was win or go home, and Federer wanted to get it done without having to come out again the next day (though he stated otherwise later).
—Djokovic has a break point at 5-5, but we don’t see what happens. An ace, perhaps?
—The French fans like to get involved, and there’s no question they helped Federer. But early in the fourth-set breaker, they helped lose him a point by cheering a good shot of his too soon. Djokovic got it back and Federer missed the next ball.
—We’ve talked about the Shot, Djokovic’s return while down match point at the Open, and how the history of the men’s season would be different if he’d missed. Here, at 6-5 in the tiebreaker, on another match point, Federer comes up with a shot of similar significance. There was a feeling in the arena that he reared back just a little more to smack the ace that ends it—the ball landed with a loud thud against the back tarp. If Federer doesn’t hit that serve at that moment, a serve that the game’s best returner can’t touch, there’s a decent chance that Djokovic wins the calendar-year Grand Slam. Either way, unlike their U.S. Open semi, this one got a properly climactic finale.
—And then Federer wagged his finger. He did something similar two years earlier in Madrid after ending a five-match losing streak to Nadal, and he did it here after ending a three match losing streak to Djokovic. Both times, part of the message was, “Not so fast, I’m still around.” It’s not shown on this clip, but at that moment Paul Annacone was pointing at Federer in a slightly goofy, “you’re the man” kind of way. I’m not sure who pointed first, or who was reacting to whom.
At the time, the finger wag made me feel sorry for Djokovic, but looking at it again, Federer’s gesture fits with this moment and this match, with the spectacle of that day. Federer had played with an edge all afternoon, and it had brought him his biggest win in a year—now it was time to let it out. As I’ve written many times, I like the camaraderie and humility of today’s male players, but I also miss the edgy, strutting showmanship of the old days. This was as close to Jimmy Connors as Roger Federer will ever get, and in that moment—a moment of vindication and bottled-up brashness released—he was, in my opinion, as compelling a character on the pro tennis stage as he’s ever been.
—I wondered, as Djokovic walked to the net, how he would handle this defeat. Give him credit. He had just lost the streak, a shot at the No. 1 ranking, and his bid for his first French Open, and he’d seen the wagging finger. In his presser afterward, Djokovic at one point stopped, shook his head, and said, “It hurts so bad to lose.” No one could rightfully have blamed him if he’d given Federer a polite handshake at the net and walked away, the way, say, both Federer and Nadal did when they lost to him at the U.S. Open. But that wasn’t how Djokovic was going to play it: He went in for the hug and the backslap anyway.
—I’ll finish with a story from the stands that might give you an idea of what it was like in Chatrier that afternoon. I was sitting in the front row of the press seats next to a man I’d never seen before. He had a credential, but he was obviously a tennis fanatic rather than a reporter. Which was nice, because he registered all of a fan’s excitement at what he was getting to see. Late in the fourth set, Federer and Djokovic played a titanic point that Federer eventually lost. The fans were up and down and up and down, and they let out a storm of noise when it ended—it felt like a riot was about to break out. At that moment, my neighbor’s phone rang, loudly. He fumbled around in a panic to find it and eventually answered with a loud, impatient “Hello!” in a European accent. He nodded as his friend on the other end of the line spoke, and then he quickly interrupted.
“I know, I saw it, I’m here.”
Pause as his friend spoke.
“I’m here!"
Pause.
"Yes, at the match!"
Pause. More vigorous nodding. Finally, he put his hand around his mouth and yelled:
How do you know when a tennis match was exciting? Here’s one way: More than three months after it was played, long after you learned the final score and you’d already written a few thousand words about it, you still find yourself leaning forward as you watch the rallies at 5-5 in the fifth set, anxious to see what’s going to happen next. The five-set U.S. Open epic between Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer was voted the No. 1 match of the season by the ATP, and it will probably be the one that’s remembered the longest—when you type in “djok” on YouTube, “djokovic federer us open 2011” immediately comes up. It’s my personal No. 2 for both men and women (see the rest of my list here), but no match on either tour was as spine-tingling. That sounds like a cliché, but sitting in Ashe Stadium during the last few games, that’s pretty much how it felt. Tennis is at its best when you feel like the two players are out on a high wire together. That’s how this one was for the whole fifth set. One guy almost fell; the other finally did.
*****
—It started a little slam-bang. The first set was close and dramatic and solidly played, but it wasn’t quite at the level of their first sets in the Australian Open and French Open semis. Those two, each of which ended in a close tiebreaker, proved to be decisive; the winner went on to win the match. And it appeared for about two hours that this one would be decisive as well. You got the sense that Djokovic had a bad case of déjà vu when he fought back to 6-6 only to lose it on a good Federer backhand. After the match, the Serb admitted that he “didn’t want another Roland Garros” to happen. He didn’t want Federer to carve another flaw in his otherwise flawless season.
—Federer, as usual, is at his best front-running in the second set. He’s more aggressive with his backhand, both down the line and crosscourt, and he ends a lot of points at the net, often with swing volleys. He breaks Djokovic with another good backhand, and the Serb, who is pulling up too quickly on his forehand and leaving them short, starts to hang his head. I thought that Federer had cruised in this set, the way he cruised in the second set of their French Open semi, but Djokovic digs himself out of his doldrums and breaks him back for 3-3. One sign of Federer’s confidence: At 4-4, 30-30, he takes a towering lob out of the air and drills it without hesitation. It didn’t appear he would lose this one.
—As Federer said afterward, Djokovic was “going to get his teeth into the match” at some point. It’s interesting what shot Djokovic uses to do that—it’s a familiar one. At 1-0 and deuce in the third, he takes a 95-m.p.h. serve out wide to his forehand and snaps the return back crosscourt and into the corner for a winner. “This is his strength,” Luke Jensen says in the booth, and Djokovic was prepared to go to it on the biggest points on this day. We now know it as the Shot, but I hadn’t realized until I watched these highlights, as well as the highlights of his match with Nadal in Miami, how many times Djokovic goes to that seemingly all-or-nothing play, and how many times he comes back with it all.
—Djokovic is off to the races for the next two sets. His forehand finds the corners, and his backhand down the line is as lethal as ever. Federer gets more passive, going to the slice backhand that he’s used so effectively over the years against so many other opponents. From the Aussie Open on this year, though, that wasn’t a play that worked against Djokovic. He got low for those slices and hit them aggressively.
Federer continues with the slice in the fourth set and is broken right away. By 1-2, he’s slowing down, and he doesn’t do much for the rest of the set. He really does appear to be tired, which we’re not used to seeing from him. Still, Federer rights himself when he must.
For much of the fifth set, I believed that the turning point, when the match was eventually written up, was going to be the seemingly innocuous end of the fourth. Djokovic had a chance to break to finish it at 5-1, but Federer, despite hitting some shots flat-footed, hung on, and was able to start the fifth on his serve. He held in that opening game, stopped Djokovic’s momentum, and found some energy—it's amazing what winning a few points will do for you. It seemed that the “wily veteran,” as Jensen calls him, had found a way out. Of course, as we know now, there was one more turning point to come.
—As the fifth begins, Djokovic is also laboring, but the two combine for some of the best tennis of the day through the first six games. Winner is met with winner, hold is met with hold. There’s a slow-mo of one Federer forehand that shows just how rapidly everything happens on that shot. It isn’t so much effortless, as it’s usually described, as it is incredibly fast from set up to follow through.
The wily veteran breaks at the right time, 4-3, and takes the balls to serve it out. As Federer said afterward, “he had it all set up.” We don’t see it here, but when Djokovic gets down 40-15, double match point, he gives the pro-Federer crowd a few sarcastic head nods, and then rips the Shot. It was aimed at the audience, and Djokovic’s own sense of frustration, as much as it was his opponent. But as we know from re-watching this match, it wasn’t an unusual play for him. When it goes in, he asks for a little applause himself.
My new favorite moment of this match: Djokovic leaning down to return serve, having just hit a return winner but still down another match point in the semis of the U.S. Open, and smiling. Smiling, no longer sarcastically, at the moment.
—We miss the tough return Djokovic makes on that point and skip right to Federer’s dismal, stunning double-fault to lose the game. We also miss most of the errors that Federer throws in after that, errors that I could see coming at the time. It was a sad way to end a classic match: The magic had left the wand.
—Afterward, Djokovic yells to his box and takes a request to dance; it seems, judging from this clip, that he had even won over some of the New York crowd—they certainly give him more love than the fans in Madrid did when he beat Nadal there in May.
Earlier though, as Federer’s last ball floated, despondently, long, Djokovic didn’t overcelebrate. He got up to his opponent quickly and respectfully for the handshake. He knew, as he said a few minutes later, that he’d been lucky.
But that wasn’t all Djokovic had been that day. Last week I wrote these words about the Serb’s famous return, and they can apply to the entire match as well:
Luck or skill, plan or pique, the ball went in and the Serb went on to take the U.S. Open. Another year, it might have gone another way. But this was 2011, and this was Novak Djokovic.
Some matches are notable for their historical significance, while others are memorable mainly for their popcorn value. The third-best match of 2011, Novak Djokovic’s win in a third-set tiebreaker over Andy Murray in Rome, is the latter. It wasn’t a Slam semi, or even a Masters final, but it was shot-maker’s special and a psychological roller-coaster. And it did have its significance, in my view, in how the men’s season played out. This was a match that, despite the five-month winning streak that he had going, Djokovic could easily have lost and shrugged off and no one would have blamed him for it. He had won the title in Madrid the previous week, he had the French Open looming the following week, and he was down a break in the third set to a determined, in-form and even briefly upbeat Murray. But Djokovic won anyway. That was his season in a nutshell.
*****
—The last time we saw Djokovic on this list, in the Key Biscayne final, he was reminding us, in case we had forgotten while watching him this fall, of all the various things he could do when he was at his peak this season. By comparison, this is a more streamlined performance. You can see by the way he starts how loose he was at that time, how purposeful he was with his shots, and how he felt like he could do pretty much anything with them from one swing to the next. My favorite early rally here is one in which Djokovic slides into a forehand and decides to loop it deep, then, on the next ball, backpedals for another forehand and drills it flat and inside-in. He had an easy mastery of everything he tried; it was his version of full-flight tennis.
—Djokovic, like most of today’s players, is not a natural net-rusher. There are many times when he has Murray pushed off the baseline, yet he rarely takes the opportunity to sneak forward to finish a point, unless he has no other choice. Instead, on a few occasions, Djokovic substitutes his drop shot for a volley. That’s making life tough on yourself, but as you can see here, he had total confidence in his drop shot. He hits two others from the place where you’re never supposed to hit them, behind his own baseline. Murray still can’t track them down. There are tactical rules, and then there are players who don’t need them. How long will he have the confidence to break them and win?
—It appeared at first that this one would be over quickly. Djokovic had done the unimaginable and straight-setted Nadal in the Madrid final that Sunday, and he had leveled the seemingly dangerous Robin Soderling a couple of days earlier. Murray, who went down 6-1 in the first, appeared to be his next victim, until he began to use his backhand more aggressively in the second set.
This is a Murray conundrum: He needs his backhand to work like a forehand, and vice-versa. In other words, because his forehand is essentially a rally shot rather than a kill shot, the way it is for Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic, he needs his backhand to do more of the offensive work. With nothing to lose in the second set, he starts to do that. At one point, one of the commentators says that Murray is “taking the legs out of Djokovic,” and the Serb does tire through the second and third sets.
—Love the little sliding flip crosscourt backhand that Djokovic hits around the net. Great footwork, great racquet work. If I were a young player, I’d spend some time isolating on Djokovic during this clip, specifically his feet. His style is efficient, smooth, and predatory at once.
—Just as Djokovic and Nadal did in Miami, these two lay it all out in the third set, but neither can break free of the other. “Good tennis,” a commentator says after one Murray winner. “Magnificent tennis,” after another. He tops it off, after a Murray no-look half-volley winner, with the highest praise of all for that shot: “McEnroe-esque!”
—It almost seems, for a few seconds in the third set, that Murray is enjoying himself. He pumps his fist, and he may even have attempted to crack a (non-sarcastic) smile. It’s hardly a coincidence that he wins that game. This isn’t his natural way, and he ends the match by going back to his roots and smashing his racquet.
Murray has been criticized by everyone who has ever watched him for being too negative on court, but he usually answers by saying that he has to let off steam out there. He’ll never turn into Rafael Nadal, attitude-wise, but if he could just swing the balance a little toward the positive, it would be a major help. The problem with Murray is that he’s negative at the wrong moments. Maybe it’s a natural, fatalistic reaction; the guy has taken a lot of tough losses. This one was particularly tough, because when he broke for 4-3 and again for 5-4, it seemed that he had, for once, left the bad vibes behind. Then he double-faulted to be broken at 5-4. It's enough to make you scream at your box all over again.
—You can see this match as foreshadowing another Djokovic comeback, the one he made in the U.S. Open semifinal against Federer. Down 4-5 in the third here, Djokovic does what he often does with his back to the wall: he lets it rip. That nothing-to-lose attitude always makes a player dangerous, and Djokovic uses it to break Murray twice at the end of the third set.
—Djokovic finishes in style, with a winning drop shot. He pumps his fists, Murray cracks his racquet, and we can put the popcorn away. Less than 24 hours later, the Serb would go on to beat Nadal in straight sets, on clay, for the second straight time. Tennis weekends don’t get much better than that.
Occasion, atmosphere, a sense of playing for something greater than yourself: These are the intangibles that we get in Davis Cup, and that so often inspire classic matches. All of those elements were in place for the final match of 2011, when Rafael Nadal held off Juan Martin del Potro in front of 24,000 highly vocal fans in Seville to clinch the Cup for Spain. By the fourth set, when del Potro, soaring on the support from his even-more-vocal Argentine contingent, staged his final comeback, and the two players began to tear across the court in increasing desperation, I wondered: Why can’t tennis be like this more often? Maybe it’s a good thing that it isn’t. It might be too much to take on a weekly basis.
On this day, and in this, the fourth best match of the year, the sport felt like it had crossed over and turned into soccer for a few hours. The crowd participation and general sense of impending chaos, which were part of the reason the match made this list, are largely absent from this highlight reel, replaced by a pair of just-slightly-partisan Spanish commentators—I like the reaction to a Nadal overhead early on: "Si señor!"
But while crowd has been cut out, the players, and their shots, haven't. They were pretty good, too.
*****
—Nadal lost the first set 6-1, but you can't say he wasn’t ready. After winning the first point of the match, he throws a fist pump in the direction of the Spanish bench, then throws in a leg kick for good measure. This is the type of too soon exhortation we’re used to seeing from Gael Monfils, and it doesn’t work for Rafa. His shots land short through the first set, and del Potro waxes him.
—This set, this match, this weekend, were all reminders that del Potro can still bomb away with the best. His crosscourt backhand and down the line forehand into the corner, in particular, were things of beauty. It’s hard to imagine anyone that tall hitting a forehand on the run with such precision. But he does it over and over here.
Until he doesn’t. The crucial points aren’t shown in this clip, but after del Potro wins the first set, he breaks Nadal right away in the second and, it appears (I can’t remember for sure), goes up 40-0 on his serve. Nadal would later say that that getting out of that jam was “when the match began” for him and he settled down. But it also came at a point when it's typical for the player who is winning easily, especially if he didn’t really expect to be winning quite so easily, will get tight. It’s one thing to win a set, but when you win a set and then go up a break, the finish line suddenly appears in your head—you've gone from having nothing to lose to having something very very big to lose. Del Potro wouldn't find his best form again until he was almost out of the match in the fourth set.
—One small observation about del Potro: When he’s returning, it takes him a long time to make his way up to the baseline during a rally. Even on second serves, he hits his return from well back in the court. This is par for the course on clay, but I do get the sense that he could do more with his return, and could have done more to pressure an obviously nervous Nadal this day.
—As tight as Nadal was to start, and as tight as he got again near the end, this was, as he said afterward in a rare moment of jocky sloganeering, “my moment.” He was right. This match and this weekend cemented Nadal’s Davis Cup performances as a significant part of his legacy. He’s 20-1 lifetime in singles, and has won his last 20 matches. But he had never won two live rubbers in a final before this year, and he’d never clinched the Cup himself. His normal strategy against del Potro is to hit high to his backhand side, but that didn't seem to be working in Seville. The change came when Nadal found the confidence to hit his down the line forehand, an essential shot if he was going to get the big guy on the run.
As with Novak Djokovic last year, the team game brought out the best in Nadal. He had been terrible the week before in London, but the clay, the fans, and his teammates combined to change his losing attitude. His backhand alone was a completely different shot from one week to the next. After all of these years and all of his success, Nadal still suffers wide swings in confidence from event to event. As John McEnroe said, the thing about Davis Cup is that there’s so much pressure to perform for your team and country that you can’t get nervous, you can’t let anything bother you, including how you played the previous week. We’ll see how long Rafa’s confidence lasts. Unfortunately, you can’t recreate a Davis Cup atmosphere, or mindset, at will.
—It ended up being a heroic and cruel weekend for del Potro. He played nine sets of mostly excellent tennis, hit a ton of awe-inspiring winners along the way, and ended up with nothing but tears to show for it. It was the loss two days earlier to David Ferrer, a match del Potro could have and should have won, that was the crusher. But credit him for coming back on Sunday, in a match that no one expected him to win. He came back from a break down at the start of the fourth set, and again at the end.
After this weekend, though, I started to ask: Which is the real del Potro, the guy who showed the fortitude to forge all the way to a five-set win over Roger Federer at the U.S. Open in 2009? Or the guy who couldn’t make that final push against Ferrer and Nadal in Seville? Will we see the former version again? Here’s hoping that he’ll remember the good things he did on this weekend. Sports can use an athlete who will shed a tear in defeat and make the world like him that much more for it. It's another reason to want to see the big man win instead.
—I like the final frame of this clip, of Nadal grimacing in happiness. But I was hoping we would see what came after. Here’s what I wrote about that scene when it happened:
While Nadal fell to the clay, del Potro trudged to the net, leaned over, and started to cry. Nadal, as his teammates jumped and hugged, made his way to the net and consoled him. Then he made his way to the other side of the court to share an embrace with each member of the Argentine team. That’s the men's game in the Age of Emotion. We’ll see Nadal’s forehand winner forever, but if future fans want to find out what tennis at its best was like in 2011, they should keep watching for the show of sportsmanship and deep feeling that followed from both sides.
Occasion, atmosphere, a sense of playing for something greater than yourself: It worked again.
In my narrative of the 2011 men’s season, the Key Biscayne final isn't merely the 5th best; it's the crux, the turning point, the afternoon when everything changed for good. Novak Djokovic had already won the Australian Open, had already beaten Rafael Nadal in Indian Wells, and was already deep into his season-opening win streak, but to me this was the match where, from both a physical and a psychological standpoint, he finally and permanently turned the tables on Nadal. Since that time, I’ve heard that Nadal himself believes the turning point occurred one tournament earlier, with his loss at Indian Wells, but I’m sticking with my story.
I’m sticking with it because in my mind, when this match got down to brass tacks and the two players began a third-set tiebreaker, I felt sure, despite Djokovic’s streak, that Nadal was going to win. Because he always wins in these situations. Because the hard work he had made his opponent do for the last three hours would pay off now, as it had paid off so many times before. And, maybe most important, because he couldn’t afford another loss to Novak.
But at the moment when Nadal was supposed to win, he lost. Instead it was Djokovic who upped his game, found the corners, got more aggressive, and looked like the fresher player. All the time that I had thought Nadal had been wearing his opponent down, the opposite had been happening. From then on, it was Djokovic who had the edge. In the four matches they played after this one, he would win 10 sets and lose just two.
*****
—Compared to the last time we saw these two, in my No. 7 match, the U.S. Open final, Nadal begins by playing closer to the baseline. He also begins by serving and hitting his backhand with more force. And his fast start lasts much longer, all the way to 5-1 in the first set. But again, in a bit of foreshadowing, Djokovic doesn’t do the usual thing and save his energy for the second set. He gets the score back to 5-4 and puts a scare into Nadal. You can see it in the way Rafa looks across the net at Djokovic after finally securing the set—it’s not a look of confidence, or even relief.
—In the first set, you can hear that commentator Robbie Koenig, like me, still believed that it was Nadal who was doing the wearing down. After one long, physical point that Rafa wins, Koenig says those kinds of points will help him later. But they don’t. Nadal would later say that he had been utterly drained by this match. He had lost, for one of the only times in his career, the grind.
—This time, it’s Djokovic who gets stronger in the heat. Despite losing the first set, his belief only grows. By the middle of the second, he’s virtually toying with Nadal. Djokovic twice wins points with demoralizing/humiliating drop shot-lob combinations.
—Overall, this clip showcases Djokovic at his versatile best. Even more than the Open final, it gives us an idea of what made him a special player this year. Everything is on display, one point after the next. The newfound accuracy and tactical effectiveness of his drop shot. His return, which he runs around and cranks freely for winners. His improved serve; he finishes the second set with an ace. His weaponized backhand, which he uses to create rather than just rally. His touch and confidence around the net, which has never been a strong suit. And most important, his defense. At first, watching this, I thought that Nadal’s forehand had slowed down a bit. Then I realized that he’s hitting it the same way he always has. It’s just that Djokovic, by tracking them down and pounding them back, makes Rafa’s strokes look a tiny bit slower than they do against everyone else.
—The third set is a war, filled with superb tennis from both; the rallies aren’t as long as those at the Open, but there’s a higher level of shotmaking here, in my opinion. It’s as if Djokovic still didn’t quite believe he could out-grind Rafa at this point, so he goes for more than he does at Flushing Meadows.
Each player holds his way to 6-6. Djokovic seems to have the upper hand, but Nadal does everything he can to hang in. A tiebreaker is the moment of truth, though, and the truth was that Djokovic was the better player. Again, as always, Nadal fights back and hangs in, but it’s no longer enough.
If there’s an art to making these clips, it’s shown here when the editor gives us a few extra seconds of Djokovic bouncing the ball on the match point that ends it. It’s a simple play from the Serb: good serve to the backhand, better forehand to the same spot a few seconds later. There wasn’t much Nadal could do on this point, or during this season.
All that was left was the handshake. While the rivalry had turned a corner that afternoon in Miami, Nadal’s feelings about that change hadn’t quite caught up. It was the last time he would offer his conqueror a hug in defeat.
“Hope they’ve got the wheelchair ready,” one of the commentators on Australia’s Channel 7 says when Francesca Schiavone finally puts the last ball past Svetlana Kuznetsova and ends their fourth-round marathon in Melbourne. As John Isner and Nicolas Mahut had the previous year at Wimbledon, these two players punched each other into oblivion. In the latter stages, they staggered around the ring until Schiavone finally delivered the knockout at 15-14 in the third set, after 4 hours and 44 minutes of play. By that point, she had served for the match twice, while Kuznetsova had squandered six match points. This wasn’t your everyday fourth-round match, and it clocks in at No. 6 on the season.
You have two viewing options above. There’s 30 minutes of quick-moving and often brilliant highlights of all three sets, marred only by the announcer’s incessant breathing into the microphone. Below that is a 11-minute clip of the final two games, which gives you an idea of just how drained everyone involved was by that stage. It remains debatable whether all of the Slams would be better off with final-set tiebreakers, and Schiavone and Kuznetsova might secretly have wished there had been one in place on this day. But the marathons are always memorable.
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—These videos remind me of how how fresh things seem in Oz in January each year. It’s a new season, the weather is warm again, the players are starting over with a blank late. That seemed to be the case for Kuznetsova in particular. She talked at the beginning of this tournament about how fresh she felt, and it showed the round before when she beat Justine Henin in the Belgian champ's final match. Losing this epic to her friend Schiavone, after blowing those six match points, didn’t seem to help. Kuznetsova went on to have a bummer of a season.
—Looking at the highlight reel, what strikes me most is how much variety you get from Schiavone. She wins points with drop shots, by serving and volleying, with flat backhand return winners up the line. It’s amazing how much a one-handed backhand changes a player’s game, how many more options he or she has with it. Does it produce a fundamentally more attractive style, or does it just look so good because that style is the exception rather than the rule now, the same way that a vintage car on the street automatically looks cool, whatever the make?
—Schiavone utters her first grunt at 3-2 in the first. Kuznetsova starts to blurt at 4-5. As with her game, Schiavone brings nice variety to her noise-making. She can go “Ah-hee!” on one shot and “Ah-ha!” on the next. At 14-all here, she even speeds up her grunt to go with her volley, the sonic equivalent of shortening her swing.
—The Italian proves again that she’s among the wiliest competitors on either tour. In the last game, she can’t get much pace on her serve, and she can’t last in rallies, but she directs the ball to the right places and doesn’t try for too much. She knows, at this point, that she doesn’t need to put the ball on the line to get it past a bleary Kuznetsova.
—I was in and out of Hisense Arena during this one; there was plenty of time to watch from multiple locations. The energy during the latter stages of the third isn’t quite conveyed in either of the clips above, so I’ll finish by returning to what I wrote that day:
As the games went on, we began to think about Isner-Mahut. The difference was that neither of these women were going to hit 100 aces—though Kuznetsova did hit 69 winners versus 68 errors. That meant they had to scrap for everything, which made the tennis itself more freewheeling and entertaining. And draining. Both women were punch drunk, but kept getting off the mat to drill one more winner and dig themselves out of one more seemingly hopeless predicament.
Some long WTA matches end in a sea of errors and service breaks—“women’s drama,” Kuznetsova calls it. This one had its miscues and chokes, but it also had its glorious saves and comebacks. Courage and frailty were on equal display. That’s why we’ll sit and watch a tennis match for 4 hours and 44 minutes.
Francesca Schiavone's coach, Corrado Barrazzutti, was known as the Little Soldier when he played. It was partly an insult directed at his plodding style. Schiavone could take that nickname from him, but it would be no insult. Asked afterward if she was going to get some sleep tonight, Schiavone smiled and shook her head. She didn’t know what she was going to do, or exactly where she was. Only one thing came to mind: “Drink,” she finally said. Here's hoping there's a little water with that wine.
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Have a good weekend. I'll be back next week to count down the Top 5.
“That was the most physical tennis match I’ve ever seen.” This was the refrain I heard from many fans after the U.S. Open men’s final. Looking at it again, it also might have been the noisiest—or maybe just the best miked—men’s match of all time. Grunts rise and fall from both guys over a steady, hard-working backbeat of sneaker squeaks. In these 14 minutes of tightly edited highlights, the 7th-best match of 2011 looks and sounds like one massive, exhausting barrage of slugging and running. It wasn’t a competitive thriller, and two of the sets weren’t close at all, but the rallies have an awesome brutality to them.
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—Nadal’s Uncle Toni said after this match that his nephew had been nervous during both the Wimbledon and U.S. Open finals against Djokovic. He knows best, obviously, but the feeling I had was that Rafa went in to each of those matches determined to be aggressive, started well, but when Djokovic hung in and got his nose in front, he quickly became resigned. The memories of his previous four losses to the Serb this year were too fresh to put aside. At Wimbledon, Nadal lost a close first set and then got blown out in the second. At the Open, he went out to a 2-0 lead in both the first and second sets, but once Djokovic settled in, Nadal didn’t have any answers. He lost the next six games of first set. We’re not used to see that kind of dominating run against Rafa. To me, it looked less like nerves than it did lack of belief, along with a dreaded sense of “here were go again.” Those two things will get you down.
—So what changed between the 2010 U.S. Open, which Nadal won in four sets over Djokovic, and 2011, which Djokovic won in four sets over Nadal? There are some fundamental differences: Nadal’s serve was much better in last year’s match, and Djokovic’s serve and forehand were shakier. But looking at clips of the 2010 version, what sticks out to me is the way Djokovic approaches the points, both between them and during them. Between points, he’s bug-eyed, like a man who’s pushing uphill and just trying to survive out there; he doesn’t seem to believe he’s actually going to beat Nadal, who was No. 1 in the world and coming off two straight Slam titles. During the points, Djokovic takes more risks, from riskier, off-balance positions, than we saw from him in 2011—sometime he connects, sometimes he doesn’t.
In this year’s Open final, by contrast, he’s calm and purposeful throughout, or at least until he tightens up a little at the end of the third set. And he doesn’t launch bombs too early in the rallies. He’s consistent and confident enough that he can wait and work the point until he has a high-percentage shot before he pulls the trigger. After the match, Nadal said that the biggest difference was that Djokovic could make “one more ball” now. That had always been Rafa’s trump card; in 2011, the Djoker trumped him back (or “called his bluff “or “drew an ace,” or some card-playing metaphor that I can’t think of right now).
—Technically, the biggest advantage that Djokovic has over Nadal is on the backhand side. Watching from the sidelines that afternoon, it was easy to see how much more effortless pace Djokovic gets with that shot than Rafa does. That’s the trump card; he has two equally dangerous weapons, where Nadal has one. You can see Rafa, as this match progresses, try to drive his backhand more, and he does. He comes up with a brilliant one-two-punch to win the final point of the third set.
But even when he hits it well as he can, Djokovic is there. On the last point of the second set, Nadal snaps a backhand return at a sharp crosscourt angle, but Djokovic reaches out and sends a forehand winner down the line for what the commentator calls, “another miracle forehand.” And when Djokovic needs a point, such as when he’s serving down 15-40 in the fourth game of the match, he goes right at Nadal’s backhand.
By the end of the first set, Djokovic is absolutely firing his own backhand, with total confidence, for brazen winners to the corners. He’s hitting it like a second forehand. Even when Nadal’s backhand has been at its best—see 2008 French Open and Wimbledon—it has never been that type of shot.
—Another, less-talked-about play of Djokovic’s that defined his improvement for me was his drop shot. It used to be a bail-out play, something he did when he wanted to get a rally over with one way or another, and he dumped it into the net a lot. Not this year. He has enough confidence in it against Nadal here to hit it from behind his own baseline, and hit it for winners.
—Nadal defended his season after this match by saying that he may have lost to Djokovic in all of those finals, but he was proud that he kept getting to them, that he was always “there.” And while he ended up having a “down" year for him, I didn’t notice much of a drop in his level play overall. He won the French Open, went 3-1 against Federer, and came into both the Wimbledon and U.S. Open finals after hammering world No. 4 Andy Murray.
One point here may sum up Nadal’s season. At 2-2 in the second set, when he was still very much in the match, he ran Djokovic all over the court and earned an easy overhead. This is his bread-and-butter shot, but he tried to hit it too hard and drilled it into the tape. It was almost as if the man who's most famous for his effort was trying too hard to beat Djokovic.
But while he never found an answer, credit Nadal for starting each set like he was starting the match all over. He won the first two games of the first set, the first two games of the second, and made one final stand in the third, the only one that succeeded.
—Still, as well as Rafa played in that third set, Djokovic still managed to serve for it at 6-5. You don’t see it here, but he got nervous, and Nadal played an inpsired game and tiebreaker. I thought it was fortunate for Djokovic that he hurt his back when he did. It allowed him to play a little more freely in the fourth set, to go for his shots as if he had just a little less to lose, and he nailed them. Even with the Djoker hobbling and throwing in his first serve at 90 m.p.h., a weary Nadal had no answers for his tormentor. If you can wear Rafa out, you deserve to win.
—It was interesting to talk to Nadal fans after this match. Most of them thought that Rafa hadn’t played well. They wondered why he didn’t do this, why he didn’t do that, why he didn’t get more aggressive, why he couldn’t hold serve, etc. I tried to remind them that Djokovic had a say in the matter, but it was still unbelievable to them that he could really beat Rafa so many times in a row. It gave me sense of déjà vu, back to four and five years ago when Roger Federer's fans said the same thing about their man after he lost to Nadal. Why doesn’t Roger come to the net? Why doesn't he go for his return? Why doesn't he do this? Why doesn't do that? Well, it wasn’t that easy, and we found out that Nadal wasn't just any old opponent. This year we saw the same situation, with Rafa on the losing end; he struggled to turn the tide against Djokovic, but he never did. Sometimes the other guy really is that good. Sometimes he makes one more ball than you.
As we count down the Best of 2011, here’s one last mailbag before the holidays, and the new season, begin.
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If ever there was a non-slam winner who belongs in the a Hall of Fame, it is David Ferrer. By virtue of his Davis Cup performances alone, I think he belongs there.
I have never looked at the Hall of Fame “rules", but maybe I will now and create a “David Ferrer for Hall of Fame” lobby. David is everything and more a great tennis player should be about.—Mr. Rick
Ferru in the Hall is an admirable idea; few have made more of what they’ve been given. In fact, Ferrer seems to use his limitations. He knows exactly what he can and can’t do.
The basic criteria for the Hall of Fame is a Slam singles title, though the organization started down a slippery slope a few years ago when it let Pam Shriver in on her doubles record. (It also helps to be an American; one-time French Open champion Michael Chang is in; two-time French Open champ Sergi Bruguera isn’t.) Ferrer has been to a couple of Slam semis, and he is an all-time star of Davis Cup. This sounds a lot like the record of another Daveed: Nalbandian. If you let in the overachieving Ferrer, you have to let the underachieving Nalby in as well. Unfortunately, I think that’s a step too far down the slope.
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I found rafa's victory over delpo oddly similar in feel to his french open final win over fed. sort of like he still had just enough gas in the tank, but it was getting tougher. less convincing than in his dominant years, and without the resultant wind at his back for the upcoming battle.—d
There were similarities. Nadal started horribly and was intermittently shaky in both matches. But those things have been true of him in the past as well—he won the Delpo match was by nearly the same scores as he did the 2006 French Open final over Federer. What did seem different in Seville was that when Nadal wrested the momentum away at the start of the fourth set, he didn’t run away with the match—in the past, once he’s gotten his confidence, he’s been very tough to stop. But here he visibly tightened up.
Granted, he was affected by the Argentine crowd stopping the match for five minutes, and he righted himself by the end of the set, but it’s a was a dicier situation than I would have thought. On the one hand, Nadal has seemed to be on the decline many times in the past; he thrives on that narrative of struggle. On the other hand, he really will start to decline at some point. My sense is that it won't be 2012.
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It was soooo heart-wrenching to see Juan Martin crying right then. I admired him for not holding back - maybe he couldn't anyway, i don't know. It was such an appropriate reaction after such an amazing 4th set and then the whitewash of the tie-breaker.—jodiecate
Is del Potro a breakthrough figure when it comes to the acceptance of crying by male athletes in defeat? His emotions are such a big part of his persona that his tears only make you like him more.
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Ready? Federer’s stamina is slipping, ever so slightly. You could see he was tired in the U.S. Open SF against Novak, how he seemed to save his last bit of energy for the final set after more or less just allowing the fourth set to go by. Same thing at WImbledon with Tsonga, I think the dude jsut got tired. He seemed EXHAUSTED(and said as much) after beating Tsonga in the WTF's, and that was best of three....hmm, I think I may be on to something.—Mr. Truth
I'm not sure I should doubt the words of a man named Mr. Truth (what nationality is your last name?).
It’s rare that I’ve seen Federer appear tired, or at least tired to the point where he loses points because of it. But I did find myself wondering about his fourth-set performance in the U.S. Open semis. He seemed to slow down, and eventually save what he had for the fifth. But it also might have been mental energy, as much as physical, that he was saving. Losing the third set, and seeing Novak “get his teeth into the match,” as Federer put it, appeared to take the wind out of his sails, confidence-wise, for the fourth.
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If they get a businessman to run the ATP who also thinks about whats best for the players then fair enough. However, if they get anyone with even remotely the same mind set as those who run the U.S Open then I'm firmly behind having an ex-player run things.—DJB
It’s been reported that Richard Krajicek has taken himself out of the running. Chris Clarey tweeted that too many people on the ATP board thought that he could become a puppet of the tournament directors. Krajicek walking away is OK in my eyes, but losing Wimbledon chief Ian Ritchie to rugby looks bad.
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Steve, I think it is fair to say, was in a very pithy mood when he wrote this.—Cotton Jack
It would be nice to be able to get yourself into a pithy mood, wouldn't it? Better than getting into another type of mood, which sounds like pithy when you lisp it.
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I own Forehand Drive by Maureen Connolly who I saw win the Nationals at Forest Hills. I was a short Irish-American girl who was taught professionally and dreamed of being a player like Mo. Little did I realize what a complicated, driven and often angry young woman she was. Of course her tennis days were ended in a horse riding accident but the story of her fight to rise in the tennis world came as a surprise to me. Another nice book is Caryl Phillips tennis anthology called The Right Set. He is a great tennis fan as well as a very good author in his own right.—wiseowl
The Right Set is an excellent intro anthology, but I had never heard of the Little mo book, so thanks. She sounds more interesting than the smiling California world-crusher you see in photos and clips.
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Thanks for another great article. I'm Romanian, and don't recall the 1972 Davis Cup final being "infamous". Maybe I was too young :) Care to elaborate? I looked it up, but found nothing of significance except... Nastase was nervous in his match against Smith... Thanks!—Adrian
See Curry Kirkpatrick's classic SI piece on it here. Bodo also wrote a great article on it for the 30th anniversary in Tennis Magazine in 2002, but it's not online.
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Steve, you've rightfully extolled "A Handful of Summers" before, so may I recommend the *very* lightweight tome of his partner in hijinks, Abe Segal's "Hey Big Boy"? It's really fun, and as weak as literature as it is a hoot, but between the storytelling and the clear picture of Segal's character it's a must for anyone who really wants to understand the world of the tennis bums who could really play but weren't tippy top tier. Thanks for the recommendations, too.—skip1515
Another one I hadn’t heard of, but need to read. There’s a small part of me that finds Abie’s character in the Forbes' books just a little too perfectly hilarious to be true (I know, sacrilege, but I can't help it). So it will be good to read it straight from him.
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Books that changed the way I thought. Hmmm, probably "The Things They Carried." A work I return to often when I'm feeling particularly unmoved by life. Others off the top of my head would include "The Right Stuff" and "The Grapes of Wrath."
Bud Collins does suffer from that-old-guy-in-the-weird-pants syndrome but thanks for the tip on his book. I love McPhee and DFW's tennis writing so it's good to know Collins rates that high in your mind.—Michele
If it’s at all like Going After Cacciato or In the Lake of the Woods, The Things They Carried must be heavy. But it also must be good.
Bud, of course, is not as consciously literary as McPhee or DFW, and there’s plenty of hokum in there, but he’s also funny and honest and readable and tough when he needs to be. Without him, there wouldn’t be a tennis history as we know it. You have to give a guy credit for inventing a word—moonball—that sounds like it’s been in the tennis dictionary from the very beginning.
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I know this is off topic but it's so beautiful I must:
"San Francisco in the middle 60's was a very special time and place to be part of but no explanation, no mix of words or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world, whatever it meant. It was madness in any direction. At any hour you could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning and that, I think, was the handle. That sense of inevitable victory over the forces of old and evil. Not in any mean or military sense. We didn't need that. Our energy would simply prevail. We had all the momentum. We were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave. So now, less than 5 years later, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look west and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high water mark, that place where the wave finally broke.... and rolled back."
Hunter S. Thompson, from "Fear And Loathing In Las Vegas" R.I.P.—Bored Poet
I remember reading those words in the library at Pomona College and having to stop and put the book down. They were too good to pass by so quickly, and I tried to copy their rhythm for a long time afterward. I think somewhere in there he also writes that in those late-60s days, you could always find someone, just by going out in your car, who was as “high and wild” as you were. Loved that phrase (though it’s probably slightly different, like all remembered phrases are).
I saw a clip of Thompson much later, in his dark late years, at his ranch. He wants to prove to the interviewer that he was once a good writer, so he reads an old passage of his and then shakes his head with a mix of regret and satisfaction. I think you can guess which one he read.
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I did enjoy reading these lists, but re-reading to decide which books I might actually buy I was completely struck by the lack of books by women or about the WTA - the only two that are mentioned being about relationships is just - well, I have to laugh. :)
I realise the lists are based on research for a particular book about a period in ATP history, but I get a more universal impression from the two posts - comments about tennis being handed from generation to generation, reading pretty much everything to sum up most of tennis history, etc. We all fall into the trap of saying "tennis" when we mean ATP tennis & it can mean that the women get overlooked and erased - however unintentionally.—jewell
That's true. My book, except for the lost Martina chapter, was about men’s tennis, mostly before 1981, so I crammed as much about the men’s game into my head as I could. Pete’s Inside Tennis and Courts of Babylon have chapters on the women. As far as the hallowed tennis boom and the early days of the WTA, Grace Lichtenstein’s A Long Way Baby captures the heady mood of the moment.
And it’s true, unfortunately, that “tennis” is often de facto for “men’s tennis.” Like when we talk about slowing the courts or the string revolution or other developments, we almost exclusively talk about them in terms of how they affect the men’s game.
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Steve had you waited a little longer before changing the channel you have found out Tsonga didn't win that match at Queens. He lost to Murray in 3 sets.—wilson75
Spoiler
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Federer stated in an article earlier this year that he injured his wrist in the match against Tsonga.—jeff
He was talking about his match with Tsonga at the U.S. Open, not Wimbledon.
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I'd be interested to know from Fed fans which of the two matches Federer lost this year were more painful, shocking, unexpected ? 1. The Tsonga loss at Wimby or 2. The US open SF against Novak—Nam1
I can’t speak for Federer fans, but, well, I will: It has to be the U.S. Open. My most vivid memory of that match is Federer walking off afterward and still managing to raise his hand to the crowd. I thought, “How did he bring himself to do that?”
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I received an email recently directing me away from my own blog and over to the comments on Pete Bodo’s, where, naturally, the subject of anagrams was being discussed. Specifically, anagrams for “Steven Tignor,” which can be generated here. Here’s one of the comments on the subject:
"they have like 200 hundred of them [for Steven Tignor]"
allow me to narrow it down: Egret von Snit Egret von Nits Egret vin Snot—Isis
I like Egret von Snit, as well another from the site, Veg Snottier. Unfortunately, my name is spelled Stephen Tignor. My favorites there? "Peter Nothings" might work as a (hopefully inaccurate) alter ego in a novel someday. But I have to say, "Serpent Hog" has a certain ring to it.
All eyes were on Venus Williams and Kimiko Date-Krumm as they played their second-round match at Wimbledon. The rain that drummed down on the roof over Centre Court had washed out play everywhere else on the grounds. It felt like the All England Club’s version of a marquee night match at Flushing Meadows, except that it began in the early afternoon.
Williams and Date-Krumm appeared to be inspired by the attention, because they pushed each other to exhausting peaks of brilliance over three long, winner-filled sets. By the middle of this clip, I was tired just watching the highlights. Venus and Kimiko have 72 years between them, but they ran and hit and shrieked like kids on this day. Their match is No. 8 on my list for 2011, but it may rank No. 1 for pure, unique tennis entertainment.
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—It’s all Kimiko to start. She seems to stun the audience, the announcers, and Venus herself with her all-around-strange style (I wanted to use “counterintuitive” there, but it seems like an understatement). In the first four games, Date-Krumm takes a Venus first serve with her backhand, runs forward, and blocks it down the line for an easy winner. She moves forward again to take another first serve with her forehand, races to the net, and ends the point with a drop-dead drop volley. She puts a topspin lob on the baseline, wins a point with a quick reaction short-hop volley, and goes up 3-0 with a ripped crosscourt forehand pass.
—Who says the “new” (in reality, decade old) grass at Wimbledon is too slow to net-rush on? They should enlighten Date-Krumm, because she doesn’t seem to believe it. Much of her game, from the abbreviated strokes to the flat swing to the two-hand slice to the odd grip to the 12-ounce club she still somehow gets around, is unconventional. But she also has the fundamentals down, and that allows to get the bigger-hitting Williams on the run. Date-Krumm counters her power by doing what you’re told to do but which so few players, men or women, do now: robbing her opponent of time. Even on hard-hit shots, she moves forward to meet the ball, takes it early, and, when she has Venus out of position, places herself inside the baseline for the next ball.
Of course, not everyone has Date-Krumm’s hands. Of the numerous drop shots and drop volleys she hits here, my favorite comes in the third set. She takes a backhand at the service line and pretty much telegraphs what she’s going to do. Venus herself is inside the baseline, she appears to know exactly what’s coming, and she’s seen her opponent do it to her a dozen times already. Yet she still can’t track the ball down. Date-Krumm’s shot is just too good.
—But if this match was a perfect showcase for what Date-Krumm does well, it eventually did the same for her opponent. Venus is down 1-5 before she begins to find any semblance of her game. At that point, most players would bow to the law of averages, lose the first set quickly, and start over in the second—and that would be the smart move. Not for Venus. She hits an ace at 1-5 that seems to spark her; soon it’s 5-all. Later, she goes down 2-6 in the tiebreaker; again, this would be throw-in-the-towel time for most players. Again, Venus refuses to do that. She gets back to 6-6, and then watches as a soft, mishit Date-Krumm passing shot catches a millimeter of the sideline. Finally, it’s too much even for Venus, and she nets a backhand to lose the set.
Still, if you're looking for an example of why she’s been a champion, don’t look at her serve or her ground strokes or even her legs. It’s Venus's simple, unshakeable belief that she can always win that has made her who she is.
—And of course, most players would have been devastated by losing a first set after coming from so far behind. Venus shrugs it off immediately and begins to play better. She bombs aces in the controlled indoor conditions, and she catches up to Date-Krumm’s flat lasers. Judging by these highlights, Venus rose to this particular challenge and played some of her best tennis of the year. Her forehand, at times a liability, was cracking.
—A word on the roof. It’s not as noticeable when you watch on TV, but it changes everything about Centre Court. I know that’s obvious to a degree, but only when the roof closes do you realize how much of Centre Court and its atmosphere depends on the sky, and the way the top of the stadium frames it. It really isn’t the same court when it’s closed. Think of it as very expensive environmental art; Christo could hardly expect to create something so effortlessly space-transforming.
—Back to the match. What may be most remarkable is how these two women sustain their energy and level of play, and how each push the other higher. You might have thought that Venus would fade after losing the first set (as long as you forgot that is was Venus, that is), and you might have thought the same of the 41-year-old Date-Krumm once the early razzle-dazzle ended and she lost the second set. Not today. By the end of the third, Date-Krumm wasn’t just skimming all over the court, she was fist-pumping and yelling “Come on!” (or the Japanese equivalent) after winning points.
—The match in a nutshell: At 6-6 in the third set, Venus began the game with a 122-m.p.h. bomb for an ace. On the next point, she hit one 120; those two miles per hour were all Date-Krumm needed, apparently, because she smoked a return and won the point.
—Another measure of how far these players were pushed, and how far out on the high wire they were. At 7-6, 15-30 in the third, Venus did something she very rarely does: Looked pleadingly to her box after missing a shot.
—It finally ends when Date-Krumm can’t quite pull a running backhand pass onto the sideline—she had made one by a millimeter to win the first set; she misses this one by roughly the same distance.
The match didn’t finish with a winner, but it was a fitting conclusion nonetheless. Williams and Date-Krumm entertained the tennis world by going all-out all afternoon. After three hours and three sets, a millimeter was all that separated them.
