There was not much to say about Rafael Nadal’s
revenge, except that to make it complete, as every observer
noted, he must follow through in the next two big tournaments, in
Paris and London. You could, if you wanted, agree with the crowd —
the herd or independent minds, in Harold Rosenberg’s classic
formulation — except: except, no, in fact there was something to
say, and it is this: you can harp on rivalries and revenges, what
Nadal showed at Rome’s Campionazzi Internazionali
is that in tennis as in so much else, offense beats defense.
Because the truth is, Novak Djokovic’s fantastic run last year,
including winning seven finals against Nadal, was surely that, a
fantastic run, one of the feats in the history of the sport. And he
is No. 1 going into the Paris Open, and it is written nowhere that
he is unlikely to retain that position going into the U.S. Open at
season’s end (that is, at the major season’s end, before the Asian
circuit and the Paris and London indoor Masters).
He is a fantastic player, who learned to fight and out-maneuver
Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal both — two champions at the peak of
their games — over the past two seasons. This took tremendous
innovative skill and imagination. He was up against both a master
chess player and a relentless hitter. Federer has so much court
sense that he can catch anything and place it wherever he wants —
he plays the classic control-the-point game first analyzed by Bill
Tilden. Nadal has so much passionate athleticism that he can and
does run after everything and tries to hit it back a winner — and
more often than not succeeds.
With the rise of Nadal, about five years younger than Federer,
it seemed in 2010 that the professional tour was set, for about
five years, in an epic two-man rivalry. The incomparably fit
Federer could carry on for about five years into his mid-thirties
(as indeed he is doing), while the powerful but evidently more
physically vulnerable Nadal (as shown by back and knee problems)
could be expected to peak in his late 20s. Other great players of
about their age, such as David Ferrer or Juan Martin del Potro or
Andy Murray, Tomas Berdych and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga, would be up
there and sometimes block them from reaching a final, but
basically, they would be like the Yankees and the Cards.
Novak Djokovic seemed to belong to that group of pretenders, and
I do not recall anyone foreseeing (I will be happy to stand
corrected) the consequence of the work he put into preparing for
his breakout season. It was clear that he was immensely gifted,
athletic, and driven, but so were all the others.
So what he did last year really was epic, and when he beat Nadal
all through the clay season, you could not avoid the most grand
comparisons: Laver, Gonzalez, Budge; further back, Lacoste, Tilden.
True, Federer stopped him in a magnificent semi at the French Open,
the crowning tournament of clay, but he roared right back with a
brutal demolition of Nadal at Wimbledon, followed by an epic
come-from-behind against Federer at the U.S. Open semis and another
brutal win over Nadal in the final. At least at Melbourne, last
January, the for-the-ages final match between these two, the
longest in history, clearly could have gone either way. Once again,
Djokovic fought from behind and overtook Nadal who, until the fifth
set, looked to many observers the stronger player.
It was a fantastic run, and it will continue, but what we saw in
the past weeks is that it cannot reasonably be expected to continue
with quite this kind of continuity, if I may put it this way, or
shall we say constancy. He will suffer defeats and he will have to
share the glory and what was supposed to be a five-year two man
supreme rivalry is almost surely going to be considerably more
complex. While losing — mind, losing in finals still makes you
better than everybody, except one — Nadal, it turns out, was also
studying. It seems obvious now, of course, as hindsight always
does, but what he was learning was that given the configuration of
the opposition, he would be wise to concentrate on offense.
Djokovic’s game is a remarkable defensive offense. That is to
say, he wins by returning one more shot. To be sure, he does this
with a lethality that against 90 percent of players would be
indistinguishable from an offense-based game. But against masters
of offense like Nadal and Federer, he banked on spoiling their game
plans and flummoxing them with his indomitable resistance, seizing
every opportunity they allowed to hit and run.
By the year’s record so far, Roger has not yet figured out how
to overcome this. Lack of power? Perhaps: though he was totally in
charge of every set through Madrid and Rome until meeting Djokovic
there, he just did not seem to have the killer shots (called
winners) that would exhaust his opponent; on the contrary, he
confessed to being tired at the end. Rafa did the opposite: he
attacked aggressively, as he had at Monte Carlo. Unusual sight:
Nole was caught off balance, scrambling, missing, falling behind
the shot.
So with possession of Madrid and Rome, the old boys are back,
the intruder pushed out? But they never left, and he is present as
ever. It was as if the arms race suddenly was in disequilibrium
last year and now that adjustments have been made, the balance is
again even. Roger Federer took Madrid with an absolutely masterful
display of strong nerve and brain. His rivals lost nasty matches,
each against a compatriot (Fernando Verdasco and Janko Tipsarevic),
unable to get their footing and their concentration on the
difficult surface, a slippery blue clay that was supposed to aid
visibility and ended up being a monumental distraction.
In this regard, it was satisfying to watch Serena Williams
overcome her own strongly expressed dislike of the conditions
(“like ice skating”) and crush all comers for the Madrid title, as
she had at Charleston. She withdrew on the way to the semis at
Rome, however, and graciously let Li Na, the world’s most famous
Chinese, go against the defending champion Maria Sharapova, the
world’s most famous Russian, though she lives in Florida. The tall
and pretty shrieker came from way behind and made the Masha-Nana
match another classic.
With Djokovic and Nadal playing again on red clay, the Spaniard
wanted to show he remains king on his own surface. The Serb perhaps
felt, by corollary, that he had to do it again to prove it was
real. But it was real, and they are both pretenders — though Rafa
owns the title — and Paris is wide open.
