Janko Tipsarevic has an elegant and powerful forehand with which
he places shots just about wherever he wants and that is what he
does all afternoon on the legendary court at Arthur Ashe Stadium at
the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Flushing Meadows,
Queens. All of New York City seems to be here. All of New York City
in fact is not here, it just seems that way, although in a few
hours it is going to be clear that only part of New York City was
here, all of New York City turns out for the next huge match here,
the Novak Djokovic-Juan Martin del Porto quarter-final of the men’s
championship in the U.S. Open. And it is a fine match, the first
tough one Djokovic, the Serb superstar, has played thus far. But
the match Tipsarevic has got into, it is not a fine match merely.
It is a match that will be a legend, that will be called a classic,
a match for the ages as the cliché has it.
They stay at the baselines and probe each other’s ground
strokes, aim at the corners and begin the dance, making each other
run from side to side, attack at the net, setting up volleys they
will put away. They are fantastic returners, Janko’s opponent in
particular, you cannot send him a serve he will not whack back with
the force of a hurricane. How does he do this? He is fast. He has
fast hands, fast feet, good eyes, and very steady arms. He returns
shots to his left with a two handed backhand that sends the other
man scrambling. And then does it again.
Tipsarevic is intent, hard as steel, an arm that must be like a
iron rod, a piston, a crowbar; no, it is a human arm, well trained
and exercised and all-too-human, capable of error. The eye, the
arm, the coordination: sometimes the mind wills and the arm does
not obey. Even here. Even in these conditions: excellent mind,
superb body, years of schooling to put the rubber ball with the
fuzzy surface inside the confines of a rectangle 78 x 27 in such a
way that the other person — the opponent — return it (within the
confines) over a net three feet in height.
And now he is in the match of a lifetime, on the great show
court of New York, in front of a large crowd — 20 thousand at
least — many of whom are shouting “Let’s-go! Jan-ko!” And he is
winning.
The reason he is winning is that he has just won the third set
and is therefore leading 2-1. He lost the first set, 3-6, but came
back to win a tiebreak in the second and took the third cruising,
6-2. The scores of themselves can scarcely reflect the grit and
grind that has defined this match, which, as the fourth set begins,
has been going on for two and a half hours.
Janko Tipsarevic is simply fantastic. He places shots on the
baseline and in the corners, he serves aces — half as many as his
opponent in this match, but when he crucially needs them — he
drops shots gently over the net. It is a class act. Cool and
somber, with the frames of his glasses matching the colors of his
suave orange and black outfit, he looks, now that you think about
it, like a Spaniard, like a grandee, like a caballero.
The man facing him, as it happens, is a caballero, if
the term has any meaning in democratic-monarchial Spain. David
Ferrer, no less than Janko Tipsarevic, is a class act. He looks
almost like a hard guy — a rugby player, perhaps, a construction
worker (which he was for one week, reportedly), a thoughtful,
mother-hen teacher worried about his charges (his mother’s career,
reportedly), a man who cares and delivers. He walks a little
hunched over, heavy shouldered, locks falling over his forehead, he
has intent eyes, a rather attractive guy in a mensch sort
of way. And the fastest feet I have seen at Flushing Meadows. And
many other places.
When you talk about feet in tennis, you talk about Roger
Federer, the fastest man in tennis. Well, Ferrer is like that. He
never sees a ball he cannot reach, and usually, he reaches it
before it even bounces. That is a bit of an exaggeration, more
applicable to the master, in truth — notwithstanding his collapse
before the mighty Tomas Berdych the other day — but it is not
inaccurate. Janko Tipsarevic is awfully fast, but David Ferrer is
even faster. Fullbacks, these guys could be (I must make a point of
asking Mr. Hillyer or Mr. Pleszczynski, sports authorities, why
there is not more cross-over in sports, why, for example, Michael
Jordan did not succeed in baseball), and the more they fly over the
court, the harder they hit the ball, in the Sisyphean task of
getting the ball to go faster than the other guy’s feet. It don’t
happen. And it don’t happen more with David than it don’t happen
with Janko.
The fourth set, Ferrer cannot afford to lose, so he does not
lose it, 6-3. Now the decider, and both men play every point as if
the match depends on it. They do this all the time, but they do it
even more now. The games go to deuce. They call medical time-outs,
Ferrer for his foot, Tipsarevic for his thigh, injured in a spill
mid-set in the fifth, taped up, but continuing to bother him. They
issue challenges to the line referees, win quite a few, argue with
the chair ump. Absolutely everything is fair now, this is war —
notwithstanding everything I have said and continue to say about
the vapidity of war-metaphors in sports — everything except
cheating, these guys are class acts and they play to win. They
never quit. The fifth set is amazing. It takes us into evening. It
goes to deuce on every game, practically. It ends in a
tiebreak.
If Ferrer has a weak point, it is his backhand. Janko knows
this, aims for it. But the man of Valencia has a backhand when he
needs it. Especially on the return-of-serve, arguably the best in
professional tennis, the Ferrer backhand must be seen to be
believed, it comes back so fast and so hard. He is the most amazing
clutch player in tennis. There is no such thing as a shot he does
not run after. You can ace get sometimes get a ball where David
Ferrer cannot reach it, and you can ace him — in tennis,
eventually, you can get anything on anybody. But usually he will
return. And the ball will be in play. And he will put it where you
cannot reach it.
In the end, though, it was not the tiebreak that did it. By the
tiebreak — I mean the fifth set tiebreak, at about four hours and
a half of play, Janko Tipsarevic, who like many young men of
Belgrade reads Dostoevsky and ponders the great questions, was more
exhausted than David Ferrer. Until the very end, it was blow for
blow. But on those last points he could no longer, made his own
errors. What really did it was Ferrer’s breathtaking recovery from
the two-to-one hole, his ability to regain the momentum by working
as hard as the other fellow and then a little harder. He came back
from 2-4 and by the time they reached 6-6 in that last set,
Tipsarevic, who is no quitter, knew he was at a distinct
disadvantage. Even a Ferrer’s inability to get his first serve in
during that last segment was not enough to stop him. But he said it
and he meant it: “Janko too deserved to win.” It was a match of
champions.
When you think of Spanish tennis, Rafael Nadal comes to mind,
one of the great players of all time and the all-time leader of
victories on clay, culminating thus far (he is scarcely at the end
of youth) in his record seventh championship this year at the
pinnacle of clay-court tennis, the French Open. In fact, Ferrer
lost to Nadal in that tournament. But Spain has a history in this
sport, going back at least to the great Manuel Santana, a champion
of the early 1960s (U.S. Open, 1965, among several others). There
is Sergi Bruguera, more recently Albert Costa (French Open 2002)
and Juan Carlos Ferrero (ditto ‘03.) It is true today’s generation
is especially strong, with Nicolas Almagro and Fernando Verdasco
having made runs here and quite a few others, including girls, I
mean women.
The Serbs are strong too, despite tennis having come to this
backward and mountainous Balkan country only lately. Spain, a
Mediterranean country, has a climate propitious to tennis
education. Serbia, an Adriatic country, is only slightly less
favored in this regard, but they have less money, which translates
into fewer facilities. However, thanks to the European Union, many
countries without tennis facilities now can develop them, using
funds loaned — kissed goodbye is more like it — by German
taxpayers.
But look at it this way: is it better to have a European credit
crunch, or to have countries only recently freed from tyranny in
the social-welfare oriented Europe of today? Would you rather have
men like Janko Tipsarevic and David Ferrer on the tennis courts or
in the secret police? Mind, they might be dissidents, freedom
fighters — or emigrants to Western Europe and America. But
energies and skills such as they have must be directed somewhere.
Tennis may well be an answer. To what exactly, I shall have to
check with Mr. Pleszczynski, who ponders these kinds of questions,
but you know what I mean. It is an interesting fact that
championship caliber tennis players these days are emerging in
recently liberated oppressed nations. Whereas the countries where
democracy is well established and which a few decades ago produced
most of the high octane tennis talent, Britain, France, the United
States, Australia, eh? I ask you.
At any rate, I am delighted Spain and Serbia have joined the
ranks of free nations. And as the second men of Serb and Spanish
tennis proved today, they are in the big leagues of sports,
enriching an international culture, and for this we should thank
them.
