The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

If Raonic was ascendant, what, then, was Grigor Dimitrov? A player graced with such precocious, easy-on-the-eye gifts that he was given the nickname Baby Fed, he nevertheless showed up at Brisbane already a bit of an afterthought on the men’s circuit. Having reached the top ten in the summer of 2014, he almost immediately thereafter went on a mysterious descent of form that ended with him falling to fortieth in the rankings by July 2016. Of the three great promises in their mid-twenties, Dimitrov, unlike Raonic and Nishikori, didn’t hold form at the very-good-but level; he sank. Quietly, however, the late summer and a new coach brought better results. By Brisbane he was ranked seventeenth. He was talked about less than his peers, all of whom he had peaked ahead of. He’d had his time; now was theirs. Dimitrov’s first big challenge of 2017 was to reestablish a pecking order that had him somewhere, anywhere, in it. On the third day of Brisbane, he beat the player talked about now as he once was: the twenty-three-year-old Austrian Dominic Thiem, ranked eighth in the world and the fourth seed of the tournament. Then he turned Raonic over in the semifinal, winning the first-set tiebreak 9–7 and then running away with the second set 6–2. The next day, he beat Nishikori in three sets. The first champion of the 2017 season was Grigor Dimitrov of Bulgaria. He’s widely considered one of the nicest guys on the circuit. Blessed with balletic movement and easy power, Dimitrov is the prototype of the stylish player. He has a long, powerful forehand and sweeping one-handed backhand. The strong traces of a tennis era gone by that you see in Roger Federer’s game are the residue of the tennis he loved as a kid. And the strong traces of Roger Federer’s game in Grigor Dimitrov’s game are the residue of his love of Roger as a kid. As Grigor was breaking through the top ranks of the main circuit, the similarities between the two players were so unmistakable that thanks to them Dimitrov ended up carrying a burden no young player should have: he was given that blessed curse of a nickname, Baby Fed. His results in recent years were such that the nickname’s days were numbered. He was no longer a baby and he wasn’t any closer to winning Grand Slams. But if the end of 2016 was promising, beginning 2017 with a title was the chance to consolidate his potential from week one of the new year. Like Nishikori and Raonic, Dimitrov wasn’t among the youngest generation on the circuit. But his story was still there to be written with his racket if he was up for it.

  Was he Baby Fed again? Or had he evolved? Was he in sync with his past, or had he broken free headlong toward the future? Whatever it was to be, Brisbane was now part of the answer.

  DOHA

  “This is what we wanted!” the commentator Simon Reed intoned into his microphone at the end of the fourteen-shot rally, his voice almost sounding bored with the statement, so crisp and certain it was. “The best two players on the planet really laying into each other!”

  It’s the seventh day of 2017: a Saturday in January in Doha, Qatar. A short walk from the commercial buildings, shops, and restaurants adorning Doha’s city center is the Khalifa International Tennis and Squash Complex, home of the Qatar ExxonMobil Open since the year of its founding in 1993. Over these twenty-five years, this 250 tournament has become a destination stop for the game’s best players. Brisbane may offer players the chance to get acclimated to Australia in preparation for the Australian Open, but Doha offers a different type of spectacle and luxury of a different degree. By summer of 2017, nine sovereign governments will have severed diplomatic ties with Qatar, including to go as far as to withdraw ambassadors and institute trade and travel bans. At this early part of the year, the White House is about to change hands. Both domestic and foreign policy for the future are completely up in the air. Brexit is or isn’t but definitely is happening. In France, the upcoming presidential race is under way and—like in the United States and in the United Kingdom—the fate of the very idea of what France is seems to be on the ticket. The world feels slippery, dense, supercharged with social and political change—and yet for a few hours here was tennis, literally a light in the sleepy darkness of my apartment. It’s moments like this, these odd hours with the game on, when its metronome and angles take the form of therapy—I listen to the world take a deep breath. Suddenly, in thinking about Doha again, it all feels so present. Not just the matches, but what they were supposed to mean. Qatar was supposed to be the herald of a new era. Qatar was supposed to change the world.

  This was the circuit’s big heavyweight bout, round one of who knows how many during the year. This was the new normal going forward. After a decade of four tennis legends battling it out year after year for supremacy in their sport, enhancing each other, elevating each other’s standards and shifting positions in the hierarchy at the absolute summit of the circuit, now only two legends were left standing. And here they were. This was how the year was destined to really get started. This wasn’t to be missed.

  This is what we wanted.

  The two best players on the planet really laying into each other.

  The 2017 final of the Qatar Open. Don’t forget it. And when you remember it, speak of it as what it was: a song of the new year to the melody of the year that had just passed—2017 in the key of 2016, back when we thought we were getting what we wanted, the two best players on the planet really laying into each other, back when there was Andy Murray and Novak Djokovic … and then there was everyone else.

  Before we sing a song of Federer and Nadal, before Murray and Djokovic disappear, reappear, and then disappear again, remember that there was Doha 2017. It was supposed to be the big bang but ended up being the whimper.

  It was supposed to be the story of 2017. How Murray finally, after so many torturous years of crying, growling, recriminating his team, and eviscerating himself, had risen to the number one ranking, and how then he would fare in defending it. And how the unconquerable Djokovic, now having finally won all four Grand Slam titles, would react to suddenly and rather unexpectedly being saddled with the number two ranking. No one was on the horizon to challenge them; they played three-hour, five-hour matches with hardly the need to sit. Insanely fit, flexible, and fundamentally defensive players by nature, they had become impossible to pass either on the court or in the rankings (except for occasional guest appearances on the circuit of Stan Wawrinka at his peak). Murray, who wears the underdog role like cashmere, found himself in the unprecedented position of top dog. And Djokovic, unplayable as recently as just last June, was inexplicably somehow now in the role of the chaser.

  Three weeks from today, Rod Laver Arena in Melbourne will be the stage for another Roger and Rafa. We’ll call them the best two players on the planet again and then again, although we won’t mean it. Not then, not yet. Then, the vintage feel in the throat when you say it will give way to a simple, dull act of veracity you recognize from before. The Swiss and the Spaniard will have settled back into their perches in the rankings by then. But for now we’re here in Qatar. It’s the seventh day of 2017, a Saturday in January in Doha. It’s a moment that sits like a stunned and stunted rock in the midst of a surging stream. A classic that was to define the year. Was this not what we wanted? Great tennis, fun tennis, something to inject a little joy into the world’s grimness. A classic that ended up having absolutely nothing to do with reality. There they were: the two best players on the planet not named Roger or Rafael or Serena. Slowly, we all had come to grips with this. We became fluent in it. This was what we wanted. The two best players on the planet really laying into each other. You say it until you mean it. But then you meant it and it was gone.

  When Murray and Djokovic play, you can see the match almost as well with your eyes closed and your ears open, listening for their footwork, the skidding, the relentless scuffing of their shoes on the court, an occasionally desperate grunt to coax out that vital extra half step, and then a short stoppage of play and a patch of silence before they do it again. Together they were heralds of tennis’s new form of dominance: sadistic resilience and rugged precision, with shot patterns dangerous enough to threaten but safe enough to guarantee that they’d stay in.

  M
urray had been great at it for close to a decade.

  Born in 1987, he grew up in the town of Dunblane in the center of Scotland. He attended Dunblane Primary School, where he and his older brother, Jamie, were when in March 1996 an armed man carrying registered guns entered the school and murdered sixteen children and one teacher before killing himself. One of the worst mass shootings in the history of Britain, it led to two Firearms Acts being passed in 1997. Murray’s parents split when he was ten, and he learned tennis from his mother, Judy, who was a coach. For the sake of his development he eventually moved to Barcelona for a year and a half to live and train at the Sánchez-Casal Academy under the tutelage of Emilio Sánchez, a three-time Grand Slam champion in doubles. Murray’s route to tennis stardom was measured but hardly slow. He was an elite junior player, turned pro in 2005, won his first title, and, upon attaining the ranking of forty-two in February 2006, became Britain’s top-ranked player. In 2007 he became a top-ten player, and in 2008 he played his first Grand Slam final, losing to Federer in straight sets at the U.S. Open. By this point he had become a fixture at the deepest stages of tournaments: a top-five player capable of winning some of the bigger 250s—Doha, Marseille, St. Petersburg—but he still stood on the other side of the chasm from Roger and Rafa, a chasm that Djokovic was already in the process of crossing.

  Between 2009 and 2011, he upped his title haul, becoming a regular title-contender at the prestigious Masters 1000s. He also took on a new coach, letting Àlex Corretja go in favor of Ivan Lendl, who convinced Murray to add a bit more initiative into his play to complement his world-class powers of reaction and adaptation. Lendl’s stoic, no-nonsense demeanor became a stay against Murray’s constant complaining, moaning, and recriminating of the box of seats where his coaches, family, and associates sat. Also, Lendl’s having won eight Grand Slam titles himself and holding on to the number one ranking for an astonishing 270 weeks during the eighties, when Connors, McEnroe, Edberg, Mats Wilander, and Boris Becker were all in their prime, added some gravitas to his instruction of a player in Murray who was now winning everything there was to win—aside from the biggest titles of them all, the Grand Slams. And here was where Lendl could help Murray profoundly by way of having lost eleven Grand Slam finals to go along with the eight he won. Murray needed to learn not only how to win Grand Slam finals, he also needed to learn what to do with all of the losses.

  He rarely had that little extra to overcome Federer, Nadal, or Djokovic. Entering Doha in 2017, his record against the three of them stood at twenty-nine wins and fifty-five losses. Of the forty-seven Grand Slam titles won by the Big Four, Murray had won three—Stan Wawrinka and his big, risk-embracing power game owned just as many and at three different Grand Slams (although Murray easily lapped him in the overall trophy count).

  And yet, Murray’s success was singular: his Olympic gold medals and Wimbledon titles granted him a type of Anglo gravitas akin to a writer’s writer or a band that only recorded a few albums, all of them classics. The doubter would say he’d lost eight Grand Slam finals. The supporter would say he’d played in eleven Grand Slam finals. Similar to his game, what he was in the grand scheme of things always limned an edge. He’d amassed legendary, unprecedented success. But as late as the fall of 2016 it looked like he would never attain the rudimentary mark of a great player: the number one ranking.

  Murray was rock-solid in his position as the second-ranked player in the world. Federer and Nadal were injured and inconsistency crept up on them with age. Meanwhile, Djokovic casually kept Murray at arm’s length from the top spot. More than with any other player, Murray’s career was playing out exactly as he played: he chased, he endured, and he was good enough to beat everybody else.

  But the fall of 2016 changed Murray’s fortunes. Djokovic failed to defend his Wimbledon title, falling to Sam Querrey over three days and looking haggard and absent in doing so. This was the start of a spiral that affected his form first—Djokovic would win his next tournament, the prestigious Masters 1000 in Toronto in early August 2016, but looked like a shell of himself doing so; his opponents seemed in disbelief that a player who had been practically unbeatable for the past two years could appear now so flat: they fell over themselves to lose to him, as though that’s what they should do … Djokovic, meanwhile, would tend to his left arm between points and look up to his support team in the stands with a glare of bemusement one moment and a blank stare of befuddlement the next. Something was not right. But such was Djokovic’s greatness, the height at which he was playing, that even a dip in form left him with enough to make a final. The luck of the draw helped him reach the U.S. Open final. He started fast in the first set and held on, barely, to win that one. Then he found himself on the receiving end of Wawrinka’s onslaught. He took time off after, and reappeared for the end-of-the-year tournament in London. And once again, he seemed blunted but was good enough to reach the final. By this point, Murray had won every tournament he entered between New York and London. While Djokovic took time to figure himself out, Murray won—in order—the 500-point tournament in Beijing, the 1,000-point tournament in Shanghai, the 500-point tournament in Vienna, and the 1,000-point tournament in Paris, and then beat Djokovic in the final tournament of 2016, the 1,500-point ATP World Tour Finals, which left him rather unbelievably with the prestigious year-end top ranking for the first time in his career. It was a chase-down, snatch-and-grab act of epic proportions to end the year. As Murray rose to number one, the curtain closed on the year. Doha 2017 was to become both the start of a new chapter and a postscript to the last.

  And it was. Until it wasn’t.

  In retrospect, the cracks in the disastrous year that both Murray and Djokovic would end up having were there for all to see in Doha. In the first set of the first round, Murray, facing Jérémy Chardy of France, raced out to a 6–0 lead. Andy won the next set in a tiebreaker (7–2). In his second-round match he won the first set against Gerald Melzer in a tiebreaker (8–6) and the second set 7–5—total time: two hours and twenty-three minutes. In the quarterfinals Murray won the first set against Spain’s Nicolás Almagro in a tiebreaker (7–4) and then won the second set 7–5—total time: two hours and ten minutes. And then seemed to right himself against his first seeded opponent, perennial top-ten player Tomáš Berdych, whom he beat 6–3, 6–4, but he took another hour and forty-one minutes to do it. The final against Djokovic would take two hours and fifty-four minutes. Murray was spending an obscene amount of time on the court. It’s one thing to be locked in three tight sets in a match against Djokovic. It’s another entirely to be consistently locked into long battles against the rest of the field. Murray wasn’t making quick work of anyone: he simply couldn’t get off the court.

  But the results were with him.

  Later in 2017, at Wimbledon, Murray would hobble through the end of a defeat to Sam Querrey, the same player who had taken down Djokovic at the same tournament the prior year. His hip would fail him, as had his shoulder earlier in the year. Dogged physicality, living every point to its last possible end, being a wall: these were the building blocks by which Andy Murray rose to the heights of the game in an era when he could have been content with being a heroic loser, a rich man’s also-ran, and no one would have begrudged him it. At least not any more than they do now, for he simply isn’t as seductive as Federer or Nadal, or as successful as Djokovic, or as romantic as Wawrinka. We saw him battle through to the final at Doha and thought, Andy Murray knows how to win. And he did now. And how! With his win against Berdych he was on a twenty-eight-match win streak. The results were the results. But the results were coming from having to rev his engine further to its limits than he should.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of the draw, Djokovic was crushing through the early rounds. He handled the sixty-third-ranked Jan-Lennard Struff, seventy-first-ranked Horacio Zeballos, and one-hundred-and-seventh-ranked Radek Štěpánek with ease. Then in the semifinal he found himself in a deep hole against the veteran Madrid-born Fernando Verdasco, r
anked forty-second at the time and on good days a handful for anyone, even at thirty-three years of age. Djokovic, for his part, was looking as gaunt as he ever had, not slender or slim but approaching skeletal, as though his body were feeding on itself from bottom to top, culminating in a sucked-out space on each side of his face where his cheeks used to be flush with life, and two dark vacancies where his eyes should be. This was compounded by his body language, an amalgam of fidgeting and wry slumps of the shoulders regardless of whether things went for or against him. At times, between points, he looked up in the crowd to the box where his coach and trainer were seated and offered them a blank stare that softened into a smirk, as though they were strangers who’d won a contest to sit in those seats and he had little interest in who they were or why they were there.

  Despite all this, he is an all-time talent, hardwired with the instinctive aspects of his game—one is his unparalleled return of serve, another his easy absorption and redirection of pace on both forehand and backhand—that make him extremely difficult to beat. He uses these to race out to a 4–2 lead to start the match. Then, suddenly, he becomes a shell of himself and vanishes. He doesn’t win another game in the frame, and, even worse, gets broken at love twice in a row. Verdasco wins the first set 6–4.

  The second set knots at the end: 6–6. They go to a tiebreaker. Win it, and Verdasco is on to an unexpected final against Murray. Lose it, and he lives to fight on for another set, but he’ll also have given life to the most lethal closer of the past half decade. Yes, Djokovic has been that good for that long. Verdasco played his way to a 6–2 lead. He only needed to win one more point out of the next four to win the match. Worse still for Djokovic, on this first match point he’s the one serving and his serve hasn’t been kind to him this night. At moments like these, on serve with everything to play for, Djokovic is known to bend forward at the baseline and bounce the ball relentlessly before starting the point. Most players bounce the ball a handful of times before going into their service motion, something in the range of four bounces or so. When nervous Djokovic routinely bounces the ball over twenty times before a serve, I imagine him rewinding in his mind how he got from finally winning the French Open in 2016 and completing the career Grand Slam and a continent-wide lead in the ATP Tour rankings to the spot where he is now, a semifinal in Doha, down four match points to Fernando Verdasco, carrying the bad mojo of the end of last season when he lost at Wimbledon, the U.S. Open, and the ATP Tour Final, and, for the first time since the summer of 2014 was ranked something other than first in the world. Bounce bounce bounce bounce bouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebouncebounce …