The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  Somewhere between Djokovic canceling all four of Verdasco’s match points with clutch play and Verdasco gift-wrapping them with nervous play lies the truth of tennis. One step in the wrong direction in the middle of one point can cause an avalanche that sweeps away any advantage, no matter its size. Opportunity’s door opens and closes quickly, quicker than in most other sports. Verdasco tightens, reads his lines, plays the role of Fernando Verdasco. On the longer exchanges he hesitates before stepping forward, then retreats back; on the shorter ones, he sprays mishit forehands into the stands. A few people in the crowd, disappointed with his drop in play, begin to hiss.

  Djokovic uses his two-handed backhand to take control of the early points. He has an undeterred ability to hit dangerous balls to all parts of the court with sufficient margin that they’re safely inside the lines. He doesn’t paint lines, he shadows them. The skill to hit these types of groundstrokes error-free and consistently gives his opponent little room for air or time to think.

  Djokovic had finally rediscovered this core aspect of his game: he had reset. Verdasco was suddenly caught in a web of indecision. Should he continue to attack? He tried to take the initiative, serving for the match 6–3 in the tiebreaker, and shanked a ball into the stands. Or should he wait for Djokovic to make an error? The next point they played was a twenty-nine-shot rally that eventually ended with Verdasco blinking and hitting out. No one does the Safety Dance like Djokovic. Murray is close, but Djokovic has a strange ability to twist through the vise he seems trapped in and somehow squeeze the life out of his opponent instead. It’s not a pretty magic, but it’s magic all the same.

  THE DOHA FINAL

  Despite Murray taking the longest path possible to get there and despite Djokovic being dragged to the brink by Verdasco, there had been an air of inevitability that the number one and number two would meet in the final. And that air of inevitability about the number one and number two meeting in the final papered over most concerns about their form. Both of them had long ago mastered the art of manageable suffering. Djokovic did it more like a passive-aggressive dance, a loose-limbed tango; Murray, a game of cat-and-mouse.

  The start of the seventh game of the first set of the first big final of the year. It was only a 250 tournament, as small as they get on the elite circuit, but it was to be the first statement match of 2017, the first clarion call of the new order of things finally cut free from the annoyance of the past. Finally, it was just Murray and Djokovic: one vs. two, slugging it out for tennis supremacy in the desert night, miles clear of all the pretenders and the two past glories on the tour.

  Act one, scene one of the way things were going to be from now on.

  Three-games-all in the first set of the best-of-three, first point of the seventh game. Djokovic takes a long, deep breath, bounces the ball just in front of his left foot again and again and again, and then, finally, rocks back ever so slightly and starts his serve. Murray had just navigated through his own tough hold of serve, which included a twenty-eight-shot rally at 40–40 that he survived using, as he often does, a defensive lob to steady himself in the point and then, after a few well-shaped crosscourt forehand conversations, punctuated it with a well-disguised forehand drop shot. The two started breathing heavily from the first points of the match. Djokovic is at least thankful there’s no wind tonight, unlike other nights in Doha where he had to contend with a continually troublesome gale gliding in off the Persian Gulf. Both are inclined to stretch a point out until it turns sheer and they can see an opening. When they play each other it’s an added exertion, their matches against each other tending to rumble on, each waiting on the other to make a mistake. Murray’s been the one to blink in these encounters most of the time, although just this past November, in the last tournament of 2016 in London, Murray had beaten Djokovic to end the year as the top-ranked player for the first time in his career.

  Despite his tall frame, to which over the years he’s added much muscle, Murray isn’t a particularly powerful player, nor is he one imbued with much in the way of grace. He wears oversized wristbands that cover most of his forearms, and a baseball cap covering his unkempt waves of hair that nevertheless still sometimes spill out from the sides; wrapped up and dour on the court, he reminds me of a beekeeper about to enter a hive. He lumbers around the court, and yet his feet are stunning in their quickness: he gets to just about everything, rarely making it look or sound easy. Indeed, there’s little quiet in the way he moves. When he stretches to chase down a difficult shot sent his way from the other side of the net, an under-duress yell often precedes his legs firing into action like the loud engine of a muscle car sputtering before it revs up, rears back, and jumps into its speed. He’s lightning-quick. Not just of body but also of mind. England has embraced him as their noble (and now knighted) champion, but his game reflects the streetwise Scot in him. He lives off of wry chicanery hidden in his consistency; his shot pattern screws with his opponents’ rhythm, often lulling them into a false sense of expectation. Imagine being given a Russian nesting doll and opening it, working your way through one carbon copy of the same doll after another, until you come across one with an egg yolk stowed inside it that spills onto your lap. This is what it’s like to play him. One of Murray’s trademarks is the way he can turn a desperate reach for an opponent’s would-be winner into a ridiculously high and probing lob, one that hangs in the air long enough both to get him back into proper position on the court and to ask some questions of his opponent’s nerve as he waits for it to drop. Time is a tennis player’s ally, except when it’s not. The complications of handling a lob—the change of eye level, the broken rhythm of the court, and the supposed ease of an overhead smash in the sudden will-he-or-won’t-he silence of the moment—have coaxed embarrassing errors out of all kinds of players. It’s been perhaps the most glaring weakness in Djokovic’s game, and from the outset of the Doha final Murray didn’t hesitate when stretched by an angled Djokovic groundstroke to respond with a lob. But time and time again, Djokovic was ready for them. The two players punched and counterpunched over three tight sets. Having shaken free of the past, they played as if the future began there and then in the nascent days of January 2017, which for the first time would be all about them.

  “This is what we wanted! The best two players on the planet really laying into each other.”

  Djokovic would win 6–3, 5–7, 6–4 after a grueling two hours and fifty-four minutes. Grueling but exhilarating—there was a lightness in their play usually absent in their matches against each other. They played as though they seemed to know that, perhaps for the first time, they were the pairing everyone was waiting to see. They had no one to worry about for the next three to four years but each other … and themselves.

  Djokovic would take the win in stride. “To start off the year with a win over the number one in the world and the biggest rival,” he said rather sanguinely after the match, “it’s a dream start, so I am hoping I can get the best out of it.”

  Two matches later, Djokovic loses to a wild card: Denis Istomin of Uzbekistan, the 117th-ranked player in the world. Bowing out of the Australian Open—a Grand Slam he’s won twice on the trot and six times overall—in the second round, he says after the match, “There was not much I could do.”

  Andy Murray would fare little better, making it only through three rounds.

  And just like that, what Doha was vanished. No one ever spoke of it again.

  THE IDEA OF ORDER AT THE AUSTRALIAN OPEN

  With Donald Trump’s inauguration on the horizon, in the countdown to it there was no escaping the fact that January felt inherently weird. A different kind of weird, though. Not the typical I-keep-writing-last-year’s-date-down kind of weird, but rather something sad and cantankerous. A restless unhappiness circulated among many of us, a haggard sagging of the soul accompanied by an unquenchable need to share it. We are more efficient than ever in sharing our unhappiness. And we have practically mastered disguising our discomfort with wry, distant c
ynicism. We meme as much as we mean. But sometimes we’re still able to surprise ourselves and hit the streets.

  January 2017 was an event horizon we all crossed kicking and screaming. There was no way out but forward, into the uncertainty of an unfamiliar world. And at the center of it was the Australian Open, which began on the sixteenth—the same day that Gaius Julius Caesar Octavianus took on the title of Augustus, the first edition of Don Quixote was published, Hitler moved into his underground bunker, and—this particular year—we observed Martin Luther King Jr. Day. We watched tennis together in the middle of the night, you and I. Maybe you skipped Brisbane, Doha, Chennai, Auckland, and Sydney, but I know you were up with me for Melbourne. Either you couldn’t sleep or you needed something to take your mind off the day while Orwell’s 1984 flew off real and virtual bookshelves. You knew the Australian Open wasn’t going to either change or save the world, but you decided to take a peek anyway at any odd hour you could, because tennis can offer what Robert Frost said poetry provides: a momentary stay against confusion.

  Djokovic and Murray holding the winner and runner-up trophies during the post-match celebration in Doha, January 7, 2017. (Anadolu Agency / Getty Images)

  And so it was slightly past dawn and you and I were up. The sky is a dull file-cabinet gray. A thick morning chill scours down on the thin morning light. People hurry by under umbrellas, a few loiter on corners up and down the street, bareheaded, waiting for a car or a bus, newspapers tucked under their arms. This is how the year begins. It’s that time of year when winter is pulled by the end of the year on one side and on the other by the start of the year. It becomes sheer, so translucent you can almost see through it. The world feels topsy-turvy—fuzzed. We’re in Australia and I am in New York.

  And therefore, as the calendar year starts and a new tennis season begins, you may find your senses thrown off a little. At least I do, watching a midsummer sport in midwinter in the middle of the night. Whether I stay up through the night to watch or get up far earlier than I should, I drift and am used to drifting, and after all, it’s only tennis. Isn’t it? It’s January, and 2017 has a vise grip on the mind. And here I am, groggy as hell, keeping up with news about tennis from sixteen hours in the future.

  During this long January of discontent, I’ve found it especially difficult to turn away from tennis. Despite the lack of sleep, these middle-of-the-night siren songs have served me well—for the most part. Nine at night. Eleven at night. Three in the morning. While avid viewers of the World Cup or the Olympics only spend a couple of weeks every four years waking up at some godforsaken early hour to catch a glimpse of their sport of choice, tennis fans go through this every year, since the circuit starts the year in Australia. The new season clears its throat in Brisbane and then sets right off, full throttle, into the fraying world.

  Tennis is a game I inherited from my parents. I’m old enough to have played with a wooden racket, but not old enough to have played seriously with a wooden racket. I’m also the age of perhaps the last generation of teenage champions. When I was a kid, seeing another kid win Wimbledon (as Boris Becker did in 1985 at the tender age of seventeen years, 227 days) or the French Open (as Michael Chang did in 1989 at the tender age of seventeen years, 110 days) was a big deal but not unfathomable; difficult but not unthinkable; far from the earth-shattering spectacle it would be today, when players in their mid-twenties are considered up-and-coming.

  In retrospect, I was part of a generation of latchkey kids whose favorite tennis players were teenagers, favorite rappers were teenagers, favorite doctor was a teenager (Doogie Howser, M.D.). Tennis, in other words, fit seamlessly into my vision of the world as being low-hanging fruit for youth. And while Monica Seles lost some prime seasons because of having been literally stabbed in the back, and Michael Chang never again won a major after winning one at seventeen; while Steffi Graf retired at twenty-nine because she’d already done everything she wanted, and Boris Becker played in a style that eventually drained every ounce of champion vigor his younger self had brimmed with; while Jennifer Capriati—a pro at thirteen and a French Open semifinalist at fifteen—learned to love the game after losing her way, what didn’t change was the ode to youth that tennis proved to be. When you’re in your teens, words like resilience, endurance, and perspective aren’t real.

  At the turn of the millennium, when I’d become invested in those words, I began to look at tennis differently. Becker was gone by then and Chang was no longer a top player, but Seles and Capriati were back and almost as good as ever. And the very back end of the last great teen generation—Venus Williams, Serena Williams, Roger Federer, and a little later Rafa Nadal—well, they were doing okay.

  Going forth into adulthood, this had given me heart and perspective. I saw players I knew from my youth, or thought I knew in the way that young people think they know distant stars, grow and change; they matured. Andre Agassi first introduced the great late version of himself as a player to the world at the Australian Open when he won it in 2000, then again in 2001 and 2003. It was the last Grand Slam Monica Seles won before being stabbed in the back by a deranged Steffi Graf fan as she rested in her chair during a changeover, and the only Grand Slam she would win after her comeback. It’s where Serena Williams made her Grand Slam debut, in 1998 at the age of sixteen, and, in the same year, where she and Venus would play their first professional match against each other in the second round. And since 2004, Rod Laver Arena has been the virtual exclusive playground of the Big Four among the men: only twice has someone not named Federer, Djokovic, Nadal, or Murray won since then—Marat Safin in 2005 and Wawrinka in 2014. The Australian Open has long been like an idea of order: arranging, deepening, enchanting from the other side of the world. It’s the purifying fire by which we start the new season. Maybe you let the Brisbanes and Dohas pass, maybe you missed the opening band, but the Australian Open was never a thing to miss. After all, it was a Grand Slam and there are only four of them and this was the action that would set the circuit in motion, this was what would set the chairs on the stage for the first act. What it typically has not been is a tournament of great surprises. It’s not been a clearing of the field, it has been a clarifying of the field, a clarifying to the field of the way things are and will be. In a way it’s been the kindest of the Grand Slams to me; its scenes of summer and the ebullient blues of the hard courts offer warmth to the spirit and mind during the cold and somber slog through January. Unlike the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open, Melbourne gives my mind of winter what it’s been missing. I notice it most when in my most inspired moments I want to pick up a racket myself and play; out into the frigid air I go, traveling over the ice, to have a hit on a clay court kept warm under an insulated bubble.

  Now it was time to let go of what was and accept what came next. That “accept” bothered me in a way that reminded me of my youth. Something stubborn inside me stirred, and I thought it and then wrote it. Just that word: accept … it didn’t feel like resilience, endurance, or perspective—nor did it feel like what those things should add up to. I had grown up. I had made my peace with the tennis players I grew up with being gone or going. There’s a time for all of us. And there’s a time to accept that. It’s time. Yes, it’s time. Lest we fall victim to what ails the world now: nostalgia.

  ROGER FEDERER DOES THE BOOGIE

  Late at night, New Year’s Eve 2016.

  Some 2,696 miles away from Brisbane and 2,124 miles away from Melbourne, westward, at the end of the continent right at the shores of the Indian Ocean: Perth, Western Australia, a place referred to by travel writer Bill Bryson as the most remote city on earth. As it approached midnight, somewhere beyond a huge amoeba-shaped fringe of palm-edged pools and the hotel-cum-casino’s showy exterior of slanted stacked glass, inside a loud pink-lit ballroom, surrounded by a huge crowd and fifteen fellow tennis players, everyone elbow to elbow, everyone busting a move as the DJ worked the room, Roger Federer was doing the robot on the dance floor.

  An
drea Petkovic, one of the game’s great bons vivants, had set things off much to the surprise of no one. It had started as one of those event nights. Black-tie, paraded onstage, perfunctory interviews with nice things said nicely, dinner: 495 Australian dollars (A$) for a single ticket; A$900 for what’s called a “perfect pair” ticket package, and A$4,500 for a table of ten for “premium West Australian dining and the finest beverages” and a little after-dinner entertainment from Little Bird and DJ Boston Switch to celebrate the start of both 2017 and the twenty-ninth edition of the Hopman Cup.

  The Hopman Cup is a mixed-gender exhibition made up of eight teams with two players each, one man and one woman. Like the Davis Cup, Fed Cup, the Olympics, and the Paralympics, it’s organized and run by the International Tennis Federation as an event that sorts the players by country, and no ranking points are in play. Federer hadn’t played there since 2002 when he was the thirteenth-ranked player in the world, had a total of zero Grand Slams to his name, and his teammate on the Swiss team was Miroslava “Mirka” Vavrinec. But he hadn’t played anywhere, either in an exhibition or official competition, since July, when he blew a late lead and quite literally fell on his face at the Wimbledon semis against Raonic and subsequently canceled the rest of his 2016 schedule in favor, finally, of knee surgery and rest. Sometimes he checked the results as player after player passed him in the rankings. By the end of the year, he had dropped to seventeen and he was approaching five years since winning his last Grand Slam trophy, and even that one—as he approached thirty-one mired in a two-year title drought—seemed a postscript to the Roger Federer that had been. He kept playing and kept making semifinals, but keeping up with Djokovic on hard courts, Djokovic and Murray at Wimbledon, and the two of them plus Rafa on clay had put a heavy dent in the trophy haul until it eventually came to a halt. In Perth he felt rejuvenated but uncertain about what the future held. So he shrugged his shoulders and danced. Why not? He’d done his homework: week after week of hard training with his team, mainly at his residence in Dubai; this included a live-streamed practice session just nine days ago with the young Frenchman Lucas Pouille. Coincidentally, Pouille, who also lives in Dubai, was one position ahead of Federer now in the rankings and had beaten Nadal at the 2016 U.S. Open. Coincidentally.