RAFAEL NADAL FIGHTS THE GODS
On the second day of the Australian Open, Nadal also beat an older player, thirty-three-year-old Florian Mayer, 6–3, 6–4, 6–4. He served extraordinarily well. Over his career his serve has been the one part of his game that wasn’t at the level of the rest. He knew how to make use of the left-handed angles to his advantage, but his serve was more a point-starter than anything else. Part of what started to separate Djokovic and Murray from him had been their relentless aggression in returning the Nadal serve, as he wasn’t one to hit it past you, or even really try to.
In recent years, however, this had turned into a recipe for disaster against Novak and Andy. Even on clay, where he’d recently lost to Murray in Madrid and Djokovic at Roland-Garros, his Batcave and his Fortress of Solitude. He had a new coach in his box with his uncle, Toni Nadal, who had been his one and only coach since he first started to play. Now fellow Mallorcan and former world number one Carlos Moyá, a longtime friend, was part of the team.
The Nadal circle is famous for being small, tight, and familial. Hence, the ideas that have circulated through it for years have been in-house ideas. While Moyá wasn’t exactly a stranger, he had observed Nadal’s game from outside that circle and was one of the very few people, perhaps even the only person, capable of introducing solutions from the exterior that would be heeded and, possibly, adopted. Improving the serve, making it more of a weapon rather than just a tool, became a mission.
Mayer was the first player in 2017 to truly bear the brunt of it. The numbers tell a brutal story: six aces, which is somewhat high for Nadal, don’t really stand out; but then there was the 70 percent first-serve percentage; the 77 percent of first serves won; the remarkable 83 percent of second-serve points won; and not a single break point faced. It was a trend that would continue for the year. Advanced tennis ratings system Peak Serve Elo calculated that Nadal was the most improved server of 2017 by a remarkable distance over the second most improved, Dolgopolov, who after losing to Nadal in Brisbane would rebound strongly as the year went on.
Nadal was embracing attack mode, starting with the serve. The draw also looked promising. He was in section five in the bottom half of the draw. Monfils, the sixth seed, had played brilliantly in the second half of 2016 and closed out that year with a career-high ranking of six. No one played the game like Monfils: When he was on his game, it was like watching a star go nova on the court. But after such bursts, he always waned. Though his title haul was meager compared to his gifts, he enjoyed a rich, successful life on the circuit. And yet, the lingering feeling followed him that he was capable of more. He, Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray are separated in age by less than a year, and it was Monfils who was the star among stars when they were juniors. There was no cap on his talent. In 2004, he was the number-one-ranked junior in the world and won the boys’ singles at the Australian Open, the French Open, and Wimbledon. He was seventeen years old. On the professional circuit, his combined record against the triumvirate of Nadal, Djokovic, and Murray stood at four wins and thirty-one losses. None of those four wins had come against Djokovic, who still points out in post-match interviews after beating him that in juniors Monfils was “the man.” Nadal’s record against him was twelve wins in fourteen matches. If there was a player at the top of one of the sections of the draw who would be particularly vulnerable in the fourth round, it was Monfils. Even Monfils had to know it, which was even better for Nadal. Let him think about it.
Monfils beats Jiří Veselý in the first round, 6–2, 6–3, 6–2.
Nadal beats Marcos Baghdatis in the second round, 6–3, 6–1, 6–3.
Let him think about it.
Monfils beats Dolgopolov, 6–3, 6–4, 1–6, 6–0. (On set point in a closely disputed second frame Monfils plays one ball from behind his back, coaxing a forehand into the net by Dolgopolov.)
Nadal does a classic rope-a-dope comeback on young Sascha Zverev to the tune of 4–6, 6–3, 6–7 (7–5), 6–3, 6–2.
Let him think about it.
Monfils beats Philipp Kohlschreiber in the third round, 6–3, 7–6 (7–1), 6–4. (With Monfils serving for the first set at 5–3, Kohlschreiber lobs a volley over the head of Monfils, who had ghosted into the net, causing him to chase the ball back to the baseline, turn, and, for some inexplicable reason, pirouette into the air as he turned to hit a forehand back to Kohlschreiber, who, standing at the net and left with the simple task of blocking the ball back into the empty court, flinches, as though he’s just seen a ghost, and dumps the easiest of volleys directly into the net.) Monfils isn’t thinking about it. If there’s ever been a play-the-person-in-front-of-you player, it’s Gaël Monfils. That he wasn’t thinking about Nadal is part of his strength. But also, maybe, part of his weakness. One doesn’t simply walk into a Rafa Nadal match.
And so a Monfils-Nadal fourth round beckoned, the sixth seed against the ninth. Zero Grand Slam titles versus fourteen. Monfils, reborn on the court, was looking to go deep in his second straight Grand Slam tournament after making the semifinals in New York. He was the higher-ranked player and on the best run of his career. But he’d lost five straight matches to players in the top ten. He thought about it.
By this point, Djokovic had been knocked out by Istomin, and now, on their day off, Monfils and Nadal would get wind of the fact that Murray had lost to Sascha Zverev’s older brother, Mischa. And that Federer had knocked out Nishikori. Things continued in that vein the day of their match when David Goffin defeated the eighth-seeded Dominic Thiem. Thus, as night approached and Nadal’s match inched closer, the draw had opened up like a nocturnal flower. Raonic was the highest seed left. Federer might have just used up all he had left in the tank getting by Nishikori in five sets. Mischa Zverev wasn’t going to beat Roger after beating Andy. Suddenly Federer looked less like a novel return to the tour and more like a legitimate threat. At least he and Wawrinka, the 2014 Australian Open champion here and winner of the last Grand Slam, would cancel each other out in the semifinal—only one could get by. On Monfils’s side of the draw, aside from the great former champion Nadal, only players from that tween generation remained. Raonic, Goffin, Dimitrov: the kids hyped as the next great things who’ve settled into being pretty good but certainly not great and aren’t kids anymore. Monfils doesn’t think about them. That he can take them. That he can handle anyone left in the draw. That if he comes out for the last match of the evening and plays the perfect version of his tennis and makes things difficult for Nadal, then maybe, just maybe … Melbourne’s nice.
After giving the first two sets away with minimal resistance, Monfils recovers to take the third, only to go on to lose to Nadal 3–6, 3–6, 6–4, 4–6. Afterward, his ranking dropped week after week without end. The fourth round became a wall that he could not pass: he managed to do so only three times all year. He withdrew from six tournaments due to injury or ailment. On the last day of 2017, he was ranked forty-sixth. He had started the year ranked seventh. And if you haven’t seen the match, and want to know more than who won, what can 6–3, 6–3, 4–6, 6–4 mean to you? The 4–2 lead Monfils enjoyed in the fourth as Nadal looked frustrated and out of gas? The three straight unforced errors Monfils made as he was serving to stay in the match? We take these things as empirical evidence. These are things that Gaël Monfils does. And things that Rafa Nadal does. Where once there were liquid bends in the course of a player’s career, all the little things gather and crystallize into diamond-hard formations, truths we settle for as part of the deal of getting involved with sports in the first place. Once upon a time at the end of 2016, Gaël Monfils had risen to sixth in the rankings and was finally playing the best tennis of his life. He came into 2017 in great form and the results at the Australian Open were falling his way. Then you stop and wonder why things turn the way they do. How some players constantly ride the current to their particular embankment of the stream time and time again, then get off at that embankment until the current comes back for them again. Come summer, Monfils will
lose at Wimbledon in the third round, which is as far as he’s ever gone, for the sixth time in his career. At the start of 2018 he’ll storm through a depleted field in Doha for his seventh title. At some point you’ll be curious again about Rafa Nadal’s journey to the 2017 Australian Open final, which you’ll consider a kind of secular resurrection. You’ll look at the numbers for his match with Monfils and see 6–3, 6–3, 4–6, 6–4. It will be enough to convince you that was all there was. It is what it is.
131–131
The truth is, there was no possible end to the 2017 Australian Open that would not have made a story for the ages. Venus Williams at thirty-six winning her first major in nine years. Serena Williams at thirty-four returning to top form, winning her open-era record twenty-third major title and reclaiming the number-one ranking. Roger Federer at thirty-five winning an improbable eighteenth major title in his first competitive tournament after a sixth-month self-imposed hiatus due to injury and against no less than his one true rival. Rafa Nadal, at thirty, and who in recent seasons had seemed gnawed on by Father Time with all the guilty, wide-eyed ravenousness of Goya’s Saturn Devouring His Son, unexpectedly capturing his fifteenth major title, edging a mere two major titles away from Federer’s record total and, coupled with a 24–11 head-to-head record against Federer, emphatically making his strongest claim yet to being the greatest player the men’s tour had ever seen.
Every possible outcome would have hit some sweet spot, that part of you that flutters and pinwheels and is hard to reckon with and hard to reconcile, the nostalgia of the cynic, the romance buried in the hard-hearted, that something in you that makes you feel like Pluto was the ninth planet again and because of it, though still the same rock, sang sweeter in the music of the spheres than it had ever sung before. This technocracy we find ourselves living in trying our best to be actual people makes time seem to pass so quickly, the length of an era shrinking to the duration of the attention span of an impatient child. Perhaps this past weekend at the Australian Open was less a passing chance to remember your younger self and cheer the all-conquering versions of Venus, Roger, Serena, and Rafa’s younger selves, and more an opportunity to remember how quickly these moments we have—all of us—to define ourselves pass us by. And how thin the margins in those moments can be.
For example, serving with advantage, up 3–2 in the fifth set and cooking with the momentum of not only having won the fourth set 6–3 but having opened this deciding fifth set by breaking his opponent, Rafa Nadal looked poised to pestle Roger Federer down in yet another final. He had already done it twenty-three of the thirty-four times the two had played overall, and nine times out of the eleven they had faced each other in the four major tournaments. No player had won as much as Federer. But no player had caused him to suffer like Nadal had. Both players had had their on moments and their off moments, and now the match had seemed to capture its intended rhythm, the familiar one: game, set, match—Nadal.
But tennis is a game of undulating rhythms that exist in four concentric circles—the rhythm of a point, the rhythm of a service game, the rhythm of a return game, the rhythm of a set—that are interrelated but don’t necessarily touch. Sometimes you can see them simply in the scoreline: 4–6, 6–3, 1–6, 6–3, 3–2. Advantage Nadal. Like an idea of order.
The two first played in 2004 in Miami, when seventeen-year-old and thirty-fourth-ranked Nadal sent ripples through the tennis world by defeating the top-ranked Federer, then twenty-three, in straight sets. Since then they have faced each other on hard courts and clay courts, quick courts and slow courts, half-clay and half-grass courts, Dubai courts and Cincinnati courts, for better and for worse, in sickness and in health.
Nadal’s advantages in the matchup have largely been physiological: his thumping left-handed topspin forehand had spent the better part of a decade grinding down on Federer’s right-handed and, crucially, one-handed backhand. The deep, high-bouncing ball is the one-handed backhand’s structural flaw, like that blind spot in any car’s rearview mirror. It’s extremely difficult to generate pace hitting a high one-handed backhand. And Nadal, like Navratilova and McEnroe before him, has crafted his left-handedness into an art. Nadal’s natural crosscourt forehand from the left side just so happens to be a menace to Federer’s natural backhand motion. But it’s not just that Nadal is left-handed; it’s that, unlike most lefties, his game is a mosaic of stroke patterns designed to take advantage of what in Latin and still in Spanish would be known as his sinister side. If Federer’s looping, elegant, artisanal one-handed backhand off the right side has been the cobra of the ATP Tour, Nadal’s quick, torquing, relentless forehand has been the mongoose.
But it turns out that Federer, after so many years of encountering the same problem, did bring a surprise with him into this final: he had altered his backhand. Suddenly he was hitting it flatter. Much flatter. You could see the difference on the shot off the racket, you could see the difference in his follow-through; it was curter—the high curlicue finish of the racket with a twist of the wrist was gone … he swung the backhand now more like someone opening a stuck door.
And he all but abandoned the backhand slice. Both the topspin one-handed backhand and the backhand slice are lifesavers: they give the person playing them a chance to get back into the point by slowing the pace of the ball and altering the pace of the point, the change in the bounce also changing the swing trajectory of the opponent. Nadal, however, being no ordinary opponent, tends to use these attempts at changing the pace to instead find the pace he desires, and the low, skidding bounce of a slice, especially crosscourt from a right-hander, slots perfectly into the exaggerated low approach in the swing of his forehand. Ironically, Federer’s attempts to save himself in a point by using the topspin and slice often led to his long-term demise in these face-offs. Nadal knew it and feasted off it. Federer knew it as well, and yet he seemed to be unable to adjust. The strength of the one-handed backhand to viewers is its aesthetic appeal, but to a player its strength lies in its flexibility. It is an easier stroke through which both to master and disguise variations of spin. And unless you’re Nicolás Almagro, Richard Gasquet, Stan Wawrinka, or Dominic Thiem—the Four Horsemen of the One-Handed Backhand—there’s not much you can do off that wing with a one-hander when you’re pushed to the back of the court other than slice the ball back. And that would be more of the same meal for Nadal to feast on.
So Federer, possibly taking cues from Grigor Dimitrov’s electric semifinal performance against Nadal, decided to swing hard, almost without fail, swing hard and flat and go at Rafa’s forehand. It bore fruit for Federer in the first and third sets, but the second and fourth were near mirror images of each other, with Federer’s own forehand, considered widely the greatest shot in the history of tennis, letting him down repeatedly.
And so here they were now, the one secret played between the two longtime rivals now out in the open. Nadal had had four sets to adjust to Federer’s backhand adjustment and the match seems now to have stabilized back to the way they tended to go: 4–6, 6–3, 1–6, 6–3, 3–2, having just crushed a short forehand winner down the line off a soft Federer return served as wide as possible to his backhand side the last time Nadal had him in the ad court, and now Nadal has him on the ad side again—one point from 4–2 and a vise grip on the match—as he leans forward at the baseline, fidgets with one shoulder, then the other, touches one side of his nose, then the other, then the other, pushes aside his hair, then picks at his shorts from the back before beginning the motion of his serve.
The point total at this very moment of the match: Federer, 131; Nadal, 131.
As Nadal, mid-serve, stares up at the ball above his head, he will never be closer to winning this match than at that very moment just before he springs up and forward as his Babolat racket smacks at the toss.
Remember that part just before about Nadal’s tried-and-trusted patterns against Federer, including that wide serve to the backhand? Well, so did Nadal. And so did Federer. Maybe. Maybe not
? But Nadal banked on knowing that Federer knew that Nadal knew. Suffice it to say, Nadal tried to surprise Federer with a body serve and Federer on reflex blocked the ball back and it tumbled, slow and lob-like, crosscourt and deep into the corner it came from. Federer, completely on the defensive now, has at least bought himself some time, which he uses to reposition himself at the center of the baseline. All he can do now is wait. The game is on Nadal’s racket now. The ball tamely hangs in the air. He decides to go for the kill. Now comes the wide shot he passed up on the serve. It was a classic cat-and-mouse game within the service game. The body serve coaxed a defensive reply from Federer and he recovered to the middle of the court, as he should. A lane for a short crosscourt winner opened up, a shot tailor-made for Nadal’s lefty topspin forehand. Nadal goes for it and it clips the tape on the top of the net. But the topspin Nadal hits with doesn’t allow the unforced error to die a quick death, no, it pops and remainders down to a spot on the court close enough to seem that it might possibly fall in but in the end far enough out to be without question out on first glance.
Forty–all now. Total points: 132 Federer, 131 Nadal.
The next point is a rapid-fire five-shot slugfest that Federer ends emphatically with a flat backhand crosscourt winner from the ad side. (Eight of Federer’s fourteen backhand winners come in the final set of the match.) Advantage Federer. The break comes shortly after, Nadal spraying an inside-out forehand from the deuce side wide at the end of another hard exchange of groundstrokes. Nadal is broken: 3–all in the fifth now. Nadal never wins another game. He’ll win eight more points for the rest of the match: 4–6, 6–3, 1–6, 6–3, 3–6. But it was closer than that. It was much, much closer than that. They say baseball is a game of inches. A discussion that could have lasted a lifetime—who is the greatest male tennis player you’ve ever seen—was ended by a quarter-centimeter of braided net cord as the world turned.
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