The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  What he didn’t know was that he’d get utterly screwed.

  The quintessential offensive baseline player, he is the personification of precision. His forehand is contemporary, he holds his racket so that when he makes contact with the ball his palm is facing upward toward the sky, and produces spin easily. It has good pop to it, enough to push an opponent around the court when needed, although it’s lacking some power, that power having been exchanged at some point in his formation for uncanny, rhythmic accuracy. The less that’s said about his backhand, the better—such things shouldn’t be spoken of or written about, as words will struggle to do it justice. He swings it as though he’s been chosen out of thousands to hit that one gong at the end of a live performance of Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody” and takes to it calmly and on time with two hands gripping the stick—it is imperious, so much so that it verges on ridiculous. Tennis is a game centered on errors, nothing about it is perfect, and yet when David Goffin strikes a backhand, even when he makes an error with it, it is perfect.

  His serve is good enough, varied enough to keep him out of trouble more often than not, and he is an elite returner, one of the top ten in the men’s game. He is the paradigm of the well-balanced player, his strengths and lesser strengths (he doesn’t really have weaknesses) in constant conversation and finding a state of equilibrium from shot to shot, point to point, game to game, set to set, match to match. The bedrock under all of this is how he handles pressure. The ATP keeps track of a statistic it calls an Under Pressure Rating, which combines how a player deals with moments when a match is most ready to tilt one way or the other—percentage of break points converted, percentage of break points saved, percentage of tiebreaks won, percentage of deciding breaks won. In 2017, he would finish eighth. He is slight, has small, clear eyes and a tall forehead on top of which is a healthy-looking flop of champagne-blond hair that he wears in a polite but messy, minimum-fuss haircut that both mother and son would agree to the latter getting at the salon. At five-foot-eleven he is neither short nor tall, but he weighs around 150 pounds, which makes him seem smallish, and the light canvas of stubble he tends to leave on his face doesn’t hide the fact that, although he’ll turn twenty-seven just after the 2017 season is over, he looks barely old enough to rent a car.

  He was born in Rocourt, Belgium, and his name is pronounced something like “Go-fah.” His father was his first coach and still coaches back in Belgium. His native country has produced all-time great players on the WTA tour—champions such as Justine Henin and Kim Clijsters, both having been recently elected to the International Tennis Hall of Fame—as well as a number of top-twenty-ranked women such as Kirsten Flipkens, Elise Mertens, and Yanina Wickmayer. Goffin, on the other hand, is the best male player in Belgium by a country mile and has been for some time. The only other Belgian man in the top one hundred is fifty-first-ranked Steve Darcis, a thirty-three-year-old with a one-handed backhand who has risen and dipped between the fifties and one-fifties in the rankings for the past ten years. And here they were now, as they had been in the quarterfinals in Bulgaria, across the net from each other on Monte Carlo’s first day of matches. As was the case in Bulgaria, Goffin handled Darcis with ease: this time 6–2, 6–1. And in the second round he weathered the body blows of the powerful Almagro in the first set before speeding past him in the second with another 6–1. Next up was another big hitter with a thunderous one-handed backhand and powerful serve but a better overall package—the ninth-ranked Dominic Thiem of Austria, who’s a fixture in the top ten but whom Goffin had proved in the past to have the measure of—he’d defeated him in the round of sixteen of this year’s Australian Open, as he had the year before as well. Of the eight matches they had played thus far, Goffin had won five. Thiem is a dangerous, bruising opponent, but Goffin couldn’t help but feel comfortable and ended up winning in three sets.

  Then came the win over Djokovic in the quarterfinals.

  Goffin had failed in thirteen prior attempts to beat a top-three player on the tour. It was as though he needed to bypass the unlucky number to break free of the jinx. Little did he know.

  Djokovic had spent the week up to his neck in tight matches. He had to escape two tough three-set matches in the prior rounds. Despite a string of subpar results throughout the 2017 season up to this point, Djokovic played quite well in this match. But Goffin tapped into a vein he’d been hiding from the world: he played the deciding set with the vigor of a champion. He was playing with the extra gear and the extra reserves at the money end of the fight. At 4–all in the third with Goffin serving, 30–30, they played a thirty-seven-second, twenty-six-shot rally. It was gut-check time, and Djokovic’s amazing defenses are designed in part to cause the opponent to flinch during just these moments. What else is there to do when your best shot, one you thought would win you the point, comes right back at you? But Goffin wouldn’t blink. The Belgian dictated the point from start to finish, answering every shot from the Serb with something extra, pulling him one way and then another around the court until a clear lane down the line opened up and Goffin stepped back into the doubles alley of the ad court to unleash an unreachable inside-in forehand down the line. He pumped his fist, blew into his cupped right hand to cool it down, then calmly walked across the baseline to serve for the game at 40–30. No hysterics. No surprise. He was where he wanted to be and where he should be.

  When Djokovic’s last shot fell weakly into the net, his forehand once again overpowered by a blistering backhand from the Belgian, Goffin dropped his racket, raised his arms victoriously, and looked up into the sky. The sun had been swallowed up by the more mischievous side of spring—the scenic Mediterranean backdrop of Monaco’s main court was suddenly more ominous: dark clouds and muddy winds circled through the stadium. I watched on a laptop at a desk in a room in an inn in Wooster, Ohio, where I was for work. At some point that afternoon I would give a talk, but made sure to keep the first half of my day clear. I remember feeling more surprised about the weather than the result. Goffin had been building toward this win for a year. But the Monaco on my monitor suddenly seemed as blustery as the Ohio outside my window. Goffin had Nadal next. With Federer wrapped up in cotton until the summer, they were the two hottest players on the tour. Such was random chance, the luck of the draw, etc., that they’d never played each other on the circuit before. Nadal had nine of these titles already. But no one on the circuit had won more matches in 2017 than Goffin’s twenty-three. He had every reason to feel battle-tested and ready, to like his chances on the dirt against the King of Clay.

  He was doomed.

  As soon as Nadal finished off Goffin in straight sets in the semifinal 6–3, 6–1, a shock wave of boos blasted down on the court from the stands.

  Nadal made his way to the net with his gaze downward and went to shake hands with Goffin, who was already waiting there for him like a person with somewhere else to be. You never know what types of platitudes, intimacies, or empty words are shared at the net after a match, but none were shared here. Nadal, as is custom, shook the chair umpire’s hand. Goffin walked by Cédric Mourier like he wasn’t there, packed as quickly as he could, lugged his tennis bag over his shoulder, and started to make his way off the court. Cheers followed him. He turned to wave. And then he was gone. He’d won four games, but the crowd had come to favor him reverently for the final twelve games of the match. At his post-match press conference Nadal would say that there were no boos at the end of the match. During the incident, yes; but not at the end of the match. This is untrue, but Nadal is a master of his mind-set. The crowd may not have been booing Rafa, but they were booing. Loudly. They spent the last hour finding any excuse to boo. They were booing that the makings of a great match had been taken from them. But most of all, they were booing at how terrible the chair umpire was. And make no mistake about it, the moment Cédric Mourier poured himself down from his elevated little chair in the shade in the middle of the first set, no good was going to come of it for anyone.

  It too
k five rounds of tennis on the clay over five days for the curse to come out to play. This is how it works: you beat the obstacles in your way, clear them from your line of sight (how one of those obstacles invariably ends up being a worse version of yourself), and you discover yourself in a moment you think will define you, not the peak of your life but a higher level seen in the distance for some time now—this is when the fates come for you, the curse clears its throat and says your name, the ghost in the dirt stirs.

  Ahead 3–2 in the first set, Goffin already with a break and looking to consolidate it with a hold: after four deuces, it’s advantage Goffin, one point from 4–2. He’s been all over Nadal, carrying over his considerable momentum from the Thiem and Djokovic matches. Nadal wasn’t supposed to look like this, not on clay. Goffin was taking the initiative every moment he could, pulling Nadal from corner to corner with a smart combination of whipping topspin forehands and penetrative backhands that time and again found the deepest corners of the court.

  This wasn’t supposed to be part of Rafa’s story.

  He’d started his clay season by bageling England’s Kyle Edmund in the first set before losing 5–7 in the second and turning the tables without much ado in the third, 6–3. But after the match Nadal was furious. Edmund shouldn’t have been any kind of a threat to him on clay, and if he wanted to get to the French Open in maximum physical condition, then he couldn’t go losing long sets in the early rounds of Monte Carlo, Barcelona, Madrid, or Rome to players he should be throttling into submission from the get-go. Nadal hit the ground running against Edmund, winning the first set 6–0. But the second set had been a sign of something that disgusted him: relaxation. It was a beautiful afternoon on the coast but, unsatisfied with his performance, Nadal put in some extra practice. The next day he played Sascha Zverev, who lives in Monaco and was celebrating his twentieth birthday. From the first moments of warm-ups Nadal looked like he was trying to set fire to anything he laid his eyes on with his glare alone. I hit pause, got up, and made some popcorn. When I came back, I got a pillow and propped my feet up. The 6–1, 6–1 beating he put on Zverev was utterly brutal, cruel and yet somehow bloodless, like only Nadal can do: a hot knife cutting through butter not because it has to but because that’s what’s there. Zverev couldn’t get off the court quickly enough. It was his birthday. Rafa didn’t care. There’d be better days ahead for him. After a routine 6–4, 6–4 win against the Argentine Diego Schwartzman, it was time not for Djokovic but for Goffin.

  Ahead 3–2 in the first, Goffin already with a break and looking to consolidate it with a hold: after four deuces, it’s advantage Goffin, one point from 4–2. It’s a quick point: Nadal hits a running forehand six inches clear of Goffin’s baseline. The line judge calls “Out,” forcefully, clearly. The audience applauds. Nadal walks toward the ball kid who has the towel to dry himself off and reset to serve down 2–4. Goffin goes to do the same.

  There’s a moment when you realize something’s about to happen. When the air changes slightly or the color of the sky suddenly warps. I had turned to do something while the players prepared for the next game, but I suddenly realized something was missing from the point they’d just played, when Nadal’s shot had clearly—beyond clearly—landed half a foot out and the line judge called “Out.” I hadn’t heard, Game: Goffin. Goffin leads four games to two.

  Why was Mourier walking toward some random mark in the dirt? Why had Mourier come down from his chair in the first place?

  Remember that players are granted three challenges per set and if a challenge is deemed correct the player isn’t charged for having used it. The process is quick, efficient, and—despite the occasional bemused reaction from a player—definitive. Hawk-Eye has unquestionably changed tennis for the better.

  Clay-court tournaments do not use Hawk-Eye. The rationale is that, unlike grass and hard courts, the surface of a clay court is in constant motion, brushed this way and that by the players’ feet, the vagaries of the wind, and other such stuff, and therefore, between when a ball is hit and when it lands on the dirt, the surface may have shifted not once or twice but countless times. The idea of a fixed mark, then, would be an unreliable one. Clay is another variable in the equation. So for clay tournaments and only clay tournaments tennis takes us back in time: the chair umpires still come down from their chairs to inspect marks as in the old days when there’s a dispute.

  No one had disputed that Nadal’s shot was out, just as no one disputed that the sun was in the sky. It was out, tennis like life was moving on to whatever the next chapter on this Saturday was supposed to be. But Cédric Mourier saw something. A common adage in sports is that the better the umpire or referee, the less he or she is seen. If you watch tennis at all, you may not know him by name, but you will recognize Cédric Mourier. Not by any remarkable power of charisma or distinguishable physical trait. You recognize him by his constant and utterly perplexing compulsion to involve himself in a tennis match. It’s one thing not to see well or to invent things, but Mourier does both under the trained eyes of players and the gaze of both public and televised audiences time and time again. He has spent years to the exasperation of many seeing things no one else has seen. Once, in Madrid in 2013, he called a ball in that was close to a foot wide. It was a serve that bounced right in front of his chair. Nadal, who was the receiver, was cruising in the match, but was utterly perplexed and protested anyway, as one would and should when you’re suddenly left to wonder what the rules of the sport are. Once, in 2008, Mourier made such a hash of a match between Federer and Ivan Ljubičić that the two players, having lost all trust in him, spent the better part of the match refereeing it themselves. Ljubičić is now part of Federer’s two-man coaching team and has played his part in the Federer Renaissance, so it all worked out fine between them. Mourier’s capacity to sow confusion and discord out of nothing boggles the mind. I saw Mourier in Rome in 2013 break Viktor Troicki’s brittle hope that the tennis gods were not against him, a hope that’s never returned to Troicki, who has stormed the circuit in an irrepressible rage ever since. Mourier has been at this for a long time. No one is safe from his hoodoo.

  Anytime you see Mourier on a court there’s the possibility that he’s been possessed by some specter from some bygone day who lives under the tennis grounds. He makes himself noticed in a tennis match by his sheer will to be noticed, but he does so without any artistry, improvising a reason to speak or be seen time and again simply because the ATP allows him to. Everyone makes mistakes, and Mourier is no exception. But Mourier is consistently the exception. Google him. I dare you. It’s not that he’s a bad chair umpire, it’s that he’s bad at being a good chair umpire, meaning he has a difficult time not being part of the story. When a player asks him why he would make such a horrendous call, he should just shrug like the drowning scorpion and say it’s his nature. And now here he comes when absolutely no one asked him to, approaching Goffin’s baseline at a crucial moment in the first set of the semifinals in Monaco. It is his nature.

  Cédric Mourier missing the mark. Monte Carlo, 2017. (Photograph by Clive Brunskill / Getty Images)

  The ball was out. The line judge made the call clearly and instantly. If the chair umpire has a doubt, then the line judge is there to confer with: Where did you see the mark? Show me. Instead, Mourier walks to the baseline, picks one of any number of random spots along the line, points to it, and overrules the call. Before he overrules the call, you can see Goffin come over to where Mourier is, curious as to what he’s up to, and start to remonstrate that Mourier isn’t looking anywhere near where the ball landed. Mourier doesn’t have any idea what he’s doing at this point. He might as well be looking for the penny someone just tossed into a public fountain.

  So, if Mourier had come to Goffin’s baseline certain that he had seen something and now is having his conviction put in doubt, this would be a good time to double back and do what he neglected to do in the beginning: bring the line judge over. Unlike a chair umpire, line judges can’t
just insert themselves in these matters. Mourier likes this part. He’ll make something up. He’ll be proven wrong. But he may shrug and say he saw what he saw and everyone makes mistakes. It’s likely. Of course, he’d say this in the restricted lounges of the Monte Carlo Country Club where these things don’t matter. Umpires don’t give interviews. They only speak publicly via their decisions on the court. They’re ghosts in the tennis machine.

  And so Goffin, who had survived a stern Nadal challenge in his service game, has suddenly come face-to-face with the long con of the curse. In tennis you have to withstand errors, because errors happen; sometimes they are coaxed out of you, sometimes you make them on your own. But this was something from a different dimension. You’ve pushed the boulder far up the hill, and suddenly, against the laws of nature themselves, it starts to roll back at you. Why was Mourier there on the court when he wasn’t asked? Why, if he had seen the ball in, did he not simply overrule it from his chair like any chair umpire in that position would? Why didn’t he ask for help when he clearly did not see what he thought he had seen? Goffin was beside himself; he called for the tournament supervisor to come out to the court and intervene. The supervisor did the former but not the latter. The chair umpire, he would explain, had made his call. They had to play on. Out of options, Goffin was left to return to re-enter the point from where things were. Ahead 3–2 in the first, Goffin already with a break and looking to consolidate it with a hold: after five deuces, it’s advantage Goffin, one point from 4–2.