The game would go on for a second eternity. It would last a total of a staggering seventeen minutes, with the crowd through all of it vocal in their utter disgust at what they’d seen. Nadal just waited for it to be resolved. After the match there were suggestions that, as he clearly acted as though he accepted that the ball had landed out, he should have given the point and hence the game to Goffin. It’s been done before, and there are things that happen less frequently on a tennis court. Nadal bristled at this suggestion, and who can blame him? It’s not in his makeup: he cherishes every ball and every point like a treasure to hoard. When Mourier pulled a Mourier on him in Madrid, he was up 6–2, 3–1, 40–40, and he treated Mourier’s mistake like it was match point in a tiebreaker in the final set. It’s not in his nature to give a point away, nor is it his job. When he finally broke Goffin and won the game, the match had balanced at three-games-all, but it felt over. The life had been sucked out of it, or at least the life that it had had been sucked out of it. Goffin had been broken, and he was broken. It was 3–3 in the first, but he would go on to win a grand total of one game for the rest of the match. When you pull back and look over the course of the clay season, Rafa rules over everything, even Rome, where in losing right before the French Open he proved himself human on the clay. Meanwhile, what could have been going through Goffin’s head? Mourier had inserted himself into a great match at the asking of absolutely no one, as though he had thought, This isn’t supposed to be part of Rafa’s story. That the clay was a story already written, it just needed to be told. Don’t we all want to see history made? Did Cédric Mourier put on his navy blue blazer that day thinking he was going to play his small part in history? After all, all that was going to happen during the circuit’s clay-court season—the clay swing—were minor matters until the end, which would be a celebration of the King of Clay. With the state Djokovic and Murray were in and Federer nowhere to be seen, didn’t everyone know it? Didn’t Cédric Mourier know it? On one side of his court was the King of Clay dressed in purple. And on the other side was a pawn, dressed in an orange that blended into the dirt so much he was almost invisible.
It started out promising, but the end of David Goffin’s clay season was swift and heartbreaking. June 2, 2017, Paris, France. (Photograph by Jimmy Bolcina / Photonews /Getty Images)
Afterward, Goffin would go on to have an unremarkable rest of the clay season. Fine but nothing special: a sleepy round-of-sixteen loss to the fifty-sixth-ranked six-foot-six Karen Khachanov in Barcelona, a quarterfinal defeat to the six-foot-one Nadal in Madrid, and a round-of-sixteen loss in Rome to the six-foot-six Marin Čilić. Business as usual, more or less. He had taken the best shot of the curse and he had emerged from it relatively unscathed.
That is, until Paris.
Up 5–4 in the third round against Argentina’s Horacio Zeballos and serving for the first set, Goffin somehow saw three opportunities to win set point escape him and suddenly found himself in the middle of a long baseline battle simply to hold serve. The set went from being practically salted away to being in dangerous flux. The rally went on: nine shots … eleven … thirteen … and then on the fourteenth, he had to chase a ball deep to his left way into the back corner of the court. He tripped over a tarp that’s kept there to cover the court overnight or in case of bad weather. His ankle gave out under him. Unable to put any pressure on it, he had to be carried off the clay to the medical room. His French Open was over. And he’d miss all of the grass season as well: no Wimbledon.
Don’t think I’d end this part of the story here. David Goffin was doomed, yes. Something in the dirt got to him. There was a little bit of the man pushing the rock up the hill to his tale. And a little bit of the power flying too close to someone’s sun. Or, he was simply screwed. Permitted incompetence got him at the start of the season, and old-fashioned bad luck got him in the end. Six weeks out and still no titles since 2014, he was a casualty of the clay. But when he came back for the hard courts and beat Kyrgios to help Belgium get past Australia to play in its first Davis Cup final and won the title in Shenzhen and the title in Tokyo, qualified for the end-of-the-year ATP Final, and beat Nadal in the round robin and Federer in the semis before losing the final, once again as in January, to Dimitrov, he ended the season for the first time ever as a top-ten player.
When I look back and wonder what cured him of the curse, how he shook free of it, I find myself remembering what was taken from him in Monte Carlo but also what was given back to him in Paris, which was far stronger and clearly lasted far longer. With his ankle in the condition it was in, Goffin needed immediate medical attention and had been taken straightaway off the court. It was clear that Zeballos, who was losing, had suddenly won. He was the sixty-fifth-ranked player in the world, without a French Open match win to his name since 2013. He had just turned thirty-two and now was into the fourth round of a major, as far by a long shot as he’d ever advanced. It was the obligation of proper decorum more than joy that led Zeballos to wave for a brief moment to the crowd, his hands barely reaching the height of his shoulders. Then he went over to Goffin’s chair, where all of his stuff sat unattended, and he packed up everything that was there, every single belonging that might have belonged to him.
He did this first. And then, with Goffin’s bag on his back, he packed his own—the towels, extra shirts, etc.—and walked off the court carrying both bags, one on each shoulder, to applause he didn’t look like he at all wanted. There’s a door in the tunnel to the right just after you exit the court: the trainer’s room. Somewhere in there was a hobbled David Goffin. And just outside that door was where Horacio Zeballos of Mar del Plata, Argentina, left the bag for the Belgian, as if to say that when he was ready the sport would be there waiting for him.
THE ROLAND-GARROS EPILOGUE
Rafa Nadal won the 2017 French Open without losing a single set. He had now won ten French Opens. And counting.
The principal court of Roland-Garros, a sea of orange and green, is where the biggest matches are played. And although it’s the smallest stadium of the four Grand Slam show courts in terms of audience capacity, the court itself is as spacious as they come. There’s room to roam behind and around the sides of the court like few in the world. And the absence of a roof overhead only enhances the feeling of wide-open space. For a player like Nadal, who loves to play deep behind the baseline and range far and wide to defend and transition to attack, this clay court is heaven on earth.
Since 2001, this court has been called Court Philippe Chatrier, in honor of the longtime president of the Fédération Française de Tennis. For seventy-three years prior to the renaming, it had been called simply Court Central.
I don’t anticipate the French removing Chatrier’s name from the stadium. That’s not the way things are done. But when all’s said and done, some form of memorial to what we’ve been witnessing at Roland-Garros, the sheer audacity of it, has to happen.
I watched the three-set final against Stan Wawrinka and saw the Swiss play as good a match as I’d see him play this year. And yet he lost, 6–2, 6–3, 6–1. Sometimes a scoreline can make you doubt your senses or, worse, make you seem a liar. Clay swallows winners and spits them back at the player who hit them. Nadal is the best there’s ever been at this on this surface. He masters space and time in that stadium like none other. There are no words for what Nadal can do to an opponent on Philippe Chatrier. It’s as though he doesn’t beat you, he erases you. All the games become one game, all the opponents become one opponent who tries and fails to bend the space and pace of Roland-Garros to his will.
It all happened so fast. There was a French Open in 2017.
And then there wasn’t.
In the end, there was only Rafa Nadal.
PART THREE Summer
450 WORDS ON THE AEGON INTERNATIONAL IN EASTBOURNE
Of the top seeds at the 2017 Aegon International in Eastbourne, England, only one was ranked in the top fifteen. The fourth-ranked player in the world entered the ATP 250 tourn
ament late by way of a wild-card invitation. “This will be my first trip to Eastbourne. I have heard great things about the tournament,” he said. And then, in an echo of Andy Murray’s comments when the clay season was about to begin, “I am looking forward to fine-tuning my grass court game ahead of Wimbledon.” And with that, Eastbourne welcomed its big four to the tournament: fourth-seed Steve Johnson, third-seed John Isner, second-seed Gaël Monfils, and the top-seed Novak Djokovic. It was the first time Djokovic had played on the grass between the end of the French Open and the start of Wimbledon since 2010. It had come to this: desperate times and desperate measures.
Even the idea in January that by June Djokovic would be ranked fourth would have seemed preposterous. Beyond preposterous. But after years of keeping pace with the massive points total he had to defend—semifinals and finals ad infinitum year after year—in June 2017 he suddenly discovered the other side of being as good as he’s been. The year prior, he had won the Australian Open, Indian Wells, Miami, and the French Open, but in 2017 he didn’t get far in any of them. And while his point total nosedived, Federer and Nadal took up all of the slack. That’s how he found himself at a tournament he never puts on his calendar, Eastbourne, doing something before Wimbledon that he had thought he had long since outgrown: warming up.
Aside from a second-set tiebreaker against the American Donald Young, Djokovic didn’t suffer much on the grass and even won that tiebreaker 11–9 and the match in straight sets. In fact, he didn’t lose a set. Monfils, perhaps spent from a long back-and-forth semifinal against his countryman Richard Gasquet, once again didn’t put up too much of a fight in the final; Djokovic won 6–3, 6–4. There weren’t too many conclusions to draw from it. After all, no matter what type of form one or the other is in, Djokovic always beats Monfils. And a draw of Vasek Pospisil, Young, Daniil Medvedev, and a final against Monfils was more to test the body than the mind. He looked okay. No worse for wear than he appeared at the French Open. Five matches later, on No. 1 Court in Wimbledon, his season would be over. He made it through fifteen games against Berdych before his elbow left him in no condition to play. He’d end the season ranked twelfth in the world.
THE FALL AND RISE OF ROGER FEDERER
The year 2016 ended for Roger Federer on Friday, July 8. In the fifth set of his semifinal match at Wimbledon, he found himself sprawled out along his service line, facedown, ruefully lifting his left leg slightly up and slowly letting it back down, as if to prove to the shocked and silent crowd that he was still alive.
Even when he had been ahead in the match against Milos Raonic of Canada, Federer looked weary. In the fourth set, he double-faulted not once but twice, ending any hope for a classic. Raonic—six feet five inches of muscle topped with a Clark Kent hairdo—is an elite-grade version of the typical North American thumper: a thunderous serve, a strong but finicky forehand, and a two-handed backhand right out of an instruction manual; yet he approaches the net like it’s an electric fence. Federer had spent his career feasting on this type of player.
But not lately. He hadn’t won a title all season; he had knee surgery earlier in the year; he skipped the French Open entirely. These days he seemed more gaunt than gracile, more canny than casually assured. Now and then, he would see what the other player didn’t, couldn’t. At such moments—whether half volleys in 2015 or overhead backhand smashes in 2014—his fans rejoiced in their nostalgia. David Foster Wallace’s Federer essay would make the rounds on the Internet like uncorked champagne.* For those of us his age, who grew up with Marlon Brando in Superman, Alec Guinness in Star Wars, and Laurence Olivier in Clash of the Titans, it was familiar and fine, though we didn’t know why. He slowed, but slowed like a dangerous panther. He staged strange suicide missions to the net on his opponents’ second serves. His game—a sexy hybrid of tennis in black-and-white, tennis in standard definition, and tennis in 3-D—looked good in defeat. Other players grunted, lunged, sprinted into swinging splits, found the worn patch on a grass surface to buckle over, the drizzle-slicked white line to slip on. Not Federer. In his tennis dotage, he was like a Fabergé egg spinning on a tabletop because it could.
And then at Wimbledon he fell. And he didn’t just fall. He looked like your uncle doing the robot and having it all go wrong. If you saw that match live, you knew then that it was over.
Except it wasn’t. He started off the 2017 season ranked seventeenth in the world. Since then, he’d won thirty-one matches and lost two. He skipped Paris again this year, not because of injury but because he could afford to. Clay wears on the body, and besides, why let Rafa Nadal take your measure on his sovereign surface? Instead, Federer took time off and waited for Wimbledon like Christmas morning.
By the time he got there, he was seeded fourth. He looked sharp, dangerous, healthy, his game kaleidoscopic. At the start of week two, Djokovic, the second seed, withdrew with an injured arm. Nadal lost to thirty-four-year-old Gilles Müller and the defending champion, Andy Murray, succumbed in the quarters to American Sam Querrey and a bad hip. Suddenly Federer’s 2017 Wimbledon became something else entirely. It became a revenge tour.
Federer cruised to the quarterfinals, where he faced Raonic again. Raonic dug in, threw everything he had at Federer, and still lost in straight sets. In the semifinal, Federer faced the player who had knocked him out of the 2010 Wimbledon quarterfinal, Tomáš Berdych. This time, Federer gut-checked him to the duck-season-duck-season-rabbit-season tune of 7–6 (7–4), 7–6 (7–4), 6–4. After the match, Berdych was asked if the 2017 version of Federer is better than the 2010, to which he replied, “There is no way to prove this, if we can measure it, if he’s better or not. He’s playing just too good.”
In the final, Federer again faced Čilić, who had beaten him in the 2014 U.S. Open. He went the entire tournament without losing a single set. Čilić wept after the second set, realizing that the foot blister he carried over from his semifinal hadn’t magically healed. Blister or no, he had no clear path to attacking Federer, and Federer knew it. The pinprick-sized holes in Federer’s game, the ones that Nadal and Djokovic learned to pry open, seemed gone now. But that’s not to say Federer healed both his body and his game. He seemed to have healed his body and changed his game.
Tennis is a kinetic and rather lonely kind of problem solving. How do you solve for Federer? Serve as though your life depends on it, push him back with high balls to his backhand, make him not only play but also think defensively, and, if any of those happen to work, floor it and don’t look back. But he pushes back as hard now as he ever has when he gets a second serve to his backhand. He hits the backhand with topspin and space resolutely from the baseline, exclusively from the baseline, as though he’d been told the world was flat and ended there. So much so that any ball that bounces at the baseline, the type of ball that even a professional would sensibly take a few steps back to hit at knee level, he plays as a difficult half volley that he makes look easy; to hit these with intention, in rhythm, again and again against top professionals, should be practically unthinkable, and yet they have become typical rally strokes in his game. Every point is about finding the first strike as soon as possible. He takes no time between serves. Rather strangely at his age, he has sped things up while making the court smaller. It is his younger opponents—a chagrined Čilić but the latest—who seem starved for time and space.
The following day, Monday, July 17, 2017, a sixteen-year-old boy will appear before a judge in Stratford Youth Court, deep inside an angular beige and burnt sienna building squeezed onto a curving East London city block. He is facing fifteen charges: one count of possession of an item to discharge a noxious substance, one count of grievous bodily harm with intent, five counts of attempted grievous bodily harm with intent, three counts of robbery, four counts of attempted robbery, and one count of handling stolen goods. He has been accused of spending this past Thursday evening throwing acid onto food deliverymen and making off—or trying to make off—with their vehicles as the victims screamed in agony, unsur
e of what had just happened to them, why, or what to do. Five times in little over an hour these attacks happened. Hackney, Islington, Stoke Newington. Neighborhoods in North East London, the other side of the Thames from Wimbledon, where the royal box is empty, the dirt patches are being re-sodded, and we were regally entertained.
Over on No. 3 Court on the first day of Wimbledon, the most talented player in the draw not named Roger Federer is down two sets to love and lying down on the grass, prone on his back, looking up and either squinting from the sun or wincing in pain. He had requested medical assistance and now the trainer was out on the court trying to stretch out his hip. He had lost the first two sets by respectable scores, 3–6, 4–6, to a respectable opponent, Pierre-Hugues Herbert, a two-time Grand Slam champion in doubles, whose game in singles grows on grass the way Albert Ramos Viñolas’s game grows on clay. He knew this and would say as much after the match, which would end soon because he couldn’t play on. It would surprise no one. He was clearly not fit. Since the circuit had switched from clay to grass he had only played one match, which he lost. And by his own admission his preparation had been less than adequate. He’s not alone in preferring to practice lightly. Federer has made it clear for years now that practice is a necessary evil he more endures than enjoys. It’s Rafa who feasts off practice. So he’d had a bit of a hit with a friend and played some practice points. His hip had been hurting him, making practice even more perfunctory than it normally was. Andy Murray was also slowed by a bad hip—it was becoming more and more of a known thing. Murray’s game hadn’t fallen off a cliff, anyone could see that. But the more he soldiered on, the more the problem became clear to anyone watching. The difference was that Andy needed his hips first and foremost so that he could chase down every ball; on the other hand, he used his hips to generate the tremendous power he had on his groundstrokes and serve. That said, regardless of what type of player you may be, the hips are at the center of everything. He had retired from matches before with injuries cited that were harder to see than the lack of effort that came with them. This wasn’t the case here. And why would it be? His game was tailor-made for the grass: a thunderous, variable serve; quick feet; power off both wings with little in the way of windup; and soft hands coupled with a natural tactical aggression that together facilitate a smooth and effective net game. He had beaten Nadal here already. On Wimbledon’s show court, no less. At the age of nineteen. And barely a year into his professional career. It was the first time they had played each other: he was a teenager gifted a wild card and Nadal was the number-one-ranked player in the world. Thirty-seven aces later (in only four sets and against one of the great returners of serve in the history of the game), even the casual watchers knew his name, the kid who jumped up and down when he got a break of serve, the one who in the middle of a rally hit an inexplicable between-the-legs forehand winner from the baseline and asked the Centre Court crowd to celebrate it with him, the brown-skinned Australian guy with the Greek last name, big gold chain, and that little bit of baby fat lingering on his long limbs and face. Three years later, despite the consistency of his inconsistent results and effort and decorum and health, he was the twentieth-ranked player in the world and everyone’s dark horse for the 2017 Wimbledon title, even for those who’d already grown tired of his act. But the grass and Herbert and he himself would have none of it. They all conspired together to do Nicholas Hilmy Kyrgios in.
The Circuit Page 14