The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  There’s no choice but to think differently about those late nights and early mornings, bingeing on tennis in the dark because the world felt so precarious and you couldn’t sleep. They were, as I said earlier, an idea of order. Not an idea of order you would have ever expected in 2017, but an idea of order all the same. You considered it a guilty pleasure, an indulgence of the part of you that loves nostalgia; but it was instead a sign of things to come. You couldn’t know it then. But by Indian Wells or Miami, you should have had an inkling. By Barcelona that inkling should have been a bell. And by Wimbledon that bell should have been ringing, this time in your head as much as in your heart. Federer and Nadal had taken every tournament that defines them this year. Zverev could have Montreal and Rome. “Baby Fed” Dimitrov could have Cincinnati. No two players grew more in stature over the course of the year than those two, with Goffin not far behind. But Melbourne, Paris, and Wimbledon—those trophies might as well have noli me tangere inscribed across the front for anyone in 2017 not named Rafa Nadal or Roger Federer.

  Now it was New York’s turn. The extremely public spectacle of Grand Slams—how they tend to bring out the tennis fan in all of us, even if only temporarily—reaches its peak with the final one of the year, when stories come into focus, scores are settled, promises kept or destroyed. This is how the tour descends on the city, not with the glitz and glamour of Broadway, but rather with the feeling of culmination and exhaustion at sunset like a showdown at the end of a western set on a series of hard courts in the borough of Queens.

  The U.S. Open is my hometown tournament. I have always wanted it to feel like home, like a warm, inviting, and familiar place with its own local charm. As strange as it may sound, this in its essence has always been New York to me. And yet, I want New York to be the other New York, too. You know which one. Yes, that New York. I want it to be an imposing metropolis, a tough city for tough people with an unshakable sense of itself as the center of the world. This is also, in its essence, New York to me. I want it to be a prism of glass and steel where I can feel lost and alone when I want to; I want to be able to be struck by sudden sadness or joy surrounded by thousands of people and feel that no one is there. This heartens me. New York has always been that city, too. I want all of the New Yorks, together and at the same time. This seems impossible on one hand and a description of every day on the other. No tennis event encapsulates this quite like the U.S. Open, which has been held over the years on all three surfaces—first grass, then clay, now hard courts—at day and at night, outdoors and under a roof; it’s been rowdy, it’s been pristine; but most of all, regardless of any of this, it’s been grand.

  CHRONICLE OF A DEATH FORETOLD: ON WHY THE 2017 U.S. OPEN WAS TERRIBLE

  When you’re walking to the entrance of the U.S. Open from the Mets–Willets Point subway station, it’s hard not to think about all that’s going on and how life seems to simply go on. But really, what’s simple anymore? And what’s done simply? I walked on and hundreds of us exited through turnstiles and turned right to head to the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center as hundreds more exited through turnstiles and turned left to head to Citi Field. Normally it’s home to the Mets, but this night it was the home of a Lady Gaga concert. Roosevelt Avenue was flush with traffic, the wheels making slushing sounds in the constant puddle the falling rain spread on the pavement. Jonathan Galassi and I had tickets to see the night matches in Arthur Ashe Stadium and, of course, it has a retractable roof and so, although the remaining outdoor matches were being suspended as afternoon turned to evening and the rain continued to fall, we knew we wouldn’t miss anything because the matches we were going to would be played under Ashe’s immense dome. The rain didn’t matter much. And, free of worry of missing out, we wandered over the wooden-planked overpass that leads to the tennis ground and dreamed a little.

  Imagine a 2017 U.S. Open with everyone healthy. The top eight seeds would be some mixture—in no particular order—of Murray, Djokovic, Nadal, Federer, Wawrinka, Raonic, Nishikori, and Čilić. Six of those players have won the U.S. Open and Nishikori is a past finalist. Raonic has only gone as far as the fourth round, but the hard courts suit his game and he’s been a recent finalist at Wimbledon and semifinalist at the Australian Open. Each wins his respective section of the draw, and you’re left with these eight as your quarterfinalists. Seeding at this point would be everything: who matches up with whom, who doesn’t face whom unless they both reach the final. It could have been great, and it was what had been missing from the season. Not everyone had been healthy during any point of the year, aside from possibly during the Australian Open way back in January. It would have been great to see a top eight and then throw in Thiem, Dimitrov, Monfils, Zverev, Goffin, Tsonga, Berdych, players capable of staging an upset and reaching a quarterfinal or semifinal. It could have been great. It likely would have been great. But it wasn’t meant to be. Due to his ailing elbow, Djokovic ruled himself out for the rest of the year. After fifty-one straight Grand Slam appearances dating back to 2005, he would miss one. Wawrinka, one Centre Court title away from a career Grand Slam, lost in the first round of Wimbledon and shortly after shut himself down for the rest of the season. Just like that, the U.S. Open lost its defending champion. Raonic, riddled with injuries throughout the year and having seen his ranking drop down to eleventh from third, withdrew from the Open after Montreal due to an injury to his wrist—he would play only one more tournament in the year, Tokyo in October, which he would end up retired from again because of injury. Nishikori would also withdraw due to a need for surgery in his wrist; his team released a statement saying that “during practice in Cincinnati, Kei hit a serve and heard a ‘pop’ in his wrist.” Čilić decided to play, despite missing Montreal and Cincinnati with an abductor injury, but didn’t look right at all in his early matches and ended up losing in the third round. Nadal was still standing and grinding out victories after losing first sets, but he, too, was clearly slowing.

  It was less than a month ago that he’d lost early in Montreal to eighteen-year-old Canadian phenom Denis Shapovalov and in the quarterfinals of Cincinnati to Kyrgios. What’s more, despite now having regained the number-one ranking the very week of the U.S. Open, he hadn’t won a hard-court title since Doha all the way back in January 2014. He had managed to reach five finals on the surface since then and he’d lost them all. Federer, meanwhile, tweaked his back in Montreal at some point during his first match since the Wimbledon final. He played and won the next three matches that took him to the final, but looked uncomfortable doing so; during the time between points he seemed pensive, as though he didn’t understand the language his body was speaking or, worse, understood it all too well. By the time he played the final in Montreal he was a shell of himself and logged a dutiful sixty-nine minutes on the court before losing the title to the twenty-year-old German Zverev 6–3, 6–4. Over the course of his career Federer’s most troublesome nemeses have been Nadal, Djokovic, and his back. It would be wishful thinking to consider him the favorite at the U.S. Open in light of the form he showed in Canada. And so that mantle, through process of elimination, went to the world’s number one and the number one seed: Nadal. And if Federer was not fully healthy, which he clearly wasn’t, then the rest of the field was open.

  And as for Andy Murray, well … his biggest impact on the 2017 season was destined to happen in New York over the course of half a day when he decided, just two days prior to the start of the tournament, that he was not going to play.

  It was a typical Saturday afternoon. At eleven on Monday morning the U.S. Open was set to begin. In the days leading up to the start, players passed each other on the grounds on their way to and from their practice sessions. Andy Murray hadn’t played since Wimbledon on July 12. Trouble with his hips had wrecked his season, with Wimbledon being the worst showing thus far. On the court that turned him into a legend of the game, Wimbledon’s Centre Court, he lost the final two sets to Sam Querrey 1–6, 1–6. He’d suffered his share of heartbreak on
that court before at the hands of Federer, who in the past had brought him to tears there.

  Federer.

  He’d beaten Murray in the final in New York in 2008 to win his fifth straight U.S. Open, tying a record for the open era. In 2010, he beat Murray in the final in Melbourne for his fourth Australian Open title, tying a record for the open era. In 2012, Murray became the first British man to play in a Wimbledon final since Henry Wilfred (“Bunny”) Austin in 1938. Great Britain whipped itself up into the type of fury usually reserved for every four years when misguided, overenthusiastic optimism about England’s chances in the World Cup floods the papers and pubs. The pressure on Murray was stifling, and more so (strangely, not less) after Murray won the first set. Then Federer won the next three on the trot for his seventh Wimbledon singles title, tying him for the most ever with Pete Sampras and our old friend from Cannes, William Renshaw.

  But now it was 2017 and Murray was at the ultimate peak of his career. He began Wimbledon as the world number one and the tournament’s defending champion, but as those two July weeks went on it became clear to everyone watching that someone would have to answer the call of a resurgent Federer, who was lurking loudly on the other half of the draw. But Murray’s body betrayed him before he got that far. The London resident capitulated meekly to Querrey before a squirming local crowd. Those final two sets were difficult to watch. Murray moved like he was wearing flippers. There are more than a fair share of players on the circuit who would have simply conceded the match. But Murray, like Wawrinka in the first round, played it out on hobbled wheels. And in doing so he showed the world just how useless a professional tennis player can look trying to compete in an elite, high-stakes competition against another pro from the upper echelon of the game. He needed to rest and heal. It was possible he needed surgery. It was undeniable he needed to reset.

  Murray’s tendency after Wimbledon was to only play the two big tournaments before the U.S. Open—the one in Canada and the one in Cincinnati—but this year he skipped them both. This was the first time in his career that he was the number one player in the world, the first time he entered every tournament—Doha, the Australian Open, Indian Wells, even Rafa’s Roland-Garros—as the top seed. He’d not only won none of them, he had only reached the finals of the 250 in Doha, where Djokovic beat him in his debut as the world number one with the equivalent of a slap behind the ear from the bigger kid, and the 250 in Dubai, where his opponents were Malek Jaziri (then ranked fifty-first), Guillermo García-López (ninety-seventh), Kohlschreiber (twenty-ninth), Lucas Pouille (fifteenth), and in the final Fernando Verdasco (thirty-fifth). That was as good as it had gotten on the tennis court for Andy Murray in 2017.

  But there was still the U.S. Open.

  He looked over the schedule. After the U.S. Open there’s the Asian Swing: Chengdu, Shenzhen, Beijing, Tokyo, and the penultimate Masters 1000 of the season in Shanghai. Then the indoor season in Europe, the last Masters 1000 indoors in Paris, and then, closing things out in November, the tour’s round-robin tournament back home in London for the top eight players of the calendar year. It was in 2016 in London that Murray had managed to pull off what once seemed impossible: clawing back a massive point differential from Djokovic to close the year at number one. There was no way he’d even make it back to London; he wouldn’t have enough points for the year unless he went on the same type of late run he had last year. It was physically impossible for him. But there was still the U.S. Open. He’d won it once before. In fact, it was the first Grand Slam title he won and it remains the only Grand Slam title he has that’s not Wimbledon. It was back in 2012, when Berdych beat Federer in the quarterfinals, paving the way for Murray to beat Berdych in the semifinals and, running with the momentum, to beat Djokovic in a five-set final. He was the third seed in that U.S. Open … Djokovic was the second seed.

  2012. Those were good memories. Much better than those on the court in 2017.

  Murray hadn’t played in a competitive match in close to two months. At this point he didn’t know if he could. But, as Shakira sang, hips don’t lie. During practice, after practice, what were they telling him? Could he play in his condition? Was he getting better? Worse? He had 7,150 ranking points, which rather obviously qualified him for direct entry into the U.S. Open. Of course it would. Those are 7,150 points. And he had been the top-ranked player on the circuit from day one of 2017.

  On Monday the twenty-first of August, a week to the day before the 2017 U.S. Open was set to start, the points accumulated from Nadal’s seemingly innocuous loss to Kyrgios in the quarterfinals of Cincinnati were tallied into his total. The number came out to 7,645.

  For the first time since June 2014, Rafael Nadal was the world’s number one.

  Back in January, at the start of the Australian Open, Murray was the proud owner of a monstrous 12,560 points.

  That was, at that moment, 9,365 more than Nadal.

  And 10,580 more than Federer.

  Now he was back to number two. Somehow.

  It was unthinkable. And inexplicable.

  That day, for the first time since 1918, a total solar eclipse crossed the United States in plain sight from coast to coast. It was called the Great American Eclipse. Scotland was one of the few countries in Europe to see it from beginning to end. Sunset had already come to the rest of the UK by then; they missed the end, they were in the dark. The new number-two-ranked player in the world wondered what he should do.

  * * *

  He spent that week in New York on the practice grounds hitting as many balls as he could bear over the net. A fundamentalist disciple of practice, Nadal saw him there and reasoned that he would play. Rafa has spent practically half his career having these hard conversations with his body. To play or not to play. Can you play? Should you play? Sometimes you have a breakthrough, you stay in the draw and give it a shot. Sometimes your body doesn’t respond and you withdraw. Even Nadal knew that you don’t need to have his injury history to know how this goes. The second biggest story of the year on the men’s tour had been injuries. People play or they bow out. The U.S. Open had become a veritable graveyard of withdrawn names. It happens. Rafa’s been there. Many players, or most, on the circuit have. Can you play? Should you play? Murray let the days pass, practicing and without making further statements one way or the other. Monday turned into Wednesday and Wednesday into Friday, the day of the draw.

  Tournaments use the week before they begin for all the brouhaha: press events, social obligations on behalf of the tournament organizers, outreach to the local community, etc. As the week progresses toward the start of play, these whittle down to the announcement of the draw, which is when it’s revealed who begins playing whom on the first days of the competition and each player’s potential path through the tournament to the finals. You wouldn’t do the draw earlier in the week because you don’t want to make it a longer distraction on the players’ preparation, you want to give players time to assure themselves that they’re fit enough to play, and shit happens, so by making the draw on Friday you’re giving the players the most time possible to make it through the week without a game-changing setback that would necessitate a late withdrawal. As with all Grand Slam tournaments, there are 128 players in the men’s draw at the U.S. Open. Thirty-two seeds. Putting everything together is logistical origami. A player’s fitness can be the monkey wrench in not days or weeks but months of planning. So the draws are announced on Friday, two days prior to the start of the first round. And thus, when the draw reveals the tournament changes, it takes a shape, accepts and rejects possible futures of itself; although far from having an outcome, the tournament has its architecture.

  Players with ambitions, then, of going deep in the competition would put head to pillow on Friday night knowing the lay of the land of their section of the draw. And who they would only be able to face in the finals due to the mere fact of having been placed on the opposite half of the draw. For the most part, draws are random. The Austrian Jürgen Melzer is still act
ive, was born the same year as Federer, turned pro in 1999 (Federer in 1998), competed with him in juniors, and has been ranked as high as eighth in the world—Melzer and Federer have played each other five times on the circuit. The American Frances Tiafoe was born in 1998. He cracked the top one hundred for the first time in January 2017. He has a handful of victories on the ATP Tour. Many players in Tiafoe’s position won’t play Federer even once in their career—he played him three times in 2017 alone, including in a late-night match in the first round of the U.S. Open.

  Amid all the possible chaos in a draw is a singular certainty—think of it as the death-and-taxes fact of the thing, the cold, hard truth of why there’s even a draw at all—the top two seeds can only play each other in the final. A draw exists to keep the presumed two best players in a tournament as far away from each other and out of each other’s way until the presumed showdown at the end. All of the other stuff—the intriguing early matchups, the dark-horse title contenders circling like sharks in some complicated section of the draw, the upsets, feel-good stories, and fairy-tale runs by young up-and-comers making the most of a wild card and by veterans returning to the fray and riding good momentum built on from the grind of the qualifying rounds—all of those are fringe benefits, the light show to keep you busy. A draw has a function. Intriguing first-round matchups and unexpected quarterfinal runs are not functions of design, they’re the residue of function. The function of design is to have one and two meet. Hence, the phrase you have likely heard, “if things hold to form.” If things hold to form, Player 1 and Player 2 will meet in the final. Form follows function.