The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  A year later, and he finds himself in a first-round U.S. Open match deep into the fifth set against the prohibitive favorite. He’s a year older now and coming off the biggest win of his career to date, having taken down the seventh-ranked player in the world and hottest player on the tour, Sascha Zverev, in Cincinnati.

  He is dressed in matte black from head to ankles, a thick black headband where his flattop starts its rise, his sneakers streaks of rouged pink. Still at the beginning of whatever path he’s on in his life, he finds himself at the same big place but this time on a much bigger stage, Ashe, against much bigger competition, Federer, two sets all, 3–5 in the fifth, 40–all: two points from losing the match but also two points from edging toward a life-changing win. He watches Federer start his toss, bend his knees, twist into trophy position, and rise to meet the ball.

  * * *

  The deuce side of the court, the right side, offers three options for a right-handed server against a right-handed returner: serve wide to the forehand; serve directly at the body; or, the high-risk-high-reward option, go for the T right down the middle of the court. The risk is that it’s the smallest of the three targets and missing it leaves you facing a more compromised second serve. The reward is that it’s the most difficult shot to return, especially effectively, and it goes to the returner’s backhand. If you hit your target on a T-serve, you’re going to get an ace at best or, typically, a compromised backhand return—usually a player’s weaker side. A serve directly to the body, which inexplicably appears to be used less these days, can surprise a returner who is expecting to have to move quickly, instinctively, to the right or left. There’s no ace to be found in it, but a hard serve directly into the body is an excellent way to get a player to freeze, and it plants another seed of doubt in the returner’s mind about where subsequent serves might go. The serve out wide to the forehand moves the returner off the court, opening up wide swaths of space for the server to play the ball into if and when the returner gets the ball back in play. It’s a classic option for a player looking to finish off a one-two punch: move your opponent off the court with a wide serve, and then, when the ball comes back to you, take advantage of the returner being off the court. Nadal has long thrived on the left-handed version of this play. The risk involved with it is that if you miss your target, you’ve given your opponent numerous options off the forehand: down the line, aggressively cross court, deep and right back at your feet—it’s a recipe for disaster.

  Federer decides to go down the T.

  The serve has spin for safe placement, which allows Tiafoe to jab-step twice to his left and hit an uncomfortable-looking two-handed backhand that bounces just behind the service line on the ad side of the court, deep enough to keep Federer pinned to the baseline. Federer loads up his one-handed backhand and sends a topspin reply deep and straight to the middle of Tiafoe’s side of the court.

  This is the start of a conversation under tense circumstances. No need to be rash. Instead, a prudent shot to see where things in this point are and where they might be heading. Hey, Frances. How’s it going? What do you want to do? a shot like this implies, where the questioner plans time to feel out the response.

  Tiafoe sees Federer’s reply coming right down the middle of the court and takes two steps backward, prepares his forehand. The choice is Tiafoe’s now. Left? Right? Straight back down the middle? High risk? Or with a safe margin? Aggressive and flat? Or defensive, with tons of spin? Tiafoe chooses to hit the ball right back at the crouched Federer, who had remained where he was, shading ever so slightly toward the ad court on his left. Having seen that his return is in, Tiafoe steadies himself and crouches into ready position. He is standing three feet behind the baseline now. He’ll stay there.

  Federer takes Tiafoe’s neutral reply with his forehand, this time letting loose a heavy, topspin shot that lands deep in the corner, making Tiafoe move and find the ball with his backhand; by the time he reaches it he’s three feet behind the doubles alley. But Tiafoe’s foot speed makes getting to this ball easy. His feet process information quickly and turn Federer’s shot out wide more into a nuisance than a real inconvenience. Tiafoe has to move, but he gets there in plenty of time and sends back to Federer a strong backhand response.

  The conversation changes now.

  His feet know something Federer can’t possibly know at this moment: they see the pattern that Federer sees, they’re reading his mind.

  Normally, Federer shouldn’t and probably doesn’t care.

  Tiafoe’s backhand does what it does best at this stage of his career: it holds the fort. Tiafoe twists into a two-handed shot from the doubles lane that he sends safely back, right back, where Federer was standing. Federer’s third shot from the same spot of the court is the change of rhythm—a punctuation mark before the final statement. He uncorks a sharp forehand straight across the court from where he’s standing. It’s not down the line, as Federer wasn’t down the line; but it’s close to it and it’s hit with venomous pace. Tiafoe has no time to sprint the length of the court to get to Federer’s forehand.

  Tiafoe sprints the length of the court and gets to Federer’s forehand.

  Federer’s no fool. Stubborn, but no fool. He knows Tiafoe is fast. And the forehand he hit, dangerous but safely inside the line, is designed to turn out the lights on Tiafoe before saying good night. Tiafoe may well get to the shot. If he doesn’t, the point is over: advantage Federer. If he does, sprinting all that distance won’t get him in position to hit anything back that would trouble Federer. And that’s when he’ll look to say good night. Maybe Tiafoe will get to it and loop something tamely back that Federer will meet at the net and pluck out of the air. Or maybe he’ll feel pressed and go for a shot he can’t possibly hit—a winner right back down the same line, for instance—and spray the ball wide. Same difference. Same result.

  Tiafoe is running with his racket already drawn back to hit a forehand. It’s the proper technique. You do this so that you don’t waste time and motion when you arrive to the ball, your racket at that point already drawn back so you just swing at it. It’s the proper technique, but to see Tiafoe do it emphasizes what a mess his technique is. Imagine a surfer standing on a board, arms bent and out, turning his trunk to change direction in the water. This is what the Tiafoe forehand looks like. His racket preparation allows him to hit the ball with both tremendous pace and spin as it stresses in his motion the action of brushing up against the back of the ball. It’s effective and unsightly. You see all of the coaches in his ear, touching his forearm, holding his elbow as they guide him through one practice swing after another, changing from one swing to another, textbook to arcane and back again. But there are things you can’t coach. This is one of them.

  His racket is behind him, the stringbed parallel to the court. This is, for now, the point of his life. He’s sprinting with ridiculous speed, it’s almost laughable how fast he’s moving. A black kid in black being a black blur on Arthur Ashe’s court. He cups the ball waist-high with his racket, catching it more on its side than on its back, and sends the ball back across the net at a forty-five-degree angle.

  It finds the singles sideline of the right service box. As it kisses the white tape, it seems to veer off farther away from the court and pick up speed.

  Federer starts to sprint after it as though he can reach it, as though he hasn’t seen what he’s just seen, but his mind catches up to what’s happened and you can see him slightly drop his head while his body still dutifully moves to the right. Then the ball skids off to nowhere. No, not nowhere. Toward a corner exit. It was done with the match and with all of us. It bids us all adieu.

  Now 5–4 in the fifth. Advantage, once again, Tiafoe.

  Federer had faced this scoreline just two points earlier. When he wiped it away with an ace down the T we ended up where this story started: deuce. But Tiafoe’s capitulation didn’t come with it. Just like when he broke Federer in the first game of the match, as the crowd still filed in and the stadium r
eeked of noise, he held on and won the set. And just like when he lost the second set 1–6 and the third set 2–6, which was the expected capitulation, he pushed back and won the fourth set in kind, 6–1, when the last thing Federer wanted to do was play five sets in the first round of the U.S. Open in the middle of the night and coming off tweaking his back. Federer wanted this to end as soon as possible. And it wouldn’t end. Not because he was sloppy but because Tiafoe answered the bell. Federer has offered Tiafoe four break chances up to this moment. And Tiafoe has taken three of them.

  So it’s 5–4 in the fifth. Advantage, once again, Tiafoe. Federer once again goes down the T. Tiafoe stretches to reach it and send back another deep, safe return almost to the same exact spot as the last point but this time with his forehand. Federer is impatient here. Enough of this. He whips the same forehand he had hit before straight across the net.

  Tiafoe’s on fire. He’s on autopilot. Federer knows the same shot he just hit for a winner is coming. But now that he knows it’s coming it’ll be easy to deal with. He charges in. He’ll snuff it out at the net.

  The answer instead comes down the line. With clarity and pace. Federer never saw it coming. Federer has offered Tiafoe five break chances up to this moment. And Tiafoe has taken four of them. Game, Tiafoe. The crowd, which had been half enthralled, half expecting the usual outcome, had come to life again with Tiafoe’s scooped crosscourt winner the point before. Now they are beside themselves. The chatter between points has stopped. A roar erupts with the break. Jonathan roars along with everyone else; amid all the cheering I only hear one word he says: heroic. Tiafoe, soaked in adrenaline, continues his baseline sprint all the way to his chair. They had played nine games in the set and it was time to switch sides. Tiafoe could serve now for 5–all in the fifth. Five–all in the fifth. After that he’d see another service game from Federer, who was unrecognizably shaky with his serve. Anything could happen.

  Then, the most likely thing happens. Federer finds his way straight into the biggest service game of Tiafoe’s young career: 30–40—match point for Federer.

  Tiafoe blasts a body serve at him, which Federer blocks back with his backhand, just short of the same spot of the court where all of the action had been for Federer in the prior game. But the return is a little short and Tiafoe’s feet push him forward to find it. Before he knows it he’s between the baseline and the service line: the rough waters of no-man’s-land.

  There is no right shot in this position at this score against this player in this place at this hour. Any shot is on the table, as long as it keeps the story going. Something with safety to it, but not soft. Something that allows you to reset and get home, weigh your options, grow into the point. And here, finally, Tiafoe’s feet fail him. He shapes up to spin a forehand to his right. Then twists at the last moment to hit one straight up the line or slightly to his left. His feet, processing the information, go out from under him. The ball goes meekly into the net. Federer looks neither joyous nor relieved, more concerned. Tiafoe has played a menacing match, he knows; but something is not right. Tiafoe looks down at the court, shrugs at it with the wave of the arm of the betrayed. But then he quickly gets over it. Heads to the net. Where he and Federer hug and walk off out of sight.

  U.S. OPEN EPILOGUE

  Dušan Lajović. Taro Daniel. Leonardo Mayer. Andrey Rublev. Alexandr Dolgopolov. Juan Martín del Potro. Kevin Anderson.

  These are the players Rafa Nadal beat to win the 2017 U.S. Open.

  The highest-ranked among them was del Potro, who staged the type of comeback that you wouldn’t believe even if you saw it against Dominic Thiem while felled almost to his knees by the flu. Down 1–6, 2–6 and facing match point down 3–5 in the third, he then emptied his tank in a stunning display of resilience and power to beat Roger Federer in a four-set quarterfinal. Out of gas and lacking the right weapons against a rested Nadal, he gave everything to win the first set 6–4, then faded, his competitiveness spent, the match soon taking the feel of pitch-and-catch.

  The average ranking of Nadal’s seven opponents was sixty-three.

  He lost a total of three sets.

  It was his sixteenth Grand Slam and his third U.S. Open title. He entered the tournament as the top-ranked player in the world, exited the tournament as the top-ranked player in the world, and would end 2017 as the top player in the world.

  For some reason, the tournament never caught fire. Anderson was the last man standing on the other side of the draw. It was loud outside and loud inside. It came and went. There wasn’t much more to it. As we say in New York, whether we love tennis or not: It is what it is.

  Nadal vs. Dimitrov at the Rolex Shanghai Masters quarterfinals, October 13, 2017. (Photograph by Lintao Zhang / Getty Images)

  THE ASIAN SWING

  Real autumn comes just before the clocks change, before all the drastic adjustments to the encroaching darkness. That’s autumn frozen in time. Picturesque autumn of any century but this one, which feels like it’s left autumn behind but for that thin line of time when the Asian swing happens and the mornings indulge themselves with long, blue 7:45 a.m. sunrises, and the days feel more like summer going slowly through the motions of becoming winter than a season unto itself. If you live in New York, as I do, it can feel like tennis has gone away and won’t be back for a long while.

  Tennis ceases to come up casually here after the U.S. Open. The final Grand Slam plays out like the final scene in a film, the fourth piece in a four-part puzzle.

  But the circuit rolls on. After the final scene there are the credits and something more—special things. And yet, it’s true that tennis becomes more intimate at this point of the year. Especially in 2017, when the Australian Open became a type of tennis therapy played out in public. In a few weeks, when the cold really comes, I’ll be back to playing on a red clay surface called Fast Dry in an indoor bubble under the Ed Koch Bridge. And I’ll be starved for a good match on the television and the casual conversations with people who’d seen some big Grand Slam match. January will come again, then, and reset everything.

  But these weeks between late September and early October are when the tour becomes a time for the players like no other point in the year. After nine months’ worth of results, the Asian swing is when a player can step away and see the shape his season has taken—whether he’ll wait to dip 2017 in amber or drop it in the trash. Chengdu-Shenzhen, Beijing-Tokyo, and then Shanghai: these form the bridge where the circuit crosses over fully into realms of personal glory. Everyone dreams of the Grand Slams, and for that reason they are for everyone; they are as much the fan’s dream as the player’s. If you tune out after New York, you miss the season-defining questions that come after. There’s still time to rise or fall in the rankings with all the personal heavens or hells that come with it. There’s still time to finish at a career-high number, in the top one hundred, top fifty, top twenty, top ten. There’s still time for a very select few lucky souls to qualify for the über-prestigious ATP Finals in London that conclude the year. Still time, unbelievably it should seem, for Federer or Nadal to end the season at number one.

  This is also the newest part of the circuit. The Japan Open, founded in 1972, is the elder statesman. Chengdu was founded just in 2016. Shenzhen in 2013. And Shanghai in 2009. This newness has allowed the swing to tuck itself sensibly into this part of the calendar, following a neat big-bigger-biggest format: the two 250 tournaments—Chengdu and Shenzhen—are played simultaneously; followed by, again simultaneously, the 500s in Beijing and Tokyo; and then the Masters 1000 in Shanghai closes out the swing.

  And it’s here, as the circuit began to near its end, that 2017 started to circle back to its beginning.

  Chengdu ended up being won by the player who first set the alarm bells of the 2017 season ringing by beating Djokovic in the second round of the Australian Open. All the way back in January, Denis Istomin had made the draw in Melbourne as a wild card. The week prior he was playing in a Challenger in Bangkok, where he lost in t
he second round. Thirty years old, ranked 117th in the world, and coached by his mother, Klaudiya Istomina, he had been born in Russia but plays under the flag of Uzbekistan. Istomin stood tall against Djokovic, hung with him stroke for stroke, and played the big points as if he and not his opponent were a six-time champion of the tournament. And this wasn’t the knackered Djokovic we’d come to see later in the year: he’d played one tournament beforehand, Doha, and won it. Djokovic acknowledged Istomin’s superiority after the match: “All the credit to Denis for playing amazing,” Djokovic said. “He deserved to win. No doubt, he was the better player in the clutch moments. He stepped it up, played aggressive. Served very well, very precise. There’s not much I could do.” For his part, Istomin was more circumspect about the best win of his career to date. Asked how he did it, Istomin responded, “I don’t know, actually, how I did it.”

  He may not have known, but he followed it up by beating thirtieth-ranked Pablo Carreño Busta of Spain in the following round. Carreño Busta would go on to have a career year in 2017: at the start of Chengdu he was ranked tenth in the world.

  The victory against Djokovic in particular was the type that, for players ranking in the hundreds, would be the highlight of their season. But when I asked my friends if they’d rather win an early-round match at a Grand Slam against the favorite or win a 250, they unanimously chose the 250. (For the record, I’d choose the slam upset.) Istomin didn’t end up having to choose: he started the year with one and closed the year with the other. Admittedly, he didn’t do much at the other majors, but so be it. As much as the start of the year turned all of the focus back on Federer and Nadal, this year was also for the Istomins on the circuit. He started 2017 as the 121st-ranked player in the world and ended it ranked 63rd. As long as he remains hovering at that number going forward he’ll be an automatic entrant into the Grand Slams, Indian Wells, and Miami.