Hangover

If you've watched enough tennis,  you know that all other things being equal , style is destiny.

Of course, all other things are not always equal, which is how Rafael Nadal came to be the defending champion at the Pacific Life Open this year. Courage, fitness, determination, self-control, emotions, mental strength, even old-fashioned luck almost always have a hand in shaping events. Tennis has its very own set of Murphy's Laws: players heads explode and leave a haze of acrid smelling cerebellum hovering over the court; emotions infect the muscle memory in the arm like a really bad computer virus and cause gimme forehand winners to go whistling into the fence, instead of that seemingly vast expanse of open court begging to be partially filled with a winning placement.

What a crap shoot the game can be.

Today, though, it was different here at the Indian Wells Tennis Sauna. Ana Ivanovic and her Serbian countryman presented a stirring defense of Platonic reality, although each of them flirted with the dirtier version. Ivanovic opened the door to let Svetlana Kuznetsova back into the match, but thought better of the idea and slammed it shut again. And Djokovic briefly forgot the grand design and let Mardy Fish finger paint all over it before he remembered that he is presently the best hard court player on the planet.

It became apparent soon after the women's final got underway that the ever-enthusiastic Serbs who staked out a few rows up at the upper lip of the stadium could prove problematic. They waved Serbian flags and banners and kept up a running, disorganized chant that sounded like a weird malapropism for "suburbia":  Surbia, Surbia, Surbia. By game three, even fans pre-disposed to tolerance were thinking, Okay, Slobodan, cool it already! and wondering what these dudes would do should Ana happen to lose -  run out and torch a Denny's?

Occasionally, one of the partisans would cry out just as Kuznetsova was about to hit a second serve. It wasn't bad bad, just annoying bad (sort of like Sunday brunch for 50 afflicted by Tourette's Syndrome) and stupid bad. In her victory speech, Ivanovic apologized to the crowd for the boorishness of her fans, and Kuznetsova greeted a press conference question on the subject with a decidedly frosty: "I don't make any comments, okay? I'm not even thinking about going to that level."

It wasn't like Serbian shock troops paid Queen Ana much mind, either. When they gave Fish the same treatment, Djokovic invited Fish to serve again. The Serbs flip around the familiar rap on the United Kingdom: great fans, stink-o players.

But then, Ivanovic  also explained that many of these fans are coming to the sport for the first time, from the bottom of the NBA and soccer ponds. They're used to shouting Surbia! any danged time they please. Maybe they should have to answer a pop quiz on tennis etiquette before they get their ducats next time.

Apart from that irritant, the match was a pretty good if not overly dramatic advertisement for women's tennis. Ivanovic plays a fetching all-court game, a clean game. She hits with good length, and a conspicuous determination to either find or exploit any inviting hole on the other side of the court. You can win tennis matches by hammering away at the weakness of an opponent, by winning the battle for turf, or both (in which case, the word "blowout" enters the lexicon).

Either way is effective, but the latter produces an elevated and appealing type of tennis. Instead of groaning and fiddling around with your Blackberry as some poor turnip shanks backhand after backhand, you appreciate the way the superior player picks her spots, sets up her placements, and executes winning shots rather than feeding her opponent's self-destructive tendencies.

E.G.: at 4-4 in the first set with Kuznetsova serving, break-point down, Ivanovic saw a short-ball opportunity and jumped on it, cracking a crosscourt forehand winner. She crisply served out the set.

My margin note: The similarities between Ivanovic and Djokovic are so strong that they could be siblings, developed by the same mad tennis genius in some small village in Surbia!. Of course, we all know how far removed that is from the truth.

In the second set, Ivanovic teased a crosscourt backhand unforced error out of Kuzzie, to go up 2-1. But Kuznetsova broke back at 15, and when Kizzie held for 3-2 it looked like destiny might be thwarted.  But Ivanovic gathered her resolve while Kuzzie lost hers. Ivanovic held, and then scored the decisive break for a 4-3 lead - with serve.

This was not an unusual string of events for Kuznetsova, who is of the burning cerebellum school. Her form can fluctuate for any reason, or, it seems, just for the hail of it. My own theory is that at select times while she's running around on the court, her mind drifts away to other things, like, Did I remember to turn off the burner on stove before I left the house?  Do Fish sleep?Who are these people?  She needs to get errors out of her system as if they were building up like lactic acid, and then she returns to the business at hand, which by then has become digging herself out of a big, big hole.

She surrender the momentum, quickly and painlessly, and knew it: "There, I lost it (in that seventh game), made a little mistake. I gave it a little bit to her, because I felt like I had pressure on me all the time. She wasn't giving me any free points and she was attacking. It was, like, you feel like it's her day, like it goes everything her way."

Ahem. Sveta. You're supposed to feel "pressure." It comes with keeping score!

At least it was an honest confession, and an interesting one.But the second part is more valuable for our purposes. Any time you hear the word "attacking" applied to women's tennis you know that someone is doing something right. I asked Ivanovic what parts of her game she was most pleased with, and she said: "I was most happy about my aggressiveness, so I was staying low and following the shots and taking my opportunities, knowing when she would hit the short ball, I would try to attack and take time away from her. I was serving really well. I had quite a few aces (5) and that was important."

The open secret of the women's game is that holding serve is too often an even more daunting task than breaking. To me, the magic number is 6: Show me a women's match with fewer breaks and now you're talking about a proper tennis match, rather than a food fight with yellow cotton candy. In this one, there were five - but Ivanovic was broken just once. She  posted a first-serve percentage of 70 and saved 2 of the only 3 break points she faced. Kuzzie, by contrast, saved just 3 of 7. It was a superb hard-court performance by a stylish stylist.

The serve was no less important in Djokovic's march to the title; unfortunately, it was in a negative sense, when it came to Fish. He had 6 aces, just one more than Ivanovic, so you could say it was too bad he wasn't playing her, instead of Djokovic, who walloped 10. Fish had an anemic first-serve percentage of 40, while Djokovic garnered a 63. But three of them were the straw that broke the Fish's back.

In keeping with the vaguely fated, almost surreal air that surrounded Fish for most of these past two weeks, the surprise finalist found a way to avert a buzz-killing blowout when he rallied from a 2-6, 2-4 deficit to snatch away the second set. In the first game of the final set, Djokovic looked rattled and disorganized as he fell behind love-40 on serve. But he flung aside his baseball cap, stepped up to the line, and hammered out three aces to get back into the game. Surbia!  Djokovic held, and it took the air out of Fish's swim bladder. He surrendered his next service game and soon found himself down 0-3. He never threatened after that.

Fish admitted afterwards that he had a hangover of sorts. He said he came into the match "subdued" because what he had accomplished in reaching the final finally hit him last night. In other words, it dawned on him: Holy Cannole, I beat Roger friggin' Federer today! The epiphany came at an inconvenient time - 4 AM, by Fish's reckoning, and he did what any red-blooded American boy would do when faced with a similarly unnerving realization: He flipped on ESPN to check on the scores and highlights of yesterday's March Madness action. "I couldn't go back to sleep, you know, kind of realizing what I was about to embark on, and what I was about to do - try to win this tournament."

Fish handled the pressure of the final well, given that he was playing the Australian Open champion and the ultimate example of the style is destiny trope. It was almost emblematic when Djokovic's sporting gesture - giving Fish a do-over first serve, because of the distraction caused by an overzealous fan of Surbia! - backfired. As Fish told it: "Novak was nice enough to give me another first serve, which I made. And then he ripped back at my feet, so I was actually - probably would have been better with a second serve. . . But no, no, no, it (the white noise) wasn't bad."

It was a great day for Serbian tennis, and a great day for just rewards. We learned a lot, including that Fish don't sleep. Somebody tell Sveta.