The A List

The most significant success story of tennis’ last two decades has been the rise, and continued rise, of the Australian Open. For years it was a major in a minor key, passed over by top players unwilling to make the trek Down Under at the end of the season. With the move to Melbourne Park and its hard courts at the start of 1988, it became the Happy Slam, a kind of U.S. Open lite without the frazzle or the glamour of New York. Twenty-two years after that shift, it might be time for the Aussie to acquire a new nickname.

In accepting his winner’s trophy Sunday, Roger Federer said of the crowd, “You always get the best out of me.” The day before, during the women’s championship ceremony, Justine Henin had said, “This was the best place for me to start my comeback.” Judging by the common word from these two sentences, we might begin to believe that the Australian is now the best Grand Slam. What would that mean, exactly? It’s tough to compare the majors as events, because each comes with such a distinct persona—they’re all the best at what they do. What the Australian Open now indisputably does best is produce excellent tennis, which, all things considered, may just make it the finest of the Slams. Once we’ve made a few laps around the grounds, excellent tennis, rather than historic atmosphere or celebrities in front-row seats, is what most of us pay to see. In Melbourne, you get the game in a classy setting, without distractions—it’s tennis with mass appeal and purist appeal. With a slew of five-setters and a rejuvenated women’s draw, it lived up to its reputation again in 2010.

What did we love from Down Under this year? Let's take it from the top today, because sometimes only the best will do.

Serena Williams

After the crime and the punishment, Serena came to Melbourne seemingly bent on playing clean, calm tennis. She succeeded for six of seven matches. In that seventh, her quarterfinal win over Victoria Azarenka, she showed us one more time what makes her unique. Who else, on a bad day, has ever possessed the ability to summon her absolute best on command, to stop all momentum and remove all frustration and doubt from her mind, her face, her strokes? Serena may or may not be the best tennis player in history—she’s won a total of 25 majors now, counting doubles and mixed—but she is certainly the game’s most instinctive and indomitable competitor.

Serena proved this again twice in Melbourne, in two very different performances. The first was in her win over Azarenka, in which she went from reverse to 100 mph in the course of a single game, all errors forgotten at will. How is that possible? If her U.S. Open blow-up was a moment in which Serena allowed her competitive desire to spin out of her hands, this match should be equally famous as an example of her astounding mental control over very similar desires, emotions, and frustrations.

Almost as impressive was Serena’s performance in the final. She played patchily but snuck through the first set against an even patchier Justine Henin. Then she watched as Henin soared through the second set on a flurry of winners to both corners. With one decisive set left, with no time to lose another, Serena found her best game and brought Henin to earth. It began at 2-2, 30-30, when Serena suddenly, for what may have been the first time in the match, stepped into a backhand return with conviction and snapped it down the line to win the point. She broke, held for 4-2 with an ace, a hop, and a fist-pump, and then broke again with another strong backhand return. Serena didn’t soar like Justine. Her play in the third set felt more like a queen stretching herself to her full height and towering over one of her subjects. It was odd, but as Serena raised herself up, Henin was diminished, until by the final game she barely seemed to be on the court anymore. The biggest story of the tournament had disappeared underneath her baseball cap. What was left was not a story as much as it was a reality—the bird-like Henin briefly soared, but when she came down, Serena was still on the other side of the net, an implacable presence that there was no getting around. As Henin herself said with special emphasis in her post-match speech, Serena Williams is a “real champion.” There can be no higher praise on the women's tour right now. A+

Roger Federer

What praises are there left to sing for Federer? This is not a new question—I asked the very same one when Tennis Magazine gave Federer its Player of the Year award way back in 2005.

Over the years I’ve explored and exhausted virtually all of the philosophical and aesthetic ramifications of Federer, so this time I’ll stick to the practical. Here are two elements of his game that make him special, and which I’d rarely taken full note of before yesterday.

First is his ability to create seemingly dozens of variations on each stroke, with the subtlest gradations of spin, angle, depth, and trajectory separating one slice backhand from the next, one kick serve from the next, one crosscourt forehand from the next. Some of these shots look almost like mistakes or mishits, but usually they aren’t. They’re just shots that no one else hits, or can hit.

The second, more important, but generally overlooked reason for Federer’s victory yesterday was his forehand. Over the last few years, we’ve heard about the rise of the return and of defense; and we all know that the serve is crucial. But forgotten by most analysts, maybe because it has become too self-evident to mention, is how crucial the forehand remains. Everyone at the top can win points, or at least set up points, with their serves, but the guys who win the Grand Slams—namely, Federer, Nadal, and del Potro—win them with their forehands, too. Andy Murray does not, and that was the difference. Federer, no matter how nervous or erratic he might have been at a certain point in the match, could always go to that well. He could always serve wide and move forward to finish the point with a forehand. If he found himself down 0-30, he could change the pace of play by taking a forehand and rushing the net behind it. If he needed a point at 30-30, he could make sure he set up the rally so he was maximizing his forehand. The unparalleled racquet-head speed he generates makes this shot safe, while his ability to hit it early—earlier than Murray hits his—means he can take over a point with it with one quick strike. More than that, having an unbeatable weapon makes settling on a strategy that much easier—your decision about how to structure a point is pretty much made for you.

Federer began the match by hitting his midcourt forehand inside-in, to Murray’s weaker forehand. It didn’t work, and I thought for a second we might see a replay of the U.S. Open final, where he kept firing into the teeth of del Potro’s forehand whirlwind. But Federer changed course early and started going inside-out to Murray’s backhand, where he has less reach. That worked. The larger point here is that Federer had the luxury of this decision because his forehand is so versatile, so lethal to either corner. No wonder the guy always looks so relaxed.

The 16-time Slammer played what he said was some of the best tennis of his career at this tournament, and he cruised through the semis and final without dropping a set. All questions of motivation seem to have been answered. Federer may not care as much about the week-to-week wins, but he doesn’t have to. The Slams are his territory, his turf, his work space, and they only happen four times a year. That seems like a reasonable workload for the next three, four, five seasons. Maybe the question should not be, When will Roger Federer start to decline? Maybe we should be asking, When will Roger Federer reach his peak? A+

Justine Henin

In the eyes of women’s tennis fans, Henin represents the beauty that's possible in the sport. Anyone who watched the way she elegantly pulverized her way through the second set of the final would know why. But Henin also needed to be gritty in Melbourne, to survive and play another day, to win ugly. Henin would have lost to Alisa Kleybanova if her opponent could have held her fitness together; she scratched and clawed past her countrywoman Yanina Wickmayer; and then she gave us a glimpse of her absolute best in her semifinal against Jie Zheng.

Henin, we learned again, is stubborn. She’s determined to play attacking tennis at all costs now. While that made her more erratic and a little less beautiful to watch—as good as her volley is, I’d rather see her backhand—it almost won her the title. Against Serena, just when Henin seemed to be wedded to a doomed tactic, to be forcing the issue way too much and not using her speed and consistency to her advantage, it all clicked. For a few games, we saw what Justine 2.0 might look like.

As exciting as it was to see her whirling around the court again, my favorite Justine moment in Melbourne came when she was standing stock still and small in front of a microphone, making her runner’s-up acceptance speech (or should it be called a concession speech?). Henin’s head was all that popped up over the mic. Her cap, touchingly, was still pulled low over her forehead—does she sleep in her tennis gear? Henin spoke calmly and with dignity. She wasn’t solemn and she didn’t cry. She told the important truth about Serena—she’s a “real champion”—without adding any sap. Henin came back to compete in matches like this, and she knew that putting it on the line meant having to accept the most crushing defeats. But unlike the last time she lost to Serena, in Miami in 2008, this one didn’t crush her. She looked happiest when she could say, with full confidence, that she’d be back in Melbourne next year. I’ve always thought of Henin as remote and hyper-controlled, the human side of her buried underneath the tennis player. Now I saw her in a different light. Her reserve didn’t seem robotic anymore; on the trophy stand she sounded classy and old world. Her stiff-upper-lip speech sounded noble. If Justine came back to teach the women how to win, she also ended up teaching the men, those weepy, sensitive, emotive men of the ATP tour, how to lose. A+

Andy Murray

I touched on this in my Federer write-up above, but the core of the problem for Murray is that his game doesn’t have a core. That is to say, he doesn’t possess a way to win points at will, a shot that he can always fall back on. We like to talk about how the game is primarily mental, as if a player’s technique has no baring on the outcome. But a player’s technical and athletic limitations come before, or at least at the same time as, his on-court mentality is being developed. Our brain works with the talents that our body gives it.

In the same way, Murray’s game has worked with what the sport’s most important shot, the forehand, has not given it. He takes the ball relatively late on this shot, and he puts a conservative swing on the ball. These two aspects together mean that Murray can't punish mid-court shots with his forehand—his natural swing doesn’t allow him too make contact soon enough or high enough, and he doesn’t have the topspin to create the kind of heavy, high-bouncing ball that Nadal has used so effectively against Federer. Because of that, Murray doesn’t move forward or attack naturally. His game instead revolves around side-to-side running and variations of spin and pace from both wings. This is not how majors are won. Grand Slam winners put the match on their racquet by ending points with their forehands. Think back to Murray’s best period in this match, the third set and its 13-11 tiebreaker. This was his last chance, a time to be aggressive, to hit out, to play with, as they say, “nothing to lose.” But who ended up controlling all of the rallies in the tiebreaker? Who ended up winning half of them at the net? It was Federer. At the very top of the sport, punch still beats counterpunch.

Like his fellow finalist Henin, Murray’s finest moment came during the trophy ceremony. As someone who has seen a lot of the guy over the last few years, a lot of his matches and a fair amount of his press conferences and practices, I was shocked to see him smile—I honestly had forgotten what a full smile from him looked like. When he came on tour as a teenager, Murray often let his emotions get the best of him, so he worked hard to keep those emotions down, way down. With his spartan fitness regimen and full-time seriousness, this consummately talented player, one of the most rewarding to watch in years, had begun to make the sport seem a little grim.

From the start of his career, Murray has also faced extraordinary pressure from the press and fans in Great Britain. He worked hard to make it appear as if he weren’t bothered by that pressure. But it was clear in the Wimbledon semifinals last year, when he was one match from seeing the Queen above him in the royal box, that the pressure was real, and that it got to him. Yesterday it wasn’t clear that he felt that pressure until after the match, when his voice cracked as he thanked all his fans back home for their support. Saying the words seemed to make it sink in that he’d come up short again. The world will remember the tears on the stand, but I’ll try to remember the smile. I already know tennis is heartbreaking. Murray has too much style and skill—and somewhere deep down, personality—to make it seem grim, too. A

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I'll get to the rest of the worst either tomorrow or Wednesday. For more from me on the tournament, find Tennis.com's podcast here. James and Pete and I will answer reader emails in our next edition. Sample question you might want to consider asking: How did you know Serena and Roger were going to win this weekend, Steve?