More than with most sports, to watch a tennis match is to concentrate and meditate on every miniscule aspect, every tic, of the two people on court. You can know a player by his forehand and his kick serve, but you can also know him by his grunt, his headband, the way he walks to the sideline, his reaction to a big win, the ritual he performs before serving. Bjorn Borg, cool assassin, blew on his fingers as he was setting up to serve. Roger Federer, nonchalant athlete, dribbled the ball between his legs as he walked back from the net, in the days when he used to serve and volley. Andy Roddick, power pitcher, drums the ball into the court. Nikolay Davydenko, reluctant champion, taps it downward as gingerly as possible. Everyone does it his or her own way, but I’ve never seen a pre-serve ritual quite like the one that Ernests Gulbis was showing off in Delray Beach last week. When he got to the baseline, he bounced the ball up to eye level, then tipped it farther upward with the back of his hand, before letting it settle into his tossing hand. What does this little juggling move say about the young Latvian’s personality? He’s pretty superstitious, and he’s got talent to waste.
In the past, the 21-year-old Gulbis has had no trouble wasting it. But that appears to be changing in 2010. After failing to win two straight matches for much of last season, and being embarrassed by Andy Murray at Wimbledon along the way, Gulbis is facing the new year with his head on straight. He’s 10-4 so far, he won his first career title in Delray, and he pushed Federer deep into a third set in Doha. Gulbis has regained the glow of the sure-shot prospect that he had back when he came out firing his cannon forehand in 2008. That glow had faded in ’09, when his questionable work ethic—as well as his rumored extracurricular activities—nearly made this wealthy man's son into a walking punch line about spoiled youth and squandered potential. Credit for the mini-turnaround must go to his new coach, Hernan Gumy, whom Gulbis teamed up with at the end of last season. “He made some big improvements in every aspect of my game,” Gulbis said in Delray. Still, it’s not like the kid has grown up all in one day. His preparation for the final included a Playstation session that lasted until 2:30 in the morning.
The question is, how much talent does he have to waste? Gulbis is now ranked No. 45, with a proverbial bullet next to his name. Is he, as everyone asks when a young player surges, Top 10 material? Let’s start by saying that reaching that exalted position is not as easy as it sounds. Or, rather, it’s exactly as hard as it sounds. There are at least a thousand guys with ATP rankings, and just 1 percent of them can be in the Top 10 on any given week. For Gulbis to enter that elite percentile, someone must exit it. Is he ready to be as consistent as, say, current No. 10 Fernando Gonzalez, or No. 9 Marin Cilic, a 20-year-old who also has a bullet next to his name?
Gulbis isn’t there yet, and he likely won’t be there this season. But the raw skills, the things you can’t teach, are in place. He didn’t drop a set in Delray. Even more impressive, he broke Ivo Karlovic three times in the final. He did it by showing an uncanny ability to read the direction of the big man’s first serve and get there in time to meet it out in front. If the skills necessary to do that—the reaction time, the hand-eye coordination, the racquet-head speed, the clean ball-striking—don’t make you believe in his potential, nothing will.
What Gulbis’ game has lacked is texture. He has variety, in the form of a superb drop shot, and explosiveness to burn. Give him an extra millisecond to hit his forehand and you can consider the point over; move up to challenge his second serve and you might find it kicking up into your face. But he never had the flexibility to gauge the moment and adapt his strokes to it. Like a human ball machine, every forehand was drilled full blast. He didn’t change the tempo of the match if wasn't going well, didn’t seem to think much before he served, didn’t dig in and adjust to his opponent. It appeared that a rally couldn’t be over fast enough to suit him. Even against Karlovic, there was still some evidence of his impatience. As Jimmy Arias of the Tennis Channel noted, after Gulbis belted a screaming roundhouse backhand into the net in the second set, there was no reason for him to go for immediate winners against Karlovic. Gulbis had the natural advantage from the ground, and he could afford to spend a little time constructing the point, moving the big guy into his backhand corner and waiting for a shorter slice to float back. It’s as if Gulbis’ ability to end a point from anywhere means that he’s never had to develop nuances to his game.
The brain cramp on that backhand aside, Gulbis played a savvy match against one of the tour's trickiest opponents. It used to be, when you played Karlovic, that keeping the ball in play was enough to earn you a service hold. Not so anymore. As Gulbis recognized, Karlovic is consistent enough now that opponents have to hit the ball hard and go for more—not that Gulbis has any trouble doing that. But his tactics were impressive in two other ways. It was a windy day, so he kept the ball far from the sidelines; that may be Tennis 101, but at least Gulbis has opened the textbook. More surprising, he began the match by going after Karlovic’s better shot, his forehand. Arias questioned this tactic, but by the end of the first set, the pace of Gulbis’s serves and ground strokes had completely broken Dr. Ivo's forehand down. It left Karlovic, who also couldn’t win points with his serve, with nowhere to turn.
All he could do was wait and hope that Gulbis would get nervous and blow up on his own. This wasn’t a forlorn hope, as the kid has had a history of winning first sets and going straight downhill from there. It appeared that it might happen again when Gulbis served, up a break, at 3-2 in the second. At 30-15, he double-faulted in a fit of pique after getting what he thought was a bad call. Here was the moment when the new Gulbis would be tested. On the next two points, instead of going for broke, he worked his way to the net for the first time in the match. At 30-30, he negotiated a thorny backhand volley in the wind by carving it crosscourt, where it blew away from Karlovic. At 40-30, Gulbis showed off his forehand volley, angling a solid passing shot crosscourt and onto the sideline for another winner. It was 4-2; Karlovic never challenged again.
If this was the moment of truth for Gulbis, what does it tell us about the truth of his game and his future? It appears that he can be patient and resourceful, that he can improvise, that he can win ugly—that, after all, there may be texture and nuance underneath the cannon-fire. It should be there. Off-court, Gulbis, whio was named after Ernest Hemingway, has a more nuanced personality than many of his peers. He speaks in an intelligent semi-whisper and mostly avoids clichés, and he has interests that range a little wider than the latest Will Ferrell movie. Gulbis prefers David Lynch; that may or may not require depth, but it definitely requires patience. Maybe Gulbis, a child of privilege who is also a lonely pioneer in his country—as he says, everything he does is a first for Latvian tennis—was ambivalent about the lonely grunt work he needed to do to succeed as a pro. Maybe, like Andre Agassi, he was a factory-made prodigy with a streak of self-doubt that led to an early case of burnout.
Like I said, there are many ways to know a tennis player, one of which is to hear what he says after a match. Gulbis’ pet word during his first couple of years on tour was “loser.” He didn’t want to be a “big loser” against Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008. Later that season at the U.S. Open, he predicted that no one would come to his press conference after his loss to Andy Roddick, because, “Nobody is interested in losers.” This was the voice of the ironical post-adolescent, the overgrown child.
In Delray, Gulbis had a new pet word, courtesy of his coach: "enjoy." “My coach told me before the match, ‘Just go on court. Enjoy your first final. You’re a young guy, enjoy it.’” You can read a lot into body language, but you can read even more into real language. This was the voice of a young man enjoying something for the first time: feeling like a winner.