!Rafa by Pete Bodo
PARIS—It was yet another bolo forehand blast, this time to the deuce court corner of his opponent's side. Andy Murray got there—barely—and tried to scrape back a forehand, cross-court. The ball never made it past the net. Across from Murray, Rafael Nadal flung his arms high in the air and fell to his knees, melting into that supreme monent of ecstacy—as if he had just equalled the record held by Bjorn Borg, winning the French Open for the sixth time.
I probably wasn't the only one who wanted to shout, But Rafa. It's not over yet. You've got one more match to go!
The reaction was telling, given how besieged Nadal has been feeling ever since Novak Djokovic became a monster doomsday stroking machine somewhere back in December. A few days ago in a post-match press conference, Nadal said, "I have almost 25 years (of age) but it seems like I am playing for 100 years on the tour." Everyone laughed, but Nadal didn't mean it as a joke. He then groused about the length of the season and came danged close to laying out a new calendar and a revised ranking system taking two years of results into account.
Nadal also rued the fact that he gets no time at the beach, and hasn't spent a single weekend at home since before the Indian Wells tournament. Never mind that he doesn't even get to celebrate his exhaustive, triumphant efforts, not properly, anyway. "And mentally (tennis) is special, too. Because you win a tournament, the winner of Roland Garros—well it happened to me, I won Roland Garros five times, but the next Monday I was practicing at Queens."
There's something more going on here than a discouraged player's familiar perception that the glass is half empty rather than half full. In fact, some in the Spanish press corps, more than aware of the similarities in the profles of two men, are scared stiff that Nadal is going to go the way of Borg. Just get sick and tired of the grind and the demands and the pressures and call it a career. Pull off something Jimmy Buffet might write a song about.
The idea is scary and entirely far-fetched, or it didn't seem so about a week ago. That was partly because the negativity that has crept into Nadal's attitude has been reflected in his tennis. The guy who once specialized in getting the early break and then bulldozing his opponent, 6-2 or 6-3, is now showing signs of the kind of mental fatigue that results in playing a set that he wins 7-5, after scoring consecutive breaks but failing to consolidate that advantage.That's exactly what happened today, and on Court Philippe Chatrier, where Nadal routinely crushes opponents of any description like a frat boy crushes an empty beer can.
The only mitigating circumstance for the alarmist is that Murray, the man Nadal beat today, 6-4, 7-5, 6-4, can bamboozle anyone, on any surface. In his last two matches before this one, Murray presented his opponents (Viktor Troicki and Juan Ignacio Chela, respectively) with a grand total of 30 break points. Today he offered Nadal 13. But he belted his way to 18 of his own against Nadal's serve, and converted just three. That was the silver lining for Nadal in this not-so-straight straight-sets match.
"It was a long match, a lot of long games, a lot of deuce games," Murray said. "A lot of service games were really, really tight. Yeah, I thought I did well. Everyone seems to think it's easy against Rafa to just come into the net or come in or go for big shots, but you do have to be very patient. Sometimes I didn't quite get the ball I was looking for, and sometimes when I did I made a few mistakes. But I think it was a close match."
At times, it seemed that the players held the games in their teeth and tugged away, like two puppies amusing themselves with a chew toy. The closest thing to a turning point arrived at 5-all in the second set, with Murray ahead 40-15. But a poor drop shot attempt off Nadal's service return opened a Pandora's box that ended with one of Nadal's numerous inside-out forehand winners. The toll that reversal took on Murray was obvious. Nadal then served what would be one of the only three love games in this match (and one of the others was the last game, when all hope was already lost).
The trouble Nadal had winning his service games, including many in which he started out strong but then lost his way (a difficult thing to do in what can be a mere four-point game), had much to do with Murray's doggedness, and his almost preternatural ability to come up with remarkable, disaster-averting shots while having a proportionately similar degree of difficulty taking advantage of his opportunities. Murray came up with genius-grade formula for self-defeat today: when Nadal wasn't clubbing winners on those break points against himself, Murray was dismissing them with lackluster play. And we all know this game usually is all about how you play the big points.
As Nadal himself pointed out, his exceptional degree of success defending those break points (it bears repeating: Murray made only 3 of 18) probably had a lot to do with the fact that Murray never led in the match—it was a steep uphill slog all the way, with the pressure to get that elusive break, to get into the match scoreboard-wise, constantly mounting.
But there was something else at work, and I'm going to share it with you even though I'd like to see if the claim holds up to scrutiny. My pal Al Delmas of Spain's sporting daily, Diaro As, explained that Nadal has described what seems to be a formula and philosophy for playing break points. When he's down break points, Nadal looks across the net at his opponent and makes a calculation: Does he go for the body serve to the forehand (cuerpo derecha) or backhand (cuerpo reves, with an accent over the second "e")—that is, he decides whether he's going to jam the returner on the forehand or backhand side.
This results in more of a jam serve than a body serve, and if you think about it, you can see how having such a written-in-stone game plan can actually relieve a certain amount of the intrinsic anxiety of the break-point scenario—it relieves you of having to make a difficult decision, and keeping you from coming unglued, distracted by the panoply of options. I don't know how long or consistently Nadal has applied this strategy; it's hard to imagine that the formula is ironclad, or as much of a magic bullet as it may seen. But there it is for your consideration.
