When You've Got Nothing...

"What I say the other day is the real thing. Today is very hard to speak about having chances of nothing. Is not the right moment to talk about that. It’s the moment to really give to this victory the right value."

Is it any surprise that Rafael Nadal would react to his smooth and simple 6-3, 6-2, 6-2 first-round win over Mikhail Youzhny at the Australian Open with caution? To his fans, it had been a moment for rejoicing; over the course of the match’s 110 minutes, they let out cries and tweets of delight. They were relieved to see, after his rusty start to the season in Doha, that his forehand was hooking, his passes were dipping, his returns were penetrating, his fists were pumping, and his kit was louder than ever. Yet Rafa, as he always does, chose not to get ahead of himself. It sounded just as important to him to assess the meaning of this match correctly—"to give to this victory the right value"—as it was to play well and win it. And he wasn’t going to let anyone change his mind about that assessment.

Afterward, reporters informed him that Youzhny said he believed the Spaniard "can be very dangerous in the second week." Nadal answered by reiterating "what I say the other day"—that he isn’t one of the favorites to win the tournament. By now, this has become one of the cherished rituals of professional tennis, as predictable as Big 3 titles and outrage over grunting. The press asks Rafa if he's the "favorite" to win something, and he responds by hunching his shoulders, raising his eyebrows, shaking his head, and saying, "No." After which, fans roll their eyes and say, "There goes Rafa being Rafa." Or they accuse him of being falsely humble.

It's a bogus process all around. To begin, a "tournament favorite" is an artificial concept, useful mainly as a conversation starter for fans and media. It's also subject to daily change. Over the course of a two-week event, the presumed favorite can shift two or three times according to who goes in and out of form. As they famously like to tell us, the players can only think about, and win, one match at a time.

Beyond that, how many tennis players have you heard come out and declare themselves the favorite at a Grand Slam before it starts? This was Novak Djokovic’s answer to the same "Who are the favorites?" question over the weekend: "Well, I don’t think it’s nice to talk about the title already now when the tournament hasn't started....We have to have a right and humble approach to the tournament. So I'll take it one match at a time." Yet it’s Nadal’s answer that makes headlines.

That said, Rafa does think and speak strategically when he sets expectations for himself. Like a lot of athletes—as well as most humans and animals—he enjoys being the hunter rather than the hunted; he plays with more hunger and fewer nerves when he’s in that position. But what’s always impressed me about Nadal is his ability to speak honestly and usefully at the same time. In his interviews so far in Australia, I’ve been struck by how well he knows the drill when it comes to comebacks, and how realistic he is about putting a long-term plan into place.

"Every time is different," Nadal said of returning after a protracted layoff. "Every feeling is different. Every time you come back, you have the doubts, you have the feeling that you are far away from your best. But at the same time, you know the only thing you can is try to play with the right attitude and try to have the schedule to play matches, to play weeks in a row. It’s the only way to find the positive feelings and the confidence back."

Realistic and experienced enough to have a plan that looks long term, Nadal wins as much with his words, and how he uses them to think about his progress from match to match, as he does with those hooking forehands. That really is worthy of a headline.

"It’s disappointing. You know, it’s probably the worst thing that could happen. But still, the year is young and I really have to now sit and work on a few things and just maybe try to have a different approach to this kind of event and try to see what was lacking."

Ana Ivanovic was the other player who made news on the Australian Open’s first day, but her fans were anything but delighted. Ivanovic, the fifth seed and a runner-up in her first event of 2015 in Brisbane, suffered a stunning loss to No. 142 Lucie Hradecka, 1-6, 6-3, 6-2. Hradecka, as far as I knew, was purely a doubles specialist; it seemed weird even to see her playing singles, let alone out-hitting a Top 10 player.

Ivanovic, as the quote above attests, was just as honest as Nadal in her post-match assessment, and even gloomier. Her willingness to be open about her feelings, whatever they may be, is one of the things I like about her. She doesn’t rationalize or get defensive or make excuses or give her opponent backhanded compliments about how she was "playing out of her mind." When she was asked how she would get over a "shock loss" like this one, Ivanovic didn’t try to stay detached.

"It’s hard," she said. "There’s no easy way to do that... It has to hurt as well."

I had wondered as the season began whether we could finally trust Ivanovic’s latest surge. It had lasted for a full year and taken her back into the Top 5, but I still had the feeling that, unlike a true perennial Top 5 player, she remained subject to the whims of confidence—she could beat anyone when she had it, but lose to anyone when she didn’t. Yesterday, Ivanovic admitted that she succumbed to first-round jitters, and she was frustrated to think that if she could only have survived this match, she likely would have played much better after that. But Hradecka wouldn’t cooperate.

As open as Ivanovic was, though, her words were different from Nadal’s in a telling way: She didn’t talk about sticking to a plan. Instead, she talked, as she often does, about reassessing everything immediately. As she said in the quote above, "I really now have to sit and work on a few things and just maybe try to have a different approach to this kind of event and see what was lacking."

Ivanovic also admitted that, while she tries to see the big picture, "I’m such a perfectionist and sometimes I judge myself too much."

The Serb is famous for jettisoning coaches and trainers and starting over again with a new team; I won’t try to count how many times it’s happened. In this, she’s notably different from Nadal, who has had the same coach, his uncle, for 25 years. Whether she’s speaking or walking or playing, Ivanovic rushes ahead, and that seems to be true about her opinions of her game and herself. Misses aren’t just misses in her mind, they’re judgements.

Ivanovic will be better again. In a sense, she’s not all that different from Nadal—here, for the first time in a long time, she was the hunter rather than the hunted, and she didn’t like it. Watching as she struggled just to get the ball over the net in the third set, I thought about the wisdom of Nadal’s pre-tournament self-assessment. "Nothing" about his game was any good, he had said with a smile.

When you’ve got nothing, you’ve got nothing to lose.