A Fab Night

NEW YORK—When you woke up on Saturday morning you may have asked yourself, as you scrolled through the tweets on your phone and shook your head in growing disbelief: How in the world did Fabio Fognini, of all people, come back to beat Rafael Nadal, of all people, from two sets and a break down at the U.S. Open? This was the same Nadal who had led by two sets at Grand Slams 151 times before and never lost. And this was the same Fognini, who...well, it was Fognini; that’s all you need to know.

I was there, and I still couldn’t quite believe it as I scrolled through my own tweets this morning. Thinking back on the Italian’s 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-3, 6-4 win, it all seemed to happen with a flick of the wrist. From my perspective, along the baseline in a rollicking Ashe Stadium in the early hours of Friday morning, that’s what I saw over and over: Fognini sticking his right arm out, rolling his wrist over, and lasering the ball into a corner and past an incredulous Nadal.

That’s all it took. Seemingly with no preparation or effort or worry or even knee bend, standing straight up and down and keeping his body completely still, Fognini swung his racquet and the ball simply exploded. While his forehand was a flick, his backhand was like a compact left-handed baseball swing. His shots off that wing were frozen ropes.

The sound that came off Fognini’s strings was like a final, decisive, deadly thud that told you this ball wasn’t possibly coming back. If his groundstrokes were hard for Rafa to track down on the court, they were almost as hard to track with your eyes in the stands. The ball was on his strings one second, and against the wall on the other side of the court the next. You had to trust that during the blur in between, it had actually landed inside the lines.

Fans gasped and roared. Italian tennis writers spun around in their chairs to look at each other, bug-eyed; breaking all the rules of journalistic decorum, they danced in the aisles. On a few points, when Nadal would hit a seemingly perfect shot only to watch Fognini swat it away with a better one, I have to say that my jaw really did drop. At that hour, deep in Queens, Arthur Ashe Stadium, with its new roof and blaring music and dancing fans, felt like some kind of enchanted island, or tennis-party spaceship, where the game is always unreal.

Fognini dominated the rallies, but he wasn’t the only one providing the entertainment. Rafa, as he will, fought against the fifth-set ground-stroke tsunami. He ran as he always runs, tried every spin and angle he could, pushed back against the tide, and was carried along by a crowd that chanted his name. He forced Fognini to end points with blazing winners, and Fognini did—he hit 70 of them, 20 in the fifth set alone. At one point late in the fifth, the level of play had soared so high that I jumped a little in my seat when Nadal hit a ball that clipped the net. It was a rare flaw in the masterpiece.

“With Rafa you have to try that,” said Fognini, whose tactics were as straightforward as his technique. “Because otherwise if you run—he start the running at the beginning and you finish at the end of the week.”

“Right now I can’t tell you something more because was something incredible that I did today, I think.”

What was the key for Fognini, who has never been a master of hard courts? That was equally simple:

“Well, I was starting to feel the ball really good, believe me,” he said.

We believe you, Fabio. It’s hard to remember a time when a player took the ball earlier, or with more immediate initiative, than Fognini did last night.

In that sense, Nadal couldn’t be too hard on himself about this defeat, and he wasn’t.

“He play great," Rafa said. "It was not a match that I lose, even if I have opportunities. It’s a match that he wins. He played better than me, no? I didn’t play bad at all. I played a normal match, but not enough.”

Just as amazing as Fognini’s 70 winners in victory was the fact that Nadal made just 18 unforced errors—three in the fifth set—over three hours and 46 minutes, and still lost.

Afterward, while acknowledging that this was the first season since 2004 that he won't take home a major title, Rafa was positive about his progress in 2015.

“I think I have a good base now,” he said. “Good thing is I am not playing terrible matches like I did at the beginning of the season. When I am losing, I am losing because the opponents beat me, not because I lose the match, as I did a lot of times at the beginning of the season. That’s an improvement for me.”

The next improvement for Rafa? Speed, he says. Not running speed; hitting speed.

“I am playing with little bit less mistakes than before,” he said. “I have better feelings on the ball. Now remain to have again the speed, that extra speed on the ball, on the winner.”

Nadal did play, as he said, “a normal match,” and he does seem to be making steady, if surprisingly slow, progress this season. But he also fumbled a seemingly insurmountable lead, which was hardly the norm for him in the past, and his 82-M.P.H. second serves made life a lot easier for Fognini.

But the bad sign, from my perspective, was that his performance on Friday night reminded me of watching Lleyton Hewitt in recent years. Like Rusty, Rafa fought hard and hung in at the end, yet he lost. Like Rusty, he could never win the point he needed to win. Watching the fifth set, I felt all along that it was Fognini, not Nadal, who would find a way to win. I can’t believe I just wrote that, but it’s true, and turning that psychological dynamic back around will be just as big a priority for Rafa as getting more pace on his shots.

We’ll have to wait to see if Nadal can do it, but he seems as eager as ever to try, and content to think long term and stay patient. For today, we can only marvel at Fognini’s performance. It was one that left my mind boggled all the way through the walk out of the stadium and the bus ride back to Manhattan through the early morning dark. It reminded me that this isn’t just a great era for tennis stars, but a great era for quality of play up and down the ranks. Nadal served and volleyed once; Fognini didn’t serve and volley at all. Neither could hold his serve in the fifth set—there were seven consecutive breaks until Fognini somehow served the match out. Yet it was some of the most frenetic, aggressive, thrilling tennis I’ve ever seen.

The next morning, two images linger.

First, there’s the look on Nadal’s face as he left the court. He turned to the standing crowd and put his arms in the air to say thank you. That's when it seemed to sink in that he wouldn’t be back here for another year, and his face deflated a little. He couldn't hide his disappointment.

Then, there’s the memory of a peak point from the fifth set. Nadal and Fognini had run each other all over the court, and slugged and stabbed at the ball with abandon. Each shot brought the fans an inch closer to the edge of their seats; it felt as if everyone was moving toward the court as the point went on. Nadal had it won, Fognini had it won, Nadal had it won again—until, finally, Fognini won it for real with a drop volley.

Fabio didn’t need to hit that last shot quite as short as he did, or put quite as much mustard on it as he did, or send it as low over the net as he did. But he did all of those things anyway; because there were thousands of people watching, because it was 1:00 in the morning in New York City, because he could do whatever he wanted on this night. By the time the ball had bounced twice, it felt like the stadium, including a grinning John McEnroe in the ESPN booth, was out of its seat and up in the air.

The tennis-party spaceship had gone into orbit.