Federer, Kyrgios beat future Hall of Famers in stunning ways Wednesday

“I knew what I had to do today,” Nick Kyrgios said after his 6-4, 7-6 (3) win over Novak Djokovic in Indian Wells on Wednesday.

What might that have been? In his first match with Djokovic, two weeks ago in Acapulco, Kyrgios had discovered the quickest way to beat a 12-time Slam champ: throw down 25 aces over two sets.

Kyrgios couldn’t match his ace count in Indian Wells; he “only” fired off 14 of them in 11 service games. But his serve was every bit as devastating. Against one of the sport’s best returners, he won 87 percent of his first-serve points and never faced a break point. Djokovic only managed to reach deuce once. Kyrgios also won a couple of crucial points—one at 3-2 in the second-set tiebreaker—with 126-m.p.h. second-serve aces. If it’s just a matter of Kyrgios realizing that’s what he has to do on a given day, and then doing it, the rest of the tour is in trouble.

We knew about Kyrgios’ serve. What was surprising and more impressive was the way he stayed with Djokovic from the ground. Kyrgios won a long rally to break early, and for a man who never met a front-facing tweener he wouldn’t try, he played well within himself on this afternoon. If he missed, it was generally not because he tried the wrong shot, became impatient or got too greedy. Kyrgios can dish out pace with his serve, but he can also absorb it from the baseline. Against Djokovic, and in his previous match against Alexander Zverev, he didn’t give his opponent much to work with, or any obvious places to go with the ball.

A year ago, I thought Kyrgios’ shovel-style backhand was suspect; not anymore. In the past, his drop shots and tweeners have been signs of apathy; this week they’ve kept his opponents off balance. From his shot choices to his desire to compete, you never know how Kyrgios is going to approach a match. That must make it hard for his opponents to know exactly how to approach him. How do you treat a match normally when he’s ignoring all of the conventions of tennis competition? In most cases, it would be a shock to see someone go out of his way to hit a tweener on match point against Djokovic, the way Kyrgios did on Wednesday, but with him you expected it.

In both of their matches, I’ve had the feeling that Djokovic hasn’t known exactly how to approach Kyrgios. While the Aussie has been fired up, and has generated the emotion in the arena, Djokovic has mostly been subdued. Kyrgios has played with an insurgent, attacking spirit, like a man with something to prove; Djokovic has played tentatively, like a man trying not to lose. With his big serve and heavy ground strokes, Kyrgios has kept Djokovic from getting his teeth into the baseline rallies. Djokovic is a rhythm player; Kyrgios is a rhythm disrupter.

On Wednesday, Djokovic was also clearly affected by the sun and heat—he started to do better when shade crossed the court—and by the fact that he was coming off a three-set win over Juan Martin del Potro the previous evening. Kyrgios, by contrast, had finished his (much easier) match in the afternoon.

This loss doesn’t negate what Djokovic did against Delpo. He said it was the best he had played this season; I’d say it was his most electric shot-making display since his semifinal win over Dominic Thiem at the French Open last year. We know that Djokovic still has that kind of tennis in him, and we can only guess that if he had had more energy against Kyrgios, he would have been properly motivated to do what he could not to lose to him again.

But we can also guess that Kyrgios’ game is going to present a problem for Djokovic. How many opponents other than Kyrgios could have beaten Djokovic on Wednesday, even in the state he was in? Not many, I don’t think. Having to face Kyrgios’ serve made a bad Djokovic mood that much worse.

“We’ve never seen you hit backhands like that,” Tennis Channel commentator Mary Carillo told Roger Federer after his stunning 6-2, 6-3 win over Rafael Nadal.

“Me neither,” Federer said.

Like Kyrgios, Federer was trying to beat a Hall of Fame opponent for the second time in 2017. And like Kyrgios, he ended up doing it in a surprising way. The shot that has always been Federer’s Achilles heel against Nadal, his backhand, was his most lethal and gasp-inducing weapon.

We’d seen signs of that backhand in Australia. Federer had moved in, stood tall, taken the ball on the rise and followed through with a longer and more confident extension than he typically had in the past. He did all of that again, and then some, against Nadal in Indian Wells.

For years—12, to be exact—Rafa had handcuffed Federer with high-bouncing, heavy-spinning balls to his backhand; they got up around his shoulders, pushed him back and kept him from attacking. Finally, on Wednesday, Federer moved forward and took those same shots earlier, at chest level, drove through them—and drove them past Rafa. The same was true with Nadal’s serve. For 12 years, he has made a living—and saved a few thousand break points—by sliding his lefty delivery to Federer’s backhand in the ad court. The response was often a floating slice to the service line. Today the response was often a line drive into the corner.

With his go-to shot gone, and the traditional dynamic between them completely scrambled, Nadal tried to go into Federer’s forehand. Federer had been waiting half a lifetime for that moment, and he didn’t let the opportunity slip. Forehand, backhand, crosscourt, inside out, down the line, on the run and at the net—Federer barraged Rafa with winners. If he wasn’t ending the point with his backhand, he was setting it up with a high and heavy topspin ball that pushed Rafa back. The tables were turned.

Nadal said he hit too short, and couldn’t get his shots high enough to Federer’s backhand, and he was right. Like Djokovic, Rafa fell behind an early break and could never find his way into the match. Rafa tried mixing up his serve more than usual, and he moved farther back in the court to receive serve, hoping perhaps to defend long enough that Federer would eventually come back down to earth. But unlike in so many of their other matches, Federer never did. He stayed up in the stratosphere until the very last shot—appropriately enough, a backhand return winner.

Where did that shot suddenly come from? Ivan Ljubicic, Federer’s coach for the last 15 months, is an obvious answer; it can’t be a coincidence that the Croat, who had a pretty muscular one-hander himself, has been on hand for this transformation. Federer himself said it was his father, Robert, who first urged him to “hit the backhand, dammit.” Whatever the origin, Federer at 35 isn’t just continuing to win; he’s also continuing to find things in his game that he may never have believed he had.

None of this means, of course, that Federer will be able to do it again when he faces Kyrgios on Thursday—especially if he can’t put a racquet on a return. Tennis is about matchups; but for the first time in his long-running matchup with Nadal, Federer seems to have found an edge.

By the time his last forehand had landed on the baseline for a winner, a question was going through my mind, one that I never thought I would find myself asking about Roger Federer: “Where has this guy been all these years?”

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