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by Pete Bodo
The two most recent singles matches played at the Sony Ericsson were very close, exciting engagements, but despite the similarities in the scorelines (as well as the hype), they couldn't have been more different in tone or substance. I'm talking about two semifinals, the Justine Henin vs. Kim Clijsters WTA battle last night, and today's sword dance featuring Andy Roddick and Rafael Nadal.
Clijsters won the WTA match, 6-2, 6-7, 7-6, and Roddick won this afternoon, 4-6, 6-3, 6-3. Let's take the Roddick vs. Nadal match first.
Nadal managed an early service break in the first set (to go up 2-1), and he made that lead stick. That's always been the problem with matches featuring Andy Roddick against a player of surpassing baseline skill on a hard or grass court: No matter which player breaks serve first, there's a reasonable chance that the feat represents endgame. If Roddick breaks, you can usually count on him to take care of his subsequent service games and run out the set. If his opponent breaks, you can usually count on his consistency - and the accompanying lift of that oppressive atmosphere that Roddick creates with his pre-emptive serving efficiency - to tide him through.
So it was after Rafa broke Andy in that third game of the first set; it was hard to imagine Roddick recovering to salvage his chances with a break, and he did not. In the second and third sets, we had the reverse image: When Roddick broke Nadal with unexpectedly crisp returning in the eighth game of the second set, the prospects of Nadal breaking back were bleak at best.
And in the third set, another Roddick break in the third game - by which time it was crystal clear that whatever else he did, Nadal absolutely had to hold his own service games - sealed the match. All it required, from that point on, was a reasonable degree of execution on Roddick's part during his own service games.
Roddick met the challenge, and further benefited from a second, match-ending break in the final game. By that time, Nadal appeared dispirited. That's something a gifted server can do to you; that oppressive atmosphere matures when the ball is flying by or at you at warp speed, serve after serve, game after game, set after set. Even as seasoned seasoned a competitor as Nadal is vulnerable to the malaise, which is probably a form of hypnosis, the essence of which is that the victim doesn't even know it's happening.
So this match had a perfectly transparent, orderly narrative; you not only knew what happened and why, you could see it coming and concentrate on wondering if it will arrive at the destination, which is determined by the players' degree of execution. This is classic Can he really do it? tennis, a match determined overwhelmingly by skill, or lack thereof. The execution level in this one was not only satisfying but evenly distributed: Roddick had 26 unforced errors to Rafa's 23; Roddick clubbed 36 winners, while Nadal contributed 32; Andy converted 66 per cent of his first serves, Rafa, 62.
The difference in the end, was that Roddick took his chances and met with success. He had no illusions about having unlocked the secret to beating Nadal. He likened rallying with Nadal to "driving head-on into oncoming traffic," and explained: "I took a lot of risk out there in the last two sets. .. the best thing I can think of is, I rolled the dice and came up Yahtzee a couple of times."
Yahtzee, for those of you who don't know, is a chance-based mathematical game played mostly by math geeks and other kids you didn't want to associate with in high school, including the one who now signs your paycheck.
Roddick added that this was not only the best but his only formula for beating a player with Nadal's skill set. "My comfort zone of moving the ball around and maybe chipping it around a little bit doesn't work against Rafa. I had to come up with something that at least took him out of his comfort zone a little bit, and it paid off."
I had been thinking about that problem in the first set, myself, for it was abundantly clear that Andy simply couldn't stay with Nadal in the baseline rallies. i was tempted by the idea that he ought to throw caution to the wind and just commence to chop, hack, drop shot and otherwise carve the very heart, the rally, out of the points. Of course, he might end up looking like a complete idiot doing it, but I know lots of players who would trade their reputations as cool dudes for a win over Nadal.
Tennis is a really bizarre game in that even though opponents are using all their skills and wiles to disrupt and neutralize each others' games - to shut each other down - they absolutely depend on each other to play along to produce good tennis. Tennis players are tied, ankle to ankle, with this invisible cord. There's a built-in mandate to play tennis a certain way; you're just not going to get a classic rally ending with a glorious cross-court winner if either of the players refuses to accept the unspoken rule.
This principle is never more evident than when a player is cramping and capable of hitting only strange, half-hearted shots; his opponent's game almost always goes right off a cliff as well. It also helps explain why nobody ever tries an underhand serve, just to mix things up. You play tennis a certain way no matter how much we celebrate those players, like Fabrice Santoro, who insist on nibbling at the edges of convention. It takes two to tango.
Anyway - refusing the invitation to play conventional serve or return and rally tennis is not an option, even when doing so is tantamount to suicide.
Roddick did the next best thing. he took the conventional game to Nadal. He attacked more than usual behind his serve, and he hit his forehand with that extra bit of pace and depth that can quickly turn attractive if fundamentally futile shots into plug-ugly unforced errors. And Roddick took chances with his return - and why not? Settle for a decent, penetrating return and it's an invitation for Nadal to take control of the rally.
As Roddick said, "it's very tough (against Rafa) once you get neutral. I don't hit the ball like him. I hit the ball straight through, and his ball comes up and down, and he can switch directions a little easier than I can.So basically I was sitting there thinking, 'All right, well is my second serve my best approach shot against him?' I thought it was, so that made the decision a little bit easier in my mind."
Nadal confirmed the value of Roddick's strategic thinking: "He play very aggressive game and started to play more aggressive in the game where he broke me. It was a change, and it was a surprise for me. After that, in the third, he put more pressure on my serve, attacking more. He was serving very regular (consistently) . . . Just congratulate him, he's playing really well."
While Roddick happily accepted the accolades, he wasn't going to try to fool anyone, including himself. He said of those scorching, match-turning returns in the second set: "You can't exactly plan on sticking three returns in one game on the line and backing him up. It's not as easy as, 'See ball, hit ball. . .' "
!98205827 All this makes for relatively straightforward, simple if not simplistic or predictable tennis. The match was determined by execution; both men played well, Roddick had the nerve and skill to successfully move out of his comfort zone, and it paid off. It was a profoundly different story in the other match under consideration, the Clijsters-Henin mud-wrestling bout that was disguised as an epic.
My foot. If anything, the match should go down in history as the anti-epic.
Just compare the winner to error ratios: the men made a combined total of 49 unforced errors, and 68 winners. The women made 103 errors and 56 winners. Or look at the ratio of service breaks to holds, always a good indication of how well the respective players observe the fundamental mandate to take care of your serve: In 28 games, Roddick and Nadal produced four breaks of serve. Henin and Clijsters played 34 games (32, really, since you can't count the two tiebreakers), 12 of them breaks. The men posted 10 break points (converting 4), combined, while the women played 25 break points, converting 12.
Let's face it, break points are exciting. Tiebreakers are titillating. Service breaks are wonderful, as is the"turning point." But near the end of the Clijsters-Henin match, I found myself feeling profound sympathy for those reporters who would have to write "game" stories. Good grief, how do you flip through 15 notebook pages containing something like three dozen boldly underlined points with the notation "Huge point for C (or H)?"
Just how "big" are those big points when there appear to have been 30 of them? Does the term "turning point" have any meaning if a match has a dozen moments that can be described as such?
The bottom line for me was that, unlike Roddick in his match, Clijsters won because, in the end, one of the women had to. They might have avoided sore backs and tears of self-pity by determining the outcome with a coin flip. This isn't to say that the match wasn't entertaining - it was, at least in the later stages, after that horrific demonstration of choking that Clijsters put on while leading by a set and 3-0. But the improbable comeback mounted by Henin, and fueled by Clijster's paralysis, hung like a pall over the proceedings.
It was the kind of tennis you might expect from two players in the 45th hour of their attempt to shatter the Guiness Book of World Records mark for the longest match ever played. Never has the term "break point" had less meaning, never did it make less sense to count serve holds or distinguish between forced and unforced errors.
A match can be exciting but fall far short of being anything like great, and that's because the heart of matter is execution. We watch tennis because we enjoy seeing great players approach perfection in their shot selection and execution, especially when the players are doing it at the same time. This is why we have statistics; to quantify the degree of execution. Let's face it, two awful players are as likely to deliver a close, exciting battle as are two top 10 pros. That cord around their ankles is always present.
But there was one mitigating factor in the Clijsters-Henin match, and that was the chemistry involved. I don't give a hang if they routinely go out to dinner or spend their nights in dark closets, sticking pins into voo doo dolls representing each other. Both of these women are, by definition, great players. But both of them have narrow but very deep fault lines in their competitive dispositions. Most of their rivals aren't capable of probing those weak spots, but somehow Clijsters and Henin almost insolently find them in each other. It's no accident that their only other meeting this year was equally anarchic; Clijsters won that one in a third-set tiebreaker, and by an identical 8-6.
Well, there's room for all of this stuff in tennis, and this hasn't at all been an attempt to compare the two divisions (WTA and ATP) of the game. The men have played awful if somewhat exciting matches as well, but in all honesty I can really think of one that can compare with the meaningless masterpiece Clijsters and Henin turned in. It will live in infamy, The Anti-Epic.
Most of you were lucky not to see it.