"Are You Talking to Me?"

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by Pete Bodo

It can't be all that easy being Robin Soderling, reviled by some, thought by others to possess all the charisma of a toothache, believed in by almost no one. The refrain as Soderling has marched through the draw at Roland Garros has been tinged with a "get this guy outta here" brand of wishful thinking: Surely, this guy can't keep going like this!

I myself called his win over Rafael Nadal "preposterous," and some fans of the deposed champion may never forgive Soderling, but they ought at least to thank Soderling for making it so, well, easy to dislike him. It would be a lot different if Nadal had been beaten by some guy with curly chestnut locks, soulful baby blue eyes, a sibling dying of leukemia and a publicly-declared affection for million-dollar Italian sports cars.

Robin Soderling is not that guy: He's got dark peach-fuzz on his head, budding mutton chops on his cheeks, and bayonet grey eyes. He probably choked to death his only sibling (a sister, one assumes), and can't you see him tooling around the cobbled streets of his native Tibro in Sweden, in a Mitsubishi bearing the bumper sticker: Caution: I Speed Up and Try to Kill Furry Little Animals.
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Swedish?* some have wondered. Aren't dreamy Stefan Edberg and hunky Bjorn Borg Swedish? Where'd they adopt this guy from?

I exaggerate, of course, but for a purpose. All this simmering anti-Soderling sentiment has come to a head here in Paris, where looks, and even more importantly, personal style, matter - and don't you ever forget it. And the one thing nobody has accused Soderling of is being stylish. This might actually mean something if "stylish" were in any way, shape, or form part of Soderling's job description as a tennis pro, which it is not. As he said, when asked which court he was on for his first match here, and how many people were in attendance:

"I don't know, court 6? 7? Maybe 6? There were a few (spectators) - my coach, my girlfriend. . . But it doesn't really matter for me. I never had any problems playing on big courts, playing on the center court. The courts are still the same. Same measurements. Again, it's just tennis. I mean, I never really cared how many were watching.  .  .

"I don't like to lose. . . All I wanted since I started playing is to win matches. You know, that's what I focus about. . . I mean, I would really want to win this tournament as much if there were no prize money. I love winning matches."

Soderling's plight is both conspicuous and sufficiently inequitable to make a fair-minded person secretly hope that he gives tennis and all its style-addicted, Blackberry-toting, fickle aesthetes a big fat middle finger by going out on Sunday and winning the French Open. For the only story that could come anywhere close to that of Roger Federer finally bagging the only major title to elude him, tying Pete Sampras's Grand Slam singles title tally, and completing a career Grand Slam would be that of Soderling, ranked no. 25 in the world and thought of as a kind of Travis Bickle of tennis, winning this, his first major.

This is for sure, no matter how you feel about Robin: he's played like a deserving champion here, whatever happens in the final.

Many of these issues percolated within an extraordinary incident that occurred today. Let me set the table. In the first two sets, Soderling had played commanding, flawless, pressure-proof tennis - a soaring, gleaming edifice built on clay but having nothing to do with clay, or the way tennis is thought best played on it. He demonstrated, as have a number of other players (including Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, whose points on terre battue often last no longer than on any other surface) that the easiest way to win on clay is to play aggressively and seize any chance you get to powder the ball. Do that, and execute at an acceptable level, and the red-dirt world is your oyster.

That's just what Soderling did to build his lead, using Gonzalez's torrid pace to his own advantage, finding the lines and corners with his serve, challenging the one called Gonzo to hit just as many gigunda, monstro-boy forehands as he wished. Live your dreams, hombre, but expect a good number of them to come flying back at you, with return postage due. . .

The third set spooled out, on serve, with no sign of a letdown by Soderling. Game after game went on serve until, with Soderling serving to stay in at 5-6, he cracked. At 15-30, he held back just that little bit on the kind of typical forehand that he'd been drilling, and his caution caused an error. Next point he tried a forehand approach, but that too was tentative and doomed to spin out in the net.

Suddenly, Gonzalez was in it, and he made the most of it. He struggled and sloughed off two break points to hold the first game, and by then his serve - good already - had become lethal. The two men traded those big groundstrokes like a pair of prizefighters standing flat-footed, swinging away, and neither could take clear advantage through eight games.

Gonzalez served the ninth game and won the first point. The next point ended with a Soderling forehand that Gonzalez saw out, but the linesman let stand. Gonzalez asked umpire Emmanuel Joseph (ed note: his is a correction from earlier version, in which name of the umpire was wrong) to check the mark, whereupon Gonzalez accused Joseph of pointing to nothing as he decided that that the ball was good. Joseph retreated to his chair. Gonzalez soon followed him, still complaining and making his case. The crowd was restless, but patient.

When Gonzo realized he'd lost that battle he stalked toward the baseline, still angry, and spontaneously changed direction and plopped right down on the mark, with both cheeks (the southern ones) - effectively wiping away whatever was there. The astonished crowd tittered, then laughed. Quite a bit of time had passed by then, and when they resumed, Gonzo lost the first point. Gonzo won the second, but when Soderling slowly walked forward to take a look at the mark, you would have thought he was menacing Carla Bruni; the fans erupted in raucous jeers and whistles. Knowing better than to provoke them, Soderling kept his head down and retreated to the baseline.

Double standard, anyone?

Worse yet for Soderling, Gonzo swept the next few points to take the game and broke Soderling easily to level at two-sets apiece. Then Gonzo reeled off the first three games of the fifth set and by then it looked like it was over - it started pretty but looked to end ugly for Soderling. What could he have been thinking? Oh, my Thor, Bjorn came all the way down from Asgard to watch this and now I'm going to blow it, so big-time!

Actually, Soderling was thinking no such thing. As he said of that period in his presser afterwards:

"It' s hard, I think, for everybody to stay focused in a full five-set match. We played for a lot of hours, and I didn't really feel that I lost too much of concentration. I mean I just felt he was playing really well. He didn't give me any opportunities to play well. But, you know, I'm really happy that I turned things around at the end."

It was, indeed, some finishing kick by Soderling. He quietly re-built his game and held to 2-4, when allowing another break would have been tantamount to suicide. And that's when Soderling found the A game that has propelled him through this tournament, one more time. Gonzalez admitted that he lost just that wee bit of confidence in the shot that had served him so very well throughout the match, his serve. In the fourth set, he had hit his high-water mark, serving 71 per cent. His decline in the fifth was nearly imperceptible, but critical.

"Even if he (Soderling) did like three good returns," Gonzo said, "I have a little doubts with my serve. I try to go - try to play with (rely on) my first serve to try to win some free points, like I did in the past sets. But I felt the match was in my hands, that why I didn't want to have to hit second serves. That's the only mistake I did. It's a mistake because I lost the match. If I win, maybe it can be a good decision."

In other words, just when Gonzo needed his serve most (or thought he did), it didn't produce for him.

I must say, I'm not sure any player has defied the odds (and the predictions) both in the big picture (round-by-round) but also in the micro-situations. How often did someone whisper: He's in trouble now. . . I knew he couldn't keep it up. . . He's going to crumble. .  .no way he can come back now. . But no trouble was insurmountable, a few loose stones and mortar were all that crumbled off the tower, and while you can't say Soderling ever needed to come back from desperate straits (except late today), there were numerous moments through these two weeks when a lost point here, a moment of doubt there, could have unleashed a landslide of difficulties. It's ever thus in tennis, most particularly for players who are overachieving but also finding themselves in increasingly unfamiliar territory.

One of the psychologically juicier aspects of Soderling's run here is that he entered as a pariah of sorts, a guy about whom fellow players grumbled because he often walked with his head down, disinclined to say hello. The locker room has conventions, starting with the universally embraced belief that a truce exists in there, and players are duty bound to be cordial and companionable. Then Soderling took out Nadal, with whom he had admittedly had some issues in the past, and refused to feign sympathy for him. He also seemed prickly, hard-edged, unwilling to meet anyone halfway to seem more a part of the ATP fold.

While he hasn't changed his MO in that regard, by the end of the long run-up to the final he seemed in some ways a changed man - a more mature and self-confident one, if not necessarily a more convivial one. He appeared thoughtful rather than reticent, hardened rather than brittle. Soderling is no stripling, but it may be that he grew up a little these past two weeks, became calmer if not softer.

When the conversation in the presser drifted that way, he said, "I'm not sure if I'm that shy. For sure I'm not going to change, you know. I feel like I'm still the same person. This is just tennis for me. Yeah, maybe they're right (the players). Maybe I don't say 'hi' all the time, but I'm always - I've always been a little tense before matches, you know, always a little bit nervous. I don't like to speak too much before my matches. That's just the way, you know, I am. There's nothing - has nothing to do with the other players."

Soderling is an unusual character; in some ways he's a throwback to certain other players whose personalities weren't all sweetness, light and sound bites perfectly calibrated for a stylish audience. One thinks of Bob Hewitt, Kevin Curren, Steve Denton, even the young Lleyton Hewitt, all of whom may not have been great guys, but who probably were good men.