I suppose Mardy Fish finally got good and tired of all those headlines - Fish Lets One Get Away! Haas Nets Fish! Umpire Hooks Fish! - and decided it was high time to. . . Reel in A Big One (rimshot, please). So yesterday he took those naked ankles and that Jigunda serve and blasted David Nalbandian off the court at the Pacific Life Open. His reward is a semifinal with Roger Federer, which comes with a free blindfold and cigarette.
The theme woven through this match was atonement, at a variety of levels. You can start with that ever-reliable choking theme. You can count on Mardy Fish, the skeptics have long said, he'll always let you down. That rap is doubly cruel because the viral inability to close out matches is about the most frustrating and basically undeserved shortcoming a player can have. He's shoved stumbling down that boulevard of broken serves before he's seasoned enough to know it's a career cul de sac in which you just go around and around and around.
But here was Mardy Fish, a middle-aged 26 year old, tennis-wise, still swimming (I promise, no more!) in circles. But a funny thing happened here at Indian Wells. Fish took the first set from Lleyton Hewitt, had a good chance to break him early in the second, but failed to capitalize and ended up going to a third-set tiebreaker. Knots of reporters gathered around the monitors in the press room, anticipating a train wreck. Fish, after all, was an expert at blowing tiebreakers. But he surprised everyone by winning the tiebreaker and the match. Then, he played another fine third-set 'breaker yesterday to topple Nalbandian.
It was in many ways a riveting battle of blown opportunities and minor redemptions - for both players. Nalbandian looked like a tub of butter in that yellow shirt, and early on Fish sliced through him like a hot knife. He was playing a game that he had abandoned some time ago, a go-for-broke, gambling, aggressive game. Fish had two break points at 4-4 in the second set but squandered them, one with a pretty ugly backhand service return error. Eyes started rolling, and when Nalbandian won the second-set tiebreaker (his first mini-break was a Fish double fault), the critics started sharpening the long knives. Could Fish could come back to beat a player of Nalbandian's big-match experience in a three-setter? Get reel (okay, okay. . .)!
But by then, anyone paying attention could see that the pattern here was the lack of pattern. This was unlikely to be an open-and-shut case either way. Fish had two break points with Nalbandian serving at 3-4, but by then he was inoculated against dejection. Nalbandian broke to go up 6-5, and when Fish lost the first set of the next game it seemed his spirit was finally broken. But he recovered nicely and ended up breaking back, with some help from a Nalbandian break-point double fault. In the tiebreaker, Fish hit a devastating forehand, only this time it devastated his opponent. The service return winner gave him the mini-break and he closed the match out with a jump-shot overhead on the next point.
So let's get back some of these atonement motifs.
First off, there's that tiebreaker thing. After the Hewitt match, Fish admitted that he hadn't won a tiebreaker all year. Big deal, he'd only played four (although one of them, in a third-round Australian Open match against Jarkko Nieminen, kept Fish from a taking a two-set lead in a match that he eventually lost ).
But Fish was talking about tiebreakers in practice, too. Fish and his coach, Kelly Jones, laughed about that earlier in the week, and then they sat down and talked about it and arrived at an interesting conclusion: The conventional wisdom is that a tiebreaker is a roll of the dice, especially for a player like Fish, with his dangerous, powerful, anything goes kind of game. But buying into that idea, instead of blocking it out, is an invitation to disaster.
As Fish said in his presser, "I was content getting to the tiebreakers and then saying, 'Okay, this is a crapshoot. It might go my way, it might not..' I would think, 'Okay, my work is done. I mean, I've gotten there, I've held serve. Oh, it's okay if you lose this set because you didn't ever lose serve. . .'"
I thought it an interesting and nuanced revelation. The solution, Fish and Jones decided, was for Mardy to remain aggressive, but within "margins", and to focus on making first serves and warding off any tendency to negativity. Given what Fish has done here, the "conversation" with Jones is a testament to the of wise coaching. Fish hit two aces in the third-set tiebreaker against Nalbandian, plus a heavy service winer. Sometimes - in fact, most of the time - it really is the simple things.
Another atonement narrative emerged when Fish talked to us about his coaching situation. Jones had been his coach many years ago, guiding him to his highest singles ranking (no. 17) and his two best tournament results, a final at Cincinnati and a runner-up (silver medal) performance at the Athens Olympic Games of 2004.
Todd Martin worked for a time with Fish, and others weighed in as well. I'm assuming that most of them tried to shore up Fish's destructible forehand, harness his power, and inject some conspicuously absent consistency into his game. Fish ultimately realized that he needed that, as the saying goes, like a fish needs a bicycle. "I kind of got away from my ultimate game plan, which is to stay aggressive, serve and volley some, and try to take first-ball strikes and things like that. Not give anybody any rhythm, that's the key. I guess I'm back doing that now."
What Fish himself calls "hit and miss" tennis - his most effective tennis- never looked so good to him, or us. But all that work he put in trying to fix what might be the strangest looking forehand since Stefan Edberg's was not in vain. At times, that forehand is still an adventure, but Fish has learned to embrace the stroke, warts and all. His riff on the forehand was pure ambrosia to the armchair sports psychologist in anyone. He admitted the shot comes and goes with confidence, and that no matter what people say about it, he feels confident with it. "I don't, you know, necessarily care (what people, or the stat sheets, say)."
Fish explained that he's been hitting the forehand better than ever for no particular reason he can name; presumably, it's because he's no longer all tied up in knots over it. And recognizing that he's just not going to beat the Hewitts or Nalbandians of this world from the baseline has been liberating. Once you get comfortable with the idea that you're a guy who's either going to win on his own terms or crash-and-burn, the prospect of crashing and burning is not longer quite as harrowing.
