A great and odd weekend of tennis: Four of the five rubbers played in Belgrade were essentially blowouts, matches you might have walked away from if they’d been played at a normal tournament. Yet it was the most dramatic—operatic—event in tennis all year. Credit this, of course, to Davis Cup. Team sports have it easy, don’t they? You don’t need to have a good match, to have a good match.
There was plenty to see and hear and feel—emotions ran the absolute gamut. Looking back, the only way I can make sense of it is to capture a few isolated thoughts and observations that stuck out of the morass of blue and red.
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This tie was reminiscent of the 2002 final, when Russia also beat France in a fifth rubber. The hero then was Mikhail Youzhny, who came back from two sets down to win the decider. But the undersung MVP was Marat Safin, who won both of his singles matches to keep his team alive. This weekend Victor Troicki played the role of Youzhny, coming off the bench to clinch, while Novak Djokovic was the Safin-esque stopper. He kept the Serbs in it with two straight-set wins over quality opponents.
Most impressive was his victory over Gael Monfils, who had looked as good as he’s ever looked in trouncing Janko Tipsarevic on Friday. Djokovic pulled off the difficult trick of playing tennis that was as intelligent as it was inspired. He was revved up, but he didn’t let that extra energy take over his game and make it riskier than it needed to be. He claimed the broad center of the court with high and heavy topspin balls and forced Monfils to go for spectacular shots from the edges to win points. Other than a slight case of nerves in closing out Gilles Simon on Friday, it was a masterful overall performance from Djokovic, one that gives you an idea of how good—how energetically solid—he can be when he’s completely dialed in and his mind is uncluttered.
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How about the other franchise player, Monfils? As he was beating Tipsarevic, I thought, just for a second, or a split-second, or a nanosecond, that we were seeing the beginning of a second career for the Frenchman. Monfils, a class above his opponent, was imperious and imperturbable throughout. If he could continue that play on Sunday, it would be something significant to build on in 2011. Then he ran into Djokovic, and he was the one who was outclassed. There wasn’t a ton he could do about it—sometimes the other guy really is too good, and sometimes you just don’t have it. While Monfils tried his share of low-percentage jumping ground strokes, he didn’t cave. He broke serve early in the third set by taking the ball earlier than he had been. But in the next game, he retreated again, went back to the pointless bailout drop shot he’d been using earlier, and faded down the stretch. His smothered backhand into the net on match point was capitulation in motion. We continue to await Monfils 2.0 in vain, but he is improving.
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Picking Llodra over Simon was not a rousing success for French coach Guy Forget, was it? I had thought going into the weekend that that was the smart pick. Llodra was hot in Bercy, was clutch in the doubles, and Simon didn't offer a whole lot of resistance against Djokovic on Friday. But from the first game you could see Llodra was a step behind pretty much every shot of Troicki’s, and the Serb looked totally comfortable even when it seemed like he might get tight in the third. Hindsight is 20/20 (20/10, really), but I remember watching Troicki play Andy Murray at Wimbledon a couple years; he looked utterly bewildered by the Scot's softball style and couldn’t create any pace off of it. That’s exactly how Simon plays, and it has worked like a charm against Troicki: He’s 4-0 against him. As we know now, Troicki is a different player when he has a target moving toward him at the net (especially a slow-moving one). Maybe it will be Troicki, rather than Monfils, who will use this weekend as a Verdasco-esque springboard to better things in 2011. But he'll have to recover from the celebration in time.
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The doubles match was a classic, glacial Davis Cup turnaround, and one of the best matches of the year, whatever the format. Five sets and four people on a court offers a lot of story lines. Troicki versus Clement was an interesting side dynamic. The Serb started out as the surprise best player on the court, while the Frenchman was the weak link, shanking easy ground strokes and looking off balance in general. But as Troicki cooled off over the last three, Clement came to life and ended the match as the emotional heart of the French team. How many overheads did he hammer for winners?
Doubles is a game of trade-offs. You had Zimonjic serving lights out for long periods but coming up just short on key backhand volleys and remaining unable to find an answer to Llodra’s lefty serve into his backhand. On the other side of the net, Llodra’s volleying wizardry was set off by his inability to get a return down at his opponents’ feet on multiple break points. The match also included my favorite moment from the tie. Late in the fifth set, Zimonjic rifled a volley at Llodra's chest. There didn’t seem to be any way he could return it, but he somehow fought it off and nubbed it back over to Troicki, who dumped his passing shot into the net. The look on Zimonjic’s face as that ball hit the net was as priceless as it was painful. Disappointment, frustration, disbelief, exasperation: They were all etched there at once.
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The Davis Cup began in 1900 as a two-team competition between the most powerful countries in the world at the time, England and the United States. Their co-Empire spanned the globe and was reinforced by a wave of inter-marriage between their upper-class families. The Cup was in part a sporting acknowledgement of their special status and relationship—Dwight Davis, its founder and namesake, went on to become U.S. Secretary of Defense (then called by a blunter name: Secretary of War). The competition retained a royalist spirit for decades. It kept the Challenge Round—the previous year’s champion sat out of the tournament and awaited its winner—in place all the way into the early 1970s. This helped the U.S. and Australia, the two premier tennis nations of the century, put a chokehold on the Cup.
Now, since the elimination of the Challenge Round, the opening of the amateur game in 1968, and the institution of the World Group in 1981, everything is upside down. The Davis Cup is the place where tennis spreads its international wings and welcomes new countries into the elite fold. Germany, Sweden, Russia, Spain, Croatia, and now Serbia have had their names engraved on the Cup. The quest to make it there is still the most dramatic in tennis. The Serbs shaved their heads in victory; Llodra sat inconsolable in defeat. The importance for Serbia can be summed up in a Tweet that Tipsarevic sent out afterward. It went something along the lines of "Serbia is a ------------- world champion!" For a small country that's seen its share of trouble, that's a major statement.
And that's the best part: All of these guys had a chance to play for history, something only Djokovic is likely to do anywhere else. As I watched Troicki and Llodra walk out for the deciding rubber, I wondered what they could be thinking. Each had been told that morning,or maybe the day before, that they would have to play what was essentially the equivalent of a Wimbledon final. All or nothing, with nothing to catch you when you fall: There’s no more exciting or frightening feeling in sports than that, and you could feel it as Troicki and Llodra began their unlikely closing match of 2010. It was a great way to cap a long season. Davis Cup isn't perfect, but it always comes through in the end.