INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—Novak Djokovic tosses the ball up and catches it. He’s seen something out of the corner of his eye. He looks to the side of the court, where a ball boy is belatedly scurrying back to his designated kneeling spot next to the net. Djokovic shakes his head. He’s testy at the moment.
This isn’t the Djokovic I’ve gotten used to seeing in 2011. That version, the Aussie Open winner and two-time winner of Roger Federer, struts through evening matches, bareheaded, in shiny black clothes. That Djokovic is light on his feet, confident in his swings, smooth in his court coverage, and calm in the clutch. He has his opponent, and the world, on a string. That Djokovic is the kind of guy who thinks he can pull wearing black-and-white sneakers with a black outfit, and he can.
This Djokovic, the daytime version, is squinting into the bright sun and dealing with the tinge of humidity in the air, a tinge that has historically been his undoing. This Djokovic is hunched, heavy-breathing, and a little ornery. He’s dressed in less shiny and less glamorous all-white, and his face is hidden beneath a baseball cap that’s pulled low over his forehead. For the first time that I can remember, and perhaps for the first time in 2011, he’s not playing his best.
Early on, daytime Djokovic struggles to catch up to Richard Gasquet’s heavy, high-arcing topspin. It gets up high on the Serb’s backhand side, and the ball sails long in the thin desert air. Djokovic’s New Serve has deserted him for the moment. The fluid motion and stinging, slicing first serves of Dubai are nowhere to be seen. Even his forehand, which has been the underrated key to his renaissance this season, is tight, stiff, more constricted than it has been. He gets broken to start both the first and second sets.
None of it matters. Not the testiness, not the forehand stiffness, not the backhand lateness, not the missed first serves. Djokovic may be a little hunched and a little unsettled, but he’s not panicked. He’s won too much lately for that. He comes back and makes the match sound routine, maybe even like a blowout, 6-2, 6-4.
“I try to get out of trouble,” Djokovic says with a smile afterward. He looks calmer than ever, and leaner than ever, as he lean forward in front of the microphone. Things are obviously going well in his world. He even nods his head and agrees with two of the reporters who ask him questions today. “You know,” he says, in one of the week’s great understatements, “confidence plays a very important role in the life of a tennis player. So if you can roll with that confidence you can have a lot of success. I feel really comfortable on the court and I'm trying to use that confidence, because I know that it can easily change.”
There’s that caveat again, the same one we heard from Federer earlier in the week, the same one that runs through every tennis player’s head: Confidence to a tennis player is a little like raw luck to the rest of us, something you know is going to run out, but you have no idea when. Or maybe it’s like carrying an egg; you have to be gentle when you talk about it, or even think about it. Bjorn Borg, the most superstitious of all tennis players, may have put it best when he talked about his long winning streak at Wimbledon while he was in the midst of it. “It’s what I live with, you know,' Borg said, "that I lose someday.” Like everything with the Angelic Assassin, the matter-of-factness on the surface hid the paranoia that his streak had engendered in him. It turned out that he couldn’t live with losing after all.
Anyway, let’s not get too heavy or ahead of ourselves here. Djokovic is still rolling and feeling good. Before it comes to an end, let’s take a look at what he’s doing well. While he didn’t cruise the whole way today, he did a lot of very good things nonetheless.
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“I’m feeling it really well in the last three months. I can flatten it out a little bit and take charge of short balls, which wasn’t the case in last maybe year or two.”
Here Djokovic is talking about his forehand, and it’s true that once he settles in he’s hitting it easily and forcefully. In Melbourne, it was the inside-in version of this shot that he used to devastating effect in the tournament’s later rounds. Today it’s the inside out that’s working like a charm. In both cases, he’s anticipating and moving up on the ball extremely well. Everything looks easy after that.
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In the past, Djokovic has often used the drop shot to bail himself out of important points—win or lose, he’s going to end the rally right there. As often as not, he’s ended up trying to cut it too fine and putting it in the net. Not today. This afternoon Djokovic slid his backhand drop smartly and safely down the line for winners. He used it proactively, offensively, intelligently, rather than desperately. It made a difference in how he hit it. He wanted to win the point with it, rather than just ending it one way or another.
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We talk a lot about the importance of first-serve percentage, and rightfully so. But there’s also the matter of when you make your first serves. Djokovic started slowly in that department today, but he didn’t finish that way. After breaking serve at 3-3 in the second, he won the opening point with a first serve. It felt like Djokovic had realized that the match was on his racquet, that he only needed two more holds, that his opponent was down, and that this was the time to demoralize him even more from the start of each point. At 15-30, he hit a first serve, at 30-30, he hit a first serve. At 40-30 he hit an ace. Two games later, when he served for the match at 5-4, Djokovic made first serves at 15-0, 30-0, and 40-0.
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Djokovic ended the first set with a masterful display of point construction, using every inch of the court and not letting Gasquet get any good looks at the ball. He briefly had his opponent, and the world, back on a string. Then it unraveled at the start of the second. He started going long with his backhand again and was quickly down 0-3. There was testiness on his face, there was sweat on his brow, there were deep breaths, there were barks in Serbian at his box. But there was no panic.
Djokovic settled down and began simply, by making balls. Soon Gasquet was feeling the pressure, and he didn’t react well. Serving at 1-3, down break point, he hit a dumb drop shot, the kind of bail-out drop shot that Djokovic can hit. It floated high and Djokovic pounced for the winner, the break, and the fist-pump. As they walked to the sidelines, you could see the difference in the two players written in their body language. Gasquet hung his head, but he wasn’t all that angry. He had merely had his expectations confirmed, his expectations of failure. Djokovic quick-stepped to his chair, but he wasn’t unduly ecstatic. He was calm. He was rolling again. His expectations of success had been confirmed, for one more day.