It was kind of funny. Two big, strapping dudes - bullies, in a manner of speaking, who readily load up and blast serves and ground strokes when they meet striplings who stand a mere 6-foot or 6-1, met on the playground of Crandon Park in the Sony Ericsson Open men's final this afternoon and they, well, agreed to disagree.
Who would have thought that Andy Roddick and Tomas Berdych would be so reluctant to belt the ball - so willing to tease each other so often with soft slices, cagey chips, and other invitations to belt the fur off the ball.
Here Tomas, enjoy this little slice, feel free to belt the big backhand!
Oh, how nice, Andy! But I couldn't possibly. . . here, let me offer you this for the forehand. . . no, no, I insist!
That's a bit how it was for the entire match, as each of these sluggers determined that discretion is the better part of valor, at least when each of them was, as they say in the schoolyard, obliged to pick on someone his own size (all the other kids having been sent home to bed by this stage).
I had expected Andy to try something like this. His evolution into a thoughtful, clever, dare we say it - Aggasi-esque - tactician almost demanded it. But I must admit I failed to consider that Berdych had good reason to pursue the same "feed the beast" strategy. But he clearly had decided that the hulking, sinewy, cap-wearing, mirror-image across the net might be goaded into making exactly the same mistakes he was trying induce Berdych to commit.
The result was something like a cat-and-mouse game between two very big felines, although at times it looked more like the men were taking turns playing the cat while the other teased him with a length of yarn.
The big exception to this pattern was at the service line, where each man clubbed his delivery with all the pent-up fury he declined to muster once the ball was in play. Once the serve was in play, both men seemed more interested in finding the well-documented inconsistency or weakness in the other's ground game, or mentality. The result was a remarkably two-faced game, with a score of nuclear blasts from the service notch yielding nothing more exciting than a fairly lengthy wait-and-see rally. At times, you could almost hear either man jiggling the loose change in his pocket.
Because of this pattern, and because each man is capable of serving pre-emptively, the analysis of Roddick's 7-5, 6-4 win is color-by-numbers stuff. Roddick converted 62 per cent of his first serves, Berdych just 48%. That nearly 15-point swing easily explains the score, as well as the outstanding statistic: Berdych never had a break point. Roddick had five, but keep in mind that two of them were match points in the penultimate game of the second set, long after Roddick had converted two of the other three - the ones that were truly critical because the breaks they produced ensured that all Roddick needed to do was serve his way to the finish line in each respective set.
We've talked a lot in this space over the past few days about the difference between "exciting" or "dramatic" tennis and good tennis, or at any rate good matches. So it's only fair to apply the question to this match as well. I admit that I'm a fan of high-grade, consistent execution, clean and simple plot lines, and a reasonable but not excessive number of important points, or turning points.
That, to me, is at the heart of a great match (think either of the last two men's Wimbledon finals, or that recent one between Lindsay Davenport and Venus Williams). So this wasn't a great match, simply because Berdych never posed enough of a challenge to Roddick's control of the action. But Berdych remained close and looked volatile enough to keep us in a state of anticipation all the way. I was at the edge of my seat for the last two games. I sensed that if Berdych, having wriggled out of those two match points, found a way to break Roddick, all bets were off. You just knew that with these two man, break points were hard-earned and almost always lethally important.
So while it wasn't a great match, it featured great execution (except in the service department), and it contained a pleasant surprise. We saw shockingly few of those ground-shaking forehand or backhand blasts that each of these guys can deliver. I couldn't help but marvel, smiling, at the retro overtones of some of those deft slice-to-slice rallies, or those fake (as well as occasionally real, if ill-advised) charges Andy made to the net following one of those shots.
The slice backhand is a shot often used for marking time. The shock and awe element of today's baseline game, driven by racket speed and penetration of shot, is impressive. But I realized today that sometimes I really miss the accumulation of anticipation and the mounting tension created by the kind of lengthy slice-to-slice exchanges of the kind we saw today.
That it would be Andy Roddick and Tomas Berdych who would kindle those thoughts is, to say the least, ironic.
PS - I'll have more thoughts on Andy Roddick tomorrow.