Ion Tiriac had been dreaming of this moment for months. Finally, vindication was at hand, and all of the haters and whiners and traditionalist nitwits could stuff it. A left-handed Spanish star was on his knees, kissing the beautiful, slippery blue clay inside his Caja Magica. Then Tiriac stuck his monocle in his eye and jutted his walrus-stache out to have a closer look.
“Huh. Verdasco,” he finally grunted. “Well, it’s a start.”
Yes, Fernando Verdasco thanked the blue clay for letting him stay on his feet long enough to record his first win over Rafael Nadal in 14 tries. It wasn’t a pretty affair, closer to the lead balloon these two tossed up in Cincy last summer than their supersonic semi from the 2009 Australian Open. But credit Verdasco for seeing his opportunity, throwing off his usual gloomy doubts and second-guesses, and seizing it.
It came at 3-5 in the third. The man known to himself as FeVer was still down a break, hardly a promising situation, but he recognized that Nadal wasn’t his usual self, that he was out of sorts and there for the taking. Instead of gagging at this realization, Verdasco began to play his most confident tennis of the day. He hit two big backhand winners in that game, and two bigger inside-out forehand winners in the next game to break Rafa at love. A few minutes later Verdasco was flat on his back with his arms stretched wide, doing his best Rafa-victory impersonation. Later he said this win, over Nadal on clay, was the “maximum for me.” It was great to see how much it meant to him.
Nadal later said that his countryman had “adapted” better to the surface and deserved to win. As slippery as these courts appeared to be, it’s a tennis player’s job to put those circumstances out of his mind. Still, Nadal didn't have to like those circumstances. “Being able to move is very important for me," a disgusted Rafa said later, "and if I can’t move well, I can’t hit the ball well, either. These courts destabilize the game. It’s a completely different game and I don’t want to take risks.”
Yesterday against Nikolay Davydenko it seemed that Nadal had, if not accepted the courts, at least resigned himself to their existence. He came out with an aggressive game plan to combat them, the way he does on grass, and it worked. Today, as the match was going on, I thought it was just a normal off day for him, the kind he can have, King of Clay reputation aside, on red dirt as well. Instead of hitting flat and moving forward, as he had against Davydenko, Nadal stood back, sent up higher and shorter loops, and failed to put away routine sitters. Serving at 5-2 in the third, up two breaks, Nadal buried an easy overhead into the net and missed two rally-ball forehands for no reason. That’s when Verdasco thought he had a chance, and he was right.
But Nadal chalked up at least some of his poor performance to the courts. They were bad enough to make him say that, if the blue clay is still in Madid next year, he won't be. Novak Djokovic, who beat Stan Wawrinka despite having just as much difficulty with his footwork, followed Nadal with the same promise. Nole said, with tournament director Manolo Santana sitting a few feet away, that the winner of the event was going to be the player who “didn’t get hurt.”
Was this the right thing for the world’s Top 2 players to do? Are they overreacting or whining unduly? I’ve read a lot about how Nadal, and now Djokovic, complain too much. It’s true, Nole is dramatic, and Rafa has his views. And who knows what Nadal would have said if had won today. But are they complaining, or just expressing their opinions? Would you not want them to say, especially when they’re asked by the press, what they really believe? Let them tell us what they think, and let the press and fans judge whether they’re justified in their opinions, or whether they’re whining. If Roger Federer, for example, believes that the court speeds these days are too slow and uniform, or that he still doesn’t love Hawk-Eye, or that he felt in control of a match that he lost, I want him to give an honest answer.
Nadal, Djokovic, Federer: They react to things in different ways and with different levels of public vehemence—it's hard to expect anything else from a Serb, a Spaniard, and a Swiss—but in my opinion none of them are whiners. All of them are aware that, when they answer questions negatively on the same topic for too long, they can appear to be harping on it. At the same time, for Rafa and Nole, the blue clay isn’t just a personal gripe of theirs. Few if any of the men have come out in favor of it—Gasquet compared it to figure skating—and Federer added his own complaint-opinion to the list today. “We never felt comfortable on the surface,” he said. “It’s a tough surface that only makes you angry even more.” With the ATP greenlighting the change on its own, who else is going to speak for themselves and for the other players, if not the top guys?
One of Ion Tiriac’s longtime dreams has been to create a fifth Grand Slam. It’s a good idea, in my opinion, as long as it’s held in the fall. But not in the middle of the run-up to the French Open. Yet he seems determined to get as close as he can to doing just that. Even if he can’t run a major, he’s not going to run a humdrum tune-up to one. In 2009, Tiriac moved his October Madrid Masters event to the spring, forcing the ATP to downgrade Hamburg (the subsequent lawsuit would have bankrupted the tour). He made it dual-gender. He built a colossal, abstract, anti-traditional arena. He has made the surface as different as he can from what’s used at Roland Garros or elsewhere in the spring. And he's not stopping. He’s been talking about introducing fluorescent balls, and he wants to lengthen the tournament to 12 to 15 days—it’s already stretching toward Indian Wells-Miami length. You do have to admire his energy and chutzpah, if nothing else.
Nadal has said he doesn’t like the idea of a fifth Slam—“there are four Grand Slams,” he once said, just like the red clay season is the red clay season, and that’s that. He and the other top players want to do what they’ve always done at a spring clay event: Use it to get ready for a major, not play on a quicker, slipperier and different-colored court, with distracting ad signs in the back. Even Federer, who found a way to beat Milos Raonic in his first match, did it largely by serving and volleying. That’s better prep for Wimbledon than it is for Paris.
After all of the shouting this year, all Nadal and Djokovic can do now is refuse to play, which isn’t as simple as it sounds. Each has points to defend, and next year each could be in a race for the No. 2 seed at the French Open, as Rafa is now. It also has an effect on fans: At this point, do you know what this tournament means for Roland Garros? Or does it feel half like a one-off event, partially divorced from the normal flow and logic of the tour? When the top men's seed is saying that he mainly hopes he doesn't get injured, it’s hard to know what to make of it, and how seriously to take it all.
Yet Thursday was exciting. Serena-Caro, Ferrer-Almagro, and Rafa-Verdasco. Nadal fans shouldn’t feel too bad. Despite his dominance on the surface, Rafa has only gone through the clay season undefeated once. He lost to Ferrero in Rome in 2008 and didn’t lose a set at Roland Garros. He lost to Federer in Hamburg in 2007 and beat him in the final in Paris. He lost to Djokovic twice last year and ended up with the French Open winner's cup in his hands once again. He'll probably be happy to get out of Madrid and see red again.
You also had to feel something for Fernando “Nobody beats me 14 times in a row” Verdasco. It might not have been the right Spaniard kissing the clay to Tiriac, but it was a sweet and surprising moment for many of us to see nonetheless.