The tennis fans of America were out early and often in Portland Friday morning. Walking past the restaurant at my hotel at 8:00, I passed a blur of red, white, and blue hats, shirts, scarves, and bow-ties sitting down to breakfast. Coming in the opposite direction, through the revolving doors, was a family in matching red sweat shirts that said “Bryans’ Bunch.”
There was a lot more of the same over at Memorial Coliseum, which was remade into ground zero for U.S. tennis for the day. A little before 1:00, the arena went dark, lights swirled on the ceiling, and what sounded like the theme from Superman filled the air. A sea of stars and stripes washed over the bleachers: There were red, white, and blue cowboy hats, baseball hats, rasta caps, rattles, Frisbees, sweat shirts, kazoos, cow bells, batons, pom-poms, drums, horns, basketball nets stretched across dudes' skulls, and my favorite, two guys in the front row done up as Captain America and Uncle Sam. (They let the Russians hear it all afternoon.) As the players were announced, firecrackers went off, thunderstix smacked, and the big screen above exhorted us to chant the letters of our country (“you-ess-ayy!”). Jon Wertheim, standing next to me, leaned over and pierced the moment just in time: “That’s what I love about the USTA,” he said. “The subtlety.”
That wasn't all they had in store for us. Between games, just in case someone in the audience couldn’t go 90 seconds without being entertained, we had jugglers, ring-tossers, cheerleading squads, T-shirt throwers, a 9-year-old singing the national anthem, and a decent-sized marching band with their own section halfway up the bleachers (head-scratching song choice: “Don’t You Love Me, Baby?”). Combine that with the 1970s-era seating in the Coliseum, and the whole thing felt like a cross between the Donny & Marie Show and Robert Altman’s Nashville.
In other words, we were throwing the kitchen sink at Russia's Dmitry Tursunov. Even better, we were throwing Andy Roddick’s serve at him, on a court that Tursunov said was “laid out for Andy especially, for his serve.” Roddick, who added that the surface “took” all of his service spins well, hit his heater up the middle, sent bullets wide in the ad court, and slid the ball away from Tursunov on the deuce side. He finished with 24 aces, many just when he needed them.
Roddick saved some of the biggest of all for the longest game of the match, when he served at 5-4 in the first and held seven set points. By the end, he was audibly huffing and puffing as he scrapped to stay in points from the baseline. When the rallies ended, he rared back for another monster first serve. After a 146 and a 143, I wondered how many he had in him. Just enough, it turned out, as he finished the set with a 147-m.p.h. unreturnable heave.
This was a vintage Roddick win in many ways. He scrapped with his ground strokes and bombed with his serve—has there ever been a player with a serve like his who had such a fundamentally defensive mindset? But Roddick also did everything well Friday. His slice, an odd stroke that he hits—chops, I should say—with his legs completely straight and standing on his tippy-toes, was more effective and varied than usual. He floated it just deep and soft enough into the corner so that Tursunov had time to run around and either go for too much or leave himself out of position. After the match, Roddick said his strategy had been to stay consistent on his return games and wait for the streaky Russian to hit a bad patch. It couldn’t have worked any better.
Tursunov was despondent and resigned in his presser, virtually conceding the tie to the U.S. He had played an odd and, as he said, “passive” match, only focusing when he got down multiple break points, which he did many times. That’s when he played his calmest tennis and put together complete points rather than gunning away from behind the baseline. Tursunov remains a difficult character to understand, particularly for a pro athlete. If you’ve ever wondered why irony is often the furthest thing from a jock’s personality, look no further than the always-facetious Tursunov. He doesn’t have the blind belief in himself that's common to many of the most successful athletes. Like his fellow Russian Marat Safin, Tursunov looks like he plays tennis out of obligation to his talent rather than joy in competition. Today he brought out his best game long enough to stay close to Roddick, but his negative body language—he often walks around between points with his racquet head pointed loosely at the ground, which makes his whole body slump—was enough to let you know he wasn’t about to do any front running today. There was something about cursory about his performance, and he knew it afterward.
By the time I got back to my seat, James Blake, traditional loser of second Davis Cup rubbers, was just where I didn’t expect him to be: up 4-1. The first backhand I saw him hit was as free and fluid as Justine Henin’s. He was mixing up speeds on his serve, tracking down everything, and not missing any forehands when he had time to set up for them.
That’s how it went for most of the first two sets. Blake improvised with a surer hand than usual and out-backhanded one of the best backhands around. The testy Russian, meanwhile, was testier than usual. He wasn’t just fighting Blake, but was also in a running battle with the ball kids, none of whom could do anything quickly enough to suit him. A few times, after a kid dropped a ball or was slow to get Youzhny his towel, he looked up at the chair umpire as if to say, “See what I have to deal with?”
Still, his body language was better than Tursunov’s, and it was only a matter of time before he clawed his way in. Youzhny started to open up the court with angles and combinations, and matched Blake’s power from the baseline. The result was a lot of winning tennis from both guys in the last two sets, as they traded bombs from the baseline and flying fist-pumps to celebrate them.
Then each of them took turns blinking. Blake, serving for the match and essentially the Davis Cup, missed first serves, forced two forehands and made errors, and was broken at love. The question that Blake had appeared all afternoon to be ready to put to rest—are you tough enough?—was in the air again. You could pretty much taste it a few minutes later, when Youzhny went up 2-0 in the tiebreaker and looked like a lock to reach a fifth set.
Whether it was the energy in the building or mental exhaustion from having battled back so far, Youzhny couldn’t cross the threshold. At 3-3, he missed a return badly, and then made his dumbest move of the afternoon. Rather than make Blake win it under pressure, Youzhny tried a drop shot, something he hadn’t done much all day. He stoned it and went down 5-3. Blake could see the finish line; the crowd, the moment, the momentum pushed him across.
Afterward, Blake said he’d wanted to prove his critics wrong and show he could win a big match (though he then denied this, implausibly, in his presser; his line amounted to: “I never think about those negative articles that I keep happening to mention.”) But Blake was right in saying that he had learned from his tentative performance in the semifinals in Sweden, and that he was going to go down swinging today. It was a simple approach that helped him stay positive through the long fourth set, when he easily could have started rushing or hanging his head, which has been his standard reaction in the past.
Until the final point, though, I had trouble believing Blake was going to break that pattern. In the middle of the fourth-set tiebreaker, I noticed Roddick on the sideline staring at the ground, his hands on his head. He looked the way I felt—I just didn’t want to see Blake lose this match, this way, in this setting. After Youzhny botched his drop to make it 5-3, Blake hit a fantastic reflex crosscourt return winner, a shot only he would try. The crowd broke loose; it was suddenly match point. In the press section at tennis tournaments there’s an iron law against applauding, but when Blake hit that return my arms shot forward in an automatic reaction. I wanted to put my hands together, but deep habit held me back. Captain America and Uncle Sam looked like they had it covered anyway. Now I wish I had joined them. James Blake deserved a hand today.
First question for Saturday: What’s the over/under on the number of chest bumps the Bryan brothers give us? Kamakshi and I are making a conservative estimate of 12.