Grinding Willy

It seems silly to try to re-create the mood and tone that prevailed some 10 hours ago in Miami here at my home in New York, so I won't even try; besides, I blew the Popsicle stand before the Guillermo Canas and Novak Djokovic pressers took place, in order to make my plane. And with all that time to reflect, my thoughts ballooned beyond the events of the day.

Those events, BTW, were not routine. In reaching two Masters Series finals in successive events (and winning one, the Sony Ericsson Open), Novak Djokovic elbowed his way into the company of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. And the way he handled the match against Willy Canas spoke volumes about the Djoker's emerging profile as a quick study. Remember, this 19-year old was semi-paralyzed by stage fright  for an entire set when he played Nadal in the Pacific Life Open just two week ago, and he played some shaky tennis in the late stages of his upset of Nadal in Miami just days ago.

But against Canas today,  he was hellbent for leather and he immediately took charge of the match; in today's match-game, he almost blew three match points,  but hit  a bold forehand winner at 40-30 to keep things from spinning out of control. When the shot landed good, he fell over like a guy who'd been shot - rather what Canas might have done, the way I saw it.

As Djokovic said in his presser: . . .On the last point was really, I said, I'm going for the forehand, I don't care.  If I make mistake, I break racquet.  And then I just fell down to the ground.  I was very happy, it was a very emotional moment for me.

After the match, Charlie Bricker of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel came over to me to talk Djokovic. He said that while he felt Djokovic was not quite ready to stand shoulder to shoulder with the Big Two of Federer and Nadal, he's a better player at 19 than was The Mighty Fed. I think that assessment is too tepid. Djokovic is their league as of (roughly) 2:30 PM this afternoon (and yes, I am aware of the title count). There is a strikingly natural form of maturity and confidence in Djokovic; unlike TMF, artistry is not going to be a complex and absorbing issue for either Djoker or his fans. He is the quintessentially practical, economical player and competitor - he is "stylish", but strictly  in a form-follows-function sort of way. He's the simple declarative sentence, not the compound one.

That seemed evident to me yesterday in the way he played Grinding Willy.  For two sets, Djokovic exposed the grinder's greatest vulnerability. You can neturalize his strengths if you avoid the temptation of trying to beat him at his own game (how some Federer fans must be haunted by those remarks made by TMF, who has suggested that he liked to play the game of his opponent sometimes, just to see if he can beat him at it!), or the temptation to pull the trigger too soon (thereby appearing reluctant to go mano-a-mano with Canas, which has all kinds of karmic implications and can be interpreted as a form of surrender). The way to beat a grinder is to avoid grinding; hit your shots boldly but not recklessly, leap on chances when they present themselves, and to hail with all the rest of it. That's precisely what the Djoker did. It  takes courage, and a high level of skill.

In the third set, it looked like Djokovic might have been fading, but I had my own theories about that. I thought  that  Djokovic's  aimless  wandering between points, his little outbursts, his tendency to go for a few too many drop shots (note, though, that he tried many of them against Canas's serve), his somewhat cranky demeanor was less a sign of fatigue than of marking time, as if he were thinking: Okay, I'm two sets up, the guy has played a ton of tennis in recent weeks, I'm just going to tread water here, waiting for my opportunity to break. In other words, Djokovic was doing what, in basketball or football circles would be called, "managing the clock." This seemed an unusually cool and mature strategy for a punk kid to take.

Unfortunately, Djoker's comments in the presser did not exactly bear out my impressions. He said:

But me, I just, I was focused, really, throughout all the match.  I was physically a little bit going down in the third set, and I knew if I lose the third set, it's going to be very difficult for me, because Cañas is, you know, physically probably fitter than me.  He's Argentinian, they go for the clay, six hours a day probably they play.  No, I'm joking. . .

But even if he was tired, rather than playing possum, Djokovic did not get over-eager or rush to finish the job. In this gunfight, the Djoker had already shot the pistol out of Canas's  hand. He was in no rush to riddle Canas with bullets as he lay writhing in the dirt. But when the moment came to finish Canas (the critical service break of the third set, which put Djoker up 5-4), Djokovic leaped to life and struck swiftly and fiercely.

Djokovic synthesized some of these features in one of his comments, saying:

I think what I was trying to do today is to stay patient in the points because I knew that Guillermo is a player which really fights every ball.  He's a big fighter, big competitor. But he really doesn't have any of his shots - all the shots are pretty solid, but none of them is like a weapon, you know.  So I was trying to stay patient, but still be very aggressive, and I managed to do that.

In fact, Djokovic walked that fine line between patience and aggression as well as anyone ever has, and in so doing he played a match that might have left a casual fan wondering, How did this guy Canas get this far, he just, like, gets the ball back. . .

The criticism is true and untrue; if you can only execute at, say, an 80 per cent level when facing Grinding Willy, you may be in for a long, rough day; but once you get above 85 per cent, things change dramatically in your favor, and each subsequent increase of a percentage point is worth far more than it's theoretical value. That is, you begin to grind Willy. But this assignment is one of the toughest in tennis, precisely because it calls for such modulation. It's far easier to simply grit your teeth, put your head down, and charge - or obstinately dig your heels in, determined to slug it out with Canas.

In the big picture, it was hugely important for Djokovic to follow-up his runner-up finish at Indian Wells with the title, even though he would have had a great month no matter what happened today. It added up to the end of something  - his vault into the upper echelon. It was a satisfying narrative -  an impressive run with an emphatic ending; something that a number of his older rivals (James Blake, Nikolay Davydenko, David Nalbandian, Ivan Ljubicic, Tommy Haas among them) have yet to write.

At the beginning of February, 2007 was looking like a continuation of last year, still the era of Pax Federana (every day, I wish I could take credit for coining that phrase). At the beginning of April, the landscape in the men's game looks transformed, but not in the only way that seemed likely just a few weeks ago (a Nadal resurgence, returning us to familiar territory).

Oh, TMF is still - hands down - the best player; no doubt about that. But he's no longer looking at a single, familiar sub-plot. There's a handful of new, potential story lines emerging, including a subtle one: Canas's second win over TMF in barely two weeks seems to have shocked the ATP Tour into waking and perhaps believing the tired and half-hearted mantra: Oh sure he can be beaten, but he's just too danged good at the moment. Whether or not that's actually true doesnt matter one bit, either. **

When you tally up all the sub-plots, the critical question is not whether or not TMF has slipped (he hasn't; it's about the only thing of which I feel sure), but how he will respond to this swift transformation of the tennis landscape. Order, of the kind we've had, favors the entrenched. Chaos favors the opportunistic and aggressive. About the only thing I feel sure about, and this is an article-of-faith with me, is that in tennis, things can change very, very quickly, no matter how long they have been the same.