"Vamo . . . vamo . . . vamo," goes the lazy, one-man chant from the corner of the Stadium 2 bleachers. In the distance, a motorcycle guns down an unseen road. Moths make erratic loops around the court's towering lighting fixtures before suddenly dropping to the court. Juan-Martin del Potro, a tan, 6-foot-6 Argentine wearing a sleeveless shirt and a fat blue headband, drills a game-ending ace.
The immense sky darkens from east to west, black ink pooling across blue fabric. What's left is one luminous, pale-yellow zone that follows the crooked outline of the chocolate-colored hills in the West. The effect is somewhere between a Magritte and a 70s soft-rock album cover. A sluggish Latin groove briefly emerges from somewhere on the grounds and dissolves. John Isner, a pale 6-foot-9 American in a loose shirt and a low baseball cap, drills a game-ending ace.
This is how the John vs. Juan-Martin show goes for 24 games and two tiebreakers. There are no breaks of serve. There are few rallies, few slices, and few signs of emotion from the players. The one break in the parade of unreturnable serves occurs when del Potro demands that a man in the far corner of the stands stop talking on his cell phone. The man leaves instead.
The battle of the bigs meets with a polite response. It's warm, and most of the spectators lean back on the benches. Loyalty leans mildly toward Isner, but it's not enough to ignite much passion. One man says to his wife that "this isn't point construction, it's point destruction." Only in the waning moments of the second set, when del Potro delivers three sizzling forehand passing shots from unlikely positions, does the match take us in its grip and make us forget the Magritte sky, the motorcycles in the desert, and the moths dropping around us. It's a routine evening on the ATP tour, Southern California edition.
Del Potro is ranked No. 6 right now, 141 positions above his opponent. The tan man in the tight shirt and long shorts—he seems to have inherited Rafael Nadal's hand-me-downs—plays this match with a brooding conservatism. Del Potro knows that if he takes his time, keeps his head down, and hits the ball inside the lines he'll be OK. Isner, the last American in the draw aside from Andy Roddick, is loose but not fierce, as if he doesn't quite believe in himself enough to break down the barrier of reputation and ranking and grab the lead. He believes enough to keep it close and hope to steal it in the end.
"I thought I played pretty well," Isner says afterward. He's just come looping up the steps from the player lounge, all arms and legs, smiling. "He didn't make many mistakes. He's a tough player."
When Isner earns a break point in the second set, he gets a look at a second serve but anxiously sends a backhand long. "That was costly," Isner says, with what what sounds like deliberate understatement. As he remembers the miss, he puts his hand on his baseball cap and pulls his head down a little.
This could conceivably be a glimpse of tennis' future, as taller players become more skilled at the power-baseline game. If the courts hadn't been slowed in many places over the last 10 years, it might even be the dominant form of tennis today. But while 6-foot-6 is common now—Cilic, Querrey, and del Potro all qualify—it will be a while, if ever, before we see much of 6-foot-9. Height has advantages—these guys made the wide serve into the deuce court, over the high part of the net, look like a high-percentage shot—but Isner suffers from grevious disadvantages as well.
Most damaging is the difficulty he has catching up to hard-hit balls on his forehand side. Returning at 6-5 in the second set, Isner found himself with a whiff of a chance when del Potro sailed a ball long to make it 30-30. On the next point, del Potro found the weakness and exploited it, aiming everything into Isner's forehand corner. The American, desperate, grasping at straws, chopped the ball back twice with abbreviated swings, but couldn't get the third one over the net. The whiff of opportunity passed into the mothy air above and never returned.
"I feel after this that I can play at this level," Isner says. "I was just a point or two from winning this match. I would have had the momentum going into the third."
If he exaggerates his chances against del Potro just a little, Isner is right that this was an important week for him. After breaking out with a run to the finals in Washington, D.C., in the summer of 2007, the brief—not great—American hope has been roaming through the Challenger wilderness for much of the last year. A wild card here led to wins over Monfils and Safin, a man Isner referred to as "one of the greatest players of all time." (Safin didn't exactly return the compliment, saying that his match against Isner was "boring," and that at some point he had started "to play like him, which isn't a good thing." Maybe we will miss Marat, after all.)
Isner says the high-bouncing surface at Indian Wells is "my kind of court," and he had del Potro reaching over his head to return his kick serves. Isner is a smart, varied server, but he smothers his ground strokes by coming over them quickly—"I need to improve my drive backhand," he says—and low volleys are a death trap.
"I had a good month of practice before this tournament," Isner says. "That doesn’t always carry over for me, but this time it did. I'll head back to Florida and get it started again, try to improve on all facets of my game. The goal is the Top 100 this year. I feel like I at least belong there." Isner shakes his head a little, somewhere between determination and resignation. He's pleased with the result, but the grind awaits at home.
It wasn't Isner's flaws that ultimately sunk him in the battle of the bigs. It was del Potro's ability to do the improbable. As the match drew to its close, the Argentine ran all the way across the court and put a forehand pass smack on the sideline. Then he seemed to fake Isner out by whipping a pass crosscourt from the same spot. (I told Isner it looked like he had guessed on that shot, but he said he'd tried to cover both sides.) Most impressive, del Potro took a nasty approach down the middle off his shoe tops and threaded an inside-out forehand between Isner and the sideline.
The idea behind the approach down the middle is to force your opponent to create an angle where there isn’t one. Isner had done the right thing by using this tactic. It's just that Del Potro had gone ahead and created an angle out of thin air anyway, thwarting the textbook plan. That's the problem in tennis: Sometimes it's not that you can't do certain things on the court, it's that the other player can do things nobody should be able to do.