I took the back way from Hisense to the press room the other day, past some empty side courts and in between a couple of seemingly abandoned buildings. There was no one around, until I turned a corner and saw a man and woman about 50 feet away, at the end of an asphalt walkway. The man was standing with his arms crossed, nodding his head. The woman was in front of him, hopping on one leg. With her other leg, she was kicking high in front of her, close to eye level.
I walked straight in her direction, thinking that she would stop hopping and kicking long before I got near her. She didn’t stop. As I drew closer, I could see, beneath a baseball cap pulled low, and behind a mask of grim intensity, that it was Li Na. I moved out of her way. As far as I know, she kept hopping and kicking for the next hour. She had that kind of look.
Li Na is intense right now. But she still has time for a joke. Today, after rolling over and through and around Victoria Azarenka with only the slightest of nervous twitches, she sat down for her press conference in a gray T-shirt. The word “Zooooooooooooo” curved up and down the front and onto the sleeves in multiple colors—it was an odd shirt. She was asked, to start, “Could you tell us what you thought of the match and why you won?”
She paused and stared straight ahead. Then she spat out, with mock venom, “Because I’m better, so I won the match.” Then she smiled. That’s more sarcasm than we’re used to in the press room. Nobody laughed except Na.
Her game at the moment is no joke. She’s always had the power backhand with the full-blooded two-handed swing, but her forehand tends to sail when she gets nervous. Today she didn’t miss an opportunity to shred the ball and take the offensive from Azarenka. There wasn’t a whole lot her opponent could do. It was a comprehensive two-set win, so comprehensive that she could say afterward, “Today I was playing better than her on the court. So this was the key to the match.” Not just the forehand, not just the backhand, not just the serve—she was playing better, period.
Na had a breakthrough win over Venus Williams, as well as her own nerves, in the quarters here last year. Two weeks ago she had another breakthrough, beating Kim Clijsters in the Sydney final. Na credits the improvement to working with the man who had his hands folded while she kicked her way toward me, her coach and husband, Shan Jiang.
“I [am] feeling good right now, because we have good communication,” the 29-year-old late-bloomer says. “So I’m feeling more happy on the court, yeah.” Na is back in the fourth round n Melbourne, a city where she enjoys considerable support. She’ll get the winner of Petkovic-Sharapova.
The husband-wife team may sound like a dicey situation, but the wife has found an upside to working with her spouse: the chance to be honest. “If I like or don’t like [something], I can just directly say it to him.” It still seems like a combustible set-up to me, but it’s working at the moment. He’s got her kicking away and winning matches. There was only one flaw today. When she went up a break in the second set, she suddenly started sailing her forehand again. Na has everything clicking, and has the game to become the first Chinese player to win a Grand Slam, but nerves are eternal. I'm guessing we'll see them surface again soon.
Na tends to refer to herself as a member of a “team,” rather than individually—“For right now, for the team,” she said today, “we have good energy. Always a positive thing on the team.”
There’s one thing she seems to particularly like about her current entourage, and which is a nice contrast from the Chinese national team she quit.
“If you stay in the national team,” she said, “you don’t need to take care of anything. They do everything for you. But right now I have my team around with me. Like if I’m lazy, I want to rest, I can say OK, stop now. On the national team, I have to follow the team.”
The chance to be lazy. It should be added to the Bill of Rights.
*
“It’s not too hot, not too warm, just the way I like it.”
These were the words of Novak Djokovic on local Melbourne TV this morning. He is, as we like to say, flying under the radar down here so far. He really is. He’s spent most of the week buried inside Hisense Arena, making his way undisturbed through the draw. I’ve tried to watch him when I can, but his matches keep ending just as I tune in. The most I’ve seen of him was when he was hitting shots sitting down and mimicking girls’ squeals at the Rally for Relief (which feels like it happened in another century at this point).
I had a little more luck today, though not much. I had hoped to see a fair amount of Djokovic’s fourth-rounder with Nicolas Almagro, but by the time I got out to Hisense he was already starting the third set. He was serving brilliantly, and the fairly slow surface is allowing him to attack and defend in equal measure. Almagro never got him out of his comfort zone. Djokovic took mid-court balls and knocked them off, and if he was pressed, he sat back and used his speed to grind. By the end, he was feeling it. He followed a topspin lob with a drop shot winner, and finished the game with an ace. He hasn’t skipped a beat since Serbia’s Davis Cup win, and he appears to have the bedrock confidence to be play well, and well within within himself, at the moment.
“Serve was great today,” he said afterward. “Game-wise, I’m happy. I’m feeling good energy-wise.”
There wasn’t much more to say than that. As with Li Na, I noticed just one flaw lingering from the Djokovic's past. It was warmer today than it has been, and despite the routine nature of his win, Djokovic still had a bout with the towel in the third set. Nerves are eternal, and so is his reaction to heat.
All that was left to the future today. The conversation in the press room quickly strayed from the match and went toward other random topics. Djokovic says he likes cruising along away from the limelight, but I’m not sure about that. He’s always been a ham and a Broadway type (see the photo above of him in an Aussie Dancing with the Stars promo this week), and he looked a little bored doing his off-Broadway routine in Hisense. He looked even more bored in his presser. By the middle of it, he was staring at his thumbnails and trying to inject some life into a pointless conversation about coaching in the women’s game.
“They should make it more fun,” he said, with a pot-stirring smile. “The girls are too serious when they invite the coach. They should make more jokes. It would be more entertaining for us to watch the TV. I like it when I see it, what’s she going to say, you know. [But] it’s always like: ‘Play your forehand, play your backhand.’ Crack some jokes!”
Nobody really laughed much, and Djokovic went back to staring at his fingernails. He’d tried, anyway.
Now it really does get serious. Djokovic plays Tomas Berdych, who, buoyed by his chanting Aussie support group, is playing some serious ball. Broadway awaits.