How do you beat a better player? More specifically, how do beat someone who plays very much the way you do, but who is faster, more consistent, just as motivated, and who fully expects to win? The simple answer is, you need to ride a high wire from start to finish. You must get off to a good start, do a few things your opponent isn’t expecting, and hope that the ensuing boost in confidence will lead you to start making shots you normally wouldn’t make. Then, after all that, you need to remain on the high wire until the final point. This last part is the hardest, because the minute you let yourself think you can win, you no longer have nothing to lose, the way you did at the start of the match. It’s one of the trickiest mental adjustments to make in sports. It's also a shock, because before one of these matches, someone may have said to you, "Well, you've got nothing to lose." But that's only true as long you're losing.
Stanislas Wawrinka couldn’t make the adjustment on Sunday in Rome. The newest member of the Top 10 did many things right against Novak Djokovic in the final of the Italian Open, and he took his thick, workmanlike game as far as it would go. Wawrinka’s serve has always struck me as stiff and powered by an awkward knee bend, but he used it wisely, knocking a flat one up the middle and then following it with a long, slow, bending kicker to the ad court that gave him time to get to the net and pinned Djokovic in the corner. He sent his forehand, which is a touch too long in the backswing to be a truly reliable weapon, up the line and took away Djokovic’s favorite point-opening play, his down the line backhand. Finally, Wawrinka’s one-handed backhand—which ends with a sweeping follow-through that is slightly Federesque, in an infinitely less elegant and more utilitarian way—proved to be versatile and deceptive enough to push Djokovic off the center hash mark and force him to hit on the run.
By the start of the first set, everything was clicking for Wawrinka. Serving at 1-2, he moved Djokovic wide with his forehand and drew an error for 30-0, then followed it up with a brilliant piece of defense. With Djokovic rushing the net, the Swiss took the pace off the ball and dropped a slice at his feet; Djokovic had to volley up, and Wawrinka was there for the forehand pass down the line.
Wawrinka must have scared himself a little with those shots, because he would only win four more games. The change came in the middle of the second set, when the rallies tightened up and each point became a toe-to-toe tug of war for control. With Wawrinka serving at 2-3, Djokovic finally established his superiority from the ground—his two-handed backhand, more dependable than his opponent’s one-hander, was the difference. When Wawrinka sailed a forehand long and wide to be broken, you could feel reality set in on both sides. Djokovic pounded his chest; Wawrinka hung his head—he’d fallen off the high wire.
That’s not quite fair, though; Djokovic did his part to give him a push. This wasn’t the Serb’s finest match, but after his less-than-gallant performance against Federer in Monte Carlo, it was a redemptive one. He began with what looked like an excess of something, either confidence of anxiety, I’m not sure which. He hit two drop shots in the first game, and then casually popped in another from behind the baseline in the second game. While he won two of those points, this was an uncharacteristically eccentric beginning for Djokovic, who is typically dialed in from the first ball. Wawrinka used the opportunity and took the early offensive.
As I said earlier in the week, Djokovic walks a razor’s edge of frustration in many of his matches—it’s what drives him, for better and for worse. (I've been speaking in Roman metaphors lately, so I'll compare Djokovic to the ruthlessly pragmatic and treacherous Cassius from Julius Caesar: Caesar notes his "lean and hungry look"—something I'm sure Federer and Nadal have noted in Djokovic of late.) But frustration is not an easy emotion to ride or even control: The Serb's impatience can boil over and lead him to throw a set away in anger, as it did against Andreev in Rome. Then again, it can also help him overcome a guy who is playing his best and seemingly rolling to victory, as it did against Wawrinka. From the second set on, Djokovic was a study in controlled impatience. He’d shed any anxiety or overconfidence; instead of drop shots from behind the baseline, he forged forward and won points at the net. Djokovic's tactics become more focused as well. Serving for the second set at 5-3, but down 0-15, he sliced his second serve up the middle rather than hitting the customary kick out wide. Surprised, Wawrinka floated his return long and lost four straight points for the set.
It was an admirably gritty and relatively quirk-free performance from Djokovic (though he did continue to pop in the odd, and usually ineffective, drop shot). That’s always been the word that comes to mind when I watch Djokovic. To me, his game is admirable in its comprehensiveness, rather than aesthetically appealing, like Federer’s or Nadal’s or Murray’s or Henin’s or even Davydenko’s.
But in the Rome final I located something in Djokovic’s game, a piece of technique, a moment repeated over and over, that was enjoyable to watch for its own sake. Whenever Wawrinka left a ball hanging in midcourt, Djokovic moved around it with startling quickness to set up for a forehand. So quick, in fact, that he had a moment to freeze, statue-like and perfectly balanced in an open stance, before rotating his shoulders through. Ruthlessly pragmatic and poetic at once, if this isn’t how the shot is taught in the textbook, the textbook needs a rewrite.