Everything is heightened on the day of a final. You can feel it and even see it around the grounds. Today at the Foro Italico the sky was clearer, the temperature was higher, the sun was brighter, the women were better looking. The ballgirls had shorter shorts and the line judges had cooler shirts. I’d even say the court was oranger. And it goes without saying that Rafael Nadal played better. At 20 years old, he’s now reached 24 finals in his career and won 21.
So who forgot to tell Fernando Gonzalez to be ready for all this? He played like a man possessed yesterday; today he looked slow on the uptake in all aspects of the game. Nadal was, from both a tactical and physical standpoint, one step (or two, or three) ahead of him. Gonzo was left a broken man in little over an hour.
That’s what Nadal has been doing to his opponents this clay-court season. He’s not just beating them, but taking their hope. Some, like Mikhail Youzhny and Novak Djokovic, endure it with a smile; some, like Nikolay Davydenko, refuse to cave; some, like Fernando Gonzalez, don’t know what the hell to do.
Yesterday I said the early indicator of Nadal’s form was a fluttering missed second serve. It was another early second serve that pointed the way today. (I guess it’s true that you’re only as good as your second serve.) After breaking Gonzalez in the first game and going up 15-0 in the following game, Nadal fooled Gonzalez with a second serve down the middle for an ace. It began a trend: He had Gonzalez bamboozled all afternoon.
Nadal served another surprise ace out wide in the deuce court to hold for 3-1. He forced Gonzalez into numerous errors by making him short-hop his heavy topspin. He mixed his serve into Gonzalez’s right hip in the deuce court, pushing him into the middle of the court, then went back hard to Gonzo’s forehand side for winners. He came out on the winning end of all the touch contests at net. He finished off the first set by serving and volleying. Gonzo was so thrown off by then that he tripped and fell trying to get to Nadal’s volley.
Bud Collins asked Nadal about the serve and volley in the presser, and Nadal answered, smiling, “I’m thinking about Wimbledon.” The kid’s got jokes, too!
Gonzalez took a short break after the set, but it didn’t change anything. Nadal came out and hit a drop shot winner on the first point of the second and followed it in the next game with a confident swing volley. By now, though, Nadal didn’t need to do a whole lot. Up 3-2, he hit a simple, soft first serve to Gonzo’s backhand to start the game. The return sailed along. At 40-15, Nadal did the same thing and got the same result. Sometimes the best strategy is to stick with what just worked a couple minutes ago—“give ’em enough rope” is a time-honored tennis tactic at all levels.
Feeling the effects of yesterday’s epic with Davydenko, Nadal played as efficiently as possible and found ways to win quickly. It helped focus his mind and tactics. He said afterward, “My special goal today was playing a little but more aggressive than yesterday. If Gonzalez take control of a lot of points it’s very difficult, his forehand, so I try to return the ball and be more aggressive.”
The last few games were uneventful, as Gonzalez exited with a slew of tame errors. But there was one more shot from Nadal worth mentioning, one that helped seal Gonzo’s fate. At 4-2, 30-30, Gonzalez pulled Nadal way off court on his backhand side. Nadal slid out there, got under a backhand, and floated it over Gonzalez’s backhand side an inch or two inside the baseline. The way Nadal hit the shot—cupping under it, McEnroe-style—reminded me of the way he had hit a couple short-angle drops this week. It’s not a technique I’d seen from him before. Maybe touch can be improved after all.
What can we say for Gonzalez? In the most immediate sense, his time in Rome was positive. “This was a good week for me,” he said in his presser, “especially if you go back one or two weeks and I was playing really bad on this surface. I feel I’m back and I’m ready to do more important things.”
OK, this is true, and having watched Gonzalez slog away in the qualifying of the U.S. Open a few years ago (a buddy from TENNIS Magazine and I were the only spectators; Gonzo kept looking over, like he was asking himself, “who are those guys?”), I respect how far he has come, and how he has continued to improve even this year. But today he looked like a guy who doesn’t know how to handle the big moment, that heightened feeling of a final I mentioned. He did come with a strategy; but when Nadal blew it out of the water, Gonzo wasn’t flexible or resourceful or tough enough to adjust.
“I tried to attack him all the time,” Gonzalez said, “tried to play very, very close to the baseline to make my opportunity to go into the net, and I couldn’t do. That was my plan for today.” Hence, the short-hop mishits.
Nadal tried to play “long,” as he said (that’s “deep” to you and me), and Gonzalez tried to crowd the baseline. That was trouble for Gonzo from the start. He had to alter his game more than Nadal, who naturally tries to play long in every match. A couple times in the first set, Gonzo tried to settle back, rally with his slice backhand, and wait for a forehand. This is a typical ploy for him, but it was never going to work against Nadal on clay, because the longer a rally goes, the better it is for Rafa in general. He has the patience to never give Gonzalez an attackable forehand.
Men’s tennis is lucky right now. When one big star falters, the other picks him up. Nadal and Roger Federer haven’t pushed their rivalry any further over the last 10 months, but they’ve traveled on parallel tracks of excellence and given fans two dominant figures to marvel at. !Steamboatricky08It reminds me, as I’m sure it does you, of the World Wrestling Federation in its 1980s glory days. They crowned a champion of the entire WWF (in my days as a wrestling fan, it was Bob Backlund; in today’s ATP, that would be Federer). But they also had a sort of side champion, who held the “Intercontinental” belt. Why there needed to be two, I can’t quite recall, but I’m sure there was a very, very good reason. The last Intercontinental Champion I remember was a gentleman named Ricky Steamboat (the fellow pictured here), later nicknamed “The Dragon.” In today’s tennis terms, the Intercontinental champ is Nadal. Let’s face it, the guy is deserving of a belt of his own.
I saw a lot of Nadal this week, but just a little of Federer. The practice of his that I caught makes me less than shocked that he and Roche parted ways. The two barely spoke during an hour on court. Anyone for Darren Cahill as coach? There’s the Peter Carter connection, and Fed loves his Aussies. I personally would like him to try Mats Wilander, who’s a wily character and certainly knows all about Roland Garros, but it’s unlikely.
Anyway, I did get a chance to see Federer from a closer vantage point than I have before. I isolated on him for a game or two. There has probably never been a player whose body dances the way Federer’s does as he plays. This is what he brings to the game—a reminder of how tennis at it best remains a blend of aesthetics and force, and that eye-pleasing style is not just an adornment, but can still be useful, even in the era of the 140 m.p.h. serve.
What does Nadal bring? Watching him will his way to victory over Davydenko yesterday, he seemed the diametric opposite of Federer. Nadal proves tennis is physical, gritty, earthbound, not always pretty, and that brains and raw desire are often enough. Grinding, gritty types have been known to be ornery at times in the past—Connors and Hewitt come to mind. Toughness on court doesn’t just appear without a little edge as well. Or does it? Nadal's toughness comes not with an edge, but with an innocence. He's proof that warriors can be civilized. That's about as close to a classic definition of a tennis player as you can get.
Today Nadal reached for a wide ball and sent it off his frame and straight into the head of an older lady sitting courtside. He seemed genuinely concerned and took a few seconds to walk over and apologize and make sure she was OK. Now, it's true that most other players would have done the same thing. It’s just that it made so much sense seeing Nadal do it.
We need Nadal and Federer playing well at the same time. We need them to square off again soon.
Let’s unify the belts.