MELBOURNE—There’s one thing, maybe only one thing, that you can say for sure about Bernard Tomic: He never stops confounding. Anyway you take the 19-year-old Aussie, he turns conventional wisdom on its head and makes it work for him. Even that isn’t quite true, though. Sometimes his unorthodox style utterly fails him and you think, OK, finally, the truth is out, he’s isn’t for real, he’s going to have to come down to earth and start acting and training and playing and serving like a real tennis pro. That’s what happened at the last Grand Slam, the U.S. Open, where Tomic was mauled by Marin Cilic in perhaps the most lopsided match of the men’s season. Then, a few months later, he'll go and flip everything on its head and make you believe again. Tomic’s unlikely, overheated, five-set, four-hour, “torturous,” rope-a-Verdasco win today in a packed Rod Laver Arena was one more of those moments.
Tomic is the prodigy whose pushy tennis dad doesn’t want him to play too much. He’s the pro whose service motion looks like the type you teach to a beginner. He hits with no margin for error, but wins with consistency. He has a two-handed backhand yet specializes in the slice. He’s 6-foot-3 and struggles with his footwork along the baseline, yet is blessed with enough court sense and anticipation to get him where he needs to be. When he has a putaway, he’s as likely to push it back as he is to drill it. He’s the child star with the cocky walk who smiles and talks like the kid on the next block. He’s the young player who admits he’s not in great shape, yet who requests a day match, as he did Monday, while failing to notice that the forecast says it's going to be 90 degrees in the shade.
And yet, what’s strangest of all is that much of the time Tomic’s game doesn’t look strange at all. He runs over, swings, sends the ball back safely into the court, and then does it again. As Roger Federer skeptically put it after playing him this fall, “We’ve know about the slice backhand.”
But that’s where this seemingly guileless kid has you fooled again. This afternoon Tomic turned convention on its head in a new way. By the start of the second set, after just an hour of play, he appeared to be gassed. He broke Verdasco’s serve for 2-0, but rather than pump his fist, Tomic sat down on a chair at the back of the court. Later in the set he broke again and immediately began limping to the sideline. He even does body language in reverse.
The gig seemed to be up in the third set, after Tomic squandered three set points at 6-5 in the second. The last of them was an easy forehand putaway that he banged into the tape. Tomic missed virtually the same forehand on a key point late in the first set. (I thought, again, that here was a major hole in the Tomic game—the lack of a point-ending forehand—and that it would be the difference today. I was wrong when it came to Tomic again.) By the middle of the third set, those missed opportunities appeared to be taking their toll on Tomic, as his body language, and presumably his physical condition, grew worse.
“It’s not a good feeling when you’re losing,” Tomic said. “You see the fans just disappearing one by one. It’s a tough feeling.”
Apparently, though, it wasn’t as tough a feeling as he made it seem. Tricky Tomic said afterward that he faked Verdasco out by making it look like he was ready to pull the plug mentally.
“He thought—I had a feeling he knew I was going to go away,” Tomic said. “I eased off, as well, I think on purpose. I eased off and seemed I didn’t care, and I think that’s what drawed [sic] him in a little bit tonight. He thought he was going to win that third set, and when the right time came, I broke him.”
Verdasco denied he was taken in by Tomic; he said he felt sick in the third and fourth sets. Either way, Tomic did break at the “right time,” on a Verdasco double fault at 4-4. What’s interesting is that Tomic would think to try to fool his opponent about his condition. It smacks of a junior tactic, in a way, but some junior tactics can be effective against even the hardest of grown-ups—think of what Michael Chang’s moonballs and underhand serve did to Ivan Lendl at the French Open in 1989.
This was hardly that type of legendary occasion. But it was a big one, and the crowd, as Tomic said, "came back one by one" as he began to come back. Two sets later, at 5-5 in the fifth set, Tomic broke Verdasco again. He reached match point a few minutes after that. The two players rallied. “There was no way I was going for a shot,” Tomic said with s smile later. “No way.”
Instead, he switched it. That’s right: “I just switched it and played something different and caught him out.” The ball went one way and Verdasco went the other.
There you go. Tomic is the kid who wins the biggest point of his life by doing something he calls “switching it.”
The first four times he was asked how he had won today, Tomic looked down, shook his head, and said, “I don’t know how I did it.” I guess if Tomic has given up figuring out how he wins, if he’s confounded even himself, we should stop trying to figure it out ourselves.