It wasn’t quite 11 A.M. in Ashe Stadium, but the seats were already burning, the Blackberries were blazing, and the few tentative spectators scattered around the stands appeared to be cowering in their seats, frightened of what the air might do to them. Whoever was programming the music over the loudspeakers did his best to make it all seem like fun by pumping out the Beatles’ cheerful “Good Day Sunshine.” Nobody was buying it.
Ten minutes later, Ana Ivanovic and Zheng Jie were almost done with their warm-up; the chair umpire had called “2 minutes.” It seemed that the only witnesses to their match would be the beefy, yellow-shirted bodyguards who ringed the court. But the U.S. Open has to start sometime, especially when it’s this hot and getting hotter. I had the feeling, though, that this under-the-radar A.M. time slot might be just the thing for Ivanovic, who has famously struggled with scrutiny and expectations—along with serves, forehands, ankles, backhands, and pretty much everything else involved with the sport of tennis—over the last year.
I guess I was right, because Ivanovic demolished Zheng 3 and 0 in 56 minutes to advance to the third round. The old-fashioned term “overmatched” was the only way to describe it. Ivanovic was on top of Zheng’s serve and in control of virtually every rally from the first ball.
“I feel like I’m playing like a Top 10 player,” Ivanovic said afterward. “I have confidence that I can beat these players. That’s huge for me.”
There’s that word again: Confidence. Or con-fee-dense, as Ivanovic says it. And she says it a lot. When she was asked today about how she dealt with the heat, I half-expected Ivanovic to chalk it up to having the confidence to stay on your feet out there, the confidence to stay hydrated. But there’s a reason she emphasizes it. She knows that it’s the only real explanation for her long nosedive in the rankings (the former No. 1 is 40th now). As today's match showed, while there may have been moments in the last couple of years when the Serbian Ana appeared to be following the career trajectory of the Russian Anna, there's no question that Ivanovic is more physically and athletically gifted than all but a few of her WTA peers. Zheng is a quality opponent, and she could barely stay on the court with her.
Ivanvovic is not alone in her obsession with confidence. For a tennis player, it's an infuriatingly elusive state of mind that’s liable to appear and disappear, swell and recede, rise and fall, 20 different times over the course of one match. Even a match like today’s. Judging from its score line, you might think Ivanovic is back to her old form, and that she suffered no lapses in confidence. But you’d be wrong. It was when she went up 5-1 in the first, when she seemingly had everything under control, that she threw up her first wayward ball toss. The yips are a sickness that can flare up exactly when you least expect it.
“I worked a lot on [my toss],” Ivanovic said. “but there are some bad tosses, like everyone else. I hope I’m not as famous for them anymore. But yeah, I do feel a lot more confident (that word again). Just playing lots of matches, it does help get your confidence up."
I was a little stunned to hear Ivanovic use the term “Catch-22” today—I thought her literary choices ran toward the Dalai Llama, not a war novel by Joseph Heller. While she didn’t use it quite correctly, the term certainly applies when it comes to tennis and confidence. Like a job application that demands that every prospective employee already have three years of experience doing that job, you can’t build confidence unless you play tournament matches, but you can’t play a whole lot of tournament matches unless you have the confidence to win them. Since Ivanovic was “all the time losing, losing,” as she put it, she never had a chance to try her toss out in pressure situations. Now, after a couple of successful events this summer, she’s had that chance. The result today was a qualified success. Ivanovic seems to have the right attitude about it. She seems satisfied not to seek perfection with her serve, but to manage the problem as well as she can. She still has a strange little hitch in her delivery—she can’t seem to bend her left leg naturally when she tosses the ball. That may prove to be a factor if she does face a few more pressurized moments later in the tournament. But she seems to have learned to live with it, which is all you can do.
How far along the long road back is Ivanovic? There were things to like and not like today. “Moving forward” is a mantra that has been cropping up in her pressers, and she clearly wanted to do that today. Not all the way to the net, necessarily, but starting with her service return, Ivanovic tried to take as many balls as she could inside the baseline. She pressed the issue with virtually every shot. It’s less a tactic than an outlook: Like Darren Cahill has said, it can help just to keep the thought of moving forward in your head as you play, even if you don’t fully act on it very often.
While Ivanovic won easily, she was still hit and miss. Two crisp winners were routinely followed by two unforced errors. Apparently she felt there was no time to shift down a gear or try to construct a point. Which was fine today—never change a winning game, as they say. At the same time, it was hard to get a gauge on how Ivanovic might do if she has to hit more than four or five balls at a time. She said she couldn’t practice for 10 days after her ankle injury in Cincy, so you don't know how her long-term consistency will be affected.
Still, Ivanovic beat a seed and is through two rounds at the U.S. Open, cause for minor celebration all around the WTA. She plays Virginie Razzano next; they’ve split two three-setters, with Ivanovic winning their last meeting, in 2008. It’s a one-day-at-time tournament for her at this point, but the best news may be that Ivanovic says she’s happy to finally be able to take what she’s been doing in practice and put it in play during matches. That may sound like a simple concept, but implementing it is anything but.
Besides her improved serve, Ivanovic showed off one other trick that I'd forgtten about: A slightly delayed body turn and uppercut fist pump that she does with her left hand—it seemed more pronounced and thought-out than ever today. While I wonder about the value of a fist-pump in the first game of a match—doesn’t it take you out of your normal rhythm and make you too tense too early?—I enjoyed seeing Ivanovic getting a chance to indulge in it. The move may seem forced, it may be counterproductive, but it’s good to know that Ivanovic is still con-fee-dent enough to look a little silly letting it fly.