The Bercy Blow Up

If you like your tennis tournaments to have the air of a three-ring circus, this has been the week for you. The Masters event in Bercy has stood logic on its head on a daily basis. Take the bittersweet case of local journeyman Julien Benneteau. Buoyed by his home-country crowd in Paris, he was transformed into a balletic volleying machine and blubbering giant-killer one day, only to be returned to his normal status as an underpowered, stoical third-round loser less than 24 hours later.

Wild swings of fortune are the inevitable result of the compact, six-day Masters format. If you were a player, you'd probably say this format also unfairly punishes those who get the short end of the scheduling stick. And it's true, these events are perversely compressed. The top guys don’t get started until Wednesday, and then they must go at it every day from there. This led to disaster for Andy Murray, who didn’t get off the court until after midnight against James Blake in the second round. Predictably, he showed up the next afternoon half-comatose and lost to Radek Stepanek. He was so out of it, he didn’t even let the Irritator get under his skin. So disappointing.

Otherwise, from a fan's perspective, the tournament has been whiplash-inducing, and more fun for it. At this point in the season, the ATP script has been thrown out the window. Even second-seeded Rafael Nadal’s trip to the semifinals has been an unlikely adventure. I’ve been trying to discern a few trends in all of it, but by the next day they’ve been reversed. So I’ll just wing it with the observations. It’s that kind of week.

Late Season Looks

It used to be Andy Roddick who would show up at the European fall events looking a little worse for wear, his hair a little longer than usual, his baseball hat an inch farther out of place. This year, with Roddick looking for apartments near my Brooklyn neighborhood, it was left to defending champion Jo-Wilfred Tsonga to carry the scruffy late-season baton. His hair was wild—it made him look much taller—but so was his play at the wrong moments today against Nadal. I’d say the same for Gael Monfils' hair, but his late-season look lasts all year long.

Speaking of Rafa, first it was sleeves, then it was the pink shirt, now it’s the plaid pants. He’s going overboard to shed the warrior look. I like the plaid—bold and loud will always be his style—but can a man win a Grand Slam title in those? Maybe that’s why he debuted them at this point in the season, and why they’ll likely be gone by January.

Keep It High and Tight to Jo-Willie

Back to Tsonga for a second. What is unique about the man’s game? He's one of the few players who are much better diving for a volley than hitting one when they can set up. Get the ball away from him and he’s deadly; few others, Pete Sampras notably excepted, have made the athletic moves Tsonga makes in tracking down a passing shot. But like Sampras, he volleys with his legs rather than his hands. Send the ball right at him and chances are he’ll carve under it too much and pop it up. On the first point of the final game, Nadal mishit a pass that ended up diving right into Tsonga's body. Unable to move into it, the Frenchman stoned it 10 feet wide.

Sod’s Dream Dies. . . For This Year

Robin Soderling has come a long way in 2009, but his old weakness—maddening inconsistency—caught up with him just a few inches shy of the finish line. He lost in three sets today to Novak Djokovic, thereby ending his bid for a spot in the World Tour Final in two weeks (unless Roddick is still apartment hunting, that is; then the Sod would be fired into the London draw). But think about Soderling’s Grand Slam season—he lost to Federer at three of them, and two of those losses were in very tight, tiebreaker-heavy matches. Soderling is still only 25, and after this year he must finally believe he belongs in the latter stages of majors. I’ve even started to like watching him play—concentrate on the arms and the swing, ignore the legs. Look no farther for your major-title dark horse for 2010.

Del Potro Gets Back to Business

There are players, like Tsonga and Monfils and Soderling, who at some point in a match will become mentally unsettled and miss a series of critical shots. Then there are players, like Murray and Verdasco and Simon and Robredo, who don’t grab a match and make it theirs. Neither group wins a lot of big tournaments. Then there’s a guy like del Potro, who’s tenacious enough to stop a bad run of errors before it hurts him, and explosive enough to grab the reins in the middle of any rally. His confidence in his ground strokes can be astounding. Serving at 4-4, 30-30 against Marat Safin in the second round, he took a deep mid-court return from Safin and, rather than doing the safe thing and looping back a rally ball, drilled it inside out for a winner. This was a tougher shot than it looked because del Potro had no natural angle to work with; he had to create it himself. At the same time, it wasn’t a wild, all-or-nothing stab designed to get the rally over with one way or the other. It was the immediate, unthinking reaction of a guy who knows he can hit any shot from any part of the court. Those are the kinds of players who win big tournaments.

Rafa Comes Out of His Shell

Was it Woody Allen who said that 99 percent of life was about showing up? That would certainly explain the continued success of both Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. They keep their noses down, go about their business, put themselves in contention, and let the rest of the world self-destruct around them. That’s been a key to Federer’s major-title wins in 2009, and it’s been the key to Nadal’s semifinal run in Bercy. In each of his first two rounds, his opponents, Almagro and Robredo, served for the match. Nadal upped his game just enough each time and let their nerves do the rest. Neither had ever beaten their fellow Spaniard, and that’s a tough obstacle to clear no matter how well you might be playing. Like an incumbent running for office or a boxing champion in a close bout, a player like Federer or Nadal will always reap the benefits of status. As Tommy Haas and Nicolas Almagro now know, you have to land the knockout punch against them.

I wrote at the beginning of the week that Nadal needs to sweat his way into a tournament before he can play his best. I just didn’t know how much sweat it would require. Rafa was in his default defensive mode, his feet firmly planted behind the baseline, through his first two rounds and well into the first set against Tsonga. But after saving three break points, he began to come out of his shell bit by bit. Nadal served better to end the first set, which put him inside the court to hit his ground strokes, which in turn led him to stay aggressive—he looked for winners with his forehand and bailed on the defensive backhand slice he’d been using earlier in the week. Even after all of his successes, it still takes Rafa time to show himself that he can win by taking control of points. It still takes him time to believe that he really is pretty good.

Best entrance music of the week: Prince’s “Erotic City” before the Nadal-Tsonga match. What was that about?

Marat TV: Final Episodes

I’ll leave you with two last Safin clips, both of which took place in Paris. That’s about all they have in common. Man of the people, that's all I'll say. Enjoy the weekend.