The Best Surprise

Has your NCAA bracket officially been busted yet? Whatever the damage, I doubt it was as bloody as what went on in Indian Wells over the last 10 days. It wasn’t just the champions—Jelena Jankovic and Ivan Ljubicic, two players whose long-term trajectories had been pointing downward—who stunned us, either. From the moment I arrived 10 days ago to find out that Justine Henin had lost in her opening round, this was a tournament that overturned expectation and precedent on a daily basis. Among other stunners, Marcos Baghdatis beat Roger Federer for the first time; Kim Clijsters folded with a commanding lead in a third-set tiebreaker; and Ivan Ljubicic ignored his collective 4-12 record against Rafael Nadal and Andy Roddick long enough to beat both for the title.

Even on Sunday morning, if forced to predict the winner of the women’s final, I would have taken Caroline Wozniacki. She hadn’t been scintillating this week, but she had looked intimidatingly competent. While there wasn't much between her and Maria Kirilenko as far as their games went, Wozniacki ruthlessly exploited what difference there was to win 0 and 3 in the third round. Then she ran Nadia Petrova and Jie Zheng into the ground in third sets—love and 1, respectively. And she’d been in total control of her straight-set semifinal with Agnieszka Radwanska.

Then, just when Wozniacki appeared set to make a Premier-level breakthrough, her competence deserted her. It began, from my perspective, in the first game of the final. Jankovic, in the middle of a standard crosscourt rally—the kind that Wozniacki had been playing and grinding through and winning all week—belted a forehand up the line for a winner. The anticipated dynamic had been broken. Wozniacki began to try to hit her ground strokes with more depth. She sent two balls over the baseline. She lost that game, and lost her equilibrium with it.

The most obvious problem was with her forehand. She missed it in every way and on every big point. Returns into the net, rally balls wide, passing shots long, you name it, when she needed a point, Wozniacki’s forehand was there to lose it for her. It appeared to me that her contact point was all over the place, that she never settled on how she wanted use it. Asked about her forehand later, though, she denied it had been a particular problem. “I just think that I was making too many errors,” she said. You can’t argue with that.

On the other hand, this was the best I’d seen Jankovic play in many months. She did a lot more than just shovel the ball back over the net, too. She won points with her serve out wide in the ad court. She reached for a nice poke drop-volley winner. She knocked off a difficult overhead while drifting back close to the baseline. She even fooled Wozniacki with a cleverly deceptive short-angle crosscourt loop forehand behind her.

Where did this shot, and this match, leave Wozniacki? She became No. 2 in the world this week and looked strong for much of it, but she didn’t rise to the moment in the final, and she didn’t seem all that frustrated about that fact afterward. She also lost to a player who, if she wants to continue to be No. 2 for any length of time, she’s going to have to beat. Wozniacki was upbeat in her presser; if she were a couple of years older than her 19, I would say she was too upbeat. Asked how she tried to change the momentum today, she didn’t have much to say. “I wanted to get her moving a bit more,” Wozniacki said. “But it’s the way it went, and it’s OK, you know. I just need to get back on the practice court, and there’s always next week.” That’s the right attitude for now. But it won’t always be.

As for Jankovic, it’s nice to have her back in the winner’s circle. For today, at least, she kept the drama-loving J.J. under wraps and played it calm and straight. She didn’t beat the Williamses or the Belgians on her way to the title, but she was back to playing clean tennis and opening up points with her famous down the line backhand, a shot that I’d seen less of from her over the last year. She got herself to match point by belting one for a winner after a long, moonball-heavy rally. It even sounded good, coming off her racquet with a deep pop. Wozniacki didn’t expect it and the crowd didn’t expect it, either. But that's what this tournament was all about.

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Who did I predict to win the men’s final, you ask? Can you guess? Come on, I’m sure you can—that's right, Andy Roddick. I thought that Ljubicic would be forced to leave his comfort zone at the baseline more often than the steadier Roddick, and that the errors he would commit doing this would be the difference. I also—big mistake—looked up their head to head and saw that Roddick had a 7-3 edge.

What’s ironic is that Ljubicic won this tournament, whose slow hard courts make it a showcase for defense and solid all-around play, with one very old-school power shot: his serve. Down love-40 early in the first set, he served his way out of the hole, hitting an ace at 30-40. In the first tiebreaker, he took advantage of a botched, inexplicable serve and volley by Roddick on the opening point by following up with a service winner for 2-0. More crucially, at 3-2, he hit a nasty sliding second serve that handcuffed Roddick on his backhand side.

By the start of the second set, Ljubicic’s serving dominance had Roddick shaking his head, then hanging his head, then pointing to the back of the line to indicate the exact spot where he was placing his bombs time and again. Ljubicic used a strong serve to save a break point later in the set and finished that game with an ace, and, as he had against Nadal, he turned it up even more in the breaker. He opened with a service winner and hit two aces to go up 6-2. At that point, though, with his first Masters shield one swing away, Ljubicic suffered a serious brain cramp. He tried a drop shot that he’d later call “stupid.” He threw away another point by hitting his second serve as hard as his first serve and netting it. Then he made the score 5-6 by ill-advisedly stopping a point to make an incorrect challenge—he was hoping more than playing. Ljubicic didn't need to hope: He stepped up at 6-5 and hit a perfect serve to the corner for the title.

This wasn’t an event that was indicative of tour trends. I’ve talked about the continued rise of overall competence at the expense of creative risk-taking, and that's true for both tours. But Indian Wells is an extreme example. What wins here doesn’t win at Roland Garros or Wimbledon or the U.S. Open. In 2009, Andy Murray’s retrieving skills made him the top performer over the course of the Indian Wells/Key Biscayne double, but he didn’t end up reaching any major finals.

Instead, this year's tournament ended with a one-off: An overdue and well-deserved triumph by a respected member of the game’s second-tier. After the final, Ljubicic sat in the press room next to the tournament’s shining abstract trophy and spoke about what winning it meant to him. “Looking at my career, I did feel like I was missing it,” he said. “It gives something special to your career. It's another thing after Davis Cup, Olympic medal, and two Top 10 finishes and now a Masters 1000, so it makes everything look—look better, actually.”

The day before, Ljubicic had proclaimed forthrightly his desire to finally win his first Masters title, after losing in three other finals. “It would mean the world to me,” he said. “When I see my name on the court, to have that little shield [the Masters-winner shield] next to my name, it would be nice.”

Sometimes, with all the money on offer in tennis, you start to wonder if it's the primary motivator for most of the players, or at least for the guys without legitimate shots at winning Slams. It would be understandable if it was, but it's not a fun thought for fans to consider—we want to believe in the glory of our game. When we hear a guy like Ljubicic recount his career achievements—none of them monetary—with so much pride, we can believe in it. We can believe that the players love the game's history as much as we do. Ljubicic's appreciation is a function of his age and his background, of course—he’s 31, and he knows all about not getting everything he wants. But hearing him talk so lovingly about that little shield was the best surprise of all this week.