Thursday’s much-anticipated Rafael Nadal-Ernests Gulbis showdown was held on Court 1, the second-largest show court and, having been built in 1997, the most modern. It has a slightly futuristic feel, in a traditional Wimbledon sort of way, of course. At its top is an oval that cuts off the sky's horizons and gives it the enclosed quality of a painting. It's the closest thing to a planetarium that you’ll find in tennis.
The match was scheduled for 1:00 P.M., but every seat was taken 15 minutes early. The big scoreboards at the corners of the court featured photos of Nadal and Gulbis grinning. They each looked about 12 years old. The atmosphere was heavy with anticipation, as it is always is before a match like this. It was easy to lose sight of the fact that the two combatants were really just kids. Being a tennis prodigy can make you a brat, but, as seems to be the case with Nadal and Gulbis, it can also make you grow up fast.
Nadal strutted out of the tunnel and onto the court a good 15 seconds after Gulbis, as if this were a boxing match and he owned the belt. Then he kept the poor kid waiting for a longer time than usual before coming off the sidelines for the coin toss. As the chair umpire gave the players their instructions, Nadal bounced on his toes like a boxer. Gulbis wasn’t sure how to counter this, so he clasped his hands together behind his back like a student trying to look innocent. Nadal had wasted no time in taking ownership of the moment. I thought Gulbis was doomed.
It’s amazing what a 130-mph serve can do. That’s what Gulbis sent in Nadal’s direction on the first two points. It didn’t stop there. Gulbis made 75 percent of his first deliveries in the opening set and won his first 13 service points. Nadal never reached deuce on Gulbis’ serve in the first set and lost it 7-5. He no longer owned the moment.
It wasn’t just the serve that the teenager had going. He was drilling his forehand down the line when he had an opening. He was hitting casually perfect forehand drop shots that even Nadal struggled to track down. He was jumping out and returning Nadal’s wide serve in the ad court with his two-handed backhand. He was winning the battle of court position. Nadal was playing catch-up the whole way.
We didn’t know, as Gulbis won the first set, that he’d reached his high watermark of the afternoon. This time Nadal jumped out of his seat as time was called to start the second set. But it was more of the same: Gulbis held at love and won the first two points on Nadal’s serve. This was danger territory for the Spaniard—he hadn’t gotten even a sniff at a break until then. That's when he started to play. At 15-30, Nadal reached for a high backhand volley. The normal choice would have been to try to cut the ball at an extreme angle crosscourt. That’s where Gulbis went, but Nadal hit it down the line instead. (I was already looking for the crosscourt myself and didn’t see where Nadal had hit the ball until it was in the curtain behind the court—that's how surprising it was.) On the next two points, Nadal fought off huge forehands from Gulbis and scraped his way to a hold. Those four points, won with a mix of surprise and desperate defense, turned the match for Nadal.
What should we make of Gulbis after this? It’s obvious he’s got a big upside, and I liked almost every aspect of his performance. He’ll always have the serve as a bail-out weapon. He’s solid on both sides and can change the ball’s direction easily. He has a nice change-up in his drop shot, which will help on clay more than anywhere else. And he can blitz a winner from anywhere and to anywhere with his forehand.
That’s also a potential problem. The fact that Gulbis can hit his forehand this well goads him to try to do it whenever he can. The stroke itself—leaping, wristy, with a lot of racquet-head speed but not a lot of topspin for safety—doesn’t lend itself to being re-created many times in a rally before it’s sailing for the back fence. Still, like Marat Safin, Gulbis’ best shots produce a cannon-like sound when they come off his racquet. That in itself seems like a good omen for the future to me.
He may be a volative shot-maker, but Gulbis is calm beyond his years in the press room. He sounds like he’s whispering even when he’s talking at a normal volume. When he was asked about what had turned the match around, he mentioned Nadal’s name and a dreamy, faraway look came to his eye. “You know, Nadal is such a player that he adjusts a lot,” Gulbis said. “He started to return better, he started to guess more where I'm going to serve. That was the key point.”
Gulbis went on to describe his strategy against Nadal like this: “I didn't try to play too much in his backhand because everybody when they play against him, they try to play more on his backhand, but I think that's not really the right way to play him, because when you're hitting to the backhand he doesn't miss and he goes around with his forehand, and then he kills you. I tried to play more on his forehand side, to get him out of the backhand corner.”
Isn’t it nice to hear that a player of any age, let alone 19, came out with a defined tactic and stuck to it? It wasn’t a bad tactic, either. But, as Gulbis said, Nadal made his own tactical adjustments. He went after Gulbis’ forehand with his serve until he could see it wasn’t going to work. Then he went with the bread and butter—the wide one to the backhand—when he needed a point. At the start of the second set, Nadal moved back to give himself more time on Gulbis’ second serve. This bothered the Latvian, but he couldn’t figure out exactly what Nadal was doing differently until he was told by a reporter. (He thanked him and said, “I’m glad you told me.”)
Gulbis went into this match saying he didn’t want to lose his self-belief as it went on. I don’t think he accomplished that—his game and his confidence reached a high watermark and receded—but that’s been happening to a lot of guys against Nadal lately. Big serves, big forehands, the bravado of youth, a new strategic wrinkle—it still wasn't enough to bring down Nadal.
The aura is intact.