He's got a long way to go, for sure, but the essential feature is there: winning a lot. (In fact, I picked him to win the tourney.) As we get used to seeing him do it, methods and patterns begin to emerge from the increasing sample size of his matches. If there is a signal quality to Djokovic this early in his career, it's his competitive scrappiness. He hustles and works, grinds when he needs to grind, lets fly when the chance comes. He's not afraid of risk. He has great jugdment of the emotional arc of matches, knowing when to exert more pressure and when he can safely slack off for a point, a game, or even a set.
He's not the prettiest player to watch. For five years we've been watching perhaps the greatest tennis aesthete ever, a man who glides over the court without audible footfalls. Federer's footwork and stroke mechanics look so perfect that literary people wax poetic about superslow-motion footage of him. Djoko, on the other hand, is better described by the word efficacious. He has the brutal directness of Safin or Agassi's two-handed backhand, merely workable volleys, and a tendency to strike the ball from contorted body positions or while doing a split.
Djokovic's style is designed to produce the right ball, at the cost of aesthetics. He's more about point-construction than about technique as an end in itself. He might end up in an open stance with his feet pointing at the opposite sidelines, but the ball that comes off his racquet goes where it needs to go. His forehand, his best-looking shot, still isn't exactly pretty, but that helicopter rotor blur of racquet speed is devastatingly effective. Even his serve is a simple, somehow workmanlike shot.
But last night's match, as so many of his, was about Djokovic serving well and playing bigger tennis than Moya at the right time, namely the second-set tiebreak. Moya made a good push to get to set point, but couldn't play freely once there. Moya is Grand Slam champ and former top player, but his competitive will seemed clearly inferior to Djokovic's. Relaxed and cheery afterwards, he mildly remarked that Djokovic had the temperamental makings of a "big champion." Moya's temperament was a little too much like a yoga instructor: maturely detached from excessive competitiveness, which is healthy in life but fatal in tennis.
Meanwhile, most of Novak's press conference concerned his imitations. Question after question asked him to identify the signal tic of each of his victims, who he thought the funniest prior players were (McEnroe and Connors; maybe to him). Finally Matt Cronin broke in with a tennis question: do you think you've reached your best level here? Djokovic's response was interesting (apologies for the lack of verbatim quotes; I don't have a copy of the transcript): he spoke very frankly about the pressure he felt coming in as a favorite to make it to Super Saturday, but expressed his happiness with his ability to last through a lot of long matches and get to the semifinal without conditioning problems.
Later the two topics, his tennis and his comedy, came together for me. In answer to the question "How long have you been imitating other players?," Djokovic talked about trying to hit a one-handed backhand like his idol, Pete Sampras, but having to switch to two hands because he was too small and skinny. (A nice reversal of Sampras' own backhand switch.) Here the topics had merged, though, and it hit me: Djokovic the player and Novak the entertainer are both essentially moldable. He has taken the best bits from many players, starting with the dominant dyad of his childhood, Pete and Andre (from whence the serve and backhand), and that studied adoption gives his play a certain unfinished, formed-of-clay appearance.
