Dominic Thiem, the prodigy who loves to play, takes another step up ladder at U.S. Open

NEW YORK—“Nobody should have to work that hard on his birthday,” the emcee on the Grandstand told Dominic Thiem on Saturday.

It was hard to argue with him. A few minutes earlier, Thiem had finished off a stubbornly tenacious opponent, Pablo Carreño Busta of Spain, 1-6, 6-4, 6-4, 7-5, in two hours and 50 minutes of vehement baseline tennis. Was this any way to celebrate your 23rd birthday?

Once the match was over and he had come away a winner, Thiem didn’t seem to mind at all.

“It was a big pleasure to play a Grand Slam match on my birthday,” Thiem said with a smile. “A great and close match, the perfect present for me on my birthday.”

It hadn’t begun that way. Maybe Thiem got the birthday party started the night before, because he came out pancake flat and lost the first set in 21 minutes.

Yet the slow start didn’t seem to bother him at all. On Tuesday, in his opening match against John Millman, Thiem had lost a similarly one-sided second set. But he had maintained an air of quiet confidence all the way through, and he showed us why when he won in five. Chalk it up as another lesson that every rising ATP player must learn: When you play three out of five, you can afford not to panic. If you’re the better player, you’ll have your chance to prove it.

This season has been one long lesson for Thiem in how to make the transition from a nobody to a somebody on the ATP tour. For the most part, he has negotiated it brilliantly, and more smoothly than anyone of his generation so far. In 2016, Thiem has cracked the Top 10 for the first time, won four titles on three surfaces and is neck and neck with Novak Djokovic for most wins with 52. He has also beaten Rafael Nadal on clay and reached his first Grand Slam semi, at Roland Garros.

But while beating Rafa on dirt shows how high Thiem’s ceiling is, that result also shows how long a tennis season is. The match happened in the semifinals in Buenos Aires in February. This may not sound like all that long ago in real time, but in tennis time—which Boris Becker once said should be measured in dog years—it feels like a match from another season, or era, entirely.

And this brings up the biggest lesson that Thiem is still learning: how to schedule like a star. Most players enter every event they can, in the knowledge that they won’t go far at many of them. That may have been what Thiem still believed when he made his schedule for 2016, but he has obviously gone far at a lot of events. On the plus side, this is what helped him reach the Top 10, and nab the No. 8 seed at the Open. On the minus side, he has played a lot of tennis, and it has started to catch up with him. Coming into the Open, he was just 4-3 since the beginning of Wimbledon.

Thiem is aware of the issue.

“I think a little bit difference is, for sure, I didn’t expect to play that many matches and that many tournaments, and go that deep in almost every tournament,” he said after retiring in Toronto last month with hip pain.

We’ll see how—or if—he alters his schedule next season. Some players like to play a lot, no matter what the consequences are. Over the last decade, though, the consistent Slam winners on the men’s side haven’t committed to many events outside the majors and the Masters 1000s.

Still, Thiem has more to learn than just how to fill out a tournament entry form. Along with making the transition to a Top 10 mentality, he’s also trying to turn himself from a clay-courter into an all-courter. He’s had some success this year, winning a tournament on grass before losing in the second round at Wimbledon. But he’s not all the way there yet.

It had been a while since I had seen Thiem play, and I was surprised by how far back in the court he still stands, even on the semi-slick DecoTurf at Flushing Meadows. Much like Nadal, Thiem’s instinct is to move backward on big points. But while that won’t be ideal in the long run, Thiem’s style helped make his match with Carreño Busta fun to watch on Saturday. The Austrian and the Spaniard, who are both wiry and quick, essentially played hard-nosed dirtball on hard courts for nearly three hours. There was a lot of athleticism on display, and very little separated the world No. 10 from the world No. 39.

The match, which never grew dull and was watched by a nearly full Grandstand from start to finish, was a good advertisement for the quality and depth in professional tennis at the moment. It also showed why it’s so tough for even the most talented young players to separate themselves from the pack—the pack is pretty darn good. In the past, once an ATP prodigy cracked the Top 10, he immediately aimed for more. In this age of the older player, that’s not as necessary anymore. For now, Thiem will be happy just to maintain what he’s done this season.

“Top 10 was a big milestone because it’s so tough to reach,” he said this summer. “You need so many points, so many good results.

“I think my next goal is just to stay there as long as possible, because it’s maybe even tougher to stay there than to break into the Top 10.”

The future can wait for Thiem, who grinned as the Grandstand crowd sang “Happy Birthday” to him on Saturday. While Nick Kyrgios, with his bad-boy reputation, generates the headlines and the magazine covers, Thiem seems satisfied to be the ATP’s good boy, who goes about his business and waits for his turn at the top. The Aussie says he doesn’t love to play tennis; so far, the opposite has been true for the Austrian.

For now, Thiem can only hope that his 23rd year is as fruitful as his 22nd was. It will begin, in a couple of days, with a much-anticipated showdown against Juan Martin del Potro. Delpo won their only meeting this spring. We’ll see what the young man has learned since.