It appeared to be an afternoon like every other in Madrid last week. The sky was a steel blue that nearly matched the silver walls of the Magic Box. The Spanish sun was as encompassing as ever, but the air was cut with a swaying cross-breeze. The well-dressed and well-heeled sell-out crowd in Santana stadium stood with their hands in their pockets and chattered excitedly while “Oye Como Va” played over the loudspeakers. It seemed like they’d come to a garden party and found out that a tennis match was going to be played as well—the very best tennis match, of course. A cheer went up when the smiling face of Roger Federer, who was waiting for his name to be announced, popped onto the big screen at the corner of the arena. He also seemed to be happy, with the sky, with the sun, with the afternoon, with life. By the time he’d reached the service line, the cheers had coalesced into a rousing ovation, one that only got louder when his opponent, Rafael Nadal, strode out. With his head down and two weighty bags around his shoulders, the home-country boy was as grimly serious as Federer was light on his feet.
Everything seemed to be going according to plan as I scanned the arena, until my eyes got back down to the court. There they landed upon something astonishing and perhaps unprecedented: Nadal, still all business, had come out for the coin toss before his opponent. He bounced and stared blankly into the distance as usual, but it was Federer who did the last second futzing and fiddling on the sidelines. My first thought was that this was a masterstroke by Nadal. He would throw off his opponent’s expectations and take control of the tempo of the proceedings all at once. When he did his customary three-step dash back to the baseline to the start the warm-up, it seemed that all questions about his post-semifinal energy levels had been forgotten.
That impression lasted through the early part of the first set. Nadal finished his opening service game with a winner and held a break point in the next game. There, on a second serve, he shanked a forehand just over the baseline. If Nadal has a weakness, it’s the forehand return of a second serve on break point. He gets nervous—remember the one he dumped in the net at break point late in the third set of last year’s Wimbledon final? Like that one, his miss here, while seemingly innocent at the time, had longer-lasting reverberations. In Madrid it allowed Federer, who looked shaky to start—he almost whiffed on his first backhand of the match—to settle in.
There’s always heightened tension in finals, and this typically helps Nadal, who slows down play and lets that tension build in his opponent’s mind. This time it seemed to get the better of him. Maybe it was the home-country crowd. Maybe it was the long string of matches on clay this spring. Maybe it was the impending trip to Paris and all that that means. Maybe it was defending his No. 1 ranking. Maybe it was the contrast to the adrenaline-injected atmosphere of the previous day. Maybe it was trying to beat Federer one more time. Some combination of those things weighed on Nadal during this warm Sunday afternoon. No, he didn’t run, slide, or hit with his customary vigor—there were probably a dozen shots that he silently got back into play that he would normally have battered into the corner with a grunt. But from where I was sitting, the bigger obstacle for Nadal was the pressure of the moment. He’s had no trouble handling his No. 1 status so far, but it is a different kind of pressure, one that you must live with every week, from the first round on Tuesday to the final on Sunday. It’s one that Federer must have enjoyed not feeling on this day. No wonder he was smiling.
That said, I didn’t feel like Federer played a great match. Rather, he played the right one, and he executed it just well enough to win. It didn’t involve attacking on every shot—can we retire that as a tactical suggestion? The one time Federer chipped and charged, he put the ball in the perfect spot, right in the middle of the baseline, where Nadal had to create an angle on his pass. And that’s just what he did, flicking a forehand past Federer with ease.
Instead, the key for Federer was that he gave Nadal no rhythm. He served flat up the middle. Then he used a medium-pace kick wide in the ad court that sent Nadal scrambling. Then he slid a slice wide in the deuce court, waited for the weak, one-handed reply from Nadal, and knocked off a forehand into the open court. Then he served at the Spaniard’s backhand hip—when he did that on set point in the first set, Nadal’s return clanged off his frame and straight up in the air. As Pete Sampras did against Andre Agassi, Federer must consider his serve, by itself, to be a counterweight to the rest of Nadal’s game. He must use it with maximum effectiveness to stand a chance against him on clay.
When the rallies started, Federer quickly used the drop shot, snuck into the net, or went big with his forehand—anything to keep Nadal from making it a more physical contest. At 0-30 on Nadal’s serve late in the first set, Federer took the first forehand he got, went for an inside-out winner from behind the baseline, and missed wide. This may have seemed ill advised on the surface, but it had the longer-term effect of not letting Nadal feel like he was safe at any stage in a rally. Federer was going to play the points on his terms, even if it meant missing (he went on to break in that game). Nadal is a rhythm player, a worker; as he showed against Djokovic, he can hit his way out of a bad day. Federer didn’t let him see enough shots to do that. It was only deep in the second set that Nadal began to grunt when he hit the ball. The grunt is part of his rhythm, evidence of his effort. Federer hadn't given him an opportunity to work himself up to it.
There are elements of a match that you can control, but they never account entirely for the result. Nadal had another break chance in the first set, after Federer had badly missed two forehands. On the break point, Federer moved in for another forehand and sent it dangerously close to the baseline. Nadal missed the subsequent pass and stared at the line; the approach had just clipped it. It was the same shot that Federer missed repeatedly in the Australian Open final. This time it went in. Later in the same set, Federer set up his own break point by hitting another forehand that spun wildly and landed smack on the sideline, again to Nadal’s exasperation. Sometimes a player or a team is due. Federer was due in Madrid.
Does this result change the dynamic for the French Open? Yes. Does it mean Federer has a better chance of beating Nadal there? Not by itself. Still, Federer's fans should be heartened by the way he played the most important, and heart-stopping, point of the match, the type of point he has been losing to Nadal for most of his career. Serving for the match at 5-4 in the second, Federer met the inevitable strong resistance from Nadal, who suddenly couldn’t miss a return after hitting them perfunctorily all afternoon. Federer went down 15-40, and the two played what must have been the longest point of the afternoon. Each hit the netcord once, and each flirted with the baseline. It appeared that Nadal had the better of the rally, but Federer fended him off with a patchwork of slices and high topspins shots, anything to stay alive and maintain the break. Eventually it was Nadal who went for it all on a backhand down the line and missed. Federer has played Nadal close at Wimbledon and in Melbourne, but he’s lost virtually all of the most crucial points. He survived this one. He should try not to forget it.
Three years ago, I wrote a piece called “The Duel” about the budding Nadal-Federer rivalry for TENNIS Magazine. I finished it by saying, “Federer and Nadal are too ambitious and talented [boring word, but I was young then] to settle for half the tennis universe. That will be the real key to making their rivalry a great one: Each wants what the other has.”
In 2008, Nadal got what Federer had at Wimbledon. He went after it, as he always does, with bare-shouldered gusto. This year, Federer, in his own quieter way, has made it clear that he wants what Nadal has at Roland Garros just as badly. Rather than let his recent losses on clay make him despair, Federer has retained his deep self-belief and remained as ambitious as he was three years ago. Think of it as the upside to his famous stubbornness. We’ll see if he's stubborn enough to win the French Open—I’m still picking Nadal. But if it’s too early to say whether Madrid signaled a renaissance for Federer, it’s clear that, just as the season is approaching lift-off, something even better for the sport has been given a fresh and glinting edge: The Duel.