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By Pete Bodo
Before we get to the meat of this post, I want to let y'all know that I had a terrific time at AmyLu and Juan Jose's wedding yesterday near Allentown, Pa. At one point during dinner at the reception, a few of the folks saw me furiously text-messaging, and one of the guests asked me if I had scores to report. I was mortified; it would have been awfully rude to be checking results in the middle of dinner, so I told the truth: "Actually, I'm getting text messages from a number of people at the US Open, but they're not conveying scores - they're asking how Amy looks, what Juan Jose's family is like, and how the wedding was."
I did the round trip yesterday, so I was ready to hit the ground running today - the last day of the first week, which I dedicated to coverage of some of the lesser lights in the game. This wasn't easy, at times. Today, Roger Federer vs. Radek Stepanek was a pretty compelling match-up, for reasons familiar to all of you. But I bit the bullet, and it paid off when Gilles Muller shocked Nicolas Almagro on the court where I have spent so much time during Week 1 - the Grandstand. I tracked the match while taking care of some other business, in the media center, and went out to catch the last few games. It was a classic mid-tournament clash; deep enough into the tournament to really matter, on a day when the other matches - to that point - had been unremarkable.
Muller, you may remember, had racked up wins over Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon and Andy Roddick here at the US Open in previous Grand Slam appearances. But he was never able to capitalize long-term on those striking upsets. He's presently ranked no. 130, and has spent most of the year playing on the Challenger circuit in places like Izmir, Turkey, Lanzarote, Spain, and Wroclaw, Poland. At Istanbul a few weeks ago, he put the hammer down on Turkey's very own Marsel Ilhan, and then spanked the Czech Republic's Jaroslav Pospicil, before losing in the quarters to Frederico Gil of Portugal.
Let me interrupt this communique with a bulletin from the twilight zone: Gil made the cutoff for the US Open, and he ended up playing Jeremy Chardy of France in the first round - for the third consecutive time in a Grand Slam event this year. Jay Snyder, the US Open tournament director, believes that this is a record. But back to Muller. . .
The 25-year old lefty from Luxembourg arrived in New York on Sunday, and had all of one day to adjust before playing his first match in qualifying - a battle that he survived, 7-5 in the third. You know how it is with some guys - give them an inch of daylight, and they'll take a mile of limelight. And this was a guy who needed all the ambient light he could get: at times this year, he has seriously contemplated quitting the game. As he would say later, "There were even moments where I thought, 'Should I still keep playing'? Because, I mean, if you're playing at the challenger level, because pretty much every week you're losing money because you have more expenses than you are earning."
Muller survived the qualifying and his first-rounder in the Big Show was against a wild card (Laurent Recouderc, of France). Muller played a smart, tight match to advance to a meeting with Tommy Haas. Muller lost the first two sets to Haas, but he managed to hang tough and slash his way to a five-set win - it was his first career comeback of that magnitude in a five-set match, but then they don't play five-setters in Izmir, or Humacao, Puerto Rico.
In Almagro (the person, not the place, if there is one of that name), Muller had an opponent who's been ranked as high as no. 11, but was playing in just his second tournament since he underwent surgery on his right (racket) hand in July. Almagro also prefers clay courts to the Deco-turf (hard courts) of this event. Still, Muller played with panache, against a high quality opponent, on a big stage. He wasted a match point at 5-4 in the fifth, but kept his composure in the subsequent games to piece together a neat upset.
Muller conforms to a familiar type: He knows how to extract the advantage of a lefty on his serve, he has a fine, slice backhand (those two factors add up to the formula that attained it's highest form of expression in the soft hands of John McEnroe - send the slider and charge the net, the rest will take care of itself!). And just to make sure you don't mistake his southpaw genetics, Muller also hits his forehand with an odd, restrained motion - as if were a dog that has to be kept on a tight leash. Why is it that so many lefthanders have trouble controlling the forehand? And what does it tell us that one of the few who has no such impediment - Rafael Nadal - is not, naturally, a lefthander?
Muller's stock in trade this week has been playing with superior focus and confidence in the late going. Today, he did it again, brushing aside two break points at 5-5 in the fifth set - after failing to convert that match point - to stay on serve. He broke Almagro in the next game with a nice backhand touch volley to end the match. In his presser, I asked him the obvious question: Why are you winning these matches?
He blinked and said, "Why?"
I shrugged. "Yeah."
Muller paused and then said, "That's a good question." After a moment of reflection, he went on. "I don't know. I guess everything is in the head. Everything is confidence. I guess I lost a lot of it through the last two, three years, because I was playing pretty good in '05 when I beat Nadal, and then Andy here in US Open. But then I had a tough time after that. I mean, I wasn't confirming my results. I was dropping in the rankings. I started to play challengers again and I was losing matches there. I lost a lot of confidence. . . So it was a rough time, but I'm glad I didn't stop."
It's a funny thing, this "confidence." Obviously, you can't just call it up at will. It's less like hitting a $5 payout on a scratch-off lottery ticket than cultivating a tomato plant through the dog days of August. The bluebloods of the game seem have that confidence, though, almost as a matter of entitlement. But even that aura is deceptive; they earned it far from public eye, through long years of excellence at the junior level.
Even those anointed ones can lose it, as we've seen time and again - which is why recapturing it is the kind of trial by fire that every aspiring champion usually has to undergo at some stage. If you think it's tough never to have possessed confidence as if it were a God-given gift, imagine what it's like to have had it as a part of your basic nature, only to wake up one morning to find it gone. And in tennis, the one thing you can't fake is confidence; if you try, you risk looking like a fool because the degree to which you may appear confident is dictated by the immutable truth of the scorelines.
The only thing I feel, well, confident saying on this subject is that confidence is not something that comes and goes on a daily basis. Mostly, it seems to be something lost and gained on a great, fairly flat arc. It takes a pretty long time for you to exhaust what confidence capital you've accumulated, and just as long to build it back up once you've lost it. That's why an isolated, great result should never be taken too seriously; a guy can play lights-out tennis and win a match he's supposed to lose - especially if he has a lot of offense in his game. But in order to build confidence, he needs to string together wins, and he needs to beat those players whom he's supposed to beat. We all walk down the street with confidence; we wouldn't, though, if we had a history of taking three steps and then tripping over own feet.
Sometimes, though, you can generate a measure of confidence simply by being fed up - by realizing that worrying about how much you have to lose is a pretty good way of forgetting how much you have to gain. Here's something about confident players: They know deep down that they have nothing to lose; that the game is, ultimately, fair. Make the shots and you win. Miss the shots and you lose. Where's the room for debate? Making the shots just makes life easier and smoother. Muller had a revelation of that order in his match with Haas. As he said:
"I'm playing Tommy Haas. I mean, he's a great player. I mean, I went on court and I played terrible the first two sets. I said, 'Come on, Man. You have nothing to lose. Why are you playing so tight?' Then I started playing better. Now I know I can turn around matches. That gave me a lot of confidence, and I can beat those guys."
There's this funny thing about winning. As much of a struggle as it may be to win, it leads to a place where things are far simpler than when you're losing. One of the main reasons why some players with a talent for winning just keep doing it is because they get accustomed to living their professional life in simple terms. Winning protects you from things that go bump in the night. Confidence simplifies life and brings clarity to it.
At Grand Slam events, a player in search of confidence can get a lot of help clearing the final hurdles. I suppose I should go look up some stats on this, but the crowd at New York is especially good at doing this. And the Grandstand crowed at Flushing Meadow seems to raise support for the underdog to an art form. Muller said of them:
"When I had my first match point today, I got goosebumps before I was returning the serve there. Yeah, it's amazing, especially here. I got the feeling that American people are not really supporting one player, but they just want a big show. I think that's why both of us, Nicolas and me today, that's what we did. We played a long match. I think level was pretty high, so I guess that's what they like."
Muller left out of this equation the role the crowd played in inspiring him to find the confidence to win, not just to play the proverbial great match. He's been a player in need of an infusion of confidence, and the crowd today was like his personal IV drip of Yes I Can!
The US Open crowd has no lock on this kind of thing; the British are also quite good at it, although there's a nervous-making vein of pity and condescension in their enthusiasm. And if you have a "pretty" game, the French will open their hearts to you, pleasantly indifferent to the fact that you might end up breaking them. They'll just sigh and forgive you, never punishing themselves for love spent on a lousy cause, because it's feeling that love that counts, right?
I think Muller is right - the US crowd wants a "big show", and maybe asking that - and not more - is why a player may be able to keep more of the fruits of his effort for him or herself. Today, Muller walked out with a racket bag stuffed with wet shirts, stinky socks, and confidence that seemed hopelessly beyond his reach just a few days ago.