!90341959 by Pete Bodo
Sometimes, bad things happen to good people, including good tennis players. And Jesse Levine is a mighty good tennis player. Oh, he may not be a contender at Grand Slam events, and he may be better known as the lad Roger Federer chose to import to his Arabian desert hideaway a few years back, when he wanted to do some intensive training in order to maintain his ascendancy (Levine, like a certain raven-haired youth from the Spanish island of Mallorca, is a lefty).
Nevertheless, Levine is talented, dedicated and clever. The best thing you can say about him is also the worst thing you can say about him, given what it takes to succeed at the highest level of the game: He's a great little player - emphasis on "little."
Levine is at a decided disadvantage when it comes to butting heads with some of the bigger, stronger players running loose on the ATP tour, and he had the misfortune of drawing one of them for his second round match at the US Open. Marin Cilic, who was born in the Bosnia-Herzegovena village Medjugorje (the world capital of the consonant), is a raw-boned 6-6 youth of 20 who weights in at 180. Levine, 21, is, in his own words "a buck-fifty" (150 lbs.), and stands 5-9, although he looks shorter than that. Levine lives in Boca Raton, but he too was born in a capital - Ottawa, Canada. Ottawa is an Algonquin Indian word that roughly translates to: city of giant, boring government buildings.
Most tennis hands consider Cilic a coming star, and although he's struggled this year, he's still ranked highly enough to have earned a seeding of 16, meaning that he would have been seeded even back in the day when men were men (if you ignored those really brief, tight shorts favored by guys like Bjorn Borg and Jimmy Connors) and the Lords of Tennis didn't feel duty-bound to seed everyone and his brother. Thus, it was surprising to see that Levine led Cilic in a Court 11 clash by two-sets to none, and it seemed like we were going to have yet another re-enactment of the Biblical tale of David and Golilath, a story with an unlimited shelf-life and one of which only big and tall people tire.
But then a terrible thing happened to Levine; the wheels came off. He'd worked his butt off for an hour and 12 minutes to go up, 6-4,6-2. And one hour and 11 minutes later they were starting the fifth set, and terrible sense of the inevitable was falling like a bad smell over Court 11. Fans winced each time Cilic, cracked that big forehand, or unloaded punishing serve. He has an interesting service action, that Cilic. He adopts an unusually wide stance with his legs at a 45-degree angle to the service notch. His feet are gunboats (I'm guessing sizes 15 or better), and he lifts the toe of his left foot high off the court, a la Pete Sampras, to start things off.
Cilic then arches his back severely, and hesitates just long enough to resemble a sculpture meant to capture something like the essence of human striving blah, blah, blah. . . And then he crashes a monstrous serve that wipes out such noble thoughts. Among other things, this delivery, effective as it is, represents Serving 101 taken to it's nth degree (for Advanced Serving, look under "B" for Becker, or even "F" for Federer).
Anyway, these matches where the disaster scenario is uncomplicated (player A wins two sets, gets within a whisker of closing it out, and then gradually but inexorably fades) are fairly common but always painful to experience (hail, they're painful even to watch). They're not like those melodramatic, see-saw brawls in which each player, regardless of who wins, experiences more or less equal measures of agony and ecstasy y until someone finally takes the danged thing. Yesterday, Levine began to long climb up Mt. Ecstasy, came a few inches from the peak, and then slid - skidded on his bottom all the way back to the foot of the hill. It shouldn't happen to anyone, but it does.
"It's just tennis," Levine said afterward. His nose was reddened by the sun, his eyes were hollowed. He has a fighter's cauliflower ears, and he looked plenty beat up.But he's a friendly, articulate kid who's going to give you an honest answer to a straightforward question. "I've seen it (this kind of thing) happen three or four times - and that's just here, in the first round. When you're out there, alone, you don't realize that it's happening. I was up two sets and all of a sudden, it's two sets all and into the fifth and it's a battle.
"It happened pretty fast. After I won those first two sets, it all started going way too fast. It kind of got out of my hands, which is not a good thing. I should have slowed it down. Maybe changed things up, put more balls into play instead of going for too much. I wish I would have done it differently."
It all started going way too fast. . . I wish I would have done it differently. . . It's always like that, and every player knows it. Jesse Levine knew it; if you'd asked him before the match, What if. . .? he would have told you exactly and correctly how to handle it - how to stop that long slide down that slippery slope. Everyone knows this kind of thing happens and what to do about it. . .until it happens to him. And then, suddenly, he don't know squat.
In Levine's case, it all began with a good game plan against a player like Cilic, who likes to whale on the ball and has the guns to use an opponent's pace to create even greater pace of his own. So Levine mixed it up early on, aware that Cilic was itching to pull the trigger on that big forehand, and eager to set the expected tone of domination suggested by the difference in the mens' size and strength.
"I mixed it up well," Levine explained. "I would rip a couple, then throw in a slice. Change things up. He likes to get in a groove and I felt he couldn't do it - that I had to keep him out of it. Once the third set came around, I wanted that break, right away. And the opportunities were there (Levine had three break points in that first game, and no more thereafter). I couldn't take them, and that gave him some confidence. He started going for his shots a little more then, and they started going in. At the same time, he was getting better, I started playing a little worse. That's a bad combination."
It's a bad combination, but it helps us understand how a tennis match can become a train wreck, and why it happens so often. For Levine wasn't the sole author of his tragedy; what happened is best understood in the terms most of us learned in high school chemistry. You take a dash of one element (Levine's ground game), mix it with a pinch of a different one (Cilic's aggression), shake it up, and the next thing you know the halls are filled with acrid smoke and you're on your way to the principal's office. In fact, the inherent volatility of the game is as good an explanation as you can find for how these disasters occur, and why they occur with such frequency to people who ought to know better.
As Levine ruefully said: It's just tennis.
Still, it was also true that as Cilic became stronger and bolder, Levine's preferred role as the artful dodger became increasingly difficult to maintain. It takes a lot of patience, determination, and no small amount of courage to stand in and take the punishing blows without going for the knockout punch yourself. It's physically and mentally draining, and it always requires co-operation from an opponent. Fool me once, Cilic seemed to be saying, and shame on you. Fool me twice, and shame on me.
Staving off those break points put some wind in Cilic's sails, and he began to find his confidence; Levine's inability to dispel his disappointment over those squandered break points played a part in the way Cilic rolled through the third set, winning it at love. But it's hard to guard against a letdown, whether it's borne of success or failure.
"I tried to tell myself to keep doing what I've been doing," Levine said. "But obviously it didn't happen. I went away from what was working. And what he was doing (early) wasn't working, so he switched over and started playing a lot better. I was starting to take some jabs at him, but he was starting to throw the hooks. It wasn't good."
!90282935 Levine also made a critical decision in that third set. Once he was down two breaks, he elected to marshal his energies for the fourth set. "I threw in the towel in third set, wanting to save my energy for the fourth so I could put up a good fight." Even after he lost, he didn't question that decision; if he had to do it all over again, he would do the same thing. And to some degree the move worked; the fourth set was close until Levine served the eighth game to stay even at 4 games apiece. Cilic played a good game to break, and Levine pressed him but was unable to break in the next game. Levine lost the set, 3-6.
One other side effect of Levine's decision to give up the third set is hard to quantify. In doing so, he may have taken himself out of the match a bit, mentally. And it certainly speeded up the process by which Cilic pulled even, helping to account for that familiar complaint - it all seemed to go so fast. The operative word is "seemed," for the third and fourth sets went by only one minute faster than the first two, despite encompassing three fewer games. And at any rate, giving up those games released the scent of fear into the air - something Cilic would have smelled and instinctively tried to exploit.
Finally, there was Levine, playing for his competitive life in a fifth set. He didn't panic, he didn't roll over. "I tried to bring some heat in the fifth, but he'd come with more heat and he definitely thrived on the pace. I changed my style and I'm not too happy about that."
Levine was broken to start the fifth; by the time Cilic built his lead to 3-0, the future for Jesse went from bleak to hopeless. And when he was broken again, hitting the reset button was no longer an option. He was out of time. Where had it gone?
I wondered, could he honestly tell himself that he was still in it at that point, that he still had a chance to come back, the way Cilic had come back on the larger canvas of the match?
"Well, yeah, I told myself that," he allowed. "I tried, but it's tough. . . I did throw some pretty big shots in that game (the one that put him behind, 0-4), it's not like I gave him the next game, either. Not in the fifth set, no way. In the fifth set, you either go home or throw it all out there. He hit some great passing shots, and all of a sudden it's 5-0 . And that was it."
So, the game recorded another disaster, another player left the main draw wishing he had done things a little differently, wondering about how quickly things got away from him, thinking, perhaps, about how this kind of thing is only supposed to happen to other people. How could he let it happen to him?
But it happens to everyone, at some time. Blame it on chemistry, but maybe it's just tennis.