In the first two matches on our Best of ’09 list, I’ve prefaced the discussion by saying that from a quality of play perspective, they left something to be desired. I’m not sure you can say that for No. 8: How much better can the quality be when 78 of its points are won with a single perfect shot, and that the guy hitting them comes up second-best?
What you can say is that Radek Stepanek’s 6-7 (5), 7-6 (5), 7-6 (6), 6-7 (2), 16-14 win over Ivo Karlovic in the semifinals of Davis Cup won’t be forgotten any time soon. Karlovic’s 78 aces, which is 23 more than his previous record, is a mark that’s going to be in the books for a while—unless Dr. Ace himself breaks it, that is. The match's length, 5 hours and 59 minutes, and total games, 82, are just short of being all-time records themselves. And can a contest be any closer? The fourth set, which Karlovic won 7-2 in the breaker, must have felt like a blow out.
The first time I posted about this match I showed an eight-minute You Tube clip of Karlovic’s 78 aces. Now they’ve been whittled to a much crisper and more convenient 2 and a half minutes. The person who put it up, Magnificat3, has also tracked the directions of Ivo’s bombs: 39 went past Stepanek’s forehand, 39 went past his backhand. What Karlovic’s height gives him is the ability to ace his opponents anywhere, including with a flat bomb out wide that lands way up the sideline. He’s the only person I’ve ever seen hit that serve. And his smooth, bare-bones delivery must be next to impossible to read. You can see that on a lot of these serves, Stepanek guesses the wrong way. Watching them go by him one after the next is comical. I start to crack up right around the one-minute mark.
What we don’t see is how Stepanek hung in to beat him; all we get here is the Czech looking helpless, until, on the final point, he wins the whole thing. One clue to his victory is that he seems to take all of Karlovic’s aces in stride. He knows they’re going to happen sooner or later (or always), and it will only hurt him to get upset about it. Whatever he did to keep himself in it—I only saw the final set—Stepanek’s achievement is one of the finest of the year. He survived three sets worth of aces.
The other moment we don’t see is the aftermath. Stepanek was overcome as he slowly moved from one of his teammates to the next and eventually into the Czech section of the audience. Karlovic, as usual, looked utterly alone. This is what I wrote the first time I posted about his defeat:
Karlovic’s freakishness has never come across as painfully as it does here, when he walks off the court a loser after six hours. He takes it as impassively as always. It’s as if he realizes he’s a guy not destined for glory, even in Davis Cup, a place where second-tier players like him are traditionally allowed to shine for a few moments. Instead, he’s destined to be good enough, in a weird enough way, to set a monumental record even while suffering the most heart-breaking loss of his career. Tennis has feared the rise of the big server for decades, but Karlovic proves again that these fears remain unfounded. If this performance showed us anything, it's that tennis still can’t be won with one shot alone. The sad thing for Ivo is that the sport is better off with him as a loser. At times, when I see how glum and lonely he can look on a court, I think he knows this.