The long, winding, scattered, sometimes-pointless pro tennis schedule does offer at least one consolation: the fresh start. These come every month or so, as the tours take up temporary residence in a new part of the world. With the shift comes a new setting, a new surface, a new style of play, a new cast of characters, even a new way of arguing line calls.
Last week brought perhaps the freshest start of all, as the men left the palm trees and hard courts of the U.S. and took over the Monte Carlo Country Club to begin the European clay-court season in earnest. This was the 100th anniversary of a tournament that’s been won by every great champion from Bill Tilden to Bjorn Borg to Gustavo Kuerten. As much as its tradition, Monte Carlo is also known for the picture-book view from its center court high above the Mediterranean. Which is appropriate: Monte Carlo stands with Roland Garros in Paris and the Foro Italico in Rome as one of the capitals of the grinding, clay-stained version of the game that’s been played for decades in the countries along the sea.
There’s no tennis player more Mediterranean than Rafael Nadal, who was born and still lives on the island of Mallorca off the coast of Spain. Monte Carlo is fast becoming a second home for him. On Sunday, he won his second straight title there, and last year’s event marked the beginning of his winning streak on clay, which now stands at 42, third-best in men’s history. (Don’t get too cocky, Rafa, you’re still 83 wins behind Chris Evert’s all-but-unbreakable all-time record.) Nadal was a little rusty to begin the tournament, but he peaked, as he always seems to do, just in time to beat Roger Federer in the final.
This was a very good match, of a much higher quality than their pressure-cooker encounter at Roland Garros last year. It may even go down as a classic, though I think we’ll get something better down the road. From the start, Nadal did what he always does against Federer: play more aggressively than usual. He hit his backhand flatter and harder than he had just the day before against Gaston Gaudio, and he was proactive with his forehand, forcing Federer to scramble from sideline to sideline. In his earlier matches, Federer had been able to get on top of the ball and control the rallies; yesterday Nadal’s topspin had him hitting at his shoulders and off his back foot in the early going.
That form held until Nadal was up 6-2, 5-3. Federer, who had looked listless and confused, with no purpose to his shots, suddenly played his best service game of the match, which made Nadal nervous. The Spaniard played an uncharacteristically jittery game at 5-4, double-faulting twice, and was broken. By the end of the tiebreaker, Federer seemed to have found a new understanding of clay-court tennis. He was on top of the rallies, he was winning points at the net, and he was even using the drop shot, which he has said he hates, to draw Nadal out of position. It looked like the world No. 1 was about to turn a major corner in his eventual quest to win the French Open. Instead, an old Federer flaw would surface at just the wrong moment.
If Nadal’s technical advantage over Federer is his heavy topspin, his mental advantage, at least on clay, is his concentration. Nadal, like Jimmy Connors and Maria Sharapova, plays each point as if it’s a war. This works well on dirt, where the length of the rallies and the relative unimportance of the serve means that matches are won one point at a time, in the baseline trenches—one service break does not spell the end of a set. Federer, like Pete Sampras, prefers to cruise. He uses his serve and forehand to hold and then comes up with a few big shots at the right time to break. Before Federer became No. 1, one knock against him was that his concentration could waver—you never knew when a series of ugly shanks might come off his racquet.
At the start of the third set yesterday, Federer broke Nadal, and the Spaniard took an injury timeout to have a finger retaped. Whether this was fair or not (it left a bad taste, though Federer had also taken a timeout to have his ankles taped after losing the first set), Federer lost his concentration in the next game, loosened up, and made a couple of strange errors after being ahead 40-15. That was enough for Nadal, who was still fighting for everything, to break back and square the match. I don’t know if this stat is kept anywhere, but Nadal must win the most games of anyone from 0-40 and 15-40 down. After winning the third set, he broke Federer from 0-40 down to start the fourth.
Federer wasn’t finished, of course. As he did against David Nalbandian at the Masters Cup last year, Federer played with a glorious fury to come from two breaks down in the fourth set and go up 3-0 in the tiebreaker. Unfortunately for him, the only person on earth who could fight off this assault of jaw-dropping tennis is Rafael Nadal. The teenager finished it by sticking with his original game plan, taking the attack to Federer and drilling a forehand winner on his first and only match point.
Before the final, Federer had said that the biggest thing for him was to “just stay with (Nadal), for the entire time.” He was right, but mentally he couldn’t pull it off over three out of five sets. Still, Federer should take heart from the second and fourth sets, periods when he appeared for the first time to have found a way to take the initiative from Nadal on clay without overhitting. Federer also proved conclusively that getting to the net is key; at one point he was 31 of 43 up there. On the down side, Federer will need to find an answer for Nadal’s lefty serve into his backhand in the ad court. The Spaniard saved 14 of 18 break points, many of them with that serve, and often used it to close out service holds.
The world’s No. 1 and 2 are entered in Rome and Hamburg in the weeks leading up to Paris, and they’ll most likely face each other at least once. Anything can happen in five weeks, but based on his play in Monte Carlo, I’d say that Federer will win the French Open—but only if he doesn’t have to play Nadal.
Just for the Record Department
Best Set
The opener of the Gaudio-Nadal semifinal. The last two French Open champions put on a tense clay-court clinic, with touch, angles, up-and-back movement, and big hitting in each point, before Gaudio won 7-5. It exhausted them both. Nadal said he was utterly drained at the end of that set, but it was Gaudio who barely won another game.
Best Match
It’s hard to beat a final between No. 1 and No. 2 for drama, but the early round encounter between Guillermo Coria and Paul-Henri Mathieu certainly came close. Coria, who has struggled this year, particularly with his serve, went down 6-1, 5-1. That’s when he decided to start fighting. He came all the way back to win the set in a tiebreaker after saving four match points. Coria seemed to go to great lengths to torment Mathieu, camping far behind the baseline on crucial points and just scraping the ball back until the Frenchman self-destructed. In the third set, the roles were reversed, as Coria, who would double fault 20 times, blew six match points before rifling a forehand winner on the seventh. A psychodrama to remember.
Finally, Monte Carlo did not employ instant replay, as the last Masters Series event, in Miami, did. The old system of checking the marks on clay is still the trusted one here. But that hasn’t stopped TV producers from using Hawk-Eye for viewers at home. In the past, there were occasional discrepancies between the mark that a chair umpire would find and the judgment of Hawk-Eye. This year, the two were in agreement every time I watched, until the final. I was prepared to write how reassuring it was to see such an old-fashioned method—no computers, no big screens, just a guy looking and pointing—continue to measure up.
That was, until the the fourth set of the final, when Federer hit a ball close to the sideline that was called out. Umpire Gerry Crawford checked the area and said there was “no readable mark,” which meant the original call would stand. Hawk-Eye showed that the ball had indeed been out, but that didn’t help Federer, who pounded a ball into the air after losing the next point. Or perhaps it did help him, because he played the rest of the way in a controlled rage that almost won him the set. Either way, it was a mystery that could have been solved. Why should I know that the ball was out, while Federer didn’t?