INDIAN WELLS, CALIF.—The best-laid tennis writer’s plans often come up useless, and that’s what happened with my first one on my first day at Indian Wells. Still, it did have the accidental virtue of reminding me—not for the first time, or even the 10th time—of how difficult it is to make any definite statements about what separates one young player from another, and who will have the bigger upside.
The cases in point were two prospects—one very hot, another who has been rapidly cooling of late—who were first up on Stadium 2 and 3 on a bright and hot morning, Milos Raonic and Ryan Harrison. Through two sets of each match, everything was going to plan. My thesis for the morning, that in tennis it’s the hedgehog rather than the fox that ultimately succeeds, seemed destined to be proven true.
The hedgehog, in the famous philosophical formula, is the person or player who does one thing extremely well; the fox is the player who has a complete game but owns no unbeatable weapons. For today, Raonic served as the hedgehog, Harrison the fox.
They can be seen as two sides of the same coin. They’re both well spoken, methodical, level-headed and appear to be trying to improve their games rather than simply sticking with what they’ve already proven they can do. In his press conference today, Raonic said that over the last few weeks he’s actually been working on taking a little off of his first serve so he can get into more rallies (a nice problem to have—his first serve is too good), and that he’s been focusing a lot on his second serve, which seems to be kicking more viciously than ever. “Me and my coach," Raonic said, "we both believe it’s the necessary step to develop and to progress and to improve,” he said.
As for Harrison, he committed long ago to trying to play an all-court game even if it hurts him in the short term. Both of those things happened today. Twice on match point he served and volleyed; twice he lost the point. In the end, though, the variety of serves that he’s developed by coming in behind them—he’s equally good at the high kick in the ad court and the hard slice in the deuce court—helped him through a couple of tough holds late in the third set.
All the variety in the world won’t win you half as much as a single shot as devastating as Raonic’s serve. It was his second one that was clutch today; he hit a monster kick to send the second set to a tiebreaker. But what separated Raonic from Harrison, for the better part of two sets, anyway, was his ability to open up points from the baseline when he needed to, especially with his backhand down the line. He hit a winner with it to make the tiebreaker 5-1, and when his opponent crawled back to 5-4, the shot was there again for Raonic. To go back to the (semi-forced) Pete Sampras comparison, will that shot, the backhand down the line, be the wild card weapon to match Sampras’ running forehand?
By comparison, for two sets Harrison’s shots looked overly spinny, lacking in weight and penetration—he had everything, except that little something extra. His opponent, Jeremy Chardy, was able to hold off three sets points and then, when he needed it late in the tiebreaker, throw in a towering—so towering it almost looked like a mistake—kick second serve that nearly put Harrison in the first row. In some ways, it’s the freak shots, the shots that you could never possibly teach, like the Sampras running forehand, that spell the difference. The Raonic serve is one of those shots. As of now, it doesn’t appear that Harrison has one in him.
