NEW YORK—At the start of this astonishing surge back into the Top 35, Tommy Haas periodically said that he doesn’t think of himself as a 34-year-old because he was robbed of so many years by injuries and surgeries (six in all, including operations on his right rotator cuff, hip and elbow). He feels, with good reason, that the game owes him a few years, and has spent a good part of this year calling in that debt.
But there are a few things from which you cannot escape, even if it would only seem right if you did, including Hawk-Eye and the least compassionate tyrant of them all, age. That was clear on Wednesday, as Haas lost his first-round U.S. Open match to Ernests Gulbis.
Haas won the first two sets and led by a break in the third, but Gulbis reversed the tide and won, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 7-5, 6-3, over an elapsed time of 3:45 that grew more painful for Haas by the minute, as his power almost imperceptibly—but surely, inexorably, and irreversibly—drained away.
Gulbis, incidentally, turns 24 tomorrow; not that Haas was aware of that.
“Sure, it's tough when you are getting a little bit older, the recovery, even when you are quite fit,” Haas said afterward. “Maybe one half step, or just a half of a half step might be missing. You know, it's just not enough against these young, fit guys sometimes. (Then) you start playing tennis that you're not supposed to play, go for too many shots and you're not really playing percentage tennis, and that's how you can end up losing.”
It was as accurate an analysis as you could ask, and Gulbis himself denied that he took any advantage of Haas because of the latter’s age. “He was playing very good, I was surprised. He played incredible. But I knew exactly what was going on in his head, and I knew what was going on in mine. I was down a break in the third set but when I got that back I knew anything could happen. That was it. It was a very physical match.”
This one would be an easy one to graph, for it held just one peak and notable shift of momentum, and that was in the third set.
Haas bolted to an early lead, demonstrating why he may be at the very top of the short list for the honor of being the best player never to win a Grand Slam title (he hit his career high of No. 2 over 10 years ago, and has been a semifinalist at majors four times). There isn’t a more complete player in the ATP barn (including Roger Federer), nor many with comparably smooth technique and timing.
Haas doesn’t just leave his feet to hit a smash or for the occasional herculean effort. He hits almost every forehand airborne, getting his full weight behind the shot as he rotates his trunk. His one-handed backhand is nothing less than classic squared, for he has a slice as well as a flat/topspin backhand, and executes both with equal precision and efficiency. His movement is balletic. During one point today, Gulbis hit a screaming cross-court backhand that seemed destined to fly by Haas untouched at the baseline. But Haas dove and hit a forehand at full stretch to return the ball.
If Haas has had a consistent shortcoming through his career, it’s been a costly tendency to take his foot off the gas, sometimes ever so slightly, when he needs to put the pedal to the metal and close out an opponent. The timidity may have cost Haas a huge chance to upset Federer in the fourth round of the French Open in 2009 (the year Rafael Nadal was upset and Federer went on to win the title), and Tommy lost a match very much like today’s to Gilles Muller here in 2008.
Haas was seeded No. 21 here, and had crafted one of the most remarkable comeback stories over the course of this year. He was ranked No. 205 and rapidly approaching his 34th birthday at the start of the year; nobody expected much of him. He won a match here and there in the winter and spring, but didn’t really get any traction until the Munich tournament that began shorty after he turned 34. He made the semis there, with back-to-back wins over Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and Marcos Baghdatis.
Denied a wild card into the French Open, he qualified anyway and won three rounds before he lost to Richard Gasquet. Shortly thereafter, he won Halle on grass, mastering Federer in the final. He made two finals after that (Hamburg and Washington) and was poised to make a run here. For two-and-a-half sets, it looked like he was on his way, despite having one of the more perilous first-round matches among the seeded players.
The turning point was sixth game of the third set, just three games after the one I described in my notebook as “the Gulbis game.” That is, the game in which the volatile Latvian seemed to seal his fate with the kind of boneheaded play that has helped him earn a reputation as one of the ranking head cases in the game. After fending off four break points in that one and reaching the haven of advantage, Gulbis made a silly unforced forehand error, and two points later Haas had what appeared to be the critical break.
But three games later, Haas pulled a similar stunt. At 30-all, he missed a sitter smash from atop the net, and even though he fended off four subsequent break points, Gulbis was stirring. He broke back when Haas drilled a backhand that clipped the netcord and flew out.
“I think I let it slip away a little bit in the third,” Haas confessed afterward, admitting that he got a “little bit tight” trying to build on the earlier break to reach 4-2. “I made a few bad errors that you can't allow yourself to happen.”
The Gulbis genie was out of the bottle, and that’s a dangerous proposition for any player. He began to find the range with his serve (Gulbis nailed 24 aces to Haas’ seven) and the winners began streaming off his racquet; he hit 70 compared to 38 by Haas, but made just a dozen more unforced errors (56 to Haas’s 44). The revival, hand-in-hand with Haas’ inevitable loss of energy and confidence, foretold how it would all end.
A few years ago, I wrote a piece about Haas suggesting that he deserved our profound respect because he was a tennis lifer, with the closest thing there is to the institutional temperament most commonly found by those who have spent most of their lives in jail and thus have trouble functioning outside it. I had to smile when I thought about that today, some fours later.
Haas is not just fluid and still explosive, he plays with something very much like exuberance, his game a visual testament to how much he still enjoys his job. He still wears that baseball cap backwards, and he’s still famous for being what women of a certain age would call a “hunk.” To borrow a phrase from baseball, he’s one of the “boys of summer,” for it’s always summer in some part of the world where a tennis tournament is underway.
When I asked Gulbis if he can see himself playing, like Haas, at age 34, he laughed and looked at me as if I were from Pluto. “No,” he said emphatically, the way all kids do. Gulbis also said that he feels he has plenty of time to hit his stride and make the most of his talent, maybe win a Grand Slam or two.
Haas once felt that way too, I’m sure. But I didn’t want to tell Gulbis that. He’ll learn, and if he’s lucky, no matter how his quest turns out, he’ll end up sounding a little bit like Haas. Who also said:
“You know what, I love this game. Even days like today, this is part of the sport, even though I'm obviously very, very frustrated. I'm going to be in a sh mood for a couple days, that's for sure. You know, you look back, you look at some of the wins that you had and the feelings that it gives you, the positives, the negatives, and it's always a rollercoaster ride when you're in sports or competing.
“That's what you get to love about it, but it can also be brutal. That's certainly one moment right now. But I've put myself in a position to pretty much have a full calendar year next year. And why not?”
I can’t think of a good answer to that, can you?