It seems, to paraphrase NFL coach Denny Green, that no one has ever said what we thought they said. Rodney King never asked America, “Can’t we all just get along?” Humphrey Bogart never demanded, “Play it again, Sam.” Mark Twain never joked, "Reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated." Andy Warhol didn't predict, “In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.” His original quote was, characteristically, more surreal and sinister: “In the future, someone will become famous every 15 minutes.”
The best line in tennis—“No one beats Vitas Gerulaitis 17 times in a row”—is real, though it came about by accident. Vitas didn’t walk into the pressroom after beating Jimmy Connors for the first time with that thought in mind, but as he was answering a question, someone there helped him turn his words into the greatest mock statement of defiance in history. Still, our sport isn’t completely in the clear. What may be its second-most-famous quote is indeed bogus. Boris Becker didn't say, “The fifth set isn’t about tennis. It’s about the heart.” Makes the game sound so soulful, right? What he originally said was, “The fifth set isn’t about tennis. It’s about nerves.”
While that’s a bit of a letdown in the poetry department, it does have the virtue of being true. What Becker left out, and what was proven again over the course of a long day of tennis in Australia yesterday, is that the second set, the third set, the fourth set and sometimes even the first set are also about nerves as much as they are about tennis. When the second week of a Grand Slam rolls around, you might as well dissolve the distinction altogether. Tennis and nerves are one and the same.
John McEnroe has said that after a certain amount of time on tour, he came to expect, and accept, that he would choke in one form or another in virtually every match he played. What mattered was how he dealt with it, how he managed it. In this case, McEnroe was using the broadest definition of choking. He didn’t mean that he regularly rolled his eyes back into his head and morphed into a racquet-swinging zombie when he got a lead, à la Jana Novotna at Wimbledon. That’s what tennis fans usually picture when we think of choking. Instead McEnroe used the word, accurately, I believe, to define any moment when his play was affected by his nerves or his mindset—when anything mental messed with his technique or tactics. Choking takes on many guises over the course of a match, or even a game, and much of it goes unnoticed by spectators. Yesterday's play in Melbourne is as good an example as any.
*
Exhibit A was Victoria Azarenka’s performance against Serena Williams. Despite having been up 6-4, 4-0 and losing, Azarenka shook Williams’ hand with a satisfied smile. The consensus was that she hadn’t gagged away that overwhelming lead; she’d just been the victim of one of Serena’s typical but still utterly bizarre mid-match turnarounds in form. And it’s true, there were no Novotna-zombie moments from Azarenka. There wasn’t even much of a dip in her game from when she was winning every point to when she was losing every point.
Yet there was one mental slip by the Belorussian, just before the ball started rolling in the other direction. Azarenka was up 4-0 in the second set and cruising. Serena said afterward that at that point she was wondering whether she could catch a flight home on Friday. At 4-0, Azarenka missed a couple forehands that she hadn’t missed all day. Then, at 30-30, with a chance to hit her favorite shot, a backhand from on top of the baseline, she tried a drop shot instead. She missed it, lost that game, and would lose the next four in rapid succession.
Until that point, Azarenka had been connecting beautifully on her backhand and belting uncontested winners with it. But that was when she was fighting to get ahead of Serena, before she had to deal with any real expectations of winning, before she could begin to imagine herself in the semifinals, before she knew that she needed to close it out or it would look like a disastrous choke job. The match’s dynamic had changed, and that change is enough to make an athlete do something awful: think.
Thinking led Azarenka to try a change of pace with a drop shot, rather than sticking with what had gotten her there. She never recovered.
*
Exhibit B is Nikolay Davedenko’s performance against Roger Federer. Davydenko came into this match, as we know, having won the last two times he’d faced Federer. He continued that form by outplaying Federer through the first set and a half. Much like Azarenka, Davydenko ran his opponent and controlled the rallies until he was up 3-1 in the second set. And much like Azarenka, he found himself facing an entirely new dynamic when he earned two break points on Federer’s serve. The specter of having a set and two breaks in hand must have brought visions of a win and a spot in the semifinals into Davydenko's head, or at least into his subconscious—how could it not? What usually accompanies these visions is a whole new set of I-can’t blow-it-now nerves. The onset of these, of course, makes it that much more likely that you are going to blow it.
Davydenko, right on cue, shanked a backhand wide for no reason. Then, even worse, he didn’t get turned for a sitter backhand and dumped it lamely into the net. One way to choke is to get tentative, another is to rush. Davydenko rushed that backhand. It would be an hour before he won another game.
*
Exhibit C is Novak Djokovic’s performance against Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. After being forced to retire with heat exhaustion last year, Djokovic purposely went to Australia early to prepare for the conditions. So how did he end up having physical problems against Tsonga anyway?
Djokovic won the third set 6-1 and appeared to be in total control. It was Tsonga who was struggling physically. Just at that moment, Djokovic was caught on camera dry heaving into his towel. A few minutes later he was asking the chair umpire if he could leave the court because, as he immortally put it, “I have to go throw up.” This briefly revived Djokovic in the fourth set, but he didn’t have anything left for the fifth and lost it 6-1.
Djokovic said that he felt slightly ill before the match, and that it grew worse in the third set. Maybe it was something he ate—he said that all he had was pasta— but I wonder if he didn’t prove Becker’s axiom to be true again. Nerves, and trying to control nerves, is tiring and makes you queasy. It’s the sport’s version of an actor’s pre-show jitters; if you don’t feel them, you know something is wrong. Every spring I come back to tennis after a winter’s break. Every spring I walk off after my first match with a forgotten sensation: An upset stomach. And every spring I find that I’ve missed that sickening feeling.
Unfortunately for Djokovic, he seems to have a constitution that succumbs to a combination of heat, nerves, pressure, physical effort over a long period, etc.—in short, all the ingredients of a Grand Slam. It’s the kind of issue that no amount of physical training can prevent. Everyone in the sport is still waiting for a cure.
*
Exhibit D is the entire quarterfinal, from first game to last, between Li Na and Venus Williams. To start, Li was so off that she spent the opening set staring in disbelief as shot after shot sailed over the baseline. In the second set, Williams caught the bug and did something a Williams very rarely does: tightened up with a lead. As Tennis Channel's Corina Morariu pointed out from the sideline, Venus wasn’t just making errors, she was decelerating her strokes and losing pace. She gave away the lead and the tiebreaker.
Then it was Li’s turn again. After playing a solid set and coming back to claim a 5-4 lead, she walked out to serve for the match and couldn’t put the ball anywhere near the court. It was 5-all in about two minutes. This time it was Li who was slowing down her strokes and guiding the ball. The terrible irony is that to overcome choking, you can’t try to hit a soft, safe shot. That will only make the ball go out. The way to play it safe is to swing fast and let topspin do the work. As Andre Agassi says, “Racquet-head speed is your friend.”
It’s a lesson that, against all odds, Li remembered when she served for the match again at 6-5. She began the game by shoveling the ball down the middle and not taking any chances. The tactic earned her the first point and allowed her to loosen up. Even when she lost two subsequent match points, she lost them with full cuts. When she got a third, I waited for the inevitable push/shank and another break of serve. No matter how determined you are, getting your racquet to move through the zone on a career-defining point like this one must be like trying to swing underwater.
There have been times like these in my own matches when I’ve had an open court for a forehand and managed to hit it for a winner. Typically, I’ll look back and think, “How did I do that? How did I keep the racquet steady in my hand?” It has to be pure muscle memory, gained through years of practice; it’s the only counterweight we have against our jumpy, doubtful brains. On her third match point, muscle memory kicked in just in time for Li. Shocking me and maybe herself, she kept her racquet steady long enough to drill a forehand down the line and past a staggering Venus, who appeared to be taken by surprise by the shot as well.
After the match, in her halting English, Li told ESPN how she felt. “I’m so exciting,” is what I thought I heard her say. Will this turn out to be a real quote? Or did I mishear it, like we have so many others? Either way, Li’s last forehand may be the shot I remember most from this tournament. It felt like more than just a winner; it felt like a victory over the natural forces of tennis. The final set for Li was about nerves, of course. But this time it was also about living with them. It can be done. Li had it right even if she said it wrong: That's so exciting.