Outside the Inner Circle

MELBOURNE—"Is it just me, or do the same four tennis players keep making the semifinals?"—professional golfer Lee Westwood, in a Tweet yesterday.

When the new season began, the predictions began with it. Tennis pundits everywhere were asked to name our season-ending No. 1s, our Grand Slam winners, our Olympic medalists, our most likely players to break through or disappoint or retire or smash four racquets in one sitting. I had my money on a Zvonareva comeback meltdown, but Baghdatis got their first.

On the men’s side, it wasn’t difficult to make the winners' picks, even nine months in advance. Even if you dearly wanted to mix it up, to throw in a surprise, to make it fun, to avoid the depressing fate of having to go “chalk” and pick one of the favorites every time, you couldn’t. At the moment, taking anyone outside the Top 4 men’s players to win anything of significance is just too far-fetched. To make your pick interesting, even if it’s a long shot, you have to be able to at least argue its plausibility. Considering that only one player beside the current Top 3 has won a Grand Slam in the last seven years, you can’t make that argument at the moment. At most times in the past, the idea of predicting the Top 4 to make the semis of any Grand Slam would have been far too boring to consider. But that’s what I did at this year’s Australian Open. For good reason: As of Wednesday afternoon, three of them are already there, and none of the Top 4 has been forced to go five sets in their 19 collective matches thus far.

On the whole, this is a positive. While the first week of a men’s Slam can feel like a foregone conclusion, we make up for it with the high intensity and high stakes of the semis and final. The trouble for a prognosticator, or, more important, for a fan looking for a fresh face, is that it’s virtually impossible to find one to get behind for the future. Guys outside the Top 4 pull off upsets; they win tournaments; they get to Masters finals; they look like world-beaters for weeks at a time; they entertain large crowds. When you’re asked for your picks for possible Grand Slam dark horses and sleepers and shock-artists, you dutifully mention their names, but you know in the back of your head that they’re not going to get it done “when it counts.”

Exhibit A of this phenomenon at the moment is Jo-Wilfried Tsonga. He was coming off a 2011 when he finally showed what he could do when he was injury-free for six months. Jo finished No. 6, beat Federer at Wimbledon, and reached the final of the ATP’s year-end event. Then he won the Aussie tune-up tournament in Doha and got the relatively kind draw of No. 4 Andy Murray in the quarterfinals in Melbourne. We asked, tentatively: Was this Jo’s time? He was already a crowd favorite here, with his own personal performance space in Margaret Court Arena. Was he going to add some more substance, some grit, to his flashy style?

We got our answer in the fourth round, when Tsonga went up against the much-lower-ranked Kei Nishikori. Over five sets, Tsonga played, as he often does, tennis that oscillated between the brilliant and the ambivalent. He attacked, and then held back. He was fired up, then he was agitated. He didn’t look crisp in the mid-day heat. You don’t have to believe that the Grand Slams are everything—and I don’t—to believe that Tsonga can’t get it done when it counts. It wasn’t as if this were a case of the Big 4 just being too good. Tsonga lost to the world No. 26.

He isn’t alone. Juan Martin del Potro has obviously been injured, and he beat everyone he was supposed to beat before losing to a sharp Roger Federer here. But this Grand Slam champ has lagged behind the top guys, and you can’t point to him as a future threat the way you could two years ago.

The list continues: Gael Monfils put on a theater of the absurd here in a bad five-set loss. Tomas Berdych played Rafael Nadal tough but missed the volley that would have put him up two sets. Mardy Fish let himself get irritated by his opponent’s calls to the trainer and was upset early. Alex Dolgopolov is a fantastic talent but lacks grit. John Isner has grit but can’t break serve.

Tennis players have flaws, and I’m not hanging these guys for theirs. There’s only one No. 1. Beyond that, why should we criticize them for losing tennis matches? It happens, and individual athletes aren't the same as sports teams, which are supported by a local following of ticket-buyers and TV viewers who have some right to expect effort and success from the organizations that represent them. The men on the ATP tour are playing for themselves first. As a fan of the game, if Tsonga loses, that means another player, this time Nishikori, won, and you can be happy for him and appreciate his effort. It’s not like we won’t get to see Jo putting on his show somewhere down the road. Why not just accept that he is who he is—flashy and inconsistent—and leave it at that?

The only answer I can give is that it gets more personal than that. You start to want things for the players you like; maybe, in the case of someone like Monfils, more than they want themselves. In that sense, watching Tsonga and del Potro lose at this tournament was a bummer. I like these guys and their games. I didn’t feel betrayed or disgusted, the way I feel when my football team, the Philadelphia Eagles, blow a game. With Tsonga, it was a bummer to see him get better and more confident last year, and then lose conviction midway through a match against a guy he should beat. With del Potro, it was a bummer to see him not quite be able to put it all together the way we know he can when he gets his tank-like game rolling. In both cases, it’s a natural human reaction against futility, and a desire to see an athlete whom you like, and a style of play that you enjoy, not fail. Unfortunately, when success is limited to such a small and regular group, that means you have to watch a lot of other people come up short at every major.

Even today, though, in the age of the Big 4, hope for a surprise success springs eternal. As I write this, the man just outside the inner circle, world No. 5 David Ferrer, is preparing to take on No. 1 Novak Djokovic. Ferrer has also improved over the past few years, to the point where he really should be challenging the big boys. He’s a good guy, too, and the epitome of an overachiever. I’m not betting on him.