Sometimes less is more. Other times, it isn’t. Other times, overkill works out just fine. This weekend in Paris was one of those other times.
Last week over at ESPN.com I wrote about how I was relishing not having any WTA results to think about for the first time in 10 months. I said the ATP should try to follow suit by cutting its season a few weeks shorter when they meet about the topic in the coming days. As I wrote those words, the men’s tournament in Bercy was getting started, and it felt a little beside the point. Nothing of historical import was going to happen. Rafael Nadal had pulled out, and neither Novak Djokovic nor Andy Murray seemed especially broken up by their losses.
I also said that tournaments take on a life of their own as a week progesses, and by Saturday Bercy was brimming over with it. The fall season is clearly excessive, but if we didn’t have it, we wouldn’t have seen the back-to-back, back-from-match-points-down, semifinal classics won by Robin Soderling and Gael Monfils.
Of course, if you go by that logic, you would say that there should be 10 tournaments every week of the year. What Bercy showed again was what makes the Masters Series successful as a whole—like the Slams, each of its eight events has a unique atmosphere (the two newest ones, Shanghai and Madrid, are in the process of creating theirs). Bercy has a cool main stadium, and a cool pre-match light show to go with it. But as the week went on and the crowds grew day by day, what it had more than anything was French fans. Americans routinely malign them as nasty and fickle, and it’s true, I wouldn’t want to get on their bad side. They had no trouble booing Roger Federer's lucky net cords in the semis or cheering Soderling's double-faults in the final. But like Philly sports fans—talk about nasty and fickle—the French also bring a unified emotional intensity to the tennis arena. You can see the difference most easily at the Canadian Open. A crowd at a quality night-session match in Montreal has a singular energy; a night match in Toronto is a mellow Midwestern affair by comparison.
What’s best about Bercy is that, unlike at Roland Garros, the French players respond well to that intensity. Monfils has reached the final two years in a row, and this time Michael Llodra was a few inches from joining him. Neither has done as well at big-time events anywhere else. But as close as Llodra was to the final, Monfils was just as close to giving the Paris faithful a double-dose of heartbreak on Saturday, when he had to save match points to beat Roger Federer for the first time in six tries.
Watching Monfils make his purposeful way around the court in the first set made me think of a story about Jimi Hendrix. At a certain point, concert promoter Bill Graham grew tired of watching the guitarist showboat his way though sets. Hendrix played the guitar with his teeth, behind his back, upside down; he made a spectacle of his performances whenever possible. Graham challenged him at various times to cut out the nonsense and play it straight, to give his best. One night Hendrix took him up on it. He went out and played one of the deepest, most riveting set of musics Graham had ever seen. At certain moments, Monfils’ performance against Federer was like that. He didn’t play to the crowd, he didn’t throw his arms to the sky, he didn’t rap to himself—he left the demented-cheerleader act at home. And did you see what happened at the end of the first set? Instead of blowing the tiebreaker, the way he normally would against Federer with a tentative of ill-conceived play, he was the one who stayed solid, saved a set point, and let Federer self-destruct. Who thought they would ever see that? As Robbie Koenig said, "Well, well, well, what do we have here?"
Federer, probably assuming that Monfils would hand him the first set, came to life after that. In the second, he began to hit the ball with the same "conviction," as the commentators (correctly) like to say, that he’d been hitting it earlier in the week. Re-energized, he played a much better tiebreaker of his own and looked like he’d broken Monfils’ will when he went up 4-1 in third. Then it happened, again. For the fourth time this year, Federer lost after holding match point—an improbable five of them this time. The one I remember most clearly was an inside-out forehand into a wide-open court that clipped the tape. To lose five match points involves a certain amount of bad luck, but when something similar happens four times in one year, it also constitutes a trend that goes beyond luck. To me, the phenomenon is a reflection of the gradual change that has gone on in both Federer’s game and in the way his opponents view and compete against him. The latter is catching up with the former.
Tomas Berdych, at Key Biscayne, and Novak Djokovic, at the U.S. Open, both saved at least one match point before beating Federer. Each of them had raised their games above their normal level and been the better player for most of those matches. Each should have won, but each had trouble making themselves believe it, because of who their opponent was. Both of them blew their leads and found themselves facing match points. And that’s when both of them felt comfortable again; they had nothing to lose again. Berdych and Djokovic went big on those match points and connected. After that, they believed again. Monfils, who like Berdych had never beaten Federer before yesterday, won the first set, lost his way when he glimpsed the finish line at the end of the second set, and then, down 1-4, with nothing to lose, began to swing freely.
A player’s success isn’t just a result of his own form and confidence. It’s a result of that form mixed with the form of his opponent, as well as how his opponent perceives him. Berdych, Djokovic, Monfils, and the fourth player to save a match point against him this year, Marcos Baghdatis, have always been second (third, 10th) fiddles to Federer (Djokovic was the only one who had a win over Federer before 2010). As his results have become less Olympian, and as his game has gotten slightly more erratic, these players know at some level that they finally have a shot. So they go in, as Monfils did yesterday, more eager and determined than normal. But as they get close to winning, the second-fiddle complex kicks in. Whatever he may be playing like on this day, he’s still Roger Federer in their minds. Perceptions of invincibility die hard.
And beating the previously invincible can make for a hard letdown. That’s what happened to Monfils on Sunday against Soderling. The Frenchman couldn’t find his range, or the right balance between patience and aggression; he spent most of the afternoon erring on the side of too much patience. The other thing that happened to Monfils, it must be said, was Robin Soderling. He served brilliantly and hit his inside-out forehand even better. Despite going to a tiebreaker, the second set felt like a foregone conclusion. Soderling was in complete, easy control.
I asked before the tournament whether Soderling could be considered among the game’s elite. He’s not quite there yet, but this is a big step in that direction. He reached a Slam final this year, and lost to either Federer or Nadal at three of them. For the last two years, he’s come up with big upsets but hasn’t followed them up with big titles. Now he’s got one. I’ll never love to watch the guy play—even his inside-out forehand winners, dynamic shots in anyone else’s hands, look mechanical and routine. But I did gain some respect for Soderling this weekend for the classy way he handled his win over Llodra. It was a crushing loss for the Frenchman in front of the home folks, one that Soderling was plainly lucky to survive—he even flinched in surprise when Llodra’s forehand pass at match point caught the tape. Soderling’s celebrations have had a vicious quality at times in the past, and as he closed in on the victory Saturday, I hoped he wouldn’t overdo it and rub Llodra’s face in his defeat. He didn’t.
It was a breakthrough for Soderling, and also for Monfils. He has a win over Federer now, and he got it in part by acting and playing within himself. Should we hope for more? Maybe Bill Graham’s story can give us a clue. Later that night, Hendrix went out for another set. He smiled at Graham from the stage and happily proceeded to pull out all of the most ridiculous grandstanding moves he could come up with. He put the guitar behind his head, between his teeth, between his legs, behind his back. That’s what he loved to do, and the crowd loved it, too. I hope Monfils loves to win more. He’s a lot more entertaining when he plays it straight.