Here’s a rally to consider. Feliciano Lopez cracks a forehand as hard as he can. Bernard Tomic, 18-year-old Australian mystery talent, casually picks it up off the Plexicushion on a short hop and floats it back. Lopez hits the same shot again, this time harder and more precisely placed toward the corner. Tomic lopes to his right and short-hops it back again. The ball seems to slow down as he swings. This time Lopez chips a backhand and comes to the net. Tomic lopes to his left and caresses a backhand pass crosscourt, past Lopez and an inch inside the sideline.
I’m sitting next to my friend Chris Clarey of the Herald-Tribune. This is the type of point we've come out to Hisense Arena this afternoon to see. “It’s the Mecir thing,” Chris says, referring to Czechoslovakia’s Miloslav Mecir, a famously stylish and original finesse player of the 1980s. “It’s like catnip for tennis writers.”
Bernard Tomic is tennis-writer’s darling. The term, if it were a real term and not one I just made up here, would refer to a player who brings something different to the court, who either elevates it with style or turns it inside out with originality. You would think, in an individual sport with so many varying and strong personalities, that these types of people would pop up every few months—every player has their own way of playing, after all. But they don’t come around all that often. Whether it was the serve-and-volley Big Game of the 1960s, or the power baseline game today, it’s hard to buck the tried and true, to play a game that hasn’t already been proven to work.
“I hit a lot of funky shots,” Tomic admits. “I like to make people miss.” It’s been that way since he started playing. The success he had with his funky game encouraged him to keep at it rather than switch to something more conventional. “I can hit hard,” he says, “but it’s not my game to hit hard.”
Tomic’s game, as Clarey noted, is reminiscent of Mecir’s. It’s also reminiscent of another tennis-writer’s darling and descendent of the bearded Czech maestro, Andy Murray. All three have great feel, hit their two-handed backhands with a deceptively soft and smooth swing, change speeds deftly, and like to work the ball around rather than end points from the middle of the court with their forehands.
But Tomic’s game is weirder than Murray’s. It’s almost perverse. He spends the majority of his time soft-balling, seemingly because that’s just what he enjoys doing. When he gets a forehand that he can drill, he might cup a short crosscourt slice instead. The shot doesn’t penetrate, and he ends up ceding ground back to his opponent, but it does do two things to his opponent. It keeps him guessing, and, if Tomic goes on to win the point, it irritates the hell out of him. After losing a point in which Tomic hit this shot today, Lopez gave the kid a sarcastic thumb’s up. “Nice work, you little so and so.”
It was nice work for Tomic today, who won in straight sets to reach his first Grand Slam third round and a Saturday night date with Rafael Nadal in Rod Laver Arena. Tomic not only annoyed Lopez, he played the big points better as well. He saved some of his best stuff for the tiebreakers; on set point in the first set, he unleashed the hardest backhand he had hit so far that afternoon. When he got down 0-3 in the second set, it looked for a second like Tomic might quit and hand that set over. He didn’t.
It’s fun, as a tennis-writer or spectator, to watch Tomic think. He never does exactly what you expect, and when he does, that’s even more surprising. He uses very little backswing and hits with his back straight up and down, both Mecir-esque qualities. His serve might be the funkiest shot of all. He hits it the way you might have taught a beginner to hit a serve in 1975, raising both arms straight up together. It’s a measure of Tomic’s timing that he can use this rudimentary motion to make the ball go 120 m.p.h.
The question is, and the question that Australian tennis has been asking for about five years now, is whether this style is more than just style. Can it do more than draw the aficionados? Can Tomic win?
As I said earlier, Roger Rasheed, Gael Monfils’ coach, doesn’t think funkiness will get it done. And sometimes Tomic’s off-speed stuff serves no purpose at all. He seems happy to hit a surprising shot, like a slice forehand, for its own sake, or rally with no discernible purpose. Tomic is very good at playing within himself, but he can cross into cute territory. The best touch players have always coupled that touch with something else: John McEnroe had his serve, Murray has his speed and his return. Tomic, whether he likes it or not, will have to compromise and hit the ball hard more than once per set. He already can do it if he wants.
Tomic maintains that there’s a method behind his game as it stands now. “The way I play, I catch a lot of guys out with not a lot of power,” Tomic says. “My strengths are, you know, I can find players' weaknesses really quickly. That’s what I’ve always been good at when I was young.”
Tomic has been a figure of controversy for years in Australia. He has a stage dad who has kept him out of competition for unexplained reasons, and he’s occasionally come across as an egomaniac in the making—as in when he reportedly refused to practice with Lleyton Hewitt because Hewitt “wasn’t good enough” (still love to imagine Rusty’s reaction when he heard that). Today you wouldn’t have known it. The fans were behind Tomic all the way, and during his press conference he appeared as fresh-faced as you would expect an 18-year-old to be after a big win at home.
Tomic still has the adolescent habit of stopping sentences early, right when the thought is done, and at the point where an adult would add a finishing touch (Sorry, I can’t explain it better; you’d know what I mean if you saw it.) But he was at his most open when he was asked about his thoughts on his next match. against Nadal.
Tomic said, “I think I’ll settle down in a day or two.”
“Is it excitement, or nervousness?”
A smile of recognition spread across Tomic’s face, as if he were realizing something for the first time. “It’s excitement, that what it is!”
Then the adolescent diffidence set back in. “He won't like my game. It’s an opportunity I’m going to take . . . I think.”
Tomic was then asked, since he says he's so good at finding players’ flaws, which one he would be looking for in Nadal.
He thought for a second. Then he sat back and laughed.