Pressure Points

“Play!” Jack Sock screamed at himself halfway through his match with Australia’s Sam Groth. But playing, or at least playing anywhere close to his best, wasn’t in the cards for the American on Tuesday. Last year at Wimbledon, the 22-year-old experienced his greatest tennis memory when he won the doubles title with Vasek Pospisil. This year at Wimbledon, Sock had an experience that was something less than memorable. Everything that could go wrong in his 6-3, 3-6, 6-3, 6-3 loss, did go wrong.

Sock came out flat, was broken in his opening service game, and never found an effective counter for Groth’s mix of huge serves, competent volleys, and deceptively good backhands. Rather than search for an answer, Sock responded with a “devil may care” demeanor, as the British commentator Chris Bowers put it. At times, he seemed stunned to be losing to a guy ranked 69th.

By the end of the third set, as the match was getting away from him, Sock had hit a ball in the direction of the Aussie Fanatics who were loudly chanting for Groth, and sent another off his frame and into the next court. By the middle of the fourth set, Sock had taken a medical timeout and had a needle stuck either in his knee or his finger, one of which needed to be drained. He rolled his head back in obvious pain. Injury had been added to insult.

Sock is now 1-2 at Wimbledon, and it’s possible that grass, unlike his newly beloved clay, will never be his surface. It may be a little too slick for him to have time to backpedal across the court and launch his supersonic forehand. But when Sock arrived in London this time, fresh off a fourth-round run at the French Open, his name was appearing in headlines next to phrases like “Next Great American hope.” This was the first time he had been seeded—31st—at a Grand Slam.

Did Sock feel the weight of new expectations? Was he suddenly playing a little less freely than he had been for most of the season? He wouldn’t be the first U.S. player to suffer that fate of late. On the men’s side, John Isner and Mardy Fish labored mightily, and in vain, to inherit Andy Roddick’s leadership mantle; on the women’s, both Sloane Stephens and Madison Keys have complained about the extra attention that their success has drawn.

“I love being from the States and having that pride,” Sock toldThe Guardian this weekend. “But at the same time, there's a lot of expectation.”

“You kind of take it for what it is and you really don’t dwell on it so much,” he said. “Obviously, we know, and it’s sometimes in our heads, but for the most part it’s in one ear and out the other, and you keep doing what you’re doing and keep plugging on with the process.”

One loss is not necessarily a sign of trouble to come, and it’s hard to know how much Sock’s injury hindered him and contributed to his foul mood. But instead of committing fully to the battle with Groth, Sock seemed upset by the challenge that the lower-ranked and less-talented Aussie posed, and thrown off by the now-unorthodox serve-and-volley game that he employed.

Is Sock’s stock still worth buying? Yes: He has the weapons, but to climb higher in the rankings, he’ll need to find a way to win even when they’re not firing.

What about Simona Halep’s stock? Is she, at No. 3 in the world, currently worth a buy, or at least a hold?

For most of 2015, the answer would have been an emphatic yes. She has been ranked No. 2 or No. 3, won titles in Dubai and Indian Wells, and pushed Serena to the edge in Miami. Yet after a mediocre clay season and an early loss at the French Open, Halep claimed she had “no expectations” for the grass swing, despite having reached the semifinals at Wimbledon last year.

“On clay I had too much pressure, and I couldn’t handle it,” Halep said in Birmingham last week. “I was blocked. I couldn’t play at the French Open.”

“After that, I took some days off at home and relaxed my mind,” she continued. “I wanted to come back stronger and more relaxed...I just want to enjoy without pressure.”

To deliberately try to play without feeling any pressure is a tough trick to pull off. Imagine how nice it would be to simply ignore it? But if you can ignore it, it might be because you’ve made yourself too relaxed out there. You want just enough pressure to spur you on and inspire your best tennis, but not so much that it makes you tighten up. The only answer is to accept it and try to manage it.

Whatever pressure Halep may or may not have felt on Tuesday, she didn’t enjoy the grass at Wimbledon for long. She spent much of her 5-7, 6-4, 6-3 loss to 106th-ranked Jana Cepelova on the defensive. But even when she had the opportunity to attack, she struggled—Halep committed 34 unforced errors to Cepelova’s 20. Often, with a chance to take control of a point, Halep pulled the trigger too early and misfired instead.

What cost Halep more than anything else, and what kept her from taking advantage of Cepelova’s nerves in the third set, was her serve. Halep double-faulted seven times and won just 30 percent of points on her second serve (compared to 50 percent for Cepelova).

Afterward, Halep said she was feeling “stressed” and running low on emotional fuel. She has played a lot of tennis over the first six months of this season. As her loss today showed, the fact that she stands 5’6” and has a second serve that remains attackable, means that beating taller, more powerful opponents will always be, at some level, an uphill battle.

What it also showed was that the fear factor that helps top players doesn’t last for long. Cepelova showed very little fear until she went up a break in the third set. Then the pressure hit—rather than ignore it, as Halep wished to do, Cepelova contained it. She aimed her shots a little farther inside the lines, and attacked when she could, especially on Halep’s serve.

By the end, the audience inside Court 1 had, as audiences at Wimbledon tend to do, embraced the underdog with a warm appreciation, leavened with a little well-mannered pity for the higher-ranked player. Cepelova had provided them with one of the pleasures of watching a Grand Slam: The sight of an unheralded player rising to the occasion and discovering that she had nothing to fear, from her opponent or herself, after all.