Steve here again. Let me interrupt the early rounds of Eastbourne to take you back a couple days, to the late great rounds of Queen’s. As Pete Bodo mentioned in his blog, we were busy with meetings yesterday around the offices of TENNIS Magazine, but I felt the need to get in a comment or two about the tennis from the weekend. Something important may have happened there; it felt like a new aura had begun in men’s tennis.
The aura I’m referring to, of course, is the one that surrounded Rafael Nadal everywhere he went on the Queen’s grass. It was the natural product of his performance in Paris the previous Sunday—you crush Roger Federer in a major final, tennis players tend to show you a little respect.
The odd thing is that Nadal seemed to intimidate Andy Roddick and Novak Djokovic in the semifinals and final more than he did Kei Nishikori and Ivo Karlovic in earlier rounds; each extended him to three sets. But by the time he reached the weekend, Nadal had clearly reached deep into his opponents’ heads. From the beginning, Roddick looked tamed, subdued, unable to summon the cocky lack of respect that serves him so well against lesser players.
As these things tend to do, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Roddick, after holding every one of his service games in his previous matches, was broken late in each set and went down in straights. It’s been noted on this blog in the past that Roddick has an exaggerated sense of pecking order: He hates when lower-ranked players challenge him, but he’s overly respectful to guys like Federer and Nadal. He can’t get outraged when they hit winners past him, and that robs him of a source of motivation. The most telling moment of his match with Nadal came fairly late in the second set. After losing a number of cat-and-mouse points around the net, Roddick finally got one to go his way, dropping a short backhand behind Nadal for a winner. When he saw the ball take a second bounce—it’s never over until it’s over against Rafa—Roddick turned toward the baseline, threw his arms in the air, and blew a few mock kisses to the crowd. “I finally won something against this guy,” was the message. It was a funny move, but it also revealed Roddick’s state of mind. He didn’t seriously think he had a shot, even though he had beaten Nadal just a few months ago in Dubai.
It didn’t take that long for Djokovic to reveal his state of mind in the final. Despite coming out on fire, rifling balls into the corners, breaking Nadal immediately, and going up 3-0, he was still agitated, still anxious, still jumpy. Djokovic had break points for a 4-0 lead but let them slip. When Nadal finally held, the Serb shot a look at his entourage as if to say: “Here comes this friggin' guy again.”
You can understand the sentiment. While the surface was different, it must have been hard for Djokovic to face a guy who had just rolled him in three sets a week earlier in Paris, and who had come back from a similar early deficit to beat him in Hamburg the previous month. In that match, Djokovic had thrown his absolute best at Nadal for long periods of time, but it hadn’t been enough. I’ve said before that one problem Djokovic may have mentally is that he plays with an edge of impatience and frustration that always lurks just below the surface. Against Nadal, you could see he was expecting to be frustrated. It built up until finally, after holding a set point, he lost the first-set tiebreaker 8-6 and slammed his racquet to the ground. I got the feeling he’d been waiting to do that all afternoon.
Djokovic’s seeming lack of belief—something you rarely see from him, if ever—continued in the second set. He went up a break at 5-4; on grass this is usually an automatic ticket to a third set. But he went down 0-30 right away and was broken. Then, down match point at 5-6, he threw in one of his obligatory half-hearted match-point drop shots (he did the same against Nadal in Rome last year and Hamburg this year, and against Federer in the 2007 U.S. Open final), which Nadal gladly took for the title.
Nadal has the aura of a No. 1 player right now. Judging by his record and his game over the last month, he deserves it. At Queen’s, he hit his backhand better—stronger and more consistently—than I’ve seen him hit it all year. Down set point in the first-set breaker, that shot more than held its own in a long crosscourt rally with Djokovic’s forehand. Nadal also anticipated the big serves of Karlovic and Roddick at just the right moments and blocked his forehand returns at their feet with ease. He was at his athletic best around the net; his footwork—discrete little steps rather than long slides—was fully adjusted for grass; he was taking the ball closer to the baseline; and he’s begun to make the wrong-foot play with his forehand, both inside-out and crosscourt, a major part of his repertoire. It’s always said that the wrong-foot is a great play on slippery clay; it’s equally effective on slippery grass. Most impressive of all was Nadal's forehand pass. All that topspin and sidespin made it look like he couldn’t hit it out even if he tried. The shots I’ll remember most from this tournament were the viciously swooping forehand passes he kept hitting from no-man's land, even as he was running full speed toward the net. You wouldn't know it from watching Nadal, but it’s a deceptively hard shot to judge (a lot of these balls end up in the net because the player is worried about hitting it long), like a floating one-hander in the lane in basketball.
As Roddick said, Nadal seemed to be in cruise control from having played so many matches—winning is a habit, just like losing. Anything could happen next week, after he’s gone a few days without winning a tennis match. Nadal may lose a little momentum, he may get a tough early draw—Karlovic would certainly make things a little scary—he may blow a close set and shed some of that bullet-proof confidence he’s been walking around with. Despite all that, I think Nadal is the favorite to win Wimbledon. Djokovic and Roddick have already seen and felt the new aura—they helped create it. How about Roger Federer? While he’s coming in on a long grass, and Wimbledon, winning streak, if he meets Nadal in the final on Centre Court, he’s going to feel it, too. Making it go away will be the biggest challenge of his career.