MELBOURNE—The lives of most tennis stars, in the collective opinion of the sport’s fans, run along a familiar arc.
First, when a great young player appears, we're indignant at this upstart who dares to challenge our old favorites. Then, when the upstart shows a sign of weakness, we react with an I-told-you-so denial that he or she was all that amazing in the first place. If the player shores up that weakness and goes on to become a dominant champion, feelings tend to split. There’s unapologetic idolization among fans; teeth-gritting resentment among detractors.
Even at their peaks, though, certain No. 1 players, especially male No. 1 players, inspire more detractors than fans. Jimmy Connors was one. Ivan Lendl was another. Lleyton Hewitt was the most recent. Hewitt’s backwards hat, his red-faced “Come ons!” his meat-and-potatoes baseline game: None of it caught on; mostly, it grated. It’s no coincidence that what we think of as the current golden age of men’s tennis began the day Hewitt surrendered his No. 1 ranking in 2003. Even his countrymen, famous for full-throated support of their sporting heroes, didn’t embrace Hewitt unconditionally. As one Melbourne columnist put it last year, the Aussies have trouble trusting a tennis player who plays with anger rather than with humor, who takes himself too seriously. Hewitt seemed to be, like Jimbo, a little too aggressively blue collar for this club sport.
I agreed with the consensus on Rusty (he got his nickname, for reasons I can’t recall, from Rusty Griswold, Chevy Chase’s son in the Vacation movies). His personality didn’t bother me as much as his game. I just never looked forward to seeing him swing that stiff-armed backhand and spin the back of his feet forward on his serve the way he does. There wasn't much that was elegant or creative about his counterpunching style; in fact, he was at his worst when he tried to create. The ankle braces he has always worn made it look like he was doing physical labor rather than playing a game.
Finally, though, after a dozen years of Hewitt-watching, all of that has changed this week. More specifically, it has all changed in the last two matches. That may not be as strange as it sounds, if we remember the tennis star's typical career arc for fans. Hewitt’s star has long faded, and he’s deep into the homestretch. Rusty is due for a “beloved veteran” moment, a Jimbo at the 1991 U.S. Open hurrah. What’s surprising is how much I’m suddenly enjoying the way he plays.
It began in the second set of his win over Andy Roddick. You could see Hewitt thinking out there and making adjustments. He stepped up into the court to take his backhand. He followed routine ground strokes to the net if he saw that Roddick was out of position. He started hitting closer to the sidelines and used every part of the court to get the American on the run. It’s always satisfying to see a player think, and succeed in changing a losing pattern (there really is hope in the world). And while Roddick hurt himself, Hewitt had already started the turnaround. He was finding a way.
I began to appreciate other elements of Rusty’s game. The backhand that always looked so stiff now looked thoughtful; Hewitt can subtly alter its speed and trajectory without altering his stroke much. I knew that his backhand lob was one of the best in the game’s history, but the one he popped over Roddick from his shoe-tops was a masterpiece of simplicity, and showed off softer hands and more touch than I normally think Hewitt owns. Then there was the way, once it became obvious that Roddick was hurt, Hewitt held his nerve, kept going after his shots and moving the ball aggressively, and didn’t gag. He said afterward that it was a “nightmare” to play an ailing opponent, and that from a mental standpoint he thought it was one of the better performances of his career. He wasn’t exaggerating; his resolve was impressive.
Even more impressive was what Hewitt did in his next match, last night against Milos Raonic. Again he was run off the court in the first set. Again he looked like the crumbling warrior who had, according to the Aussie experts, “lost the spark” and “lost a step.” Again he turned it around. This time Hewitt showed his smarts by mixing paces and keeping the ball low to the 6-foot-5 Raonic, who spent much of the match in an uncomfortable-looking crouch. Hewitt was even more masterful with his serve, showing how effective you can be with very little power, as long as you make up for it with tactical smarts. It was like watching a baseball pitcher get the league’s biggest slugger to ground out. (Not strike out—Hewitt doesn’t have that power, but he didn’t need it to get the job done.)
Then came the final game. A few hours earlier, I had watched Gael Monfils put on a spectacle against Mikhail Kukushkin in Margaret Court Arena. It involved pretty much everything you can do on a tennis court, other than winning a match. Hewitt, as he stood at the baseline to serve it out at 5-3 in the fourth against Raonic, with the crowd rising to urge him on, looked like the anti-Monfils. You felt like, no matter how nervous he was or how big his opponent hit, Rusty—an adult now, not the kid in the movie—was going to close.
Hewitt did get tight—he made two errors for 15-30—and Raonic was hitting big. Down match point, he began using his forehand to dictate the way he should have been using it all night. But Hewitt, moving his serve around and steeling his ground strokes when needed, found a way to get the last out.
It’s way late in coming, but after watching a young Monfils strut his way to defeat, I finally got the full sense of what’s special about Hewitt. In the end, while the “Come ons” and the lawnmower may have grated, he was more like the good-humored sporting Aussies of the past than we may have realized. As fierce as he was, Hewitt always knew it was a game, a game you did everything to win; a game that, by now, he knows how to win as well as anyone in the world. That’s always fun to watch, and will always be missed.