* !Picby Pete Bodo*
WIMBLEDON, England—It was 1:29 p.m. on this blustery, sunny day, and out on Court 3, things were getting desperate for Benoit Paire. He trailed Brian Baker by two sets to one and 0-3 in the fourth; occasional cries of "Allez Benoit!" rent the air like the forlorn wail of seagulls. The Frenchman looked to be in grave danger of holding serve.
Yep. That's no grammatical misstep. From the time Paire had been broken for 1-2 in the third set, he'd been doing his level best to solidify his burgeoning reputation as a kind of Roger Federer of head cases, while continuing to stimulate hopes that that he might become a plain old Roger Federer—a more remunerative and honorable achievement for sure, but not nearly as exciting.
Paire hit a lunatic high point in the third set; serving at 1-3, he was broken with a cross-court forehand winner, after which he performed a post-modern Michael Jackson crotch grab. As he yanked up on his shorts, he gave the crowd a great view of his multi-colored underwear (whether said crowd wanted it or not). After a quick Baker hold, Paire made no effort to disguise the fact that he was trying his best to tank the game, and set, by hitting truly screwy shots—some of which inadvertently landed in the court. He also added a chapter to the game's history of great mysteries when, while doing his "best" to lose that game, he wasted a challenge on an out call—one that had gone aganst t him.
"You think he is crazy now?", a French colleague asked me. "You should have seen him two years ago, before he calm down."
I took pains to describe Paire's antics because they could not have been easy to handle for Brian Baker, the level-headed rehab case who has overcome seven years of horrific adversity to resurrect a career that once promised so much, but deferred payment. And I couldn't help but marvel at the difference between the two men. Paire spends a lot of time debasing and wasting his considerable talent, while Baker is level-headed, and more thankful for the mere chance to play the game at this level than you or I can ever know. Was any of this going through Baker's mind, while Paire tested his nerves by alternating some spectacular shotmaking and periods of play with bouts of petulant and insolent indifference?
"Yeah, I mean, he was a little out there," Baker said later. "You could tell that some games it looked like he would take off a little bit, but then he would come up and slap a couple winners, too. It is difficult to play a guy like that, but I think it was more difficult, just to have the conditions today. It was really blustery out there. Never felt like the wind was even in the same direction in every game."
All in all, Baker navigated the cocktail of challenges with great aplomb, but then that quality may be Baker's most potent weapon, and the trait most responsible for the way he's skyrocketed back into the Top 100 despite not even owning a ranking as recently as June of 2011. It was two kinds of cool clashing on Court 3 today, Paire's "I'm crazy, gifted, bearded, and I curse in four languages and smash racquets any time I want" type, and Baker's sort, which declared: "I'm just here to play tennis and will show you so little of what I'm thinking or feeling that it will make the back of your neck go all prickly when we get to a big point." As is almost always the case, Baker's cool was more successful.
After the match I visited with Baker's dad, Steve, a Nashville lawyer who once worked at the same law firm as disgraced former U.S. Presidential candidate John Edwards. "What I find hard to believe," Steve told me, "is how he got to be such a better and more solid player without being even exposed to this level of competition for seven years. It's obvious that his ordeal has made him stronger, and he's 27 now, not 22. But that still doesn't seem enough to explain it all."
Brian Baker doesn't meet with much more success when he tries to explain what's been happening to him; all he knows is that he doesn't want it to stop. But perhaps all that anxiety and adversity has had a cumulative effect, and left him better prepared than a typical happy-go-lucky pro—like Paire?—to meet challenges of the kind he faced today. That challenge was twofold; the pressure of making it to the haven of the second seek at Wimbledon, and the ambient conditions.
"I think it's a little bit easier to handle some of the ups and downs," Baker said. "Even being older (helps), too. Even though I haven't had the experience over the last five or six years because I haven't played, just being a little older, a little more mature. I mean, I know things aren't going to go my way the whole match. You have to be able to handle some adversity. It definitely happened today. It's never easy closing a match out, and I was fortunate the last volley went in."
Baker was talking about his second match point and, as Steve Baker pointed out, the fact that his boy didn't look nervous, or holler "Come on!", or throw upper cuts after winning points was a mite deceptive. The true measure of how much he wanted to win this match was expressed in the first match point, when Baker powdered a forehand approach shot two feet beyond the baseline. Paire would use his cavalier magic to conjure a break point, but Baker regained his composure and reeled off the next three points to end it.
Later, Brian would admit, "When I'm on the court I know I definitely have nerves. Closing out the match you definitely know what's on the table, what you can accomplish. I mean, I missed a few shots at the end that I probably wouldn't miss if it was the quarters of a challenger and not trying to get to the round of 16 at Wimbledon. It is crazy, kind of, what's going on. But I'm still trying to stay focused on the task at hand and not get too wrapped around. Because once you do that, I think it's tough to be able to play your best tennis once you're happy that you've been there. So I'm trying to every match go in there hungry and try to win the next one instead of, I'm in the round of 16 of Wimbledon; this is awesome."
Steve Baker knows his kid, because he's lived a parallel life with him in tennis. Steve still has to blink his eyes to convince himself that he's here at Wimbledon again, nine years after his first trip to the All-England Club. "We were here for the juniors," he told me, "we thought he could win it."
Brian was just four when his father took him to the tennis club, and the pro there first planted the seed that would grow into a career in tennis. "It wasn't so much that Brian was able to hit the ball," Steve said. "The pro said a lot of kids can hit a ball at four. It was that Brian could move to the ball on either side and swing and make good contact that impressed him."
Curiously enough, that anecdote about Baker at age four may be all you need to know about his game today; the rest is just connecting the dots. Baker doesn't have that explosive, Rafael Nadal-esque movement, nor the balletic glide of Federer. But he moves with ease and economy, relying on anticipation and a great sense of court space instead of ham-sized quads or calves of steel. His two-handed backhand is a thing of beauty, and perhaps most impressive when he's returning serve. But so many of Baker's great assets are intangibles.
The lack of a big serve (Baker's fastest was 123 M.P.H.; his average was 113 on first serves and 94 on seconds) may be an obstacle for Baker going forward, but what he has is well employed, and the tennis brain behind it is of the highest quality. He knows how to turn his low ranking, and his story, into an asset, admitting, "I'm kind of happy being the hunter going in there."
And it's been made manifest often enough—a happy hunter is usually a deadly one.