The Human Litmus Test

(ed. note: correction appended. Pete)

Howdy, Tribe. Hope you all had a good weekend. Mine had two highlights. First, the first snow squall of the year, Saturday afternoon.  It was a sun shower of sorts, played out against a backdrop of the final glorious week of "leaf season." We stood by the sliding doors leading to the deck, wood stove cranking, and watched the weather event unfolding in a gold and white and blaze orange whirl.  You know those cheap souvenir shake-up globes filled with snow (fess up, I know one of you must have a world-class collection)? It was as if someone on the assembly line where they  make those things screwed up and put the wrong background scene into the wrong globe.

The other highlight was that Cowboy Luke spotted a few deer in a field below the house before his aging (and, apparently, rapidly failing) daddy. "Daddy, it's a buck! Look!" Danged if he wasn't right, too. I was so proud my heart thumped against my shirt. Of course, Luke then explained that it was "a daddy deer and a mommy deer and a brother deer. They're eating breakfast corn cakes in the field and then they are going home to take a nap and watch Gold Dust (a Thomas the Tank Engine movie) on the video."

On the drive home, we listened to Willie Nelson again. You Were Always on my Mind. It's one of the all-time great romantic ballads for the simple reason that it's not about young love, which is easy love, but old, worn, broken and only partially fixed (isn't that always the case?) love. That is, some semblance of real-life love, considered when the heavy lifting has all been done already.

I have to admit that Marat Safin, the philosopher king who blogged his way to the Moscow final - often sounding very hippy-dippy en route-  was not much on my mind over the weekend, but he is now. I suppose he was right on his blog: getting to the final was an achievement of such merit that even losing there (to Nikolay Davydenko) did not do much to dim its luster. I believed him when he wrote that, although I'm sure there are some skeptics.

It's a good way to look at things, I suppose; players who assign too much significance to losses and not enough to wins fall out of the Big Chase (the quest to contend for Grand Slam titles) - usually, it's long before they earn enough ATP points to get into the majors. It's all relative, of course, but you simply don't survive as a pro if you don't know how to take losses. Even when good players take a loss "badly", they do so within certain bounds that usually stop far short of real self-bashing.

On the other hand, what a fine opportunity it was for Safin to shine in front of his countrymen, in his home town. I've got nothing against Davydenko - tennis is scored in order to determine that the better man or woman wins. So, raising the issue of whether that happened or not after a match - any match - is an act of fundamental and flagrant prejudice, and knowing that doesn't stop us. I suppose that's why we're called tennis fans, as opposed to tennis scorekeepers. I only object to that kind of Kool-Aid drinking when the person indulging in it labors under the delusion that you can defend, rationally, the theory that the better player lost. The better player wins, by definition.

Safin and his game remind me of the guy who is forever misplacing his reading glasses. He knows they're around somewhere, because he had them on just a short while ago. He knows this, and his family knows this. The glasses must be somewhere in either of two or three rooms, but he's going nuts trying to find them, and so is his family. Sooner later he smacks his forehead, goes into the kitchen, and there they are! Right where he set them down, next to the bottle of tequila and the lime squeezer. Then everyone returns to watching CSI St. Polten.

I was thinking about all these issues while reviewing the brief but intense flame wars that broke out over my Unsurprising Surprises post last week, in which I took a loss by Rafael Nadal as a jumping-off point for some comments on the indoor seasons. I understand why a certain number of readers would get their shorts in a bunch over my perceived slight of Joachim Johansson; I suppose I could have given him more credit, or framed the discussion around him, and the class of players he represents (they thrive, as I did note, at this time of year).

But I still have a lingering sense that many readers don't really have an informed and accurate perspective on the indoor season, and the way it's so different in tone and texture from the rest of the year -  for all the reasons I mentioned in the original post and comments. You all are familiar with how different pre-season baseball and football games are from the real deal, right? Well, in some ways the indoor schedule is like a post-season-pre-season, and I'm standing firm on that one.

Oh, sure, the really big events (we have one this week, in Madrid) are to some degree exceptions. They can be very telling. But by and large, this time of year is feasting time for the opportunistic and ambitious almost-haves (as opposed to the have-nots and haves) - that is, if you can characterize guys like Ivan Ljubicic (winner in Vienna) or Davydenko (winner in Moscow) as such.

As for the Nadal Goes Indoors narrative thread, I'm going to pull rank a little here and note how Bjorn Borg, even in the late stages of his career, simply didn't look comfortable (or flourish) during the indoor season. One intriguing if difficult to quantify factor: Borg (and you can substitute Jet Boy here) had a fierce will that enabled him to ward off temptations to lose interest, or to make excuses for poor play, because of, say, swirling wind, court conditions, or other specifics of ambiance. He gave up that mental edge indoors, where conditions are generally lab-like, right down to artificial light.

So let's get back to the "almost-haves." Davydenko hardly surprised anyone with his win over Safin for the bragging rights in Russia, although I'm probably not the only one who thinks that a Safin triumph  in Moscow would have been more satisfying and resonant in the culture whose literature gave us Fyodor Dostoevsky's proto-Safin, Dmitri Karamazov (scroll down here for a handy thumbnail if you've never been strong enough to heft The Brothers Karamazov).

Besides, as Safin noted, Davydekno is a Ukrainian, not a Russian, and you don't need to be a Kremlinologist to appreciate the profound differences therein. In fact, Davydenko reminds me strikingly of a fellow Ukrainian (see correction), late Vitas Gerulaitis Sr. (Vitas's dad), who was known to everyone as, simply, "Mr. G".  He was a slight, fair man with fine bone structure in his face. Mr. G was well into his 60s when I got to know him, but he looked young in the same way that Davydenko looks "old."

Sounds confusing, I know, but the bottom line is that the payoff for both men in looking like they were 60 at age 30 is that people like that always end up looking 30 at 60. All in all, not that bad a deal for a poor schmo with male-pattern baldness and bony knees, right?

Where were we? Oh. In some ways Davydenko represents the worst kind of opponent for Safin. I think of Davydenko as the Human Litmus Test, in that he's one of those players (every generation has them; Ljubicic is another in this era) who's got a rock solid all-around game, the consistency to go deep in almost every event he plays, a great facility for keeping other, erstwhile HLT-grade  players under his thumb and - this is the real giveaway - the tendency to slink back into the wire crate once the Big Dogs are off the leash.

Furthermore, the HLT is a player who won't beat himself, and one who demands that an opponent bring a high measure of technical, strategic and emotional maturity to the party. The HLT will give you nothing, and he'll beat anyone who lays back expecting a handout. By the same token, if you're bold and confident and inventive enough, you can nose him right off the bowl of chow and you'll barely get a growl of protest out of him.

End result: If you beat the HLT, you' ve got a right to think of yourself as either representing a player of a different class - the highest class, really, although we'll leave room for the caveat that you may happen to be lucky enough to have a game that, for subtle reasons, matches up very well (or poorly) with his. In which case, you seek your validation elsewhere.

These theories, of course, are always seductive when they occur to you, so I decided to test it out. I decided to go to the ATP website  and check Davydenko's record against 10 players - a group who represent a diverse portrait of the tour. Here's what I came up with:

Davydenko vs. Fernando Gonzalez: 3-0 to Davydenko. Gonzo fails the litmus test, on the grounds of consistency (lack thereof).

Vs. Roger Federer: 0-8. No caveat about this one, despite the fact that TMF own HLT.

Vs. Ivan Ljubicic: 2-2. A perfect number, given that this is HLT vs. HLT.

Vs. Tommy Haas: 2-0.  Tommy is mercurial and his game is flashy. Not quite enough to pass the test.

Vs. Rafael Nadal: 0-0.  Funny, huh?

Vs. Andy Roddick: 0-4. This actually says a great deal about Roddick's fundamental solidity.

Vs. Lleyton Hewitt: 0-3. Hewitt, after all, is what happens to a Davydenko when he transcends being an  HLT.

Vs. Marcos Baghdatis: 1-0. Not much to extrapolate here because Baghdatis is a relative newcomer; my gut feeling is that he'll pass the HLT easily in the next year or two. Heck, Davydenko had to go to 7-5 in the third to beat Baghdatis in their only meeting thus far (Miami Masters Series this year).

Vs. Tim Henman: 1-2. I've always been hot-and-cold on Henman, but he gets a lot of credit for passing the HLT here, for his is a game that a solid guy like Davydekno could pick apart.

Vs. Marat Safin: 2-2.  Davydenko won the last two matches they played, and if you review Safin's shortcomings in the context of what it takes to beat the HLTs, you end up with a pretty clear picture of where Marat is today, and where he needs to get - again. Compare TMF, Boy Andy or Li'l Lleyton's records against Davydenko and it's easy to see why Safin so flummoxes his most ardent fans.

This week in Madrid should give us some great fodder for discussion and, if you've been reading Marat's blog, you know that his management team runs this tournament. The head of that squad is Ion Tiriac, and I'll be posting a long meditation on him tomorrow.

Correction: Vitas Gerulaitis was Lithuanian, which I knew but spaced out on - Pete