It was kids’ day at the Australian Open on Saturday. The central area of the grounds, between the main entrance and the front of Rod Laver Arena, had been remade into a fair for dancing, laughing, game-playing, autograph-seeking, player-hounding child Aussies. They bashed foam balls at each other, did something called the “safe dance,” and went on the Tennis Tornado (sounds scary to me, but I could never handle rides). The afternoon had broken out into bright, cloudless sun for the first time in days, and the atmosphere was rightly festive.
The grounds here are split in two by a worn-looking, tubular elevated walkway. It slices through the middle of Melbourne Park and divides Laver Arena from the newer Hissense Arena. It also leaves one small group of side courts, Nos. 16-22, in isolation. Today this area was not so festive. There were no laughing children to be seen. Instead, air was filled with the sound of grunts, screams, cracked racquets, and moans of despair and outrage. This was where the qualifiers were doing their work.
It’s difficult to get to these courts. You have to wind through a maze of makeshift iron fences and barbed wire to see anything. Construction is still going on all around; today the players were serenaded by jackhammers in the distance, and a few feet behind one court a group of workers were loudly loading a truckbed with scrap metal.
Inside this industrial zone a 21-year-old from the Netherlands, 6-foot-7 Thomas Schoorel, was playing on a court next to 20-year-old, 6-foot-5 Milos Raonic, a Canadian of Eastern European descent. Raonic is ranked No. 153 and Schoorel is No. 165. Neither is young enough to be called a future Top Tenner, but each has garnered some attention over the last year. Schoorel nearly took a set from Roger Federer in Doha, while Raonic and his partner Vasek Pospisil beat Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic in doubles in Toronto last summer.
When he played Federer, the lefty Schoorel’s serve reminded me, at least in its backbend, of John McEnroe’s. That wasn't quite so apparent from the front row today. Up close, what comes across about Schoorel is his lanky, loping height and the raw sound of his shots. His serve makes a battering sound.
As for the rest of his game, Schoorel moves decently to set up his inside-out forehand, and he hits a clean one-handed backhand. He takes his forehand straight back and brings it straight through in an unpolished, Soderling-like manner. His style is pretty one-dimensional for a guy with a one-hander; he doesn’t seem to have a way to get to the net. As with all big guys, success or failure depends on whether Schooorel can set up when he hits, or whether he to do it on the move. Today he won the first set in a tiebreaker against the veteran Stefan Koubek. But when he got to a second-set tiebreaker, Schoorel lost his range and fired an ugly series of forehands all over the court. At the end, when he’d lost the set, he stopped and said, in a Schwarzenegger-ish way, “Oh, you have got to be kidding me.”
On the next court, Raonic was playing a different game. He bombed his serve, naturally, but he moved more easily than Schoorel, he changed speeds with his shots, and he used an interesting maneuver I don’t think I’d ever seen before. When he got a forehand that he could move into, he hit over it like any other ground stroke and just ran in behind it. It worked; he knocked off a couple of smooth-looking forehand volleys. He won in straight sets.
Raonic is a professor’s son, and his father has asked coaches over the years whether it’s worth it for him to keep at the pro game, or whether he should go to school instead. He’s obviously too good not to give the pros a shot, even if he’s had most of his success in doubles thus far. He has the power, as well as some of that elusive tennis DNA in his strokes. Plus, he's coached by a man with one of the best names in tennis, Galo Blanco.
Leaving the Raonic match, I ran into Schoorel. I expected that Koubek would have finished him off in the third set, but the Dutchman said no, he had won, 6-2 in the third. “I started out great,” he said, “but then I started playing his game. I was just getting the ball in and moving it around instead of playing my game,going after my forehand and serve.” Call it one more hazard of the business: Starting to play with your opponent instead of against him—it can happen.
Tomorrow Schoorel will play a more well-known qualifier, Grigor Dmitrov, for a place in the main draw. Raonic will face Andrej Martin in the same situation. Today was a success, one that they could very briefly enjoy. “It was hot,” Schoorel said, “so I’m happy to get past it and get ready for the next one. I'll try to play my game again.”
The two young men saw each other on their way back to the locker room, as they walked under the barbed wire and past the jackhammers.
“Milos,” Schoorel called out, “did you win?”
“Yeah, you?”
“Yes.”
They clasped hands in congratulation. There were no kids hounding them for autographs. There were no fans for miles. Neither of their smiles lasted long. There was more work to be done.