By Bill Simons
The birds were at last singing in the trees of Roland Garros.
Parisian clouds had cleared, temperatures were sublime, breezes cool. Gone were the blankets, umbrellas, and sweaters of earlier days.
Ladies in stylish bonnets and gents with continental style and metro panache crowded the arena.
The day was perfect, the contest critical. Welcome to the match of the year, tennis’ heavyweight championship, between its two greatest players. Never mind that it was a semifinal.
Expectations were high.
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World No. 1 Novak Djokovic, 26, and the king of clay, Rafael Nadal, 27, have now met a whopping 35 times, which is as many as any other duo in the Open era. About the arena, breaking down their stats became a kind of red-state, blue-state statistical adventure: Djokovic is favored on paper, Nadal captures the heart.
Going into battle, Rafa led the matchup 19-15, including wins in three of the duo’s last four meetings. However, in 2011 and early 2012, Djokovic slammed Nadal seven straight times, including their classic 2012 Australian Open final, a match still painful to Rafa.
But hold on, tennis lovers. This is Court Centrale. This is Roland Garros. This is the clay court stretch. And here the mighty King Rafa I still reigns.
Simply put, since 2005 virtually every spring has been just one thing: the season of the twitch. Time and again, en route to victory, we see Rafa fussing with his hair, tweaking his headband, tugging at his (now surprisingly short) shorts, lining up his water bottles just right, or sprinting out—almost manically—on court. When it comes to the clay-court season, twitchy Nadal also makes every foe twitch, especially flinch. No player—not Bjorn Borg on clay, not John McEnroe indoors, nor Roger Federer on grass or hard courts—has dominated a surface the way the Spaniard has ruled clay.
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Never mind that Nadal encountered ample scares against little-known players early in the tourney, or that he had moaned early on that he was full of anxiety and if he didn’t calm down he might as well go home and fish. Well, some Sturgeon just off the Mallorcan coast may now rest easy. But there was one Serbian warrior who was not exactly at ease.
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The French Open is the one Slam that Djokovic has not claimed, and he has won all the Masters except Cincinnati. His beloved coach, Jelena Gencic, who passed away just days ago, dearly wanted him to capture the French to become the eighth man to win the career Slam. Novak openly said he wanted to win it for her. This “Win One for the Gipper” theme was but one backstory of a marathon semi with more plots than Arlington National.
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Thrust, parry. Attack, retreat, Triumph, blunder. Every great sporting battle has its twists and shifts.
When Rafa came out flat and struggled to win his first service game, one dared to wonder, quite prematurely, “Will this be Djokovic’s day?”
But Rafa intensified the pressure and a clearly tentative Djokovic donated three backhand errors in the seventh game, allowing Nadal to break. Newly confident, Nadal then sprinted to win the first set and score an early break in the second. The error-prone Serb was hitting too often to Rafa’s dangerous forehand, wasn’t powering his returns, and was struggling while serving with the wind.
Frustrated and out of sorts, Novak roared in agony and gestured—akin to a boy without his toy—to his box. (Memo to headquarters: this was supposed to be a classic. It looks like Rafa will romp.) With cropped hair, white cap, and seemingly mechanical strokes, Djokovic has little of the quirkily charismatic magnetism of Nadal or the dreamy grace of Federer. But make no mistake: He is a man of fire who emerged from a small nation where many bombs fell from the sky and few tennis stars have risen the heights.
Easy to dismiss on this increasingly toasty Friday afternoon—too thin, too fragile, hurt hip, having to play unnatural patterns to the lefty Nadal—he nonetheless blasted precision groundies to the corners, both left and right. Nadal, the greatest defensive player to ever scamper about this court, was now on the defense, in long breathless rallies which captivated an almost-packed house of some 16,000 people.
Djokovic broke back—not once, but twice—and collected the second set, 6-3.
•••
The best-of-five battle would now be the best-of-three, and the pattern of the first two sets would repeat.
After offering ecstatic roars of triumph just a few games earlier, Djokovic inexplicably went flat. Tired and listless in the mid-afternoon heat, and beaten to the punch by Nadal’s power forehands, he dropped the third set, 6-4.
Already, this match seemed to have everything: wondrous points won by a scrambling Nadal, flubbed overheads suffered by Djokovic, a possible leg injury to Djokovic early in the match, untimely delay of game penalties to two of the slowest players in the game, and a controversy over the desert-dry yet slippery court, which Djokovic wanted to be watered and slowed.
To his credit, Novak rebounded in the fourth set, and managed to break when Rafa was up 6-5 and serving for the match. With a backhand winner from off the court that handcuffed Rafa, he won the tiebreak and forced a final set.
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The most important match of the year now became the most important set of the year, and Djokovic wasted no time in breaking.
But on this dirt, Rafa is a slider and glider like no other. The master of the laws of clay, he commands with his astounding left-handed topspin. Dipping and devastating, his shots kiss distant corners, forehands discovering open space faster than an American pioneer. Even his weaker shot, a laser backhand, has all the kindness of a gangster.
Healthy again after all these months, he seamlessly calls on an explosive step-in-and-blast athleticism and the type of been-there, done-that belief that only a man with a 57-1 tournament record could feel.
Yes, he was broken early in the fifth set. But as he said later, “When you play against Novak or Federer, who can be brilliant in the way they play, you might be down sometimes, so you have to let those points go and forget about them, weather the storm, and then continue your game.”
Nadal sensed the match was in his control. “The only thing I knew is that during the fifth set the dynamics were in my favor,” he said afterward. “[It was] completely different from the [2012] Australian Open. Of course, I thought about this. This is true.”
And this is true, too:
Nadal owns this court.
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Because Djokovic broke Nadal early in the fifth, “all” he had to do was serve out the set. But that’s a mighty ask. And in the seventh game, after Rafa hit a backhand on the line and Novak dumped a rally forehand into the net, Djokovic’s lead was gone.
Back on serve and holding their nerve, the two stars would take the match into overtime. As the tension grew, and the French crowd all but exploded, the chief question was how this battle-of-the-year would end. Would it be defined and decided by a brief lapse, a miracle shot, a bad call, a breakdown in fitness, a flurry of brilliance, or by the powerful will and courage of one of the warriors?
Then, in the 16th game of the fifth set, Djokovic committed four astounding errors in just over a minute: another muffed overhead; the decision to allowi a Nadal backhand to fly by him and drop well within the lines; and two forehands of his own which flew long.
An epic marathon ended in a flash. Having lost 6-4, 3-6, 6-1, 6-7, 9-7, Djokovic—always a good sport—blew kisses to the heavens, where his former coach Jelena Gencic had to be sad. Still, she’d understand that her man did not surrender this battle. Nadal, the ruler of clay, the Spanish master of the dirt canvas, was on a mission. Off the circuit for seven months with a knee injury, he brought a ferocity, a belief, and yes, a love, to this court. Like no one else in the history of this game, he is a single match away from winning the same Grand Slam for an eighth time.
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After the match, I asked Nadal about the ingredients of his remarkable success: “Any great champion has to have great strokes, a great mind, and tremendous conditioning. But also talk about the role of courage or will or … even the love of the game. How does that come into play?”
Nadal responded, “All of these values are important, but I will say something that is really special … You need to love the game. When you love the game, you love what you are doing. You appreciate what you are doing in every moment.
I learned during all my career to enjoy suffering, and these kind[s]of matches are very special. You don’t have the chance to play these kind of matches every day. So when these … happen you suffer, but I really enjoy these moments, no? I really enjoy suffering, because what’s harder was when I was in Mallorca last year and I had to watch these kind of matches on the TV.
Today I am here. So you can lose, you can win, and that’s part of the sport. That’s the good thing about the sport. That is real … Everybody likes the sport because what you see is what it is. One [player] wins; another loses. Sometimes one; sometimes the other. But [it] is real, and that’s the beautiful thing.”
