2013 Australian Open: When athleticism is not a gift, but a curse

When you talk about a player who’s naturally athletic, you usually use the term ‘physically gifted’. Why would anyone consider towering height, powerful arms and great flexibility as anything but gifts? Trust the game of tennis, though, to turn simple logic upside-down. Day 3 at the 2013 Australian Open did show us the advantages that come with being naturally athletic, but it also gave us a disturbing look into the crippling obstacles that ‘physical gifts’ can sometimes create.

The last match on Rod Laver Arena, the second-round encounter between Novak Djokovic and Ryan Harrison, was a textbook on how to make the best of your obvious physical superiority. We’ve always known that Djokovic is a terrific athlete; you don’t get to be No. 1 in the Federer-Nadal era without being one. But when pitted against a player who is supposedly the Next Big Thing in tennis, Djokovic’s gifts came even more sharply into focus. Anybody who watched the match today would be irrevocably convinced that there is almost nothing that Harrison can do on a tennis court that can come anywhere close to matching Djokovic. At least not at this stage of their respective careers.

Harrison’s forehand is supposed to be his strength, but today it looked like a lightweight shot compared to Djokovic’s forehand (which, for the record, is supposed to be his weakness). The American’s backhand was always going to be his Achilles’ heel in this matchup, but once the match started it looked more inferior than even the most pessimistic of predictions would have suggested. And court coverage? Djokovic made Harrison, normally one of the quickest players on tour, look slow and sluggish.

Despite all that imbalance on the court, though, Djokovic still had to keep his foot on the gas and get the job done. And that’s exactly what he did. All through the match he remained focused; he ruthlessly hammered his groundstrokes to all corners of the court, and seemed fully in control of nearly every rally. Never letting his eye off the ball, Djokovic exerted non-stop pressure on his dazed opponent; at no stage of the match did he seem even remotely touched by the idea that the whole thing was too easy for him. Djokovic’s athletic superiority may or not be a gift, but he sure treated it like one today – like a treasure that deserved to be respected.

At the other end of the spectrum, Samantha Stosur was saddled with the unfortunate task of showing us that athletic superiority can sometimes give rise to unconquerable demons. In her second round match today, Stosur enjoyed a natural advantage over her opponent Jie Zheng in nearly every area of the game. She is taller, stronger, has a much better serve and forehand, and is an expert volleyer. And yet, by the end of the match, Zheng was running circles around Stosur, who could only respond by repeatedly burying shots into the net or sending them sailing past the baseline.

Is it justified to call Samantha Stosur a ‘mental midget’? No, it isn’t. You don’t win a Grand Slam trophy, and you definitely don’t do it by defeating Serena Williams in the final, if you’re a mental midget. Stosur knows how to fight; she’s not one to give up without putting up an effort. What Stosur is afflicted with, instead, is a problem that I’d be willing to bet 99.99% of the world’s population suffers from: the tendency to get nervous when you’re expected to do well. All of us battle against this condition at some point of our lives or the other – expectations bring with them a unique fear of failure, which in turn can have a severely crippling effect on our actions. When we’re writing an examination, we forget what we had crammed into our head just hours earlier; when we’re giving a presentation at a meeting, we stammer and stumble our way through our meticulously rehearsed notes; when we’re asked to take a driver’s licence test, we suddenly find our hands shaking and our feet numb.

Stosur can hit the ball harder and more effectively than most players on the tour today. So every time she steps on the court, she is beset with the idea that she should come away from the match with a win. It’s only natural, then, that her racquet falters when she’s in a position to seal the deal. When she’s expected to establish her superiority by nailing a forehand down-the-line – a shot she can hit with her eyes closed in practice – she ends up hitting it wide. When her serve, perhaps her strongest asset, is expected to bail her out of trouble, it suddenly loses its potency – Stosur served for the match twice against Zheng today, but both times she got broken through a flurry of nervous errors.

All players (including the likes of Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal) are chokers at some level – even the greatest of champions are not immune to human fallibility. But why does Stosur seem to choke more often than any other active player today? Maybe it’s because she’s so physically gifted that the pressure of expectations on her shoulders is greater than that on the shoulders of any other player. Any other player not named Serena Williams, that is. And what happened when Stosur went up against the only player physically superior to her on the grandest stage in tennis – the 2011 US Open final? Armed with the knowledge that she wasn’t expected to win, Stosur produced one of the finest displays of shot-making ever seen to register an epic triumph.

It’s true that some people are more gifted than others. But it’s also true that some people can use their gifts better than others. Today, Novak Djokovic used his athletic gifts to great effect, blowing his opponent off the court with a sustained display of precision shot-making. Samantha Stosur, on the other hand, was too afraid of what she might have to endure if she didn’t use her athletic gifts effectively, which eventually made her succumb to defeat. The good-natured Aussie might be forgiven for thinking that her natural athleticism is not a gift, but a curse.