Australian Open 2010: It's A Cruel, Cruel Sport

If Andre Agassi’s quick, hurried, almost OCD-afflicted walk between points came to be one of the iconic images of the 90’s, then Juan Martin Del Potro’s slow, lumbering and almost hang-dog movements between points may just prove to be the defining image of the muscular, powerhouse tennis that the man embodies. At a height of 6 ft 5”, no one’s ever going to mistake Del Potro for a midget, but his body language screams ‘giant’ in every way imaginable. Not only does he look tired and bored when he goes about his mid-point rituals, he actually looks physically sick, which often lulls his opponent into a false sense of security. The next thing you know, Del Potro is merrily chasing down the most unreachable of shots and blasting searing winners one after the other. Poor James Blake – he just didn’t know what hit him.

In what will definitely go down as one of the most power-packed matches ever witnessed, Del Potro outlasted James Blake in an extraordinary five-set thriller, 6-4, 6-7, 5-7, 6-3, 10-8. The Australian Open does have a history of producing electrifying encounters in the early rounds that go deep into the Melbourne night, and this match merely continued that tradition, but I do get the feeling that this one will be better remembered than the other classics, partly because of the stature of one of its participants (and I’m not talking about Blake here) and partly because of the amount of battering that the tennis balls used for the match took. Honestly, at one point, I felt like screaming out to those guys to stop belting the ball with so much ferocity; violence of that kind, even if inflicted on an inanimate object, just can’t be good for the well-being of anyone involved in the match, including the spectators.

The match, however, was as much about the physical power of the two men as it was about the mental will to survive for just another set, just another service game, just another point. Blake, bless his heart, has not been known to be the most dogged of fighters on the tennis court, having gifted away a match to his opponent in a blaze of wild errors and knuckle-headed shot selection on so many occasions that I have actually lost count. But today, the man had come fully prepared to battle till his last breath, countering every one of Del Potro’s bullets with equally savage shots of his own. He was also, unusually for him, remarkably adept at the net, rushing forward on 66 occasions during the match and winning 43 of those points, for a more than acceptable conversion rate of 65%. It’s cruel that the American has nothing to show for the more than 4 hours of incredibly courageous fight that he put up, specially after the miseries he’s had to endure over the past year. The fact that he will continue to languish outside the top 40 in the rankings even after such a heroic effort is almost too torturous for anyone to bear. And we wonder why tennis players always seem to have such woebegone expressions on their faces.

The man of the moment, Del Potro, meanwhile, continues to startle us with his seemingly unstoppable game. It’s not enough that he displays exceptional movement for a guy of his size; he has repeatedly shown that he can move fluidly AND blow past his opponents with ground-scorching lasers even when he is beset with annoying injuries and niggles. He was supposed to be carrying a wrist injury into the match, and while Blake himself had his own share of ailments, the manner in which Del Potro continue to chug along, refusing to wilt in the face of the most inspired tennis Blake has played in months, bodes well for his future, very well indeed. We may wring our hands at super-talented players like Richard Gasquet and Ernests Gulbis frittering their gifts away through their carelessness, but there’s something to be said about players like Rafael Nadal and Del Potro who make sure they maximize their potential through their unshakeable focus and dedication. It’s no coincidence that these are the only two players who have managed to defeat Roger Federer in a Grand Slam final.

Something that cannot have escaped any serious tennis follower’s attention about the match is the number of 2^nd serve aces that Del Potro hit. I may be wrong about this, but I think the final tally was 3, and if my memory serves me right, they were all on break points. And that, if I may be so dramatic as to say, is just not normal. In fact, I’d even go as far as saying that Del Potro is the best server under pressure in the men’s game today, usurping that title from none other than Federer himself. Incidentally, the hang-dog look between points and the exceptionally strong second serves are attributes that were once the preserve of Pete Sampras. Is it too early to predict a Sampras-like career for the young Argentine? Perhaps, but the signs are in place alright.

I had started writing this post intending to devote all of it to the Justine Henin-Elena Dementieva 2^nd round match that took place almost simultaneously with the Delpo-Blake epic, but the quality of tennis in the men’s match was such that Henin’s hard-fought win has been reduced to an afterthought. That is not to say that the quality of the Henin-Demmy match was in any way less than superb; in fact, I don’t think it happens very often that two matches that are candidates to be the best men’s and women’s match of the year respectively occur almost at the same time.

Dementieva was up to her usual self for most of the match – she belted thundering groundstrokes off both wings and mixed in some deft volleys, dropshots and lobs in too, but her big-point play was often less than stellar, which was solely because she was a little too passive in those moments. One person who can never be accused of being passive in the big moments, however, is Justine Henin. I must admit that I’ve taken a long time to warm up to her game and personality – perhaps too long – but today I was reminded why the women’s game was so much the poorer during her 20-month hiatus. She WAS a little patchy at times during today’s match, which is entirely understandable, because rust is not something that can be shaken off in a matter of two weeks. But she more than made up for it with the way she brilliantly took charge of almost every point that mattered. Every single break point or game point in the match seemed to end in a Henin winner or unforced error. While that caused her to yield plenty of ground to Elena, being broken several times during the match, it was Henin’s self-belief that turned the match in her favour when push came to shove. It goes without saying, of course, that Henin’s stop-the-traffic gorgeous backhand and vastly underrated, point-ending forehand made quite a few appearances in the match as well. Some of the points were so magnificently constructed that they can only be described as – there’s no other word for it – Federer-esque. And yet, Dementieva had an answer for almost everything that Henin threw at her. Unfortunately for her, sometimes, even having all the answers is not enough. Funnily, during the match, every time Dementieva seemed to take a point by the scruff of the neck with her punishing strokes only to lose it to a touch of genius by Henin, just one thought kept repeating itself over and over in my head – ‘female Davydenko, female Davydenko, female Davydenko!’ Tennis can really be a cruel sport sometimes.