- p37. Djokovic uses his two-handed backhand to take control of the early points. He has an undeterred ability to hit dangerous balls to all parts of the court with sufficient margin that they're safely inside the lines. He doesn't paint the lines, he shadows them.
- p44. You knew the Australian Open wasn't going to either change or save the world, but you decided to take a peek anyway at any odd hour you could, because tennis can offer what Robert Frost said poetry provides: a momentary stay against confusion.
- p46 The Australian Open has long been like an idea of order: arranging, deepening, enchanting from the other side of the world. It's the purifying fire by which we start the new season. Maybe you let the Brisbanes and Dohas pass, maybe you missed the opening band, but the Australian Open was never a thing to miss. After all, it was a Grand Slam and there are only four of them and this was the action that would set the circuit in motion, this was what would set the chairs on the stage for the first act. What it typically has not been is a tournament of great surprises. It's not been a clearing of the field, it has been a clarifying of the field, a clarifying to the field of the way things are and will be. In a way it's been the kindest of the Grand Slams to me; its scenes of summer and ebullient blues of the hard courts offer warmth to the spirit and mind during the cold and somber slog through January. Unlike the French Open, Wimbledon, and the U.S. Open, Melbourne gives my mind of winter what it's been missing.
- p85 When I'm at a tournament I tend to find myself a place in an elevated corner and perch there. Many people prefer to be low and close to the court. But I love the geometries of the game and those structures that find their form in the interchange of shots from point to point. THat's difficult to see from down on the court. What you see from down close is speed and spin, which harder to see on television. But what you miss is the geometry, that long game the mind plays as the body's stuck in the short game of swinging and running, swinging and running. Everything has its expense. Proximity is no different.
- p92 Zverev, raised from birth to be a tennis player by tennis players, dug out a second set tiebreaker to force a third set in a match in which an unbothered Kyrgios had taken to hitting tweeners for winners. The third set proved to be more like the first than the second. A Kyrgios stroll. It took him six match points to put Zverev away, but then he didn't face a single break point over the course of the entire match: 6-4, 6-7 (11-9(, 6-4 Kyrgios. Zverev will rack up many wins after this, including against Kyrgios, and at such a young age become a title contender in any tournament that doesn't play five sets. But you watch him and it's hard not to notice that he is a product. He was produced to produce. Kyrgios is a talent dropped from the sky, he's the hero who in this part of the story doesn't want the responsibility. He's not a tennis player for all seasons, one who puts in a dutiful shift wherever whenever for whomever. And yet, when the bell rings and the big moment is upon him, he is a mental blip short of unplayable.
- p94 He whips a heavy crosscourt backhand at Kyrgios. A shot like this isn't designed to end a point or produce an error in the opponent, it instead seeks to stabilize the rally by getting the opponent on the back foot, quite literally, and coaxing a neutral and safe response. It's deep. It clips the baseline. Kyrgios is backpedaling diagonally toward the doubles alley. What happens next shouldn't under any circumstances happen. Not only does it disobey the rules of simple tennis physics, it shouldn't be in a player's head to even contemplate precisely, because it's not an option on the physical plane. Kyrgios has back-pedaled not out of a need to be defensive but out of a desire to be offensive. Seemingly at the same time, the backpedaling stops, the shoulders and hips turn, and the racket's swing path causes the stringbed to clasp and release the ball with furious intent. It speeds over the highest part of the net and finds the line: 5-all. It was a shot that said, I'm not going anywhere.
- p103 Clay gives and takes from your game. It clings to you and - if you let it - weighs you down. For seven weeks, the players were covered in orange dust, match after match, back to front, head to toe. The clay bristled underfoot. It wasn't quite summer yet, but the heat had arrived. Clouds were scarce. And the sky was bursting blue. But, as Van Gogh said, there is no blue without yellow and without orange.
- p111 The clay season is a ghost story. It always has been. There's a ghost in the red dirt.
- p113 It was his tenth title there, his tenth time turning the orange dust into a celebratory scene for the rarest of synergy between player and surface, a gift that at times has seemed as sacred as a covenant, a strange bond between him and the ground.
- p124 By the end of the clay swing David Goffin had every reason to believe that he was cursed. Not a may-the-world-immediately-come-crashing-down-on-your-head kind of curse but a Sisyphean curse, a long-game curse. The kind of curse you don't realize has been put on you until it finally descends to tell you straight to your face that, yes, you've been cursed.
- p126 The quintessential offensive baseline player, he is the personification of precision. His forehand is contemporary, he holds his racket so that when he makes contact with the ball his palm is facing upward toward the sky, and produces spin easily. It has good pop to it, enough to push an opponent around the court when needed, although it's lacking some power, that power having been exchanged at some point in his formation for uncanny, rhythmic accuracy. The less that's said about his backhand, the better - such things shouldn't be spoken of or written about, as words will struggle to do it justice. He swings it as though he's been chosen out of thousands to hit that one gong at the end of a live performance of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody" and takes to it calmly and on time with two hands gripping the stick - it is imperious, so much so that it verges on ridiculous. Tennis is a game centered on errors, nothing about it is perfect, and yet when David Goffin strikes a backhand, even when he makes an error with it, it is perfect.
- p132 The next day he played Sascha Zverev, who lives in Monaco and was celebrating his twentieth birthday. From the first moments of warm-ups Nadal looked like he was trying to set fire to anything he laid his eyes on with his glare alone. The 6-1, 6-1 beating he put on Zverev was utterly brutal, cruel and yet somehow bloodless, like only Nadal can do: a hot knife cutting through butter not because it has to but because that's what's there. Zverev couldn't get off the court quickly enough. It was his birthday. Rafa didn't care. THere'd be better days ahead for him.
- p142 Clay swallows winners and spits them back at the player who hit them. Nadal is the best there's ever been at this on this surface. He masters space and time in that stadium like non other. There are no words for what Nadal can do to an opponent on Philippe Chatrier. It's as though he doesn't beat you, he erases you. All the games become one game, all the opponents become one opponent who tries and fails to bend the space and pace of Roland-Garros to his will. It all happened so fast. There was a French Open in 2017. And then there wasn't. In the end, there was only Rafa Nadal.
- p154
aug 22 2019 ∞
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