What Wind?
NEW YORK—All day here at the National Tennis Center the talk centered on the wind, and how the conditions were not only affecting the quality of the tennis but how players were, or ought to be, adjusting. How, depending on whether they liked to hit flat or with spin, employed a high or relatively low service toss, hit backhands with one or two hands, or were fans of the Rolling Stone or Beatles, they would or wouldn't have an advantage or liability.
This evening, Roger Federer made a mockery out of all that Deep Tennis punditry in the course of his 6-4, 6-4, 7-5 win over Robin Soderling, the man who's made a pretty good living recently dashing universally-held hopes for Grand Slam finals featuring Federer vs. Rafael Nadal. This quarterfinal match had shaped up over the past few days as something like that storied clash at the same stage between Pete Sampras vs. Andre Agassi in 2001. For the first time this week, the session was a sellout. The collective imagination of the cognoscenti was aflame. It was a night match in New York.
The difficult conditions—an unusual combination of heat, humidity, and winds gusting up to 30 MPH—gradually came to replace the tale-of-the-tape as the main topic of conversation as the day wore on. By the time the sun set, the temperature was plummeting (it would hit 60 degrees by match time), but the wind howled undiminished. When was the last time you heard people trying to work out the wind chill factor on an early September evening?
But if the wind swept away the developing occasion, it also set the stage for one of the most remarkable performances by this most remarkable of players, Roger Federer. When the historians of the future come across Federer's 2010 U.S. Open quarterfinal result, they're likely shrug, if their eyes even stop at this particular scoreline. After all, Soderling has never been No. 1, nor claimed a Grand Slam title. And Federer, in the grand scheme of things, was merely doing due diligence on his way to another major semifinal.
But if you know where Soderling stood today as an equal opportunity menace to the twin icons of the contemporary game, and a factor in Grand Slam events, and if you saw how the meteorological conditions in play turned ordinarily sensible human beings into so many Nostrodamuses, foretelling the horrible demise of pretty much anyone who had to play today, you have to bow to Federer and say whatever it is that takes "too good" to the next level of praise.
Federer made those elaborate ruminations on the impact wind velocity might have on the rotational integrity of a sliced backhand sound a little bit like one of those late night conversations you get when one college sophomore asks another, "Dude, ever wonder how different life would be if, like, the dinosaurs never went extinct?" Didn't I hear Brad Gilbert assert, just this afternoon, that if the wind keeps blowing like stink, it would be a huge—huge!—advantage for Rafael Nadal, who would be able to calibrate the degree of spin in his ground strokes to meet whatever challenge the wind presented on either end of the court? I've got news for you; if Nadal makes it to the final, the conditions remain what they were today (which they won't), and Federer plays like he did today, the only thing Nadal will be calibrating is the size of the runner-up's check.
And that's by no means a criticism of Nadal. It's a tribute to Federer, who played as if it were 80 degrees and sunny, with the flags hanging limp. He dominated the match with his serve in a demonstration that rivaled his mastery of Andy Roddick in the epic Wimbledon final of 2009—and on a day when ugly tennis seemed pre-ordained.
Against Soderling, Federer hit 18 aces, and 43 of his serves (48 percent) went unreturned (Soderling's stats in that department? A pair of aces and 22 unreturnables). He hit 36 winners, 20 more than Soderling. Federer also put 75 percent of his returns in play, compared to 52 percent for Soderling. The Swiss star, bedecked in a navy blue ensign's suit with white piping, sailed out of Soderling's view quickly. Much was made during the day of the difficulties of playing with the wind behind you at one end of the court, and in your face at the other. But in truth, Federer had the wind at his back, all the way.
If you can watch Federer with a mind stripped of all the associations and assumptions you've formed about serving a tennis ball, you might be inclined to think he doesn't toss the ball at all. He gently places it at just the perfect place for getting the most velocity and action out of his leisurely motion. Technically speaking, his toss is not a millimeter higher than it needs to be, which is certainly an asset in the wind. But so is the attitude he brought to match. "I practiced my serve my entire career," he told Pam Shriver, immediately after the match. "If I don't know how to serve, I've got a problem. You can wake me at two or four in the morning and I can go out and hit my serve."
But, that wind?
"I guess I got a good service motion, and one thing I can do is adjust my motion to hit different kinds of serves from the same toss, so when the wind catches the ball a little I can handle it."
He also said, "By now, I see playing in the wind as a challenge—an opportunity to play differently. It's not easy, you know. . . It's cold, it feels like the wind's blowing through your ears. I used to dislike it so much that I've been able to turn it around, and now I actually enjoy it."
There's a little bit of masochist in every great champion.