The Greatest Tennis Game Ever Played

[winstonplum]

Trying to get this published somewhere. Thought I'd post it on here for some serious tennis fans.

---------------------


“And you simply cannot give more”--Andrew Castle, BBC, after the game


1. The Set-up


I’m assuming that in order to truly appreciate the magnitude of the final game of the 2013 Wimbledon Men’s Final you need to have played tennis at some level and played with enough invested in certain matches that it really, really mattered if you won or lost. One of the remarkable things about tennis, and off the top of my head seems so for most sports, is the incredible similarities there are between the sports we play down at the local ballfield or at the municipal golf course or on the city courts to those we watch at Dodger Stadium or Augusta National or Centre Court at Wimbledon. It’s all the same. The fear, the ecstacy, the perseverance, the dread; all of it is there. All that is missing are the fans and the money. The emotional ecosystem of a tennis match at the club has a startling likeness to most high-stakes matches you watch on television. If you care deeply, if winning a particular match will do something profound for you if only for an hour or a day; if your beating someone whom you have never beaten before will provide you with such a rush of esteem and pride; if you are so scared to lose that you get nauseous, dizzy, your legs week underneath you and you feel you might actually keel right over there on the court, then what Andy Murray did that scorching July day holds a special place in your heart. What I remember most about watching the final game is the shock I felt that Murray didn’t simply puke his guts out right there in front of millions of viewers. As those three championship points ticked away one, two, three as fast as you could say Pimm’s Cup, I would not have been shocked one iota were Murray to have simply fallen down on the court, vomited, and quit, such were the stakes and such was the pressure.


What makes a tennis game the greatest in the history of a sport? Surely there have been games that have gone to twenty deuces or even twenty-five at an Indian Wells here or a Rome Masters there. Maybe two points in a row. Surely there have been games that have eclipsed the thirty-minute mark or consisted of rallies that hit the fifty-shot mark. But in order for a game to be the greatest, it has to fit certain criteria. First of all, it needs to have happened in a Grand Slam Tournament. Secondly, it needs to be in a final, or at least a semi-final, where legacies (at least in the minds’ of the pundits) can turn on points. In order to be considered the greatest game of all time, the participants have to be of legendary status. Although Andy Murray will remain, and rightly so, at a non-partnered status in the Big Four, he was a titan of the game for eight years. Sometimes message-board jockeys compare the careers of Murray to Stanislas Wawrinka because they have both claimed three grand slam trophies. A minute scratching of the surface illustrates the humor of this comparison. Wawrinka has been in four slam finals, Murray eleven. Another metric of tennis greatness is Master Series 1000 wins, weeks at number one, and finishing the year number one. Wawrinka has won one MS 1000, competing in four finals. Murray has won fourteen while playing in twenty-one finals. From 2008 to 2016, Murray ended eight of those nine years in the top four and finished 2016 the number one player in the world. Wawrinka has only finished five times in the top ten. Murray lost eight slam finals. He played into the teeth of three of the four greatest players of the Open Era in the dead-center of their primes. A book could be written about the different permutations of the Big Four and how they have each robbed each of key titles and thus chances to tack on gold plating to their legacies, but none of the four, obviously, was hurt by fate of birth date as much as Sir Andy Murray. For the glorious stretch of this now ending Golden Age of tennis, the Big Four (Murray, Rafael Nadal, Roger Federer, and Novak Djokovic) put up a record of dominance that is staggering and unlikely to be matched. The stats illustrating their brilliance are downright silly, but if one had to be picked that captures best their level of excellence, it might be that in the last fifty grand slam finals, spanning thirteen years, there has been one grand slam final that didn’t have a member of the Big Four in it.


So in order for this to be the greatest game, at least of this era, it had to be contested by two members of the Big Four, and it was, as Novak Djokovic was on the other side of the net that day. The trajectory of these players’ careers also conspired to add to the significance of this match. No Brit had won the crown jewel of tennis since Fred Perry in 1936 (or as Federer famously said, jokingly [sort of], in a “thousand years”). Murray used to like to quip that he was British when he won, Scottish when he lost, but by the time the 2013 final arrived the Kingdom was united as never before behind Dunblane’s favorite son, especially so after his gut-wrenching loss to Federer the previous year and his all-hankies-on-deck runner-up speech. Murray had semied three years in a row at Wimbledon before making the finals in 2012, so there was an incredible hope and momentum in 2013, making this final feel like it had to be the one for him. Novak Djokovic had upended the narrative of his career in 2011, one that had cast him as perennially talented but perennially mentally weak, capable of racking up lots of non-slam wins but never being able to deliver the goods in the biggest events since his sole slam win in 2008. 2011 changed everything. He reinvented himself as not only the most consistent baseliner in the world, but a mental giant who two US Opens in a row had saved match points in semifinals against Federer, and in 2011 had gone on to win the tournament. Saving match points in “normal” matches is very hard; saving three match points across two years--two of the match points while returning--to the greatest player of all time on the biggest stage is unheard of. Djokovic came into the 2013 Wimbledon as the last person Murray wanted to see across the net in the final.


It wasn’t a great match. It can’t be ranked in the top hundred all-time slam finals. For one thing it was a straight-set affair. It seemed as though in two of the final three sets the match might take on a much different feel as Djokovic went up a break in each of these sets. In the second second set, Djokovic was up 4-1, only to lose five out of the next six games and the set. In the final set, Djokovic, after going down a break to begin the set, broke back and then broke again, to take a 4-2 lead, only to not win another game. No, it was not a great match, and the feel of the match, its general choppines, perhaps due to the heat inching towards ninety, or the fact Djokovic had been stretched terribly by Juan Martin Del Potro to five sets in the semis, hid from view all the swirling undercurrents, individual player tendencies, and latent tension that existed between these two champions. All of it came bursting forth in the final game.

 

[winstonplum]

2. The Game


Serving for a match is difficult. Serving for a Grand Slam title with the hopes of sixty-five million people draped across your shoulders is body breaking. In that topsy-turvy final set, after having gone up 2-0, only to be broken twice, followed by his breaking Djokovic twice, Murray had to feel the surety of his serving out the match at 5-4 an iffy proposition. Through nine games of the final set, there had been five breaks of serve. Holding serve to win a match is unlike any other hold of the match. Every point is magnified; the first point of the game ten times more important than the first point of any normal hold. The first point of the game went as well as it could have for Murray with Djokovic sailing a backhand long on only the third shot of the rally. A dream start. Energy expended--zero. On the second point, Djokovic repeated a pattern he had been enacting all day of seemingly bailing out of rallies, this time on the seventh shot, with a poor backhand dropper that left Murray plenty of time to charge and then nestle a forehand winner down the line. Was it the heat? Was it the Delpo match? Djokovic, usually willing to go toe to toe on the baseline, endlessly, with anyone, was conspicuously prone to pulling the trigger on less than deadly dropshots.


When you serve for a match and get to 30-0, it is inescapable to not have to mentally grapple with the fact the next point could give you match point. There is no such thing as choking in this moment. There is only a functioning brain that will tell you if your opponent leaves a sitter and you put that ball in the correct corner you will be sitting at match point and your hand is on the door to victory. This thought--I will be one point away from victory--does cross your mind as you move toward the sitter. As the ball is bouncing, or as you see the ball leaving at a poor trajectory (for your opponent) from your opponent’s racquet, you will have time to think about how close you are to victory. There is no way around it. At 30-0, Murray finally hit a first serve that Djokovic could not get back in court. He did not even have to grapple with the thought of being one point away from being one point away from victory. He was at match point with one good swing of the racquet.


Every tennis player will tell you that when you are up 40-0 in a a game, and serving, you need to get the next point. If you lose that first point, sand starts pouring on a scale in your mind, slowly moving down the side that says “easy game,” while the other side, labeled “trouble game,” starts to rise. Magnify that by ten when you’re serving at 40-0 at match point. Championship Point in the biggest moment of your tennis life? Get the next point! There is no sand if you close out the game at love. Once your opponent gets to 15, the sand begins to pour. That fourth point was a horrorshow for Murray. First Djokovic blocked back an excellent serve that very well could have been a service winner, and then Djokovic’s next shot was a floater than just stayed in. That’s two moments in which Murray thought, I’m going to win, it’s all over. Then Murray had a backhand cross-courter that could have been a winner, only to be stabbed down the line superbly by Djokovic at the net. Murray then had a chance for a down-the-line winner that Djokovic expertly backhand volleyed crosscourt essentially ending the point. Energy expended--loads. Four times Murray thought the match might be over. Four times, however he pictured his personal glory in his mind’s eye, he pictured it. Things slow down enough that you are actually thinking about your own personal post-match cascade of sublimity. While you are trying to finish point. It’s very difficult. Perhaps Murray saw the love of a nation, his name etched in tennis immortality, and another chance for a moving post-match speech. It was not to be. The sand had begun to pour.


Mercilessly, Djokovic made no doubt to the outcome of the fifth point by scorching a backhand service winner down the line. You can see Murray’s breathing at this point. Pressure on match points is like no other pressure. Your mouth is bone dry; muscles are prone to cramp; your heart is pounding. Your legs get rubbery under you as you move around during the point. It’s a very unique sensation. Each additional stroke in the rally villainously bringing forth in more detail the vision of your own collapse, both mentally and physically. All other sports that have clocks are incapable of creating the same dread and pain in an athlete. The clock will come to you. The clock will end you, one way or the other. It provides mercy. In tennis, because there is no clock, there are no timeouts; you are stuck in the purgatory of almost winning as long as it takes. Ten seconds left in the basketball game, someone takes the shot, and a victor or loser emerges. Same thing in football. Even non-clocked games like baseball can’t recreate this special form of torture: bases loaded, bottom of the ninth, full count, the pitch is thrown, and victor or loser emerges. In tennis, you can return to the hell of almost winning over and over. Like Agassi said in his autobiography Open, match point is like a demonic magnet simultaneously pulling and pushing you away. As Murray toed the line at 40-30, the sand was now pouring, and the magnet of match point was pushing now more than pulling.


There’s one of the many telling moments of this game after Murray’s first serve on the sixth point. He sent the first serve about a foot and a half long yet requested a challenge. The camera picks up Djokovic ruefully smiling and shaking his head. Murray wants a time-out. He wants it to end. Boxing is the sport that tennis is most often compared to. And it’s a fair comparison--mano y mano--and all that. But again, boxing is over after thirty-six minutes (for a twelve-found fight), come what may. A round is over after three minutes, come what may. There is no escape in tennis. Murray with that challenge was asking to escape, and Djokovic knew it. When the point began after the second serve, Murray made the right decision when he pulled the trigger on the backhand down the line, but it sailed long because he didn’t fully commit to the shot. There’s a calibration that every player makes before every single time they strike the ball: what should the ratio of risk to caution be on this shot. If your opponent is gassed, or injured, or a mental case, or just inferior in the talent department, you dial the risk/caution far to the caution side. The person is basically beating themselves, so why go for lines, or corners, or even first serves. If second gear is getting everything done, there’s no need to explore what third or fourth will look like against this opponent. When the legends of the game meet in slam finals, both of them are playing most of the match in fourth or fifth gear, but that does change when one gets a two set to zero lead, and that most definitely changes on match points. The urge to let your opponent beat him or herself on match point is tantalizing, almost irresistible. You are one point from your dream finish and all that has to happen is that he or she screws up. Somehow. A broken string, a clanker, a twisted ankle, a bolt of lightning, a fan screaming out as your opponent strikes the ball. Please God, just this one last time let him flub it, net it, send it wide. But it’s a mug’s approach. And you see the muggery on full display down at the club or the local court as players inch closer and closer to victory hit softer and softer, until they reduce themselves to a ninety-year-old with a bum hip, praying the other player will falter. Murray chose correctly. Tennis is a game saturated by the maxim “fortune favors the bold.” He just wasn’t bold enough.


Three championship points arrive; three championship points depart. At deuce Murray hits the ninth shot of the rally into the net, trying to take an inside out forehand up the line. The ball doesn’t hit the tape but rather an inch below it into the net. No legs on the shot. Another shot Murray didn’t believe in, combined with the fact he’s physically draining from the stress. Murray shows a champion’s will on the serve at break point, going for it down the T. He’s rewarded with Djokovic sailing the forehand return long. After two points in a row of not committing to the shot, Murray commits to that first serve and reaps the benefits. Watching the match now, four and a half years after the fact (and only watching the final game), I don’t have the same sensation I did that July morning of the imminent collapse in the offing were Murray to have lost that break point or either of the subsequent two. But at that moment in 2013, it felt more likely than not were Murray to have let those three match points go and lost the game, the match might have gone all the way back the other way with Djokovic winning in five. It happens often enough, although usually players of Murray’s caliber right the ship and don’t lose three in a row. But the pressure at that moment was ungodly. To have been that close, one point away three times, and then to have to start over again on serve in the third, who knows what might have happened. Djokovic had such belief in himself at that point is his career. He never seemed out of a match.

 

[winstonplum]

Double post

 

[winstonplum]

Two points: At deuce the rally goes on for seventeen shots before Djokovic, charging the net, half-volleys a backhand that clips the top of the net, goes almost straight up, but carries just enough to land on Murray’s side where he is unable to run it down. This would have been excruciating had it happened on a match point, but Murray looks accustomed to the tennis purgatory he’s now been whipsawed into. The next point: facing his second break point, Murray plays one of the gutsiest points of his career, ending it with a looping forehand taken off a ball Djokovic has left short after a punishing rally that had geometrically carved up the court--down the line, crosscourt, crosscourt again, down the line, crosscourt, crosscourt, down the line. Both players trying to redirect the ball in order to make headway in the rally and neither being able to. Djokovic finally mishits a forehand, leaving it terminally short. Murray’s legs are jelly, and although he gets to the ball in plenty of time, he can barely get his body out of the way to bring the racquet through. What proceeds is an ugly all hand and arm shot that just does get the job done. “Sporting immortality doesn’t come easily,” Andrew Castle of the BBC tell us and no truer words were spoken that day. Tim Henman and Boris Becker, also in the booth, gasp about resilience, digging deep, and glory. Murray, whose body fat comes in at about 5%, has his most demonstrative moment of fatigue, as he hangdogs it back to the baseline, feet clomping forward, being brought forward and down like the cinder blocks they’ve got to be feeling like. If that point doesn’t bring him to his knees, nothing will. Back to deuce.


Bother players flagged from the previous two points, Murray tries a dropper on a chip return by Djokovic, but Djokovic gets there in plenty of time to slot a crosscourt winner. Three match points; three break points. On his first forehand of the next point Murray goes big with his forehand down the line, the commitment there that had been lacking in the third and fourth point of the game. Counterintuitively, it’s often easier to go for shots when you’re down a break point than it is when you have a match point or are a point away from match point. It’s not a nihilism that sets in (nothing to lose), but rather you’re not trying to protect anything. You’re no longer on tenterhooks feeling that if you don’t make a mistake surely the other guy will. Back to deuce. Murray earned his final match point because Djokovic blinked on his achilles heel--overheads. Djokovic immediately took control of the rally and on the ninth shot blistered a forehand down the line, which Murray could only caress into a mediocre lob. Nine times out of ten, that’s a lob that doesn’t come back, but Djokovic hit it at 70%, giving Murray plenty of time to size up a strong down the line backhand and win the point two shots later. Djokovic’s overhead, in fact any time he’s close to the net, has always conspicuously been the weakest part of his game, as he had fallen into the net like Billy Bucktooth on the jayvee high school team just over a month before at Roland Garros, defibrillating Nadal’s chances late in the fifth set of that classic. Even the greats will be found out on the tennis court.


On what what would be the final point of the match, you sensed Murray didn’t want to serve the ball. Every tennis player who has gone to four or five deuces while trying to serve out a match, again, a match you really, really need to win, gets to the point Murray was at. He kept bouncing the ball. If you don’t serve, you won’t lose the point. You can’t lose what you don’t start. There’s a dread of having to start another point that might bring it back to deuce. It’s a hopeless wish that you can somehow win the match without having to win it. No timeouts, no visits to the mound from the manager, no sliding off the ice to change shifts, no standing eight counts, no spiking the ball to reset. So after a few more bounces, another look at Djokovic (almost a longing look), Murray toed the line for the last point of the match. Of course Djokovic backhand stabbed the fabulous out-wide serve so that the ball floated all the way back to the baseline; thus Murray had to look one more time at the glory, the immortality, the accolades, the relief, while simultaneously trying to size up the ball. A strong forehand that Murray hit back was netted by Djokovic as he tried to take his backhand up the line.

 

[winstonplum]

3. The Aftermath


Fans sometimes marvel at the, well, not inarticulateness of the world’s greatest athletes, but the bloodless tenor of their rhetoric. Especially tennis players. Tennis players die hundreds of emotional deaths throughout the course of a career, yet are never able to tackle their opponent, punch him, check him, throw a heater high and tight, or given them a hard foul on the way to the rim. Sure, a racquet gets shattered here and there (or in the case of Marat Safin, eighty or ninety) but largely it’s a journey to the center of yourself where your only weapons on the trek are whatever self-discipline or concentration you can call forth from a haggard mind. It’s the loneliest sport there is. Not even a caddy to shoot the breeze with. All the pain redounds back on the player. Because of the nature of this isolated journey, game in game out, week in week out, year in year out, the great players maintain and even keel, even after the most heartbreaking of defeats. They don’t couch the affair in the apocalyptic terms their fans sometimes do, nor do they proffer an opinion on the hyperbolic legacy industry. They realize the knife’s edge on which matches at the highest level are played. They also don’t get too high when they win career-defining matches. Words aren’t manifested to capture the inner turmoil from which they’ve emerged. They encase themselves in mental armor both on and off the court in order to survive. After the match, Murray expressed what amounted for an elite tennis player to purple-prosed melodrama when he admitted it was the hardest he’ll ever have to work in a single game.


Novak was gracious as usual in defeat. No other of member of the Big Four is better at demarcating the zero-sum arena of the court with the non zero-sum arena of “normal life.” In his case, it’s an instantaneous recognition, as even his embraces at the net are fraternal. While Nadal is prone to a quick handshake and turn to the chair umpire, and Federer is prone to the not a slight slight in the post-match presser, Djokovic honors the game with his post-loss sportsmanship. It’s a photonegative of the McEnroe, Connors, Natasie et al. antics in the 70s and 80s. Where these champions used every single opportunity the ball was not in play to exact an advantage--between points, on changeovers, before after matches--the new champions have mastered the art of bleeding for the win on the court, yet supporting their fellow players off the court.


Murray would revisit Wimbledon glory again in 2016, taking down Milos Raonic in the final. Djokovic would bounce right back and take the title in both of the two years following his defeat to Murray. In 2014, he showed gumption almost to the level of Murray in 2013, by overcoming a late fourth set meltdown to Federer. Djokovic found himself where Murray was the previous year. Serving for the match at 5-3 in the fourth, Djokovic blinked and was broken. He then proceeded to lose the next three games, sending the match to a decider. It was reminiscent of another great escape of Federer’s on Centre Court when he wiggled out of the 2008 Final’s fourth set against Nadal. But like 2008, Federer would not be able to finish, as Djokovic stayed right with him and then broke at 4-5 to take the match.


Perhaps you didn’t have to play tennis at a competitive level or ever even have picked up a racquet to weep quietly to yourself as the match ended. Judy Murray buried her head into the chest of Great Britain Davis Cup captain Leon Smith and visibly shook, and Andy Murray, after embracing Djokovic, staggered around the court before finally falling to his knees. “And you simply cannot give more,” Andrew Castle aptly nailed it again. No you cannot. In a tennis match, you simply cannot. Murray arrived at the end of the match and saw the summit of all his tennis dreams and extended his foot to attain it, and it improbably started to move away from him. He lurched and jumped, but the tennis gods and the genius of Novak Djokovic told him he had still further to go. Most people who watch that match will have a hard time telling you what happened during the first thirty-one games. No one who saw it will ever forget what they saw in the thirty-second. It’s hard to imagine there’s ever been more pressure on one player to win one tournament in the long annals of the sport.


One of the great lines written about boxing is Norman Mailer’s description of the look on Muhammad Ali’s face as he came back to his corner midway through his fight against George Foreman. In The Fight, Mailer writes that Ali was “looking as if he was looking into the eyes of his maker.” Ali had arrived at a crossroad where he had to ask himself “‘Do you have the guts?’ and he kind of nodded to himself like ‘You’ve got to get it together, boy.’” The stakes in a boxing ring can be life and death. That doesn’t exist on the tennis court. You don’t take your life into your hands. But you do have to ask yourself, either consciously or by merely surviving one more rally, one more serve, one more game, that you have the guts. That you can get yourself together and keep yourself together for as long as it takes. Djokovic asked him that question over and over in that final game. Thirteen points. Twelve and a half minutes. “Do you have the guts?” Murray answered.

 

[ojo rojo]

In fewer words,
MuryGOAT

 

[jaggy]

There seems to be some conspiracy on these boards to elevate Andrew Castle to almost Petchey like status. It won't work I tell you.

 

[Vcore89]

How so?!

 

[stringertom]

I much prefer the fedr/mury Wimby'12 final marathon game that fedr used his long break earned to seal #17/7. Sixth game of the third set from a 40-0 mury lead to the eventual break for 4-2. 20 minutes of pure drama with a couple of tumbles to the turf by a scampering mury trying his best to get to fedr's finest array of touch.

 

[TimeToPlaySets]

I'd like to watch an extended highlight video of this match.

 

[TimeToPlaySets]

 

[TimeToPlaySets]

"And he's forgotten his mum!!"