The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  The itinerant nature of the circuit is similar. The cities stay still and tennis just misses the mark, setting up shop nearby in more spacious or simply more exclusive environs. A tennis tournament can easily come and go without the city it’s named after feeling even the slightest breeze from the tournament passing through. The Miami Open has never been in Miami. It was started at Delray Beach in 1985 by an ex-player named Butch Buchholz and was known then as the Lipton International Player Championships. Buchholz felt there was a void at the start of the tennis calendar, especially given that the Australian Open was played in December back then. There was an opportunity to fill a January-sized gap in the schedule with something big. Perhaps something like a Grand Slam. So he hired Alan Mills, who was a tournament referee at Wimbledon at the time, to work as his head referee. He also hired Ted Tinling as “director of protocol”—Tinling had been the preeminent fashion designer for the women on the women’s tour throughout the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. Both Mills and Tinling were Englishmen and iconic figures of tennis’s recent past. You can see where Buchholz was heading with this: a 128-player draw and both the men’s and women’s tours playing there concurrently … the Lipton wasn’t aiming to be another scattered dot on the players’ annual itinerary—no, there were bigger plans. It was going to send a shock wave through the circuit by giving the world what it didn’t know it was missing: a winter Wimbledon.

  That was all fine and good, but a January date wasn’t going to happen. The organizers of the Australian Open decided that 1985 would be the last year in which the tournament would take place in December. And so the Lipton settled into a spot in February and was hosted by Rod Laver and his second cousin Ian’s Laver’s International Tennis Resort, a tennis club and condominium resort complex rolled into one, dropped tidily into a convenient spot in Delray Beach right between I-95 and Route 1. The prize money that first year was good and brought out stars such as Ivan Lendl, Mats Wilander, Yannick Noah, and a nineteen-year-old Stefan Edberg. Tim Mayotte won the title after the draw collapsed like a house of cards, coming back from two sets down to beat Scott Davis in the final. The women’s draw held up better, with the top two seeds meeting in the finals, in which Martina Navratilova beat Chris Evert-Lloyd, the latter having beaten an unseeded fifteen-year-old named Steffi Graf in the semifinals. With four American finalists (Navratilova had become a naturalized citizen) and an intriguing mix of veteran stars and young, up-and-coming talents, and a temperate, vacation-friendly venue staged in the saggy drone of winter, just like at its cousin Indian Wells, things were looking good.

  Then, in August of that year, Ian Laver died along with 136 other passengers and crew members in a plane crash in Dallas. The Laver resort would never be the same. The following year, Buchholz moved the Lipton to Boca West, a golf course disguised as a town. The Lipton, still bursting at the seams with a Slam-sized 128-player field, drew in more elite players with Jimmy Connors and Boris Becker entering the fray. Lendl beat Wilander for the men’s title, Evert-Lloyd upended Graf in the women’s final, but Boca West wasn’t the best fit, and so the Lipton would be on the move once again, making it three years of existence and three different venues. This third place would stick, and thirty years later Buchholz’s winter Wimbledon, which he sold to IMG in 1999, was still settled in at Key Biscayne’s Tennis Center at Crandon Park.

  Key Biscayne is an island off the Miami mainland with only one small bridge to serve the flow of traffic, which normally is light, given Key Biscayne’s sleepy reputation in comparison to the hot spots that surround it across the water. This contributes to its shifting identity, which, come to think of it, is what many of the places where tennis tournaments settle down have in common. The Miami Open has become, like Indian Wells, a tennis-and-tourism event: three hundred thousand people descend, knowing that the weather will be warm and the game’s biggest stars (health permitting) will be playing. However, there’s a marked difference between Miami and Indian Wells. The latter holds no pretense to be any place but where it is, eschewing the idea, for instance, that it’s the Palm Springs Open. Tennis has enhanced the name Indian Wells, not the other way around. Meanwhile, the Miami Open attracts spectators who want to be in Miami. They want to take their talents to South Beach, not to Key Biscayne. This leads to a daily pilgrimage on and off the island. The bridge swells, traffic stops. Visitors arrive in Miami for the Miami Open and end up stuck in Key Biscayne. For better or for worse, the problem was finally resolved after a long period of disquiet by the Miami Open embracing its transient past, picking up its nets, and once again leaving.

  In December 2017, Miami-Dade County agreed to allow IMG to relocate the Miami Open inland to the Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, home of the Miami Dolphins, which will host the tournament starting in 2019. A few weeks after that announcement, Miami took a page out of the Indian Wells playbook and hired the charismatic retired player James Blake as tournament director.

  Winning Indian Wells and Miami back-to-back is known as the Sunshine Double. It’s rare and difficult—two consecutive super-sized tournaments with the best players on the circuit, one disputed in intense dry heat and the other played immediately after in a haze of thick heat; what’s more, if you win Indian Wells you’ll end up arriving in Miami with little time to settle in before your first match. Ten players have done it, only two have done it more than once: Novak Djokovic four times (2011, 2014, 2015, 2016—note those three years in a row!) and Roger Federer three times (2005, 2006, and that highly improbable one in 2017).

  It already seems long ago now, but I recall people wondering if Federer would even play Miami. Anything after titles at the Australian Open and Indian Wells would be gravy. And the back end of the Sunshine Swing is taxing. In retrospect, this line of thinking was powered by the presumption that Federer would play at least a small part of the clay season. For my part, I thought he’d skip Miami and reserve his body and mind to play only the two bookends of the clay swing, Monte Carlo and the French Open. It never crossed my mind that he would skip clay surfaces entirely. In choosing to do just that, Federer, who had embraced the idea of pacing himself as he went through the year, found himself in a position to do something once and only once in 2017: let it all go, push himself to the limit, knowing that a couple of months of rest were just around the corner. He played fourteen sets: half of them went to tiebreaks. He won three straight rounds where the deciding set was a tiebreak. He had to save two match points in the deciding tiebreak in the quarterfinals against Tomáš Berdych. The scoreline of his semifinal win against Nick Kyrgios, 7–6 (11–9), 6–7 (9–11), 7–6 (7–5), improbably undersells the tension of the match.

  Federer and Kyrgios had only met one previous time: in 2015 on clay in a round-of-thirty-two matchup at the Masters 1000 in Madrid. That match also played out in three tiebreakers, the final one in the deciding set won by Kyrgios 14–12. Kyrgios, then ranked thirty-fifth in the world, had already beaten Nadal the year prior, in an early round of the 2014 Wimbledon Championships—not even two weeks past his twentieth birthday, he had already beaten both Federer and Nadal. In Madrid, he blasted twenty aces past Federer and was opportunistic, converting two of the measly three break points he saw during the match. This 2017 match at the Miami Open would mark the third time they had played and the second time in consecutive tournaments. At Indian Wells, Kyrgios remorselessly routined his young friend and counterpart Sascha Zverev 6–3, 6–4 in the third round before blasting Djokovic off the court in their fourth-round matchup with a display of power tennis rarely seen—performed against the once-in-a-lifetime defensive skills of the great Serbian champion.

  Federer was up next in the quarters. The buzz about that match began to build before Kyrgios and Djokovic had even reached the net to shake hands. But that night, Kyrgios drank a shake that didn’t agree with him. And the next morning, as fans piled into the stadium at Indian Wells early for what many suspected would be one of the better matches of the year, unofficial word began to circulate around the g
rounds that Kyrgios was sick and wouldn’t be able to play. Federer won by a walkover. The midday sun seemed hotter and more cruel then, as there was little to do or distract from the intense glare and heat. Federer, who had arrived as though the match would go on, came out to address the crowd, thanking them for having come out. Then he entertained the crowd with a video of him, Grigor Dimitrov, and Tommy Haas singing Chicago’s “Hard to Say I’m Sorry” accompanied on piano by David Foster. Since Federer, Dimitrov, and Haas all play with one-handed backhands, the group was dubbed the One-Handed Backhand Boys. The crowd was entertained. Federer was once again the winner. If you think moments like that have little to do with what happened one tournament later in the Miami Open semifinal, you would be sorely mistaken.

  Kyrgios’s path to his first rematch with Federer was a daunting one: after a first-round bye, Damir Džumhur in the second round, the best server on the circuit in the person of Ivo “Doctor Ivo” Karlović in the third round, eighth-seeded David Goffin in the fourth round, and Sascha Zverev again this time in the quarterfinals. Each match was a minefield. Džumhur, twenty-four, was coming into his own. He had beaten Nadal and Berdych the year prior and was fresh off of having survived five match points against future star Hyeon Chung in the first round: 6–4, 6–3 Kyrgios. Playing the punishing six-foot-eleven Karlović is like trying to run in a wind tunnel: you cannot break him, he cannot break you, so you end up alternating winning the games you serve and losing the games he serves until arriving to a tiebreaker at the end of each set: 6–4, 6–7 (4–7), 7–6 (7–2) Kyrgios. Goffin, by contrast, is one of the best returners and steadiest players at the top of the circuit: 7–6 (7–5), 6–3 Kyrgios. This led to Zverev, who in his previous match had dispatched top-seeded Wawrinka with ease. They played three sets, but Kyrgios diced throughout. 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 running 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), 6–3 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. The crowds that survived the humidity and the snarling traffic to cross into Key Biscayne were loving seeing this uncharted and barely controlled brilliance firsthand. Until it came up against Roger Federer.

  With the match on his racket, serving 5–4 in the third-set tiebreaker against Federer—after having lost a tiebreaker in the first set with nine points and having won a tiebreaker in the second set with nine points—the crowd hated him. They tolerated him at first, when the tennis was exhilarating, the kind of elite-caliber first-strike game-of-chicken tennis that’s hard to come by in today’s game. There was first hearty applause and then gasps of amazement from the audience as they began to realize that they were watching on the last day of March the best match of the year. And when Federer pulled out a nerve-wracking first set, the audience responded in a way that’s unusual when it comes to his matches: nervous relief. He was back to being a world-beater, but was it a temporary return? Was it a dream? Would Key Biscayne be where it all vanished? And would they be the unlucky souls who bought tickets to see it happen live in the flesh? After the first set the answer to all of these questions was no. They had seen better tennis than anyone there had the right to ask for, Federer was out in front, and another final with Nadal waited in the wings. It was the best of both worlds for them on a Friday night.

  There’s a moment when an audience becomes a crowd. That moment in this Miami Open semifinal matchup happened at some point during the second set when Kyrgios refused to indulge in a dip of form, a lapse in concentration, or a competitive bite, refused to invite wild thoughts that everyone from down courtside to up in the rafters to refreshed in the suites, all of them, wanted Federer to win. Didn’t the audience turn into a crowd when they needed to in Federer’s last match when he saved two match points against Berdych when they made it clear time and time again as the Czech tried to hold his nerve that they had had enough of him, that they weren’t there for him, that he could hit the ball wide or into the net and they would be happy? And didn’t Berdych do just that?

  There’s a moment when an audience becomes a crowd: 5–4 in the second-set tiebreaker, Federer serving from the ad court. In true Miami fashion, it was time to go: the spectacle had been served, Friday night beckoned, and a Federer-Nadal final on American soil beckoned, too. It was time to go. They were both dressed in Nike’s vision of hunter green. Kyrgios in the seasonal stock they’d given to their Nike-sponsored players to wear during the Sunshine Swing. Federer, as always, in his personalized line that he alone wears on the tour. Kyrgios, playing to type, separates himself from matching too much with Federer’s color scheme by wearing shocks of fluorescent chartreuse in his shorts, socks, and shoes. Federer starts with a kick serve to Kyrgios’s two-handed backhand, which, at six foot four and blessed with calm hips and hands, he catches early and on the rise, sending it back down the line with interest on it. Federer is compromised. He takes three lightning-quick steps to his right but still has to lunge for the ball, and here, ironically, does what Kyrgios does so often in this position: he sends back a deep forehand slice to the ad court. Kyrgios, not having left that area, unloads a biting crosscourt backhand that Federer sees before it happens and, having sprinted over to his own ad court, is already there. 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 backpedaled 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. The crowd cheered. But then started to roil. Some were no doubt well oiled.

  After Kyrgios won the second set, the third became a battle of nerves. Federer’s face reflected the seriousness of the situation. Such a warm face, but when troubled the angles make it seem more stern, like a hawk’s. Kyrgios, naturally vocal on the court, became more so as the match wore on—berating his decisions, cheering his great play, and, eventually, telling the crowd to shut the fuck up. It was match point for Federer in the third tiebreak, 6–5. Among the effusive cheers for Federer to help and hearten him were also whistles, jeers, and, finally, someone in the crowd calling a ball out in the middle of the final do-or-die point. Game. Set. Match. Federer. Kyrgios responded by shattering his racket on the court, swinging it at the ground like it was a towel on fire that he was trying to put out. Interviewed on the court immediately afterward, Federer thanked the crowd. By that point in the Friday night festivities, Kyrgios had left the court.

  There had been a slight air of Jimmy Connors at the 1991 U.S. Open to it, in that the crowd was all in with him and he was riding his
luck. Nadal’s route to the final had been far less dramatic, although his being bageled by Kohlschreiber to start his third-round match was startling to behold. That said, there was little surprise when Nadal won the next two sets with the minimum amount of fuss. He made his way efficiently to the finals and had less wear on his tires from the Sunshine Swing due to Federer knocking him out of Indian Wells early. Early and rather quickly—that match ran a remorseless sixty-eight minutes. After all of the drama of the closely disputed final in Melbourne, round two in Indian Wells was a disappointment. Now, in Miami, the conditions were different and moving toward Nadal’s favor. He was fresher than Federer, had a smoother run through the draw, and was primed to take advantage of the notoriously sluggish court speed of Miami’s purple hard-court surface, and his popularity could paper over the fanatical support Federer had been enjoying throughout the tournament and which had clearly overwhelmed both Berdych and Krygios in key moments of their matches. The Miami crowd was in love with Nadal, who addressed the audience post-match in Spanish and, having never won Miami, could be seen as the underdog to cheer for.

  Federer beat Nadal for the third time in four months. This time 6–3, 6–4 in a clinical one hour and thirty-five minutes. The final score and the length of the match might lead you to think that things were closer than they were in Indian Wells, but this match was even worse for Nadal. If anything, the conditions in his favor optimized the result for him, but watching the match live was like watching your blender slowly break down a chunk of ice. Nadal faced nine break points in two sets … out of nine service games played. And although he saved seven of those break points, he played the match swimming against the current. The Indian Wells matchup had an air of unbelievability to it; even Nadal’s face at the end signaled something that was widespread among the viewers: bemusement. This was furthered by the context. Due to their low seeding, the luck of the draw left the two of them on opposite sides of it in the Australian Open, leaving them to meet up in the finals or not at all. At Indian Wells, Nadal was the fifth seed and Federer the ninth: the luck of the draw not only placed them in the same section but resulted in an early-evening match for them. You could possibly look back at Indian Wells, taking all of this in, shrug, and say fair enough. That’s basically what Nadal did. But Miami was hard to look at and hard to look away from. Federer had now throttled Nadal in five straight sets: 6–3—in which he won the last five games—and then 6–2, 6–3, 6–3, 6–4. Worse for him, Federer was toying with the tried-and-trusted patterns of point construction that Nadal had relied on in their matchups for years. Worse for us, there was a sense creeping into the fold, a burgeoning lack of astonishment at the result if you watched the matches with an impartial set of eyes and a hardening of January’s tender wonder at seeing this rivalry once thought to have run its course now renewed. The two greats were back and on top of the tour again. But I couldn’t help starting to wonder whether we’re not better off now seeing them apart from one another; whether we’d already reached the point of diminishing returns.