The Circuit

by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

  He played the Cyprian Marcos Baghdatis in the final. Baghdatis was the number-one-ranked junior player in the world in 2003 and a former rising star on the tour. He climbed as high as eighth in the rankings in 2006, but he is now perhaps best known for his guest-starring role in the final win of Andre Agassi’s career in that year’s U.S. Open. Agassi’s autobiography Open uses his 6–4, 6–4, 3–6, 5–7, 7–5 win as a framing device for the story of his life in tennis, and Baghdatis plays the role of emergent talent personified in irrepressible, lovable youth, which is funny inasmuch as Baghdatis sported the same well-insulated frame back then that he does now. In the end (spoiler!) the intensely physical demands of the match and their unwillingness to yield got the best of both of them. They finished the five sets on their feet but barely made it back to the adjacent medical tables in the trainer’s room to receive IVs for their cramps. They held hands there, tennis having brought the old master and young artist together in joy and pain.

  Eleven years later, Baghdatis was the old soul in the Chengdu final. He was in his third final in the past three years, having made it that far at Dubai in 2016 and Atlanta in 2015—but he hadn’t won a title since Sydney in 2010. The year 2017 was firing off warning signs to Baghdatis about the state of his career: he arrived at Chengdu having lost in the first round in seven of the fifteen tournaments he’d played on the circuit, and, to add insult to ignominy, on day one of the tournament the latest rankings revealed that he’d dropped out of the top one hundred for the first time since October 2014. But he’d been better of late, having played tough in St. Petersburg, Winston-Salem, and Washington, D.C. And he had to like his chances against Istomin, who, aside from an uptick in Gstaad, seemed to have blown his wad of good luck in Melbourne.

  Six games into the Chengdu final, serving at 2–3, 15–all, Baghdatis sprayed a forehand down the line wide and the Cypriot’s face took on a look not of disappointment or frustration but of bitter recognition. He bent at the waist a few times and then continued. On the next point, he took a few exaggerated deep breaths and hit a serve as hard as he at that moment could, and when the return headed back toward him he halfheartedly swatted at it as you would a gnat. He collapsed to his knees, slowly, taking up a prose of supplication—knees to chest, facedown, arms out in front—that changed to dismay: he began to pound the court with his fists. His back had given out. I watched Baghdatis prone on the court, bent over in no-man’s-land, and I couldn’t help but think of his moments in Open when even though he lost, his body could give everything it had for him; and I couldn’t help but think back to Istomin’s skill set giving everything it had for him to defeat Djokovic in January. Agassi became Djokovic’s coach in 2017. I wonder what the two of them would have thought had they been watching this abbreviated match together as it was happening. Either way, Denis Istomin was the 2017 champion of Chengdu. After, he’d make the semifinals of a Challenger in his native Uzbekistan, but he wouldn’t win another ATP Tour match for the rest of the year. Baghdatis would make it back to action two weeks later and win a round-of-thirty-two match at the Stockholm Open, and that would be the end of things for his year on the circuit as well. But Chengdu ensured them both direct entry into the 2018 Australian Open. And once there, they would both make the second round, earning a cool $70,560 each.

  Meanwhile, 1,056 miles due southeast toward the coast of the South China Sea, past Guangzhou and Dongguan, lies Shenzhen, a mere ten and a half miles from Hong Kong. Although a 250-class enterprise just like Chengdu, Shenzhen has lacked for top-of-the-draw star power over the four years of its existence. Andy Murray won the first iteration of the tournament in 2014 and Tomáš Berdych won in 2015 and 2016. Neither could play in 2017. The top seed coming in was Sascha Zverev, who, still getting accustomed to such things perhaps, fell in the quarterfinals to Bosnia and Herzegovina’s top player, Damir Džumhur. The older Zverev, the left-handed serve-and-volleyer Mischa, was the third seed and lost in the second round to Israel’s Dudi Sela, a pocket rocket of a player with a surprisingly effective one-handed backhand for someone of his size. Sela is also another well-traveled player in his early thirties who becomes especially dangerous during the back end of the circuit. Goffin was the second seed and made his way through the draw untroubled until the semifinal, when he needed three sets to get by the Finnish-Swiss Henri Laaksonen. This set up a final with someone from the first pages of this book: none other than Alexandr Dolgopolov.

  Things in 2017 had gone extremely well for Dolgopolov since that early date with Nadal in Brisbane. He won a 250 on the clay of Buenos Aires, beating Carreño Busta and Nishikori to take the title; he made the quarters of Rio, where Carreño Busta would exact some revenge. He made the final of the Swedish Open in Båstad, beat eventual U.S. Open finalist Kevin Anderson of South Africa in the big tune-up in Cincinnati, and made it to the round of sixteen in New York, where he’d lose once again to Nadal.

  After an early exit in the 250 tournament between Cincinnati and the U.S. Open, the Winston-Salem Open, Dolgopolov came under scrutiny from the Tennis Integrity Unit (TIU) due to an alarming swing in online betting activity during his match against Thiago Monteiro of Brazil. In short, Dolgopolov was playing an opponent who had never won an ATP Tour–level match on hard courts and he lost 3–6, 3–6, spraying errors on his groundstrokes and managing not one single break-point opportunity in the match. (The only two other times this had occurred in his career were against Federer, one of the most dominant servers in the history of the game.) Two hours before the match was set to start, online bets on it drifted so dramatically that gambling sites began removing betting on the match, meaning they sensed something wrong. Some websites continued to offer bets on the match and the odds continued to drift up to minutes prior to the match, inviting play on a Dolgopolov loss: the money had moved Monteiro from the big underdog to the big favorite. In the fourth game, he was broken after double-faulting on back-to-back points. By now more betting sites were removing the match from play and connoisseurs of tennis gambling across the globe—they are legion—were live-streaming the match to catch a glimpse of what all the noise was about concerning what should have been an innocuous first-round match at a 250 tournament. Afterward, Dolgopolov would provide testimony to the TIU and face a very curious press corps at the U.S. Open. He denied all wrongdoing, chalking up the bad result to fatigue and pacing himself for the U.S. Open. When asked in New York what he thought about all of the circumstantial evidence surrounding the suspicions of match-fixing, he replied, “You want my honest answer? I don’t give a fuck to be honest because it’s like a circus.”

  On the court, the essential elements of funk and improvisation still powered his game, but it was blending nicely with smart decision making, which allowed Dolgopolov to show off his tennis IQ and his above-average athleticism. Things were clicking for him.

  Amazingly, he still didn’t have a sponsor for his racket. In fact, not only did his stringbeds not have a stencil on them, it looked to the naked eye like he was playing with a batch of older rackets. They showed signs of wear and tear across the top as well as up and down the sides, and a chunk of the bumper was gone. He still used what looked like Wilson Pro Staffs and still walked out onto the court with a Wilson bag similar to Goffin’s, whose fate had changed completely from when he was last seen on clay: injured and Horacio Zeballos carrying his bag back into the locker room for him.

  The final was a fight marked by little degrees that swung the match in Goffin’s favor. Dolgopolov tried to discomfit Goffin with topspin forehands designed to push him back, then opening the court for the Ukranian’s assortment of drop shots and slice. But Goffin now had found that little measure that would rocket him into the top ten. He was catching those high bouncing balls early, before they reached the peak of their ascent, and redirecting them flatter and with pace. Fully healed from his ankle injury, he was even leaving his feet at times to get on top of a ball he wanted to send back with authority. He was hitting out more and seeking the initiative
in points during moments where before he was more liable to politely continue the exchange with a safer groundstroke. Now more than ever, Goffin was hitting aggressively into safe targets. And, being the technician that he is, safe targets for him are closer to the line than most. The formula got him past a red-hot Dolgopolov and was key to his lifting the trophy in Tokyo, too. The only bad thing about winning consecutive tournaments is that there’s a third tournament right after to play. With so much tennis in his legs, doing much of anything in Shanghai was too tall an order and he lost to France’s Gilles Simon in the round of thirty-two. However, everyone was going to have their hands full in Shanghai. Nadal had entered the ring at Beijing and beat Pouille, Khachanov, Isner, Dimitrov, and Kyrgios to win the title, add another 500 points to his lead on Federer, and get a head start on the final stretch of the year. Federer would show up for Shanghai and Shanghai alone. Its courts are some of the fastest hard courts in the world, fast like they used to be and not the plodding composite used in places like Miami. He was fond of it, it flattered his game. And he seemed to genuinely love the city. He would lose one set there.

  A magnolia in autumn, the Rolex Shanghai Masters is the penultimate of the nine Masters 1000 tournaments played throughout the year and the only one in Asia. It’s played in a large bowl called the Qi Zhong Stadium, whose interior is ringed by blue and red seats, a purple hard court centered on a bright green bed, and, up above it all, a beautiful retractable roof made of eight curved wedges that as the roof starts to close slowly twist to meet in the middle and clasp together overhead like a spiral galaxy. For the first five years of the stadium’s existence the tournament was named the ATP Tour Masters 1000 Tournament of the Year. This is the tournament I wake up to on those autumn mornings when there’s less dawn light and more of a chill in the air. In a way it marks its own special end to the circuit, in that it’s the last outdoor tournament of the year.

  Shanghai began on the eighth of October. Ten months ago to the day, I woke up with the big things in tennis as they had been for a while. Djokovic and Murray had just battled it out in a final in Qatar. Who would have guessed then that we’d be where we were now? Maybe there were signs in the little things in tennis. Like how ten months ago to the day a small 250 in Sydney started what would end with thirty-three-year-old Gilles Müller of Luxembourg winning his first-ever title after nearly sixteen years on the tour. He’d go on to win a second title, this time at ’s-Hertogenbosch, and then perhaps top both by beating Nadal at Wimbledon in the round of sixteen by gutting out a 15–13 victory in the fifth and final set. (Remember, at Wimbledon they don’t play tiebreakers in the final set.) “I’m just glad it’s over,” Müller said after the match. “Somehow I made it.”

  And somehow the circuit had made it to Shanghai. It had been a strange brew of the monumental and the minimal that had gotten us here. Some of the yardsticks had been buried in the ground—the biggest ones: we know who won the majors. But that didn’t matter to Shanghai, did it? Why would it? Shanghai wants its say, too. It had been a long year, in tennis and outside it. And now, before tennis headed back to the indoor arenas of Europe, Shanghai was at once a hello and a goodbye to all that. There were still things in play and to play for, things to motivate players on the final turn in a long run that had turned into a sprint.

  Zverev had already qualified, continuing his run of youngest-since-Djokovic feats over the course of the year. Four players arrived in Shanghai with a chance to be the eighth and final player to qualify for the final tournament of the year, the 1,500-point ATP Final in London. In eighth place at the moment was Goffin, which was even more impressive considering he’d missed six weeks of the season. But he’d returned and was closing out the year in peak form. Thus far for the year, he’d played eight matches in Asia and won eight matches in Asia, having won the titles in Shenzhen and Tokyo back-to-back. Hot on his tail were Querrey and the U.S. Open finalist Kevin Anderson.

  And then there were Federer and Nadal. Federer was set to play his first tournament since losing to del Potro in New York. Nadal played Beijing between New York and Shanghai, beating a flustered Kyrgios 6–1, 6–2 in the final and bagging 500 additional ranking points for the effort. That made 149 weeks at number one in the world over the course of his career. He was playing out the year with an eye to extending that further. McEnroe had 170 weeks. Djokovic 223. Connors 268. Lendl 270. Sampras 286. And Federer, up until that point in October 2017, had spent 302 total weeks at the top of the rankings. Neither Nadal nor Federer were defending points, as both had been injured at the end of 2016. For 2017, Nadal had a healthy lead on Federer and didn’t have to worry about points dropping off. Any points picked up from here on were gravy.

  The Shanghai quarterfinals were among the best of the year. Nadal and Dimitrov staged a sequel to their semifinal at the Australian Open, with Nadal once again having that little bit extra to win. The volatile Troicki put his considerable skills on display in Shanghai by dispatching the young Canadian phenom Shapovalov by bageling him in the third set, edging Thiem and Isner in a third-set tiebreaker, before pushing del Potro to the distance, then succumbing to him, the Argentine in the end being too much and in too rich a vein of form for him. Čilić also won a routine victory against another surprise quarterfinalist in Ramos Viñolas.

  And then there was Federer-Gasquet. This was one of my favorite matches of the year due to the fact that you rarely encounter two top players as distinctive and yet similar as these two. They both have beautiful one-handed backhands, but Federer’s is more a weapon and Gasquet’s more an instrument. The new Federer approach of hitting through the backhand to produce a flat groundstroke that cuts through the court differs greatly from Gasquet’s single-hander, which is loaded with spin. One backhand is like a name printed in bold and the other is in cursive. Their forehands are similar, but Gasquet’s is set for stun, while Federer’s is set for kill. You would think, then, from this description that Federer would simply bludgeon Gasquet, but it’s not simply how you choose to hit the ball that matters, it’s also where you choose to stand. Federer, as we’ve gone over, hugs the baseline now at all costs and even half-volleys short-hops if he needs to; all of this is designed to rob his opponents of time and also keep his impetus going toward the net so that he can sneak in at the right moment and finish off a point with his polished net game. On the other hand, Gasquet tends to position himself two to three feet behind the baseline, sometimes more. This gives him not only extra time to respond and react to his opponent’s shots, but also the space and distance for the looping backswing his topspin groundstrokes require to carve through the court on both vertical and horizontal planes. Gasquet has been a fixture on the tour since 2002 after a decorated career in the junior ranks. He’s won fourteen titles and made the semifinals of Wimbledon and the U.S. Open, the quarterfinals of the French, and four times has been to the fourth round of the Australian Open, and he has qualified for the ATP Tour Finals twice. And yet, when you consider Gasquet’s strengths, it’s easy to see his weaknesses as well. He stands too far back in the court, and the beauty of his groundstrokes comes at the expense of pace. This makes him tough opposition for players below the top twenty but compromises his chances against higher-ranked players. The beauty of the 2017 quarterfinal in Shanghai was more aesthetic. Federer’s 7–5, 6–4 win over Gasquet pushed him to 16–2 in their all-time matchups. But it was fascinating to put Federer’s backhand in context when he plays another player with a single-hander, and Gasquet truly prides himself on the optics of the shot. Federer’s groundstrokes take the ball early, causing the spin his shots generate to be less pronounced to the observer. Gasquet, meanwhile, from his drawback to his follow-through seems in terms of playing style a cousin of Federer’s. With his modern racket and strings he produces spin and arc we wouldn’t otherwise be able to see, but the grace and ballet approach hark back to an earlier idea of tennis as a type of ballet with a moving target. His approach is beautiful and works more often than it doesn’t. Bu
t then, as much as a score like 7–5, 6–4 tells a story of a match decided by small differences, when Federer broke Gasquet late in the first to practically close out the set and then broke him in the second, got broken back, and then broke him again, I remembered that the only two times Gasquet had ever beaten Federer had been via third-set tiebreakers on clay. I had been drawn once again into the flickering flame that is watching Roger Federer. I thought I had escaped, but I hadn’t.

  Federer would go on to meet del Potro in the Shanghai semifinal, lose the first set 6–3, and beat him in the next two 6–3, 6–3. Although Nadal and Djokovic have beaten Federer far more often than del Potro has, no one has done more damage to Federer than del Potro, with those two U.S. Open upsets in 2009 and 2017. Neither defeat had enhanced or further humanized Federer, as many of the losses to Nadal and Djokovic had done. No, del Potro simply beat him. He has been the Trojan horse in the men’s game for going on a decade. He’s a gift to the circuit. But you never know what’s inside him on any given day, often until it’s too late. Federer learned this the hard way twice, and his career has been forever changed for it. He’s beaten del Potro far more times than he’s lost to him: he’s won eighteen times—and lost only six—including the four-and-a-half-hour marathon on Centre Court in Wimbledon: a 3–6, 7–6 (7–5), 19–17 match at the 2012 Olympics that’s been described as the greatest Olympic tennis match ever played. But del Potro’s six victories are like gut punches and resonate. In 2009, Federer was riding a streak of five consecutive U.S. Open titles. When he played del Potro in the final, he won the first set with ease: six games to three. But then the big Argentine won tiebreakers in the second and fourth sets and then took the fifth set in a stroll. After years recovering from his numerous wrist surgeries, he played the 2016 Rio Olympics hardly match-fit and took out Djokovic in the first round, sending the Serb off the court in tears. In this year’s U.S. Open he was up to more of the same, first against Thiem and then again against Federer. Rarely has someone so large and so obviously in possession of rare gifts of raw power slipped so easily into the underdog role and enjoyed widespread support from fanatics as well as neutrals. Something about his game and demeanor draw people in. Part of it is that he often looks like he can’t continue playing even when he’s fine; it’s just his body language, he’s a languid guy. Part of it is that he has a true flair for the dramatic and appears to play his best on the biggest stages. And part of it is simply that he’s ridiculously good. He’s still only twenty-nine as I am writing this, and yet so much of his twenties were taken from him—and from us—due to injury. What could have been. And yet, what still can be.