As the most difficult season of Rafael Nadal’s career turned into the homestretch on Monday night at the US Open, many among the Spaniard’s manifold followers had reason to fear the worst.
Not only had the 14-times grand slam champion entered as the No8 seed – the first time he’s been seeded outside the top three at Flushing Meadows since George W Bush’s first term – but he had drawn for his first-round opponent Borna Ćorić, the Croatian teenager presently soaring up the rankings who had beaten Nadal in their only previous meeting last fall.
By the time Nadal uncorked a 110mph service winner down the middle on match point at 11.43pm and throttled his fist to the New York sky, the sense of relief from the Spaniard was as palpable as the humidity that had kept the grounds a sweatbox long after sundown. The 6-3, 6-2, 4-6, 6-4 victory over one of the tour’s young lions will no doubt bolster a confidence that for the past year has been shaken to its foundation.
Few players could have benefitted from a light touch in the opening round more than Nadal, who opened the year ranked No3 but dropped as low as No10 and has gone more than 14 months since making it past a major quarter-final. Ćorić was not that.
The Zagreb native with the Eisenhower-era crew cut is a future star – John McEnroe says he’ll crack the top five within two years – who plays fearless tennis with weapons-grade power off both wings and fleet-footed court coverage. Already the youngest player in the top 50, he has claimed scalps of Nadal and Andy Murray over the past year to rise to No33 in the world. Had he been ranked one spot higher last week, Ćorić would have been seeded and avoided a first-round meeting with a player like Nadal. Still the sense persisted on Monday that perhaps Nadal might have been luckier to avoid a player like him.
The 29-year-old from Mallorca, a two-times champion here, notably made the teenager wait nearly five minutes in the tunnel before they took to the court before a nearly full Arthur Ashe Stadium. The early exchanges augured a long night as two pugilistic power-baseliners went blow for blow.
Ćorić, who two years ago won the US Open boys’ title, showed impressive nerve in the opening stages, pushing Nadal in his service games and holding with ease. He hung in the rallies and matched the Spaniard’s powerful groundstrokes with crowd-pleasing shotmaking. Yet with Ćorić serving at 3-4, Nadal shrewdly adjusted his return position and scratched out a break at love – the first of a dozen points in succession he won to wrap up the first set running away.
The second set was more of the same as Nadal won all 12 points on his first serve while Ćorić began to cede far too much ground on Nadal’s service games and in the rallies.
But then Nadal wilted while serving at 4-5. Ćorić earned his first break-point chance of the match at 30-40 and made the most of it, pounding a vicious cross-court backhand into the corner that Rafa could scarcely get a racket on. All of a sudden it was game on.
“The first two sets I played a very high level,” Nadal said. “Then I got a little bit tired. I had some problems. I was sweating a lot. I lost a little bit, I didn’t feel strong enough.”
He managed to recover before it got too complicated, saving his best tennis for the show-closing fourth, and Ćorić continued to misfire. The postmortem squared up with the action on the court: Nadal won 88% of his first-serve points and won 16 of 17 points at the net.
“It was an important victory for me,” Nadal said. “Happy the way that I played when I was, you know, physically good.”
Nothing has signaled the end of the Big Four era that for years defined men’s tennis more than Nadal’s decline. Though he remains a top 10 player on merit and has lost only one match at Flushing Meadows since 2009 – a four-set final against Novak Djokovic in 2011 – he is but a silhouette of the elemental force that during one stretch between 2010 and 2013 won seven of the 13 major tournaments he entered.
He advances to face Argentina’s Diego Schwartzman in the second round, but a quarter-final clash looms with top-seeded Novak Djokovic, who has won six of the seven matches they have played since 2013.
Whether he can even make it that far is no sure thing given his patchy form, but few believe the indefatigable Spaniard will go down without a fight.
“I had a great week of practice before the tournament start, no? I practiced at a very high level of tennis during the previous weeks, no?” he said. “That gives me calm. That gives me confidence. I know if I’m able to keep having those feelings, I don’t know here or I don’t know in the next tournaments, but I will have the success again.
“I will have the feeling that I can compete against everybody with good conditions.”
