If this isn’t the shot of the season on the ATP tour and possibly one of the all-time single point sequences, then it certainly must be top five or, possibly, top three.
It happened Sunday afternoon at the Legg-Mason final in Washington, D.C.,. and showed why Gael Monfils — not Rafa Nadal — is the greatest pure athlete in the game.
Gael Monfils
You don’t have to watch this point over and over to appreciate it. One time is enough. But you will want to watch it over and over because, if you haven’t seen Monfils perform with this kind of incredible speed and athletic ability before, you will be quite amazed.
Monfils lost the point, but not before he saved three volleys and, in one of the most acrobatic and athletic plays you’ll ever see in tennis, leaped approximately three feet on the dead run to return an overhead from Radek Stepanek.
OK. Here’s how it happened and I wouldn’t be surprised if it hits youtube.com by Monday, allowing you to see it in full color.
Shortly after a long rain delay, Stepanek was serving at 4-3 and 15-love. Step’s first ground stroke was a backhand deep and flat to Monfils’ forehand corner. Gael made a sliding (yes, sliding on a hardcourt) retrieval, his shoes screeching as he came to a halt outside the plane of the doubles line.
His return was defensive, down the middle, and Radek, already well on the way to the net behind his first groundie, guided a forehand volley now deep to Monfils’ backhand side. No problem. Gael, his long legs in full flight, was there and threw up a lob.
Stepanek retreated a step, measured it and slammed the overhead straight on, a little to the right of Monfils’ center mark. And here’s where the gasps occurred.
On a full run to get back into position, Monfils jumped, his right arm stretched high, and he returned the smash. How high was he? I’d make the height of back-wall curtain about six-feet and, looking straight at Monfils, his waist was about even with the top of the wall. Can we say he was three feet off the ground when he hit that overhead? I’d call that a fair estimate.
Unfortunately, he didn’t get the point, but Stepanek needed two more volleys to put it away.
I’ve seen a lot of tennis in my years, but I can’t say that I’ve seen more pure athletic ability in one point than I saw in this spectacular display.
Roger Federer was looking, and no doubt feeling, justifiably smug after breezing through the fifth set of a match that twice left him staring at an historic first-round defeat at Wimbledon.
But at some point, when the euphoria of this 5-7, 4-6, 6-4, 7-6 (1), 6-0 win begins to fade, he’s going to have to come to grips with the reality that his game is in a slow fade.
This wasn’t world-class Tommy Haas, who was up two sets to love on Federer at last year’s French Open before losing. This was No. 60 Alejandro Falla, who came into this Day 1 opener on Centre Court with fewer grass court wins (seven) than Federer has grass court titles (11).
This was a Colombian challenger who has never won a tour title, even on his favored clay. This was an opponent who three times had the ATP trainer out to work on a pulled thigh or hamstring muscle after he had won the first two sets. This was a player who had previously confronted Federer four times, without winning a set, and who went down to Fed 6-1, 6-2 on the grass at Halle, Germany, two weeks ago.
Anyone who concludes that Federer’s championship days are over would be wrong. He put on more than a few of those quintessential Federer Moments — upper case. But he’s no longer a dominant player, even on grass. He’s beatable and every top player knows it, despite Federer blowing off losses to the likes of Albert Montanes and Ernests Gulbis as non-Slam and inconsequential.
He was down love-40 at 4-4 in the third set of this gripper and saved four break points that would have left Falla serving for a straight-set win, and he played some brilliant stuff to ward off failure. (Falla did serve for the match at 5-4 in the fourth set, but was broken easily).
But there were far more errors. Too many shanks. Too many inexplicable ground stroke errors. His second serve is not what it once was, allowing Falla to step inside the baseline and burn returns back that put him immediately in charge of points. And Federer no longer sprints to his right as he once did.
Meanwhile, Falla played perhaps the match of his life and, like Andy Roddick in last year’s Wimbledon final, had to gut out this loss with a leg injury. No excuse there. It’s all part of the game, though in this match it was Federer who did most of the running. So let’s give Federer some high marks for fitness.
Falla did a beautiful job in the first three and a half sets of mixing speeds, of controlling Federer with his lefty backhand crosscourts, and of curling his second serves into the ad court so deep that Federer was unable to get around them to return with a forehand. He looked composed, unflappable, as if he knew he could win.
But that was before the finish line appeared. That’s when he looked jangled.
Federer went down love-40 at 4-4 in the third with three awful errors — a surprisingly weak backhand into the net, a forehand into the net and one of his numerous shanks. But Falla could not finish the job. At 40-30, he had a good look at a forehand volley in tight to the net and netted.
He had a fourth break point and blooped a return that left Federer an easy winner. “Come on!” Federer screamed when he scored that one easily. Then, at deuce, Falla tried to play a delicate drop volley that Federer reached. Another mistake. A service winner gave Fed a 5-4 lead and he served it out to get back within a set.
Had Falla won that game. . .? Well, who knows. He would still have to serve it out, and he showed in the fourth set he wasn’t capable of that.
His last great moments got him into the fourth-set tiebreak, where he lost six straight from 1-1, hitting three unforced errors. He didn’t look fatigued. How could a clay-courter from South America looked fatigued on grass? But it was obvious the leg was bothering him.
Final statistics will show that Federer won 56 percent of his second serve points, which is just about right on his average for the season. But he was only at 50 percent in the first two sets, and this is grass, where you’d expect his percentage to be even higher than his 56 percent average. In last year’s final vs. Roddick, for example, he won 60 percent of his second serve points.
No doubt Falla has seen enough of Federer’s relaxed second serve this year that it became an attack issue and, on every second serve return point, as well as many first-serve points as well, he’d step inside the baseline as Federer went up to hit the ball, and took his cuts. He missed some. He made some. But it was the sort of tactic that pumps up underdogs, and that certainly was a big part of the Falla game plan.
The win sends Federer into the second round against No. 152 Ilija Bozoljac, a tall, 25-year-old Serbian who defeated veteran Nicolas Massu in four. It looks like a gimme for Federer.
