Chapter 13: The Second Classic
The 2013 Roland-Garros semifinal was match filled with bizarre twists and turns, but ultimately as gripping as any Djokovic-Nadal battle.
Following Djokovic’s win over Nadal in the 2013 Monte-Carlo final, a rematch was the hope at Roland-Garros that year. With Nadal seeded third and Djokovic first, the clash took place in the semifinals. It was historically near-impossible to pick against Nadal on the Parisian clay, but when he played Djokovic, it became slightly easier—Novak was the only player who could consistently make Nadal look mortal on the dirt.
Djokovic reinforced that impression by starting faster, pinging precision baseline winners in a thoroughly dominant hold of serve to open the match. Nadal was made to work immediately, an ace and a stunning backhand pass required to get him through a multi-deuce game to make it 1-all.
And yet after that start and after Djokovic’s incredible victory in Monte-Carlo, Nadal was the one in control again. By 2-all, he was harassing Djokovic’s serve. The ball would hang up for an instant, then Nadal would send a forehand bullet to one corner, putting Djokovic on the dead run until the eventual winner. Nadal had his first break at 3-all, then served out the set in almost routine fashion.
Some players have lapses at the very beginning of a set. It’s almost inevitable—you go from the intensity of closing out a set, then sit down for a while and let your heart rate slow, then you get up and are made to do it all over again. Of course you’ll need a few points to warm back up. Nadal, instead, used the first point of the second set to hit a forehand winner down the line, at the end of a sprint, from miles outside both lines. (On Djokovic’s serve.) Nadal wouldn’t break in that game, but the tone had been set. After cruising through a couple service games of his own, Rafa put away a heavy-handed drop shot from Djokovic to break for 3-2.
Here the match took a bizarre turn. Out of nowhere, Djokovic went from a slightly flat level to an outrageous one. He broke back. Huge first serves got him out of trouble from 15-30 down in the next game. And at 4-3, his forehand exploded: two sizzling returns, one untouched and one that Nadal could barely touch, brought him to 30-all. Feeling the pinch, Nadal double-faulted to fall down break point. Djokovic worked the point purposefully, waiting for his chance, then moved around a Nadal backhand slice to hook a forehand into the right corner. Rafa’s strained reply fell in the middle of the court, he stayed home in the hopes of anticipating the putaway, and Djokovic bashed an inside-out forehand for a winner through the other side of the court. Then Djokovic served out the set despite two Nadal winners, one at the end of yet another sensational rally.
The first game of the third set indicated that this match would be the latest dose of pure magic from the rivalry, tennis that defied logic. With Djokovic burning so hot in the second set, he looked in the ascendancy, yet on the first point of the third, Nadal capped a 25-shot rally with a crosscourt backhand pass that he appeared to strike about a millimeter above the ground. This was the matchup at its best—both players were immune to psychological dips from huge swings in momentum and the thrilling rallies could come at any time.
By the end of the third set, the takes were in another universe. Having pushed Nadal to deuce in the opening game, Djokovic’s level tumbled off a cliff and then into the Marianas trench. Nadal didn’t have to do all that much to win the set 6-1. It was an inexplicable lapse from Djokovic, who would say after the match that he dipped physically in the set. (Quite an understatement, really.)
Nadal looked certain to win the match in four, but Djokovic pulled off an all-time heist to steal the set. Rafa grabbed a break for 4-3, Novak hit two absurd crosscourt angles—one backhand winner, one forehand return—en route to breaking back. Serving at 5-all, Djokovic abandoned all tactical nuance and put all his might into slashing forehand winners. He looked utterly out of ideas. Ever the master defender on clay, Nadal scraped a ball back deep for each winner Djokovic pounded past him, and finally he extracted enough errors, as a dentist pulls teeth from a screaming child, to get the break.
Djokovic’s superpower is that he can turn a match around, at any time, from any position. He is capable of waking up from a deep sleep at any moment. He can play lackluster tennis for an hour and a half, then decide he doesn’t want to lose when his opponent is serving for the match and suck the air out of a match in 30 seconds. His game being so balanced, any successful tactic his opponent uses can cease to function as soon as Djokovic’s tennis clicks into gear.
But against Nadal on clay? Even that had to be a bridge too far. Serving for the match, Nadal fell down love-15, then blasted two perfect, impossible inside-out forehand winners. The second left Djokovic wearing a smile that you might see on a pain-loving boxer who has just been punched in the face. The match looked completely over.
And then Djokovic stopped making mistakes. Nadal helped him out with two, then Djokovic pinned Nadal in the backhand corner and fired a forehand winner. Break gone, just like that. In the tiebreak, Djokovic got the first strike in relentlessly, went up 6-3, then flicked a pass at Nadal’s shoes to send the match into a fifth.
In a matter of seconds, Djokovic had gone from dead-to-rights to looking all-powerful. Nadal went down love-30 in the first game of the decider, and at that moment, right when Rafa typically wins a clutch point to escape danger, Novak roped a forehand return winner down the line en route to breaking. The semifinal was into epic territory at this point. Djokovic was at his very best, Nadal fighting just to stay within one break. He had never been in such peril while playing so well at Roland-Garros. This level had always been enough to win; when Robin Söderling had beaten him in 2009, Nadal was flat and exhausted from a brutal season. Here, he was fresh and sharp and across the net from an opponent who could pin him against the ropes anyway.
But if Djokovic was intent on giving an all-time fight, Nadal would match him every step of the way. Rafa had a break-back point in the fifth. Djokovic drew him to net with a drop shot and ripped a crosscourt backhand past him. Up 1-3 already, Djokovic ripped into Nadal’s serve. At 30-all, deuce, and ad-in—three massive points that he had to win to stay in the match—Nadal found winners with his backhand, his weaker wing. He was scraping the very bottom of his well of shots, reaching for a place most players were afraid to go.
When Djokovic held at love for 4-2, though, it appeared that even the bottom of the well might not be enough. Nadal resisted his apparent fate, embracing the risk of aggression to play as many points on his own terms as possible. Forehand after forehand speared down the line and through Djokovic’s defenses. One clipped the very outside of the sideline, a shot whose arc was out of a mathematician’s backwards nightmare.
The fateful moment came with Djokovic serving at 4-3, deuce. He’d just saved a break point as Nadal shanked a forehand, a desperate cry of “No!” following the error. Given his chance to hold, Djokovic spread the ball to the corners of the court masterfully: an inside-out forehand, a backhand down the line. He hooked Nadal’s defensive reply to into the left corner. Nadal could only throw up a lob, and even that barely cleared the net. The ball was begging to be bounced at an unreachable angle into the stands.
When I wrote earlier that Djokovic’s seamless tennis allowed him to change the course of a match at any moment, I neglected to mention the one visible seam. It’s hard to see, and most of the time it’s just as functional as any other part of his game. But sometimes his overhead smash sticks out like a sore thumb. Here the one faulty gear in the machinery cost him dearly.
Djokovic did indeed tap away the unreachable smash, the ball landing well inside the lines—but he lost his balance while doing so. Standing so close to the net, Djokovic’s forward momentum sent him wobbling into the net’s black grid, a fly noticing the spider’s web a split-second too late. Nadal, watching him eagle-eyed from the other side of the net, pointed at the Serb after the net touch. Djokovic protested, but the rules were the rules. He was docked the point: ad-out instead of ad-in.
The net touch wasn’t immediately fatal—Djokovic saved the break point with an enormous forehand—but Nadal hit back with a huge crosscourt backhand, and on the next break point Djokovic cracked with an inside-in forehand into the net. His chance was gone. It wasn’t that Djokovic didn’t factor in the match after 4-all, it was that Nadal was on the warpath. He continued to brutalize forehand winners constantly, from all kinds of positions. The 6-all game began with Nadal slamming a forehand winner on the dead run, then blasting a backhand winner down the opposite line. Djokovic had enough left in the tank to match Nadal for just a little while longer, successfully serving to stay in the match three times, but his overhead smash continued to malfunction. At 7-8, he badly biffed one to begin the game. From there, it was clear he was out of gas, while Nadal’s gauge was yet to hit the red. Nadal set up love-30 with a backhand passing shot winner (Djokovic had a play on it but let it go). The Serb overhit two forehands, and the match was done.
Nadal spun around to look at his box, holding up the #1 finger and wagging it gleefully as he ran towards the net. Never has a semifinal felt more like a final1. “Screw it: Rafa Nadal is your 2013 French Open champion!” Brian Phillips wrote in his liveblog on Grantland. The match was an obvious mirror image of the 2012 Australian Open final. In both cases, the eventual winner had a golden opportunity to win in four sets, missed it, then briefly lost control of the match in the fifth set only to recover in the end. The pressure had been higher on Nadal, what with the semifinal taking place on his turf, and Djokovic being a more recent major winner. Inches away from a brutal loss, he had hit back. His game failed to meet the demands of the match at crucial moments, but throughout the fifth set, Nadal had never lost belief. He could easily have gotten demoralized at 1-3, when Djokovic was on the charge for another break of serve, but instead hit back with some huge backhands, redlining his weaker wing to stay in touch. And in the end, his resilience had paid dividends.
In truth, it was a bizarre match. The best moments were brilliant, but Djokovic’s third-set lapse confined the semifinal to the lower-reaches of the pantheon of epics. It was a film with a relatively uneventful first hour, followed by twists so searing that by the end the audience was as gripped as they could be by anything else. But the numbers ruthlessly pointed out some newfound flaws in Djokovic’s tennis. His backhand wasn’t nearly as reliable as it had been in Monte-Carlo—he hit 27 backhand unforced errors to Nadal’s 13, a disastrous ratio for someone renowned for the steadiness of his two-hander—and he made a nearly comical number of overhead smash errors. Vallejo observed in his liveblog for The Changeover that Djokovic’s backhand down the line was unreliable; the Serb instead bombarded Nadal’s forehand corner with crosscourt backhands and inside-out forehands. On clay, it was a risky gameplan: Djokovic had to hit the ball with extreme pace or angle to avoid being attacked by Nadal’s forehand. If he hit too hard, he would miss. If he didn’t hit hard enough, Nadal would belt a forehand past him. Nadal, had he been more clinical, could have finished the match in three sets, or certainly in four.
Djokovic was understandably shattered after the loss. His first tennis coach, Jelena Genčić, had passed away a mere six days earlier. Djokovic had continued playing Roland-Garros, trying to use the emotions as fuel rather than letting them hold him back. He had done an admirable job, but on top of the loss of his childhood coach, Djokovic’s campaign for a first Roland-Garros title had ended in heartbreak. Genčić was the first to recognize his immense, world-beating potential and was crucial to his development. “The lessons she taught me never left,” wrote Djokovic in Serve to Win.
Nadal’s borderline invincible gatekeeping of Roland-Garros was a nuisance to everyone, but to Djokovic, it was becoming a threat to his career ambitions. Keep in mind that Federer was 0-5 against Nadal at Roland-Garros at this point, didn’t have to play Nadal en route to his only title on the Parisian clay. It was the only Roland-Garros title Federer ended up winning; even for a man of such outrageous skill, with Nadal around, you just had to hope he would slip up.
Djokovic was on the same path as Federer, only he hadn’t yet had the fortune of playing a final at Roland-Garros against anyone except Nadal. The 2013 semi was his fifth loss to Nadal at Roland-Garros, the others being the semifinals in 2006, 2007, and 2008, plus the 2012 final. Djokovic had beaten Nadal at Monte-Carlo, Madrid, and Rome. He had won all three of those titles (for reference, Federer ended his career title-less at Monte-Carlo and Rome). Yet at Roland-Garros, Nadal simply would not let him through. Djokovic had won all the other majors; Paris was all he needed to complete the Career Grand Slam. No one doubted his abilities on clay, which were all too obvious. But he hadn’t won Roland-Garros yet. His frustration was palpable. In 2012, Djokovic had beaten Nadal in the last three major finals. In 2013, Djokovic had just beaten Nadal in Monte-Carlo and put up his most resilient performance yet in Paris, rescuing the match from certain defeat late in the fourth set. Nadal was making sure every single Djokovic campaign on the Parisian dirt ended in a loss, though, and by 2013, the constant disappointment was surely starting to wear on the Serb.
There were things Djokovic could have done better in the losses. He wasn’t physically or mentally ready to beat Nadal at Roland-Garros before 2011, he had simply not been good enough in 2012, and in 2013, even with suboptimal tactics, he had come within a hair’s breadth of the win. But in a way, that made it even worse—he and likely legions of tennis fans felt that Djokovic was capable of scoring that momentous win, he just hadn’t done it yet. Roland-Garros took place once a year, and with Nadal being less than a year older than Djokovic, it was anyone’s guess as to when the Spaniard would flame out. If asked whether or not Djokovic would ever win Roland-Garros, you’d surely still have to say yes—he was 26 and simply way too good not to finish his career without the Career Grand Slam. But the pressure was building.
After the four-hour, 37-minute semifinal, Nadal played a fresh-as-a-daisy David Ferrer in the final, who had won his own semi in straight sets. Nadal beat him 6-3, 6-2, 6-3.
Thanks so much for reading The Golden Rivalry. The previous chapter led to a couple donations, which I’d like to say thanks for here as well—the idea that anyone would enjoy my work enough to pay for it is a little surreal to me. I’ll do my best to keep putting out the kind of writing that you like.
And if you think it’s all downhill from here for this rivalry in 2013, you’re mistaken. I’ll be back on Sunday to break down another two Djokovic-Nadal thrillers from that year. See you then! -Owen
It's a pleasure to read your writing, Owen. Best wishes to you for the future editions. I will be here reading ☺️