Chapter 6: The Shift
Entering 2011, Nadal was ranked #1 and led his rivalry with Djokovic 16-7, having won all the important matches. Indian Wells and Miami changed everything.
I used to be a competitive runner. Between 2018 and 2019, I ran three half-marathons. In my first, I didn’t yet understand how hard to push and was tired when I finished, not shattered. But in my next two tries, I started the races at a pace faster than what I thought I could maintain, then tried desperately to hold on until the end, and it somehow worked. I ended up with a personal best faster than anything I dreamed I was capable of. I remember walking down the street after crossing the finish line in my second half-marathon, mildly freaking out at how the intense pain I felt at the end of the race hadn’t ceased once I stopped running. But the achievement was thrilling. I would try again in 2020, I knew, and averaging a pace faster than six minutes per mile felt tantalizingly doable.
I’d never run another one again. In early 2020, I played an indoor tennis match on a hard court with a hole in the bottom of my left shoe. An ache blossomed under the base of my big toe that I didn’t think too much of, continuing to log long runs on pavement in the coming weeks. The pain got worse, a doctor misidentified the issue and said I could keep exercising. Eventually, I couldn’t run on it anymore.
Fast-forward through wearing a boot for a couple months, trying something called a “bone stimulator,” and a couple failed attempts at returning to consistent running, and what we have now is a tennis writer who hasn’t run a half-marathon since setting that personal best, hasn’t run seriously since 2021, and has cushiony flip-flops and sneaker inserts to protect the injured spot. And I still have a damn foot that hurts if I put weight on the wrong area.
The point to this story is that you don’t always know in the moment that you’ve done something for the last time, or that a big part of your life will never be the same again. You’ll see why that’s important in today’s chapter in a little bit. Bear with me.
At the end of 2010, Djokovic was still ranked #3 in the world behind Federer and Nadal, though his win over Federer at the U.S. Open and a Davis Cup triumph made him a closer #3 than he had been in the past. He had cut gluten out of his diet, improving his breathing. He was developing the gymnastic flexibility for which he is now well-known. At the start of 2011, with an offseason behind him and gluten removed from his diet, Djokovic came out of the gates at top speed and refused to slow down. He won the Australian Open at the cost of a single set. The high point was a tense straight-set win over Federer in the semifinals. (Just look at how he hits his forehand in the first point of the video linked below.) Federer had beaten Djokovic at the World Tour Finals after their U.S. Open thriller, so an argument could have been made that he was the favorite to win their Australian Open clash in 2011, but Djokovic’s decisive win marked the last time Federer was given a 50-50 shot to beat him for a long time, maybe ever.
The Australian Open victory was likely cathartic—Djokovic’s first major win had come a full three years earlier, and he spent the interim dealing with the dreaded possibility of being a one-slam wonder. An emotional letdown in the coming weeks would have been understandable. Instead, Djokovic went to Dubai and won the title, destroying Federer 6-3, 6-3 in the final. His endurance was still a question for some given that he hadn’t played any particularly taxing matches during his streak, but all the little hesitancies and lapses in his game seemed to be gone. Suddenly, he was simply better than everyone else.
Djokovic went to Indian Wells next and handed his first three opponents a 6-0 set each. He crushed Richard Gasquet in the quarterfinals. In the semifinal it was Federer yet again. In the past, when Federer held the reins in the rivalry, it was in large part due to his forehand (and the precise serve to set it up). The Federer forehand was easily the most destructive groundstroke in the matchup, and he used it to devastating effect. He could overpower Djokovic’s forehand in crosscourt exchanges. If Djokovic left a backhand down the line a bit too close to the middle of the court, Federer would send the ball flying to the opposite corner in a flash with a brutal crosscourt forehand. And if Federer got control of the point with his forehand? He would have Djokovic scampering all over the place like a jackrabbit. In 2011, though, Djokovic had started to belt his own forehand, which helped him make offensive headway. Federer’s forehand still did plenty of damage, but it was no longer an automatic kill switch in the matchup. Increasingly, Djokovic could engage Federer’s forehand with his own and come out on top at times, if not a majority of the time. Even when he didn’t, his willingness to take on Federer’s best groundstroke told Federer that Djokovic wasn’t afraid of him. Armed with a superior backhand, return game, and defense, Djokovic could then proceed to pick Federer apart. At Indian Wells, Federer came back hard at Djokovic in Indian Wells having lost the first set, but Djokovic proved way too strong in the decider, winning it 6-2.
It was the third straight time he had beaten Federer, and the matches had all been important: a major semifinal, a 500 final, and a Masters 1000 semifinal. Djokovic had gotten the monkey off his back in one of his two main rivalries. Entering the Indian Wells final, he had won all 17 of the matches he had played in 2011. He was answering every question that had been asked of him in the past three years. His grunts of “waaah-eh” started to sound ominously inevitable rather than labored.
But Rafael Nadal was waiting in the Indian Wells final. Nadal was still ranked #1 in the world, and Djokovic was still yet to beat him in any kind of a final. Rafa had lost to David Ferrer at the Australian Open, hampered by a hamstring injury, so Djokovic hadn’t gotten the chance to avenge the 2010 U.S. Open final. In 2011, Djokovic had been playing the better tennis. He had endured the more difficult semifinal at Indian Wells, toughing it out against Federer while Nadal feasted on Juan Martín del Potro, 6-4, 6-4. Djokovic hadn’t lost the entire season, and the clash was on his preferred surface of hard court. But the sense remained that Nadal was the better player. Each time they had played an important match in the past, even when Djokovic went out to a lead, Nadal had found ways to equal him, then wear him out down the stretch. Despite the tear Djokovic was on, Nadal still felt like the favorite.
And the first set of the Indian Wells final, a somewhat standard 6-4 set for Nadal, did nothing to change that impression. Djokovic retrieved a break of serve to even the set at 3-all, but Nadal immediately broke him again, and went on to serve out the set at love. It felt businesslike, even routine, which was not ideal for Djokovic. For most of 2011, he had been playing at a standard that forced opponents to a pace they could not maintain, and here he had lost a set to Nadal without making the Spaniard work especially hard.
Slowly but surely, Djokovic got his teeth into the final. With Nadal serving at 3-4, love-30—a big chance for Novak—Djokovic defended a wicked inside-out forehand, then a smash, then countered Nadal’s drop volley by sliding into a masterful lob and burying a smash of his own. The way the second set played out from there was telling. Nadal was able to save the first two break points, but not the third, and despite having a break point and saving five set points when Djokovic served for the set, he could not break back. Set point was a long, long rally, with both men stalking the baseline; it was never quite clear who had the advantage. Finally, Nadal went for a crosscourt backhand winner—Djokovic didn’t chase it—and barely missed.
Djokovic taking a set from Nadal on hard court was nothing new, but the way he had done it here was striking. It was less about a burst of brilliance—he had produced plenty of those in the past, but had trouble sustaining them—than playing steadier tennis than Nadal, the easier-said-than-done ratio of which is akin to telling a singer to become more famous than Taylor Swift. Djokovic had ground down Nadal’s backhand in the set, hitting 76% of his groundstrokes to that side and drawing eight unforced errors from it as a reward. However, Nadal was at least as responsible for the way the set had unfolded: he had made an abysmal 25% of his first serves in the set.
Nadal would never regain full control of the rivalry.
He couldn’t have known it, nor could the viewers. Plenty of times, Nadal had lost the second set against Djokovic before going on to win the crucial third. And even if he lost this match, he could and would play better in the next one. But his iron grip on the matchup with Djokovic was irrevocably gone. Many newer tennis fans likely aren’t familiar with the early portion of the Djokovic-Nadal rivalry at all, and for good reason—Djokovic has been thoroughly dominant in 2023, so much so that it’s difficult to imagine anyone ever being his better, and it’s been more than 12 years since Nadal was truly superior to Djokovic on a surface other than clay. But he was. He was for a while. And then he was not.
In the third set, Djokovic simply ran away from Rafa. He forced the court open with angled groundstrokes and floated drop shots into the empty space. His shots smeared the area around the baseline, rushing Nadal with their depth and weight. Nadal, for all his accolades in deciding sets, couldn’t come up with a response. Djokovic took the third set 6-2, with Nadal hitting a sadly emblematic forehand into the middle of the net on match point. While it was not the first time Djokovic had outplayed Nadal in such a manner, it was the first time he had done so in a must-win set. Nadal certainly would have been disappointed with the way he finished the match, but equally notable was the way Djokovic wrested control—Nadal had been in the driver’s seat for a set and a half, but Djokovic had stayed patient, waited for his chance, then thrown Nadal out the window.
At the same time, Nadal had given Djokovic that chance. In October, I contacted Matthew Willis, author of the phenomenal and much-missed newsletter The Racquet, to ask him some questions for a separate tennis project. Among them was which moments from the Big Three era stuck out to him most, and along with a couple others, he singled out the 2011 Indian Wells final.
“Nadal won the first set and then the strangest thing happened—his serve completely disappeared,” Willis wrote to me over email. “Djokovic completed the comeback and went on to make 2011 his own. I'm still fascinated about what would have happened to Novak’s momentum that year in a parallel universe where that Indian Wells final is less unusual. It didn’t even really feature many of the matchup dynamics that ended up making hard courts tough for Nadal against Djokovic, it was as close to a self-implosion as I've ever seen from Nadal.”
That self-implosion helped Djokovic to a first win in a final over Nadal and a first deciding-set win over Nadal, establishing that it was possible for Djokovic to match and overcome Nadal when it mattered most. For the first time in a while, the landscape at the top of men’s tennis seemed to be shifting. No one had beaten Federer and Nadal in consecutive matches since del Potro at the 2009 U.S. Open. Those two had shared an absurd 25 of the last 31 major titles. But here was a bona fide threat to the top two, someone with a more balanced game than them. Djokovic was seeded third at Indian Wells, but after he shook hands with Rafa and began to celebrate exuberantly, a Tennis TV commentator said, “for the moment, you’d have to say he’s the best player in the world.”
We ended up saying that for a hell of a lot longer than a moment. “Rafa did everything he could to arrest Djokovic's momentum (even getting heat stroke for his troubles) when they met in an incredible Miami final a week later, but it was just slightly too late,” Willis wrote to me.
“Novak already believed.”
In Miami, Nadal played the role Djokovic had in Indian Wells by beating Federer in the semifinals—though he did so even more handily, Federer being up against it from the start in the 6-3, 6-2 loss. With Federer now seeded third after Djokovic’s Indian Wells victory, the match hammered home that Djokovic and Nadal were the two best players in the world and were putting distance between themselves and the pack. Djokovic had an easier route to the final, hammering Mardy Fish in the semifinals to set the rematch with Nadal.
Nadal had never won Miami before. In 2005, he was up two sets and a break on Federer in the final—it was just their second meeting, and Federer was totally bamboozled early—but failed to close out the vital third set, leaving himself vulnerable to a comeback. Federer won the final two sets easily, 6-3, 6-1. The sense was that Nadal wasn’t yet ready for such an extreme physical challenge.
It was the last time he would run out of gas for years. Mere weeks after the 2005 Miami final, in the final of the Italian Open, Nadal went toe-to-toe with Guillermo Coria in a much longer, more attritional five-setter—five hours and 14 minutes!—and came out on top. He had looked tired early in the fifth set, and even fell down a double break, but he not only didn’t give an inch, he was able to turn the tide by continuing to play the long rallies that had defined the match up to that point.
In the following years, his status as tennis’s marathon man would only solidify. There was the five-hour defeat of Federer in the Rome final the following year, the four-hour, 48-minute classic in the 2008 Wimbledon final (another defeat of Federer). There were the twin five-setters Nadal won to round out his victory at the 2009 Australian Open, the first that exhausting semifinal with Verdasco. Despite it being the longest match in Australian Open history at the time—and Nadal having less rest before the final—the Spaniard had the steadier performance in the final, outlasting Federer 6-2 in the fifth set. While the four-hour Madrid meat-grinder against Djokovic in 2009 took its toll on Nadal’s knees, he had been fine endurance-wise, standing fully upright as Djokovic lurched from cramps. His legs and lungs seemed impervious. He was the fittest player on tour.
The 2011 Miami final began much like the Indian Wells final. Early on, it was a struggle—up a break at 2-1, Nadal had to save a break point with a forehand winner at the end of a 26-shot rally, again demonstrating his iron physicality. Djokovic hit out with some impatient misses thereafter, falling behind 5-1, and though he reclaimed one break and got a sniff of hauling back the other, Nadal won the set 6-4. Djokovic asserted himself on the match to win the second.
At Indian Wells, Nadal had uncharacteristically failed to play a strong deciding set, but in Miami he showed up. It was an exquisite battle, the kind of which tennis fans dream of. Nadal took a love-30 lead on Djokovic’s serve at 2-1 but could only watch as Djokovic clipped the sideline with a volley and punched an inside-out backhand behind Nadal with surgical precision. Both shots required extreme confidence; they weren’t ones a tennis player would attempt if they wanted to play safely, but Djokovic was nerveless in his aggression. Nadal found himself down love-30 in the next game, but sent Djokovic scurrying from side to side to retrieve his fizzing forehands before lifting one down the line and right into the corner for a winner. It was back-and-forth tennis, played at an outrageously high level, with little margin for error.
Midway through the third set, the match started to get attritional in a way the Indian Wells final never had. The match clock ticked over three hours. In previous cases, Nadal’s physical edge would have become clear somewhere along the line—they’d have a long rally and Djokovic would need a bit longer to recover, or Djokovic just wouldn’t be able to match Nadal’s point-in, point-out ability to grind. Here, though, their fitness levels seemed dead even. It turned the match into a high-quality slog. Neither player had an easy way to win points, so they simply had to rifle the ball back and forth at each other until one missed or a lane opened for an untouchable winner. Djokovic and Nadal’s games were as well-balanced as anyone’s, with enough power to blast winners but enough speed to get their rackets on anything, plus forehands and backhands that didn’t break down easily. This meant that almost every rally had to be won through merit, sometimes by outlasting the opponent with sheer attrition.
It was a different kind of tennis than Federer played with Nadal (or with Djokovic, for that matter). Against Federer, the gameplan was transparent, even if it didn’t always work—attack the backhand, keep the ball in play, try to only let him hit his massive forehand if he’s on the run. With Djokovic and Nadal, there was no obvious tactic on either side. They would target each other’s backhands, which were less offensively potent than their forehands, but they were each still more than capable of doing damage with the two-hander. More often than not, the ideal gameplan was just attacking whenever the opportunity presented itself, because failing to take a chance to go on the offensive meant the other guy certainly would. It was this, the scorched-earth inching forward against the opponent’s seemingly invincible tennis, that led Djokovic and Nadal into their most exhausting, legendary matches. I imagine, on some level, each was fearful of playing the other, because they knew there was no easy route to victory. Every match, the possibility of a sequel to Madrid 2009 was there. And the 2011 Miami final was the first time they returned to the abyss.
Something started to happen deep in that third set, something that had not happened in years: Nadal started to fade physically. It wasn’t that noticeable; you won’t see it in the highlights of the match. It didn’t even happen until the do-or-die tiebreak, before which Nadal played very well—he had been two points away from winning the match as Djokovic served at 5-6. But at 2-1 up in the tiebreak, Nadal found himself at the mercy of Djokovic’s forehand. He sprinted from corner to corner a few times in an effort to get back on level terms in the rally, and indeed made a couple retrievals that likely would have been beyond the reach of any other human being alive, but a desperate lob dropped just long, and that seemed to sap the last of Nadal’s energy. He double faulted at 2-all. Down 3-2, he hit a poor return off a serve that had been hard but far from precise and couldn’t get back Djokovic’s follow-up forehand. At 4-2, Nadal did the unforgivable, missing a second serve return. At 5-2—a must-win point for the Spaniard—Djokovic locked him in his backhand corner with crosscourt forehands, usually one of Nadal’s best tricks, then pulled the trigger with a looping forehand winner down the line. Nadal, caught way out of position, barely moved for the ball.
You could see it then, the fruits of Djokovic’s labor. The Serb clenched his fist and kissed it lightly, standing tall, ready to return serve on the first of four match points at 6-2. Nadal advanced to the line to serve, the crowd still going wild—but then he hunched over. It wasn’t for long, maybe a second or two. He straightened up, then bent over again, breathing heavily, looking at the ground.
Djokovic had finally broken Nadal physically1.
Vidaković recalled the match during a 2022 interview, highlighting the magnitude of Djokovic being able to stay with Nadal physically after years of Rafa outlasting him. “Here, Djokovic looked just fine. He looked like he could do another entire match,” he told me. “At one point, there was a really long rally. Djokovic won the point, and Nadal was bending over. Doing a [Gael] Monfils-bend-over. When Monfils bends over, it looks like he’s about to die…Nadal bends over, sweat dripping from his face, and he does the Nadal worried look. And I’m thinking, is Nadal done? No fucking way.” The most telling thing about the match, Vidaković said, wasn’t that Nadal broke down, it was that Djokovic looked fresh even by the end of the match.
Down four match points, Nadal had a mini-recovery, saving the first on his serve (after which he hunched over yet again) and the second on Djokovic’s, ripping a vicious inside-out forehand and dinking a delicate volley winner at net. But the gap that had opened was too wide. At 6-4, Djokovic fired a careful, precise sliding serve out wide, advanced on Nadal’s mid-court return, and spun it away for a winner.
If Djokovic’s reaction after winning Indian Wells—arm pumps of increasing power and elation—reflected exuberance, his reaction after winning Miami reflected disbelief. He raised his arms slowly, a massive grin on his face. The win was more significant than Indian Wells in many ways. Yes, he had beaten Nadal from a set down there as well, but this had been the best Nadal, the Nadal of the fully plugged-in, high-quality deciding set. The Spaniard hadn’t given an inch when the pressure was on, hadn’t given Djokovic a foothold to work with, and Djokovic had been able to hammer away until he had earned one by himself. It had been his closest shave in 2011, having been two points away from defeat, and he had come through.
Djokovic being able to physically outlast Nadal, or keep pace with him at the very least, changed the entire dynamic of the rivalry. In the past, the Spaniard had always been able to count on that edge in endurance. If he could just stick around for long enough, Djokovic would get tired. With that advantage gone, Nadal’s hold on the matchup loosened considerably. It wasn’t that he had any problems sustaining his own intensity, but with Djokovic’s issues gone and his fitness so complete that he could potentially outlast Nadal himself, the matches went into a new territory. Nadal had never really had to force through heavy legs to beat an opponent before, at least not more than once or twice. And the baseline dynamics were difficult enough already. This wasn’t the Federer matchup, where Nadal always had a safe spot to aim at in the Swiss’s one-handed backhand. Against Djokovic, if he left a backhand down the line short and central, he would have to watch Djokovic’s peerless backhand send the ball flying into the opposite corner immediately. Nadal had to attack more frequently to maintain control of the rallies, but he liked to play with high-margin aggression, not line-licking winners. Djokovic was starting to force him further and further out of his comfort zone, and the Serb wouldn’t stop until Nadal had nothing left to fall back on.
Thanks so much for reading The Golden Rivalry, and for reading this far. If you’re just joining me, I’d encourage you to check out the previous chapters—though the format is not the same, this is written like a book, so this chapter is built on the foundation of the previous five.
The rivalry is starting to kick into high gear—I’m pretty excited to share what I’ve written about the matches to come. If you’ve enjoyed the ride so far and are able to contribute, please feel free to send an amount of your choice to me on Venmo (Owen-Lewis-43) or Paypal (@thegoldenrivalry). It’s greatly appreciated, more than I can say, as are your comments and tweets. No question or comment is too small. I’ll be back on Sunday with another huge chapter. Can’t wait to see you then. -Owen
As Matt wrote to me in his email, Nadal got heat stroke from his efforts in this match. Still, Djokovic gets the credit for forcing Nadal to the brink, just like Nadal gets the credit for forcing Djokovic to the brink of his in their early matches.