Novak, Adrift

Besides La Décima, of everything else that happened during the French Open, it was Novak Djokovic all but sprinting scared from the court during and after his third set against Dominic Thiem that my mind keeps coming back to. To think that a year ago, he looked absolutely invincible. Now, he floats along in a tiny lifeboat in the middle of a wide, wide ocean, and lacks any obvious means of propulsion.

I was going through old recordings on the DVR, and I happened to find the last fifteen minutes of the final of last year's U.S. Open. The narrative of the Open going into that match was, "See, this summer was just a blip. Novak is back in the final." But I believe strongly now that his erstwhile success there hid just how big the problem he was facing really was. It took him four sets to get out of his first round match against Jerzy Janowicz, the kind of player he was beating six months earlier in a fashion that looked more like a workout on the practice court than an actual competitive match. He got a walkover in the next round, then his opponent retired just six games in in the third. Yes, in the fourth, he dispatched Kyle Edmund in three easy sets. In the quarters, he got up two sets to none against Jo-Wilfred Tsonga before Tsonga retired. He looked shaky in beating Gael Monfils in four sets, Gael Monfils who played a strange, almost disrespectful match, appearing to want to annoy Novak more than actually play against him. Monfils admitted afterward that he simply didn't believe that he could actually beat Novak Djokovic, which I promise you guaranteed that he couldn't. But all of that was forgotten as Djokovic made the final. He made the final! Novak is back!

He won the first set in that final in a tiebreak, but he lost the second and third and, at the point where my recording started, was down a break in the fourth. Over the course of the match, he'd been pretty much comprehensively outplayed by Stan Wawrinka. During one of his final return game, the camera caught him wearing a look on his face just like we saw last week against Dominic Thiem. It was not just that he was losing, and he didn't like to lose. He looked, instead, like a man utterly lost. Like the question he was asking himself wasn't, "Why can't I win today?" but instead, "Who is this person in what used to be my body?"

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