More than with most sports, to watch a tennis match is to
concentrate and meditate on every miniscule aspect, every tic, of the
participants on court. You can know a player by his forehand and his kick
serve, but you can also know him by his grunt, his headband, the way he walks
to the sideline, his reaction to a big win, the ritual he performs before
serving. Bjorn Borg, cool assassin, blew on his fingers as he was setting up to
serve. Roger Federer, nonchalant athlete, dribbled the ball between his legs as
he walked back from the net, in the days when he used to serve and volley. Andy
Roddick, power pitcher, drums the ball into the court. Nikolay Davydenko,
reluctant champion, taps it downward as gingerly as possible. Everyone does it
his or her own way, but I’ve never seen a pre-serve ritual quite like the one
that Ernests Gulbis has developed. When he gets to the baseline, he bounces the
ball up to eye level, then tips it farther upward with the back of his hand,
before letting it settle into his tossing hand. What does this little juggling move say about the
young Latvian’s personality? He’s obviously superstitious. More important, he’s
got to talent to waste. And at 21, he’s still young enough to waste it.
All that appears to be changing for Gulbis in 2010.
After failing to win two straight matches for much of last season, and being
embarrassed by Andy Murray at Wimbledon along the way, Gulbis is facing the new
year with his head on straight. He’s 10-4 so far, he won his first career title
in Delray, and he pushed Federer deep into a third set in Doha. Gulbis has
regained the glow of the sure-shot prospect that he had back when he came out
firing his cannon forehand in 2008. That glow had faded in ’09, when his
questionable work ethic—as well as his rumored extracurricular activities—nearly made
this wealthy man’s son into a walking punch line about spoiled youth and
squandered potential. Credit for the mini-turnaround must go to his new coach,
Hernan Gumy, whom Gulbis teamed up with at the end of last season. “He made
some big improvements in every aspect of my game,” Gulbis said in Delray.
Still, it’s not like the kid has grown up all in one day. His preparation for
the final included a Playstation session that lasted until 2:30 in the morning.
The question is, how much talent does he have to waste? Gulbis is now ranked No. 45, with a proverbial bullet next to his name.
Is he, as everyone asks when a young player surges, Top 10 material?
Let’s start by saying that reaching that exalted position is not as easy as it sounds. Or,
rather, it’s exactly as hard as it sounds. There are at least a thousand guys
with ATP rankings, and just 1 percent of them can be in the Top 10 on any given week. For
Gulbis to enter that elite percentile, someone must exit it. Is he ready to be
as consistent as, say, current No. 10 Fernando Gonzalez, or No. 9 Marin Cilic, a 20-year-old who also has a bullet next to his name?
Gulbis isn’t there yet, and he likely won’t be there this
season. But the raw skills, the things you can’t teach, are in place. He didn’t
drop a set in Delray. Even more impressive, he broke Ivo Karlovic three
times in the final. He did it by showing an uncanny ability to read the
direction of the big man’s first serve and get there in time to meet it out in
front. If the skills necessary to do that—the reaction time, the hand-eye
coordination, the racquet-head speed, the clean ball-striking—don’t make you
believe in his potential, nothing will.
What Gulbis’ game has lacked is texture. He has variety, in
the form of a superb drop shot, and explosiveness to burn. Give him an extra
millisecond to hit his forehand and you can consider the point over; move up to
challenge his second serve and you might find it kicking up into your face. But
he never had the flexibility to gauge the moment and adapt his
strokes to it. Like a human ball machine, every forehand was drilled full
blast. He didn’t change the tempo of the match if wasn’t going well, didn’t seem
to think much before he served, didn’t dig in and adjust to his opponent. It appeared that a rally couldn’t be over fast enough to suit
him. Even against Karlovic, there was still some evidence of his impatience. As
Jimmy Arias of the Tennis Channel noted, after Gulbis belted a screaming
roundhouse backhand into the net in the second set, there was no reason for him
to go for immediate winners against Karlovic. Gulbis had the natural advantage
from the ground, and he could afford to spend a little time constructing the
point, moving the big guy into his backhand corner and waiting for a shorter
slice to float back. It’s as if Gulbis’ ability to end a point from anywhere
means that he’s never had to develop nuances to his game.
The brain cramp on that backhand aside, Gulbis played a savvy match against
one of the tour’s trickiest opponents. It used to be, when you played Karlovic,
that keeping the ball in play was enough to earn you a service hold. Not so
anymore. As Gulbis recognized, Karlovic is consistent enough now that opponents
have to hit the ball hard and go for more—not that Gulbis has any trouble doing
that. But his tactics were impressive in two other ways. It was a windy day, so
he kept the ball far from the sidelines; that may be Tennis 101, but at least
Gulbis has opened the textbook. More surprising, he began the match by going
after Karlovic’s better shot, his forehand. Arias questioned this tactic, but
by the end of the first set, the pace of Gulbis’s serves and ground strokes had
completely broken Dr. Ivo’s forehand down. It left Karlovic, who also
couldn’t win points with his serve, with nowhere to turn.
All he could do was wait and hope that Gulbis would get
nervous and blow up on his own. This wasn’t a forlorn hope, as the kid has had
a history of winning first sets and going straight downhill from there. It appeared that it might happen again when Gulbis served, up a break, at 3-2 in the second. At
30-15, he double-faulted in fit of pique after getting what he thought was a
bad call. Here was the moment when the new Gulbis would be tested. On the next two points, instead of going for broke, he worked his way
to the net for the first time in the match. At 30-30, he negotiated a thorny
backhand volley in the wind by carving it crosscourt, where it blew away from
Karlovic. At 40-30, Gulbis showed off his forehand volley, angling a solid
passing shot crosscourt and onto the sideline for another winner. It was 4-2;
Karlovic never challenged again.
If this was the moment of truth for Gulbis, what does it tell us about the truth of his game and his future? It appears that he can be patient
and resourceful, that he can improvise, that he can win ugly—that, after all,
there may be texture and nuance underneath the cannon-fire. It should be there.
Off-court, Gulbis, whio was named after Ernest Hemingway, has a more nuanced
personality than many of his peers. He speaks in an intelligent semi-whisper
and mostly avoids clichés, and he has interests that range a little wider than
the latest Will Ferrell movie. Gulbis prefers David Lynch;
that may or may not require depth, but it definitely requires patience. Maybe
Gulbis, a child of privilege who is also a lonely pioneer in his country—as he
says, everything he does is a first for Latvian tennis—was ambivalent about the
lonely grunt work he needed to do to succeed as a pro. Maybe, like Andre
Agassi, he was a factory-made prodigy with a streak of self-doubt that led to
an early case of burnout.
Like I said, there are many ways to know a tennis player,
one of which is to hear what he says after a match. Gulbis’ pet word during his first couple of years on tour was “loser.” He didn’t want to be a “big loser” against Rafael
Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008. Later that season at the U.S. Open, he predicted that no
one would come to his press conference after his loss to Andy Roddick, because,
“Nobody is interested in losers.” This was the voice of the ironical
post-adolescent, the overgrown child.
In Delray, Gulbis had a new voice and a
new pet word, courtesy of his coach: “enjoy.” “My coach told me before the match, ‘Just go on court. Enjoy your
first final. You’re a young guy, enjoy it.’” You can read a lot into body
language, but you can read even more into real language. This was the voice
of a young man enjoying something for the first time: feeling like a winner.
