Men\u2019s Tennis Forum<\/a> a few days ago. In one section, Borg explained his definition of percentage tennis:<\/p>\nMy synonym for percentage tennis is patience. I want to hit one more ball in court than my rival. I want him to think I’m much more patient so he’ll make a mistake either in execution (racquet error) or in picking a low-percentage ripper for the lines.<\/i><\/p>\n
It worked well enough to win six French Open titles, four of them consecutive. Rafael Nadal<\/b> was going for his fourth consecutive French Open today and his opponent for the last three has been Roger Federer<\/b>. I don\u2019t know what Rafa\u2019s odds were but you wouldn\u2019t have made much money off him because he hasn\u2019t dropped a set here and only one player, Novak Djokovic<\/b>, pushed him to a tiebreaker.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d have made a bunch of money, though, if you\u2019d bet that Roger would win a total of four games in the match because no one expected that. How could Rafa \u2013 who\u2019s undefeated at the French Open \u2013 have possibly improved? This is how: he played slightly lower percentage tennis.<\/p>\n
He didn\u2019t stand way behind the baseline and he didn\u2019t play patiently. No, he didn\u2019t turn into James Blake<\/b> or Dmitry Tursunov<\/b> overnight and rip every ball in sight, but he did move closer to the baseline and he did flatten out some balls that he would have hit with topspin in the past. This is how he explained it after the match:<\/p>\n
I play more inside the court\u2026so I play more aggressive. Not the typical clay court style, for sure, but I play more aggressive than usually.<\/i><\/p>\n
Roger was surely watching Rafa\u2019s matches here so it\u2019s surprising that he seemed so shell-shocked. Rafa was up 3-1 in the first set when he hit some flat backhands and broke Roger at love. Roger was already walking around with his head down \u2013 the official pose of the befuddled \u2013 and it didn\u2019t improve as Rafa\u2019s court positioning allowed him to hit passing shots before Roger had fully arrived at the net.<\/p>\n
Roger recovered his state of mind briefly with a break to get to 1-2 in the second set \u2013 only the second game he\u2019d won in the entire match. Three games later, he hit one of those extreme angled cross court backhands he used against Rafa earlier this year but Rafa calmly hit a winner off it and Roger tipped his head back in disbelief.<\/p>\n
Roger was playing more aggressively himself and it was working as he held his serve twice in a row to get to 3-3 in the set, but his mental state was still in the doldrums. In the next game, Rafa hit a winner off a net cord \u2013 which you expect after all – and Roger looked like a bedraggled rag doll as his head drooped and he threw his arm down in frustration. He never really recovered and, unbelievably, he didn’t win another game.<\/p>\n
Roger, baby, Rafa has been nearly impossibly to beat on clay the entire tournament so we didn\u2019t expect you to beat him, but dropping your head and flailing away, that is too much to bear. Three all in the second set and you couldn\u2019t win even one more game? Novak Djokovic<\/b> put up a better fight than you did. And what\u2019re you going to do at Wimbledon?<\/p>\n
The match was so short the network was reduced to showing last year\u2019s Wimbledon final and somewhere in the back of Roger\u2019s mind he must be thinking: if Rafa is playing this much better on clay by being more aggressive, how good is he going to be on grass? And what do I have to do to keep up with him?<\/p>\n
After the match he admitted that Rafa had improved:<\/p>\n
He no longer plays short balls as he did in the past. You can no longer attack him on his forehand, as I could in the past. He is getting much more aggressive, and it’s becoming much more difficult.<\/i><\/p>\n
Difficult isn\u2019t the half of it. Rafa\u2019s performance was masterful. But Roger was decidedly absent and we didn\u2019t hear his usual \u201cI\u2019m getting close to beating Rafa on clay\u201d because he isn\u2019t. He\u2019s as far away as he\u2019s even been and it\u2019s hard to see that changing.<\/p>\n
It looked like Djokovic might be the one to move pass Rafa and Roger, especially with his hard court skills and Rafa\u2019s problems on hard court, but Rafa isn\u2019t done yet and a title at Wimbledon, which looks a whole lot more likely after today, might get him to number one first.<\/p>\n
And what if Rafa improves on hard court? That\u2019s a scary thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Rafael Nadal won the French Open today by beating Roger Federer 6-1, 6-3, 6-0. Can you believe it? I came across an excerpt from Bjorn Borg\u2019s 1980 autobiography, My Life and Game, on the Men\u2019s Tennis Forum a few days ago. In one section, Borg explained his definition of percentage tennis: My synonym for percentage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-902","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=902"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/902\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=902"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=902"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/ninarota.com\/tennis\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=902"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}