Did Stubborness Cost Thiem His First Major?

Wawrinka was a doormat. With Magnus Norman, he wasn’t.

I do get worried seeing players complacent. I get it – Australian Open finals, magnificent achievement. Fantastic work. Just extraordinary.

Sure about that? Where’s the praise today for Robin Soderling? Cedric Pioline? Anyone heard of Martin Verkerk? Still excited about Tomas Berdych? Rainer Schüttler?

As much as I loved Baghdatis and Fernando Gonzalez, both past Aussie finalists, I am nonetheless reminded of what Brad Gilbert recently said.

Best four things a player hears after a slam final.

Game. Set. Match. Your name.

And yes I think Thiem is soft in slam finals. He is until he isn’t.

Wow, the Muster hate…not justified.

Muster ripped players hearts out. Thiem is sweet and generous. That’s fine…after the match.

Muster, a master of wicked tennis. From Davis Cup 1990:

“Muster arrived in Vienna with a 23-0 record on clay in Davis Cup competition, and he wasn’t about to let style prevail over his considerable emotional substance. Screaming, stoking, feeding off Agassi’s pace as well as the roaring arias from the crowd, Muster annihilated Agassi 6-2, 6-2, 7-6.”

The U.S. still won that crazy tie against Austria in 1990, but Muster beat Agassi and Chang, badly. Muster knew how to use the elements. The crowd may not be part of the court, but every player should realize: THE CROWD IS PART OF THE TENNIS COURT. USE IT.

Thanks for the link. Diego has a fascinating story. I see the article is part of a series, and am looking forward to reading some of the others.

Also not sure what I am making up. Harold listed 10 players better on clay than Muster. Muster was 2-9 against Sampras and lost to him at Roland Garros. He was 1-4 in Slam matches against Courier, including 0-2 at Roland Garros. He beat Agassi on clay a few times, no doubt. Domi Thiem has also beaten Rafa on clay, however. And Muster was 0-3 against Kuerten.

This is a player I am supposed to bow down to? Come on. Spare me if I can’t ‘Muster’ up any excitement for a player who couldn’t solve the clay court genius of Pete Sampras in a best of 5 match.

Yes, Scoop’s emotional intensity theory matches up with Thiem’s problem in being ahead and stopping himself. I don’t think the match was entirely on his racquet but it was close – if you’re up two sets to one, you have your foot on the other player. And if you decide everything is going well, then it’s over.

I don’t know if Medvedev, if he were up two sets to one on Djokovic, would have closed it out – but given Medvedev has a little more ability to match his intensity to his opponent, he might have.

Murray was a different guy with Lendl in his court. The way he went after Federer in the Olympics in London and then Djokovic a year later on the same court, that version of Murray was so business like it was frightening.

I think Kenin was pretty scary in the mental ferocity department this whole week.

Scoop is right, Thiem could do worse than, given he has all the shots, watch some tape of himself from Vienna if not watch re-runs of Hewitt during Davis Cup, or even Massu during his Olympics run in 2004 (which was an insane comeback against Mardy Fish). He can’t keep checking out when he’s up like that.

I consider myself a bit of a tennis historian and remember well when Muster became a Grand Slam champion in 95 and didn’t even have the decency to directly tell Wimbledon he wasn’t coming.

“I have a few days off and I’m playing a tournament in Austria,” Muster said after Paris. “Then I have another two weeks off and will play the second part of the season.”

In 1996, he let his agent do his dirty work: “When they call him on Monday, they will soon find out whether he’s there or not.”

That folks is why Muster is considered one of the biggest gutless quitters in tennis history. He will never be considered a great champion for how he disrespected Wimbledon.

Muster was awful on grass. In fact, the grass today as you know wasn’t the grass of then. It was a miracle Agassi won Wimbledon on the “true grass”. The new strands allow for a higher bounce, which was decades ago and in Muster’s time not part of Wimbledon (at all).

First, in passing, Kenin’s win reminds me most of Thomas Johansson’s 2002 AO victory on the men’s side. Kenin is likely to have a bigger career than Johansson, and he was a veteran of course, but otherwise the parallels are clear: Johansson was the sixteenth seed, came through a draw which had been cleared of seeded players but not decimated—he had to beat Safin to claim the title along with other seeded but lesser players, and while no one would have put him on a pre-tournament list of favorites he was a strong player (and underrated for his tenacity) and it wasn’t a shock that he won.

Johansson played under the radar, stayed under the radar, and greatly enjoyed his career-making win and silencing his Swedish critics even if the win didn’t boil the oceans with the media or stir up the tennis world.

I can’t resist weighing in on the Thomas Muster half-empty or half-full debate. I saw Muster play in person at least half a dozen times and countless times on TV…how one evaluates his career has many parallels with how we rate golfers or baseball players all-time—is it Slams versus regular events, best of era versus steady achiever, versatility versus specialism?

It is also like baseball debates in that there were a passel of great clay court players roughly in the same era as Muster (Wilander, Courier, Kuerten), just as there are frequently a cluster of outfielders or first basemen or pitchers of the same generation whose stats seem impressive but who weren’t regarded necessarily in the first rank in their heyday, either by peers or pundits.

For me anyone who wins 44 ATP titles (more than Rosewall, Edberg, or Newcombe), even if mostly on clay, and mainly lower and mid-tier events, belongs high in the pantheon, even if he wasn’t the absolute best of his generation in most years (though getting to #1 doesn’t happen by accident).

I also think it matters how respected you are by your peers and Muster ranks well in that regard…other than his misadventures on grass (and Muster’s camp would tell you that the disrespect from Wimbledon was mutual because they seeded him well below his ranking). No one ever went into a match with Thomas Muster and expected an easy day at the office—probably including those Challenger opponents he was still playing in his mid-40s.

You could say the same about David Ferrer—who is the closest equivalent to Muster in more recent years—but Muster got much better results than Ferrer despite his losing record to the very highest-ranked players in Slams, whom he competed well against. (Or, to put it a different way, Muster was ahead of his time: he was made for the age of UTR).

There is a deeper issue here—the way that tennis observers evaluate the geniuses and the grinders in the history of tennis–and please forgive me as I tie this in passing to Scoop’s prescient remarks on Thiem and the will to win.

There were many years in the early 1980s, when Ivan Lendl was in the process of losing four straight Grand Slam finals and tennis writers doubted his inner hunger and his will to win. “Choke-o-slovakian” was among the nicer things said about him. Lendl, it was argued, lacked artistry and grace and his power baseline style was an affront to the elegant all-court “pattern play” tennis employed by the champions of the past.

And it was all true. Lendl was a grinder. He was made, not born. There had always been grinders, of course—think Eddie Dibbs and Harold Solomon and Ion Tiriac and a lot of now-forgotten Europeans– but Lendl was the first to reach the pinnacle of the sport through athleticism and brute power, not innate feel and touch and giftedness (or, at least, what looked like that kind of effortlessness).

So travel back with me to the men’s French Open final of 1984, McEnroe versus Lendl (viewable in its entirety on YouTube), to my mind the most significant match of the men’s Open era. For the first two sets, like a supernova burning the brightest before it fades, McEnroe, on clay no less, plays the greatest and most inspired version of artistic old-time tennis ever seen—chips, angles, volleys, change of pace, service variety—the gamut.

And by the third set McEnroe starts to fade just a bit. But the key thing is that Lendl visibly acquires self-belief—in the sense that he becomes less introverted, comes out of his shell, works the crowd— and at the same time he begins fully to trust his power game. If he turns up the power while maintaining consistency off the ground, he can simply hit through McEnroe and all the latter’s brilliant embellishments become, from the point of winning, irrelevant. (It’s a bit like the scene from Raiders of the Lost Ark, released around the same time, when Harrison Ford’s antagonist carries out a series of impossibly complicated sword moves, and Ford simply shrugs and shoots him.) Lendl gains passion, gains confidence, and gives his all, literally throwing up before the awards ceremony.

McEnroe, then and after, grumbled about Lendl’s lack of artistry and grace and the direction the game was headed, but the Rubicon had been crossed. The peak of the tennis world is still divided into grinders and geniuses (think Federer and FAA on the one hand, Courier and Djokovic on the other, and remember when Djokovic was the Clown Prince who couldn’t win the Big One?), but in one respect we are all Lendl’s children. Unless you are Ivo Karlovic, you must be able to play a power baseline game adequately just to get into the vestibule of the club…there are no more Miloslav Mecir’s, at least not in the men’s singles draw.

So to wrap up— Thiem could certainly use the kind of fervor that Lendl would belatedly acquire, though whether Muster can impart what he once embodied is possibly another matter. And it may not be too late for Thiem to do so given that thirty in tennis is the new twenty-five.

And we are, I think, prone to underrate the grinders in modern tennis history compared to the geniuses. (Wilander, with seven slams if I recall, is another example of a grinder being underrated despite his stellar record.) Muster fares among the worst in that aesthetic comparison because he was among the first generation of post-Lendl power baseliners, and because his dogged style made Lendl look like Fred Astaire. Yet in another respect Muster’s game was just ahead of its time…a war of attrition and routine perfection staged in long rallies at high velocity…in short, the foundation stone of modern men’s tennis.

I am totally bewildered by Thiem getting such a hard time here because he lost to Djokovic. This is DJOKOVIC we are talking about – the guy who has the record number of AO titles! Before the tournament started virtually everyone predicted Novak would win it, despite Rafa and Fed being in the mix.

Dominic, only recently considered a threat on hard courts, made it to the final when other, more highly regarded players, did not. He took the match to 5 sets. He was a bit fortunate that Novak lost steam for a while, but then Novak got back to his normal form. I was rooting for Dominic but, in all honesty, would have been pleasantly surprised if he had won.

Scoop, your solution for all players seems to be that they need to “roar like a lion.” Then it is amazing that Federer, hardly a roarer on the court, won 1 Slam, much less 20.

Scoop, you did not address my point that Fed does not show tons of emotion on the court, and he has done OK. 🙂

As far as a comparison of Murray to Thiem, Andy lost his first 4 Slam finals, so it’s not as though he did better than Dominic at this stage of his career.

Federer is a huge lion. I don’t see why it’s a big deal to say that Thiem could channel some of this to his benefit, show the crowd he intends to stay in the biggest matches until the final ball.

The crowd is part of the court. Young players…THE CROWD IS PART OF THE COURT!!!