Even if you follow tennis fairly closely, there’s a good chance you’d never heard the name Lukas Rosol before today. There’s a good reason for that – he turns 27 next month, but he hasn’t done much on the ATP Tour. He has a sub-.500 record in singles play this year. He’s never made it past the third round of a major (his third round performance was at last year’s French Open), he’s never gotten out of the first round at the Australian or U.S. Open, and he’d already achieved his best result at Wimbledon this year… by reaching the second round.
That’s where you’d figure it would end, since Rosol’s opponent in that second round today was Rafa Nadal, two-time Wimbledon champ, five-time finalist, and one of the greatest players ever. This was going to be over quickly, Rosol would be the sacrificial lamb early-round major opponents of Rafa are, and we’d all move one step closer to another Nadal-Djokovic final. Except: from the beginning, Rosol gave Rafa trouble. The first set went to a tiebreak – Rafa won, but it had to go to 11-9 first. And then… Rosol took two sets.
Quite an accomplishment, but then Nadal stormed back, taking the fourth 6-2. This had to be it. Sometimes great players get pushed to five sets by upstart challengers. It just happened to Djokovic at the French. Now Nadal had him where he wanted him. Rafa wouldn’t drop the fifth set. The fifth set is when he finally overwhelms these pesky underdogs. They can’t keep up mentally. He’ll drive them crazy staying in points. He’ll pump his fist and yell “VAMOS!” over and over.
But Rosol kept serving the crap out of the ball.
And before you knew it, he was serving for the match. But could he finish it off? John McEnroe listed reason after reason why Rosol was in for the toughest challenge of his life. This was Rafa Nadal Rosol was playing. He has to think about how close he is. How the guy across from him has 11 majors and will almost certainly retire with more. He’ll think about all that and his legs will begin to feel heavy, McEnroe said. There was no reason to doubt any of it.
And then, Rosol went back out and did this:
McEnroe wasn’t alone in not believing what he’d seen (hell, we just went back and watched the video again so we’d believe it ourselves). But there it was: an unbelievable – Sampras-like – display of pure power rendering Nadal’s legendary defensive ability, his ability to stay in almost any point, useless.
And that’s where this all did make a little sense: the other McEnroe brother, Patrick, talked after the match about how Rosol went for broke, went all-out with every shot. That’s what the people who’ve stunned Nadal before have done. When Robin Soderling handed Nadal the only French Open loss he’s ever experienced in 2009, he did it by hitting as big as possible with no fear. Jo-Wilfried Tsonga blew him away at the Australian Open four years ago with unrelenting firepower. Even when he got pushed to five sets at the French last year, it was John Isner – one of the biggest servers on tour – doing the pushing.
Still – Rafa lost in the second round. To this guy. That’s no insult to Rosol – he just hadn’t done anything in his career to give you even the remotest idea he could hang with Nadal. But that’s why sports are fun. There was no logical reason to believe this could happen – and yet it happened anyway.
And it makes the rest of this tournament very interesting (if arguably less interesting than it would be with Nadal in it). Most people had him penciled in as a finalist. Who gets there now? Well, the highest seed remaining on that side of the draw is Andy Murray. Murray is, of course, from the UK. No one from the UK has won Wimbledon in three quarters of a century. Few would have expected Murray to get past Nadal. Nadal’s not there anymore. No pressure, Andy.
But if we could offer Murray one bit of advice before he’s nearly suffocated by the expectations of his countrymen: watch that clip above. Play like that. And if we could imagine Murray’s response to our hypothetical advice, we’d picture four words coming back our way, four words that couldn’t be truer: “Easier said than done.”
Getty photo, by Clive Rose
