Haas no match for Raonic’s youth and power
Canadian uses 145-m.p.h. serve to advance, will face Kyrgios in third round
“(Milos) played extremely well in the beginning and put me under pressure. He took a lot of my confidence away.” TOMMY HAAS
WIMBLEDON— I grow old… I grow old… I shall wear the bottoms of my tennis shorts rolled. (With apologies to T. S. Eliot.) Sentiment was with the old guy but hardboiled tennis prefers youth and power.
Thus did Milos Raonic disappoint a clearly partisan — pro-Tommy Haas crowd — by dusting off the 37-yearold German veteran in four sets Wednesday afternoon.
That puts the decade-plus younger pride of Thornhill — which he long ago traded in for Monte Carlo, imagine that — safely into the third round at the All-England Club, there to knock heads and big-bop serves with the current bad boy of tennis, Young Turk (actually he’s Australian) Nick Kyrgios, four years his junior.
Raonic dispatched Haas in four sets 6-0, 6-2, 6-7(5), 7-6(4).
In the process, on the hottest day in Wimbledon history, he uncorked the third-fastest ace in SW19 history: a 145-m.p.h. rocket.
“I wish I had a serve like that just once in a match,” Haas marveled after Raonic put him away with a brace of aces in the final game.
Yet Haas, returning to the sport following arthroscopic surgery on his right shoulder last June — only the most recent of multiple procedures under the knife — is something of a marvel himself.
On Monday, he became the oldest man (37 years, 100 days) to win a match at Wimbledon since Jimmy Connors in 1991.
“He was playing a lot more aggressive and controlling more,” said Raonic of his opponent, who recovered from the first-set bagel to make a hugely entertaining encounter out of a match that unfolded under blistering temperatures. “I was fortunate that I played well at the end of the fourth set.”
Not a hair out of place for Raonic when it was all over after two hours and 34 minutes. (That hair, by the way, has a Twitter account of its own, as does “The Sleeve.”)
Never cracked a smile either, maintaining his poker-face throughout, even as the audience pressed ever more volubly for Haas.
The seventh seed was devastating on serve, with 29 aces up that sleeve.
Haas could summon only six points in the 18-minute first set and won merely two games in the second. Yet he tapped into experience and cleverness in the third, claiming the set on a tiebreak and surviving Raonic’s overwhelming if sometimes erratic howitzer serve.
After saving three match points in the 12th game, the former world No. 2 arm-twisted the 24-year-old into another decider.
“He came out firing and swinging away,” said Haas of that whip-quick first set. “He played extremely well in the beginning and put me under pressure. He took a lot of my confidence away.”
The German’s ATP ranking is down in the nether region at 861. He was the lowest-ranked player to start in this year’s men’s draw, playing here on a protected ranking of No. 25.
But look at it another way: Raonic was all of six years old and hadn’t even picked up a racquet yet when Haas made his Wimbledon debut in 1997. Haas added about the man who beat him: “I remember when he came up,17,18 years old. Back then he already had big weapons. He was just not controlling them yet.”
And it is a formidable weapon, that signature serve — a weapon of mass destruction on the court.
Raonic sealed the victory, though, with a backhander in the second tiebreaker of the match. It was in fact the backhander that was on best behaviour, while the forehand side went into the bottom of the net on more than a few third set returns. “I just had to sort of find a way, a little bit better, from the baseline, find a way to return better.
“I only really started figuring things out a little bit midway through that fourth set, getting sort of back on top. I had a love-30 game where I had a forehand to make love-40 and then I had the love-40. But all in all, it was like any three-out-of-five set is going to be. It’s going to go back and forth.”
In the bigger picture, Raonic’s Court 1 acquittal was enormously boosted by 61 winners.
It’s taken a couple of years for him to feel comfortable on the Wimbledon one-eighth inch lawn, not a favourite surface.
“Before, I thought I could get away with just throwing (the serve) down because it’s grass and sort of slides away from the guy. Then last year I learned quite a bit how important it is to keep going for it full out all the time. Not flat but high-paced. Not slowing it down to sort of try and be fancy and hit the spots more.”
A year ago, of course, Raonic advanced to his first Grand Slam semifinal, imperiously set aside by Roger Federer. On now to a much anticipated third-round match with Kyrgios, who beat Argentine Juan Monaco 7-6(5), 6-3, 6-4.
It was Raonic who halted the Australian’s stunning teenage 2014 breakthrough at Wimbledon, defeating him in the quarters. A wild-card, Kyrgios had ousted world No. 1 Rafael Nadal in the fourth round, hitting a career-high 37 aces — most Nadal had ever faced.
Raonic revisited his encounter with Kyrgios. “I remember that there were many difficult moments but I felt the thing that helped me the most was my calm demeanour. In that sense I had quite a few opportunities a few different times. I wasn’t making the most of them but my attitude was what helped me get over that hump and clear my way through that match.”
He was asked whether it’s unfair to contrast his cool manner with the volatile Australian, as became the instant trend once the head-to-head was confirmed. “I really couldn’t care less.”
His prediction, stylistically: “I think, for both of us, it’s going to be first-strike tennis. We both do well, especially when serving, on probably two-to-five ball rallies. That’s both our strengths. It’s about who can manage to take it over and dictate more in those situation.”
They look the type for a long career rivalry.
And as for Haas, he might never pass this way again. Or he could . . . dare to eat a peach.