ROUGH RIDE FOR RAFA
Tennis heavyweight bounced by larger-than-life qualifier.
WIMBLEDON— Rafael Nadal has made more than $75 million in direct tennis earnings, not counting his many lucrative endorsement deals.
Dustin Brown spent three years living out of a VW van — purchased by his parents, who took out a loan — tootling around Europe and entering obscure tournaments.
While Nadal was racking up 14 Grand Slam titles, the German-Jamaican Brown was counting pennies and washing out his kit in laundromats.
Nadal, in the superstar stratosphere, came into Wimbledon very much an earth-bound 10th seed, as his play has gone worrisomely south. But still. He’s Rafa, possessor of possibly the most magnificent forehand the sport has ever seen. Brown is a qualifier, ranked 102nd in the world. Yet it was Brown, with his waist-length dreadlocks flying, who shockingly got the better of the legend on Thursday, eliminating the Spaniard in the second round at SW19, 7-5, 3-6, 6-4, 6-4.
Then the 30-year-old journeyman — and even that descriptor is a kindness because he barely merits such a designation — lifted up his sleeveless top and tapped the tattoo on his torso: A portrait of his dad.
And poor Rafael, all twitchy and bamboozled by his opponent’s eccentric style of tennis, is staring squarely at the downswing of his extraordinary career. The whispers have become reached a voluble crescendo: Is Rafa done? Ousted in the quarter-finals at Roland Garros, which the 29-year-old practically owns — and ending his 39-match winning streak there — was bad enough. But knocked out of Wimbledon in the first week for the third time in four years against a distant also-ran might be the point of no return, as Nadal could not handle Brown’s freakish fast returns, mixed in with a heavy dose of all-overthe-place drop shots and low volleys.
For Nadal, it was a fourth straight Wimbledon loss to an opponent ranked in three figures: 100th, 135th, 144th and, yesterday, 102nd.
“Keep going,” Nadal vowed afterwards, while looking terribly downcast. “It’s not the end. Is a sad moment for me. But life continues. My career, too. I have to keep going and working more than ever to try to change that dynamic.”
Alas, there’s not much dynamic about Rafael these days. And it’s painful to watch a colossi cut down to mere mortal size.
The two-time Wimbledon champion and five-time finalist simply couldn’t figure out Brown’s unorthodox tactics, a kind of throwback to the era of aggressive net play, almost completely eschewing the baseline game that today predominates. Nadal was left stumbling, chased over deep areas of the court, never finding a rhythm.
But he was gracious about it because he is a class act. “I am a good loser,” he said, smiling wryly. “I am not happy but accept that I am not good enough. I never considered myself that good to not accept when somebody’s better than you, no?”
And perhaps this outcome shouldn’t have come as such a gobsmacking outcome. Brown has defeated Nadal before, pulverizing him in two sets at a grass court tournament in Halle, Germany, last year. But still. He’d never before defeated a seed at any Grand Slam, losing all five of his previous matches against seeds at majors. He’d been dumped in his 11 previous matches against seeds at all tournaments and has never been ranked higher — fleetingly — than 78.
Brown played with joy yesterday, though, and utter abandonment, a funky version of tennis that combined sheer ingenuity with high-risk second serves and slicing forehands — and all those befuddling volleys, half-volleys, flick-of-the-wrist pseudo volleys that just kept falling in: 58 winners.
A total showman and the crowd — which has never stopped loving Nadal and didn’t yesterday even though clearly pulling for the upstart — lapped it all up.
“I’ve never been on Centre Court and I thought I’d freak out,” a giddy Brown said afterward. “I don’t know if it was because I had beaten him in Halle but I felt comfortable. I had nothing to lose and that made it a lot easier for me.”
He did it in front of his proud parents, German mother Inga and Jamaican father Leroy.
Brown was born in Germany, immigrated to Montego Bay with his parents as a youth, then returned to Germany complaining that Jamaican sports authorities were not being sufficiently supportive.
And, really, you can count the number of elite Jamaican tennis players over the decades on the fingers of one hand. (One of them, though, was Doug Burke, now residing in Toronto, who immigrated to Canada in 1978 with his parents and became Canadian junior champion.)
That tattoo of his father, Brown got it last April. “I’ve always wanted to have a tattoo. I have the (same) portrait of my dad at home in my bedroom also. I don’t get to see him that often.” Commentator John McEnroe described yesterday’s spectacle as one of the all-time greatest performances he had ever witnessed.
“He said the same thing to me!’’ Brown enthused at his press conference. “It’s a great feeling for him to say that, you know, from the generation that was playing like that, playing serve and volley, coming to the net a lot. It was great to be able to do that today and do it for that long.”
There was hardly a game, a point, in the match that Brown didn’t rise to, en route to acing it out in the fourth set.
“The point was to take him out of his comfort zone,” he explained. “If I would stay in the back and rally with him left, right, that would not be a very good match for me, I know that. The second set, he got into a little bit and that was very difficult for me because you’ve got to put the volley on a dime in the corner.”
It was a bravura performance and Brown savoured the moment, recognizing that all the stars had aligned for him on the grass that he loves but Nadal dislikes. “I wouldn’t want to play him on clay or hard court because it would make playing my type of tennis even more difficult.”
He next faces Viktor Troicki, of Serbia, seeded 22nd. But it will be near-impossible to match the stunner of Thursday, as the early evening sun’s slanting rays bathed Centre Court.
On and off the court, Brown dances to his own beat, a reggae beat, an off-the-beaten-path beat, though the van is gone.
“All of that has made me the person I am, tennis-wise and also as a person and as a character. And I guess all of that led to this day, today, which is obviously a great day, the best day of my life so far.”