Other men, as usual, have walked away with the satisfactionand the trophies, but no one deserves more of your sympathy at this early stageof the tennis season than Stanislas Wawrinka.
The powerful, sensitive Swiss veteran was gallant in defeatat the Australian Open, where he kept taking chances and came closer thananyone to beating Novak Djokovic.
So it continued in Geneva. Last week, he lost the longestmatch in the Davis Cup’s long history as he and his partner, Marco Chiudinelli,were beaten, 24-22, in the fifth set after 7 hours 1 minute of tennis by TomasBerdych and Lukas Rosol of the Czech Republic. Then on Sunday, Wawrinka lost anextended, four-set duel with Berdych that clinched victory for the Czechs.
That was quite enough to make a grown man cry.
“I train every day for this,” Wawrinka told the Swiss mediaafter breaking down in the postmatch news conference. “I so appreciated thesupport of the public.”
The crowd in the Palexpo in Geneva was significantly smallerthan it would have been if Wawrinka had been joined on the Swiss team by hiscountry’s best player, Roger Federer. But Federer sat out the first-roundmatch, as he has sat out so many first-round Davis Cup matches during his gloryyears.
Since 1999, the Swiss have yet to win one without him andare increasingly grumpy about his absence, all the more so after he spent theoff-season playing lucrative exhibitions in South America. Even Wawrinka,Federer’s long-faithful sidekick and Olympic doubles partner, voiced hisdispleasure heading into the match against the Czechs.
But Federer’s remarkable durability at age 31 is as muchabout intelligent scheduling as it is about his passion for the game. And if hehas avoided major injury, it is also because he has avoided digging too deeplyinto his reserves.
Even last year, when he did commit to playing the openinground for Switzerland, the Swiss were upset at home by John Isner and theAmericans.
Davis Cup remains a maybe, not a must, for the world’s verybest players, and it will be intriguing to see whether Djokovic sticks with hisdecision to recommit to the Serbian team in 2013.
This is the first time Canada has advanced past the firstround of Davis Cup’s World Group, but with Raonic winning the decisive match,it finished off Spain on Sunday. It was a major upset in terms of recentachievement “ Spain has won the cup five times in the past 13 seasons “ but noupset at all considering who actually took part.
The Spanish were without their best players, including theworld No. 4, David Ferrer, and their biggest star, Rafael Nadal, who is finallyset to return to the circuit this week in ViÃa del Mar, Chile, after more thanseven months’ absence.
The tennis landscape has shifted since Nadal last competed:Andy Murray is now an Olympic and Grand Slam champion; Ferrer is the top-rankedSpaniard. But much remains the same: Djokovic is still No. 1, Federer is stilla factor in his 30s, and Wawrinka, no matter how agonizingly close he has comethis year, still cannot quite generate the strokes and breaks to win thebiggest matches.
