Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic – this order sounds right – have come together to create an immense era in the game.
There cannot be too many complaints about that. But as the deep red of Roland Garros hovers into view again, traditionally the most idiosyncratic of the grand slam tournaments, it might be nice to be surprised by a genuine “dirt rat” again.
Dirt rats are, according to Andre Agassi, what the legendary coach Nick Bolletieri used to call those European clay-court specialists that once populated the tour.
Bolletieri and Agassi used the term derisively. Writing of the 1988 clay swing, while playing the Italian Open, Agassi felt the surface remade him at some molecular level.
When he arrived in Paris he expected more of the same. “Walking into the locker room at Roland Garros, I see all the clay experts leaning against the walls, leering,” he writes in his autobiography, Open.
“They’ve been here for months, practising, waiting for the rest of us to finish hard courts and fly into their clay lair.”
Agassi sensed the otherness of the French Open, the only grand slam tournament that felt as if it was being intruded upon by the rest of the tennis season.
It was the only grand slam tournament that required knowledge of a language other than English.
There alone did its winners thank the crowds in their language. Paris lapped it up, as when that most American of Americans, Jim Courier, won in 1992. “Je parle francais comme une vache espagnole” – I speak French like a Spanish cow.
The sense of propriety for the French Open was best exhibited by the dirt rats. The French Open, each of their wins seemed to say, only let its own win. Dirt rats used to annoy me. They upset tennis narratives.
There you would have Boris Becker, Stefan Edberg, Ivan Lendl, or Mats Wilander winning slam tournaments.
Here, suddenly and shudderingly in May, would appear one guy whose name you could not pronounce, who you would barely hear of outside the clay season, who would win the French.
Most vivid in that memory was Sergi Bruguera, who slugged his way to titles at Roland Garros in 1993 and 1994. He never made it past the fourth round at any other slam event.
For a time through that decade its winner’s list made it the weirdest grand slam tournament. There were hardcore dirt rats, such as Bruguera, Andres Gomez, Alberto Costa, Juan Carlos Ferrero and Gaston Gaudio.
Franco Squillari never won, but was, according to Brad Gilbert, “the dirt rat of dirt rats” and had his most dirt-rat season in 2000, when he won consecutive titles on German clay and made the semis in Paris.
These guys existed for the duration of the tournament or season and then vanished – in a puff of clay.
Champions such as Gustavo Kuerten, Carlos Moya and Thomas Muster were not strictly dirt rats because they gave more of themselves to clay but at least looked like they cared about other surfaces.
For about three years Nadal looked like he may become the most prominent dirt rat in the game but ended up helping subvert the idea of dirt rats, making it OK, even desirable, for them to broaden out.
Alongside Federer and Djokovic, the change in surfaces mattered less to this trio than it did to an Agassi or Pete Sampras, or Becker and Edberg. Since then the modern prevalent style of play has also subsumed the dirt rat.
Most players now, in theory, are dirt rat kind of players: happy to hang back on surfaces that are generally slower than before, with strings better geared to the topspin style so beloved of original dirt rats.
They do not try to win rallies as much as control them, to increase their chances of winning – dirt rat 101.
Tennis has increasingly needed a bona-fide dirt rat triumph, if for no other reason than to break the sameness of Nadal’s long reign and the dominance of Djokovic, Federer and Andy Murray around him.
Perhaps we will see a long overdue breakthrough for David Ferrer, or Feliciano Lopez, or even a Nicolas Almagro.
osamiuddin@thenational.ae
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