Enter the Del Potroverse
With hardier wrists and better injury luck, could one very tall man have changed the course of tennis history?
by @ratloff
A rainy week two in Queens pushed the 2009 U.S. Open men’s final from its usual Sunday slot to Monday afternoon. I watched the final alone on a TV that me and my dirtbag roommates mounted directly into the drywall, where it miraculously held up for most of the school year before crashing to the ground a couple weeks before graduation. I still remember the broad strokes of the match: fresh off of a straight-sets victory over Rafael Nadal in the semifinal, the 20-year-old Juan Martin Del Potro bludgeoned Roger Federer — the five-time defending U.S. Open champion, fresh off of winning what would become his only French Open and his sixth Wimbledon title (he lost the 2009 Australian Open final in five sets to Nadal), the undisputed GOAT, 28-years-old and at the height of his powers — to death with his impossibly flat, 0.0fucks forehand and a surprisingly fluid all-around game. It was the first time I can recall a tennis broadcast sharing the velocity of groundstrokes. In five sets, Del Potro proceeded not just to defeat Federer, but to out-hit and outlast tennis’s grandmaster in a display that led many to proclaim the arrival of the next transcendent star. At 6-6, Del Potro was the tallest man ever to win a slam.
11 years later, and Del Po himself seems destined to be remembered only in such broad strokes. Knee and wrist injuries have kept the swashbuckling Argentine largely at bay since his 2009 triumph. Tennis history, in the meantime, has been written in blood by three of the greediest champions in sports, whose superlative careers we need not dwell on here. But, quickly: in the 60 slams since Marat Safin won the 2005 Australian Open, only seven men have won one of tennis’s crown jewels. Federer, Nadal and Djokovic have combined for 52; Andy Murray and Stan Wawrinka have split 6 titles, and Del Po and Marin Cilic each nabbed one, the 2009 and 2014 U.S. Opens, respectively.
Among the four players to disrupt the Big Three’s 15-year monopoly on glory, you’d be dumb and wrong to rank Del Po any higher than third. (Murray, a relentless usurper and the only person besides the Big Three to be world number one in the 2010s, will inarguably be remembered as the Best of the Rest.) And yet, rewatching the 2009 U.S. Open final today, I am struck by a revelation: if any player in the Big Three era could have transcended the role of marginal agitator to become a fixture among the Fedalovic elite, to have really, persistently challenged and defeated the Big Three, loosened their vice-like grip on the sport, claimed his own piece of the narrative, it was Juan Martin Del Potro. Del Potro, and no one else.
Let’s watch some tape.
First Set
Down 1-0 and break point in his first service game, Del Po shows a glimpse of the resilience to come …
…before Federer — crisp, regal, perfect out of the gate — breaks him with an absolute peach of a point. (Del Po hits 5 excellent shots and zero substandard ones in this point, and loses.)
With a rude, Samprasesque display of first serves up 5-3, Federer puts the opening set on ice, a tidy, one-break 6-3.
Second Set
Del Po elects to double fault on break point in the opening game of the second set, after having also been broken in his first service game of the first set.
Down a set and a break to the greatest of all time, he is certain to lose. Roger is giving Del Po the silly around-the-back business and laughing and smiling. The crowd is delighted. Not an hour into the match, and Roger is already savoring the kill, playing with his food.
Del Po again finds danger serving at 1-3, but gamely thumps his way through multiple break points to hold and make it 2-3, one break down. Still, he has a zero percent chance of winning the match.
Finally, our first Del Po Moment arrives, and it’s worth the wait. Returning at 30-30, 4-5, two points away from spotting the Fed a two-set lead, Del Po turns on an excellent Fed approach and whistles a do-or-die down-the-line forehand pass that clips the singles line — but is called out.
Del Po challenges immediately, it’s overturned, and we are treated to some vintage Federer vs. Hawk-Eye courtroom theatre. (“He does not trust this system,” Mary Carillo confides to us.) Federer looks to force the issue again on break point, and Del Po once again comes up with the goods on the forehand wing with another down-the-line pass on a dead run. We’re on serve, friends. Consecutive holds force a tiebreak, and the players do not fail to deliver a stunning display of power baseline tennis. But Del Po once again rips off a medley of extremely clutch forehands to take the breaker 7-5 and square the match.
Third Set
The quality from the tiebreak carries into the third set. Del Po breaks Fed to take a 4-3 lead — only for Fed to break right back. At this point we’re playing some tennis.
The ninth game is especially classy. The Federer serve is rolling and Del Po hits some more Forehands to Remember. 5-4 Federer, but we’re on serve, and another tiebreak looks probable.
On second thought — the ninth game has clearly taxed Del Po. Serving to stay in the set, he looks tired. He double faults to lose the set, 4-6. And once again, this match is over. Let’s call it six in a row for the GOAT.
Fourth Set
Del Po fights off a couple break points serving at 0-1, then locks down the hold by ending a 13-stroke rally with a forehand that is probably still being studied by ballistics researchers throughout the world.
There is a palpable shift in the atmosphere now; the crowd, engaged and generous in its applause throughout, now registers the grateful, full-throated ovation reserved for truly epic U.S. Open matches after nearly every point. They know what they are seeing.
But the story takes a familiar twist, and Del Po again finds himself on the brink of certain doom, serving at 4-5, down 15-30. This time, he leans on the first serve to get himself out of trouble and again crunches a forehand to seal the hold.
Like in the second set, we go to a tiebreak, and it’s all Del Po. 7-4. We’re going the distance.
Fifth Set
There is no great drama, no swings or turning points in the fifth set. Del Po’s power has seemingly broken Federer. He races to a 3-0 lead, and it’s some version of this point over and over again.
The final stanza feels like a coronation, just not the one everyone expected. Del Po breaks Federer at 5-2 to win the championship. He’s the first Argentine man since 1977 to win a slam.
***
History always seems inevitable in retrospect, and the Big Three’s reign feels especially preordained to all who have witnessed their total, suffocating, unending dominance. It’s hard to believe any player could have drawn breath in their orbit for long — because no one ever did (…or will). But with Del Po, seeing is believing. At 20 years old — the same age Novak Djokovic won his first slam (Australian, 2008) and two years younger than Federer at his maiden slam (Wimbledon, 2003) — Del Po took an opportunity that two generations of other shiny Next Big Things have shanked or crumbled under and he hammered it painstakingly into the ground. He was the first to defeat Nadal and Federer in the same slam tournament, and he remains the only person besides Djokovic and Nadal to defeat Roger in a slam final.
Although it feels flukish in retrospect, Del Po’s rise wasn’t altogether surprising at the time. He was Federer’s stiffest competition at the French that year, where he lost in a similarly wild five-set semifinal. (“Del Potro is young and strong,” Fed said after the match. “I have a lot of respect for him.”) He won six titles in the 14 months leading up to the 2009 U.S. Open. His victory solidified his status as an all-world talent, and it felt like he was destined to become a long-time fixture.
But the injuries set in almost immediately. Del Po sat out nearly all of 2010 with a right wrist injury that emerged only three months after his U.S. Open triumph. After a brief return to form two years later (which included an epic five-set loss to Djokovic in the 2013 Wimbledon semis), he was sidelined in 2014 by another injury, this time the left wrist. That pattern has repeated itself many times since, with highs (a silver medal at the 2016 Olympics, a five-hour clash with Nadal at Wimbledon in 2018, an appearance in the 2018 U.S. Open final) invariably followed by more health issues. At 31 years old, Del Potro is currently recovering from the latest in a series of knee surgeries after fracturing his kneecap late in 2018 and again in 2019.
Ultimately, the ability to keep their bodies performing at such a high level for so long is no small part of the Big Three’s interminable success (health is a skill, etc.). And perhaps durability issues were always bound to lower the ceiling for a man of Del Po’s generational size. But revisiting his sublime 2009 U.S. Open performance, it’s exhilarating to imagine a parallel universe where Juan Martin Del Potro sustains that level of play for the ensuing decade, competes in all four slams every year, steals more than a few, injects a spicy element of delirious power into an increasingly fitness-oriented game, and ends up being remembered as an all-time great. If only we had been so lucky.