There are no chill Rafael Nadal matches, like oh cool, I’ll watch some tennis and my blood pressure will stay level.
There are the steamroller jobs, in which he grimly grinds an overwhelmed opponent into red dust. There are the matches he actually loses — as the past and present world No. 1, a 17-time major winner, these are rare — but not before leaving behind a Mediterranean Sea’s worth of sweat and tears.
Then there are the matches like Tuesday’s instant-classic night-and-early-morning-cap on Arthur Ashe Stadium, when he draws a very game foe into a battle of nerve and endurance, a contest of attrition. It’s nearly impossible to best Nadal in one of these, and he proved it again in a marathon 0-6, 6-4, 7-5, 6-7 (4), 7-6 (5) victory over No. 9 seed Dominic Thiem in the U.S. Open quarterfinals that kept his bid for back-to-back titles alive by the thinnest of margins.
The match ended at 2:04 a.m. after four hours and 49 minutes — the longest match Nadal has played at the U.S. Open.
“Always the passion to keep going, to play one more point, to save one more ball,” Nadal said in his on-court interview, summing up both his willpower in the fifth set and what has served him as his greatest tennis trait. “Keep going always, you can a little bit more, and that’s the only reason I can be where I am today.”
There was precious little to separate Nadal and Thiem, and in the fifth-set tiebreak, they remained within a point until the last ball. Some patented Nadal scrambling forced Thiem to take one more swing, an overhead, and the 25-year-old Austrian pulled it long.
Nadal can enjoy an extra day of rest before Friday’s semifinal against No. 3 seed Juan Martin del Potro.
“It’s been a great battle,” Nadal said. “I’ve played many, many hours on this amazing court. I’m not sorry. I’m just sorry for my legs.”
Thiem, who entered the match with a 3-7 record in the rivalry (all of those matches on Nadal’s preferred clay), delivered an impeccable first set to bagel a listless Nadal in a mere 24 minutes. John McEnroe speculated on the ESPN broadcast, “Physically there’s something off because he’s not moving.”
Nadal’s coach, Carlos Moya, chalked it up to nerves.
Whatever it was, Nadal walked it off in the second set, finding the range on his forehand and venturing more to the net. Nadal failed to serve out the set at 5-3, then promptly broke Thiem’s serve for the second straight time to even the match.
“Wake up,” Nadal said he told himself. “It was a very tough start. Finish this first set, forget about this start and try to stay in the match in the second. … And that’s what happened.”
The pure quality of the tennis peaked in the third set, both players whaling away from the baseline: Nadal unfurling his signature dipping forehand and stepping into his backhand, Thiem hitting the flatter, harder forehand and uncorking a picturesque one-handed backhand.
An expanded version of this report appears on NYPost.com.
