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At the Australian Open, Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev Look, Again, Like Heirs to the Throne


It wasn’t so long ago that Grand Slam semifinal meetings between Dominic Thiem and Alexander Zverev seemed less like possibilities than inevitabilities. Thiem and Zverev were the young players who were most consistently pushing and—at least on the tour level, in best-of-three-set matches—even beating Novak Djokovic, Rafael Nadal, and Roger Federer, three men who have been the greatest players of all time for a while now. Zverev and Thiem seemed poised to take their places in the standings, if not in history. They were the rivalry of the future, in part because they resembled the great rivalry of the recent past.

Zverev, a six-foot-six German, had a nimble grace that belied his height, a smooth serve that he could use to win free points or start rallies from a strong advantage, and superior timing and technique with his groundstrokes. He was rooted to the baseline, and could be overly defensive, but there was still an unpredictability and creativity to his game. His public image was familiar, too: handsome, princely, and professional, though he could be prickly with the press. In 2017, Zverev became the youngest player to win a Masters 1000 tournament, the level just below the Slams, in years. In 2018, he won the A.T.P. Tour Finals, beating Federer in the semifinals, and then defeating Djokovic to take the crown.

If Zverev seemed part of Federer’s lineage, Thiem was the heir to Nadal. Setting up in the hinterlands behind the baseline, he played, and practiced, with an almost terrible intensity. His groundstrokes, on both sides, were instruments of blunt and brutal power, perfectly suited to clay. Unlike Zverev, he was solid and compact, with a boyish face and the chest of an ox, and off the court his manner was direct and unassuming. He had been working with the same coach since he was nine years old.

But, as the Slams rolled by, the two young men started to seem more and more like cautionary tales. Everyone still expected Thiem to win the French Open title as soon as Nadal allowed, but he played an overburdened and inefficient schedule, flying halfway around the world for small tournaments, sometimes arriving at the big ones tired. He struggled to shorten his big strokes for surfaces that were faster than clay. In the first few months of 2019, he won only three matches. Zverev, meanwhile, after his triumph at the A.T.P. Finals, seemed to fall to pieces. Despite rising to No. 3 in the world, he had yet to make it past the quarter-finals stage of a major—something about the longer format of matches seemed to weaken his ability to close out wins. (Fans joked that perhaps he thought “best of five sets” meant “must play five sets.”) He stopped working with his longtime manager, and they entered a long, ugly legal battle. During matches, his mind was elsewhere, and it showed. He tried hiring a super-coach, Ivan Lendl, but the two didn’t click; occasionally, Lendl didn’t even show up for Zverev’s matches. After a first-round loss at Wimbledon, Zverev told the press, “My confidence is below zero.” But worse was to come: he got the yips. In a single match in Cincinnati last summer, he hit twenty double faults, and in a fourth-round loss at the U.S. Open, he hit seventeen.

Last spring, Thiem split with his childhood coach and started working with a former player, Nicolas Massu, who urged him to play tighter to the baseline. Instead of relying purely on the deadly speed of his shot, he turned the speed of his feet into a weapon. Thiem won Barcelona and made the Roland Garros final—impressive, though also no surprise. The leap came on hardcourts: he won the prestigious tournament in Indian Wells and then made it to the final in the tour’s year-end championship. Zverev, too, was turning his fortunes around. He had been eclipsed by the rise of others, not only Thiem but the young Stefanos Tsitsipas and Daniil Medvedev. Perhaps that was a blessing: there was less pressure. He signed, in August, with an agency that Federer founded, which began managing his off-the-court responsibilities. In the fall, he made the final of the Shanghai Masters and the semis of the China Open, in Beijing. He qualified for the year-end championships, where he lost in the semifinals—to Thiem.

Still, the Grand Slams in 2019 were all won, once again, by Federer, Djokovic, and Nadal. And during the A.T.P. Cup, at the start of January, Thiem and Zverev went a combined 1–5. One enduring image from that tournament was the sight of Zverev screaming at his father, who was serving as his coach, with such ferocity that the older man began to cry.

Progress in tennis is rarely linear. On Thursday, in Melbourne, at the Australian Open, here they were again: Zverev versus Thiem, for a spot in the final. Zverev came into the tournament with no expectations, from the public or from himself. After his first match, he promised to donate ten thousand dollars per win to the bush-relief effort—and the entire $2.7 million winner’s check if he takes the title. An easy promise to make at the time: “I know I’m not the favorite,” he noted, in self-deprecation. Then he kept winning, losing only one set on the way to the semifinal. More incredibly, given his recent serving problems, he had the highest first-serve percentage of any man in the tournament. The rest of his game flowed from there. What accounts for the change? He hit thousands of serves on the practice court, he said. He’s putting less pressure on himself, taking the Slams a little less seriously, he added. Or maybe it’s as simple as this: he’s supremely talented, a little sensitive, and still only twenty-two years old.

Thiem is twenty-six—not young for an athlete, but in his prime. And in the quarter-finals, against Nadal, he played like it. For more than four hours, the two men blistered the ball. Nadal was playing well, but it didn’t matter: Thiem, save for one game in which he seemed nervous, and a few choking moments as he tried to close out the match, was clearly better. “I honestly didn’t play a bad match, no?” Nadal said afterward. “Good, positive, fighting spirit all the time. He’s younger, he’s very quick. He has a lot of power, so he’s able to produce these amazing shots from a very difficult position.” Thiem is not the first man to beat Nadal at a major, but he is probably the first to do it looking more like Nadal than Nadal himself.

For most of the first two sets against Zverev, though, Thiem looked like he was feeling the effects of that long match against Nadal. In the first, he hit thirteen unforced errors, and only five winners. But he won the second set, and in the third the match caught fire. Zverev could not have served more perfectly—reaching speeds between a hundred and twenty and a hundred and thirty miles per hour, he didn’t miss a first serve in the third set until four-all, thirty-all. When he finally had to try a second serve, he hit a second-serve ace, then followed that with another ace. But Thiem was loosening up nonetheless: his feet were flying, the torque of his muscular core turned him into a human slingshot. He saved two set points and forced a tiebreaker, in which Zverev retreated and Thiem took the initiative. Thiem seems to thrive in moments when every point counts. When the fourth set, too, went to a tiebreak, it was hard not to think of Thiem as the favorite. He won the match, 3–6, 6–4, 7–6(3), 7–6(4).

Halfway through the tournament, Thiem fired Thomas Muster, a coach he had brought in to work alongside Massu. Muster is a former player, an Austrian legend. On his way out, he took a few cryptic shots at Thiem. “He has improved a lot, but he has to catch up in the technical, physical, and foremost in the mental area,” Muster told Eurosport. Perhaps, but, in Melbourne, there is only one man left for him to catch: Djokovic, the reigning champion, who will face Thiem in the final, on Sunday.



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