The Hindu : Sport / Tennis : Santoro — a player of unrivalled stature

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Wednesday, Jan 25, 2006

Sport

Sport - Tennis

Santoro — a player of unrivalled stature

He weaves points delicately, every groundstroke measured not in kilometres but in levels of deceit, writes Rohit Brijnath

Close your eyes at the Australian Open and you cannot tell the players apart; they sound like a group of soloists playing from similar song sheets producing a fine but muscular music. Every stroke strikes a powerful chord, every rally a drum roll of brawny defiance, tennis as Wagner might have composed it.

Sharapova wears what looks alarmingly like a nightie, but that is all that is feminine to her game, so aggressive it gives off fumes. Tennis is now the slugger's game. Haas and Federer played on Monday night with such violence that this was tennis promising to become a contact sport.

At least it was fun as lines were tattooed by machine gun fire, but elsewhere the Open descended into a tour de tedium. As players exchanged mechanical strokes, each rally the echo of the next, all superb technique but grim, repetitive geometry, the mind pleaded "No more".

Then respite arrived in the form of a Frenchman who should be sitting in Montmartre painting landscapes, but somehow found his destiny involved a slightly larger canvas. Fortunately he did not let go of his brush. Fabrice Santoro, some distance from six feet, is a tennis pygmy yet a player of unrivalled stature.

In time when players mainline aggression, only art flows in Santoro's veins. Too small to overpower anyone, he has settled for improvisation, a man whose survival demands that he own an alternative menu of shots. He plays low volleys double-handed; his forehand is a double-handed slice; he walks into serves; he has patented angles.

Genius

When this writer asked Leander Paes about Santoro, the Indian's reply was a single word: "Genius". He was not finished. "When you play him the last shot you would expect is the one you have to be ready for".

Santoro came to this Open, his 54th grand slam, having never reached a slam quarterfinal, bullied across the world, a man who has lived his tennis life with his back to the wall.

But Santoro persists, for 17 years he wants this quarterfinal, so he weaves points delicately, every groundstroke measured not in kilometres but in levels of deceit, only for someone to nonchalantly fire a hole through his tapestry. Then he starts again.

Maybe in this great, unstoppable adventure of evolution God still has a soft spot for dinosaurs, and Santoro fights his way through round by round this year, still scurrying across the court at 33, the oldest man in the draw by four years.

Every man in an Open plays his own final, and Santoro's will come against David Ferrer in the fourth round. He will win. Then he will weep. Of course he does. As he says: "Today I knew it was my chance, maybe the last one".

Happy ending

It is his happy ending. On Tuesday, David Nalbandian insists on it. But for half an hour in their quarterfinal, it is magic. Santoro deliberates before serving like a man hatching a plot. Then he executes. He plays a lunge stop volley which lands and spins back onto his side of the court. He plays a drop volley, then a lob, then another drop volley, then another lob, all in the same point. Everyone sighs, even Nalbandian.

Every point must be relished because it cannot last, art must eventually bend to power. Santoro breaks in the seventh game of the first set. It is a final hurrah. Nalbandian shrugs his sturdy shoulders and every blistering winner is like a knife through the Frenchman's canvas, as if defiling his art, allowing Santoro only 19 more points in the match from 5-5.

Santoro loses 7-5, 6-0, 6-0; he is gone but not easily forgotten. Before the courts echo again to a muscular percussion, as the cleaners come in this morning to sweep centre court before play begins they might amidst a tossed plastic glass and lost wristband, a few bristles from a paintbrush. "Ah", they might say, "Santoro was here".

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