U.S. Open Tennis: Can't Call Them Comebacks

(Photo by Clive Brunskill/Getty Images)

Last year I bought Bud Collins' History of Tennis: An Authoritative Encyclopedia and Record Book.  Any serious fan of the sport's history should own this book, for its wealth of factual material, as well as Bud's characteristically piquant narrative writing and his manifest love and knowledge of the sport. 

Faced with the task of writing this article, I dipped into the book to answer the question of comebacks at the U.S. Open.  I restricted myself to matches in the late rounds, from the quarters on.  I defined an amazing comeback in the men's as a victory obtained after trailing two sets to love, and in the women's as surviving the loss of the first set and down as well late in the second set. 

What I discovered surprised me.

On both sides, almost no comebacks occurred, at least by my criteria.  Without more research, I cannot rank these for drama, so I'll list them chronologically. 

1922—Bill Tilden defeated Bill Johnston

1940—Bobby Riggs defeated Don McNeil

1947—Jack Kramer defeated Frank Parker

1949—Pancho Gonzales defeated Ted Schroeder

1975—Manolo Orantes defeated Guillermo Vilas

1979—Vitas Gerulaitis defeated Roscoe Tanner

1984—Ivan Lendl defeated Pat Cash

2003-Andy Roddick defeated David Nalbandian

2005-Andre Agassi defeated James Blake

I'll throw in for good measure a "mini-comeback":  Roger Federer's Wallenda act in 2007 against Novak Djokovic when he faced multiple set points in the first two sets and managed to win each set on his way to victory.

Similarly on the women's side I found a paucity of comebacks.  Tracy Austin overcame Martina Navratilova in 1981; Graf bested Martina in 1989; and Sanchez-Vicario topped Graf in 1994. 

I plead guilty to deficient research, which likely failed to uncover more examples of great comebacks.  And my definition may be too restrictive since there are probably many comebacks from two sets to one, or dramatic reversals in the deciding set.  But my instincts tell me that these too happen rarely, and that interests me more for what it tells us about tennis at the highest level, and maybe at all levels.

Simply put: better players usually win, and better players usually win fairly easily.  Tennis requires too many points, too many shots, for flukes to occur often.  That fact usually prevents better players from falling behind.  Tilden enjoyed injecting drama into matches by lolling about, letting his rival get far ahead, then coming back at the penultimate moment. 

That exception proves the rule: most better players fight for the lead, then ride it to victory.

What about matches between contestants more or less equal, presumably like those I uncovered in the late rounds of a slam like the Open?  How do we explain why comebacks happen so infrequently? 

Here, all of us, from hackers to true proficients, know in our bones the truth.  We lose matches mentally as much as physically.  We feel ourselves falling behind, getting passive, not knowing what to do to change the action in our favor, or somehow fail to muster the nerve to do so. 

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