History said if Ruud had any chance of prevailing he would have to win the first set. Across all these years and hundreds of Grand Slam matches, Djokovic has lost only five times after winning the first set.
Ruud broke Djokovic’s serve to start the match and surged to an early lead as Djokovic played a shaky first game, muffing overheads and pushing forehands and backhands off the court as Ruud played the mostly error-free and deceptively dangerous tennis that has characterized the best moments of his career.
But then the Djokovic that the tennis world has come to know and fear the past dozen years emerged. With Ruud serving at 4-2, close enough to sniff the first-set finish line, Djokovic indulged in one of those classic grinding rallies, where he runs from corner to corner, forward and back, keeping the point alive long after it should be over. It ended the way it so often does — with an exhausted opponent struggling for oxygen and dumping a ball into the net.
Ruud would come close one more time, coming within two points of taking that set on the strength of a backward-running, between-the-legs lob. But Djokovic erased that threat with about a dozen shots over the next four points.
In most tennis matches, when a set moves to a tiebreaker the outcome is akin to the flip of a coin. That is not how it works with Djokovic, not Sunday, not this whole tournament, and rarely on the biggest stages during this most recent run of mid-30s dominance.
It’s not an accident. Last week, he explained that when a tiebreaker begins, his mind moves to state of hyper-concentration as he uses everything at his disposal to “stay in the present,” as he describes it, and play each point on its merit.
He started this one with a lunging forehand winner down the line, and finished it seven points later with another blasted forehand that Ruud didn’t even bother making a run at, not that it would have made a difference. When it was over, Djokovic had played 55 points in tiebreakers during this tournament and had yet to make an unforced error.
