Today, in the fourth round at Wimbledon, Gilles Müller served at 4–3
against Rafael Nadal in the second set. Müller has a huge, lefty serve that
had been troubling Nadal all day, and Nadal simply blocked it back
toward the ad-court service line. Müller rushed the net and took the
floater out of the air, hitting a forehand volley at an angle so acute
that it barely crossed the net—a winner in any other instant. Nadal,
with stunning speed, ran the ball down and dug it up just before it hit
the grass, sending it into the deuce corner. Müller was already moving
backward. Somehow, he managed to turn, backpedal, and send up a high
lob, which Nadal smashed cross court. Müller, who is six feet four,
leaped and got his racket on the ball to send up another lob, one of the
more improbable retrievals I’ve ever seen—followed not too far behind
the running, twisting, blind forehand that Nadal used to send it back.
Müller hit a regular backhand slice—a please-have-mercy shot—and Nadal
followed it with one of his own. Müller sent back another rally ball,
and this time, Nadal hit a two-handed backhand, falling on his heels,
that curved and barely clipped the outside of the line.

I’m not sure that was even the best point of the match.

Müller’s 6–3, 6–4, 3–6, 4–6, 15–13 victory over Nadal is the match of
the tournament so far, and maybe the match of the year—for the fifth set
alone. It was a contest with several chapters. For the first two sets,
Nadal played clean (no unforced errors!) but overly cautious tennis,
trying to figure out how to deal with Müller’s big, varying serve and
instinct to charge. When he lost the second set, it seemed that he might
be stunned into submission. But then a more familiar version of Rafa
reappeared: the fighter, angry beast. The teeth were gritting, the fists
were swinging after every good shot. VAMOS! He was feeling it, you could
tell. The forehand was curving. The crowd was for him. It promised to be
the match that made Nadal’s Wimbledon, the crucible that would return
him, finally, to perfect confidence.

The story seemed written. But Müller kept pressuring Nadal’s serve. Rafa
was hot, was firing, but Müller had a henchman’s cold air to him. The
fifth set was a riveting fight.

There is a pattern that Nadal has followed at Wimbledon since finding,
finally, success on the grass. In the past five years, he has been
injured or vulnerable to a certain type of player. This player is tall
and young and fearless and unknown. He is ranked outside the top hundred. He
can take Nadal’s heavy topspin shots, the bounce deadened by the grass,
at the perfect height. His serve gets going. He starts to zone. He hits
insane trick shots. He wins over the crowd. Nadal begins to lose his
confidence, and with the confidence goes the serve. Then the forehand
shortens. Then the shoulders slump. For three or four hours, his
opponent, having undergone some mystical transformation, plays like an
all-time great. He becomes a supernova. An hour or two later, the
blinding flash of brilliance recedes, and he, like those before him, is
knocked out.

That is not what happened today. Gilles Müller has had a long and solid
but unspectacular career. He is thirty-four years old. He has a career-high ranking of twenty-six. He first played Nadal in 2003. Coming into his fourth-round match against Nadal, he had not beaten a top-five player
since 2008. He is not the man I would have picked to beat Nadal. That
would have been Karen Khachanov, the young, big-serving Russian whom
Nadal had clinically dismantled in the previous round. But, in truth, I
wouldn’t have picked anyone to beat Nadal—not this Wimbledon, not when
the grass is dry and slow, not when Nadal has been playing simply at a
higher level than any other player on tour.

Müller did not come out of nowhere. (He comes, in fact, from Luxembourg:
population, five hundred and seventy-five thousand.) None of the top players would have liked to face
him; his performance on grass these past two years has been so good that
he got a ten-spot bump in the seedings. What is remarkable is not that
he took three sets off of Rafael Nadal. What is remarkable is that Nadal
fought. He adjusted, stepped back, learned to read Müller’s tendencies.
He played with frenzy. He was in it. He leaped, roaring, teeth bared,
chest out. Nadal won many of the most exciting points. “I think I played
with the right determination, right passion, right attitude to win the
match,” Nadal said afterward. And Müller won.

They walked off the court together, side by side.