Alas, the ear-splitting noisemaker is here to stay. But today is no day to lament the persistence of Davis Cup. Serbia’s Novak Djokovic and John Isner proved again this weekend that playing for someone other than themselves forces the pros not only to find their best tennis, but to give us their personalities at their most fervent and concentrated—their truest. What does a player look like when he’s not allowed to cave, not allowed to pack it in, not allowed to default because of injury, not allowed to do anything other than find a way to win? Davis Cup brings it to you every time.

Isner and Djokovic, not surprisingly, are very different people and competitors when it's all on the line. The American’s DC debut was memorable for its stoic, if ultimately tragic, heroism. While he lost both of his singles matches, it wasn’t because he was overcome by the moment. Isner’s performances in his doubles win with Bob Bryan—he drilled the key shot of that match, a forehand pass to clinch the third set—and in his five-set loss to Djokovic showed that beneath the backward hat and gawky gait is a problem solver who keeps his emotions out of his way. When he lost a point this weekend, even a crushingly important point, he rarely did anything more than call for the towel and move on to the next one. Last year I talked to Isner after he’d been eliminated at Indian Wells. I knew he had a reputation as a practical joker—rubbing habanera pepper on his trainer’s toothbrush was a specialty—so I was surprised by how sober, how enclosed, how all-business he was during our conversation. And, despite a few choice swear words and a few less-than-choice double faults on break points, that’s the attitude he maintained through all five sets on Sunday. Like Fernando Verdasco in the DC final in 2008, Isner may have even proved something to himself in this tie that he can take with him for the rest of the season. Is it too early to designate him a dark horse—a very long snake in the grass—for Wimbledon?

Isner’s serve, especially the wide one in the deuce court, was crucial, of course, but he had the edge in many of the rallies as well. He hit his forehand past the speedy Djokovic, he passed well with his backhand, and he made a specialty of hitting drop volley winners while threatening to fall flat on his back. He also pulled off the gutsiest play of the day by following his second serve in at set point in the tiebreaker in the fourth. Like a lot of Isner’s plays this weekend, it wasn’t pretty—he slipped and stumbled through the frontcourt—but like a lot of those same plays, it worked.

The difference in the end was the court surface. On clay, Djokovic’s defense meant as much as Isner’s offense. More specifically, his ability to scramble to his forehand side was decisive. This has always been a weakness of Isner’s; while he has improved his movement, he still ends a lot of rallies waving at the ball at it streaks past him on his right. Djokovic, on the other hand, is fast enough to run in that direction and still flick the ball back at an acute crosscourt angle. The Serb, who, depending on your point of view, became either more intelligently conservative or more anxiously tentative when he needed a point, won with consistency and court coverage. But if this wasn’t his most impressive or spectacular win from a playing perspective, Djokovic was nevertheless must-see TV all weekend. He wasn’t just a tennis player. He was a drama in multiple acts. A few highlights of the Loco Djoko show:

After winning the first set 6-2 against Sam Querrey and looking to be cool, collected, and far the superior player, Djokovic lost the first two points of the next set on his serve. You might think the No. 2 player in the world would shrug this off without a second thought. You’d be wrong. Djokovic immediately started to breathe more deeply, to suck wind. He leaned back and put his hand over his nose, as if he were having trouble getting oxygen. He sighed and shook his head. He stared up to the heavens and down at his feet. He looked like the weight of the world had just been dropped onto his shoulders. And he hadn't even been broken yet. But he was soon after. In his anxiety, Djokovic got away from his game and began trying to end points too quickly. He popped up an awful drop shot to hand Querrey a break point. His fears were a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Events proceeded on similar lines through most of that set. Djokovic threw his hands in the air when Querrey hit a good shot, as if to ask how this could possibly happen to him. He snarled in the direction of his teammates and his entourage. When, down 1-4 and at 30-30, he reached back to hit an overhead, it appeared that he had lost all hope. Djokovic took out his frustration by hitting that shot as hard as he could, the way you might hit a shot if you were on the verge of tanking. But it went in. He won the point. He snuck out of the game. He started holding his head a little higher. He breathed easier. When he broke serve, he pounded his chest, and on the way to the sideline he did that little thing where he sticks his jaw out and puts his tongue in his cheek. It’s usually a sign that he’s feeling cocky again. He’d gotten his strut and his self-belief back as quickly as he’d lost them. Djokovic would go on to save five break points at 4-5 and win the set. Naturally, when he was broken early in the third set, he smashed his racquet in half. Never mind that he was still up two sets to none to a guy ranked 20 spots below him.

The rage, the fear, the strut, the wind-sucking, the cocky tongue-in-cheek, the highs and the lows experienced from one point to the next: That’s how Djokovic played all five sets against Isner. No wonder he struggles to keep it together after two weeks at a major; Davis Cup, with its four intense weekends spread out over the course of the year, should be his kind of event. I’ve written here that Rafael Nadal takes his fans along for the emotional ride when he plays. But he’s got a face of stone compared to what Djokovic showed us this weekend. When he was coming up a few years ago, I admired the guy for his steeliness and his resolve—he seemed cutthroat, a born winner. It hasn't worked out that way, but now I like him more. It turned out that, like a lot of us, Djokovic was a live wire whose reason and confidence are often blinded by emotion. Like a lot of us, he has trouble taking the long view and seeing beyond his success or failure in the point he has just played. 

When Isner's final shot found the net and Djokovic had clinched the tie, he burst into tears. But I preferred his reaction to his first-set win, when he ran toward the net like a blind banshee. Normally, you might say this kind of thing was in bad taste—the match wasn't even close to being over yet. But after Djokovic had shown us all of his nerves and fears over the weekend, his crazed reaction to overcoming those fears didn't seem crazy or tasteless at all. It was touching. 

Of course, five minutes later, after he was broken to start the second set, he smashed another racquet and sent it flying toward the bleachers. Never change, Novak. There are safer and smarter places to be, but no ride can compare to the roller-coaster.

There have been three drug-related developments in the news recently that apply to tennis. First there was Andre Agassi’s admission that he used crystal meth for recreational purposes in the '90s, failed a drug test, and got off without punishment after concocting an excuse that was only slightly stronger than saying, "Uh, I didn't do it." Next came the news that a British rugby player, Terry Newton, had become the first athlete to fail a blood test for HGH. This was proof, at last, that the test worked—Newton admitted to using the drug and has been suspended for two years—and has spurred baseball commissioner Bud Selig to push that sport’s player’s union to allow blood testing.

Tennis, which doesn’t have a particularly united player’s union, and which signed onto the more rigorous Olympic testing system a few years ago, already has blood testing. You can see just how much, or, depending on your attitude about these things, how little blood testing it has in this document. It’s a list of the ITF’s “2009 Tennis Anti-Doping Statistics,” and it runs down who was tested where and in what manner last season.

What does this list tell us? Are there holes in the testing system? Does it lead you to believe that tennis has a steroid problem? The site where I first clicked onto it certainly does: It’s called tennishasasteroidproblem.com. Both that blog—which is highly speculative but disturbingly compelling for pro-athlete skeptics and conspiracy junkies alike—as well as tennis writer Charlie Bricker, in a piece for Ubitennis, point to the number of out of competition tests, 47, that came back with no result at all. On the ITF list, these are indicated by three zeros—no urine, no blood, no EPO. The now-famous “whereabouts” rule requires that each player give the testing authorities a place where they can be found for one hour each day. According to the ITF, not all of these cases were whereabouts violations—the tester didn't arrive during the 60-minute window—and some were later deleted from the document.

The highlights, from a big-name perspective, of those missed 2009 tests are: Roger Federer (October 28); Rafael Nadal (June 14); Maria Sharapova (July 9); Juan Martin del Potro (Aug. 26); Venus and Serena Williams (June 16); Jelena Jankovic (Sept. 22); David Ferrer (Sept. 22); Caroline Wozniacki (Nov. 23). Gilles Simon missed two of them.

This isn't damning information, from a player perspective. Federer and Nadal, for example, were present for out of competition tests on May 18^th and 19^th, respectively. And there were dozens of lesser names and unknowns—Florence Gravellier, Julien Benneteau, Liezel Huber, Daniel Nestor—who were no-shows as well. Obviously, tracking the pros down away from events is more difficult than it is at a tournament, where they can be led off the court and straight to an on-site testing area.

Other points of interest in the document that you may or may not already know:

—Blood and EPO testing were only done at the Grand Slams. No out of competition blood tests were listed, but most of the top players received at least one blood test at a major. For example, Federer, Nadal, Djokovic, Roddick, Verdasco, Safina, Dementieva, and both of the Williams sisters got one in Australia.

—There were no EPO tests given at all until Verdasco took one at Roland Garros. He was followed there by Azarenka and Kuznetsova. Wimbledon appears to be the epicenter of EPO testing; there were 12 given there, compared to only two, to Serena Williams and Ekaterina Makarova, at the U.S. Open.

—Nadal, for some reason, was tested twice during the Davis Cup final weekend.

You can make what you will of all of these facts, depending on how much faith you have in (a) professional athletes, and (b) your particular favorite player. Skeptics will say that knowing you’re only going to receive a blood or EPO test at a Slam, and knowing generally when you’ll receive a urine test, allows too much time for players to use PEDs, enjoy the positive effects in their play and in their training, and get them out of their system in time. Optimists will say that regular testing, along with the threat of unannounced tests, should keep any sane athlete from taking the risk. Skeptics may then counter with the classic and unassailable retort, “Marion Jones never failed a drug test.” There’s really no arguing that point, except to say that, if you take that line of pessimism to its logical conclusion, we might as well not do any testing at all. Bigger cynics will say, citing Agassi, that a star’s positive test will just be covered up anyway. I’d like to think that the WADA program, instituted in the years since Agassi’s meth-head days, would make that less likely.

The argument can go deeper. One observer might look at the bodies of today’s players, compare them to the wiry frames of the pros of 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, and draw comparisons to the McGwire and Bonds era of baseball, when player’s arms, legs, chests, even their heads increased in size. Why, this person might ask, did Ivan Lendl, who was devoted to fitness training, remain so rail thin?

But another observer could answer that pro sports evolve in all ways, including physically. That the advent of bigger racquets led to an emphasis on power, which required stronger and faster players, some of whom—Clijsters, Nadal, Monfils—have inherited pro-athlete genes, and others of whom happen to be 6-foot-6. Just because Boris Becker outweighed John McEnroe by 40 pounds, and Guillermo Vilas could run all day and had meat-hooks for arms, doesn’t mean these guys were juiced. Just because Grand Slam champions are getting taller doesn’t mean they’ve been taking tall pills since they were in their cribs.

In the past, I’ve wondered whether the whereabouts rule was too invasive, but those triple zeros on the testing list are haunting, and they’ve convinced me otherwise. I talked to Dr. Gary Wadler, a testing expert who has worked with various professional sports, including tennis, on their doping systems. Not surprisingly, he said that testing is useless without the out-of-competition element, and that out-of-competition tests are impossible without whereabouts rules that have some teeth.

As a tennis writer, to praise or even assess any player’s toughness or coolness under pressure, I have to presume that they’re innocent until proven guilty, that they're not just really good at taking drugs. All I can do is ask for the most effective testing possible. And if it doesn’t work, if the skeptics and conspiracy theorists are proven right in the future, I can listen to them say: I told you so.

The defining feature of the American team is height. For the Serbs this weekend, it’s black hair and facial scruff. Janko Tipsarevic and Nenad Zimonjic have been sporting full-blown goatees, and by the end of the week even Novak Djokovic appeared to be tentatively following in their footsteps. The Tall and the Brooding—a perfect set-up for a soap opera, and for what should be a tight and rowdy tie.

First rubber: John Isner vs. Viktor Troicki

Serbia’s coach had a heads-or-tails choice for his No. 2 position: Tipsarevic, currently ranked No. 36, or Troicki, currently ranked No. 35. In picking Troicki, he went with youth over experience—Tipsarevic has played 38 Cup matches to Troicki’s eight. But the Serbs also got a guy who has beaten Isner in their only meeting, on hard courts in Bangkok last fall. For U.S. captain McEnroe, picking Isner was easy. He’s transformed himself from a sideshow to a serious player over the course of the last year, cracking the Top 20 and bringing his best game at the majors. 

The pros for Isner in this match: The fact that his big-serving style forces him to play, and win, lots of tiebreakers should, at least theoretically, help him cope with the pressure of making his DC debut in hostile territory. He’s always playing on a razor’s edge anyway. If this one does go to breakers, his serve and his long reach on returns may spell the difference. Plus, Troicki rides an emotional roller coaster at times. He can get negative, and he may not be the calm at the center of the home-crowd storm. The cons for Isner: As it is for every American man, clay is foreign soil. But there’s really no pressure, no pressure at all. Except that if Isner loses this match, the Americans are in serious trouble.

Second rubber: Sam Querrey vs. Novak Djokovic

That’s because, however much Querrey himself has improved in the last year, he’s still a long shot against the world's second-ranked player. Djokovic is 2-0 against Sam, including a 4-and-love win on clay in Monte Carlo in 2008. But, as we must note, that was two seasons ago, before Querrey had pushed Rafael Nadal on clay in his Davis Cup debut, before he won the U.S. Open Series last year, and before he cracked the Top 25 (Querrey is No. 22 right now). Djokovic is coming off a win in Dubai, which should make him confident but perhaps a little weary—with four of his matches going three sets, he played a lot of tennis in the desert to earn that win. And while he’ll be running on adrenaline before the home folks, Djokovic has had his ups and downs in Davis Cup. He’s 12-6 lifetime in singles, but last time out, in Spain last year, he dropped six straight sets to Nadal and David Ferrer. As collected as Querrey is likely to be under these trying circumstances, I think we can say for sure that that’s not going to happen to Djokovic this weekend.

Third rubber: Bob and Mike Bryan vs. Janko Tipsarevic and Nenad Zimonjic

With the Bryans around, you can usually call the doubles for the Yanks—the Bros are 17-2 lifetime in Davis Cup. But this one won’t be easy. Besides the clay and the crowd, Tipsarevic will be the most talented guy on the court, and he’ll be rested. And the 34-year-old Zimonjic is nothing if not a DC doubles warrior. He’s 22-5 lifetime, and, if Serbia’s coach wants to make a substitution, he can work with anyone. Zimonjic, a Grand Slam doubles champ, has won with Tipsy, Troicki, and Djokovic in the last two years.

Fourth rubber: Isner vs. Djokovic

These two have never played, which I don’t think is an advantage for either of them. Djokovic is obviously the better tennis player and the more versatile athlete. Isner’s hope is to take sets to tiebreakers, where, like I said before, his huge serve and long arms on returns always make him a threat. But while Djokovic has been tinkering with his own serve, and trying to find the right balance of patience and passion, it’s hard to imagine him losing at home on a Sunday, whether he’s playing to clinch or to keep the Serbs in it.

Fifth rubber: Querrey vs. Troicki

If it comes down to the wire, the Serb’s versatility may help. Depending on who has played how much tennis, the team could fire a fresher Tipsarevic in against Querrey. Though that may not be the smart move. Querrey is 1-0 against Tipsy, and 0-1 against Troicki. But if this is the deciding match-up, I like the cooler-headed Querrey’s chances.

Serbia: 3-2

***

For U.S. fans looking to embrace the anarchic time-warp that is Davis Cup for another weekend, the tie begins, live, at 10:00 A.M. on Friday on the Tennis Channel. 

In 2009 they returned with a vengeance. Ivanovic’s serve, once a weapon, was now cringe-worthy, a train wreck. No amount of work or thought or mid-match adjustment could help her put the ball where she wanted it go for more than a few games at a time. In her early-round, side-court matches at Wimbleon, the buzz of excitement would turn to a buzz of fear after her first toss, which inevitably slipped out of her hand and flew wildly. As her part-time coach, Darren Cahill, said last summer, when your serve goes south, the rest of your game will follow. By the time she got to the Australian Open this year, Ivanovic’s game and confidence were closer to the vicinity of Antarctica. I thought a friendly exhibition at Madison Square Garden on Monday might ease her serving burdens, but while she played some solid tennis, the errant toss was still in evidence. Yesterday, Pete Bodo quoted her new coach, Heinz Gunthardt, as saying that Ana would need to learn to think a little less about her serve to get it under control. That’s undoubtedly true—there's nothing worse than an athlete thinking about what she’s doing as she's doing it. And Ivanovic’s serving problems, while they may stem from a technical glitch in the way she raises her left arm—she almost seems to relax it to the point where she no longer has any control over it—it’s a psychological issue at bottom, a manifestation of anxiety that becomes self-fulfilling. It’s a hitch.

Is it possible for an athlete to unthink his or her way out of a hitch? The most famous example in American sports is Steve Sax, a second baseman who woke up one day and couldn't throw the ball to first base. He was so wild that fans in the seats behind first base started wearing helmets for mock-protection when he played. It took Sax six years, but he did manage to get his “disease” under control (It really is known as “Steve Sax disease,” and it has affected a few other second baseman; the problem is that, unlike a throw from a shortstop, the second baseman doesn’t need to throw his hardest to get the ball there in time, which means he ends up aiming it, which in turn means he ends up thinking about it.) In tennis, Elena Dementieva has had the most famous recent case of the yips. By experimenting with various tosses, she has also brought them under a certain degree of control.

Still, Dementieva’s nerves remain part of her body and her personality, and they continue to act up at inopportune moments. I don’t know if anyone has devised a successful method for practicing not being nervous, or pretending that an important point doesn’t matter; it’s like practicing being confident. In tennis, confidence can only come from having something go right for you during a match. It doesn’t even have to be something you’ve done yourself. If your opponent donates a win to you by making 100 unforced errors, the simple fact that you’ve won, no matter what the quality of your play may have been, is what will make you feel like you can win again. Confidence, and the lack thereof, is a volatile mix of cold, hard, reality-based analysis, total irrationality, and wishful thinking.

From a personal perspective, I’m guessing it will be a long, bumpy, tricky road to getting Ana to unthink her way to a better serve. Maybe that’s because as a player, I’ve felt her anxious pain for years. It’s not on my serve. I was taught to reach up for my imperfect tosses and hit them whenever I could, because no one, not even a pro, places the ball in the exact same spot every time. There’s some variation in every player’s toss, so you might as well make your motion as flexible as possible to accommodate that variation (this would obviously not work for Ivanovic, who would fall flat on her face if she attempted to hit her worst tosses). No, the train wreck for me wasn’t my serve; it was, and still is, my backhand. Be warned: It’s a sad story, of a disease for which there would never be a cure.

When I first played tennis, at age 8, the only shot I could hit over the net was my two-handed backhand. The stroke was unorthodox, born out of my baseball swing. I’m left-handed, but I bat right-handed, and I transferred a baseball grip and swinging motion from the Little League diamond to the tennis court (if it looked like anyone’s, it looked something like Jim Courier’s two-hander). For the first six or seven years I played, my backhand was my best stroke, my only weapon. I can remember playing matches in the 12s and 14s when I found myself hitting winners with it that I was only half-trying to hit. Sometimes it felt so grooved that I couldn’t have missed it if I’d tried. I can still remember the feeling I had when, during a practice set with an older kid at the cracked courts at our local elementary school, I sent two straight backhands crosscourt for blatant winners. After the second one, my opponent stopped and stared at me, as if to say, “Where the hell did that come from?” It was the first time I felt like I could be a good tennis player someday.

The trouble, which I didn’t realize until later, was that because it was such a natural stroke, there was no need for me to refine my backhand or make any structural changes to it—no need, for example, to adjust the weird grip. Why would I mess with the magical alchemy of success? It was my single-handed forehand, which suffered because I wasn’t strong enough to hit it well, that needed work. I worked on it endlessly, and while it was also unorthodox—I felt most comfortable with a Borgian Western grip—it became the equal of my backhand. More important, it was the product of practice rather than nature or talent, and that turned out to be a much sturdier platform.

Through my mid-teens and into college, I began to struggle with my backhand, especially at crucial moments of matches. From a textbook instructional perspective, my grip left the racquet face too closed and my baseball swing was too fast and abrupt, which meant that there was little margin for error, as well as an over-reliance on topspin to keep the ball in. If I was at all shaky with it, or if I pulled up even a nanosecond early, the ball took a vicious dive into the bottom of the net. Practice, in the form of mind-numbing ground-stroke drills, did help, and staved off total disaster for most of my competitive career. But like Ivanovic’s serve, the fact that my former weapon was now a shot I had to avoid hitting sapped my confidence in my entire game. I fumbled through dozens of losses in my senior year of college trying futilely to hide behind my serve and forehand. But at least I could still make my backhand go in. Post-college, when mind-numbing ground-stroke drills were no longer compatible with my working life, I lost the stroke completely.

While at Tennis Magazine over the last 10 years, I’ve taken lessons from various pros at various resorts. Each of them has drilled my backhand and offered useful tips about extending through the stroke, staying low, cutting down on my backswing, lengthening my backswing. And each time it has worked, for a week. Every spring it’s the same story. I come out in May determined that I’m going to hit two-handed backhands this year. I drill for a couple of weeks, hitting the ball well enough to make me cautiously optimistic. In my first match, I take a high backhand early, smack it for a winner, and feel the old feeling again, the same one I did when I was 11 and thought I could become a good player. Then my next backhand finds the tape. The next one, because I’ve overcompensated, flies long, wildly long. The next one ends up spinning uselessly at the bottom of the net. Finally, as the second set starts, I take my right hand off the racquet and revert to a slice. It’s safe, it’s consistent, it’s relatively effective, it’s even fun to hit in a vintage-tennis, all-whites kind of way. But it will never be me.

What happens when I start to miss? Technically, I’m pulling up too fast, but that’s not why I’m missing. I’m making errors because as I start to bring the racquet forward to meet the ball, I think, “Don’t miss it.” I’m not actually saying these words to myself; instead, it’s some scattered combination of emotion and thought and anxiety and fear and hope that coalesces right at the moment of contact and makes me rush the swing. By now, that little fatal rush has been embedded in my muscle memory. In other words, I don’t even need to get nervous to miss the stroke, a terrible fact that may be a partial explanation for the mystery of Ana's service toss.

Watch any formerly famous senior player. You may not know him from his face or his physique, but you will almost certainly know him from his signature shot. Strokes in tennis take on lives of their own; for fans at a distance, they’re a part of a player’s persona, just as much as his sense of humor may be to his friends. Like I said, I’ve found a safe new slice backhand that has at least allowed me to keep playing the sport. In fact, I’ve even found a whole new sport, squash, in which the two-handed backhand doesn’t exist—it’s heaven. But I’ve never cured my hitch. I may have learned to unthink, but it's too late now. My thoughts and nerves have infected my technique too thoroughly. I go on court like a cripple, a shell of my former self. I've gone from two hands to one. I've lost part of my tennis personality. I've lost a limb.

In the past, the 21-year-old Gulbis has had no trouble wasting it. But that appears to be changing in 2010. After failing to win two straight matches for much of last season, and being embarrassed by Andy Murray at Wimbledon along the way, Gulbis is facing the new year with his head on straight. He’s 10-4 so far, he won his first career title in Delray, and he pushed Federer deep into a third set in Doha. Gulbis has regained the glow of the sure-shot prospect that he had back when he came out firing his cannon forehand in 2008. That glow had faded in ’09, when his questionable work ethic—as well as his rumored extracurricular activities—nearly made this wealthy man's son into a walking punch line about spoiled youth and squandered potential. Credit for the mini-turnaround must go to his new coach, Hernan Gumy, whom Gulbis teamed up with at the end of last season. “He made some big improvements in every aspect of my game,” Gulbis said in Delray. Still, it’s not like the kid has grown up all in one day. His preparation for the final included a Playstation session that lasted until 2:30 in the morning. 

The question is, how much talent does he have to waste? Gulbis is now ranked No. 45, with a proverbial bullet next to his name. Is he, as everyone asks when a young player surges, Top 10 material? Let’s start by saying that reaching that exalted position is not as easy as it sounds. Or, rather, it’s exactly as hard as it sounds. There are at least a thousand guys with ATP rankings, and just 1 percent of them can be in the Top 10 on any given week. For Gulbis to enter that elite percentile, someone must exit it. Is he ready to be as consistent as, say, current No. 10 Fernando Gonzalez, or No. 9 Marin Cilic, a 20-year-old who also has a bullet next to his name?

Gulbis isn’t there yet, and he likely won’t be there this season. But the raw skills, the things you can’t teach, are in place. He didn’t drop a set in Delray. Even more impressive, he broke Ivo Karlovic three times in the final. He did it by showing an uncanny ability to read the direction of the big man’s first serve and get there in time to meet it out in front. If the skills necessary to do that—the reaction time, the hand-eye coordination, the racquet-head speed, the clean ball-striking—don’t make you believe in his potential, nothing will.

What Gulbis’ game has lacked is texture. He has variety, in the form of a superb drop shot, and explosiveness to burn. Give him an extra millisecond to hit his forehand and you can consider the point over; move up to challenge his second serve and you might find it kicking up into your face. But he never had the flexibility to gauge the moment and adapt his strokes to it. Like a human ball machine, every forehand was drilled full blast. He didn’t change the tempo of the match if wasn't going well, didn’t seem to think much before he served, didn’t dig in and adjust to his opponent. It appeared that a rally couldn’t be over fast enough to suit him. Even against Karlovic, there was still some evidence of his impatience. As Jimmy Arias of the Tennis Channel noted, after Gulbis belted a screaming roundhouse backhand into the net in the second set, there was no reason for him to go for immediate winners against Karlovic. Gulbis had the natural advantage from the ground, and he could afford to spend a little time constructing the point, moving the big guy into his backhand corner and waiting for a shorter slice to float back. It’s as if Gulbis’ ability to end a point from anywhere means that he’s never had to develop nuances to his game.

The brain cramp on that backhand aside, Gulbis played a savvy match against one of the tour's trickiest opponents. It used to be, when you played Karlovic, that keeping the ball in play was enough to earn you a service hold. Not so anymore. As Gulbis recognized, Karlovic is consistent enough now that opponents have to hit the ball hard and go for more—not that Gulbis has any trouble doing that. But his tactics were impressive in two other ways. It was a windy day, so he kept the ball far from the sidelines; that may be Tennis 101, but at least Gulbis has opened the textbook. More surprising, he began the match by going after Karlovic’s better shot, his forehand. Arias questioned this tactic, but by the end of the first set, the pace of Gulbis’s serves and ground strokes had completely broken Dr. Ivo's forehand down. It left Karlovic, who also couldn’t win points with his serve, with nowhere to turn.

All he could do was wait and hope that Gulbis would get nervous and blow up on his own. This wasn’t a forlorn hope, as the kid has had a history of winning first sets and going straight downhill from there. It appeared that it might happen again when Gulbis served, up a break, at 3-2 in the second. At 30-15, he double-faulted in a fit of pique after getting what he thought was a bad call. Here was the moment when the new Gulbis would be tested. On the next two points, instead of going for broke, he worked his way to the net for the first time in the match. At 30-30, he negotiated a thorny backhand volley in the wind by carving it crosscourt, where it blew away from Karlovic. At 40-30, Gulbis showed off his forehand volley, angling a solid passing shot crosscourt and onto the sideline for another winner. It was 4-2; Karlovic never challenged again.

If this was the moment of truth for Gulbis, what does it tell us about the truth of his game and his future? It appears that he can be patient and resourceful, that he can improvise, that he can win ugly—that, after all, there may be texture and nuance underneath the cannon-fire. It should be there. Off-court, Gulbis, whio was named after Ernest Hemingway, has a more nuanced personality than many of his peers. He speaks in an intelligent semi-whisper and mostly avoids clichés, and he has interests that range a little wider than the latest Will Ferrell movie. Gulbis prefers David Lynch; that may or may not require depth, but it definitely requires patience. Maybe Gulbis, a child of privilege who is also a lonely pioneer in his country—as he says, everything he does is a first for Latvian tennis—was ambivalent about the lonely grunt work he needed to do to succeed as a pro. Maybe, like Andre Agassi, he was a factory-made prodigy with a streak of self-doubt that led to an early case of burnout.

Like I said, there are many ways to know a tennis player, one of which is to hear what he says after a match. Gulbis’ pet word during his first couple of years on tour was “loser.” He didn’t want to be a “big loser” against Rafael Nadal at Wimbledon in 2008. Later that season at the U.S. Open, he predicted that no one would come to his press conference after his loss to Andy Roddick, because, “Nobody is interested in losers.” This was the voice of the ironical post-adolescent, the overgrown child. 

In Delray, Gulbis had a new pet word, courtesy of his coach: "enjoy." “My coach told me before the match, ‘Just go on court. Enjoy your first final. You’re a young guy, enjoy it.’” You can read a lot into body language, but you can read even more into real language. This was the voice of a young man enjoying something for the first time: feeling like a winner.