It might have been one of the craziest stat lines ever in a Grand Slam tennis match. When Fernando Verdasco shocked Rafael Nadal in the opening round of the Australian Open, he finished the 4-hour, 41-minute, five-set match with 90 winners and 91 errors.
Read that again: 90 winners and NINETY-ONE errors. In victory. Verdasco ripped forehands at more than 100 miles an hour. Down the stretch, he went for the lines on almost every shot. The strategy not only won him two sets in tiebreakers but also blew away his fellow Spaniard and lefty in the fifth set, winning 6-2 after an 0-2 start to the set.
Said a stunned Nadal afterward: "The game is changing a little bit. Everybody hit the ball hard and try to go for winners in any position. Game become a little bit more crazy."
Joked Verdasco: "I just closed my eyes."
It rarely used to be this way. Tennis instructors coached even their best pupils to aim for a spot six inches or more inside the lines. Far better to allow your opponent another crack at the ball than to give away a point being too aggressive.
But that was then, when the rackets were less forgiving, as well as the strings. And the players' biceps often looked less like those belonging to linebackers. And the game wasn't a 365-day-a-year grind.
"Some of it is that's the style it has taken to beat Nadal in the Slams over the years," said University of Tennessee at Chattanooga women's tennis coach Jeff Clark, who starred as a player at McCallie and Vanderbilt. "You look at Nadal's loss to Lukas Rosol at Wimbledon one year and when Robin Soderling became the first man to beat him at the French Open. That's the style they used: Go for broke."
But Clark also said there are other reasons for higher-risk tennis.
"The advent of the polyester strings in the early 2000s has been as transformative as the introduction of graphite rackets once were. It's allowed players to take huge cuts and have the ball still go in. Those strings kind of catch the ball, then send it back with so much topspin."
Manker Patten pro Ned Caswell agreed on both points.
"When you play someone like Nadal, if you play your regular game, you have almost no chance to win," he said. "But the equipment also has a lot to do with it. Staying on the baseline against some of the top players is less risky than it used to be."
But as a Division I college coach, Clark also has seen the players change.
"The strength and conditioning of players now as opposed to 15 or 20 years ago is night and day," he said. "They're so much stronger and in better shape. They spend so much more time in the weight room than when I played."
In truth, the mindset has been developing at the sport's apex for years. Merely consider these quotes from current No. 1 Novak Djokovic and all-time great Roger Federer after back-to-back five-set U.S. Open semifinals they played in 2010 and 2011, when all-or-nothing shots on match points against him delivered Djokovic two stunning wins.
After his 2010 victory over Fed, the Djokster said: "To be honest, I was just closing my eyes and hitting forehands as fast as I can on match point. If it goes in, it goes in. If it goes out, just another loss to Federer in the U.S. Open."
Countered a frustrated Federer after the 2011 loss: "For me, this is very hard to understand. How can you play a shot like that on match point? Maybe he's been doing it for 20 years, so for him it was very normal. You've got to ask him."
As the Aussie Open roars toward its second week, there are a lot of questions being asked concerning the integrity of professional tennis. A gambling scandal threatens to smear the sport as much as or more than baseball's stubborn steroid problem.
Though most of the accusations currently involve such mundane acts as tanking a serve on the minor-league-like Challenger circuit - yes, in Europe you can bet on whether a player will double-fault in the fifth game of the second set - more than out-and-out match fixing, the reality is that once a gambler gets his hooks into a player, there's no way out. Today's double-fault could become next month's tanked match in a Grand Slam event.
And while there's currently no credible evidence of such behavior by men or women ranked in this week's top 10, no less than Djokovic already has been forced to deny that he threw a match against since-retired Fabrice Santoro at the Paris Masters in 2007.
At the time, Djokovic - then ranked No. 3 in the world - blamed it on having just had his wisdom teeth extracted a week earlier.
On Wednesday, after a second-round win at the Aussie Open, he said, "I have nothing more to say. You know, until somebody comes out with the real proof and evidence, it's only a speculation for me."
All this came after Djokovic admitted he was offered $200,000 to throw a match in St. Petersburg, Russia, earlier in 2007, which he refused to do before dropping out of that tournament.
So tennis clearly is being targeted for more than taking target practice at the lines on its courts. But all that is likely to take months, if not years, to settle in a court of law.
For now, Clark is taking a big-picture view of big-risk tennis.
"It's not a style that could have been played 20 years ago," he said. "But every sport evolves. You can play high-risk tennis today and win."
Or as Verdasco said after beating Nadal: "Sometimes if you do what I did today, and you put all the balls outside, it's like, 'This guy's crazy.' But when they are coming in, it's unbelievable. The difference is just so little and can be so big."
Just close your eyes and swing, indeed. After all, as anyone who's ever taken a blindfolded home run cut at a pinata can attest, sometimes you whiff, but sometimes the results are as sweet as candy.
Contact Mark Wiedmer at mwiedmer@timesfreepress.com