Italian translation at settesei.it
In the last several days, Fernando Verdasco has seen a little too much of Diego Schwartzman. On Sunday in Rio de Janeiro, the two players met in the final of the 500-level clay court event, which Schwartzman won in straight sets. Both players immediately headed for the hard court tournament in Acapulco, where they drew each other in the first round. Verdasco lost again, this time winning six games instead of five.
The odds of this sort of final-to-first-round scenario, with back-to-back matches against the same opponent, is quite rare, and the surface switch makes this one even more unlikely. For one thing, the tour doesn’t move from one court type to another very frequently, and when they do, players don’t always travel through the same sequence of events. Another cause of improbability is that a pair of players who contest a final are usually pretty good, meaning that both of them are often seeded at their next event, making a first-round meeting impossible. In order to see a pair of consecutive matches like Schwartzman’s and Verdasco’s, we require synchronized schedules and a hefty helping of luck.
As Carl Bialik pointed out, this isn’t the first time Verdasco has played back-to-back matches in February against the same opponent, albeit on the same surface: He did so in 2011, dropping the San Jose final and then a Memphis first-rounder to Milos Raonic. Remarkably, when we broaden the search a bit, Verdasco’s name comes up twice more. In 2009, he lost to Radek Stepanek in the Brisbane final, then in his next event, the Australian Open, he beat Stepanek in the third round. (Radek played Sydney in the meantime, for what it’s worth.) And five years later, Verdasco overcame Nicolas Almagro to win the 2014 Houston title, then faced his countryman in his next event two weeks later, losing to Almagro in the round of 16. (Again, while they were back-to-back tourneys for Verdasco, Nico squeezed in a few matches in Monte Carlo in between.)
Back to the matter at hand: In the course of five decades of Open Era men’s tennis, just about everything has happened at least once before. But this exact scenario–two guys facing each other in a final, then a first round match the very next week on a different surface–is a new one. Relax any one of those constraints, and we see a few instances in the past.
Since 1970, there have been about 3,750 tour-level finals. Roughly one-third of the time, the two finalists ended up playing each other at least once more over the course of the season. 197 of those pairs drew each other in their very next event, and in another 62 of the finals, one of the players faced the other in his next tournament (though the other had played an event or two in the meantime, like Almagro and Stepanek). Several of the 197 duos played each other the next week, though it is a bit more common that there was a week off in between.
Of the 197 finalist pairs, 25 of them drew each other in the round of 32 or earlier in their following tournament, though not all of those were first-round matches. (Or, in the case of Andy Murray and Philipp Kohlschreiber in 2015 after contesting the Munich final, they played in Murray’s first Madrid match the following week but not Kohlschreiber’s, since Murray had a bye.) The most common round in which finalists met again was another final, which ensued about one-third of the time.
Dividing up the 197 pairs a different way, about one-fifth (39) played the follow-up match on a different surface. In only a few of these instances were the two surfaces hard and clay; a disproportionate number of these back-to-back matches happened in the 1970s and early 1980s, when carpet was regular feature on tour, so the hard-to-carpet or carpet-to-hard transition shows up in these results much more frequently than hard-to-clay or clay-to-hard. For any pair of surfaces in these 39 matches, only three occured in the round of 32, and none in the round of 64 or 128.
The three precedents for Schwartzman’s back-to-back wins all have several things in common. First, like Diego’s feat, the same player won both matches. The other two are unlike the Schwartzman double: In each case, there was a one-week break between the tournaments and one of the events was played on carpet.
The first similar achievement was recorded by Tom Gorman, who won consecutive matches against Bob Carmichael in 1976. The first was the Sacramento final (on carpet), followed by the first round in Las Vegas (on hard). Next up was Martin Jaite‘s pair of wins over Javier Sanchez in 1989. After triumphing in the Sao Paulo final (on carpet), Jaite won a hard-court first-rounder against the same opponent two weeks later. Finally, Fernando Gonzalez defeated Jose Acususo twice in a row in 2002, first in the clay-court final in Palermo, then a bit more than a week later on carpet in the first round in Lyon.
Like Schwartzman and his three closest predecessors, most of the finalists managed to defend their victory. Of the different-surface instances, the same player won both matches 26 of 39 times. When the two matches took place on the same surface, the title winner won the next match 101 of 158 times. Most recently, Yuichi Sugita failed to do so: After beating Adrian Mannarino for his first tour-level title in Antalya last summer, he met the Frenchman again in the Wimbledon second round and lost. In a more notable exception, Andre Agassi knocked out Petr Korda for the 1991 Washington title, then lost to Korda in his first match the next week in Montreal. (It wasn’t Korda’s first match, as he didn’t get a bye like Agassi did, but the extra effort paid off. The Czech reached the final.)
We could wait fifty years for an exact parallel of Schwartzman’s feat. Or we could set the bar a little lower and see a rematch almost immediately: Another of last week’s finalist pairs, Lucas Pouille and Karen Khachanov, followed up their Marseille title match with another meeting in the Dubai second round only three days later. Regardless of which standard you choose, there’s one person who would surely prefer to take a break from consecutive matches against the same opponent, and that’s Fernando Verdasco.