Man of the moment

Wawrinka’s Australian Open triumph is unlikely to alter the standard set by the Big Four in the game

For nine years now, four players have defined an era of men’s tennis, their play so consistent the rest of the ATP World Tour seemed to exist on another planet. There was Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Novak Djokovic and Andy Murray, and then there was everybody else.

So when someone outside the Big Four managed to win a Grand Slam singles title, as Stanislas Wawrinka of Switzerland did at the Australian Open, the temptation will always be to look for cracks in the hierarchy. To see if perhaps more than four players can maintain residency in the upper echelon, or can rent-to-buy, at least.

That is the temptation and, in some quarters, the hope. But there remains one problem with the idea of a shake-up, even in the wake of Wawrinka’s triumph — four problems, actually. Federer may never win another Grand Slam title, but the others are all still very much in their primes, and it will take an unusual confluence of events for the Wawrinkas of the tennis world to seize more than the occasional major tournament trophy.

That is not a knock on Wawrinka, who played the best tournament of his life the past two weeks. That is a nod to the Big Four, as dominant and steady as any four in the history of tennis. They did not combine to win 34 of 35 majors before Sunday for any other reason.

Those who disagree with that, or find the premise to be disrespectful to Wawrinka, need only listen to Wawrinka’s words after his triumph. No one was more surprised at what happened than Wawrinka himself.

“I saw Roger winning so many Grand Slam in the past,” he said. “If you look the past 10 years, it’s only the top four guys who was winning all the Grand Slams. So, yeah, I will need time to realise what I did in these two weeks.”

For that, Wawrinka should be applauded. He toppled the No 2 seed and defending champion in Djokovic. He bullied the baseline bully in Nadal, the tournament’s top seed. He continued to build on momentum that started last year, with a semifinal appearance at the US Open.

He won the Australian Open title. He did not back into it. And yet, there is no ignoring what happened in Melbourne. Murray, Federer and Nadal all landed in the same half of the draw. Murray recently returned from back surgery. Federer competed with a larger racquet head and a new coach, Stefan Edberg. Nadal fought through the bracket with both a nasty blister on his left hand and, in the final, a problem with his back.

Again, pointing out Nadal’s injuries is not meant to steal credit from Wawrinka. He played Big Four tennis throughout the fortnight. But these events were not meaningless. “Before today, for me, it wasn’t a dream,” Wawrinka said. “I never expect to play a final. I never expect to win a Grand Slam. And right now, I just did.”

That Wawrinka did win a major tournament, that he did join Juan Martín del Potro, the 2009 US Open champion, in interrupting the Big Four’s streak, was no doubt good for tennis. The four men who hog all the Grand Slam singles trophies are known across the world.

What Wawrinka did throughout this tournament is become more known outside of tennis. He introduced himself to the casual sports fan. That sports fan knows Rafa and Roger, knows Djoker and Andy, but only sometimes follows tennis. That sports fan is at least more likely to know Wawrinka now, to join in an international game of “Words with Friends” in which players can only make up words that use “Stan” - “Stanimal” and “Stan-dard” and “Stantastic” among them.

That is important for far more than Wawrinka. That is important for tennis, which is popular, but in most places is not a mainstream sport. The same players meeting in all the finals can build the game through rivalries, but the occasional interloper helps to break the monotony.

“The top four have been so great for the sport, but they’ve also been so greedy,” said Justin Gimelstob, a member of the ATP board of directors. “They’ve hoarded all the championships. One of the challenges for our tour has been for the public to understand that if one of those guys isn’t there, it’s still an important tennis tournament. There’s real value in that.”

Gimelstob was careful to qualify that he while he considered a new winner a positive development, he felt for Nadal, and he wished Wawrinka’s play and not Nadal’s injury would be the takeaway from the tournament. Gimelstob also noted that perhaps Wawrinka’s victory, with wins over Djokovic and Nadal in the process, would have a ripple effect, giving players in that second tier — like David Ferrer and Tomas Berdych and Jo-Wilfried Tsonga and del Potro — confidence in future Grand Slams.

Of course, there were similar hopes after del Potro won the US Open. But it took nearly five years before another player outside the top four vanquished the upper echelon.  Besides tennis, Wawrinka also provided a boost to the Irish writer Samuel Beckett. Last March, Wawrinka got a tattoo of Beckett’s prose on his left forearm, and as he continued to win, as he continued to climb in the ATP rankings, the ink got as much ink as Wawrinka did.

It reads: “Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” That seemed fitting last Sunday. Because Wawrinka did fail. He failed at failing. And even if it was for one tournament before the Big Four resumes its streak of dominance, it made for a good story and some well-deserved attention pointed elsewhere. The Stan-dard prevailed, though, the standard, the Big Four, will remain just that.